Students are to post ONE reaction (minimum 350 words) to the assigned listening/reading/viewing linked below. Students are encouraged (but not required) to additionally respond to other student reactions."The Autumnal Genius of John Bellairs" by Grady Hendrix: "There’s a particular kind of nostalgia that smells like burning autumn leaves on an overcast day. It sounds like a static-filled radio station playing Brylcreem advertisements in the other room. It feels like a scratchy wool blanket. It looks like a wood-paneled library stuffed with leather-bound books. This is the flavor of occult nostalgia conjured up by author John Bellairs and his illustrator, Edward Gorey, in their middle grade gothic New Zebedee books featuring low-key poker-playing wizards, portents of the apocalypse, gloomy weather, and some of the most complicated names this side of the list of ingredients on a packet of Twinkies." Click heading to read essay.
"Is there still room for scares in John Bellairs?" by Erik Adams: "The imagery and atmosphere of Bellairs’ work inspired a previous generation of readers to become a new generation of writers: The John Bellairs Fandæmonium website collects testimonies from such fans-turned-authors; The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy recently dropped Bellairs’ name in an NPR interview about Under Wildwood, his second YA effort with wife/personal Edward Gorey Carson Ellis. It all goes to show that the art that most often sticks with us, the work that most terrorizes and tantalizes, is that which leaves room for the unknown and the unsaid, that which invites us back by leaving room to interpret what’s hovering just out of view." Click heading to read the essay.
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THE GASHLYCRUMB TINIES by Edward Gorey: "Part Tim Burton long before there was Burton, part Edgar Allan Poe long after Poe, the book exudes Gorey’s signature adult picture book mastery, not merely adorned by the gorgeously dark crosshatched illustrations but narratively driven by them." Click heading to read/view The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
THE HAPLESS CHILD by Edward Gorey: Click title to download PDF of The Hapless Child.
Why the Link Between Bellairs & Gorey is Unbreakable by Matt Domino: "Bellairs were browsing a bookstore and came across The Fatal Lozenge, an illustrated alphabet book by Edward Gorey. Bellairs was particularly fond of Z, which was illustrated with a Zouave [a class of French Army infantry members in the 19th and 20th centuries] hoisting an impaled baby on a bayonet with an accompanying verse." Click heading to read essay.
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Charles Addams by Christian Willaims (The Washington Post): In a sunny day in 1953, patent attorney F.T. Griswold holds a funny-looking electrical gizmo out the window of his office, aiming it down at the streets below. At his side stands the inventor of the device, hat in hand and waiting hopefully. "Death ray, fiddlesticks!" comes the verdict. "Why, it doesn't even slow them up."That is, of course, a New Yorker cartoon perpetrated by Charles Addams. Like his inventor's ray gun, Addams has never successfully harmed anybody. But it is safe to say that, over the past 50 years, his weird cartoons have certainly slowed them up." Click heading to reading article.
The Father of the Addams Family (NPR): They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them. They said he kept a guillotine at his house and received chopped-off fingers in the mail from fans. It was once reported that he had been given a monogrammed straitjacket as a birthday gift -- a garment that might have come in handy if the other stories were true, such as the one Patricia McLaughlin told about Addams moving around the living room at a party, "methodically and imponderably depositing" dollops of tooth powder in various corners. "A charm to ward off cavity-causing vampires?" she wondered. People said that Addams had married Morticia, the pale dagger in the spidery black dress from The Addams Family, that familiar band of subversives that included Gomez, Lurch, Pugsley, Wednesday, Uncle Fester, Grandma, Thing, and Cousin Itt. Click heading to read essay, excerpt, and/or listen to interview.
Is Someone Going to Bake Me a Pie? The eeriness of Mother Goose. Charles Addams' Illustrations remind us how the classic tales could seem in the minds of the kids to whom we read them. Click heading to view book.
