:: Wallowing in Faerie

[delphipsmith]

Am currently overdosing on retellings of classic fairy tales -- Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling's Snow White, Blood Red and Black Thorn, White Rose, and Tanith Lee's Red as Blood: Tales from the Sisters Grimmer. Fairy tales (which are not tales about Tinkerbell, nor do the female characters remotely resemble the Disney princesses) are so endlessly flexible and malleable, as though they're a Platonic ideal of "story-ness" and all other tales derive from them. Tons of ideas percolating now (Red Riding Hood but with a male as main character? Rapunzel as a mother who refuses to let her daughter grow up? What if the seven dwarves were kidnappers? What if renewing magic in the world really did require human sacrifice? What if Prince Charming arrived too soon, or too late -- and what if he wasn't charming at all?). Am hoping to coax a few to emerge in a coherent form. You never know what you'll get when you dip into the great simmering soup of story!

Also, cannot let today pass without noting this afternoon's very funny (and honest) episode of "You Must Read" on NPR, by "a tweed-clad ectomorph" who reads Rosemary Rogers.

Comments

[noeon.livejournal.com]

Okay. Your stuff on fairy tales is AMAZING and I'm a little too brain-fried to be smart about it, but I LOVE.

"a tweed-clad ectomorph" who reads Rosemary Rogers."

I DIED LAUGHING. I REMEMBER LOVING ROSEMARY ROGERS!!!!!! (And Charlotte Rampling, wasn't it? And all the duuuurty gurlssss)

Bodice rippers can be fun

[delphipsmith]

I read a couple of hers as well, back in the day, though I went more for the gothic romances of Victoria Holt and Barbara Michaels (I still reread Wings of the Falcon occasionally, cheesy though it is!). I thought the whole piece was hilarious and yet also rather touching, especially this: "[T]he very thought that men and women were occasionally conjuring the same sugarplums made me feel much closer to my female comperes in general, and less like a creeping lust monster." Hee.