Fairy Tales: W is for Winsome Wilde
Slimy Characters: Dante's Whining Lovers
Dante confines adulterers to the second circle of hell. One of the adulterers, Francesca, argues that she and her husband's brother fell into an affair while reading about Launcelot and Guinevere. It sounds all very sermony and plausible--until one realizes that Dante isn't excusing the lovers. He has punished them.
And the fact is, Francesca is whinging.
If one is looking for a non-slimy role model, Launcelot would not be it. As I write in Modred versus Launcelot:
Launcelot is such a great guy to hate. Launcelot is the quintessential spoiled kid who goes off to college or prep school or wherever and gets into trouble with some other spoiled kids. He may even be the ringleader, but it will never be clear; he will never own responsibility. And then they all get into trouble, and the other kids may even get expelled, but Launcelot goes and cries and says how SORRY he is and how he never meant it to get out of hand and isn't it too awful and it wouldn't have gone so badly if it hadn't been for that other guy (who told on them).
Dante was not blind to fundamental human nature. Passion and affection are not evil. As C.S. Lewis stated: Joy and affection and pleasure are the aspects that God adds to an affair. By the time the act occurs, the sin is long past.
It is the self-justifications and blame-the-poetry arguments that keep Francesca's character in the second circle's rats-on-a-wheel windstorm. And yet Dante finds her actions less hopelessly damning than later sins since they at least look outward.
Dante was a student of human nature par excellence.
W is for Wishy-Washy Wow with Wroblewski
What I read: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Basically, it is Hamlet.
With dogs.
I'm not giving anything away (although I may later) since a blurb on the dust jacket refers to the book as an "American Hamlet." In many ways, it makes a good deal more sense than Hamlet since a troubled fourteen-years-old boy who can't make up his mind is a good deal more understandable than a sulky thirty-three-years-old who can't make up his mind.
And Wroblewski provides magnificent insights into the original characters.
My two problems with the book are that it took forever to hook me, and the book changed from a story that echoed Hamlet to a story that retold Hamlet.
First, the beginning of the book, for me, was very, very slow. It is extremely readable and not dull. But I never would have kept reading if it wasn't my "W" book, and a lady from my book club hadn't recommended it.
I think the style is a matter of personal taste, not good or poor writing. I like to start stories in the middle--bang! This preference can't be blamed on the Sesame Street generation complex, by the way. I grew up without television. Let's face it: preference is just preference. Some people prefer books that introduce them to a person's life and then tell them every single itty-bitty detail about that life: a lot of non-plot romance books fall into this category. Some people prefer books that slowly unwind, inviting them into a world which they can inhabit breathe by breathe, moment by moment. I will confess that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is one of the few books of this type that I have read and loved. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle falls into this category. I didn't love it, but it is an excellent example of this type of writing.
In any case, as I mentioned before, the reading is painless, so I kept going (slowly). And about 2/3rds of the way through, the plot picked up tremendously, and I finished the book in about two sittings.
So my first problem with the book isn't really a complaint.
The second is. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
It is fairly easy to parse out which humans and dogs in the novel correspond to what in Hamlet, but the book doesn't read (at first) like an allegory or direct analogy. That is, Almondine doesn't HAVE to represent Ophelia. She can just remind us of Ophelia. Forte doesn't HAVE to be Fortinbras (although his purpose, otherwise, is unclear); he just needs to bring Fortinbras to mind.
Unfortunately, by the time the book hits the 1/2-way mark, it has begun to follow the play pretty closely. It is no longer a matter of the story reminding us of Hamlet. It IS Hamlet, and everything pays off as it does in the play.
This isn't done unintelligently; in fact, Claude's manipulation of Glen really brings home the oily smoothness of Claudius' manipulation of Laertes. But it does make the book feel a tad unorganic. Up to the 1/2-way mark, the book feels entirely organic. What happens happens as a result of a people coming together at a certain point in time. But the end, while not descending into the macabre or the totally contrived, feels like it might just. Soon.
Of course, Hamlet sort of feels this way too (witness audience laughter provoked by the end of Kenneth Branagh's otherwise fascinating Hamlet). Shakespeare didn't have to apologize because he wasn't trying to create American realism. Wrobelewski is. I won't say the effort fails because I don't think it does.
But. Still.
Granted, I think death is a cop-out (again, except in Shakespeare), so I have a problem with a book that pulls you along, bringing together multiple threads and teasing you with occasional variations...and then gives you what you knew happened the first time anyway. Eh? So, it's a little different (I have my own opinion about Essay's choice at the end), but 562 pages! I read 562 pages for a little different?
However, it says a great deal for Wroblewski's ability that I don't considered the time spent a complete loss.
In fact, I can honestly recommend it!
2023: I decided to stick with medieval history reimagined and read Courting Dragons by Jeri Westerson, the first book in a series that presents Will Somers as the detective in the Tudor court. [I recently picked up the second book.]
I enjoyed it!
Westerson sold me on the court, including the aspect of the Tudor court where people were constantly changing bed partners. She easily presents the setting and time period, as if it is any relatable setting (no mean feat in historical re-imaginings!).
Her Henry VIII is also quite good, being the young, charismatic Henry VIII of the time of the Great Matter (divorce from Queen Catherine to marry Anne Boleyn). This is the Henry VIII from A Man from All Seasons and The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970). He is big, intelligent, gifted, attractive, and commands great loyalty (and fear). He is also capable of great self-deception as well as realistic tenderness.
Robert Shaw's Henry VIII |
And she sold me on Will Somers. The fool of the Tudor court, he was a real person and survived Henry and ALL of Henry's children. That is...thoroughly astonishing.
Westerson presents him as clever, absolutely loyal to Henry (even though he loves Queen Catherine and Princess Mary), moral (making him absolutely trustworthy in his loyalty) and capable of knowing exactly where to draw the line.
I look forward to the next book!
Great Television Villain: Livia
Sian Phillips from I, Claudius is a great villain!
Fairy Tales: V is for Villains
The father in this tale is evil. |
More on Amateur Aristocratic Detectives: Harley Quin
The one somewhat aristocratic character that Christie created was Harley Quin. He appears in the short story collection bearing his name, The Mysterious Mr. Quin. He is a dark, saturnine young man who shows up when problems/mysteries arise involving lovers. He often solves them by prompting an elderly man Mr. Satterthwaite to take certain actions.
Harley Quin is not entirely aristocratic, but he bears markers in common with Wimsey and Vance--namely, his secrecy and vaguely humorous air. However, he has a far darker side than the other characters. Christie was drawing on Harlequin from the Harlequinade, and Harley Quin has the unorthodox and faintly chaotic nature of Eros. Not the cutesy Cupid but the god who might just challenge all expectations.
Christie's novels show a continual willingness to allow for passion and terror in the face of domestic love. She would, of course, come down on the side of Miss Marple regarding civility and decent behavior. But she allows that people are often helpless before their emotions. Characters who plan and carry out deaths are far more venial in her books than characters who wish and hope in secret, full of painful desires. On more than one occasion, Poirot consoles a character by pointing out that "wishing" for a death, however desperately, is not the same as carrying one out.
Christie also, continually, comes down on the side of young women leaving home to "chance" their lives with rogues and other such lovers rather than remaining safely at home. One gets the impression that she wouldn't be all that big on trigger warnings. Stepping outside the door matters more than throwing up blockades to experience.
Harley Quin protects lovers but not always in the way we or Mr. Satterthwaite expect. The stories are, oddly enough, more Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid walking about on legs that give her continual pain than anything from Hallmark.
Love is dangerous. Harley Quin will help but he will not pause or excise the emotion.
Two Short Jokes
Example One
The podium in Spin City. It is raised to give the tall mayor the illusion of being less tall--and therefore, supposedly less intimidating. When Michael J. Fox's character, Mike Flaherty (Alex Keaton, all grown up) walks behind it, he disappears. Flaherty, of course, takes the event in stride. (Click on the image to see the clip.)
Example Two
Doris Sherman (Katherine Helmond) comes to persuade Hayden to become her coach. She walks into a room where everyone, including Shelley Fabares, is taller than her. Katherine Helmond is 5'2", my height.
She comments that she had to drive so far into the woods to find Hayden's cabin, she thought she would encounter Big Foot.She turns and sees Dauber.
"Hello," she says in an oh-there-you-are tone.
Bill Faberbakke is 6'6"--the perfect height for a football coach!
V is for Van Dine and Deja VU: The Amateur Aristocratic Detective of the 1920s
What I read: The Scarab Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine
S.S. Van Dine's hero, Philo Vance, is remarkably--and I mean, remarkably--like Peter Wimsey (in the early Wimsey novels). Both are of the upper class (Peter Wimsey is of the British aristocracy; Vance is a New York socialite). Both have a deliberately nonchalant way of speaking and say things like, "We're dealin' with a most unusual situation. Somebody translated [the victim] from this world in to the hereafter in a very distressin' fashion." Both have the ability to become serious, when necessary. Both have a friend who plays "straight man" to their overblown personalities (Charles Parker, a police inspector, and Markham, a D.A.). Both have "deceptive upper body strength" (as Colby says to Charlie in Numbers). Both wear a monocle!
In fact, the similarities are so striking that I compared dates. Sayer's first Wimsey novel appeared in 1923; Van Dine's first Vance novel in 1926.
I actually think it is possible that both Sayers and Van Dine brought their characters to life at the same time without ever reading each other's works though both were part of the "Golden Age of Mysteries.: They likely at least knew about each other's works.
William Powell played Vance before |
and after Thin Man |
But it is also entirely likely that there was a zeitgeist--something in the air--that led to the creation of the gentleman detective, Wimsey and Vance. It's kind of like when every movie studio in Hollywood suddenly decides to do a movie about bugs. Or aliens. It's in the air!
Why amusing fops who investigate crimes would be in the air in the 1920s is something I can't explain off hand. It was the season of the flapper: a sort of jump-start era to the later rock-n-roll era of Elvis and the Beatles. Both horror and murder mysteries were big news. Hitchcock was on his way to making a killing (ha ha ha) as the premier mystery/suspense director in Hollywood.
But Hitchcock relied on Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant for his heroes: the all-American boy and the all-sexy Britisher.
Another explanation is that the amusing, witty, aristocratic detective was an attempt to meld Holmes (wholly cerebral) with Bertie Wooster (wholly extroverted and quirky).
To return to The Scarab Murder Case, it is a bit slow, being more focused on "railway tables" (so to speak) than on human motives. The mystery is more about whowentwherewhen than relationships. The subject matter is interesting: ancient Egyptian history. The solution is fairly unimpressive. (Agatha Christie did this particular mystery problem better.)
2023: I read the first Philo Vance, The Benson Murder Case. I was confirmed in my reaction that Van Dine is a "mechanics" murder mystery writer. Every chapter is headed with a date and time. Each chapter reveals more about the mystery's forensics or timing.
Van Dine also focuses on the "surprise" or whodunit. Sayers spent more time on "how" a murder was committed though interestingly enough both Van Dine and Sayers make the same point: without overwhelming evidence, one can make an argument against anyone for just about any reason. The most interesting part of The Benson Murder Case focuses on breaking the primary suspect's alibi. Both the alibi and the solution are interesting, and the climax is quite exciting. The other chapters, which focus on "then we go here and question this person" aren't so much.
As mentioned above, Sayers not only focuses more on people and "how," she is also funnier and less prone to "telling" than Van Dine. Van Dine (the writer and the narrator) tells readers exactly what they are supposed to think about Vance and everyone else, in exhaustive detail. In comparison, Sayers' first book starts with Wimsey already in motion. We readers learn about him from his behavior and conversation. Although he is lightly rendered in the first book, he yet reveals a more substantive character, as when he confesses to Charles Parker that he likes the beginning of a case when it is just a puzzle but finds it more difficult to proceed when he begins to actually know people. Charles robustly tells him that he is focusing more on his attitude--his pose--than on the truth, and he needs to grow up and cut it out.
Van Dine portrait by his brother. |
Another notable difference between Sayers and Van Dine is that Van Dine is as interested in the police officer characters as in Vance. That is, I got the impression that Van Dine actually wanted to write Blue Bloods! (Nearly all of Van Dine's books were made into films when he was alive.)
But the zeitgeist referenced above was all about the so-called amateur detective, so the amateur detective is what Van Dine supplied.
Fairy Tales: U is for Unique Uchida
Kopakonan and Other Mermaids: Upcoming Publication
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 the same time as my saintly character.
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 (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.
U is for Unsatisfying Uhnak and Ummm Updike
What I read: Victims by Dorothy Uhnak
I'm not a huge fan of crime novels. Mysteries, yes. I LOVE mysteries. And I'm a big fan of television police procedurals (CSI, Law & Order, Blue Bloods). But I've never found novel cops and robbers particularly interesting.
Victims, however, starts out good. The main cop protagonist is interesting, and the entire novel (at first) is based around the real-life Kitty Genovese case in which a woman was stabbed (several times) outside an apartment complex; her neighbors saw and heard it happen, but no one helped.
Using a similar set-up, 2/3rds of Victims focuses on interviews with the neighbors and their reasons for not calling 911. Uhnak does a fairly good job demonstrating a wide range of what is popularly called the Bystander Effect. There is a nice degree of tension between the protagonist, the famous reporter who wants to write about the neighbors, and the neighbors.
And then, the book completely collapses. It collapses because Uhnak falls back on the plot device of POLITICAL MACHINATIONS by POWERFUL PEOPLE.
There are really no words to express how unbelievably boring this plot device is. If anything can make me fall asleep while upright, it is POLITICAL MACHIzzzzzzzzz.
Like death, POLITICAL MACHINATIONS by POWERFUL PEOPLE is a writer's ultimate cop-out, a contemporary deus ex machina. The autopsy report was changed! Thousands of workers were bribed to keep their mouths shut! The reporter sells out for movie rights! Money buys off everyone!!
It's boring. (This may be why, while I enjoy crime shows, I lose interest the moment the Mafia enters the picture.) And it completely overwhelms the human element. The story is no longer about individuals struggling to get on in life; it's about whatever the powerful people are doing or thinking or...who cares?
How can this type of art even speak to people? Other than conspiracy-theorist, paranoid-type people? Sure, if all a person wants out of life is a fear of big, bad forces OUT THERE--I suppose the art has some use. But I can believe in big, bad forces OUT THERE without the help of art. Those big bad forces are called volcanoes. And earthquakes. And, if I'm really insistent, asteroids. I don't need to rely on people to clutter up my vision of big, bad forces.
If I'm going to watch movies and read books, I expect something more human, something closer to the human condition. The trappings are unimportant. The exploration of human interaction is what matters. Genre matters less than human connection, be it humorous, light, fantastical, bizarre, down-to-earth...
But plot devices that fall back on tired cliches about everyone being at the mercy of THE MAN--oh, please. Who cares. Go leave that message on someone else's machine.
Give me Columbo over POLITICAL MACHINATIONS any day.
2023: I read John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius. It was readable but intellectually tedious. Despite the wealth of historical details and the use of supposedly medieval names (until the end), the story felt like a suburban love affair plopped into the middle of a historical moment.
I, Claudius, like HBO's Rome, descends into melodrama but is pulled back from the brink by the dark humor and phenomenal comedic timing of the main actors, namely Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, George Baker, and Brian Blessed. At one point, Sian Phillips as Livia and George Baker as Tiberius encounter each other--both in their own litters--in the marketplace where they start squabbling about her birthday. It's a fantastic scene that undercuts the melodrama and brings the viewer in on the joke: Yes, we are making the ancient Romans sound like a family in a sitcom. That's the point! Why shouldn't they be?!
Fairy Tales: T is for Tolstoy and Tendentious
I didn't enjoy Tolstoy's works.
Fairy tales have always been used--from Aesop to the French philosophers of the seventeenth century--as vehicles for lessons and morals. Even Disney--sometimes tendentiously, sometimes not--tends to attach life lessons to its movies. Consequently, the belief that fairy tales are primarily meant to improve people's lives is a common misconception.
Hopefully, this list has shown that fairy tales have been used for as many different reasons as any other creative production: to entertain, to distill social conditions, to preach lessons, to inflict horror, to work out flights of fancy, to create another world, to explore the "other," to question, to ponder, to experiment...
A tale with a lesson is definitely one possibility, and I don't automatically dislike it. After all, I adore C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, and I don't particularly mind mice or other characters singing out their life lessons. In a sense, Into the Woods is an exploration of morals and meaning.
So why does Leo Tolstoy bother me so much?
To start, I should stress that Twenty-Two Russian Tales for Young Children By Leo Tolstoy is an interesting compilation. Some of the tales have morals. Others are more "slice of life" and still others appear to be reminiscences from childhood.
But the moral tales aren't simply tales with morals. They are moralistic.
Like C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, Tolstoy has a gift for detail. The people and animals belong to specific times and places.
Unlike C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, the tales seem devoid of complication. They belong to what I occasionally refer to as "Box A or Box B" religious thought. Instead of people making the best decisions they can while faced with conflicting moral goods, random outcomes, and occasional non-answers (take a path--see what happens), all life's choices are distilled into GOOD PEOPLE/CHOICE BOX A and BAD PEOPLE/CHOICE BOX B. The result is not a sense of people trying to do the best they can at any given moment but, rather, people being applauded for BEING GOOD TODAY!
"And Sergei never again wanted to trap birds."
"[F]rom that day, they again let the old man eat with them at the table and took better care of him."
With C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, I always feel (and felt as a child) that their characters are real people saying, "Right now, I'm going to take this risk, make this choice, and hope it is for the best. Later, I could change my mind. No matter what, I will keep on being the same person. I will live with the consequences of my actions. Nobody will shower me with adoration for my supposed goodness."
Edmund, for instance, makes a series of poor choices whose consequences don't suddenly get washed away when he is rescued. He changes and begins to return to his true self. And he goes on making choices, many of which aren't clearly BOX A or BOX B. Edmund has to use experience, his wits, and his best guesses to navigate.Moreover, his personality doesn't radically alter. Throughout the series, he remains somewhat wry and diffident about his past. It gives him wisdom and good judgment. It doesn't alter his innate ability to observe. Nor does it excise his responsibilities: to exercise wisdom, he has to call on his past--not simply "be" that guy now.
As for George MacDonald, his characters seem, like the characters from Babette's Feast, to be overwhelmed by grace. They are ordinary, flawed, odd people (like everyone!) who come in contact with the sublime. Grace doesn't lead them to the perfect choice. Grace enables them to make choices over and over again. And to not be ashamed of their human need to make choices over and over again.
Kids know: Life is more complicated than that.
AI is a Bad Writer
I detested AI "writing" from the beginning--I was never one who thought that AI was soooo amazing, which is rather sad since the programming likely is amazing. But it was presented to me, from Day 1, as writing that was indistinguishable from a professor's writing.
My reaction, from Day 1, was "well, sure, a professor who is a terrible writer."
Unfortunately, that is a lot of them! Students who try to use AI in my literature course inevitably end up giving me something that sounds like it was written by a pompous Ivy League professor who never does any real research--on anything.
The writing is beyond awful: generic, redundant, full of supposedly sophisticated thesaurus terms hiding hollowness, dangling modifiers (yup, even when "good grammar" is requested), illogical arguments, a lack of decent claims, passive voice, and off-topic information.
I'm not even talking about the obviously dumb stuff--the so-called "hallucinations." (Watching pro and con AI pundits anthropomorphize a machine, for good or ill, doesn't exactly impress me with their scientific acumen.)Here is an AI-produced passage:
Recognizing the potential for cognitive development, social interaction, and personal enjoyment, fostering a healthy gaming environment becomes essential. As gatekeepers, parents should engage with their children, exploring age- appropriate games together and understanding the positive impact these experiences can have on skill development and social dynamics. By fostering open conversations, setting boundaries, and promoting responsible gaming practices, parents can harness the potential of video games as valuable tools for the growth and development of their children.
Here is what it means:
Seeing the possibility for improved thinking skills, people skills, and fun [dangling modifier]. As the people in charge of what enters the home, parents should work with their children, checking out child-level games together and grasping the good [nonsensical parallelism followed by a vague phrase] can have on improved abilities and people skills. By encouraging their children to talk, creating rules, and encouraging responsible behavior, parents can make video games a useful means for the improvement of their children.
In other words, the passage repeats the same thing over and over without producing any real meat. What type of improved thinking and people skills? How do video games foster "healthy gaming environments"? Specifically? What type of boundaries? What does "age-appropriate" even mean? Which games, for that matter?
The passage says absolutely nothing--but, hey, it says absolutely nothing a lot!
Even more embarrassing: in the last year, it has gotten WORSE.
Here is an AI passage produced within the last month:
Whether they reside in a bustling city apartment or a quiet countryside home, cats effortlessly adjust to their surroundings. This adaptability makes them suitable companions for individuals with diverse lifestyles. Additionally, cats are known for being low-maintenance pets, requiring less attention than some other animals, making them an excellent choice for busy individuals.
The same paragraph with my notes:
Whether they reside in a bustling city apartment or a quiet countryside home, cats effortlessly adjust to their surroundings [logical fallacy of hasty generalization—sounds like a generic advertising statement]. This adaptability makes them suitable companions for individuals with diverse lifestyles [such as?]. Additionally, cats are known for [passive voice] being low-maintenance pets, requiring less attention than some other animals, making them an excellent choice for busy individuals. [Off-topic—no longer about cats but about owners.]
Frankly, I expect better from my students. And I always have.
Trollope Continued: Review of The Warden & Entirely Relevant Trollope Quotes about Social Media
The Warden by Anthony Trollope (see T is for Terrific Trollope) revolves around an important religious issue in the 19th century (and now). A clergyman is living, partly, on the income derived from the property attached to an Almshouse. As the Almshouse property value increased, the amount extended through charity remained relatively the same. The older men at the Almshouse--who are basically in assisted living--are not abused or even struggling. Nonetheless, in truth, the clergyman is living a rather well-padded existence based on a charity that gives him most of the money.