A Blog of Bosh

Enchanting visions of fairyland
We cannot get rid of the past, even if we try to. Just as history constantly informs the present, so childhood stays with us, shaping our gestures and responses. If the child makes the man, it is not surprising that children�s stories might also attract and please adults. Hans Christian Andersen took [...]

Children’s Christmas books
Recommendations from the Electronic Telegraph’s BooksOnLine

‘Grinch’ Helps Get Hollywood Back on Record Pace “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a lavishly mounted offering from the director Ron Howard, starring Jim Carrey, has virtually catapulted families into movie theater seats, dominating the five-day Thanksgiving weekend and earning an estimated $137.4 million in its first 10 days of release, nearly $74 [...]

Boing! Pop-Up Books Are Growing Up Pop-up books may be the literary preserve of children, but lately the whirligig pages of flaps, foldouts, pull- tabs and double wheels are moving frenetically to attract grown-ups.The New York Times

Sense and Nonsense
At the top of the juvenile pantheon, the benevolent ruler of all that he sees, sits Dr. Seuss. In the world of children’s culture, perhaps only Walt Disney has as wide and enduring name recognition. But whereas Disney was primarily an impresario and an empire builder, the Henry Ford of fantasy, Dr. Seuss, [...]

So Elegant, So Intelligent
T. S. ELIOT knew that his carefully constructed persona could be forbidding. He satirized himself, gently but tellingly, in a piece of light verse: How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! With his features of clerical cut,And his brow so grimAnd his mouth so primAnd his conversation, so nicelyRestricted to What PreciselyAnd If [...]

You’re not so bad, Mr. Grinch
The story has a moral lesson no different than Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — but with a tone that is loony rather than melodramatic. It’s basically about learning what the true value of Christmas is. The Grinch (Jim Carrey) is a cave-dwelling curmudgeon who lives with his dog Max at [...]

The animator of worlds
[on Wullschlager's biography of Hans Christian Andersen]
An unmarried man, without family of his own, he was dependent, emotionally and physically, on others until the day of his death, demanding assurance, consolation, praise and home comforts. In his sixties, he was described by an English visitor to one of his surrogate families as [...]

Counter Culture� - The dialogue stars in You Can Count on Me. The 6th Day thinks through cloning and capitalism. Why’d they bother with How the Grinch Stole Christmas? � by David Edelstein
The new, live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas doesn’t settle for this biological-determinist interpretation of the Grinch’s misanthropy. It takes a humanistic approach [...]

‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas’: And He Clucked, ‘What a Faaabulous Trick’
The movie is so clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys “R” Us during the Christmas rush. Both the film and its omnivorous star, Jim Carrey, who seems to [...]