By: Kara Schaff Dean, the Yankeerat,
on 2/2/2009
There's subversive literature, and then there's this. Let's hope that the ALA and the CPSC can get things sorted out, so we can go back to worrying about the real dangers books present to children, like making their own choices and stumbling across the odd explative.(Sorry, did that sound sarcastic?)
By: Matt Phelan,
on 2/9/2008
By: Matt Phelan,
on 2/6/2008
By: Matt Phelan,
on 1/27/2008
By: Becky,
on 1/7/2008
The last TedTalk to make a big impression on the home education blogs and groups was Ken Robinson's, on how schools educate children to become good workers rather than creative thinkers.
The next TedTalk to start making the rounds and already making a splash is Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do by Gever Tulley of The Tinkering School, a summer program to help kids ages seven to 17 learn to build things. The talk comes from Tulley's book in progress, Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do; click the book link and you'll find some of Tulley's labels which should be familiar to Make fans; we here at Farm School are always keen on subversive labels and stickers. As I once quoted Charles Darwin,
"Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can, in any likelihood, pursue."Gever Tulley and Matt Hern, author of Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better (and whom I wrote about here) certainly seem to be on the same wavelength.
By: Becky,
on 1/4/2008
From tomorrow's London Times:
BBC hopes youth of today will thrill to Swallows and AmazonsAnd the related leading article, also in tomorrow's Times,
by Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter
It’s as far from a toxic childhood as you are likely to get. Captain John, Able Seaman Titty and Ship’s Boy Roger are to set sail again in a big-screen adaptation of the Arthur Ransome classic Swallows and Amazons.
Inspired by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, the BBC is betting that camping, fishing and messing about in dinghies will seem as thrillingly exotic to modern children as any special-effects-laden superhero movie.
The producers believe that the resourceful young heroes of Swallows and Amazons and the book’s idyllic Lake District setting possess an allure that they did not have when the tale was last filmed in 1974, before childhood hobbies became as sedentary, solitary and technology-driven as they are today.
It is a hope backed by the National Theatre, where a musical of Swallows and Amazons is in the pipeline, and at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, where an exhibition on Ransome’s work will open later this year.
There are 12 Swallows and Amazons adventures and BBC Films is close to acquiring options on all of them. Jamie Laurenson, executive producer for BBC Films, is hoping for a cinema release next year. He said: “It’s a great story and a fantastic adventure.”
If Swallows and Amazons is to work, Mr Laurenson said, it also needs to make the natural world genuinely frightening. “For a modern audience you need to bring out that feeling of danger. It’s only implied in the action because of when it was written, but it’s about children taking on adult responsibilities. The youth of today are cosseted. We rail against couch potatoes and obesity in children but ban conker fights [see aforementioned Dangerous Book], so I think this is very timely.”
Ransome would have agreed. He was a charismatic man with a love of the outdoors. In a life packed with adventure he married Trotsky’s secretary and may have spied for the Bolsheviks before settling down in the 1920s to work as an occasional foreign correspondent and angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian. He made his breakthrough as an author with Swallows and Amazons, which was published in 1930. ...
Purists should be reassured that they will still be set in the prewar years, he added. “I think that period feel is part of their charm.”
Geraint Lewis, chairman of the Arthur Ransome Society, said that the modest nature of the stories themselves was an important element of their appeal. “Ransome was a very good writer and his deceptively simple style has endured. They have never gone completely out of fashion but there does seem to be a welling of interest in them now,” he said.
No DuffersIn other words, paddle your own canoe, and mess about in your own dinghy.
Don’t just watch Swallows and Amazons — be them
From an ancient farmhouse on a peaty fellside, into the jump-cut mayhem of X-boxes and preteen blockbusters, come John, Susan, Titty, Roger and a gaff-rigged dayboat called the Swallow. They’ll fill her up with bread and cheese and tents stitched by their mother. They’ll sail her from a Peak in Darien to an island in the “great lake in the North”. They will find a secret harbour and the perfect campsite. Nearby, still warm, there will be embers. Undeterred, the Swallow’s crew will unroll their sleeping bags and wake to the hearstop-ping sight of an arrow in the gnarled bark of the great tree at the high end of the island.
Oh, to be under surveillance by a faceless enemy armed to the gunwales and master of the timing of her attack! Yes, hers, because the Amazons will soon reveal themselves, not just to the Swallows but to a global audience of millions courtesy of BBC Films. The rights to Arthur Ransome’s books may not be in the bag but they’re being hotly pursued. A feature is planned, and possibly a franchise. Time’s wheel has alighted on the most wholesome of all parallel children’s universes as the best bet for a filmic expression of everything that Nintendo is not.
Good luck to the producers. What greater thrill can there be for any child, in any age, than to create her own world in the real world and be allowed to risk her life in it? For that is the explicit premise of Swallows and Amazons, set out in the children’s father’s legendary telegram sent from his naval ship on service in the Far East: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN. Tough love was never since so tough (and in any case has long since been outlawed by social services). But this was the green light that sent Roger hurtling down towards a mythic Coniston to tell his siblings their great adventure was a “go”. Let the film version spawn thousands more like it – real ones, rich with the smell of wet rope, burnt camp-fire sausages and lichen on granite. Because Tomb Raider takes some beating.
By: Matt Phelan,
on 12/8/2007
As my workload begins to ease a trifle, I'll try to get back to the ol' sketchbook and, consequently, the ol' posting semi-regularly on the blog. One thing that has helped me stay sane in the past couple of months is my current obsession with reading the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse, Suuuuuper Genius. The latest was Heavy Weather, and it did not disappoint. So here's a rather quick sketch of Lord Emsworth and his prized pig, Empress of Blandings.
If you need to be further convinced of the greatness of Wodehouse, let me point you to my Favorite Blog Written by a Little Stuffed Bull. Bully's regular posts are also genius, by the by.
By: Matt Phelan,
on 8/27/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 7/21/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 7/3/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 6/16/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 6/5/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 6/2/2007
By: Matt Phelan,
on 5/13/2007
Sketched whilst drinking coffee and listening to Studio 360 talk about the new Buffy comic (go, Joss!). Why this led me to medieval-esque doodles, I have no idea.
Touche! The scary part is that it ALMOST made it past the radar!