Monthly Archives: October 2012

October 31, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Helping to restore the “wyr,” or life force, after calamities to nature–Daniel Heath Justice’s “The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles”

Today, I have an apology to offer my readers, and a presumably good excuse for it.  The apology is this:  I promised some time ago to finish reading, and to write a review of, Daniel Heath Justice’s (already obviously excellent and motivating) omnibus revised edition of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  That is, I rather cavalierly assumed that I would be finished with it by the end of October and would have already written a satisfying and provocative post on it.  The book is quite long (588 pages, plus a 28-page Glossary of Names and Stories at the End), but that isn’t part of my excuse:  I’ve read long books, longer works, before, and have been able to comment on a number of books at one time in some earlier posts.  The problem is just that chore after chore and routine after routine from daily life got in the way, so that I barely had time to do simpler readings in order to complete the posting schedules I’ve set for myself.  I had hoped to finish the book and leave myself time to comment, but now that I am 159 pages into the work, it has already become obvious that I cannot begin to do credit to it.

First of all, on the most pragmatic level, there are perhaps even more significant if not more main characters in the book than there are in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or at least as many.  This bodes well for the book’s ethos, because it helpfully represents that every voice is heard, even those which may not be helpfully inclined.  Secondly, the book has several spiritual paths to Enlightenment through craft, not one generalized sort of wizardry which is split into good and evil practitioners, though the most sympathetic path is that of the wyr, or the Green and growing world, the world of the various Tree-Born Kyn, and Beast-Clan Tetawi; there are also Other Folk of the Everland and Beyond and The Sons and Daughters of Man, to give the names of just the groups of main characters.  The concepts of sexuality have also been expanded to include other than just male-female relationships, which along with many other features in the book indicates a generosity of the picture of empathetic life force for everyone.

The path leading to further experience of the wyr as a flowing life force for one of the main characters, Tarsa’deshae, a she-Kyn Redthorn Warrior destined to become a wyr Wielder, is a rite of passage, in which (as far as I have read so far) she encounters her “true face” as a mysterious floating mask suspended in mid-air in the tunnel behind a waterfall in the main council town of the Kyn.  When she accepts the correct mask, she has a vision of the Eternity Tree, and swims in a body of water which surrounds it:  a brief quote cannot begin to describe the beauty of the full description, but I will provide it anyway.

“The Wielder couldn’t identify the color of the Tree’s bark–there didn’t seem to be a word to describe it.  It was neither silver-blue, nor grey, nor green, but a shifting marriage of the three….The leaves were of all seasons and none.  The burning red, brown, and orange of autumn flared amidst the young green of spring-born morning, and these mingled with ageless silver, copper, brass, and gold.  The Tree was of all species, all forms, all genders and none, but each image was unique in its way, and each leaf grew large and lush, wild beyond living memory, as tendrils of endless generations of ivy wrapped themselves around the great trunk and branches, dipping deeply into the waters that lapped against the wide and reaching roots.”  There is a union of opposites in the image of Tarsa in the pool of water while her clothes are consumed away by a mystic flame of life from the Tree and through the water itself, and then her elders and teachers come to claim her as one of themselves.  But this is by no means the end of the story, as all the stories in the book are still waiting to be resolved at this point; this is as far as I have read, and I simply had to share the description of the Tree, though there’s a lot more about it and about the force of wyr to read in the book.

Thus, though I have failed on my original promise to write a full review/article on this so-far gripping and spiritually very fine book by the end of October, I hope I have whetted your appetite for the book itself:  it’s less important in the final analysis that I get a lot of credit for writing a good post on the book, though I naturally want to do it justice, than it is that you read the book and we get a chance to discuss it.  So, if you read no other fantasy novel this whole year and even if you think fantasy except for classics like The Lord of the Rings isn’t your “thing,” please consider that this book is truly a world classic and isn’t just like Tolkien’s in the sense that unlike Tolkien it isn’t limited to Western culture’s mythologies and traditions, but is about the World, as its multiple cultures and divination traditions indicates.  I will faithfully try to finish the rest of the book as soon as I possibly can, and perhaps do another post on it when I’m done, but I couldn’t let the last day of October go by without reverting to my promise and attempting to fulfill it as far as I can.  As I said before, I may have covered only 159 pages so far (to the beginning of Chapter 12), but I’m already anticipating re-reading it once I’ve finished it, as I have with Tolkien’s work many times in the past.

Though I know that many people just now are still recovering from the latest of natural disasters, recent storms such as Hurricane Sandy that have hit as well as the massive snowstorms that have blanketed parts of the United States due to Sandy’s conflict with the jet stream, I am writing today because I have mostly been only inconvenienced by the storm, and would like to share something which might provide spiritual inspiration for others who are equally looking to help people in need of a worthwhile distraction from their own worries.  I would like to position this novel squarely where its talented writer has already positioned it in the writing:  in the belief that we all have a part to play in the world, and that what happens to one person does not happen to him or her alone, but happens to us all; thus, we need to share in whatever way we can to restore the “Eternity Tree” of life to those around us both near and far, and to improve the flow of life force to us all.  I hope it won’t seem callous thus that I am going on with my life in an ordinary way, having given Sandy its due and picked up again where I left off.  And maybe, just maybe, if I get really lucky, my post will lift someone’s spirits who needs it, or will place a copy of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles in someone’s hands, someone who needs a spiritual boost from a writer who is a true leader and an inspiration for the way to go forth after much destruction.  And this applies not only to Sandy, but to tsunamis, and earthquakes, and tidal waves and tornados:  there is for each culture a Good Book to which people look for guidance, but in the world there are in more modest ways also many “good books,” “great books” even, which can help to show the way when life seems most threatened by disaster.  Justice’s book is one such book, is all I am claiming.

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October 28, 2012 · 6:28 pm

“I am at two with nature.”–Woody Allen (or, weathering the storm)

Roughly a week ago, Maine was the epicenter for a middling-to-large earthquake, felt for many hundreds of miles around.  This week, not only is there a (somewhat downgraded) tsunami in Hawaii and a large quake in Canada that caused it, but lots of rain and snow in Canada as well.  In the southern United States on the East Coast, people are already trying to clean up and recoup their losses from Frankenstorm Sandy while the Mid-Atlantic states are in the midst of it or have just had it leave, and New Jersey and farther North are bracing for the impact, assessing risks and giving advice and aid to those who need it.  We seem to be these days (in Woody Allen’s words) “at two with nature.”  Though my spectacles are a bit nearsighted and I haven’t lately looked at world weather beyond this continent, during this year at least there have been major weather events the world over, all of which tell us that something is vastly wrong, beyond the notion of a twenty year weather cycle such as some people cite.  And that something is clearly what is known as global warming (which until recently a child of my acquaintance referred to by the accurate misnomer of “global warning”).

Yes, we clearly are receiving a “global warning,” about our use of fossil fuels, and about our polluting of the earth, and about all our other climactic sins and misdoings.  So what do we do now?  Well, the idea of windpower strikes me as especially fortuitous, because one of the results of our misuse of the earth has been higher winds, gales, hurricanes, and if we can manage correctly to use the bad conditions we have thus created, then it’s a step toward redemption and redress of Mother Nature’s grievances.  Now if only we could find some natural process that required the use of dirty air, dirty water, etc. then we would be a lot better off than we are now.  That’s what we as a global people can do, if that’s not too much dreaming.  At the very least, we can learn to live on better terms with our environment than we do now.  As Willa Cather said of trees, “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”  Right now, trees with leaves still on them are losing branches willy-nilly in storms and water surges, yet beginning next spring, already many of them will be sprouting little limbs out of the raw, torn flesh where full grown limbs once were.  Then again, many of them will be too damaged to do so, and will die and need to be chopped down, so it doesn’t do to be too sanguine or lackadaisical.  This to us sometimes seems like the cruelty of nature, the anti-human and illogical force that swirls around us and sets limits to the greatness we could achieve.  Yet, what do we do (sometimes) when we have “greatness” in human terms?  Often, we end up displaying an equal or worse cruelty in human terms to anything nature could dream up, making wars and genocides and allowing people to starve and die needlessly.  At the very least, one can say that Mother Nature is impersonal (whereas we have even made our complaints against nature personal by personalizing and referring to “her” as “Mother”).

It follows from this that the best we can be as humans is to help solve the problems created by impersonal forces such as nature, both to our environment and to other humans.  And in the process, we help save ourselves and solve our own dilemmas.  This year, why not volunteer to clean up a beach, or to help out at a soup kitchen, or to run or walk for a charity, something which you yourself are interested in so that you don’t lose steam halfway through?  I have in the past for differing periods of time served as a sighted guide for a visually impaired person and have volunteered at an animal shelter, working predominantly with cats.  If you don’t have much time on your hands, then think of contributing to a charity of your choice.  This is how we stand a chance of weathering the metaphorical storms of our lives, and pulling together to solve the larger problems of our existence, such as the ones “Mother” Nature is throwing at us right now.

As to more immediate and personal plans for this coming week?  Be practical, prudent, and self- and other-protective in anticipation that nature may have some unexpected challenge for you.  We have bought groceries which we plan to cook or prepare ahead of time, things that will keep fairly well.  I have my reading and my crocheting to keep me busy during the brunt of the storm.  We have towels ready for the rain, which may or may not seep in around the windows.  And we have batteries and a heavy-duty flashlight ready to keep us steady should all the lights go out.  Our prescriptions and over-the-counter medications are stocked and up to date, and our car will, we hope, be parked in a spot where we can avoid having it flooded.  Here’s hoping that you have (or have had) the same luck with your preparations.  And here’s a dedication to those who have died in this storm already; may they find rest in whatever home individually awaits them according to their wishes, and may some spring come when fresh buds spring out from where they were torn away.

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October 26, 2012 · 4:58 pm

Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder”–a mystery and a story about conflicting loyalties in the Amazonian forest

So many times it seems that I start a post wanting to share my sense of the book, but am forced to “spoil” the plot by retelling large chunks of it in order to make my points about the quality of a book.  This time, however, even if my post turns out to be a great deal shorter than usual (which is what I always seem to threaten but rarely deliver on), I’m determined to keep the book’s character development and events largely a mystery because they are just too good to ruin for my readers.

The story in State of Wonder begins in Minnesota at Vogel, a large pharmaceutical company, which has recently received news about Anders Eckman, a lab technician who has been sent to the Amazon to check on the progress of a recalcitrant researcher (a Dr. Swenson, who is in her seventies).  Dr. Swenson has sent news that Eckman has died of a fever.  Marina Singh, Eckman’s office mate, receives the news from her boss, Mr. Fox, with whom it later turns out she is having an affair.  Neither is married to or involved with anyone else, because this isn’t where the drama of the story lies, but also because there is a certain constraint between them due to their relative positions in the company, Marina calls him only “Mr. Fox,” seems mostly to think of him that way, and only uses his first name about once.

From the beginning, there is a blurriness between the loyalty Mr. Fox feels to his relationship with Marina and his use of her as an employee.  When he goes to tell Karen Eckman about her husband’s death, he leaves Marina to do the hard emotional work, and leaves it largely to her after that to care for Karen’s upset over the issue and her urgent insistence that she would know if Anders were actually dead.  There is also an obscurity in the pull Marina feels between helping Karen and helping Mr. Fox, until the two threads of narrative entertwine:  it turns out that whatever it is that Mr. Fox feels for Marina, he wants her to go to the Amazon and push Dr. Swenson some more about her research, when it will be done, for example, what the results are.  It is a fertility drug being researched in the confines of the Lakashi nation as far as Marina knows.

There is some play with conflict in the early parts of the novel when Marina must decide whether or not to go to the Amazonian jungle and resolve the mystery surrounding Eckman’s death while also prodding Dr. Swenson for her employer.  One such moment of indecision for Marina is when she must decide whether or not to take Lariam, an anti-malaria drug which causes almost hallucinogenic nightmares in the taker, as Marina knows because she had to take it as a child in order to visit her father in India.  Another is when she distances herself from Mr. Fox’s demands by taking with her a special cell phone he has sent, while leaving it in her suitcase, which gets inconveniently (or conveniently) lost.  Finally, when she reaches Manaus, Dr. Swenson’s port-of-call on a bi-monthly basis for supplies, there is the sense of straining loyalties as well.  Dr. Swenson has left Barbara and Jackie Bovender, a married couple of alternative culture nature, in charge of her apartment and of fending off inquiries about where exactly in the jungle she is.  They themselves don’t even know exactly, and Dr. Swenson in the protection of her research has cut herself off from telephone, computer, and every other form of modern technology, even from her employer.  The Bovenders genuinely like Marina and are torn by their obligations to be nice to her and also to respect the wishes of Dr. Swenson, their employer.

When Marina finally makes contact with Dr. Swenson and a young deaf Hummocca boy whom she adopted in the past under unarticulated circumstances, she is at first strenuously rejected by Dr. Swenson and then unwillingly accepted.  It turns out that Dr. Swenson was once Marina’s teacher and mentor before she became a pharmocologist, when both were in obstetrics, and Marina made a serious error in a caesarian section, one which she herself saw as a reason to change careers.  Since the drug being researched involves fertility, there is an overlap of interests, as when Marina gets to meet the Lakashi people and becomes willy-nilly their obstetrician and general surgeon.  She is very, very unwilling to do so, but because of Dr. Swenson’s past and present influence over her, her loyalty causes her to allow herself to be committed to the project.

Past this point, I am unwilling to proceed, because I don’t want to give everything away.  But I will give some hints:  the fertility drug can cause unexpected people to become pregnant, and has some interesting side effects; Anders Eckman’s death has more to it than is first articulated, much, much more; there are other doctors there doing an unproclaimed kind of research with Dr. Swenson; Marina Singh experiences some of the joys and perils of “going native,” as it used condescendingly to be called, a topic in literature important in such works as The Heart of Darkness most noticeably; and the most heartbreaking scene in the whole book is when the deaf boy, Easter, whose hero was Eckman before Eckman disappeared, is used unwittingly at first as a counter in an unexpected barter.  Beyond these hints, which I hope will lead you to discover the book for yourself and experience the complexity of Patchett’s ability to consider all variables involved in experiments with life forces and the interactions between different peoples, I won’t go.  Please dip into the book at your earliest opportunity, and follow it through to the startling ending.

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October 24, 2012 · 2:57 pm

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat”–Coincidence and the Inconsequential in Fiction

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat” is at first encounter a short, short, and flimsy tale about a coat, of all things.  It isn’t as “big” or as long as Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” for example, though it is riddled with absurdities as well.  It is rather about coincidences and the inconsequential which add up to the breakdown of true communication, and the result is that it causes one to wonder if one has in fact understood what real communication is about.

The story begins when the character narrating, Paul Holle, receives a note from a long-lost cousin who had disappeared twelve years before after going out to mail a letter.  But the absurdity begins almost at once:  the cousin writes, requesting that Holle mail to him in Australia his “light gray spring coat,” but notes that he may keep the book about edible mushrooms which is in the pocket, because there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When Holle tells his wife that he’s had the letter from his cousin, she doesn’t respond in a characteristically human way, by asking where the cousin has been all this time, or expressing surprise that they’ve heard from him.  Rather, she simply asks “‘Really?  What does he write?'”  When Paul tells her the message, he reduces it likewise to something inconsequential:  “‘He needs his light gray coat, and there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.'”  His wife responds that the cousin (Eduard) should then eat something else.  The conversation ends here, and once again, all lines of ordinary communication are shut down:  there is no further curiosity expressed between these two characters about Eduard’s motives in leaving or his choice of Australia, or anything else for the time being.

The next section begins with “Later, the piano tuner came.”  One wonders just what the “through line of action” could be, but this is not left a mystery for long.  While the piano tuner is working, Paul notices that what he takes to be his cousin’s “light gray spring coat” is hanging in the closet, and knowing his wife’s habits, is surprised that she has brought it downstairs so promptly from the attic, “for normally my wife does something only after it no longer matters whether it gets done or not.”  He takes the coat and mails it out, but forgets to remove the book from the pocket.  When he gets back, his wife and the piano tuner are searching for something, which turns out to be the piano tuner’s coat:  it is the one which Holle has mailed out to his cousin by mistake.  When he tells them he has just sent it to Australia, “by mistake,” he explains no further, nor do they ask for an explanation, except that his wife asks “‘Why [to] Australia?'”  He only repeats “By mistake,” and the piano tuner takes his part in the farcical dialogue: “‘Well, then I won’t intrude any longer,’ said Mr. Kohlhaas [the piano tuner], somewhat embarrassed, if not particularly surprised.”  The humorous here is invested in the fact that Kohlhaas is not in fact surprised, since he knows nothing about the similar appearing coat, nor about the cousin.

They give the piano tuner the cousin’s coat in exchange, but the mistake (despite the fact that Paul has a sherry with the man and they talk about pianos) is never explained.  Two days later, they receive a box of mushrooms from the piano tuner, and a letter which he found in the pocket of the cousin’s coat, sending a now twelve years old ticket to the opera to a friend and telling him that he was going to be out of town for a while.  The incurious wife only asks about why they’re having mushrooms for lunch, and when she’s told that the piano tuner sent them, remarks that it’s “nice of him,” but he “shouldn’t have” without apparently seeing any connection with the previous remark at the beginning about there being no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When she sees the opera ticket on the table, she asks about it too, but when told simply that it’s twelve years old, says only “‘Oh well….I wouldn’t have cared to go to [it] anyway.'”

But the ridiculousness of the situation doesn’t end there.  The cousin writes another letter and says that he needs to be sent a tenor recorder.  The cousin reports that in the coat pocket of the coat he has received “(which, strangely enough, had grown longer)” he has found a book on how to play the recorder and is going to use it.  He also says, however, that recorders are not “available” in Australia (this is patently absurd, to borrow a phrase, but by now the point is clearly made).  When Paul reports to his wife that he’s had another letter from his cousin Eduard, the wife once again asks, as if by rote, “‘What does he write?'”  When Paul ridiculously condenses the whole matter into the information “‘He says there are no recorders in Australia.'”  His wife simply responds:  “‘Well, then he should play another instrument.'” Paul agrees.  The story ends with the simple two-sentence paragraph, “My wife is refreshingly and disarmingly matter-of-fact.  Her replies are straightforward but thorough.”

What creates the highly comic atmosphere of this story is in fact the combination of coincidence (the two light gray spring coats appear similar, each has an instruction book in its pocket, there are several letters) with the inconsequential manner in which every possibility for the characters to create a genuine kind of communication about the events is neglected and short-circuited.  It’s true, the issues at hand are not major life and death issues and are purposely mundane and somewhat silly.  Yet, if this is how these characters ordinarily communicate, what on earth would they do with a more devastating event?  In each case where there is an opportunity for the narrating character to explain more about what he knows, he neglects to do so.  What’s more, the other characters (including the piano tuner, who loses his own coat and finds a book on mushrooms in the replacement coat he is given, and the cousin, who receives a coat that doesn’t fit and a book on recorders in the coat pocket) regard this situation as normal, and don’t ask for further information.  The punchline of the whole story truly does occur in the final paragraph, because the speaker is praising his wife’s matter-of-factness, straightforwardness and thoroughness which she exhibits while lacking total information without which she is acting or advising action.  One must therefore wonder what this marriage is based on, a serious point in the midst of so much humor, if the characters or even one of them routinely hide matters from the other, or speak so definitively about something they don’t have complete information about.  But they obviously feel secure with each other this way.  And in fact, since all the characters in the story share this notable lack of curiosity, what sort of world is it they live in which provides for such incompetence in social circumstances without devastating catastrophes of misunderstanding?  If the stakes were a little higher and had to do with something more than a misplaced overcoat, this story itself might depict such a catastrophe.  As it is, once again Hildesheimer has managed to captivate and enchant with his off-beat, quizzical, absurdist view of life.

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October 22, 2012 · 4:42 am

“Alice, angry, told herself that it must be the fiftieth time she’d seen the man without knowing his name.”–Fall 2012 Writers’ Relay

I had an idea.  It’s not an original idea, but I think the way I plan to do it and the place I plan to do it (here, on my site) may be new.  The idea is this:  I’m going to write two paragraphs, not more than 10-15 lines each, and post them in this space below.  The first person to comment gets to write the next segment, also composed of not more than 2 paragraphs, 10-15 lines long each.  The second person responding gets to write the next set of paragraphs, and so on and so forth (please rewrite your comment before hitting the comment button if it is too long, so that as many people as possible get a turn).  For me, this will have the upside that I get to read and talk to my followers a lot more (but you can respond to this post even if this is your first time on my blogsite).  For me and for you both, it may turn out to be funny, enlightening, enriching, and just a lot of fun.  If the comments slow down, I’ll take another turn, and every time there’s a response I’ll answer with another story fragment, unless someone else gets there first.  If you’re just ready to respond and someone gets in in front of you, you can read their comment, adjust yours slightly to fit the next slot, and then go.  This writing a collaborative “book” has been done numerous times in literary history, the most famous ones known to me being A Book by Twelve Authors in which Henry James and others participated, and in the 20th century Naked Came the Stranger, written by several famous authors under the pen name “Penelope Ashe.”

The rules are simple:  keep to the WordPress.com rules about appropriate language and material, which means a few curse words and profanities are okay, but it’s not about showing off your arcane vocabulary or shock value, and it’s not necessarily for any high literary purpose.  You can parody or play it straight (no previously published texts of yours or anyone else’s, please), but please don’t send any links, videos, or photographs in your response.  All it’s about is fiction for fun.  Even if Arabella Heartthrob Rapture writes first, and fills up her two paragraph limit with sighs and billings and cooings, that’s no reason why Anthony “The-Tantalus-Machine” Velociraptor can’t take the lovers on a swift interplanetary ship to the farthest galaxy in his two following paragraphs.

I don’t know whether you will like this or not, and if you don’t, then we won’t do it anymore.  But I think it might be a good exercise, if nothing else, something you could turn to now and again and limber up on before you begin your serious writing for the day.  And don’t worry if you don’t write fiction–write it for fun, or produce some highly embroidered non-fiction that will protect your privacy, if you like.  If it turns out that I get a lot of responses from this, then I may do it again, once a season at least.  Just remember:  two paragraph limit, not more than 10-15 lines long for each paragraph.  I hope you’re ready!  Here goes:

Alice, angry, told herself that it must be the fiftieth time she’d seen the man without knowing his name.  He always gave her a slight nod, or a friendly smile, or a cheery wave.  But today, when she was standing by the cosmetic counter at Wenkel’s, one of about six cosmetics counters the major chain store boasted, someone had come up to stand beside her, and a moment later had gently placed a warm, dry hand over hers where it rested on the counter, at the same time sliding something beneath it.  She jerked her hand away in reflex, now really annoyed with the saleswoman who was taking so much time to wait on someone else.  As soon as she had moved her hand and looked up, she saw the man looking into thin air in front of him, as if he really had no connection with his own hand.

“Does your husband know you come here?” he asked, still without looking at her.  Husband?  What husband?  Trying to frame an adequately chilling response, Alice glanced up again, but the man was already walking away in the distance.  She looked at his back.  His top coat was a gray rain coat, which had beads of moisture all over the surface; he must’ve just come inside.  She turned back and as she raised her hand to attract the saleswoman’s now unoccupied attention, her hand brushed a card, the business-style card the man had left under her hand.  She squinted at it; the writing was small.  The card said:

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October 20, 2012 · 2:20 pm

What did I know about dinosaurs before there was Jurassic Park? Plenty–all of it confused!

When I was a child in grade school (known to some as primary school), I had already started out with the reading habits I have today, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on that interested me.  My interests were more shapeless and inchoate then, because even with all the reading I did, I hadn’t yet narrowed things down to simple preferences.  I had interests (monsters, ghosts, dinosaurs, love stories, folk and fairy tales, tales of heroes and heroines, things rather in the fantastic line than not).  Those early years were the years which saw the creation of that great masterpiece “Vicki and the Spider” by my friend David D., a story in which I fell into a giant pit and was eaten by an equally giant spider, a masterpiece made of sheets of that giant paper teachers used to give us to write on with our giant pencils (no wonder the spider was so big, everything in our world except us was big in those days!).  This scurrilous publication of course called for retaliation, but I took the high road and gave my friend David a nobler foe than a creepy old spider in my follow up short “novel” “David and the Lion.”  The literary gods were clearly pleased with me, for after David D. moved away to another part of the country, they continued to inspire me to read and to write, and led me to some of my favorite books earlier than was suggested for my age range.

First there were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, then some secretary who solved crimes whose name I no longer remember, but whose titles always featured color names, such as “Murder in Maroon,” and so forth and so on.  Then, there was the terrifying short story which I’ll swear also had the name “The Woman in White,” but which unlike Wilkie Collins’s novel of that name featured a jealous and vindictive wraith of a first wife who stalked a betrothed man with a bread knife and at one point visited him in a dream, trying to slice him in half.  Though he doubted the veracity of the dream the next morning when he first awoke, when he looked down, half of his mattress was cut in ribbons!

One of my earliest memories was of my first fantasy/science fiction novel, however.  It was  a dinosaur story which had far more of fantasy than science about it, and was read in the days when my friend David was still around with his brotherly recommendations about what to read.  There was nothing cute and cuddly about these dinosaurs, no “The Land That Time Forgot” about any of them.  They were fearsome and toothy and nearly inescapable except for those very accustomed to surviving with them–and here’s where the Jurassic Park element comes into play:  where, in what space and time, is it likely that humans and dinosaurs would ever interact?  Just as in “Jurassic Park,” in this book, whatever its obviously forgettable title was, the anachronism was alive and well, and events conspired to make the book exciting if totally inaccurate.

When I refer to anachronisms, I’m not referring to the part of the book in which two boys, friends, go to a mysterious carnival/state fair where they visit the booth of some piece of machinery like Zoltan the Fortune-teller, who predicts an adventure (or was it an actual human fortune-teller?  I’ve forgotten).  Nor am I referring to the fateful tent they enter which is full of dinosaur bones and skeletons.  Nor am I referring to whatever happens to them to throw them back into the past, into a dinosaur-filled realm in the world, where all around them the world is a constant menace and a threat.  What I am referring to by anachronism is the fact that in this world (as happens by scientific accident in “Jurassic Park”) there are real, live humans alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, picking their way carefully in the giant footsteps of their monster-like neighbors!  The only other fiction I’d ever seen at the time in which a dinosaur was alive at the same time as humans was the cartoon “The Flintstones” on television, in which a very tame and dog-like dinosaur was the family pet, and there were a few other dinosaurs scattered in the storyline here and there, all geared to (human) domestic purposes.  By contrast, this book about the two boys and the dinosaur-age boy they learn to communicate with was thrilling!  What excitement!  What chills as they barely escaped the vicious monsters time after time!  What a life-like picture (I thought in my small person’s head) of a village of stone age (?) people forced to live alongside forces and beings constantly trying to eradicate or simply to eat them!  This was the life!  This was camping out!  This was reading!

Inevitably, of course, the two boys fall asleep or faint in the past, or get hit over the head, or something along those lines, just as they are about to be eaten.  They wake up again in the dinosaur bones tent, or at Zoltan’s booth, somewhere which of course makes them half doubt their big adventure (though it’s at least a minor sort of adventure in adult terms for even two very emotionally connected individuals to go through a sort of folie à deux experience in this way).  And the book is over.  And within a short amount of time, David D. moved away, and before the year was out, we studied dinosaurs, and a teacher concerned to keep us from nightmares and to provide us with the truth as was her duty and prerogative informed us that in fact dinosaurs and humans had never inhabited earth at the same time, far from it!  I promptly lost my interest in dinosaurs and started to think more about ghosts and monsters, things which were in my dreams often enough and could lurk helpfully in the shadows until teachers were otherwise occupied, and which were murky enough to exist in the miasma of a young reader’s mind, however much adults might deny them.

Though I can’t blame my entire lack of interest in science that isn’t carefully explained in detail which makes it alive for a non-specialist on this early disillusionment about dinosaurs and humans, who knows but that I might be scraping down the sides of an early human encampment with a trowel and saving crockery specimens with the best of them had the threat of meeting up with dinosaur bones in the same burial plot been possible there?  What about you?  What are the most memorable reading experiences of your early childhood, and how do you feel they shaped your later reading self, career, or intelligence?  My comment pages are always open!

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October 18, 2012 · 7:07 pm

How magic resides in the lessons of life–Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

When we hear a simple tale told by a grandparent in an unpretentious style, with a sort of humorous, or sad, or wry punchline attached to the end, we may make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of another old country saying (or street-wise rejoinder, for that matter), that the punchline is something not really to be taken seriously.  But if we had lived that person’s life through, we might well think otherwise–in fact, that punchline or reduction of a piece of reality to what seems like a formulaic old saw might in that case be something to make us sit up and take notice, or mumble under our breaths, or sigh dramatically, or feel a shiver as if a “person just walked over our graves.”

Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist is all about the experience of attaining life wisdom through a sort of personal journey, paying attention to signs and omens along the way and always keeping one’s goal in sight even when it seems delayed by everything that happens to one.  And the book is full of teacher figures eager to share their principles with the right student and knowing more than he does himself about his dreams.  Signs and omens and pilgrimages to Mecca and belief in Jesus Christ and Allah and prophets and seers and Gypsy fortune tellers and scholars and merchants and even, yes, an alchemist all have their place.  Even encounters with rogues and thieves and people who threaten to murder one are or become learning experiences for an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who starts out only by having unusually troubling dreams.  When he asks a Gypsy woman to interpret, she tells him that if he goes to Egypt and visits the Pyramids, he will find a treasure that makes him a rich man.  It’s obvious that a kind of symbolic alchemy is going on in the text, however, because as Santiago is led on through the book by various prophesying and teaching figures, he accepts a spiritual sort of quest in place of a monetary one, and thus is in the process of refining himself and allowing himself to be refined by others.

Santiago learns that he is in search of living out his own “Personal Legend” and is being led by these others to perceive the “Soul of the World” in all living things.  Reading the signs and omens as he learns to do, he seems not ever actually to use or to use only once the two magic stones, one black and one white, Urim and Thummim, pronosticating stones given him by Melchizedek, a mysterious “king” with a Biblical name who says he is the “king of Salem” and wears (under a voluminous robe) a golden breastplate.  Santiago learns the importance of accepting his fate and learning to perceive it truly and follow it well because, as an Arabic crystal dealer for whom he works for a year says, “Maktub,” (“It is written”) by “the hand that writes all,” though the words used are always “Personal Legend” and never the less gentle and more dreaded word “Fate.”

What’s the most unusual is the combination in the book of an uncomplicated story line with what amounts almost to a treatise on belief, as Santiago goes from being a shepherd to a traveller to a temporary employee for a candy dealer in Tangier, then for a crystal merchant in Tangier, whom he so enriches by his merchandising concepts that he makes enough money to decide whether he wants to pay his passage back to Spain and forget the whole matter or go forward.  But he would have worked for neither of the two men had he not been robbed at a time in Tangier when he was unable to speak Arabic; what he later learns to speak fluently is known as “the universal language without words.”  He also learns that understanding and following one’s Personal Legend is a matter of not perceiving himself as a victim of the thief, but as someone following his own destiny.  After all, as he also knows by this time, “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”  (In my edition of this book, there are questions for discussion, and one of them is centered around whether this does not convey at least a hint of narcissism–but when one has covered the entire book and realizes that the doctrine taught throughout is that the main unifying force of the whole world is love, and that acting in line with love in fact helps one find one’s Personal Legend, the point is dismissible, I believe.)

Santiago in fact goes to the Sahara and, surrounded by dangers such as tribal warfare, makes his way with his caravan to an oasis, meeting an Englishman along the way who first introduces him to the idea of alchemy, carries a load of books along, and also has two prognosticating Urim and Thummim stones.  The Englishman is trying to learn from books what the shepherd is learning from life.  At the oasis, the Englishman seeks for knowledge of the alchemist who is said to live just to the south of there, and Santiago falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Fatima whom they have stopped to ask for information.  This later becomes a temptation to him also, to forget about the treasure near the Pyramids and stay with her.  But fate intervenes again:  the boy reads the omen of two hawks warring in the sky, and reports back to the oasis chieftains (who are at peace with each other in the oasis) that a warring tribe is about to descend.  He is threatened with death if this turns out to be a false prediction, but he has spoken truly, and the chieftains muster in time successfully to defend the oasis from attack.

The boy’s fate takes another turn when the real alchemist seeks him out and challenges him because he read the signs of the desert accurately.  Because the boy shows courage at this meeting at swordpoint (said to be the most necessary thing to have in order to stand up to one’s Personal Legend), the alchemist leads him further into the desert, within a short distance of the Pyramids, to an old Coptic monastery.  There the alchemist shows the boy how to transmute lead into gold, but when the boy asks if he himself will ever be able to do so, the alchemist responds that it is his own Personal Legend to have done so, not the boy’s.

When Santiago is actually standing in front of the Pyramids, he is remembering that his heart earlier told him to be aware of the place where his tears fall, because there is where his heart is and his treasure also.  At this point, he weeps at the beauty of the Pyramids and the desert night, and so takes the command literally and begins to dig with his hand in the desert soil beneath him, hoping to unearth a literal treasure.  But at the next moment, he is set upon by refugees who take his only remaining gold from him and beat him nearly senseless.  They have asked, though, what he is doing there, and when he tells them he is digging for treasure because he twice dreamed of it there, they scoff at him and prepare to depart.  One of them in mocking him, however, goes go far as to tell him that he had fallen asleep on just that spot on the desert two years before and had dreamed something about a treasure buried in an old sycamore tree near a ruined church on the field of Spain where the shepherds and their flocks sometimes stayed, but that he himself is not so stupid as to cross the whole desert and into another country to follow a dream.  They leave, and suddenly Santiago realizes that he is now rich beyond his dreams, because he does have that kind of belief, and he can get his way back again somehow and claim the treasure.

Lest one assume that this story ends with the usual lessons about alchemy being only a means of transforming a metal or only truly being about changing people from one state to another morally or spiritually, it is for Santiago both:  it is this complexity which means that if he is a wise man and a rich man, he will never confuse the two, but will always pay his debts of teaching and learning and of wealth in the proper coin.  It also is not a tale which rewards us only with the unadventurous thought that “happiness is best found in your own backyard.”  That would be a truly unrewarding moral to the story.  Luckily, Coelho provides an Epilogue in which Santiago goes back to Spain, retrieves his treasure, and feels the kiss in the wind of his desert woman, Fatima, waiting for him.  The optimism of the text leads us to believe that he will go back to the oasis, too.  Thus, though he has achieved his Personal Legend, he will never have to reproach himself, as others in the story do, with not having had the courage to act on their dreams.  He is both materially and spiritually successful, but it took the second to bring about the first, and it is the second which will ensure that he does not misuse his material goods.

The 1993 English edition of the text translated by Alan R. Clarke and published by HarperCollins has a brief biographic sketch of the author and tells how he himself was repressed first by his parents from following his dream to be a writer, and then imprisoned and tortured by a repressive political regime for defending free expression.  When he was freed, he first decided to live what he regarded as a more “normal” life.  But then he had “an encounter with a stranger,” whom he had first met in a dream.  “The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic.  He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.”  After that pilgrimage, Coelho’s writing career took off.  As of the 1993 printing, “The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.”  It just goes to show that what to one person might be a tall tale or a moralistic fantasy chockful of truisms is for another a guide to true wisdom, and that discovering one’s own Personal Legend means listening sometimes to older, wiser voices that speak of their own experience of things, so that one doesn’t have to find everything out through trial and error.  And Paulo Coelho is one of those voices who speak truly of life’s tribulations, though he disguises them ever so well as simple learning exercises, perhaps so that we can learn to resist discouragement as well as his character Santiago did, and as he himself obviously had to do.  This book, though, is a delight as a literary experience as well, with its simple style and clear explanations of complicated states of mind.  I predict that it is the fate of Santiago the shepherd boy in The Alchemist to continue to please readers for many years to come.

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October 16, 2012 · 3:01 pm

Anticipation and longing in Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler”

In the middle of November, I will be travelling to Canada by train to attend my graduation for my Ph.D.  While there, I will stay with some dear friends, a man and woman who have helped me over many a hurdle by their concerted force and welcoming ways.  So, it was only fitting that some days ago when I happened to read Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler” I immediately understood the notions and laughable moments he set forth therein:  anticipation and longing are an arrival of their own, an arrival at the state of appreciation for one’s eventual destination.  The glow cast over the trip itself is something which comes from one’s expected activities:  for me fellowship, laughter, and good times, for Federico V. in the story a regularly appointed rendevous with his lover, Cinzia U., “a resident of Rome” who also lives at the end of a train journey.

The whole of the story, a ten page short story, is taken up with describing Federico’s activities as he looks forward to the train journey, calculates just where on the train to sit and how best to get a compartment as much as possible to himself, plans the details of his trip ahead of time, and gets a “token” of his whole trip, an actual telephone token with which he will call Cinzia once he arrives.  It is significant that he only supplies himself with one, when he could easily even on his apparently middle class budget afford to supply himself with several, in case of loss or error on the phone line.  This token is in a sense the last bar that stands between him and his lover, and is simultaneously the last thing he has to do to meet her and the first contact he will have with her each time he travels.  As the text says, “Everything seemed to be there to encourage him, to give a spring to his steps like the rubberized pavement of the station, and even the obstacles–the wait, his minutes numbered, at the last ticket window still open, the difficulty of breaking a large bill, the lack of small change at the newsstand–seemed to exist for his pleasure in confronting and overcoming them.”

The whole trip is filled with things Federico already knows well from past experience:  how to keep other people at bay and mostly out of his compartment by closing the curtains; how to borrow a paper from someone who’s finished reading it; how to start out in a second class car perhaps to switch to first later in the trip; how to arrange his clothes for sleeping so that he does not wrinkle his overcoat, which he uses as a blanket; how to adjust the heat and cold to keep himself comfortable without too much resistance from other passengers; in short, how to organize each and every moment of the trip so that nothing goes wrong and he gets to where he is going with the greatest ease possible.  And yet, how can it be the greatest ease possible, when he has planned everything out with the careful consideration of an obsessive-compulsive person who has never been on the trip before?

When he is finally on the train and having his “adventure,” which to some people would be simply a rather pedestrian and necessary trip (though of course they are not travelling presumably for the same reason as he), snatches of a French love song he seems to be making up in his head flow through the text, and one wonders if he’s finally thinking of Cinzia as something other than an abstract goal.  But the fragments of the song (“Je voyage en volupté,” “Je voyage toujours…l’hiver et l’été,” “du voyage, je sais tout,” “J’arrive avec le train,” and so forth) are more about the trip itself than about his lover Cinzia, love in the wonderful city of Rome, or anything more usual that a man travelling for love might be expected to be thinking of.

When the old pillow merchant comes by out on the platform, there is even a bit of Calvino’s fantastic imagination:  “The pillow now was in Federico’s arms, square, flat, just like an envelope, and, what’s more, covered with postmarks:  it was the daily letter to Cinzia, also departing this evening, and instead of the page of eager scrawl there was Federico in person to take the invisible path of the night mail, through the hand of the old winter messenger….indeed the very fact of departing, the hiring of the cushion, was a form of enjoying [later comforts, later intimacy, later sweetnesses], a way of entering the dimension where Cinzia reigned, the circle enclosed by her soft arms.”

The comedy of the story and the gentle pathos is typical Calvino, for when he calls Cinzia up on the telephone, she is still drowsy from sleep, “and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; and he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.”  On the surface, of course, the “perfect night of love” is the night he will actually spend with Cinzia; still, since they have “days” together they presumably may have also more than one night, and the “perfect night of love” about which he will never be able to tell Cinzia the significance is also the night he has spent on the train, on his great “adventure,” a modern day knight-errant struggling against modern day challenges to reach his lady.

Thus, though Calvino is never heavily ironic nor heavy-handed either, this stands as a mild cautionary tale about letting anticipation and longing build and find their natural release in an ordinary way, instead of frittering away the strength of one’s feelings through petty details and obsessive habits.  It certainly was an eyeopener of a tale for me, because ever since my trip was planned, I have been notifying my friends of every minor detail of my arrival and departure and have tried to make my plans foolproof from this end as well.  Now that I know what one of my favorite authors has to say on the subject, I will try to conduct myself with a more becoming gravitas, and save my feelings for my friends rather than for the displacement activity of hogging the seats on the train!

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October 14, 2012 · 5:59 pm

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”–Samuel Beckett sums up a reader’s experience of Kafka’s “The Castle”

A few weeks ago (and it was longer ago than it should have been, because I had a real difficulty forcing myself back to Franz Kafka’s The Castle every time I put it down), I decided that since Kafka is so very important to existentialism and existentialism is not only so monumental in 20th century thought but is also still healthy and well in portions of some contemporary novels, books, and plays, I should read him.  The only Kafka I’d read before was “The Metamorphosis,” and I quite enjoyed it, so I expected equally well to enjoy The Castle.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my finally getting the point of the book), it was no such thing!

After the first few chapters, I found the book painful to pick up (in the attention-span sense), excruciating to make my way through, and delightful to put down.  I read it at long intervals interspersed with other things of more interest and apparent moment, and took it as in the old days people took their castor oil in the spring, as a sort of needful and necessary tonic.  Definitely I appreciated all the variety and color of the other works I was reading much, much more by contast with The Castle.  Not making it any easier was the fact that there were insertions which had to be made periodically and read with the understanding that they had been in one version of the book and not in another, and the book’s tangled history of revision and translation was against me, was, in fact, truly Kafkaesque (now I really, really know what that word means whereas before I merely threw it around as a synonym for “existential”; there is a difference, because “Kafkaesque” means something more like “existential” plus “evilly absurd and apparently pointless, though endlessly involved”).

The basic situation is even too complicated to explain at length, though I’ll make a start at it:  “K.,” the main character, is travelling at night and comes to an inn where he is allowed to stay on a bag of straw in the parlor.  But in the middle of the night, a castellan from a previously unmentioned castle which dominates village protocol wakes him and insists that he does not have the right to stay without permission from the castle itself.  Though there has been no previous statement that K. is a land-surveyor on the way to a job, and in fact he doesn’t at first even seem to know where he is, he says that he has been called to do work, and they take him at his word!  The castle, when contacted over the phone, even acknowledges that he has been called.  From there on, the absurdities rapidly proliferate, with different bureaucrats from the castle and village endlessly complicating the affair by the good or bad ways in which they receive K., and the manner in which they quickly change the tenor of their remarks to him from favorable to unfavorable at the drop of a hat.  Each man and woman, it seems, has a vision of his or her own importance to the castle, and though they seem always to understand amongst themselves how the game of changing places and importances is played, K. himself remains on the outside, always at the mercy of whomever he happens to be speaking to at the moment and their quick-change artists’ psychologies, even when he is talking to Frieda, a woman to whom (for once acting as quickly as the rest) he has become affianced.  Nor does this connection avail him of anything much but a momentary peace, however, for his relationship with Frieda unravels nearly as easily as the rest, and he goes on trying to find other routes than Frieda to Klamm, an important bureaucrat whose previous involvement with Frieda he’d hoped to capitalize on in order to get ahead.

I did read the book until the end, and read the revisions, and deleted passages, and continuations.  One of the more intriguing bits of information which has accumulated about the book is that Kafka said (to his friend and executor Max Brod) before he himself died that he was planning to have K. the land-surveyor be told on his deathbed that though he himself had not technically acquired a legal place in the village, because of “‘certain auxiliary circumstances'” it is going to be allowed for him to stay there.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been so glad to see the end of any book I’ve read.  And I have to recognize that so many people before me can’t be wrong:  the book is a monumental work of art (and is monumentally boring as well).  It’s one of those works of art that once done, cannot be done again in a like manner by anyone else, though I’ve run across lots of books now which have been called “Kafkaesque.”

Then, my mind was jogged by Thomas Mann’s tribute to Kafka, in which he called The Castle one of Kafka’s “warmhearted fantasies” and suggested that like The Trial it might cause people to break into open laughter if they heard it read aloud.  I remembered my frustration with the book: was I really so off-target?  After all, when I thought of Samuel Beckett’s remark from “Waiting for Godot,” (“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”), isn’t that the reaction I was actually having?  And the fact is that even though people are constantly coming and going in Kafka’s book, nothing really happens!  The awfulness I was so in angst over was what was making others capable of laughter in Mann’s view!  The only end that is really suitable to the whole experience is the one Kafka confided to Brod before his own death, and later recanted about, also to Brod, telling him that he planned to leave the work unfinished!  Now, finally, I understood.

There is, however, another darker side to the book, and it’s one which I would give myself credit for having apprehended from the start.  It’s the notion which I’ve seen articulated in several places, that evil is not really a derring-do procedure of demons and imps and ghosts and horrible hallows; evil can, in fact, have something boring and procedural about it.  The lack of moral imagination and dullness of mind which endless days and nights of bureaucratically following an unscrupulous leader bring about, for example, might be mentioned.  Hannah Arendt has mentioned them, in reference to Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil.  There, she says, “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us–the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”  How many people in concentration camps must’ve been affected by the way in which, when they appealed to human empathy, to their Gods, even, it might have seemed that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes” (except Death), until the final devastating end of the war, when the great insults and affronteries that human life had borne became so evident that no one could deny or ignore them anymore?  And it’s still much the same today:  the same calculations of number of bullets and guns needed, number of missiles at the ready, the same mind-numbing statistics about casualties to one side’s or the other’s blame, the same helplessness of refugees and starving peoples, and the recurrent mutilations of the weak and innocent, and we continue the evil pattern.  Even Kafka, though he and his friends apparently laughed until tears came when he read them his other great work, The Trial, which Thomas Mann tells us “deals explicitly with the problem of divine justice,” might have been stricken to silence and have been unable to laugh.

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October 12, 2012 · 3:20 pm

The third and last Halloween post–early memories of two terror films from the small screen

Though I said yesterday that I probably was going to write a shorter post than usual, in fact I became quite verbose on the subject of Joss Whedon’s “The Cabin in the Woods,” and got some good pointers about it from my commenters.  Today, the subtext of my post is that memory of terror, unless it’s perhaps of a genuine personal tragedy or accident that has befallen one, is fragmentary and gets confused with other moments one has witnessed on the screen, or perhaps is connected with the time and place when you encountered the substance of the memory.  Thus as a former fan of “Dark Shadows” when it was in its first “incarnation” as a television show in the 1970s (and Mom didn’t know, I don’t think, that we watched it in the afternoons after school), I can’t be sure that my memory of  what sticks in my mind as one of the most frightening werewolf scenes I’ve ever seen didn’t come from that show.  Maybe it did; maybe it was Quentin Collins I’ve confused the werewolf snippet with.  At any rate, I want to pass along here two early memories of the two most frightening images/films I saw at the time when I was eagerly absorbing all sorts of fictional material, and before I had more or less eschewed horror films.

In the barest trace of the werewolf film in question (which is all my memory retains of that particular episode), the unusual thing wasn’t the amount of blood and gore I saw, which is in marked contrast with the horror films I’ve lately seen advertised on television.  I can recall no blood and gore.  What was the most startling and vivid and terrifying was the pursuit of the victim herself as she ran through an autumn wood, where some leaves were down while others still clung to the trees above.  There was a suitably mysterious mist rising to all sides of the path she was fleeing along, though she was quite unmercifully clear and plain ahead, even I believe losing a shoe as she ran along the path, screaming fitfully and in sheer hysteria.  But do you know what was the most frightening aspect of all?  It’s that her screaming was muted and subdued as if coming through a tunnel from a distance:  what I heard in the foreground audio was the hoarse breathing and growling of the beast running behind her.  Moreover, the film was taken from the beast’s visual point of view as he or it ran.  This may be standard now for all I know, but I had never seen this before, and was astounded by the greater immediacy of my fear; I was in the werewolf’s totally unreasoning mind, his hungry and rapacious point of view suddenly my own.  This was a very effective way to keep a young child up at night with nightmares (believe you me!), though of course what was even more frightening was that I couldn’t confess my fear because I didn’t want to be prohibited from perhaps more scary television watching to come.

The second memory is of me as a slightly older child, acccompanied by my five-year-old brother.  It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at a relative’s house for the celebration.  It was a very small party, though such family favorites as Swedish meatballs were on the menu (another stray fact my mind insists on dredging up).  While the adults partied in the kitchen and dining room, my brother and I sat in the den, served food periodically like little princes by adults who popped in to see if we were all right.  It got late and then later.  All of a sudden, on came “Chiller Theater,” a classic show of which we had only heard, never having been allowed to watch it before.  We made one of those unspoken pacts children make and turned down the sound a bit:  we were going to watch a movie on “Chiller!”

This movie did not feature monsters.  In fact, it featured something which our culture nowadays believes to be the province of Bart Simpson:  the trick harassing telephone call.  (In our area, there was a tobacco called “Prince Albert,” and it came in a can.  We were fond of calling up total strangers at stores and markets on the phone and asking “Do you have ‘Prince Albert’ in a can?”  Our busy and long-suffering audience of one would either unsuspectingly or just to give us cheap joy answer “Yes.”  Whereupon we would respond with the nostrum, “Well, you’d better let him out then, hadn’t you?”)  Anyway, to get back to the “Chiller” movie in question:  the basic plot involves a teenage girl’s slumber party, at which she and her friends are getting bored late at night and trying to think of something to do.  The parents are away at a late night party.  At the risk of giving away the whole story early, I should probably tell you that the title of the movie is “I Know Who You Are, and I Saw What You Did.”  Well, the story jogs along at average pace for a while, with various comic misunderstandings when the girls call strangers and say “I know who you are, and I saw what you did.”  Then, the girls happen to strike a nerve in a major way with someone who has really done something horrible, we don’t find out what right away.  The phone line on the other end of the call goes dead.  The dread and thrill gradually build as the girls become the victims of their own practical joke; near the end, a call to the police to come and prevent an intruder who is trying to get in from entering goes awry, when their own phone line goes dead, due to it having been cut through by the mysterious criminal.  (This was well before the day of cell phones.)  It was also before the day, however, of horribly bloody scenes being actually “shown” on film, and so in the end the police do get there in time, in league with the returning parents (whose calls had received no answer, of course).

Though I can’t say that either of these memories haunted me for life (and it’s a fact that I continued to read Gothic novels and scary stories for some years to come), they have certainly stayed with me as reference points to my earliest recall of scary movies, even though they were only television films.  What about you?  What are some of your earliest fictional scary memories?  How have they affected your reading and viewing habits since?

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