Quotations: Out of Control

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, X

 

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 

The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and   That is why we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully those who like something else.

it appeals to what is primitive in us.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 41

 

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

Leo Rosten

 

In a sense, writers don’t get ideas: ideas get writers.  They happen to us.  If we don’t submit to their power, we lose them; so by trying to control or censor them we make the negative choice of encouraging them to leave us alone. But we can never force ourselves to be truly creative. The best we can do is to teach ourselves receptiveness—and trust that ideas will come.

Stephen R. Donaldson, Afterward to The Real Story

 

Farewell, Studio 28

When I returned home from a trip to England in 1998, I got a job at a movie theater in Wyoming, Michigan called Studio 28. It had 20 screens. I applied to be a projectionist, since I was studying film at the time. Instead, they asked me to work in what they called guest relations. Essentially, it was a security position. I worked there until the summer of 2000, at which point I moved to Indiana.

In 2008, Studio 28 closed for good. And now, it has been demolished.

I had not seen a movie there since 2005. My wife Mandy and I were driving back to Indiana from the UP, where we went after getting married. We thought it would be fun to stop in and catch whatever was playing that looked good. After all, we had met there.

I made a lot of good friend working there. It was an interesting place to be for a while. I saw lots of movies. For a while, working there allowed me to see every new movie that was released.

A friend of ours, Mike Endres, sent us a brick from the razed building. Thanks, Mike.

Reading

Grad school infiltrated my reading habits. No surprise, since grad school for people in folklore is a whole lot of reading. So now when I read something, I tend to read a lot of stuff about the thing I'm reading.

For example, when I read the Arabian Nights, I wanted to really into it. So when I got about a hundred nights in, I read Robert Irwin's Companion. Then after a while I read Marina Warner's Stranger Magic. As I read through roughly five nights each day, I read bits of Ulrich Marzolph's Encyclopedia of the Nights, and Muhsin Mahdi's book about the history of the various manuscripts that have been put together over the years. As I got into the home stretch of the tales themselves, I read the collections Scheherazade's Children and The Arabian Nights and Orientalism.  Along the way, I flipped through Hasan El-Shamy's Motif Index to the Nights. I also read the introduction and some stories from Hussein Haddawy's translation and the Norton Critical Edition of that translation. I intended to read  Gerhardt's The Art of Story-Telling, but never got around to it.

Now I'm on to the Brothers Grimm. I'm reading two or three of their fairy tales each day, from the Ralph Manheim translation. I've already read all of Philip Pullman's Tales from the Brothers Grimm, which I liked quite a lot--he picked fifty of the stories to translate (though I question some of his choice because he clearly doesn't like all of the stories). I've got Jack Zipes book on The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts on the Brothers Grimm, and Donald Haase's The reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales. I've been reading bits of Jacob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology--a four volume set that you really shouldn't just sit and read straight through. It's more like an encyclopedia than anything else. But it's really wonderful. I intend to get the Grimms' book  on German legends somewhere along the way, but I'm not in any hurry. I've also got a copy of Folktales of Germany by Kurt Ranke to read periodically.

Following that, I intend to read Tom Shippey's The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous as a way to switch from German folktales to Norse Mythology. I've got a history of the Vikings all lined up, with Margaret Clunies Ross' Prolonged Echoes, John Lindow's Murder and Vengence among the Gods (I've also got his handbook on Norse myth--more about that series in another post), both the Eddas, H.R. Ellis Davidson's Gods and Myths of Norther Europe, and the behemoth Sagas of the Icelanders.

I see that John Lindow has a book about trolls coming out next week.  I'll include that in the list above, just cause it looks great. Then there's the new translation of Beowulf coming out in May, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

After that I'll move on to Greek mythology. I haven't worked out what I'll read for that yet, but I might as well begin with Homer and Hesiod, then Walter Burkert's Greek Religion, and his Structure and History in Greek Myth and Ritual, and a whole bunch of collections of essays that I've accumulated over the years. And a couple of G.S. Kirk's books, The Nature of Greek Mythology and Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures.

So that's how I read these days. Well, if you throw in three or four novels for every work of scholarship, that's how I read.  Oh, and all the research I do for various projects, like the movie I'm writing about Canaanite gods, or the Superman and comics research. Actually, I'm only able to read like this because most all of my Superman research is done.

Triumph

I haven't written anything much about Superman lately, mostly because I knew that a decision was coming about publication any day now. I've been working with the University Press of Mississippi, which was my first choice for this book, through the stages of peer review and editorial board approval--all of which has been mysterious to me.

I've excited to say that my book "Superman in Myth and Folklore" has been approved by the editorial board, and will be published by Mississippi.

There's still a lot of work to do, of course. It'll take a while before it's available, because I need to revise it one more time, and then there's copy editing, and indexing, and the whole thing needs to be designed, and the cover needs to be worked out, and probably a thousand things I don't know about because this is my first book and it's an academic book, which seems more complicated than a novel.

So, thanks to everyone who helped me get to this point--especially you, dear blog readers.

Quotations: Just two today

There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes.  Settled by the peoples of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own.  You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.  Be he Englishman, Frenchman, German, Dane, or Scot; the European who scoffs at an American, calls his own brother Raca; and stands in danger of the judgment.  We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality--whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession amongst ourselves.  No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one.  We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.  For who was our father and our mother?  Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders?  Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world’s as our own.  We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance.  On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearth-stone in Eden.

Herman Melville, Redburn, 195

Accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he will always give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also.  I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this necessity, and strove always to reach perfection: Leonardo; the end of his vein effort being merely that he would take ten years to a picture and leave it unfinished. And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way.

            The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent….All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

            Accept this then for universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact…that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”

 

The Best Stories in the World: Love Like Salt

Lear (Ian McKellan), Cordelia (Romola Garai), Goneril (Frances Barber), Regan (Monica Dolan)

I've become obsessed with a certain little story called, by folklorists, "Love Like Salt." Tale-type 923. The core of the story is that a father asks his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. The elder two are gushing in their replies, but the youngest replies that she loves her father like salt. She is banished or disinherited, and any number of complications arise from this event.

It is how King Lear begins, though Cordelia's response

I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less. 

is quite different from, say, the daughter in, say, "Cap O'Rushes": I love you as fresh meat loves salt.

The usual folkloric variations apply across the various cultures that tell this sort of story, and the tale-type itself is genetically connected to type 510, which includes Cinderella. But let's not get lost in tale types again. The best version of this story is in Grimm's Household Tales (story 179--not to be confused with "The Goose Girl," tale 89) told by someone called "D'Ganshiardarin." It's too long to include in full, but here's the gist:

A young count was walking along when he sees an old woman, reputed to be a witch. She asked him to carry a heavy load for her, and he agrees. She set it down and he picks it up--but it's unbelievably heavy, though she carried it without much effort. She heckled him all the way to her house, and he completed the task. At the witch's house the count saw a spring full of geese, being tended by another old woman. Though not as old as the witch, she was uglier. The witch told the other woman to go inside, so that the count wouldn't fall in love with her. She also promised the count a treasure for his work.

The witch gave him a little emerald box and sent him on his way. The count was, by this time, lost, and he wandered for three days in the forest. At last he came to a city. Since he was a stranger he was brought before the king and queen. Such a situation demanded a gift for the royal couple, but all he had was the box. Upon presenting it, the queen looked inside. What she saw made her faint. The guards were about to drag the young man to the dungeon, but the revived queen bade them to stop.

"Bring him to me," she cried. And she told him her story. Apparently she had three daughters, the youngest of which was the most beautiful. "She was as white as snow and as pink as apple blossoms, and her hair shone like the beams of the sun." She was so perfect that she wept pearls instead of tears. But her husband had asked them to tell him how much they loved him. The elder two answered with gushing affection, but the youngest said, "I love you as I love salt." So the king sent her away, and left a trail of pearls in her wake.

The king and queen had no word of her, assuming she was dead until looking into the box and seeing one of the pearls. The count led them to the witch's hut near the spring. They arrived under a full moon, and though the witch was inside, the other woman was out by the spring. They watched her unfasten her skin and take it off to wash in the spring, revealing their beautiful young daughter, white as snow and pink as apple blossoms. The count fell in love with her at once. But before they could get to her, she put the skin on and returned to the hut.

The king, queen, and count went to the hut, and the royal couple were scolded by the witch for the king's foolish actions. "But I think you've been punished enough by your own suffering." Then out came the princess, and they were reconciled. And the old witch disappeared. It's all very well and good, but the ending is my favorite part. I'll quote it here from Ralph Manheim's translation of the Brothers Grimm:

There's still more to the story, but my grandmother who told it to me was losing her memory and she forgot the rest. All the same, I believe the beautiful princess married the count and I'm pretty sure they stayed in the palace together and lived happily as long as God wanted them to. I wouldn't swear that the snow-white geese the goose girl tended were girls (don't anybody take offense now) whom the old woman had taken to live with her, or that they got back their human forms and stayed on as maids-in-waiting for the young queen. But it seems likely. This much I do know: the old woman wasn't a witch, as people thought. She was a Wise Woman. I imagine she was present when the princess was born and that she was the one who gave her the gift of weeping pearls instead of tears. That kind of thing doesn't happen any more. If it did, the poor would get rich in no time.


Maybe it's just me, but there are few better endings to stories out there.

When I first read that story (I think it was Philip Pullman's recent translation) I was completely immersed. I got to that ending and felt like I'd come across something monumental. I soon invented an entire culture based around the idea of telling stories that end with a plea of forgetfulness, not on the part of the narrator, but on the part of the source of the story. It opens up a world of possibility and wonder. Someday, maybe I'll write all that down. 

In an interesting turn of events, the story of King Lear was taken up by modern day writer Christopher Moore, who transmogrified it into the novel Fool, out just a few years ago. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this book; and I'm excited for its sequel, The Serpent of Venice, which will be released on April 22.  Fool follows roughly the same plot as Lear, but it's all told from the point of view of the Fool, given the name Pocket by Moore. He changes the end of the play considerably, but all to the benefit of his story--it would be foolish for Moore to kill his own fool, whom Shakespeare does away with much sooner than I expected. Moore is a humorist, one of the best writing today.

If you're looking for a bit of scholarship on this story, read Alan Dundes' "To Love My Father All," collected in Interpreting Folklore.

Why is "Love Like Salt" one of the best stories in the world? Versatility, for one. The height of literate tragedy, the pinnacle of oral tradition, brilliant comedy. It's all possible with this story.

Thoughts on Frozen

The Frozen dvd came out a couple of weeks ago. I didn't read any reviews of the movie when it was playing in the theater, but for whatever reason I came across a couple in the past day or two. Some of them didn't like the movie very much. Jill Pantozzi over at The Mary Sue seems to have articulated a common enough set of reasons why. The reason I wanted to respond to this isn't because I disagree--I wanted to try to express an idea that has been in my head for a while, about the difference between fairy tales and movies, and using this movie seems a good way to do so. I think Pantozzi's review is accurate in its critiques, but for me those critiques aren't what makes or breaks this movie. Here's the crux of her argument:

I felt Frozen was truly lacking in the story department. We quickly skim over Elsa and Anna’s childhood to get to what seems like should have been the more important, main story, but it left a lot open to the imagination which could have easily been focused on for a while (Did Elsa really just sit in her room alone, day in, day out, for her entire childhood?). Everything else just felt like it was trying to get from Point A to Point B, then C without taking time to stop and smell the roses.

Let me reiterate: I agree with everything she's saying. I noticed how odd it was that Elsa seems to sit in her room for a decade. (And it's weird that there's no closing musical number. Just throwing it out there.) But it didn't stop me from enjoying the movie. Here's why.

Frozen is a fairy tale. That's the key to understanding why certain things in it happen the way they do. Disney as an animation studio is the most popular disseminator of fairy tales since the Brothers Grimm. But it's important to understand that fairy tales don't work like modern American movies. As somebody who studied folklore, literature, and film, I paid a lot of attention to the ways stories change as they move from the spoken word, to prose and poetry, to film.

It's fairly common wisdom that short stories make for good film adaptations because the story has room to breathe. They can be expanded instead of reduced. In adapting a novel, a lot will always have to be left out. So to follow that line of thought, fairy tales, being like short stories, should make for excellent cinema.

But there are problems with adapting fairy tales--namely, that things in fairy tales don't make a lot of sense. In a fairy tale, a woman can give birth to a hedgehog. A witch can turn a young girl into an old woman. A boy can be turned into a deer by drinking in a stream. A princess can be turned into a snake, be transformed back when a man's head is cut off, and she can also possess a magical potion that returns the decapitated man to life. A girl can stay alone in a room for years. There's never a system to the magic (also a criticism of Frozen's treatment of ice magic). That's not the point of the fairy tale.

There's a huge literature devoted to the description of fairy tales as a genre. Max Luthi, Axel Olric, Bengt Holbek...the names are interesting in their own right. Consider the fairy tale as a story that includes flattened, two-dimensional characters, a story of events that lack a certain development, without any of the psychological depth we expect from the modern novel. That's how fairy tales work. And that's why the fairy tale works well as a musical. The lack of depth allows lots of time for singing.

The fairy tale plows forward. It's relentless. There are two important things to consider when thinking about a fairy tale: 1), that we sympathize with the main character. This often happens because the main character is downtrodden, treated miserably, or very much an underdog. 2) That we are emotionally uplifted by the ending. Fairy tales end happily, especially those coming directly from oral tradition. That's it.

So lots of criticisms of Frozen stem from the disjunction between the classical fairy tale and the contemporary movie.There's nothing wrong with expecting a movie to work differently than a fairy tale. I guess I've just read enough of them--thousands, really--that I'm used to it.

Better than the Book: Jaws

I'm not sure why, but I was under the impression that Peter Benchley's novel Jaws was really bad. It appears to have been a best seller when it debuted in 1973, but it has been swallowed up by the movie. Nobody talks about it much, but it's number 11 on Amazon's Kindle bestseller list for sea adventure books. Take from that statistic what you will. I checked out the top twenty of that list and was disappointed to find The Odyssey nowhere on it. It is dominated by someone named Clive Cussler.

Anyway...Benchley's book was pretty good. There's a whole lot about life in Amity, how the town is in trouble because of the lack of tourism, which leads everybody wanting the beaches open despite the shark. There's stuff about the mob, and Brody's tension with his wife. In short, the bulk of the book is about the effect of the shark on the town, not about the shark. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just not as good as the movie.

Also not as good as the movie: that part where Brody is dumping chum into the water and the shark comes right up to surprise him. It's precisely the same event in both mediums, but it's a whole lot more effective on film. Here it is in the book:

Brody's butt was sore from sitting on the hard transom, and his arm was growing weary from the dipping and emptying of the ladle. So he stood up, stretched, and facing off the stern, tried a new scooping motion with the ladle.

Suddenly he saw the monstrous head of the fish--not five feet away, so close he could reach over and touch it with the ladle--black eyes staring at him, silver-gray snout pointing at him, gaping jaw grinning at him. "Oh, God!" Brody said, wondering in his shock how long the fish had been there before he had stood up and turned around. "There he is!"

Compare that to this:

There really is no comparison. Everything in that scene adds to the tension, from the camera angles to the acting to the music. In the book, it's all very calm and matter-of-fact, exclamation points notwithstanding. And it's not very compelling. We don't need to read Brody's worry that the shark had been there for a while, but we do need to see his face after he notices the shark. And then there's the line. Not in the book. Is there a way to invoke that sense of shock using only words? It doesn't seem like it. There's no means of doing that, making people jump.

We can say that about every shark scene, I think. I've been a big fan of horror fiction since I was a teenager, but I am rarely scared or startled by what I read. The only book that ever really creeped me out was Salem's Lot, and staying up until the middle of the night to read it had a lot to do with it.

I seem to be digressing a lot here.

As with "You're gonna need a bigger boat," nearly everything great about the movie is original to it. The script puts that chum ladeling scene at the beginning of the trip out to the water to get the shark. Benchley puts it just a few pages from the end. The result is that we get our first good look at the shark with Brody, and feel his fear of it. It's a great move on the screenwriter's part (either Benchley or Carl Gottlieb).

If the book is better than I expected, the movie isn't as good as I remembered. There's an awkwardness to a lot of it, especially the sound editing. Some of it feels forced. The story has gotten some complaints about how unlikely it is that the town would still go to the beach with the threat, and I will say that the novel spends a lot of time making this plausible, giving the mayor motivation.

Still, everything having to do with tension, with the shark, works better on film. I think that's because of the documentary quality of the camera's presence. When writing,  the limited nature of prose--describing one thing at a time as opposed to the encompassing nature of the visual image--really allows tension in certain ways. The camera can imbue any object with menace, find tension in the simplest things. Every time anyone's in the water we can feel the tension. David Lynch is a master of this technique.

But once the trio is on the water, the movie just works. That's all there is to it. Even the end, with Brody killing the shark, works despite the fact that it's not realistic. The novel just sort of fizzles out.