Urban Legends: Upcoming Publication

The canonization process in The Serpentine History of the Saint involves my investigators in urban legends. 

In a sense, all fairy tales and folktales are urban legends, not due to their setting but in their production. Rather than strumming gondoliers and courtly poets and even lecturing ministers, folktales originate in "have you heard about?! can you believe it?!" gossip.

Actually, they originate in both high and low cultures. But gossip is the fuel for these tales. 

And comeuppance is so often the pay-off. The urban legend my investigators encounter falls under Stolen Debris: a family puts a body or stool sample or dead pet or, at the most extreme, dead granny in a bag or suitcase or box. It gets left on a seat or strapped to the roof of a car. And it gets stolen. Ha ha! Joke is on the thieves! 

In fact, the tale often ends with the climax: "And it was gone." The comeuppance/joke is implied as listeners can imagine unwrapping...that. Oh, gross!

In fact, many urban legends rely on the "Tell-Tale Heart" final line--the confession (rather than the arrest). Take the urban legend popular when I was growing up: Man sleeps with a beautiful woman. Next day he wakes up and scrawled on the bathroom mirror in lipstick is, "Welcome to AIDS."

Tales like this are often attributed to the need to warn, the same purpose often attributed to Little Red Riding Hood. But the truth is, hardly anyone ever dwells on the lesson. They never did with the AIDs story when I was a teen. 

I suggest that the tales are closer to Stephen King's hypothesis about horror movies: the tale may come from the same place as the "warning" part of the psyche, but the telling is more about catharsis, releasing a worry, than alerting others to danger. 

Urban legends aren't about logic. They are hardly about social understanding. They are, I would argue, almost entirely atavistic and self-serving. 

As one of my investigators says about the Stolen Debris tale (the "debris" in this case is a bone):

Phillipe said, "Part ghost story, part I can tell you exactly what happened with my excessive detail baloney. A worn-out trope. People wrapping up dead pets and grandmothers and stool samples in pretty paper and what do you know, the item gets stolen by thieves.”

“Thieves would surely go for the unwrapped items in the car,” Victor agreed solemnly. 

“Carjacks. Air compressors. Leather seat covers,” Justin murmured. 

He and Victor grinned. Phillipe grimaced and bobbed his head. But he added, “The family is trying to excuse their jerk ancestor for not returning the bone.”

Kopakonan and Other Mermaids: Upcoming Publication

In my novel slated for May publication, a Congregation--group of sainthood investigators--delve into the possible sainthood of a mermaid, Saint Margaret. 

They discover that she (possibly) fled Bamburgh Castle for the Faroe Islands. Is that likely at all? For someone, human or mermaid, to head from Northumbria's east coast to the Faroe Islands around 500 C.E. (A.D.)? 

Yes! Saint Brendan the Navigator performed this task about that time. 

I discovered that the Faroe Islands produced one of many selkie tales common to Northern Europe: a seal woman sheds her seal skin when she comes ashore. That skin is stolen by her husband-to-be. She stays with him for many years, but as soon as she finds the skin again, she dons it and departs. In the Faroe Island version, the human husband later kills Kopakonan's seal husband and children, and she curses his descendants. 

I used the idea of a mermaid's curse in my first published short story: "The Birthright."

The investigators in my new story have to square the vengeance part of the tale with the saint's supposed merciful character. They are helped by (1) medieval saints being somewhat more belligerent than modern saints; (2) the Lady Margaret apologists who live on the island. 

The statue of Kopakonan on Kalsoy Island (above) was erected in 2014. 

The second tale comes much later and is largely ignored by my fictional investigators. But it is a real tale--in the sense that I was able to get a digital copy of the 1882 chapbook version of the tale from WorldCat during my research. Thanks, WorldCat! 

The story is of one John Robinson, a young sailor who ends up in the sea when his ship wrecks. A mermaid saves him but only because he catches hold of her girdle and "got the first word with her." The chapbook states, "Never, never let a Mermaid get in the first word!" She gives him the means to get to shore, but she later returns, gets in the first word, and claims him. 

The mermaid here is similar to the mermaids in Pirates of the Caribbean and elsewhere: less vainly self-centered and more entirely amoral. 

A much nicer tale from Cornwall reports a young male member of the church choir who joins a mermaid in her watery home--and appears later to be living happily with her in a cave. 

But that tale proves the rule: mermaids are incalculable, like keeping lions as pets. They might cozy up to you. They might eat off your face.

Fairy Tales: English Folklore, the Quintessence of Practicality

In the nineteenth century, searching for the "true" national identity was all the rage. Part of that search involved collecting folklore, tales from the supposedly unadulterated, "pure" nation's past.

Intellectuals of the nineteenth century had a lot in common with current academics who invest in theoretically manufactured "pure" group identities.

Although awash with as much national pride as other countries, the English never entirely embraced the "English" identity in folklore. (Perhaps due to already having an extensive empire.) Unlike even the Scots and Irish, English lore remained consistently local.

The local and regional emphasis explains a great deal about the lore of colonial transplants. A belief in witchcraft as well as the accoutrements of lore--riddles, songs, and traditions--moved to the North American colonies with the English. However, beliefs in fairies and pixies didn't travel as well. Location or place (that hill, that mound, that forest) was home to such creatures. Separation from the home meant separation from the creatures.

One of the many, many reasons for the Salem Witch Trials was likely the near-obsession by early Puritan lore collectors like the Mathers with witches and poltergeists--and I ponder if that near-obsession stemmed from loneliness. They'd lost their fairies and pixies and water monsters when they crossed the ocean. Witches and demons were all they had left to fill the wilderness and town.

So, yes, ghosts, poltergeists, and witches show up all over Puritan tales while the tales that influenced Shakespeare stayed put in the homeland--as did the legends (King Arthur, Robin Hood). Consequently, many of the English tales that have "carried" beyond local towns and hamlets--such as the Horatio Alger tale "Dick Wittington and His Cat"--contain little to no magic. Place and time and practicality rule the day.

For reading, I recommend Folktales of England, edited by Katharine M. Briggs. Richard Dorson's forward to Briggs' book does a fantastic job detailing the chronology of English lore collectors. I use Dorson's American Legends when I teach American Folklore, which book also addresses the problem of regional versus  a nationally common lore. Dorson and Briggs focus on what actually gets told again and again and again, and they were  prepared to embrace urban legends, which older antiquarians were reluctant to do. In 1965, Dorson and Briggs, along with Jan Harold Brunvand, were way ahead of the game. 

In addition, the tales in Folktales of England are introduced with contextual notes, which I always appreciate. 

Folklore: The Captivity Narrative

The captivity narrative is very, very, very old. So old, it even has its own number in the Stith-Thompson motif index!

Basically the captivity narrative occurs when a member of one culture is seized and dragged into another culture.

Think of civilizations as having a common center. Despite what conspiracy theorists and angry Rousseauians try to get us to believe, this is normal. It is normal and inevitable for a stable culture to have a stable center of traditions and language and attitudes and beliefs. 

Human nature being what it is, that stable center is surrounded by variations--those who adhere to the center but interpret it in their own way; those who debate the center; those who ignore the center; detractors, even rebels.

On the edges of all this response to the center lie Sondheim's woods--a person goes into the woods to explore the "outside," which is, by itself, is fascinating.

However, here's what's even more fascinating. The woods are edged by the woods of another civilization, which has its own center.

How do we enter into that culture while still retaining our own?

If we merely go for a visit, we will still--and always--be perpetual outsiders. And it might not be a good idea anyway. Look what happened to Frodo.

If we're rebels, trying to search for another identity, well...first of all, that's kind of negates the "retaining our own center" aspect of the journey. The rebel has already shed the center, which makes the rebel somewhat less than interesting. (This lack of interest is evinced by the ones the rebel leaves behind and by the ones the rebel encounters: Benedict Arnold lost the respect of everybody, including the British.)

Because the real interest in the captivity narrative is the clash between the two centers. Captivity is both resisted and desired.  What happens when a person, who is still holding onto a center, is forced to adjust to another stable way of being? What compromises ensue?

Some of the most classic literary/popular culture productions in existence utilize the captivity narrative, including Beauty & the Beast; Light in the Forest; a stunning number of nineteenth-century "captivity narratives" regarding Native Americans and religion (Mormons, Catholics); a large portion of all sci-fi, including Asimov's non-alien sci-fi (the human-colonized planets colonized are as culturally distinct from each other as any "alien" planet); alien/UFO narratives...

Memorable Moment: Best Explanation of Cinderella Ever

The third season of Love Boat delivers a Cinderella tale. A woman comes on-board with three daughters, one of them a step-daughter. Naturally, the step-daughter is the "gopher," and naturally, the step-daughter, Cindy, is befriended by Gopher. She can sing, so Gopher wrangles her a solo at the cruise's last-night costume ball, complete with a Cinderella gown and slippers.

The guest band leader, Frank Sinatra, Jr. (character name: Preston Maddox), is impressed by Cindy's voice. However, she runs off after her song, in part because Gopher is afraid of getting in trouble with Cruise Director Julie: the Cinderella gown was supposed to be hers. Cindy naturally leaves a slipper behind.

Come the end of the episode. Frank Sinatra, Jr. is kneeling in the lounge trying slippers on all the young ladies. He must find the young lady with the beautiful voice!

"Why don't you just ask Gopher who she is?" Julie says.

"Well, actually, it's a lot more fun this way," he responds.

There you go: Cinderella explained.

In the end, Cindy reveals herself by singing--which makes far more sense than shoe size.

Stupid Politics in Literature

Generally speaking, I don't mind apolitical literature. I despise politics and believe that current-day American society has allowed itself to be high-jacked by the notion that politics is the end-all-be-all of existence, so . . .

Most of the time, I say, the less politics the better.

I can't help but get irritated, however, when a story presents a political situation that doesn't take reality into account.

For instance . . .

I recently read a short novel based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," only with a happy ending. I rather adore sea fantasy/mermaid/merman literature, and truthfully, I'll probably keep this short novel on my Kindle despite finding it rather frustrating.

The frustrating part: the novel postulates that human beings have messy politics because human beings are so controlling and nasty and toxic and power hungry. Merfolk's politics, on the other hand, aren't like that at all. Their king and queen are super nice, more like supervisors, ya know, than actual dictators. All that messy human stuff never happens to them.

The reader is supposed to buy into this despite the fact that one of the ongoing issues in the novel is that the king and queen don't want their youngest son, or any merfolk really, to go to the surface. It's dangerous and puts the merfolk at risk. National security, ya know.

Let's think about this.

If the king and queen--who awesomely enough function out of Maine waters--are localized, then there must be other mer kings and queens throughout the world. Do they all agree that fraternizing with humans or land folk is a bad idea? Really? Does that type of total agreement seem likely for any sentient species? For all of them to absolutely agree on a single issue without exceptions or caveats or yes-buts? As if they were robots--and not the fun Asimov kind?

Both Nesbit and Lewis provide their

merfolk with complicated motivations.

Since it highly unlikely that they would all agree, what do the localized king and queen do when a king and queen from, say, Scandinavian waters decides, "Hey, we need/want to trade with humans." Do all the kings and queens get together for an international summit? What if the summit fails? Do they go to war? How important is security, keeping merfolk safe?

Perhaps this king and queen control--eh hem, sorry--supervise all merfolk throughout the world. So how exactly do they prevent their supervisees from meeting up with humans? How much security do they have operating at any given moment? The son is fairly closely guarded in the days after he returns from seeing his land-based lover. Does this apply to all merfolk?

It's hard to believe that a king and queen in Maine could control/supervise a bunch of merfolk around, say, Australia without a massive standing army. Doesn't a massive standing army betoken a huge infrastructure that costs somebody somewhere an awesome amount of fish or gold or whatever merfolk work for?

Or maybe they don't work. Maybe they float around all day. But in that case, do the security guards and sentries (which exist in the story) volunteer? Is it really possible to get sentient beings to volunteer for things like guard duty? Even if it is a National Service kind of thing?

What if the security guards don't agree with the king and queen? What if they also fall in love with land folk? Who is going to keep them in line? Do security guards and sentries get punished? By whom? Where do they go if they get punished? If they don't go to prison, are they also closely supervised? Wouldn't that involve MORE sentries and security guards?

Do merfolk mind being constantly watched? If not, how are all these sentient merfolk being culturally indoctrinated to believe that constant supervision isn't tedious and infantilizing? Or maybe they are rewarded for spying on each other--but with what? And who decides how they are rewarded?

Or maybe they are cowed into upholding an ideology that they don't entirely agree with. Who is doing the cowing? Do merfolk go to rallies? Under the Sea Political Conventions?

Perhaps, we are supposed to believe that all merfolk are so happy that the prince is a kind of anomaly. That weirdo, going off to want to be with land people. If so, isn't that prejudice? Or at the very least, a stigma?

Maybe the prince wanting to be with a land person is somehow more offensive or dangerous than it is for ordinary citizen merfolk--this argument (coming from the king and queen) would actually make sense, but that would mean that merfolk care about things like reputations and examples and role models. It would suggest that certain individuals, such as royalty, have more sway than ordinary civilians, and the book is at pains to deny this.

Worse: perhaps the prince wanting to be with a land person is consider a special case--because he is so unique and advanced and what-not. In other words, all the other merfolk are drones who only care about robotically obeying their king and queen. The prince is a kind of advanced uberspecies who thinks outside the box.

Sound elitest? So much for the merfolk not having a power-based (however intellectual) hierarchy. (To be fair, the book denies this possibility--other merfolk do fall in love with land folk. But ooooh, the questions that raises.)

I honestly don't think the author thought this far ahead about any of these issues. She is a skilled enough writer to provide enough motivation in the day-to-day interactions of both the prince and his lover to compensate for the senseless political labels.

I find the lack of political commonsense tiresome, anyway.

Writers: simply declaring that one group is bad and power-hungry and awful and another group is wonderful and lovely and sweet doesn't really work if you don't know how the differences could actually be sustained.

So stop doing it already. There's a reason Jane Austen stuck to the day-to-day. She wasn't being parochial when she didn't deliver diatribes on the Napoleonic Wars in her novels. She was being smart. 

Hearts Over Time: Romance Has Always Been With Us

The next book on the A-Z list, Part 4, is The Amorous Heart by Marilyn Yalom. The call number is 611.12, which means it belongs in the Applied Sciences section.

In truth, the book should probably be in the 300s--psychology, customs, and culture. Or even the 800s--literature. The 600s are supposed to be more about health. The book does discuss the heart as an organ but only very briefly.

On the other hand, Yalom makes the successful argument that since the beginning of writing and song and poetry, people have linked love directly to the organ, as in the physical heart, as in the feelings/reactions that people have when they are excited, lustful, passionate, uncertain, etc. etc. etc.

The connection to the heart icon 💕💕💕💕 came about much later as I discuss below.

Yalom's book makes several fascinating points:

1. Stories about beating, frantic, heavy, loving, jealous, committed hearts are very old, going all the way back to the Egyptians. And the expression of those emotions re: the heart is surprisingly consistent. That is, romance has been with us for a very long time; the ways we think about romance even longer. Probably the first cave-people occupied their evenings by talking about how Bob was felled by a mammoth AND about how Bob's wife was cozying up to Igor now.

2. In Christian medieval Europe, amorous feelings were naturally explored through poetry and songs. The amorous heart had a contender--the heart committed to Yahweh, Christ or, in Islam, to Allah. However, as in the Song of Songs, the terms used to described a religious passion for deity often borrowed from the amorous tradition (and vice versa: see Cohen's "Hallelujah").

Love, Medieval-Style

Yalom is a trustworthy historian and points out that despite the erotic nature of medieval religious poetry, it would be a mistake to get all Freudian about it: "[L]ove as experienced and expressed by medieval mystics should not be reduced to sublimated sexuality; they loved God in a style that was in keeping with the religious culture of their times."

I agree with Yalom. Still--having read some of the included passages, I can only conclude that people in the past were a lot less hung up on the physical aspects of devotion than people are now. I maintain elsewhere that the true split between the body and the mind happened in the nineteenth century, and the poetry of medieval clerics would back me up.

3. Yalom makes the fascinating point that the heart icon appeared early on in history but that does not mean it represented love. It was a shape in nature and therefore a decorative shape in paintings where it clearly meant nothing more than "hey, I'm a decorative shape" (like paisley).

In other words--attaching the emotion of love to the physical location of the heart took place entirely separately (and earlier) from attaching the emotion of love to the decorate symbol of  💟.

So if you've ever thought there was no connection cause, well, just look at the real thing...hey, you were right! After all, the icon itself has been explained as being anything other than a human organ: it represents buttocks or fruit or flowers, etc. etc. The connection to love and therefore to the physical heart itself didn't happen until late in the medieval era.

And the icon didn't truly take off until the nineteenth century. In our current culture, it may be hard to believe that the heart symbol was once merely one of several symbols of love and passion and marriage (human beings tend to reason backwards from their own experience and assume that what is now always has been). The truth is the heart symbol has not always been the prevalent image it is today.

The location of the heart within the body and its connection to the physical reactions of love HAS. So maybe that is why the book is in the 600s--physiology eclipses greeting cards.

Z is for Zahler: Classic Retold Fairytales

Zahler writes retold fairy tales. I chose Princess of the Wild Swans because it was one of my favorite fairy tales growing up.

My mother told me the story first. Although I can't remember her version exactly, the basics are always the same: a princess's brothers are changed into swans by an evil enchantress. The princess escapes into the wild where she learns that she can turn her brothers back if she weaves shirts out of nettles--only she must not speak at all during the months of weaving. 

In the Grimm-like ending, a prince finds and weds her. While he is out of town, his (evil) mother decides that the nettle-collecting princess is a witch and tries to burn her alive. The princess continues working on the shirts as she is being hauled to the stake. Her brothers fly over the town, and she throws the shirts over them. Since the last shirt isn't finished, that brother ends up with one wing instead of an arm.  

I was utterly enamored of this tale, which I first heard when I was five or six. When our family journeyed out West and stopped in the Redwood National Park, I was captivated by the "walk-in" trees. That was where the princess lived!

When I got older and started collecting books off Amazon, Nicholas Stuart Gray's The Seventh Swan was one of the first ones I hunted down (I also own Nicholas Stuart Gray's impressive short story collection, A Wind from Nowhere).  

Zahler's coming-of-age story, although a tad slow in parts, is an excellent adventure yarn and actually makes more sense than the original. For one, the princess still mustn't speak, but she can telephathically share her thoughts with her helpers. So the last 2/3rds of the book is not devoid of dialog.

I also never understood how nettles could be made into shirts and assumed that the nettles were sewn together. Zahler makes clear that the nettles go through a process that eventually results in yarn: nettle yarn is a real thing. Consequently, however, this means the princess needs help, which again makes more sense than some starving girl hanging out in the woods by herself. She is helped by one of her brother's sweethearts, that woman's brother, their witch mother, some of the guards, and the townspeople.

The evil enchantress-stepmother poses a problem, and the final chapters are quite exciting!

In the wrap-up, Zahler thankfully retains the prince with one wing: it's a great pay-off for a story. So often, fairy tales end rather like Star Trek episodes: How did the ship get fixed so fast? But the swan story leaves a hint that a problem can resolve but not always exactly as expected.

This completes the third A-Z list. Coming next . . . non-fiction!

Q is for Quiller-Couch: the Virtues and Problems of Beauty & the Beast

I originally reviewed this book in connection to another A-Z list. 

* * *

Arthur Quiller-Couch was a nineteenth-to-twentieth century British writer/collector of verse who belongs to the same tradition as Andrew Lang. He concentrated more on verse than folklore, yet he did create a number of fairy tale re-tellings, among them Beauty & the Beast.

Beauty & the Beast is unlike many other fairy tales since it was originally crafted as a literary piece in its own right. Although the history is too long to go into here, the original version was written by a woman for the French salons, seventeenth century bohemian get-togethers which focused on the arts. It was later abridged by another French woman.

Quiller-Couch's version lies somewhere between Marianna Mayer and Mercer Mayer's picture book (see the dying Beast below) and Robin McKinley's more extended (and more altered) YA version.

Quiller-Couch attempts to address some of the ongoing issues, such as the sisters' jealousy. (McKinley disposes of this by having all the sisters gets along, a refreshing change; Disney, of course, disposed of it by making Beauty an only child.) Quiller-Couch's text provides the motivations and thought processes found in de Beamont's version. While Beauty accepts the family's new poverty with good grace, the sisters resist. They snarkily criticize Beauty: "You have low tastes and were born to this kind of life." When Beauty's father returns with her rose and the story of the Beast, the sisters chastise Beauty for asking for the rose in the first place; didn't she know that pearls and dresses are easier to come by?

Quiller-Couch's Beauty is naturally--*sigh*--absolutely sweet and perfect, a problem that McKinley disposes of by making her a normal, bookish teen-going-on-twenty-year old, utterly relatable to the young fantasy lovers who read the book.

Quiller-Couch relies on the device of the dream (used in some versions, not in others) whereby Beauty sees her human prince when she's asleep and believes him, at least initially, to be a captive of the Beast. The problem with this device is naturally the problem of many fairy tale tropes. When the dream prince begs Beauty to rescue him by "not relying on appearance," you'd think she'd say, "By gum! I bet the Beast is the prince in disguise!"

Hasn't she read any fairy tales and myths?

An interesting retelling would be if Beauty did tumble to the Beast's real identity early on but wasn't able to free him because she didn't really mean her protestations of affection.

Generally speaking, despite some problems (one more to go--see below), the tale flows well with few of the extreme oddities that attend tales like Hansel & Gretel (in which the parents must either be exonerated or vilified) or Jack in the Beanstalk (why hasn't his mother sent him to live with some relatives by now?) or Puss in Boots (why doesn't Puss simply take over the kingdom himself?).

Beauty & the Beast was constructed as a written story and the bones of the original construction show. The father has a good reason to return to the city (to see if his fortunes have revived). Beauty has a good reason to take her father's place at the Beast's table (the Beast insists on certain terms being kept). The protagonists are allowed time to get to know each other. And few writers, or Disney, can pass up the opportunity to detail Beauty's entertainments in the Beast's castle--ranging from a library filled with all the books ever written to a window that looks out on the world, allowing Beauty to pass her time watching the equivalent of television (Quiller-Couch's interesting invention), to activities, such as feeding the birds and having a snowball fight.

And the well-crafted final scenes deliver that moment of ultimate satisfaction--no, not the appearance of the prince but Beauty's rush to return to the castle and confess her love to the dying Beast.

And then he turns into the prince and everything falls apart.

This problem is so endemic to the story that writers continue to struggle with it. McKinley's Beauty is alarmed by the prince's appearance but then recognizes aspects of her Beast in the prince. Quiller-Couch relies on the assumption that any woman would prefer a prince to the Beast--it doesn't work, especially since his Beauty has already argued with the dream prince about her preference for the Beast. The psychological problem of Beauty settling for dream boy instead of insisting on reality lends credence to serious doubts about the marriage's long-term success.

The transformation works better

with a snake!

And Disney uses the Beast, not the prince, in its parks' parades.

The astonishing aspect of Beauty & the Beast is that like all good show-don't-tell narratives, it encourages the reader to fall in love with the Beast as much as Beauty does. In many ways, Tanith Lee's version--in which Beauty is so overwhelmed by the alien Beast's handsomeness that she returns home in stunning disbelief--is most accurate. She needs time to adjust. Eventually, she returns.

My review of Beauty & the Beast (2017) will be re-posted next.

O is for O'Brien and Outlandish Science

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh is the type of book I usually don't read--I prefer people, even tiny people like the Borrowers or the Littles.

Anthropomorphized animals don't catch my interest. My apologies to all the Jacques fans in the universe but I never got into the Redwall series (I kept thinking, "Why can't these characters just all be human?").

Having said that, Mrs. Fribsy and the Rats of Nimh is a good book and a good movie (The Secret of Nimh).

The comparison is odd because although the movie makers used sizable chuck from the book, including the entire opening plot sequence, it is also HUGELY different. The book rests on the proposition that the rats are scientifically advanced and wish to become self-sufficient. The movie rests on the idea that scientific advancement comes with mystical advancement--the kind of idea that makes U.F.O. and Bigfoot nuts* happy but drives Sherlock Holmes and Sheldon Copper mad with irritation.

Justin meets Mrs. Brisby

And yet, it works in The Secret of Nimh. I'm not sure why although it could be that I never really bought into the whole Flowers of Algernon idea where the rats became smart due to injections. I mostly hated Flowers of Algernon (although I like its movie version, the Bourne Legacy). So the addition of a mystical element in Nimh didn't bother me even though I tend to side with Holmes and Copper when it come to real science.

Besides which, the movie ends on a more positive note than the book: namely, Justin doesn't die (his death is implied at the end of the book). Interestingly enough, O'Brien's daughter, who wrote a couple of sequels, keeps Justin alive; Justin is totally lovable in the book and when I saw the movie years later, I considered his image/voice a perfect match for his book character.

*U.F.O. and Bigfoot nuts didn't start out that way. In the early 20th century, hunting for the unknown was still a legitimate science; there were unexplored parts of the world (explorations that have now moved into the oceans and into space). Anything could be out there!

There are still explorers of this type among the U.F.O. and Bigfoot crowd although the authors of Abominable Science point out that they may be explorers; they are not trustworthy scientists.

Unfortunately, for the explorer-types, U.F.O. and Bigfoot believers expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to include mystics, fortune-tellers, astrologer-promoters, and crystal-gazers--basically, all the people in Independence Day who get destroyed by the alien spaceships while they are dancing on the roof and holding signs saying, "Welcome!" Belief in E.T. and Bigfoot moved inward, becoming a matter of self-indulgent naval-gazing and the use of hypnosis (as opposed to radio signals) to ponder the possibility of alien contact.

As you might imagined, these new-age believers are enemies of the original believers. Every sect has its fault lines.

Car Superstitions: I KNOW They Can't Be True . . .

My aqua car: I swore I'd

never seen that color on a car

before--until I bought it
and starting seeing that
car color everywhere!

Every time I step out my door, get in my car, and drive, I swear the experience takes on a specific character.

One day will be Truck Day. There are trucks all over the road, cutting in front of me, slowing up traffic, trying to make bad turns.

The next day is Crazy Pedestrian Day. Suddenly, sidewalk strollers are darting out into traffic, not obeying cross-walk signals, strolling down the meridian.

And then it will be Out-of-Town Driver Day which, in Maine, usually means Massachusetts drivers trying to back all the way up (one-way) State Street, just to find a parking space.

I KNOW that the pattern is simply the result of perception--like when you buy a new car and suddenly, EVERYONE has that color car. But that doesn't stop me from determining, "Crap. Today is People-Making-Inconvenient-Left-Turns Day."

Our brains are wired to sort and select information. As an example, students of the brain often refer to the invisible gorilla experiment. The best-known version is a gorilla walking across the floor at a basketball game; when asked, "Did you see the gorilla?" about 1/2 the attendees said, "No."

Apparently, this tunnel-vision works the other way as well--to see only gorillas--which makes sense from a survival standpoint. Our brains are wired to perceive patterns, especially patterns that might save our lives.

However, this wiring often results in confidence about non-statistically viable conclusions. In response to the myth, "Your first answer is usually the right one!" Ken Jennings (in his book Because I Said So! The Truth Behind Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids), states the following:

One review found that, out of thirty-three studies, not a single one showed that changing answers hurt test-takers . . . [but] students are more likely to remember the times that an answer change worked out badly, because they'll feel cheated by the last-minute switch that cost them the question. Those memories tend to overshadow the (actually much more common) memories of an answer switch that went from incorrect to correct. It's similar . . . to the conviction that all changes of grocery store checkout lanes result in slower progress. It's not always true, but we're so outraged by the times when it is true that we forget the times when it's not.

Likewise, there are probably just as many trucks and pedestrians and out-of-state drivers on the road (at least in the summer) per day as any other day. But on any given day, my brain will start to sort and store a particular type of road annoyance more than any other.

This doesn't stop me from thinking, "Holy cow, this is Crazy Construction Day!" And I'll swear (no matter how irrational it is) that knowing, "Today is Stupid Blinker Day" helps me prepare against possible accidents.

I just wish someone would send out a memo beforehand!

Easter in the Eighteenth Century

Like many holidays in the post-Reformation world, Easter in England in the 1700s became more an excuse for festive wildness than an incentive for religious devotion.

The Medieval Catholic Church supplied pageantry and ritual coupled with religious devotion. The Protestant Reformation did away with much of the ritual. Protestants leaders like Henry VIII wanted to keep in the ritual (he just wanted to remove the pope from the equation). However, Henry VIII--however unwillingly--opened the door to the purer form of Protestantism that wanted to replace ritual entirely with individual testimony/scripture reading (Henry VIII did find it useful to detest ritual whenever it meant he could relieve churches of their belongings).

However, the rituals didn't vanish. In the absence of state-sanctioned ritual, many churchgoers simple retreated to or continued on with older folkloric customs, which customs had never really gone away in any case. 

Christmas underwent such a transformation, which is why the Puritans in America didn't celebrate it (or other ritualized celebrations). The American Christmas is the result of comparatively "new" traditions though even today, English Christmases tend to be far more, uh, worldly than so-called commercial American Christmases. To understand an English Christmas, think Thanksgiving plus Halloween plus the aftermath of a football game when the home-team won. The Christmas story is in there somewhere.

Post-Reformation Easters weren't all that dissimilar--in fact, most festivals in 1700s England could be described as "excuses to harass the neighbors and drink." (Making it more and more understandable why the Puritans were so un-enthused about bringing over these traditions.)

There was a particular Easter tradition called peace-egging which is basically trick-or-treating--for eggs! The eggs were sometimes dyed. Sometimes, the trick-or-treaters would sing. There could possibly be a connection here to "egging" a house without treats on Halloween! And a possible connection to caroling. My guess is that certain traditions simply lend themselves to being used . . . no matter what the occasion!

The picture is teenage me with an egg tree, a tradition that my mom started (or continued) in our family. She would cut a bare bush or tree limb in early spring (often as the result of pruning). We would then hang blown, dyed eggs from the limb. I don't know if there is a pagan/folklore connection. To me, the egg tree simply always meant "Easter"! At one point, when I was working at a business that wouldn't allow any religious decorations, I brought in my own egg tree. Another woman, also a Christian, brought in a palm branch. There's something to be said for symbolism that flies completely under the radar because nobody gets it but the people who produced it. (Though it could also say something sad about the gap in American education.)