Fairy Tale Friday: Sleeping through Math

First up, Unsettling Wonder is a new fairytale journal dedicated to the retelling and re-imagining of traditional fairytales and folktales. One of my favorite writers of fairy tales, Katherine Langrish, is involved. To get the party started, she has written a short piece on the range of fairy tales (and their frequent lack of actual fairies). Good stuff.

At Breezes from Wonderland, Tatar has a post about how Lady Gaga co-opts the Sleeping Beauty framing for her own commercial/performance art purposes. As she points out, Sleeping Beauty is a frequent image in art, partly because the "passive treasure" aspect of her is just so useful for artists who like a subject who stays still, and because of the continuing bias in Western culture toward women who know their place (i.e. waiting patiently to be rescued). Also, did she rip off another artist's schtick? Personally, I doubt it. The idea of a sleeping woman isn't exactly a new notion, even in performance art.

Countering that conventionality is this book, Computational Fairy Tales by Jeremy Kubica (via Sur La Lune blog). In this book, the Princess is the one to go questing. To aid her, the book offers a pile of mathematical and computer science concepts. I really want to browse through this, because a) I'm fascinated by math in a very English major sort of way, and b) most books attempting to teach children via stories are clunky and not very attractive as tales. So I'd like to see if Kubica is able to clear that hurdle. On the bright side, it appears that it's only $3.99 on Lulu.

For the writers among us, here's a fairy tale themed flash fiction contest with a due date of October 13, which is hosted by Yearning for Wonderland (not to be confused with Tatar's site). There's a Pinterest inspiration board to get you started. I hear there are prizes.

And finally, I want to point out this video. It's not new, but the "viewed" count on YouTube seems depressingly low to me, since it's such an intriguing piece of crazy. The video was done by Bill Sneed, apparently for no other reason than because he wanted to. I plan to talk more about it soon, but please give it a watch (especially if you're interested in red capes, wolves, deliberate mistranslations, and evil snacks). Totally worth it and a great way to distract yourself at the end of the work week.

Happy linking!