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Monday, February 26th, 2007
Watching Wild Strawberries tonight for the second-and-a-half time. At the opening scene I am hit by the realization that Dr. Borg is based (in part) on the same archetype which underlies Moominpappa's character. (I am rereading Comet in Moominland to Sylvia for bedtime stories this past week or so.) Also Sara reminds me of the Snork Maiden. Funny... I wonder how much Bergman and Jannsen are coming from the same place culturally.
posted evening of February 26th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
A new Moomin book arrived today -- it is the newly published Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book One. Sylvia and I looked at the first story, "Moomin and the Brigands", this evening -- I was impressed by how well Sylvia is reading -- this was her first experience with hyphens but she seemed to get it pretty well after I explained. Here is a preview of the book. Just beautiful artwork -- the dialog (in the first few pages at any rate) is not as interesting as it is in the books though.
posted evening of November 15th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, May 26th, 2006
I am reading Dickens' Bleak House now -- it is a book that has been on my shelf for many years, one that was spoken of very highly on the Pynchon-l and that I've always been resolved to read sometime. It's proving easier going than I expected, with plenty of laughs and a plot that is only occasionally obscure. But there are so many characters! It's a little hard to keep track of who, say, Mr. Guppy is, who has not been mentioned in the past 50 pages or so, when he pops up. So the Unofficial Moomin Characters Guide has given me an idea -- a general purpose, web-based database utility for keeping track of characters in a book or series of books. I don't think this would be very difficult to do and it seems like it would come in handy.
posted evening of May 26th, 2006: Respond
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I'm very happy to see that Drawn and Quarterly will be bringing out five volumes of Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips. First one is due in September!
posted afternoon of May 26th, 2006: Respond
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Sunday, October 30th, 2005
Our bedtime story tonight was "The Fir Tree", the final story in Tales From Moominvalley, which Ellen and Sylvia picked up the other day at Scandinavia House. Sylvia requested this story because the picture on the first page of the story is of a young Woody, who looks kind of like the Dweller Under the Sink from Moominland Midwinter. The DUS is a mysterious creature who does not speak the same language as the Moomins, and when Moomintroll tried to talk to him, he got angry and said "Radamsah!" which Sylvia found just hilarious. So, we read this story with Sylvia specifying that I call the Woody "Radamsah", which substitution I did make most of the times his name came up. (When I failed to make it, Sylvia was quick to correct me.) (This occasionally happens when we are reading a story, that Sylvia asks me to make some substitution -- for instance when we read Moominland Midwinter, the instruction was always to refer to Too-Ticky with masculine rather than feminine pronouns. -- Note that this is kind of interesting in a weird way as Too-Ticky was modeled on Jannson's female partner, maybe Sylvia is picking up on an intentional gender confusion?) "The Fir Tree" is a wonderful Christmas story, one of the best ever I think. To summarize: The Moomin family normally hibernates through winter and so do not know about Christmas; but this year the Hemulen wakes them up because he is resentful at their sleeping peacefully away while everyone else works so hard at celebrating Christmas. He doesn't bother to explain what's happening though, and the best the Moomins can make out from their fractured interactions with various Hemulens and Gaffsies, is that some kind of dangerous creature named Christmas is coming when it gets dark, and they need to find a fir tree and decorate it, and cook a dinner and set out presents to placate the monster. They end up setting up a very nice Christmas jubilee for the Woody and his small friends and relations, who are impoverished. And then go back to sleep, still not really understanding what is going on. While we were reading the part where the Moomins were arriving at their conclusion that "Christmas" is the name of some monster, Sylvia observed, "like the Dr. Seuss Christmas monster, who takes all the presents away." Yes, nice parallel to find.
posted evening of October 30th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Sylvia and Ellen were at Scandinavia House (on Park Ave. and 37th) yesterday, and found to their great surprise that the gift shop there is just full of Moomin merchandise. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Seems pretty obvious now -- they have stuffed animals, pottery and a bunch of other stuff. They did not get any of that, but did pick up the CD of "Muumilauluja" -- lovely but hard to understand, being in Finnish er, Swedish and all. We listened to it last night and played "try to guess the character who's speaking" based on the voice characteristics, which was pretty fun. This morning I did a search and found that the CD is translated into English as Moomin Voices, available from CDBaby. Update: Er, I'm confused here. Looks like "Muumilauluja" is, as I at first thought, in Finnish; and "Moomin Voices" is in Swedish. No English translation, I think.
posted morning of October 27th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, October third, 2005
Tonight we finished Moominpappa At Sea -- Sylvia surprised me by telling me, "Dad -- maybe the lighthouse-keeper is the fisherman" about two pages before that identity is revealed -- she's been paying closer and more subtle attention to the story line than I had thought she was. Then she said, "I've been thinking about the moomins all day." And how cool is this -- the events of the last chapter take place on October 3rd, which is the date we're reading the last chapter on!
posted evening of October third, 2005: Respond
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Friday, September 23rd, 2005
Sylvia and I watched the first two episodes of Moomin-Mania last night. She was crazy about it, which strangely created a bit more distance for me, than when I watched the first episode before. I am thinking the changes in the story-line make for a less interesting story than the book. But, the visuals are fantastic. And the voices are generally really good too, although there are spots where they are not quite properly synchronized with the action.
posted morning of September 23rd, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
Last week I discovered, browsing around the internet, that an animated Moomin TV series was produced in Japan in the early 90's, and is now available on DVD! Excited, I tried ordering it (from Britain; it is not available in the US) and got a warning that it might not work with an American DVD player. Browsed around a bit and learned that DVD's have a region code printed on them, and DVD players are programmed to reject discs from the wrong region; and furthermore, that DVD players in computers generally don't have this limitation. So, I went ahead and ordered it, hoping it would work on the computer. It arrived in the mail today and indeed, I was able to watch on my computer. This is an excellent thing. (Based on the first episode, which is all I've watched so far.) The animation is beautiful, the voices range from very good to excellent. The story is slightly modified from Finn Family Moomintroll. A movie of "Comet in Moominland" was produced in 1993; but it does not appear to be available on DVD yet.
posted evening of September 20th, 2005: Respond
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Today Sylvia took A Comet in Moominland in to school with her to show her librarian, who has not heard of the series before. (I asked her about it at the school ice cream social last week.) I wrote Mrs. Lambert a note about the book, to the effect that I thought it would be a good one to have in the school library.
posted morning of September 20th, 2005: Respond
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