Catherine F. King's Blog
November 2, 2022
Climate Change in Fiction, pt 2
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Titania, from Act II Scene 2, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
So, back in September, I wrote about climate change as it appears in works of fiction. I covered Game of Thrones and Hadestown and their particular iterations of climate change. Since that blog post, I have been to Denver and back in order to attend LeakyCon and present there (read more about it here) and have experienced a few unseasonably hot days in a Los Angeles autumn. In other words, the threat of climate change remains as heavy and omnicidal as ever.
To wrap up my original September blog posts, here are two more examinations of climate change metaphors in literary, fictional worlds— with elements of science fiction (multiple dimensions) and fantasy (large-scale magic).
His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman:
Spoiler alert for The Golden Compass: At the end of the book, Lord Asriel succeeds in his ambition to open a portal directly from his native world to another one. His portal is situated in the Arctic circle, under the aurora borealis; the portal opens onto a place with a Mediterranean climate (strongly implied to be an alternate-universe version of Italy).
The plot really kicks off then; we’re not sure what Asriel gets up to, but Lyra and her daemon pass through the window and into the land known as Cittagazze.
Now, we don’t know exactly what the effect is on the Mediterranean climate. But for the Arctic, the consequence is dire.
Iorek Byrnison, king of the armored bears, notices that there are storms and mists, strange weather patterns. The ice is melting. Byrnison even scouts out the Himalayas, to see if his bear kingdom can live there. That’s how bad it is—prompting animals to move from their ancestral homelands because the weather has grown unlivable.
I like that Pullman thought this detail through: climate change is an unintended consequence of the plot. Unavoidable, as long as the window stays open, and furthermore destructive. It does fit in with Asriel’s character— put simply, he is so focused on his goal he is willing to destroy plenty of things to get there.
Spoiler alert for The Amber Spyglass: thanks to angelic intervention, the window is closed and the weather patterns are restored to normal. It’s a little pat, but hey, you’ve got twenty pages left, what are you going to do? Pullman tore a hole in the sky over his world, and then, even though the plot lay elsewhere, he took the time to expound on the consequences of Asriel’s actions.
Tyme, by Megan Morrison:
The Tyme books are not as well-known, but they deserve to be VERY well known. So far, there are three books:
Grounded, the Adventures of Rapunzel
Disenchanted, the Trials of Cinderella
Transformed, the Perils of the Frog Prince
And let me tell you, they are terrific. As you may have guessed, each one is a retold fairytale, though they do tie together.
So in book one, Jack (the Beanstalker) introduces Rapunzel to this company that is found everywhere in Tyme, called Ubiquitous (great name). Ubiquitous sells acorns.
But not just any acorns!
These acorns, when cracked against a hard surface, give a shower of sparks and then, presto chango! They provide anything, and we mean anything. Need a tent for a little camping? Ubiquitous! How about some writing implements? Ubiquitous is there! Gosh, we could really do with some sled dogs, just for a few hours. You’ll never guess… Ubiquitous has it!
Now, see, book one is about the sheltered Rapunzel traveling through the countryside. Having spent the last twelve years in a tower, Rapunzel has everything to learn about how the world works. Ubiquitous is just part of the picture, but nothing to look at too closely. I mean, c’mon, it’s magic.
Book two is about Elegant “Ella” Coach, living in the glamorous capital city of Quintessence, with her eyes open to the exploitation of workers in the blue city’s garment industry. Ella knows how the world works: she wants to change the entire machine.
This goal is only spurred on when a horrible fire breaks out at a garment factory. What was the cause? Well, there was a worker cracking a “cough syrup” Ubiquitous acorn, creating sparks. An unfortunate accident: what is much worse is that the factory management locked the doors to keep workers from escaping the inferno. Ella focuses on the evils of the one percent; Ubiquitous was simply in the wrong place, wrong time.
Right?
Then in the third book, we see Tyme through the eyes of Syrah, prince of the Olive Isles. Syrah, like Ella, has been part of the community of Tyme all his life, but like Rapunzel, that life has been sheltered. He takes his privileges, multitudinous as they are, for granted.
After a selfish decision, he’s transformed into a frog, with the cryptic guidance that he must lose himself to find himself.
Three years pass, and Syrah begins to despair that he’ll ever shake off his froggy form. But then it becomes clear there’s bigger problems in Tyme. A strange plague is spreading through Yellow Country. After a panic over witchcraft, level-headed thinkers trace the sickness to the food source— seeds from Ubiquitous acorns.
Syrah’s frog’s eye-view of the situation gives him a look at the deeper root of things. The fairies of Yellow Country are sickening. What about those enchanted monsters— Stalkers— that prowl the wilderness? Does this have to do with the machinations of witches? Or the hundred-year sleeping curse laid on the Pink Empire? Or… maybe… maybe those oh-so-handy Ubiquitous acorns may be calling in a higher cost than anyone is prepared to pay.
Now…
THAT is what I call a climate change analogy!
It is woven in so subtly you would never suspect it in book one. Magical acorns that give you what you need: how whimsical! What a great way to keep the plot rolling along.
Then in book two, we see that capitalism is firmly rooted in the Tyme economy. Ubiquitous, seen from this angle, is being used by the one percent as a kind of numbing cream, the short-term glue to keep the ninety-nine percent operating, manufacturing and buying the stuff of capitalism.
Then in book three, we realize, oh, wait, it’s not just that people misuse Ubiquitous. Maybe these handy magical acorns, promising everything for such a low, low price, maybe there’s something rotten in the very transaction. Yes, it’s convenient, but, seriously, at what cost?
I expect that this list will grow as time goes by, as I read more works featuring fictionalized climate change, and as more writers explore the topic. But I think this makes a very good beginning. Stay tuned for further updates. As I finish this blog post, today in Los Angeles it finally feels properly autumnal (it’s early November). I’m currently reading Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, and enjoyed it very much. In the last couple of weeks, I finished Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, and The Mists of Avalon, by MZ Bradley. As long as I don’t think about the future, I am doing really well.
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Titania, from Act II Scene 2, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
So, back in September, I wrote about climate change as it appears in works of fiction. I covered Game of Thrones and Hadestown and their particular iterations of climate change. Since that blog post, I have been to Denver and back in order to attend LeakyCon and present there (read more about it here) and have experienced a few unseasonably hot days in a Los Angeles autumn. In other words, the threat of climate change remains as heavy and omnicidal as ever.
To wrap up my original September blog posts, here are two more examinations of climate change metaphors in literary, fictional worlds— with elements of science fiction (multiple dimensions) and fantasy (large-scale magic).
His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman:
Spoiler alert for The Golden Compass: At the end of the book, Lord Asriel succeeds in his ambition to open a portal directly from his native world to another one. His portal is situated in the Arctic circle, under the aurora borealis; the portal opens onto a place with a Mediterranean climate (strongly implied to be an alternate-universe version of Italy).
The plot really kicks off then; we’re not sure what Asriel gets up to, but Lyra and her daemon pass through the window and into the land known as Cittagazze.
Now, we don’t know exactly what the effect is on the Mediterranean climate. But for the Arctic, the consequence is dire.
Iorek Byrnison, king of the armored bears, notices that there are storms and mists, strange weather patterns. The ice is melting. Byrnison even scouts out the Himalayas, to see if his bear kingdom can live there. That’s how bad it is—prompting animals to move from their ancestral homelands because the weather has grown unlivable.
I like that Pullman thought this detail through: climate change is an unintended consequence of the plot. Unavoidable, as long as the window stays open, and furthermore destructive. It does fit in with Asriel’s character— put simply, he is so focused on his goal he is willing to destroy plenty of things to get there.
Spoiler alert for The Amber Spyglass: thanks to angelic intervention, the window is closed and the weather patterns are restored to normal. It’s a little pat, but hey, you’ve got twenty pages left, what are you going to do? Pullman tore a hole in the sky over his world, and then, even though the plot lay elsewhere, he took the time to expound on the consequences of Asriel’s actions.
Tyme, by Megan Morrison:
The Tyme books are not as well-known, but they deserve to be VERY well known. So far, there are three books:
Grounded, the Adventures of Rapunzel
Disenchanted, the Trials of Cinderella
Transformed, the Perils of the Frog Prince
And let me tell you, they are terrific. As you may have guessed, each one is a retold fairytale, though they do tie together.
So in book one, Jack (the Beanstalker) introduces Rapunzel to this company that is found everywhere in Tyme, called Ubiquitous (great name). Ubiquitous sells acorns.
But not just any acorns!
These acorns, when cracked against a hard surface, give a shower of sparks and then, presto chango! They provide anything, and we mean anything. Need a tent for a little camping? Ubiquitous! How about some writing implements? Ubiquitous is there! Gosh, we could really do with some sled dogs, just for a few hours. You’ll never guess… Ubiquitous has it!
Now, see, book one is about the sheltered Rapunzel traveling through the countryside. Having spent the last twelve years in a tower, Rapunzel has everything to learn about how the world works. Ubiquitous is just part of the picture, but nothing to look at too closely. I mean, c’mon, it’s magic.
Book two is about Elegant “Ella” Coach, living in the glamorous capital city of Quintessence, with her eyes open to the exploitation of workers in the blue city’s garment industry. Ella knows how the world works: she wants to change the entire machine.
This goal is only spurred on when a horrible fire breaks out at a garment factory. What was the cause? Well, there was a worker cracking a “cough syrup” Ubiquitous acorn, creating sparks. An unfortunate accident: what is much worse is that the factory management locked the doors to keep workers from escaping the inferno. Ella focuses on the evils of the one percent; Ubiquitous was simply in the wrong place, wrong time.
Right?
Then in the third book, we see Tyme through the eyes of Syrah, prince of the Olive Isles. Syrah, like Ella, has been part of the community of Tyme all his life, but like Rapunzel, that life has been sheltered. He takes his privileges, multitudinous as they are, for granted.
After a selfish decision, he’s transformed into a frog, with the cryptic guidance that he must lose himself to find himself.
Three years pass, and Syrah begins to despair that he’ll ever shake off his froggy form. But then it becomes clear there’s bigger problems in Tyme. A strange plague is spreading through Yellow Country. After a panic over witchcraft, level-headed thinkers trace the sickness to the food source— seeds from Ubiquitous acorns.
Syrah’s frog’s eye-view of the situation gives him a look at the deeper root of things. The fairies of Yellow Country are sickening. What about those enchanted monsters— Stalkers— that prowl the wilderness? Does this have to do with the machinations of witches? Or the hundred-year sleeping curse laid on the Pink Empire? Or… maybe… maybe those oh-so-handy Ubiquitous acorns may be calling in a higher cost than anyone is prepared to pay.
Now…
THAT is what I call a climate change analogy!
It is woven in so subtly you would never suspect it in book one. Magical acorns that give you what you need: how whimsical! What a great way to keep the plot rolling along.
Then in book two, we see that capitalism is firmly rooted in the Tyme economy. Ubiquitous, seen from this angle, is being used by the one percent as a kind of numbing cream, the short-term glue to keep the ninety-nine percent operating, manufacturing and buying the stuff of capitalism.
Then in book three, we realize, oh, wait, it’s not just that people misuse Ubiquitous. Maybe these handy magical acorns, promising everything for such a low, low price, maybe there’s something rotten in the very transaction. Yes, it’s convenient, but, seriously, at what cost?
I expect that this list will grow as time goes by, as I read more works featuring fictionalized climate change, and as more writers explore the topic. But I think this makes a very good beginning. Stay tuned for further updates. As I finish this blog post, today in Los Angeles it finally feels properly autumnal (it’s early November). I’m currently reading Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, and enjoyed it very much. In the last couple of weeks, I finished Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, and The Mists of Avalon, by MZ Bradley. As long as I don’t think about the future, I am doing really well.
September 13, 2022
Climate Change in Fiction, pt 1
Climate change! We know it, we hate it, it’s an existential dread that makes it a struggle to get out of bed in the morning. It’s entirely the fault of the 1%. We ought to load all the oil executives and petroleum billionaires onto one greyhound bus and then line ‘em up for the guillotine.
Right?
My conscience would interject to say, “Shoot the oil executives and save the planet? But the oil executives are only the tip of the whole festering boil of social infrastructure that inches down to your home, your computer, your AC unit. So go ahead, shoot the oil exec. Another one will be along in a minute. Why not shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone, and invade Antarctica?”
But I quash my conscience. No one wants Terry Pratchett quotes at a time like this.
Anyway, I wanted to write about some fictionalized takes on climate change. It’s possibly the major crisis of all human history. One might say that authors are obliged to discuss this— but I’m rather with Oscar Wilde in the camp that authors aren’t obliged to do anything, except to not be boring, and, occasionally, when they can’t avoid it, to write.
But writers do tackle climate change— with interesting results. It’s a big topic, so I decided to break it up into two blog posts. I’m going to talk in some depth about Game of Thrones (the book series and TV series) and Hadestown, the Tony-award winning musical. Let’s get started.
Game of Thrones:
Winter is coming. That’s the first thing we learn about Westeros.
It’s kind of important. This isn’t snuggly winter, this is an Ice Age to last generations. With zombies. The first scene shows one survivor getting away to tell the tale. He has to warn everyone what is happening.
And when we meet him again, he is executed for desertion by Lord Eddard Stark.
This opens both the “Song of Ice and Fire” books by George RR Martin, and the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” helmed by David Benioff and DB Weiss.
“Winter is coming,” you’ve heard it again and again. In the backstory (boy, there’s a lot of backstory) the continent of Westeros is prone to very long Winters, Winters which merit the capital letter. Then you’ve got the Grandeur That Was Valyria, utterly destroyed by volcanic cataclysm; that might be the destruction by Fire that foreshadows Westeros’s destruction by Ice. Either way, we’ve got climate change on our hands.
Now, are the Winters natural or supernatural? It’s unknown whether humans have any role in triggering or stopping the Winter. The only thing to do is prepare.
And prepare they do… not.
No one heeds the warnings about Winter. People are greedy and short-sighted. Politics of courts near and far occupy our attention, with sumptuous costumes and religious uprisings and beautifullest ladies. Obviously, Martin has fun with the political plots, but it works as a creative choice as well. We the helpless audience get to watch these horrible people tear themselves apart rather than unite against the one foe that really matters.
Yes, reality has borne this thesis out. Kudos to Martin. I hate it.
However, you still need to end a story on this scale.
“Ice zombies eat everyone! All the emotion you invested in this story came to absolutely nothing!” is a possibility.
On the other hand, you can implement a cheat code.
Enter the King of Winter. A sort of Evil Overlord. Kill him off— just this one dude— and the worst of Winter will die with him. No ontological inertia and all that. Very handy for Messiah types like Azor Ahai.
If you have a shred of artistic integrity left, you can make it clear that Winter Is Still Here, but We Avoided the Worst.
And ideally, if you’re going to commit to “The Winter King is a metaphor for climate change,” his defeat should be something a little more, well, epic than just stabbing him with an above-average knife.
Still, you’ve got a whole continent to save and five hundred or so plotlines. So, no surprise if Martin is having trouble with the ending.
But he’s one lucky duck, at the same time— he can look at the ending penned by Benioff and Weiss, and veer in any other direction.
Benioff and Weiss disposed of the Winter King by having a whole battle at Winterfell, where Bran Stark acts as bait, and then Arya Stark sneaks up on the Winter King and stabs him with an above-average knife.
It’s a bit of an anticlimax.
Then the writers can move on to the real story they wanted to work on: about how Daenerys Targaryen, a rape survivor and anti-slavery advocate, has been, all this time, a metaphor for the West’s bloody imperialism. Dany, she goes utterly nuts when her boyfriend breaks up with her. City-incineration levels of nuts, so nuts that her boyfriend has to kill her for everyone’s safety. That’s the real story Game of Thrones was building up to, not Winter at all.
To which I say, Boo and hiss!
In short, the show absolutely failed in its depiction of climate change. And the books?
Well, Martin might be planning for Mad Queen Daenerys the whole time (he might change his mind) — but I’ll say this for him, I don’t think he would throw Winter out the window just because a shinier plot point comes along. But like I said above— climate change is an existential threat. It is quite “big picture.” It’s no wonder he’s having a hard time figuring out how to deal with it— so are all the rest of us.
So there’s the screen and page, but what about the stage?
Hadestown, the musical:
Hadestown, the brainchild of Anais Mitchell, has undergone a few transformations on its road from small Vermont musical to Tony-winning Broadway hit. The music, costumes, and lingo suggest 1930’s America, with a contrast between the Big Polluted City and Quiet Honest Life in the Country. But don’t be fooled by this pastoral domain: every version of the play is in a post-apocalyptic setting.
In the Broadway version of the soundtrack, vagabond Eurydice sets the stage, singing:
“Weather ain’t the way it was before,
There’s no spring or fall at all anymore;
It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold,
Any way the wind blows.”
There aren’t many gods on the scene: you’ve got the three Fates, you’ve got Hermes at the crossroads, and you’ve got Persephone and Hades. Persephone, no longer the carefree maiden of spring, is now a bohemian of a certain age, patroness of poets, never happier than when someone uncorks a bottle of wine in her honor (or at least in her presence). Hades has expanded his underground kingdom into an industrialist empire. In other words, he’s holding strong as the god of wealth.
Does this entirely track with Greek mythology? I don’t know, but I recognize them as American archetypes— Amanda Wingfield and JD Rockefeller, together at last.
Their marriage is somewhat on the rocks, Persephone and Hades. He stews in a melange of spite and jealousy; she’s hardly better off, with a bottle always ready to hand. When they argue, the winds rise and storms blow up, scattering poor mortals. And the mortals haven’t the strength to fight back. Persephone confirms:
“In the meantime up above
The harvest fails and people starve
Oceans rise and overflow—
It ain’t right and it ain’t natural!”
Just in case you forgot the setting, you know.
Now, the course of the plot sees Hades lure Eurydice, starving and hopeless, to his employment in the mills of Hadestown. Orpheus follows his wife to the Underworld. When he finds her, Eurydice has been transformed; she sold her soul to the company store. Persephone is moved by their plight. Hades, in a sadistic humor, gives Orpheus a chance to sing for Eurydice’s salvation.
Orpheus sings of the humble young lover who was Hades, and the lass in dappled sunlight that was Persephone.
Hades’s heart breaks, and he and Persephone clasp hands and dance.
And then, when the young lovers set off on their ill-fated voyage, Hades turns to his wife and lets her go to the world above, without resentment. She asks only, “Wait for me,” and he says “I will.”
That’s the crescendo of their love, and the promise of spring coming again.
To say it’s very very good is an understatement. Anaïs Mitchell’s music creates a new world, a new vocabulary of love, and she carries it off with flying colors.
But it’s not a great climate change resolution.
Look, if you say “We’re going to defeat climate change with the power of love!” I’m going to give you the side-eye.
There is a kind of love that is necessary to defeating climate change: agape, that is selfless, transcendent, all-encompassing love. Love for nature, love for the ecosystem, love for people I will never meet on the other side of the world, love for generations of daughters I will never see.
But eros is romantic love. And it’s powerful, yes, it is healing, but to see it used as a shorthand— as a cheat code, almost— for undoing climate change, it just grinds my gears. Yes, let’s undo climate change in five minutes because two people went to therapy. It puts me in a bad mood; it feels like you insulted my intelligence.
I don’t even mind the Fisher King aspect— the gods’ discord translates into an imbalanced climate— The Lion King did it, and King Arthur does it. It’s a good trope. But to deliberately name oil drums and the fossils of the dead, and how oceans rise and overflow— you’ve just broken the barrier between the theater and the outside world, and for what? For a resolution that works well on an interpersonal scale, but on a macro scale, HA. If you’re not going to deal with climate change as it deserves, maybe don’t invoke it so specifically in the first place.
See, this is why I just tend to ignore the post-apocalyptic setting of Hadestown. The musical works just fine in the 1930’s.
This concludes my first discussion of climate change in fiction. Stay tuned for a writeup concerning His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Tyme by Megan Morrison, and even a little Shakespeare.
My news is that I will be presenting at LeakyCon West 2022! That’s right, in Denver, Colorado, in mid-October, I will be holding forth on the virtues of Harry Potter fanfiction, and on the art and science of annotating the Potter books. More about that later!
Right?
My conscience would interject to say, “Shoot the oil executives and save the planet? But the oil executives are only the tip of the whole festering boil of social infrastructure that inches down to your home, your computer, your AC unit. So go ahead, shoot the oil exec. Another one will be along in a minute. Why not shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone, and invade Antarctica?”
But I quash my conscience. No one wants Terry Pratchett quotes at a time like this.
Anyway, I wanted to write about some fictionalized takes on climate change. It’s possibly the major crisis of all human history. One might say that authors are obliged to discuss this— but I’m rather with Oscar Wilde in the camp that authors aren’t obliged to do anything, except to not be boring, and, occasionally, when they can’t avoid it, to write.
But writers do tackle climate change— with interesting results. It’s a big topic, so I decided to break it up into two blog posts. I’m going to talk in some depth about Game of Thrones (the book series and TV series) and Hadestown, the Tony-award winning musical. Let’s get started.
Game of Thrones:
Winter is coming. That’s the first thing we learn about Westeros.
It’s kind of important. This isn’t snuggly winter, this is an Ice Age to last generations. With zombies. The first scene shows one survivor getting away to tell the tale. He has to warn everyone what is happening.
And when we meet him again, he is executed for desertion by Lord Eddard Stark.
This opens both the “Song of Ice and Fire” books by George RR Martin, and the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” helmed by David Benioff and DB Weiss.
“Winter is coming,” you’ve heard it again and again. In the backstory (boy, there’s a lot of backstory) the continent of Westeros is prone to very long Winters, Winters which merit the capital letter. Then you’ve got the Grandeur That Was Valyria, utterly destroyed by volcanic cataclysm; that might be the destruction by Fire that foreshadows Westeros’s destruction by Ice. Either way, we’ve got climate change on our hands.
Now, are the Winters natural or supernatural? It’s unknown whether humans have any role in triggering or stopping the Winter. The only thing to do is prepare.
And prepare they do… not.
No one heeds the warnings about Winter. People are greedy and short-sighted. Politics of courts near and far occupy our attention, with sumptuous costumes and religious uprisings and beautifullest ladies. Obviously, Martin has fun with the political plots, but it works as a creative choice as well. We the helpless audience get to watch these horrible people tear themselves apart rather than unite against the one foe that really matters.
Yes, reality has borne this thesis out. Kudos to Martin. I hate it.
However, you still need to end a story on this scale.
“Ice zombies eat everyone! All the emotion you invested in this story came to absolutely nothing!” is a possibility.
On the other hand, you can implement a cheat code.
Enter the King of Winter. A sort of Evil Overlord. Kill him off— just this one dude— and the worst of Winter will die with him. No ontological inertia and all that. Very handy for Messiah types like Azor Ahai.
If you have a shred of artistic integrity left, you can make it clear that Winter Is Still Here, but We Avoided the Worst.
And ideally, if you’re going to commit to “The Winter King is a metaphor for climate change,” his defeat should be something a little more, well, epic than just stabbing him with an above-average knife.
Still, you’ve got a whole continent to save and five hundred or so plotlines. So, no surprise if Martin is having trouble with the ending.
But he’s one lucky duck, at the same time— he can look at the ending penned by Benioff and Weiss, and veer in any other direction.
Benioff and Weiss disposed of the Winter King by having a whole battle at Winterfell, where Bran Stark acts as bait, and then Arya Stark sneaks up on the Winter King and stabs him with an above-average knife.
It’s a bit of an anticlimax.
Then the writers can move on to the real story they wanted to work on: about how Daenerys Targaryen, a rape survivor and anti-slavery advocate, has been, all this time, a metaphor for the West’s bloody imperialism. Dany, she goes utterly nuts when her boyfriend breaks up with her. City-incineration levels of nuts, so nuts that her boyfriend has to kill her for everyone’s safety. That’s the real story Game of Thrones was building up to, not Winter at all.
To which I say, Boo and hiss!
In short, the show absolutely failed in its depiction of climate change. And the books?
Well, Martin might be planning for Mad Queen Daenerys the whole time (he might change his mind) — but I’ll say this for him, I don’t think he would throw Winter out the window just because a shinier plot point comes along. But like I said above— climate change is an existential threat. It is quite “big picture.” It’s no wonder he’s having a hard time figuring out how to deal with it— so are all the rest of us.
So there’s the screen and page, but what about the stage?
Hadestown, the musical:
Hadestown, the brainchild of Anais Mitchell, has undergone a few transformations on its road from small Vermont musical to Tony-winning Broadway hit. The music, costumes, and lingo suggest 1930’s America, with a contrast between the Big Polluted City and Quiet Honest Life in the Country. But don’t be fooled by this pastoral domain: every version of the play is in a post-apocalyptic setting.
In the Broadway version of the soundtrack, vagabond Eurydice sets the stage, singing:
“Weather ain’t the way it was before,
There’s no spring or fall at all anymore;
It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold,
Any way the wind blows.”
There aren’t many gods on the scene: you’ve got the three Fates, you’ve got Hermes at the crossroads, and you’ve got Persephone and Hades. Persephone, no longer the carefree maiden of spring, is now a bohemian of a certain age, patroness of poets, never happier than when someone uncorks a bottle of wine in her honor (or at least in her presence). Hades has expanded his underground kingdom into an industrialist empire. In other words, he’s holding strong as the god of wealth.
Does this entirely track with Greek mythology? I don’t know, but I recognize them as American archetypes— Amanda Wingfield and JD Rockefeller, together at last.
Their marriage is somewhat on the rocks, Persephone and Hades. He stews in a melange of spite and jealousy; she’s hardly better off, with a bottle always ready to hand. When they argue, the winds rise and storms blow up, scattering poor mortals. And the mortals haven’t the strength to fight back. Persephone confirms:
“In the meantime up above
The harvest fails and people starve
Oceans rise and overflow—
It ain’t right and it ain’t natural!”
Just in case you forgot the setting, you know.
Now, the course of the plot sees Hades lure Eurydice, starving and hopeless, to his employment in the mills of Hadestown. Orpheus follows his wife to the Underworld. When he finds her, Eurydice has been transformed; she sold her soul to the company store. Persephone is moved by their plight. Hades, in a sadistic humor, gives Orpheus a chance to sing for Eurydice’s salvation.
Orpheus sings of the humble young lover who was Hades, and the lass in dappled sunlight that was Persephone.
Hades’s heart breaks, and he and Persephone clasp hands and dance.
And then, when the young lovers set off on their ill-fated voyage, Hades turns to his wife and lets her go to the world above, without resentment. She asks only, “Wait for me,” and he says “I will.”
That’s the crescendo of their love, and the promise of spring coming again.
To say it’s very very good is an understatement. Anaïs Mitchell’s music creates a new world, a new vocabulary of love, and she carries it off with flying colors.
But it’s not a great climate change resolution.
Look, if you say “We’re going to defeat climate change with the power of love!” I’m going to give you the side-eye.
There is a kind of love that is necessary to defeating climate change: agape, that is selfless, transcendent, all-encompassing love. Love for nature, love for the ecosystem, love for people I will never meet on the other side of the world, love for generations of daughters I will never see.
But eros is romantic love. And it’s powerful, yes, it is healing, but to see it used as a shorthand— as a cheat code, almost— for undoing climate change, it just grinds my gears. Yes, let’s undo climate change in five minutes because two people went to therapy. It puts me in a bad mood; it feels like you insulted my intelligence.
I don’t even mind the Fisher King aspect— the gods’ discord translates into an imbalanced climate— The Lion King did it, and King Arthur does it. It’s a good trope. But to deliberately name oil drums and the fossils of the dead, and how oceans rise and overflow— you’ve just broken the barrier between the theater and the outside world, and for what? For a resolution that works well on an interpersonal scale, but on a macro scale, HA. If you’re not going to deal with climate change as it deserves, maybe don’t invoke it so specifically in the first place.
See, this is why I just tend to ignore the post-apocalyptic setting of Hadestown. The musical works just fine in the 1930’s.
This concludes my first discussion of climate change in fiction. Stay tuned for a writeup concerning His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Tyme by Megan Morrison, and even a little Shakespeare.
My news is that I will be presenting at LeakyCon West 2022! That’s right, in Denver, Colorado, in mid-October, I will be holding forth on the virtues of Harry Potter fanfiction, and on the art and science of annotating the Potter books. More about that later!
May 4, 2022
All the Faith You Can Buy
I want to write about my spiritual life, but will that make for good Content?
Content says “Make it marketable, make it relatable. Don’t offend anyone—unless you can offend someone really well, because that generates clicks!”
And my Conscience is there, too, pecking at me, like an irate bluebird. “Is your faith really supposed to be aired out for everyone to gawk at?”
But I mean, it seems these days everything is aired out, for others to gawk at…
“Roll on up, for my price is down,
Come on in for the best in town
Take your pick of the finest wines!
Lay your bets on this bird of mine…”
It’s a crass, commercialist world out there. Full of junk and full of noise.
You want to take your concerns to God? Well, sure! Just head down to the heart of the financial district—the cathedral is big and shiny with an in-house gift shop. You can’t miss it!
I mean to say, it doesn’t take a fan of The Righteous Gemstones (available only on HBO) in order to figure out that religion, too, is a big old industry. Movies and newspapers and Christian romance (including bonnet-rippers); pilgrimages and televangelism, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“Roll on up, Jerusalem,
Here it is, it’s us and them
While our Temple still survives
We, at least, are still alive…”
And I’m a California girl, to boot. California is associated with a hippie, New Age, nebulous concept of unending self-improvement, in realms spiritual, mental, and physical. That means— incense, crystal grids, color-sanctified candles, and yoga retreats—those are my birthrights.
But I’m trying very hard not to fall into a trap.
Namely, the trap of thinking you can shop your way into enlightenment.
“What you see is what you get,
No one’s been disappointed yet,
Don’t be scared, give me a try—
There is nothing you can’t buy.”
(Jesus Christ Superstar)
Let me put this very simply. Atheism is not for me.
For me, mental health includes spiritual health.
So God is a presence in my life.
Uh… what kind of a presence?
Some recent books I’ve read on the topic of God include “Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation,” by Mary Daly; “The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog,” by Patricia Monaghan; and “She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World,” by Carol P. Christ. Are you noticing a theme?
The first thing is that I think of God as Goddess. It’s hard to alter a lifetime’s habit of thinking of God as a big tall fella with a big white beard, but the Goddess calls me in ways I cannot really put into words.
I mean, I try.
That’s a great first step. What’s next?
Mary Daly says we must think of Goddess as a verb.
Ah, darn.
God(dess) is in the movement of all energy through the universe. Slow movement, like trees growing, and swift, like lightning flashing.
But does that mean there is no person of God(dess)?
Philip Pullman may roll his eyes, but I say, yes, there is.
Mary Daly may be disappointed, but to me, God can be a noun and a verb.
And what more can I say with certainty? Not a whole lot.
I feel weird even confessing this online, to a vague mob of readers. It’s bad enough trying to talk about spirituality in real life, when I know that my cherry-picked, hand-cobbled personal beliefs are not likely to meet an exact match.
It’s kind of like Shel Silverstein said. “All the magic I have known, I’ve had to make myself.”
My spiritual life is a journey through terrain that is constantly shifting. Right now I am backpacking through hills and forests. I am following the flight of swans. I am embarking across a lake in a little canoe, following the mists in their depths. Send me to Caerleon. Send me to Avalon. I am on pilgrimage.
I discovered a quote on the Wikipedia page for “Spiritual Tourism,” by Fr. Frank Fahey. He said, “Every pilgrim is at risk of becoming a tourist, and every tourist is at risk of becoming a pilgrim.”
And that kind of ties into what I was saying earlier; it’s very easy to think you can shop your way to enlightenment. My quest, then, asks me to be comfortable with doubt and the lack of answers. Negative capability, as J. Keats might have said. To be an open mind, but not necessarily an open wallet.
My pilgrimage began very early, and continues into a future I can’t see. I am searching for meaning and truth. I may never find either; that’s okay, the journey is what matters. Asking questions and examining the world in new ways, that’s what matters. To be awake to the beauty of the world.
A final note, added on May 2, 2022, when an initial draft of a majority opinion has been leaked to the press—a majority opinion that the Supreme Court ought to overturn Roe v. Wade. Reproductive freedom is one of the cornerstones of women’s liberation.
I will never apologize for centering women in my activism.
I will never apologize for loving the Goddess in all Her manifestations.
I will use my voice to speak up for my Goddess and my sisters.
And my anger is as sacred as the rest of me.
… you can’t raise hell with a saint…
Content says “Make it marketable, make it relatable. Don’t offend anyone—unless you can offend someone really well, because that generates clicks!”
And my Conscience is there, too, pecking at me, like an irate bluebird. “Is your faith really supposed to be aired out for everyone to gawk at?”
But I mean, it seems these days everything is aired out, for others to gawk at…
“Roll on up, for my price is down,
Come on in for the best in town
Take your pick of the finest wines!
Lay your bets on this bird of mine…”
It’s a crass, commercialist world out there. Full of junk and full of noise.
You want to take your concerns to God? Well, sure! Just head down to the heart of the financial district—the cathedral is big and shiny with an in-house gift shop. You can’t miss it!
I mean to say, it doesn’t take a fan of The Righteous Gemstones (available only on HBO) in order to figure out that religion, too, is a big old industry. Movies and newspapers and Christian romance (including bonnet-rippers); pilgrimages and televangelism, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“Roll on up, Jerusalem,
Here it is, it’s us and them
While our Temple still survives
We, at least, are still alive…”
And I’m a California girl, to boot. California is associated with a hippie, New Age, nebulous concept of unending self-improvement, in realms spiritual, mental, and physical. That means— incense, crystal grids, color-sanctified candles, and yoga retreats—those are my birthrights.
But I’m trying very hard not to fall into a trap.
Namely, the trap of thinking you can shop your way into enlightenment.
“What you see is what you get,
No one’s been disappointed yet,
Don’t be scared, give me a try—
There is nothing you can’t buy.”
(Jesus Christ Superstar)
Let me put this very simply. Atheism is not for me.
For me, mental health includes spiritual health.
So God is a presence in my life.
Uh… what kind of a presence?
Some recent books I’ve read on the topic of God include “Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation,” by Mary Daly; “The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog,” by Patricia Monaghan; and “She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World,” by Carol P. Christ. Are you noticing a theme?
The first thing is that I think of God as Goddess. It’s hard to alter a lifetime’s habit of thinking of God as a big tall fella with a big white beard, but the Goddess calls me in ways I cannot really put into words.
I mean, I try.
That’s a great first step. What’s next?
Mary Daly says we must think of Goddess as a verb.
Ah, darn.
God(dess) is in the movement of all energy through the universe. Slow movement, like trees growing, and swift, like lightning flashing.
But does that mean there is no person of God(dess)?
Philip Pullman may roll his eyes, but I say, yes, there is.
Mary Daly may be disappointed, but to me, God can be a noun and a verb.
And what more can I say with certainty? Not a whole lot.
I feel weird even confessing this online, to a vague mob of readers. It’s bad enough trying to talk about spirituality in real life, when I know that my cherry-picked, hand-cobbled personal beliefs are not likely to meet an exact match.
It’s kind of like Shel Silverstein said. “All the magic I have known, I’ve had to make myself.”
My spiritual life is a journey through terrain that is constantly shifting. Right now I am backpacking through hills and forests. I am following the flight of swans. I am embarking across a lake in a little canoe, following the mists in their depths. Send me to Caerleon. Send me to Avalon. I am on pilgrimage.
I discovered a quote on the Wikipedia page for “Spiritual Tourism,” by Fr. Frank Fahey. He said, “Every pilgrim is at risk of becoming a tourist, and every tourist is at risk of becoming a pilgrim.”
And that kind of ties into what I was saying earlier; it’s very easy to think you can shop your way to enlightenment. My quest, then, asks me to be comfortable with doubt and the lack of answers. Negative capability, as J. Keats might have said. To be an open mind, but not necessarily an open wallet.
My pilgrimage began very early, and continues into a future I can’t see. I am searching for meaning and truth. I may never find either; that’s okay, the journey is what matters. Asking questions and examining the world in new ways, that’s what matters. To be awake to the beauty of the world.
A final note, added on May 2, 2022, when an initial draft of a majority opinion has been leaked to the press—a majority opinion that the Supreme Court ought to overturn Roe v. Wade. Reproductive freedom is one of the cornerstones of women’s liberation.
I will never apologize for centering women in my activism.
I will never apologize for loving the Goddess in all Her manifestations.
I will use my voice to speak up for my Goddess and my sisters.
And my anger is as sacred as the rest of me.
… you can’t raise hell with a saint…
March 9, 2022
Leaving Childhood: The Golden Compass & I
I used to be extremely fond of rereading my favorite books. A few years ago, however, my pleasure in rereading was overcome by impatience: get to the point already, get to the end! I traced this problem to an out-of-date prescription for my reading glasses. Unfortunately, even with a new prescription, the ennui persists. On the bright side, I am blazing through my TBR pile
.
And on the inside, well. There are some books that I don’t need to reread. I’ve read them enough in the past that I no longer need light by which to read them. These books could in fact double as sources of light: they shape how I see the world.
Three of these books are The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, collectively known as His Dark Materials.
Note: In the UK, the first book is known by its original title, Northern Lights.
HDM is enjoying a moment. HBO picked it up for a serial adaptation. For a while, an alethiometer billboard gleamed thirty feet high above Sunset Boulevard. There’s Funko Pops over at Hot Topic and a running recap column in the AV Club. Well, HBO, the AV Club, and the Funko Pops with their ghastly staring eyes are all late to the party, because this is my house.
If you thought I was possessive about Little Women, you ain’t seen nothing yet…
His Dark Materials opens in a world parallel to our own, focusing on a girl named Lyra who runs half-wild around the colleges of Oxford. Everywhere Lyra goes, her daemon familiar, Pantalaimon, is nearby. Oxford’s Scholars are in uproar about a mysterious substance called “Dust,” but Lyra doesn’t care—until her best friend vanishes without a trace, and Lyra goes on a quest to rescue him.
The HBO adaptation is very good, really, especially the second season. Excellent cast, good production values. I like how they flesh out the roles of Marisa Coulter and Lee Scoresby, and Simone Kirby perfectly captures one of my all-time favorite characters, Mary Malone. The one— shall we say— glaring weakness is the CGI daemons. Put simply, there ain’t enough of them, and daemons are a little important to the thematic unity of the entire damn series.
Dæmon is the proper spelling, of course, but not all computers have the “æ” symbol.
Pullman wisely takes his time dispensing information on what a daemon is. Gradually, we learn that every human in this world has one. Every daemon is animal-shaped (misprints from an early edition of Northern Lights notwithstanding). Daemons talk. They offer help, companionship and the occasional scolding to their humans. Okay, so they’re magical animal sidekicks. What else?
Children’s daemons change shape with impulse or will, but adults’ daemons are “settled” in one form. Now, this seems like a loss. Who wouldn’t cherish whimsy, not to mention the possibility of flight?
But in the first book, Lyra meets an old sailor— and his seagull-daemon— who reassure her. It’ll be worth it, says the sailor, to know who you really are. What kind of person you are.
Now imagine those ideas reaching a lonely girl in the seventh grade— just about Lyra’s age.
See, my memories of His Dark Materials are inextricable from that time period. That’s the age when I started tying my hair back in the tightest braids and ponytails I could manage. When I switched from the plaid uniform skirts to navy blue uniform trousers (dear god, what if someone saw my thighs? Or realized that I hadn’t shaved my calves?). I did not like what was happening to me at that age. I did not want to grow up.
Why not? Oh, haven’t you heard?
“Never-neverland, for once you have found your way there, you can never, never grow old.” (Peter PanPeter Pan.)
“Toyland, Toyland, once you pass its borders, you can never return again.” (Babes in ToylandBabes in Toyland.)
“And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3.)
The messaging is pervasive in our society. Childhood is the era of clarity, wonderment, delight. To grow up is to lose magic. To grow up is to lose your way. Peter Pan can flit gaily among the skies of Neverland forever, but Wendy must resign herself to turning gray amid the grime of London. (1) And to a kid who had enough difficulty navigating middle school, the thought of having to grow up was a terrible one. What if I lost my imagination, the one thing that made me really special?
And then I start reading these books.
And in between the chases and escapes, the cold expanses of the North and the slow secrets of the alethiometer, Pullman comes up to us with the idea. Hey, it’s better to be an adult than to be a little kid. Yeah, little kids can run wild— but they’re vulnerable. Adults know who they really are, and in that knowledge lies strength.
And Pullman just developed this theme further, with my aforementioned favorite, Mary Malone. Sometimes when I read the books, I imagine her as a young woman; sometimes she’s closer to fifty than forty. At any age, Malone thinks of herself as “slow and plodding,” no sort of adventurer at all. But on the course of her journey, she discovers depths of playfulness and courage within herself. She reawakens to her enormous capacity to think, to feel, to love—one greater than what she had when she was a shy child, praying to a child’s God.
All these themes: honoring the coming-of-age process; the elevation of knowledge, wisdom, and art to a universal vocation; the importance of free will; the life of the inner soul; these themes have shaped me as a person.
And some of them, I’ve developed into my own theses: Pullman is a staunch atheist, and although I absorbed that dimension of His Dark Materials, my spirituality has grown beyond it.
And then there’s the question— would these themes stick with me so, would they have transformed me, if it weren’t for Pullman’s skill for adventure and intrigue? Without the initial imaginative leap of “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall…” Prompting me to ask, what is a daemon? What is this book about?
And the answer is, it’s about entering the world. It’s about growing up. It’s kind of about everything.
And HBO… l do look forward to seeing how the third season will approach the monumental scale and imagination of the third volume. Maybe they will even tackle the inconsistencies within Pullman’s texts. (Authority is bad, until there’s twenty pages of book left and one angel needs to swoop in and tell everyone what to do, brooking no disagreement. Um…)
But do the people at HBO really understand His Dark Materials? At times I feel like they are shifting the story to be more, well, Game of Thrones-ian. They’re establishing several different factions all working up towards one big battle… you know, that’s fine, but in Pullman’s vision, there are only two factions, only one question that really matters. Are you for Freedom, or for Authority? Yes, the characters kill the Christian version of God, several times over, just to be sure, (2) but it’s not about using violence to overpower the people who are wrong. It’s about understanding and connection, relating, teaching. It’s about growing up.
But, hey. You’ve got to take adaptations, even the very best, with a proverbial grain of salt. The series is better than the 2007 film by Chris Weitz; then again, there are things I miss about Chris Weitz’ vision (another excellent cast, and really good daemons). It’s not like the HBO series was ever going to replace the books in my heart. Books are my preferred medium, and besides, the books reached me at precisely the right wrinkle in time for me to absorb their message.
I said earlier that these books double as sources of light. With books and stories that matter to me this much, it’s fun (nay, necessary, good, AND fun) to revisit them periodically. Revisiting Compass shows me how I’ve changed since the last time I read it. And for that reason alone, I’m grateful to the HBO series. It may not be perfect, but it gives me an excuse to return to Lyra’s Oxford. I will take that opportunity, and bring along as many new travelers as I can.
(1) This is a shallow but common reading of the text of Peter Pan; JM Barrie himself was wiser than that. But I’m speaking about the predominant image of eternal, carefree youth.
(2) Incidentally, when I put it that baldly, I start wondering what if the characters from The Righteous Gemstones were to stumble their way into His Dark Materials… but no, if Pullman were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave at the very notion…
.
And on the inside, well. There are some books that I don’t need to reread. I’ve read them enough in the past that I no longer need light by which to read them. These books could in fact double as sources of light: they shape how I see the world.
Three of these books are The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, collectively known as His Dark Materials.
Note: In the UK, the first book is known by its original title, Northern Lights.
HDM is enjoying a moment. HBO picked it up for a serial adaptation. For a while, an alethiometer billboard gleamed thirty feet high above Sunset Boulevard. There’s Funko Pops over at Hot Topic and a running recap column in the AV Club. Well, HBO, the AV Club, and the Funko Pops with their ghastly staring eyes are all late to the party, because this is my house.
If you thought I was possessive about Little Women, you ain’t seen nothing yet…
His Dark Materials opens in a world parallel to our own, focusing on a girl named Lyra who runs half-wild around the colleges of Oxford. Everywhere Lyra goes, her daemon familiar, Pantalaimon, is nearby. Oxford’s Scholars are in uproar about a mysterious substance called “Dust,” but Lyra doesn’t care—until her best friend vanishes without a trace, and Lyra goes on a quest to rescue him.
The HBO adaptation is very good, really, especially the second season. Excellent cast, good production values. I like how they flesh out the roles of Marisa Coulter and Lee Scoresby, and Simone Kirby perfectly captures one of my all-time favorite characters, Mary Malone. The one— shall we say— glaring weakness is the CGI daemons. Put simply, there ain’t enough of them, and daemons are a little important to the thematic unity of the entire damn series.
Dæmon is the proper spelling, of course, but not all computers have the “æ” symbol.
Pullman wisely takes his time dispensing information on what a daemon is. Gradually, we learn that every human in this world has one. Every daemon is animal-shaped (misprints from an early edition of Northern Lights notwithstanding). Daemons talk. They offer help, companionship and the occasional scolding to their humans. Okay, so they’re magical animal sidekicks. What else?
Children’s daemons change shape with impulse or will, but adults’ daemons are “settled” in one form. Now, this seems like a loss. Who wouldn’t cherish whimsy, not to mention the possibility of flight?
But in the first book, Lyra meets an old sailor— and his seagull-daemon— who reassure her. It’ll be worth it, says the sailor, to know who you really are. What kind of person you are.
Now imagine those ideas reaching a lonely girl in the seventh grade— just about Lyra’s age.
See, my memories of His Dark Materials are inextricable from that time period. That’s the age when I started tying my hair back in the tightest braids and ponytails I could manage. When I switched from the plaid uniform skirts to navy blue uniform trousers (dear god, what if someone saw my thighs? Or realized that I hadn’t shaved my calves?). I did not like what was happening to me at that age. I did not want to grow up.
Why not? Oh, haven’t you heard?
“Never-neverland, for once you have found your way there, you can never, never grow old.” (Peter PanPeter Pan.)
“Toyland, Toyland, once you pass its borders, you can never return again.” (Babes in ToylandBabes in Toyland.)
“And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3.)
The messaging is pervasive in our society. Childhood is the era of clarity, wonderment, delight. To grow up is to lose magic. To grow up is to lose your way. Peter Pan can flit gaily among the skies of Neverland forever, but Wendy must resign herself to turning gray amid the grime of London. (1) And to a kid who had enough difficulty navigating middle school, the thought of having to grow up was a terrible one. What if I lost my imagination, the one thing that made me really special?
And then I start reading these books.
And in between the chases and escapes, the cold expanses of the North and the slow secrets of the alethiometer, Pullman comes up to us with the idea. Hey, it’s better to be an adult than to be a little kid. Yeah, little kids can run wild— but they’re vulnerable. Adults know who they really are, and in that knowledge lies strength.
And Pullman just developed this theme further, with my aforementioned favorite, Mary Malone. Sometimes when I read the books, I imagine her as a young woman; sometimes she’s closer to fifty than forty. At any age, Malone thinks of herself as “slow and plodding,” no sort of adventurer at all. But on the course of her journey, she discovers depths of playfulness and courage within herself. She reawakens to her enormous capacity to think, to feel, to love—one greater than what she had when she was a shy child, praying to a child’s God.
All these themes: honoring the coming-of-age process; the elevation of knowledge, wisdom, and art to a universal vocation; the importance of free will; the life of the inner soul; these themes have shaped me as a person.
And some of them, I’ve developed into my own theses: Pullman is a staunch atheist, and although I absorbed that dimension of His Dark Materials, my spirituality has grown beyond it.
And then there’s the question— would these themes stick with me so, would they have transformed me, if it weren’t for Pullman’s skill for adventure and intrigue? Without the initial imaginative leap of “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall…” Prompting me to ask, what is a daemon? What is this book about?
And the answer is, it’s about entering the world. It’s about growing up. It’s kind of about everything.
And HBO… l do look forward to seeing how the third season will approach the monumental scale and imagination of the third volume. Maybe they will even tackle the inconsistencies within Pullman’s texts. (Authority is bad, until there’s twenty pages of book left and one angel needs to swoop in and tell everyone what to do, brooking no disagreement. Um…)
But do the people at HBO really understand His Dark Materials? At times I feel like they are shifting the story to be more, well, Game of Thrones-ian. They’re establishing several different factions all working up towards one big battle… you know, that’s fine, but in Pullman’s vision, there are only two factions, only one question that really matters. Are you for Freedom, or for Authority? Yes, the characters kill the Christian version of God, several times over, just to be sure, (2) but it’s not about using violence to overpower the people who are wrong. It’s about understanding and connection, relating, teaching. It’s about growing up.
But, hey. You’ve got to take adaptations, even the very best, with a proverbial grain of salt. The series is better than the 2007 film by Chris Weitz; then again, there are things I miss about Chris Weitz’ vision (another excellent cast, and really good daemons). It’s not like the HBO series was ever going to replace the books in my heart. Books are my preferred medium, and besides, the books reached me at precisely the right wrinkle in time for me to absorb their message.
I said earlier that these books double as sources of light. With books and stories that matter to me this much, it’s fun (nay, necessary, good, AND fun) to revisit them periodically. Revisiting Compass shows me how I’ve changed since the last time I read it. And for that reason alone, I’m grateful to the HBO series. It may not be perfect, but it gives me an excuse to return to Lyra’s Oxford. I will take that opportunity, and bring along as many new travelers as I can.
(1) This is a shallow but common reading of the text of Peter Pan; JM Barrie himself was wiser than that. But I’m speaking about the predominant image of eternal, carefree youth.
(2) Incidentally, when I put it that baldly, I start wondering what if the characters from The Righteous Gemstones were to stumble their way into His Dark Materials… but no, if Pullman were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave at the very notion…
January 24, 2022
The Ninety-Ninth Bride: Back in Print
Hello, faithful readers. It has been a while, hasn’t it?
As of Tuesday, January 25th, I am self-publishing The Ninety-Ninth Bride with Ingram Spark. I’m putting this story back out into the world, a leap of faith.
You see, between when Bride first went out of print and now, I was in a stew of self pity and doubt. It can be hard for a writer (or an artist, or a musician, you get the picture) to look back on their recent work with a non-judgmental eye. The artist sees all the growing pains and flaws. If the writer’s craft has developed even a little, they look at their late choices and go “Ugh, I should have done this differently.” And that’s not taking into consideration the doubts that plague every artist I know.
But, in November of 2021, clarity broke upon me. I snapped out of the fog and realized my doubts were holding me back. There are people who want to read The Ninety-Ninth Bride, and the book is good enough to stand on its own two feet and be out in the world. So it’s not perfect—so what? It is a picture of my soul at the time of writing.
The story of Bride is this: one night in college (“Friends forever, Whittier”) I was thinking about the One Thousand and One Nights, and I got an idea. Unfortunately, to spell out the idea would be to give away the ending of the book, but suffice to say I wrote out a tidy little scene in a spare notebook, and when I was done, I looked upon my work and said, “Hey, not bad.”
It took a couple more years (and a trip to England) before I developed the scene into a short story (well, I say “short,” it was really more of a novelette) and submitted it to the Book Smugglers, for their anthology of “subversive fairy tales” (a genre near and dear to my heart).
When the Book Smugglers asked me if I would expand Bride into a proper novel, I agreed readily.
In looking back, it’s kind of stunning how the novel I wrote was also an autobiography. The time when I wrote the novel wasn’t an easy time for me, and here were all the aspects of my soul on display: there was the Sultan, pacing about in a shrinking circle of wrath; Zahra, the storyteller from the shadows, the voice of intuition who always acts on her own time, and no one else’s; Upalu, the djinn whose grief threatens to consume her like fire; Munir, shrinking in fear from everything, and—
—in the middle of it all—
There’s Dunya, trying to listen, trying to see the underlying pattern of the city, trying to make sense of it.
That’s my girl.
Now, in the year of our Lord (I say that tentatively) 2022, why self-publishing?
Well, for my Greek myth project, I am still pursuing the advantages of the traditional path: an agent who knows the market inside and out, a publishing house that can help with distribution and publicity and binding, a professional editor (swoon).
But Bride has already been in print once; it has been edited copiously by the Book Smugglers and myself. In this instance, I prioritized getting my book into the world again.
You see, writing is only partially about getting the words on paper. It’s also about (among other things) creating the headspace in which the book dwells. I could list out the elements of Bride’s headspace, like a Pinterest board (dusky blue, shadows at midnight, crookedy streets like Cairo) but… that’s not the same as being able to enter that headspace and live in it again.
All that is to say, I think it is right to let Bride exist as a relic of the time it was written. Let it be, as the song goes.
Last thoughts:
If it had been entirely up to me, I might have let Bride gather dust for ages, a “trunk novel” to only be brought into the light when I am rich and successful. But on Saturday night, I had the opportunity to hear Guillermo del Toro speak. It was at a screening for his new film Nightmare Alley: Vision in Darkness and Light.
I asked the last question of the night (on the motif of monsters in del Toro’s work) and del Toro told me that there are two big lies that society sells us: perfect romantic love, and success.
If success is a lie, what am I doing, then, letting Bride gather dust?
No, The Ninety-Ninth Bride's place is in the world, available online in ebook and print formats. I’m publishing it not to assuage my vanity, not to chase that elusive success, but for my readers, past, present, and future.
Del Toro also spoke aboke the challenges of art in the time of COVID, and said “It sounds like a Chinese cookie, but it’s true—in art, the blocks, the obstacles? They are the gift.”
My heart overflows with gratitude: to my family and friends, who supported me and believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. I’m grateful to Reiko Murakami, who loved Dunya as well as I did, and who kindly let me use her breathtaking cover art for the new edition. And the Book Smugglers themselves, Thea James and Ana Grilo, who gave me such support and such help, as editors and colleagues. Most recently, Thea suggested I use Ingram Spark for self-publishing. It has been a true voyage of discovery, and it’s not over yet.
And I am grateful to you, faithful readers.
Shukran kteer, thank you so very much.
Now, let’s see what tomorrow brings.
As of Tuesday, January 25th, I am self-publishing The Ninety-Ninth Bride with Ingram Spark. I’m putting this story back out into the world, a leap of faith.
You see, between when Bride first went out of print and now, I was in a stew of self pity and doubt. It can be hard for a writer (or an artist, or a musician, you get the picture) to look back on their recent work with a non-judgmental eye. The artist sees all the growing pains and flaws. If the writer’s craft has developed even a little, they look at their late choices and go “Ugh, I should have done this differently.” And that’s not taking into consideration the doubts that plague every artist I know.
But, in November of 2021, clarity broke upon me. I snapped out of the fog and realized my doubts were holding me back. There are people who want to read The Ninety-Ninth Bride, and the book is good enough to stand on its own two feet and be out in the world. So it’s not perfect—so what? It is a picture of my soul at the time of writing.
The story of Bride is this: one night in college (“Friends forever, Whittier”) I was thinking about the One Thousand and One Nights, and I got an idea. Unfortunately, to spell out the idea would be to give away the ending of the book, but suffice to say I wrote out a tidy little scene in a spare notebook, and when I was done, I looked upon my work and said, “Hey, not bad.”
It took a couple more years (and a trip to England) before I developed the scene into a short story (well, I say “short,” it was really more of a novelette) and submitted it to the Book Smugglers, for their anthology of “subversive fairy tales” (a genre near and dear to my heart).
When the Book Smugglers asked me if I would expand Bride into a proper novel, I agreed readily.
In looking back, it’s kind of stunning how the novel I wrote was also an autobiography. The time when I wrote the novel wasn’t an easy time for me, and here were all the aspects of my soul on display: there was the Sultan, pacing about in a shrinking circle of wrath; Zahra, the storyteller from the shadows, the voice of intuition who always acts on her own time, and no one else’s; Upalu, the djinn whose grief threatens to consume her like fire; Munir, shrinking in fear from everything, and—
—in the middle of it all—
There’s Dunya, trying to listen, trying to see the underlying pattern of the city, trying to make sense of it.
That’s my girl.
Now, in the year of our Lord (I say that tentatively) 2022, why self-publishing?
Well, for my Greek myth project, I am still pursuing the advantages of the traditional path: an agent who knows the market inside and out, a publishing house that can help with distribution and publicity and binding, a professional editor (swoon).
But Bride has already been in print once; it has been edited copiously by the Book Smugglers and myself. In this instance, I prioritized getting my book into the world again.
You see, writing is only partially about getting the words on paper. It’s also about (among other things) creating the headspace in which the book dwells. I could list out the elements of Bride’s headspace, like a Pinterest board (dusky blue, shadows at midnight, crookedy streets like Cairo) but… that’s not the same as being able to enter that headspace and live in it again.
All that is to say, I think it is right to let Bride exist as a relic of the time it was written. Let it be, as the song goes.
Last thoughts:
If it had been entirely up to me, I might have let Bride gather dust for ages, a “trunk novel” to only be brought into the light when I am rich and successful. But on Saturday night, I had the opportunity to hear Guillermo del Toro speak. It was at a screening for his new film Nightmare Alley: Vision in Darkness and Light.
I asked the last question of the night (on the motif of monsters in del Toro’s work) and del Toro told me that there are two big lies that society sells us: perfect romantic love, and success.
If success is a lie, what am I doing, then, letting Bride gather dust?
No, The Ninety-Ninth Bride's place is in the world, available online in ebook and print formats. I’m publishing it not to assuage my vanity, not to chase that elusive success, but for my readers, past, present, and future.
Del Toro also spoke aboke the challenges of art in the time of COVID, and said “It sounds like a Chinese cookie, but it’s true—in art, the blocks, the obstacles? They are the gift.”
My heart overflows with gratitude: to my family and friends, who supported me and believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. I’m grateful to Reiko Murakami, who loved Dunya as well as I did, and who kindly let me use her breathtaking cover art for the new edition. And the Book Smugglers themselves, Thea James and Ana Grilo, who gave me such support and such help, as editors and colleagues. Most recently, Thea suggested I use Ingram Spark for self-publishing. It has been a true voyage of discovery, and it’s not over yet.
And I am grateful to you, faithful readers.
Shukran kteer, thank you so very much.
Now, let’s see what tomorrow brings.
December 9, 2021
Why Los Angeles Needs Movie Theaters
"People need art in their houses,” said Ezra Croft, American male artist. “They don't need Bed Bath and Beyond dentist-office art. They need weird stuff.” I encountered this quote on Tumblr and Pinterest, websites which offer proof that humans, like corvids, like to save shiny things that cross their path. I agree heartily with Croft, here. I’m even going to expand the scope.
People need art in their cities, and I mean WEIRD art. I’m talking about little cramped museums that store magnificent oddities. I’m talking theater in the park and poetry slams of dubious meter. And people need movie theaters. Especially if you want the future of filmmaking to have any life, any true weirdness, Los Angeles needs her cinemas.
Having lived in France, I adopted the French term for movie theaters. Also, it’s handy to distinguish between live theater and the silver-screen kind.
Call me a traditionalist, call me old-fashioned. Say that I can’t move with the times. But I say Los Angeles needs to preserve its theaters in order to nourish the current and upcoming generations of filmmakers. I mean, artistic inspiration doesn’t purely come from within.
The opportunity to stream films at home provides many advantages. I’m not disputing that. But the act of attending theaters with a live audience! Crafting images for the big screen! That art form should not die, nor ossify into a mass-produced cinematic universe of pablum, no, this art form should live, especially in the American home of filmmaking, the great city of Los Angeles.
In the first place, sometimes size matters. I speak from personal experience: swooning over the art of Alphonse Mucha for years online is as nothing compared to seeing Mucha’s art in person. All it took was one poster of Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame Aux Camellias, larger-than-life, in a French museum. The blue, the stars, the linework— they sank into me, resounded in me. I saw them in a whole new way. Now, apply that principle to film, which includes not only a dimension of light, but a dimension of sound and a dimension of time.
And there’s the matter of taking time out to really experience something in its proper mode. Every aspect of tangible, in-person moviegoing— chatting in line, getting the popcorn, the laughs and gasps of the audience around you in the darkness, the vastness of the screen that swallows you up— it forms a link in a sacred chain.
Attending cinemas together makes friends out of strangers. It reinforces bonds of community that already exist (think of a whole audience hollering “DAMMIT, Janet!” in unison). Unlike screenings at home among friends, lovely as they are, cinemas allow different groups of fans to mingle and compare notes. French New Wave-o-philes alongside lovers of the Chick Flick, Kung Fu aficionados arm-in-arm with Spaghetti Western cowboys.
Without big screens, the ability to experience films in their more-or-less intended context, how can young filmmakers stay linked to the history of their medium?
And we need independent cinemas. When I saw Encanto at an AMC theater in Century City, hand to God, there were a full ten minutes of AMC promos— Let’s show Coca-Cola pouring into a glass thirty feet high! Let’s review safety protocols in the most obnoxious fashion possible! Let’s remind you that you paid extra for the BIG SCREEN experience!— ten minutes of this, in addition to a battalion of promos for movies that ranged from “meh” to “this actively degrades the artistic landscape.” The in-your-face “Isn’t AMC great?!” promos almost spoiled my mood for the movie itself. We need independent cinemas.
Filmmakers need to be able to visit screens that are standalone— not attached to a shopping mall. There ought to be cinematheques that draw from the reels of bygone eras. There ought to be places to watch films from overseas, and the weird little films that pop up all over. The alternative is a shrinking box of regressive, simplistic, reheated properties.
Speaking of reheated properties, this December I’m hoping to see two remakes: West Side Story, which I’ve heard is a good rendition, and Nightmare Alley, a film by Guillermo del Toro. One promises to be a spectacle of movement and whirl; the other will immerse me in del Toro’s twisty vision. Color, dance, and rage; Labyrinths, mind games, carnival mystique. I want to be taken out of my own world; I want to experience catharsis and poetry. Because when the soul seethes, art is what provides the surgical lance.
That’s why, here in the heart of screenland, there must be a few houses remaining that serve up film in its original, intended environment. Which present film as art, not merely as content. Los Angeles needs movie theaters.
People need art in their cities, and I mean WEIRD art. I’m talking about little cramped museums that store magnificent oddities. I’m talking theater in the park and poetry slams of dubious meter. And people need movie theaters. Especially if you want the future of filmmaking to have any life, any true weirdness, Los Angeles needs her cinemas.
Having lived in France, I adopted the French term for movie theaters. Also, it’s handy to distinguish between live theater and the silver-screen kind.
Call me a traditionalist, call me old-fashioned. Say that I can’t move with the times. But I say Los Angeles needs to preserve its theaters in order to nourish the current and upcoming generations of filmmakers. I mean, artistic inspiration doesn’t purely come from within.
The opportunity to stream films at home provides many advantages. I’m not disputing that. But the act of attending theaters with a live audience! Crafting images for the big screen! That art form should not die, nor ossify into a mass-produced cinematic universe of pablum, no, this art form should live, especially in the American home of filmmaking, the great city of Los Angeles.
In the first place, sometimes size matters. I speak from personal experience: swooning over the art of Alphonse Mucha for years online is as nothing compared to seeing Mucha’s art in person. All it took was one poster of Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame Aux Camellias, larger-than-life, in a French museum. The blue, the stars, the linework— they sank into me, resounded in me. I saw them in a whole new way. Now, apply that principle to film, which includes not only a dimension of light, but a dimension of sound and a dimension of time.
And there’s the matter of taking time out to really experience something in its proper mode. Every aspect of tangible, in-person moviegoing— chatting in line, getting the popcorn, the laughs and gasps of the audience around you in the darkness, the vastness of the screen that swallows you up— it forms a link in a sacred chain.
Attending cinemas together makes friends out of strangers. It reinforces bonds of community that already exist (think of a whole audience hollering “DAMMIT, Janet!” in unison). Unlike screenings at home among friends, lovely as they are, cinemas allow different groups of fans to mingle and compare notes. French New Wave-o-philes alongside lovers of the Chick Flick, Kung Fu aficionados arm-in-arm with Spaghetti Western cowboys.
Without big screens, the ability to experience films in their more-or-less intended context, how can young filmmakers stay linked to the history of their medium?
And we need independent cinemas. When I saw Encanto at an AMC theater in Century City, hand to God, there were a full ten minutes of AMC promos— Let’s show Coca-Cola pouring into a glass thirty feet high! Let’s review safety protocols in the most obnoxious fashion possible! Let’s remind you that you paid extra for the BIG SCREEN experience!— ten minutes of this, in addition to a battalion of promos for movies that ranged from “meh” to “this actively degrades the artistic landscape.” The in-your-face “Isn’t AMC great?!” promos almost spoiled my mood for the movie itself. We need independent cinemas.
Filmmakers need to be able to visit screens that are standalone— not attached to a shopping mall. There ought to be cinematheques that draw from the reels of bygone eras. There ought to be places to watch films from overseas, and the weird little films that pop up all over. The alternative is a shrinking box of regressive, simplistic, reheated properties.
Speaking of reheated properties, this December I’m hoping to see two remakes: West Side Story, which I’ve heard is a good rendition, and Nightmare Alley, a film by Guillermo del Toro. One promises to be a spectacle of movement and whirl; the other will immerse me in del Toro’s twisty vision. Color, dance, and rage; Labyrinths, mind games, carnival mystique. I want to be taken out of my own world; I want to experience catharsis and poetry. Because when the soul seethes, art is what provides the surgical lance.
That’s why, here in the heart of screenland, there must be a few houses remaining that serve up film in its original, intended environment. Which present film as art, not merely as content. Los Angeles needs movie theaters.
October 8, 2021
The Princess Bride & the Melting Pot
When I was fourteen years old, in the eighth grade, our noble teacher made sure we got a good grounding in Greek mythology, poetry and short stories (including, one memorable Halloween day,
A Rose for Emily
). The last unit of our literature class that year was a novel: William Goldman’s The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love & High Adventure. In tiny letters on the cover, it adds “A Hot Fairy Tale.”
Having literally studied The Princess Bride , I’d say I know it pretty well. But I’m only human, and sometimes I make mistakes. Once I confused the movie and the book, and babbled on about the Kid (Billy) listening to a story read by his grandfather. My eighth grade teacher gently corrected me. In the original book, Billy isn’t listening to his grandfather.
He’s with his father.
Goldman isn’t just spinning a grand old adventure yarn. I think he’s playing with a prominent trope of American literature: the immigrant experience over successive generations. Let me explain.
The writer Goldman (WG) conjures up a frame story within a frame story. In the frame story’s flashback, Goldman’s fictitious father is a first-generation immigrant from Florin. Where is Florin? Europe, somewhere. The “Old Country.”
In the Old Country, Goldman Senior was a brilliant man, but in being translated to English, to American, well, that’s a different story. The writer conjures it thus: “The facts are when he was sixteen he got a shot at coming to America, gambled on the land of opportunity and lost.” Worse than the indignity of becoming a barber, when he might have been a lawyer, is this: Goldman Sr. can barely connect with his son, the embodiment of the brighter future for which he’d come to America.
What interest grips little Billy Goldman’s heart? Sports. (In 1973, he hangs onto the radio to catch a football game; in 1987 in winter, he’s playing a baseball video game.) When his father comes to his sickbed with a ponderous volume in hand, Billy’s first question is “Has it got any sports?”
Goldman Sr. tries to sell the book with sports— “Fencing, fighting, true love, strong hate—” and Billy concedes that he’ll try to stay awake. (Many years later, in the tongue-in-cheek half-sequel called Buttercup’s Baby, WG will paint The Princess Bride as the enduring epic of Florinese literature. Like The Three Musketeers, with all the swashbuckling and honor that implies. It’s got its own museum, for goodness’ sake.) But at the moment, in 1973, there is only a battered old book and the old barber’s memory of a brilliant author.
Billy is unimpressed.
At first.
It’s not clear in the book where the magic exactly kicks in, but it does. And it endures. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Grandpa assures Billy “She does not get eaten by the eels at this time,” (it’s sharks in the book), and you noticed that the little moppet was indeed clutching his blankets in anxiety. Billy loves the book, in the movie and the original novel alike.
The novel elaborates, as novels can. When Billy gets a little older, he requests readings from his father— “How about the duel at the Cliffs of Insanity?” It seems like sharing the book was the way that they showed affection for one another. And as Billy grows up, he grows to love all stories to do with swordplay and derring-do. That leads him naturally to the world of film.
And only slightly less naturally, it leads to our 1973 version of William Goldman— he’s a Hollywood success who seems to have it made. But he is on the verge of forgetting his son Jason’s tenth birthday. At that crucial juncture, The Princess Bride haunts him in his father’s voice. It reminds him of honor. Of duty. Of what really matters. In light of money, fictional William Goldman may be a success. But in light of Morgenstern’s epic, the guy’s kind of a sad sack, hitting on starlets at poolsides, despising his wife, incapable of connecting with his own son. If he’s his father’s second gamble at the American Dream, then he won, but— yeesh! Such a cost!
Fortunately, this is all fictional. (Double-fortunately, Buttercup’s Baby gives Jason a future life that’s squeaky-sparkle-happy-clean; if you ask me, it rings just a bit false.) Best of all, in the 1987 movie, the vision is a great deal more optimistic all around. Grandpa in the movie is no sad sack— he’s Columbo! Billy suggests that Grandpa come back tomorrow to read the book, and Grandpa’s reply, “As you wish,” indicates the beginning of a beautiful new love language. This is a portrait of two souls connecting.
The point is, there's probably a whole essay to write about how Goldman in the novel is drawing off tropes about how immigrant parents and their children connect, or fail to connect. Probably you could get even more specific and put The Princess Bride in on the shelf of works about the Jewish experience in twentieth-century America. The first generation reaches America and tries to honor the old ways; the second generation is torn between being as American as possible and reaching for the culture that’s already almost gone. The third generation is… well, that’s a good question.
The true origin of The Princess Bride is that William Goldman’s daughters asked for a bedtime story: one requested a princess, the other one a bride. Goldman’s answer led to one of his best books.
Maybe that’s the later generation’s place in all this— every later generation. When you’ve got an education and you’re even leisured enough to study writing—what are you going to do with it? One thing you’ve got to do is make sense of your history. How the Old Country transitioned into the New Country via an Atlantic passage. How honor and True Love became flag pins and coupons. That’s some of the stuff you hand down to your kid, whether you’re a teacher, a parent, or both. An understanding of your past and your present.
Until next time, I will still be striving to make sense of the past and present. My tools include milquetoast late night comedy, a shelf of empty notebooks, a Word document where I archive pandemic memes, and the hodgepodge city of illusions known as my bookshelf. Goldman has gone on to the Great Amphitheater in the Sky, but the closing words of his frame story still resonate: “And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.”
Having literally studied The Princess Bride , I’d say I know it pretty well. But I’m only human, and sometimes I make mistakes. Once I confused the movie and the book, and babbled on about the Kid (Billy) listening to a story read by his grandfather. My eighth grade teacher gently corrected me. In the original book, Billy isn’t listening to his grandfather.
He’s with his father.
Goldman isn’t just spinning a grand old adventure yarn. I think he’s playing with a prominent trope of American literature: the immigrant experience over successive generations. Let me explain.
The writer Goldman (WG) conjures up a frame story within a frame story. In the frame story’s flashback, Goldman’s fictitious father is a first-generation immigrant from Florin. Where is Florin? Europe, somewhere. The “Old Country.”
In the Old Country, Goldman Senior was a brilliant man, but in being translated to English, to American, well, that’s a different story. The writer conjures it thus: “The facts are when he was sixteen he got a shot at coming to America, gambled on the land of opportunity and lost.” Worse than the indignity of becoming a barber, when he might have been a lawyer, is this: Goldman Sr. can barely connect with his son, the embodiment of the brighter future for which he’d come to America.
What interest grips little Billy Goldman’s heart? Sports. (In 1973, he hangs onto the radio to catch a football game; in 1987 in winter, he’s playing a baseball video game.) When his father comes to his sickbed with a ponderous volume in hand, Billy’s first question is “Has it got any sports?”
Goldman Sr. tries to sell the book with sports— “Fencing, fighting, true love, strong hate—” and Billy concedes that he’ll try to stay awake. (Many years later, in the tongue-in-cheek half-sequel called Buttercup’s Baby, WG will paint The Princess Bride as the enduring epic of Florinese literature. Like The Three Musketeers, with all the swashbuckling and honor that implies. It’s got its own museum, for goodness’ sake.) But at the moment, in 1973, there is only a battered old book and the old barber’s memory of a brilliant author.
Billy is unimpressed.
At first.
It’s not clear in the book where the magic exactly kicks in, but it does. And it endures. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Grandpa assures Billy “She does not get eaten by the eels at this time,” (it’s sharks in the book), and you noticed that the little moppet was indeed clutching his blankets in anxiety. Billy loves the book, in the movie and the original novel alike.
The novel elaborates, as novels can. When Billy gets a little older, he requests readings from his father— “How about the duel at the Cliffs of Insanity?” It seems like sharing the book was the way that they showed affection for one another. And as Billy grows up, he grows to love all stories to do with swordplay and derring-do. That leads him naturally to the world of film.
And only slightly less naturally, it leads to our 1973 version of William Goldman— he’s a Hollywood success who seems to have it made. But he is on the verge of forgetting his son Jason’s tenth birthday. At that crucial juncture, The Princess Bride haunts him in his father’s voice. It reminds him of honor. Of duty. Of what really matters. In light of money, fictional William Goldman may be a success. But in light of Morgenstern’s epic, the guy’s kind of a sad sack, hitting on starlets at poolsides, despising his wife, incapable of connecting with his own son. If he’s his father’s second gamble at the American Dream, then he won, but— yeesh! Such a cost!
Fortunately, this is all fictional. (Double-fortunately, Buttercup’s Baby gives Jason a future life that’s squeaky-sparkle-happy-clean; if you ask me, it rings just a bit false.) Best of all, in the 1987 movie, the vision is a great deal more optimistic all around. Grandpa in the movie is no sad sack— he’s Columbo! Billy suggests that Grandpa come back tomorrow to read the book, and Grandpa’s reply, “As you wish,” indicates the beginning of a beautiful new love language. This is a portrait of two souls connecting.
The point is, there's probably a whole essay to write about how Goldman in the novel is drawing off tropes about how immigrant parents and their children connect, or fail to connect. Probably you could get even more specific and put The Princess Bride in on the shelf of works about the Jewish experience in twentieth-century America. The first generation reaches America and tries to honor the old ways; the second generation is torn between being as American as possible and reaching for the culture that’s already almost gone. The third generation is… well, that’s a good question.
The true origin of The Princess Bride is that William Goldman’s daughters asked for a bedtime story: one requested a princess, the other one a bride. Goldman’s answer led to one of his best books.
Maybe that’s the later generation’s place in all this— every later generation. When you’ve got an education and you’re even leisured enough to study writing—what are you going to do with it? One thing you’ve got to do is make sense of your history. How the Old Country transitioned into the New Country via an Atlantic passage. How honor and True Love became flag pins and coupons. That’s some of the stuff you hand down to your kid, whether you’re a teacher, a parent, or both. An understanding of your past and your present.
Until next time, I will still be striving to make sense of the past and present. My tools include milquetoast late night comedy, a shelf of empty notebooks, a Word document where I archive pandemic memes, and the hodgepodge city of illusions known as my bookshelf. Goldman has gone on to the Great Amphitheater in the Sky, but the closing words of his frame story still resonate: “And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.”
August 28, 2021
A Pacifist at Troy
“Athena thought about The War. That conflict back East. That ten-year clusterduck that everyone wanted to leave behind.”
This is a sentence from the Greek mythology retelling that I’m working on. The narrator is referring to the Trojan War, only they don’t say “duck.”
In my last blog post, I reminisced none too fondly about the origins of the “War on Terror,” as launched by W. Bush. What I did not foresee was that, in August of 2021, President Biden would actually carry out the campaign promise he made—a politician? Keeping promises? What?—and withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
As the withdrawal began, and Kabul fell, I was (am) writing a book that covers the end of the Trojan War from the point of view of the gods. Me? I might as well be a god of lesser rate, sitting on Olympus, watching human suffering from afar. It’s my people that brought this about—American officials with a stupid cowboy cheerleader for their poster boy—my elected President that decided to withdraw, leaving chaos in the army’s wake.
We’re coming up on the twenty year anniversary of September 11, 2001. After that horrific day, a terrible passion overtook the US, collectively: a passion of war, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Now, not everyone was enamored of war. The Nation magazine knew, even back in 2003, the conflicts in the Middle East would only turn into a quagmire. Hell, from a linguistic point of view, it was easy to see that all this furor about Triumphing Over the Terrorists was a load of bull. “War on Terror”? Do you mean the emotion? Or do you mean the sort of violence that is, by its very nature, defiant of order and government? Wait, I get it, you want a war against an idea, rather than any particular nation, state, or splinter group. That way, the war can just keep going on and on!
God, I wish life were more like books.
In a book, if you want to prevent war, all you have to do is a little time-traveling (A Swiftly Tilting Planet) to make sure the right bloodlines get passed on! (Wait… that’s kind of icky.) Or you ensure that the Antichrist doesn’t buy into this “Our Side Will Prevail” nonsense. (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch) Best of all, in a book, the full-on horror of warfare (Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima) and its consequences (Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes) are clean and spelled out, so no one would ever invoke such a nightmare again!
Break for hysterical laughter.
I’m a pacifist because I believe that violence only causes more problems, if not now, then further down the line.
I’m a pacifist because I have read enough literature that convinces me that war is a godawful hell that accomplishes less than nothing, and that no one should have to live through.
But Catherine, you say, look around. Sometimes peace is a godawful hell that accomplishes less than nothing, and that no one should have to live through.
Well, that’s true. That’s why I stand with movements such as Black Lives Matter. In this particular case, the American government is the aggressor, forcing my black neighbors to live under a regime of terror (there’s no other word for it). It’s necessary to fight back, in service of the ideal that everyone has the right to live in peace. It’s not an easy process.
I myself don’t throw a punch, because I don’t trust myself to stop punching. And I don’t want to open the Pandora’s Box that is violence, in the personal sphere, in the sphere of a movement, in the sphere of a government. Because I am a pacifist. That’s my decision and my principle, but I’m not going to force anyone else to adhere to it.
Yeesh. Compared to the centuries of violence that have unfolded in the United States and in the Middle East, a ten-year-long siege war in Ancient Troy seems positively tidy.
In the Trojan War, every god took a side. Gods who inspired love, gods who built cities, gods who lived for laughter and inspiration, they cheered on slaughter, rape, and enslavement. Maybe that’s why the stories of Troy survived long enough for Homer to write a couple epics about it. War is such a corruption, even the gods themselves were not immune.
***
A final note: War ain’t what it used to be. To talk about the War on Terror conjures up the fervid bloodthirst of the early 00’s. Now, in fact, the prevailing emotion of the War is indifference. The American people were indifferent to the situation in Afghanistan until the withdrawal began, whereupon everyone became an expert on foreign policy… for five minutes, until the next shiny object in the news cycle took its place.
In the meantime, here I am. Writing. Writing a book about the fallout of war, about the difficulty of trying to win peace. Keeping the people of Afghanistan in my heart. Examining why I’m a pacifist. Waiting, waiting and seeing.
This is a sentence from the Greek mythology retelling that I’m working on. The narrator is referring to the Trojan War, only they don’t say “duck.”
In my last blog post, I reminisced none too fondly about the origins of the “War on Terror,” as launched by W. Bush. What I did not foresee was that, in August of 2021, President Biden would actually carry out the campaign promise he made—a politician? Keeping promises? What?—and withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
As the withdrawal began, and Kabul fell, I was (am) writing a book that covers the end of the Trojan War from the point of view of the gods. Me? I might as well be a god of lesser rate, sitting on Olympus, watching human suffering from afar. It’s my people that brought this about—American officials with a stupid cowboy cheerleader for their poster boy—my elected President that decided to withdraw, leaving chaos in the army’s wake.
We’re coming up on the twenty year anniversary of September 11, 2001. After that horrific day, a terrible passion overtook the US, collectively: a passion of war, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Now, not everyone was enamored of war. The Nation magazine knew, even back in 2003, the conflicts in the Middle East would only turn into a quagmire. Hell, from a linguistic point of view, it was easy to see that all this furor about Triumphing Over the Terrorists was a load of bull. “War on Terror”? Do you mean the emotion? Or do you mean the sort of violence that is, by its very nature, defiant of order and government? Wait, I get it, you want a war against an idea, rather than any particular nation, state, or splinter group. That way, the war can just keep going on and on!
God, I wish life were more like books.
In a book, if you want to prevent war, all you have to do is a little time-traveling (A Swiftly Tilting Planet) to make sure the right bloodlines get passed on! (Wait… that’s kind of icky.) Or you ensure that the Antichrist doesn’t buy into this “Our Side Will Prevail” nonsense. (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch) Best of all, in a book, the full-on horror of warfare (Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima) and its consequences (Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes) are clean and spelled out, so no one would ever invoke such a nightmare again!
Break for hysterical laughter.
I’m a pacifist because I believe that violence only causes more problems, if not now, then further down the line.
I’m a pacifist because I have read enough literature that convinces me that war is a godawful hell that accomplishes less than nothing, and that no one should have to live through.
But Catherine, you say, look around. Sometimes peace is a godawful hell that accomplishes less than nothing, and that no one should have to live through.
Well, that’s true. That’s why I stand with movements such as Black Lives Matter. In this particular case, the American government is the aggressor, forcing my black neighbors to live under a regime of terror (there’s no other word for it). It’s necessary to fight back, in service of the ideal that everyone has the right to live in peace. It’s not an easy process.
I myself don’t throw a punch, because I don’t trust myself to stop punching. And I don’t want to open the Pandora’s Box that is violence, in the personal sphere, in the sphere of a movement, in the sphere of a government. Because I am a pacifist. That’s my decision and my principle, but I’m not going to force anyone else to adhere to it.
Yeesh. Compared to the centuries of violence that have unfolded in the United States and in the Middle East, a ten-year-long siege war in Ancient Troy seems positively tidy.
In the Trojan War, every god took a side. Gods who inspired love, gods who built cities, gods who lived for laughter and inspiration, they cheered on slaughter, rape, and enslavement. Maybe that’s why the stories of Troy survived long enough for Homer to write a couple epics about it. War is such a corruption, even the gods themselves were not immune.
***
A final note: War ain’t what it used to be. To talk about the War on Terror conjures up the fervid bloodthirst of the early 00’s. Now, in fact, the prevailing emotion of the War is indifference. The American people were indifferent to the situation in Afghanistan until the withdrawal began, whereupon everyone became an expert on foreign policy… for five minutes, until the next shiny object in the news cycle took its place.
In the meantime, here I am. Writing. Writing a book about the fallout of war, about the difficulty of trying to win peace. Keeping the people of Afghanistan in my heart. Examining why I’m a pacifist. Waiting, waiting and seeing.
May 29, 2021
Witch is a Word for Target
Witches walk among us.
They don’t have green skin. Their broomsticks are only used for sweeping. In fact, they look like ordinary women, right up until they smile at you and utter a hideous spell. Don’t listen too closely! To understand a witch’s words might turn you into a witch, too. And this is what’s important: everyone, everyone, hates a witch.
Witches lay hexes, curses, and jinxes. Witches peddle nothing but superstition and lies. We, however, are a scientific nation. We believe in compassion for all people—but, of course, witches aren’t people! Don’t be silly.
Now…
Witches are a powerful recurring archetype in folklore around the world. In the post-modern landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers and singers have reclaimed witches, making them heroic figures: Kiki and her Delivery Service come to mind, courtesy of Eiko Kadono As opposed to passive archetypes such as the Mad Ophelia and the Maiden in a Tower, a Witch can make her own way. She flies by broomstick and taps into secret wells of knowledge.
But there are some shadows even a witch cannot shake. Particularly in the American imagination, the notion of witchcraft is forever tied with the history of the Salem Witch Trials.
In Salem, between 1692-’93, twenty-five people died. Each one was under suspicion or conviction of witchcraft. What witchcraft would be afoot in a quiet Puritan town? Does it matter? What matters is that neighbor turned on neighbor, master turned on servant—each one pointing the finger at another, desperate not to be accused themselves. The pastors and magistrates would have purity at all costs— and that necessitated a scapegoat. Hence, witches walking in Salem.
See The Witch of Blackbird Pond, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and The Crucible for examples of the legacy that Salem has left on American literature. In the case of The Crucible, Salem’s shame helped Arthur Miller comment on the insanity he saw in his own time.
But of course, this is 2021! America has moved on from the obsessions of those Puritans. Right?
There’s a modern witch I’d like to discuss, whose roots go back a hundred and twenty years. See, in the year 1900, author L. Frank Baum began mapping out a land called Oz. This magical land is divided into four countries, each ruled by a Witch. The Witches of the North and of the South are Good Witches, but the Witches of West and East are very wicked.
In 1939, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a film, wherein there is one extra-benevolent Good Witch, and one Wicked Witch (her sister is a rather flat part). For a technicolor world, MGM dressed the Witch of the West (played by the kindhearted Margaret Hamilton) in blacks, with bright green skin. She cackles, she menaces, she bullies poor Dorothy on every step of the Yellow Brick Road. When she melts into an ignominious puddle, she seals her reputation as one of the icons of film, the viridian villainess.
In 1995, Gregory Maguire published his take on Oz: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West . Ten years later, his book was adapted to Broadway by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. I’m going to stick with Wicked: the Musical, because that’s the version that I know best, although I know it’s very different from the original book. But what’s interesting about both is, Maguire, Schwartz, and Holzman bring the Witch closer to her roots than Baum ever dreamed. The Wicked Witch, or Elphaba to her friends, is an activist and idealist waging a campaign against the corrupt Wizard. She’s a victim of Oz’s propaganda machine. She’s a scapegoat.
The musical Wicked, in addition to being an actress’ showcase, a roaring spectacle, and one of my favorite shows ever, is a scathing condemnation of the Bush presidency. And let me tell you, it has lost none of its venom in the age of Trump. Oz seems to be a prosperous nation, with an emerald capital and the bastion of free speech, Shiz University. But under the surface, there are engines turning, putting pressure on talking Animals to shut up and know their place. The only human who seems to care is Elphaba, a pariah herself on account of her green skin and uncanny magic.
Elphaba hopes that the Wizard will fix things, once he just knows of the situation. But it turns out, the Wizard is a normal fella with a flair for showbiz and a taste for power. He blithely tells Elphaba, by way of advice, that “If you want to unite people, give them a good enemy.”
And this is hardly the stuff of fantasy. When Wicked the musical was in previews, George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term of the Presidency. Bush’s whole image was— and is— painted to make him seem harmless, a cowboy dope with an aw-shucks smile. Meanwhile, his administration started dubious wars and pushed an agenda of Islamophobia in order to sell those wars. The right-wing media depicted Muslim- and Arab-Americans as terrorists in waiting, just waiting to take advantage of liberal tolerance and weakness. Remember “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”? Remember the discourse about flag pins? Can anyone really be loyal enough to the flag?
In a national state like that, of course it takes a witch to speak the truth and call out the powerful. And many were the artists and activists who did. I know the Bush years were the beginning of my activist education. That’s something to be proud of.
But those witches…
What does this mean for the year 2021? When I look around my social media circles— which, politically, lean to the left, sometimes far to the left— I see a certain worrying strain. I see people who view compromise as an evil in itself. And sure, as the American right wing becomes steadily more unhinged and racist, there are wrong places to compromise. But I mean about cooperation between those far to the left and those closer to the center— and all strata in between. I see people taking a subtle difference of priorities, and blowing it into all-out war. I see the phrase, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” now sunken into the very bedrock of public discourse.
Unfortunately, there’s another line from Wicked that well sums up this current moment: “There are precious few at ease/ With moral ambiguities /so we act as though they don’t exist!”
One of the problems is, it’s becoming easier and easier to discount the humanity of those you disagree with, because after all, they’re just a name and an avatar on a screen. Another problem is that online, people tend to group up with like-minded fellows, and create little echo chambers— rest stops, if you will, along the Information Superhighway. That can be purely done by humans, or algorithms can hustle the process along. Within those echo chambers, the loudest voice tends to dominate, and pretty soon, extremism prevails. Then, nuance becomes too dangerous to entertain. Then, a minor difference of opinion becomes cause for excommunication, and where had been ordinary strangers, there lurk witches on the horizon.
And where there’s a witch, there must be a pyre ready. Citizens must loudly denounce the witch, frequently. You can find whole communities that have never seen so much as a pointy hat in years, all feverishly listing out the harm they would do unto witches if ever they met one. But it’s all just venting, they assure any horrified viewer. ‘Tisn’t serious. Anyway, it’s nothing compared to the harm witches do with their spells. That’s why witches must be destroyed.
This is all a metaphor, I’m sure you’ve gathered. The fact of it is, witches are experiencing a bit of a moment. Books such as The Good Witch’s Guide and Basic Witches: How to Summon Success, Banish Drama, and Raise Hell with Your Coven present witchcraft with a hipster-friendly vibe. Settle your spell ingredients in a mason jar. Coordinate your pentacles with your outfit. I’m afraid it might be more of a fashion aesthetic than a calling to a nature-based spiritual practice, and speaking truth to power, but, oh well.
But my point remains. The Internet’s culture rewards extremism. Where there’s an in-group with strict rules and regulations, there must be an out-group. There must be someone to be made an example of— to demonstrate to the in-group that no one mourns the wicked.
Everyone hates a witch. All it takes is one voice to call out the sinner, and the entire community will cast the witch out. No second chances. Everyone must plug their ears against the witch’s calumnies.
A witch can be many things. But when some mob urges you to read the word “witch” as “enemy,” without exception and without mercy, I suggest that you be cautious, and not only because the mob that hunts a witch will eagerly seek a new target. There’s an insidious power in determining who can speak, and who must be silenced. Be careful whenever someone urges you to disregard nuance in favor of simplistic, black and white stories. Trust in what you know, but keep your ears open. Don’t be cowed by the threats issued by some twopenny Wizard. And don’t be afraid of the label of “witch.”
They don’t have green skin. Their broomsticks are only used for sweeping. In fact, they look like ordinary women, right up until they smile at you and utter a hideous spell. Don’t listen too closely! To understand a witch’s words might turn you into a witch, too. And this is what’s important: everyone, everyone, hates a witch.
Witches lay hexes, curses, and jinxes. Witches peddle nothing but superstition and lies. We, however, are a scientific nation. We believe in compassion for all people—but, of course, witches aren’t people! Don’t be silly.
Now…
Witches are a powerful recurring archetype in folklore around the world. In the post-modern landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers and singers have reclaimed witches, making them heroic figures: Kiki and her Delivery Service come to mind, courtesy of Eiko Kadono As opposed to passive archetypes such as the Mad Ophelia and the Maiden in a Tower, a Witch can make her own way. She flies by broomstick and taps into secret wells of knowledge.
But there are some shadows even a witch cannot shake. Particularly in the American imagination, the notion of witchcraft is forever tied with the history of the Salem Witch Trials.
In Salem, between 1692-’93, twenty-five people died. Each one was under suspicion or conviction of witchcraft. What witchcraft would be afoot in a quiet Puritan town? Does it matter? What matters is that neighbor turned on neighbor, master turned on servant—each one pointing the finger at another, desperate not to be accused themselves. The pastors and magistrates would have purity at all costs— and that necessitated a scapegoat. Hence, witches walking in Salem.
See The Witch of Blackbird Pond, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and The Crucible for examples of the legacy that Salem has left on American literature. In the case of The Crucible, Salem’s shame helped Arthur Miller comment on the insanity he saw in his own time.
But of course, this is 2021! America has moved on from the obsessions of those Puritans. Right?
There’s a modern witch I’d like to discuss, whose roots go back a hundred and twenty years. See, in the year 1900, author L. Frank Baum began mapping out a land called Oz. This magical land is divided into four countries, each ruled by a Witch. The Witches of the North and of the South are Good Witches, but the Witches of West and East are very wicked.
In 1939, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a film, wherein there is one extra-benevolent Good Witch, and one Wicked Witch (her sister is a rather flat part). For a technicolor world, MGM dressed the Witch of the West (played by the kindhearted Margaret Hamilton) in blacks, with bright green skin. She cackles, she menaces, she bullies poor Dorothy on every step of the Yellow Brick Road. When she melts into an ignominious puddle, she seals her reputation as one of the icons of film, the viridian villainess.
In 1995, Gregory Maguire published his take on Oz: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West . Ten years later, his book was adapted to Broadway by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. I’m going to stick with Wicked: the Musical, because that’s the version that I know best, although I know it’s very different from the original book. But what’s interesting about both is, Maguire, Schwartz, and Holzman bring the Witch closer to her roots than Baum ever dreamed. The Wicked Witch, or Elphaba to her friends, is an activist and idealist waging a campaign against the corrupt Wizard. She’s a victim of Oz’s propaganda machine. She’s a scapegoat.
The musical Wicked, in addition to being an actress’ showcase, a roaring spectacle, and one of my favorite shows ever, is a scathing condemnation of the Bush presidency. And let me tell you, it has lost none of its venom in the age of Trump. Oz seems to be a prosperous nation, with an emerald capital and the bastion of free speech, Shiz University. But under the surface, there are engines turning, putting pressure on talking Animals to shut up and know their place. The only human who seems to care is Elphaba, a pariah herself on account of her green skin and uncanny magic.
Elphaba hopes that the Wizard will fix things, once he just knows of the situation. But it turns out, the Wizard is a normal fella with a flair for showbiz and a taste for power. He blithely tells Elphaba, by way of advice, that “If you want to unite people, give them a good enemy.”
And this is hardly the stuff of fantasy. When Wicked the musical was in previews, George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term of the Presidency. Bush’s whole image was— and is— painted to make him seem harmless, a cowboy dope with an aw-shucks smile. Meanwhile, his administration started dubious wars and pushed an agenda of Islamophobia in order to sell those wars. The right-wing media depicted Muslim- and Arab-Americans as terrorists in waiting, just waiting to take advantage of liberal tolerance and weakness. Remember “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”? Remember the discourse about flag pins? Can anyone really be loyal enough to the flag?
In a national state like that, of course it takes a witch to speak the truth and call out the powerful. And many were the artists and activists who did. I know the Bush years were the beginning of my activist education. That’s something to be proud of.
But those witches…
What does this mean for the year 2021? When I look around my social media circles— which, politically, lean to the left, sometimes far to the left— I see a certain worrying strain. I see people who view compromise as an evil in itself. And sure, as the American right wing becomes steadily more unhinged and racist, there are wrong places to compromise. But I mean about cooperation between those far to the left and those closer to the center— and all strata in between. I see people taking a subtle difference of priorities, and blowing it into all-out war. I see the phrase, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” now sunken into the very bedrock of public discourse.
Unfortunately, there’s another line from Wicked that well sums up this current moment: “There are precious few at ease/ With moral ambiguities /so we act as though they don’t exist!”
One of the problems is, it’s becoming easier and easier to discount the humanity of those you disagree with, because after all, they’re just a name and an avatar on a screen. Another problem is that online, people tend to group up with like-minded fellows, and create little echo chambers— rest stops, if you will, along the Information Superhighway. That can be purely done by humans, or algorithms can hustle the process along. Within those echo chambers, the loudest voice tends to dominate, and pretty soon, extremism prevails. Then, nuance becomes too dangerous to entertain. Then, a minor difference of opinion becomes cause for excommunication, and where had been ordinary strangers, there lurk witches on the horizon.
And where there’s a witch, there must be a pyre ready. Citizens must loudly denounce the witch, frequently. You can find whole communities that have never seen so much as a pointy hat in years, all feverishly listing out the harm they would do unto witches if ever they met one. But it’s all just venting, they assure any horrified viewer. ‘Tisn’t serious. Anyway, it’s nothing compared to the harm witches do with their spells. That’s why witches must be destroyed.
This is all a metaphor, I’m sure you’ve gathered. The fact of it is, witches are experiencing a bit of a moment. Books such as The Good Witch’s Guide and Basic Witches: How to Summon Success, Banish Drama, and Raise Hell with Your Coven present witchcraft with a hipster-friendly vibe. Settle your spell ingredients in a mason jar. Coordinate your pentacles with your outfit. I’m afraid it might be more of a fashion aesthetic than a calling to a nature-based spiritual practice, and speaking truth to power, but, oh well.
But my point remains. The Internet’s culture rewards extremism. Where there’s an in-group with strict rules and regulations, there must be an out-group. There must be someone to be made an example of— to demonstrate to the in-group that no one mourns the wicked.
Everyone hates a witch. All it takes is one voice to call out the sinner, and the entire community will cast the witch out. No second chances. Everyone must plug their ears against the witch’s calumnies.
A witch can be many things. But when some mob urges you to read the word “witch” as “enemy,” without exception and without mercy, I suggest that you be cautious, and not only because the mob that hunts a witch will eagerly seek a new target. There’s an insidious power in determining who can speak, and who must be silenced. Be careful whenever someone urges you to disregard nuance in favor of simplistic, black and white stories. Trust in what you know, but keep your ears open. Don’t be cowed by the threats issued by some twopenny Wizard. And don’t be afraid of the label of “witch.”
April 27, 2021
Sound & Silence in the COVID Age
As I start this blog post, I can hear the whirr and thump of the dishwasher. I can hear my dogs snoring beneath my chair. I can hear air traffic overhead. It’s a quiet day.
And yet for all that, can I even hear my own thoughts?
This blog has been really silent lately. Trust me, Gentle Reader, I regret that fact very much. It’s certainly not that I haven’t been reading-- my To-Read list is actually down from 52 to 15 (thank you, Los Angeles Public Library!). There’s plenty of topics in the news and culture that I could weigh in on. But maybe there’s the rub. I feel somewhat compelled to only pick words that can meet this moment. Only Utterances of True Genius will suffice.
So what do I say?
I repeat comforting platitudes. My Facebook posts burst with bland, banal cheer, or else memories of happier days. I message friends-- I feel like I could turn into a parrot, with how often I type “Thinking about you! Hope you’re okay! Squawk! Heart emoji!” (More or less.) I’m sending out query letters regularly-- that’s a worthy use of my voice, to be sure.
And what am I not saying?
I don’t share a lot of political opinions-- I don’t want to start a fight I cannot win. (That is, if I win a fight but lose a friend, I haven’t won at all.) I don’t talk about my pervasive terror of climate change. There are whole reams of feelings that I keep hidden, even from myself if at all possible.
And there are friends of mine who have suffered devastating losses-- whose houses ring with silence. I want to help them, desperately, but what can I possibly say?
In the age of COVID, I feel like my words are never enough. And as a writer, that’s a painful spot to find oneself in.
When historians look back on 2020 and later years, they may well define this era by silence and sound. There is the reprehensible silence of the previous administration, which refused to acknowledge the danger of the coronavirus until it was too late, and refused to adopt a unified, federal response. There was no mourning for the thousands upon thousands of deaths-- a deafening lack.
But there are other kinds of silence. There is the silence of listening to all sides, and of deep consideration. I think the new administration does a better job in that regard. A bully can easily slam their fist and force their opinion through, but it takes maturity to really listen. Americans aren’t typically famous for listening, but hey, this is an unprecedented era.
I also wonder if future historians will see the chatter of our moment as some kind psychological tell. The Disney megacorporation never allows their streaming service to rest quiet. As soon as the Mandalorian wrapped up, it was on to Wandavision, and then breathlessly on to Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Next, next, next! We must have chatter on, always, (Bridgerton! Snyder Cut! Tiger King!) and it must be entertaining but never really shake up what we know. If we like it, we’ll watch it again and again. Anything to drive out the silence where our economy and our friends used to be.
But maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe that sound n’fury is what the Information Age was always destined to become. Or perhaps this is all a flash in the pan, and this is the most homogenized our culture will get. Only future historians will know.
Very likely they’ll be confused, too.
In honor of the notion of silence and sound, I’ve been reflecting on a couple of books which may interest you, Gentle Reader (I admit, I’m not immune to Bridgerton’s charms).
I recently reread Speak: The Graphic Novel, a faithful adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson’s classic, illustrated by Emily Carroll, whose art takes an already-powerful story to a new level. It tells the story of Melinda, a freshman girl hated by her peers because she busted the end-of-summer party-- but why, exactly, no one cares to know. Even Melinda would rather not know. The book is about isolation, finding one’s voice after suffering the unspeakable-- also about growth, scarring, and art.
A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi is, on its surface, about the culture clash between American and Pakistan, seen through the eyes of two ten year old girls: Mimi, an American visiting her grandparents in Karachi for the first time, and Sakina, who works in Mimi’s grandparents’ kitchen. But it’s also about discovery and friendship, about T-shirts with hokey jokes on them, about trying new food and dreaming big-- and the limits of dreams. And, of course, questions.
Even though this blog post is silent except for the clacking of keys (and, earlier, the swoosh of a ballpoint pen), I’d like to say, thank you for listening. I’ll try to get better at saying what’s on my mind and in my heart— and I hope you, Gentle Reader, will take good care of yourself until we meet again.
Stay safe!
And yet for all that, can I even hear my own thoughts?
This blog has been really silent lately. Trust me, Gentle Reader, I regret that fact very much. It’s certainly not that I haven’t been reading-- my To-Read list is actually down from 52 to 15 (thank you, Los Angeles Public Library!). There’s plenty of topics in the news and culture that I could weigh in on. But maybe there’s the rub. I feel somewhat compelled to only pick words that can meet this moment. Only Utterances of True Genius will suffice.
So what do I say?
I repeat comforting platitudes. My Facebook posts burst with bland, banal cheer, or else memories of happier days. I message friends-- I feel like I could turn into a parrot, with how often I type “Thinking about you! Hope you’re okay! Squawk! Heart emoji!” (More or less.) I’m sending out query letters regularly-- that’s a worthy use of my voice, to be sure.
And what am I not saying?
I don’t share a lot of political opinions-- I don’t want to start a fight I cannot win. (That is, if I win a fight but lose a friend, I haven’t won at all.) I don’t talk about my pervasive terror of climate change. There are whole reams of feelings that I keep hidden, even from myself if at all possible.
And there are friends of mine who have suffered devastating losses-- whose houses ring with silence. I want to help them, desperately, but what can I possibly say?
In the age of COVID, I feel like my words are never enough. And as a writer, that’s a painful spot to find oneself in.
When historians look back on 2020 and later years, they may well define this era by silence and sound. There is the reprehensible silence of the previous administration, which refused to acknowledge the danger of the coronavirus until it was too late, and refused to adopt a unified, federal response. There was no mourning for the thousands upon thousands of deaths-- a deafening lack.
But there are other kinds of silence. There is the silence of listening to all sides, and of deep consideration. I think the new administration does a better job in that regard. A bully can easily slam their fist and force their opinion through, but it takes maturity to really listen. Americans aren’t typically famous for listening, but hey, this is an unprecedented era.
I also wonder if future historians will see the chatter of our moment as some kind psychological tell. The Disney megacorporation never allows their streaming service to rest quiet. As soon as the Mandalorian wrapped up, it was on to Wandavision, and then breathlessly on to Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Next, next, next! We must have chatter on, always, (Bridgerton! Snyder Cut! Tiger King!) and it must be entertaining but never really shake up what we know. If we like it, we’ll watch it again and again. Anything to drive out the silence where our economy and our friends used to be.
But maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe that sound n’fury is what the Information Age was always destined to become. Or perhaps this is all a flash in the pan, and this is the most homogenized our culture will get. Only future historians will know.
Very likely they’ll be confused, too.
In honor of the notion of silence and sound, I’ve been reflecting on a couple of books which may interest you, Gentle Reader (I admit, I’m not immune to Bridgerton’s charms).
I recently reread Speak: The Graphic Novel, a faithful adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson’s classic, illustrated by Emily Carroll, whose art takes an already-powerful story to a new level. It tells the story of Melinda, a freshman girl hated by her peers because she busted the end-of-summer party-- but why, exactly, no one cares to know. Even Melinda would rather not know. The book is about isolation, finding one’s voice after suffering the unspeakable-- also about growth, scarring, and art.
A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi is, on its surface, about the culture clash between American and Pakistan, seen through the eyes of two ten year old girls: Mimi, an American visiting her grandparents in Karachi for the first time, and Sakina, who works in Mimi’s grandparents’ kitchen. But it’s also about discovery and friendship, about T-shirts with hokey jokes on them, about trying new food and dreaming big-- and the limits of dreams. And, of course, questions.
Even though this blog post is silent except for the clacking of keys (and, earlier, the swoosh of a ballpoint pen), I’d like to say, thank you for listening. I’ll try to get better at saying what’s on my mind and in my heart— and I hope you, Gentle Reader, will take good care of yourself until we meet again.
Stay safe!
