I spotted Waldo in Silver Spring, Maryland last weekend at the second annual Silver Spring Zombie Walk. Well, undead Waldo.

When I was in elementary school, I used to complain about stomach aches all the time to get out of math class. And when I say all the time, I mean all the time. The school nurse knew me. She could even recognize my footsteps and my knock. Anyway, being an extremely patient and sympathetic woman (perhaps she didn’t like math either), she always let me stay. I would hop up onto the spare cot with a Where’s Waldo book and spend the next half hour searching through the pages.

On the morning of October 5, 2009, as he was crossing the road to kick some hippies, Jim Groom was fatally injured by a rogue New York pizza truck.

He is survived by his loving wife, children, and the hippies.

I’m not in the habit of writing “this is what’s going on in my life” kind of posts, but this week has big news: I caved and bought an accordion. I’ve been wanting to learn accordion for a while now, but could never find any instruments to try out, let alone buy. I’m discovering all kinds of neat things and challenges. Still very excited.

Sick of me writing about books you don’t have access to? Well, this week’s reading, “Sixty Folk-tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources”, is online and free! You lucky dog. There were many things that struck me about the selections I read from this book, but one of the most immediate was the complexity of the stories. Not only is there a quest, but the quest has three parts. And then there’s a secondary quest, and that one is usually even more challenging. I’m not sure why it is that the fairy tales we’re used to aren’t set up this way. Perhaps they’ve been simplified, or there may be a basic difference between the oral traditions of Eastern and Western Europe that affected the development of their folktales.

This week’s reading for my individual study was an anthology of fairy tale retellings. As is generally the case with anthologies, some stories were stronger than others, but the ones that really struck me tended to recontextualize the source material in a wholly unexpected way. We’re used to retellings from the villain’s point of view, excusing his or her actions. We’re also used to feminist reworkings of popular stories like “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” in which the heroine is given a much less passive role. These are not the kind I’m talking about.

I briefly linked to two animated versions of Bluebeard in my last post, but they’re both so interesting that I wanted to do them justice. The first, “Blue Beard’s Last Wife” (”La Dernière femme de barbe bleue”), blends the Bluebeard legend with ancient Greek mythology in an unexpected (and humorous) way. The second, “A Very Blue Beard” (”Ochen sinyaya boroda”) is a Russian musical short about a detective investigating Bluebeard’s crimes… with a surprising twist! So take a break, put your feet up, and watch a couple of really neat shorts!

One of my readings this week in Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde focuses on the symbolism and origins of the Bluebeard story. In a chapter titled “The Ogre’s Appetite”, Warner discusses many different iterations of a common theme: the serial murderer. What with Perrault’s fairy tales, medieval legends, devoured Catholic saints, and historical child killers, it’s pretty clear that society has been morbidly obsessed with these stories for centuries.

It has recently come to my attention that, as a child, I may not have been exposed to the normal sort of things one expects at that age. Instead of watching cartoons, I’d beg my parents to let me see new nature programs on the Discovery Channel. I knew Chaplin before Carrey, watched more Fred and Ginger musicals than Disney movies, and had a strange fascination with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” before I even understood all the words.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking and reading about fairy tales and mythology lately, as part of my individual study this semester (and because I can’t stay away from them). As is often the case with fascinating reading, overwhelming and fascinating ideas have invaded and it’s been difficult to sort them into something that makes much sense. But–finally–I’m going to try. Even better, I’m going to try in a way that delineates my often strange mental connections between things that really shouldn’t be related. I hope.

It’s been a busy week, what with stock market disasters, presidential nominees visiting campus, and hilarious CBS interviews with a certain governor from Alaska. Normally, I’d say that students here are mildly interested at best (completely apathetic at worst), but there’s been a huge spike in campus political involvement. Much of that may have to do with Obama’s recent visit, but UMW students–like most of the country–seem much more fired up about this election than has been the case in past years. Students here are actually watching the news, debates, …