A Slow Afternoon with Wordplay

Q. Wordplay, remember when you used to be fun? You wrote all kinds of silly stuff about little things that happened to you at home, what you were thinking about, dragonflies, colors of the day, etc. It wasn’t all this Dark Academia falderol.

A. Yes, well,  I’m trying to develop a niche here in one little corner of pop culture, if that’s OK with you.

Q. Don’t you even have any comments on larger issues in the culture? With so many serious things going on—

A. You’re quite right. There are a lot of serious things going on and plenty of people available to comment on them. Right now I prefer seeing facts unfold. A bunch of people’s opinions are well and good, but what we need most are facts.

Q. I used to love those little personal anecdotes you shared.

A. OK. Well, I got some grease on a pair of pants the other night while cooking dinner. It didn’t come out even when I dabbed it with detergent. Then I remembered that I once got a similar stain out with lemon juice and salt. Just let it sit overnight, then wash. Voila!

Q. You’re kidding me, right?

A. Pas du tout. Don’t you remember—I once wrote an entire blog post on how to get a stain out of an upholstered chair. That’s a fact. Things were slow in my life then. Another fact is, if you want to deep clean your bathroom, put bleach solution in a spray bottle, spray your shower walls and the inside of your shower liner, turn on the hot shower, close the door, and let the bathroom get really steamy. After a few minutes, you can turn the water off, but keep the door closed for a good long while. I always remove towels and other items before doing this so that they don’t get bleached. I think I read this tip in Real Simple years ago; I just wanna tell you, it works. I got rid of mildew on my bathroom ceiling one time by doing this.

Q. Now you’re being useless. I never thought I’d say this, but even Dark Academia is better than this.

A. OK, well, I just read a novel by Alex Michaelides called The Maidens. It’s set at Cambridge University and involves a series of murders among a group of female students, acolytes of a classics professor who seems to wield undue influence over them. There are atmospheric descriptions of the campus! References to Demeter and Persephone! Quotes from Euripides! One thing I got out of it is to never go to a therapist who is unable to pick up on vibes such as her late husband having been bonking her niece right under her nose for years before he died. Also that her niece has homicidal feelings toward her. Just slipped past her radar somehow. I get it that therapists are just people, but that’s a hell of a blind spot.

Q. That’s depressing.

A. Yes, well. How about some dessert tips then? If you want to make a really delicious dessert that’s kind of like tiramisu but really, really easy, make some vanilla pudding, then mix it with several cups of sweetened whipped cream. Put a layer of graham crackers on the bottom of your pan, then layer it with the filling mixture and repeat, ending with graham crackers on top. Make a simple chocolate ganache to spread over everything. You could sprinkle some espresso on the layers if you want to make it more like tiramisu. C’est delicieux! Not an every night dessert, but great for an occasional treat.

Q. OK, but I could have gotten that from the Internet.

A. I know, but you didn’t, did you?

Q. I can’t stand you when you’re in this kind of a mood.

A. Moi, je l’adore. Mais oui, on est nul.

Q. You’ve been watching Emily in Paris again, haven’t you? What does “on est nul” mean?

A. I think it’s kind of like “f**k my life.”

Q. Gotcha.

The Gods, They Are Not Like Us

This week, I finished reading Madeline Miller’s novel, Circe (2018). As you can probably tell from the title, this is the story from Greek mythology of the renowned witch whose island is visited by Odysseus and his men when they are on the way back to Ithaca; she transforms the men into pigs but later turns them back into men for love of Odysseus. The episode of Circe’s island is but one incident among many in Odysseus’s journey, but in this novel, the story is told from Circe’s point of view and encompasses hundreds of years of her life, beginning in the court of her father, the sun god Helios.

Circe’s mother is a naiad, and all of her children with Helios turn out to be witches. In the novel, they are distrusted more than any other immortal save Prometheus for their powers, which threaten the gods because they stem from the earth, and in particular from pharmaka, magical plants. Never a favorite at her father’s court, Circe is eventually banished, for various transgressions, to the island of Aiaia, where she is marooned as a permanent exile. What’s meant as a punishment turns out to be the making of Circe as a witch; she begins to learn the ways of the island and develop her skills using native plants, while also befriending the animals who are for a time her only companions. She is later summoned to tend her sister Pasiphae as she gives birth to the Minotaur (a feat worthy of an entire team of witches). While at Knossos, Circe meets both her niece Ariadne and the famous Daedalus, the craftsman who, at the command of King Minos, builds the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur.

From all of this, you can see that Circe’s story overlaps with that of the characters central to the legend of the labyrinth. Ms. Miller takes a character peripheral to that story and lets us see Ariadne, Theseus, Minos, Pasiphae, Daedalus, and the rest from the point of view of someone who is immortal but almost human in her outlook. In my book, I explored the characters for their symbolic and psychological significance, but Ms. Miller turns them into flesh-and-blood characters—even the ones who are actually immortals. Pasiphae, for one, is thoroughly unlikeable but gives an admirably clear-eyed and unvarnished assessment of what life is like for a minor goddess in the court of a powerful father, something not even Circe is fully capable of acknowledging.

Ms. Miller manages the difficult task of “fleshing out” gods and goddesses, major and minor, and the legendary heroes and humans they interact with, giving them distinctive personalities and motivations. The inexplicable whims of the gods become understandable when she reveals them to be a mostly selfish lot of bored and egotistical goons with nothing but time on their hands. They’re either fatuous or vicious, or both. No wonder they thrive on flattery, pleasure, gossip, novelty, and the exercise of power—they’re a bit like the Ewings of Dallas or the Carringtons from Dynasty (for all you Boomers who don’t mind references to ’80s TV shows)—minus any of their redeeming qualities. They’re glorious and awe-inspiring, wonderful to look at; all hat and no cattle, if you will (though they have cattle, too, as it turns out—it’s character they lack). If you’ve ever felt sorry for the humans in the Greek stories fated to live under the thumb of the immortals who use them as pawns until the day they die and have to spend eternity in that gray and dismal spot, the Underworld: think again. This novel turns the entire matrix on its head and makes you consider whether being human is really so bad after all.

“Dreaming the myth forward” is a concept often spoken of at Pacifica, which is of course where I studied mythology. This novel is an excellent example of that, as the author creates a story that in many ways is quite faithful to the source material while putting a fresh interpretation on it. Circe, as a witch, is usually lumped in with all the other villainous gods, demigods, and monsters Odysseus must hazard on his way back home from the war. But in Ms. Miller’s conception, they meet almost as equals, having a believable if tragic relationship. When you see the situation from Circe’s point of view, turning men into pigs is an act of self-defense, perfectly understandable when you realize it is they who are abusing her. Odysseus is very much the flawed hero here, a strong man with some depth of character who is nevertheless brutal when dealing with others and out of his depth when he does return to Ithaca.

Circe is one of best retellings of classical mythology I have read. In some ways the novel might be characterized as a feminist retelling, with its emphasis on Circe’s Prospero-like claiming of her own power and agency, but the author gives a balanced view of the foibles of both gods and goddesses. Circe is in many ways a sympathetic character but remains a goddess until the end, and the twists and turns of her own fate make for a narrative every bit as compelling as that of Odysseus, if not more so.

How the Apocalypse Cured My Social Anxiety

A Short Story from the “Wormhole Series”

Before the end of the world, I lived in a really small town high up in the mountains of North Carolina. It was so small, you’ve never heard of it. Not much there except for an inn, a gift shop, a couple of restaurants, and a church. Most outsiders who came to our town came because they wanted a mountain vacation, but I grew up surrounded by mountains and felt hemmed in by them. I wanted with all my soul to see what lay beyond the mountains, out there in the real world, and eventually I got my wish, though it wasn’t anything like I expected it to be, not by a long shot.

I was the only boy in a household of women once my grandpa passed on. My mama, granny, and aunts raised me, and all my cousins were girls. Before my grandpa passed away, he lamented loudly and often that the women of the family were fixing to sissify me—but I never saw it that way. Aside from the undefined shame I felt because he apparently thought I was missing some vital piece of manhood (which he never offered to give me himself), I was not aware of anything unusual in the arrangement. I never felt that my family doted on me, as you might expect they would; they merely treated me with an absent-minded, mostly benign tolerance, not seeming to know what to do with me other than leaving me to scramble up the best I could. I spend all my early years feeling that I had missed out on developments that were crucial to becoming a man. I was horribly shy and did not know how to turn to any of the men in our town who might have been willing to share what they knew of being a man. If I had, I’m not sure they would have been willing to help—the faint hostility I sensed told me I’d been written off as a lost cause.

You may be wondering where my father was in all this, and all I can say is that I never knew him. He took off to start a new life, running off with Preacher Sizemore’s daughter when I was just a baby. He was always spoken of in dismissive terms, as if the fact of his absconding was no particular cause for regret, but I had the sense I understood something of what motivated him. I, too, longed to make a break for the freedom I imagined down in the flatlands. I wanted to see cities and coastlines and maybe even foreign countries. I was a dreamy boy, they said, always with my nose in a book. It was the books that gave me those ideas, but no one seemed really worried about it. They must have known there wasn’t much to keep a young man in such an isolated place. Or maybe, what it really it was, they doubted I had the wherewithal to break free to begin with, rendering the whole thing moot. My lack of confidence in my own abilities was so profound that it almost amounted to a disability. I saw a program on HBO the other night in which a  character kept talking about her anxiety disorder. Yep, that was me all right. Never knew there was a name for it, so that was good to find out, though it doesn’t matter that much anymore.

When I was 15, someone from outside the family finally did notice me, and that was Deacon Pilbro, an elder in our church. Despite the fact of my father’s running off with the Sizemore girl, two of my aunts still attended the church regularly, Sundays and Wednesdays both, usually insisting on taking me with them. The church was a half mile walk from our house, up a steep hill and through some trees. Deacon Pilbro at some point began asking me to stay behind to help with chores—chopping wood for the stove, shoveling snow in winter, and doing repairs to the roof. My aunts resented these occasions because they relied on me to escort them home, but because it was doing the Lord’s work, they felt unable to complain. The Deacon used to ask me questions about school and home while we worked and seemed genuinely interested, though he mostly talked about himself and how he never would have imagined being stuck in such a small parish, but when the Lord called you, you answered, until such time when you could go in for a better opportunity. He used the word “opportunity” a lot, and seemed struck by the idea that he was destined for better things. But when he asked about my plans, I just shrugged. I was shy about sharing my dreams with people—I had to keep something to myself just to make it day to day. If you had told me back then that those dreams wouldn’t come true, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have just hurled myself off the mountain.

The real trouble started (not the really bad trouble but my personal trouble, which ended up seeming like the same thing) when the Shrumfelds moved to the little house behind the Brookside Inn so that her parents could help run the place. Carlie Shrumfeld was my age and ended up in several of my classes at school. She came from New Bern, a place of unimaginable sophistication to me, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with her clear blue eyes and long silky hair. We started spending time together after school, and although I was mostly content just to be with her and listen to her talk, watching the light in her eyes and admiring her graceful ways, she was well ahead of me in the courting and sparking department and soon let me know that she was willing to share what she knew with me. We had started finding places to be alone, and the most private place we had found was the little shed behind the graveyard where we kept the mowers and the shovels for yard work at the church. Carlie and I had already gone far enough for me to know this was something I wanted to do every chance we got, and on that spring afternoon when we finally went all the way, not once, but three times, we were found out by none other than Deacon Pilbro, who pushed open the door to find the two of us tangled in a heap on top of some coal sacks.

Carlie screamed and scrambled for her clothes, holding them against her as she jumped up and ran, without ceremony, out the door. The Deacon just stood there staring at me, so red in the face that I thought he might have a heart attack right where he stood. All I could think to do was to cover myself, because otherwise I was frozen. I could no more have thought of anything to say than if I had been struck mute, so shocked I was to see him. After staring at me angrily for several long seconds, the Deacon did something I was not expecting: he started taking off his own belt and began yelling, somewhat incoherently, about sin and absolution, and at that moment, I found my limbs again, scrambling to my feet and pulling up my pants as I hopped toward the door. The Deacon tried to catch me, but I was a good runner, and I got away, shooting off through the woods any old way, my only thought to put as much distance as I could between myself and the wild man the Deacon had suddenly turned into. I could hear him crying and shouting for me to come back, yelling that he meant no harm, but I kept going, my feet barely seeming to touch the ground until I was at the top of the mountain. I paused in the little clearing where my grandfather’s grave was nestled along with the graves of several other deceased Jaspers who had been unwilling to be buried next to the church.

It was when I paused in the clearing to catch my breath that I saw it: the cloud that would change everything. It had exploded in the north, far off beyond the ranges of the mountains, which seemed to go on forever, except that there was now something beyond them all right, this enormous mushroom cloud, billowing with fire and ash and reminding me of the throne scene in The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on the Inn’s television as a special Easter treat several times when I was small. But I knew this was not a thing of childhood imagining—this was the end of the world. Somewhere far off, a bomb had fallen. Even as I watched the specter climb higher and higher into the sky, three similar clouds blossomed to the north and west of me.

I stood and stared. Where could I run to get away from such a calamity? It would reach us in the mountains, too, and we would all be poisoned, sooner or later. I was trying to decide if I should run back to our house and warn everyone when two more clouds appeared, and then two more, and a sound like the explosion of a volcano reached my ears. Everyone would have heard it by now. Doubtless, it was already on the TV news at the Inn. I could go back down and wait for the end with my family, a terrible certainty coming over me that it would not be a long wait. I had half-turned to go back down the mountain when I suddenly noticed a door, standing between two tall elms at one end of the cemetery plot. While I was trying to process what I was seeing, the door, which was of plain oak with a brass knob, opened from the other side, and I saw two strangers, a man and a woman, beckoning to me. Without speaking any words aloud, they conveyed to me that there was nothing I could do, that the forest would be incinerated within a minute but that there was an escape if I wanted it. We will not harm you, they said. We are here to help, but you must decide. You will be dead as will everyone on this mountain before you even go 30 paces.

Like a sleepwalker, I stumbled through the doorway, which looked as if it led only to the forest behind it until I stepped though it and found myself at the bottom of a silver staircase with the vastness of space all around me. The door shut behind us, and I had left the world completely behind. All around us was a silence broken only by a faint crystalline sound of bells. A shooting star streaked by as we climbed the staircase, through a blue-black vastness studded with stars. Up above, perhaps a mile distant, was the moon. The serenity of the scene could not have been in greater contrast to the calamity we had left behind. The staircase was broad and zigzagged gently on its way up. When we reached the top, we were standing on a tiny platform in front of a small brick building. Through the windows, I could see what looked like an office. When we stepped inside, the staircase dissolved behind us, and I found myself in a smallish room with an office desk, a filing cabinet, and a water dispenser, along with a small sink, a mini refrigerator, and a microwave oven. There was a clock with black numbers on the wall. Inside the door to my left was a small washroom. A short staircase—an ordinary one, not made of starlight—led up into the moon itself.

The man and woman were very kind, fully understanding how bewildered I was. They sat down with me at the desk and explained that they were not actually humans, although that was the form they had taken. They said they had seen the disaster unfolding from afar and had tried to save anyone who happened to be near what they called “portals.” My family’s private plot happened to have an open portal while I was standing in it, although they also told me that sometimes things happened like that for a reason. They said I would not be the only survivor, although the chances of my seeing anyone I knew ever again were unknown and not to be counted upon. They said that there were ways of mitigating the disaster, and that they would do what they could to stop it from spreading any further than North America. I would be able to go back one day, they said, if they were successful in their efforts. In the meantime, I should wait here, where there was an endless supply of food and refreshments, a comfortable bed, board games, a stereo system, a flat screen TV, a fitness room, a music studio, hot showers, and a back porch with a view of the Milky Way.

They made it clear that it was up to me whether to stay or go. I could go back to Earth at any time, though they did not recommend it due to extremely unstable conditions that would likely last for quite a while.

“We will come to visit you,” they said. “There are others of our kind, and you’ll probably meet them, too. Eventually, we hope to reestablish some form of stability on the Earth, but you must be patient. You are safe here, if you decide to wait, which we strongly suggest that you do. Any questions?”

It was strange how calmly my mind accepted what they were saying. I wondered what they really looked like but decided that I’d rather not know as that was altogether too much to chew on just then (later, it began to seem like the least important thing about them). I wondered if they were space aliens, or angels, or creatures from myth, and although they never actually cleared this point up for me, I eventually decided that the precise truth, if any, was another distinction that had no meaning.

They showed me into the moon itself, which they gave me to understand was just a simulation moon, built with all the comforts of a small house: a bedroom, a balcony with a view, and what they called an en-suite bathroom with a rainfall shower head and a sunken tub. I had never seen anything like it, even at the Inn, which was my previous gauge for fancy living. After we had talked for a couple of hours more, with their constant reassurances and quiet explanations that they were prepared to deal with just such a situation as was now taking place, and that they had long been concerned it would happen, they asked if I was tired and would like to sleep. I was about as bone-weary as I had ever been, and when they left me, with promises of seeing me again soon, I sank back on the bed, which was the softest I had ever slept in, almost like sleeping on a cloud. The soft lights dimmed even further, to a pale white that made the violet and blue of the wall coverings and bedding glow like twilight over the western mountains.

I wondered if I would ever see that sight again; the thought that I would not was overwhelming. When I thought back over the day, it seemed incredible that the first time I’d ever had sex coincided with the end of the world. It would have seemed almost funny except for the thought that I had no idea where Carlie was or if she had even survived. The space people had told me before they left that there were likely few survivors in our part of the country but not to give up hope entirely. They also reassured me that my having had sex was in no way connected to the calamity itself, even though they knew it might seem that way to me. “Unfortunate timing,” is how they described it.

So I settled into what was now my new home, with a view of the universe outside the large picture window in my bedroom. I wondered why I had been spared. Although there was never really an answer to that question, all of the space people who visited from time to time seemed to hint that despite the terrible thing that had happened, there was always an underlying order and a reason for things. It was their assurance of this that helped give me a reason to go on: I wanted to see what would happen next and how I might fit into the future that was unfolding. I had wanted to see the wider world, and now I had found the universe was vaster than I had ever realized.

Whenever I opened my refrigerator, there was always a new store of food that replenished itself by some means unknown to me. I could make things on the cooktop, since I had a whole pantry of raw ingredients, or I could take ready-made dishes out of the fridge and put them in the microwave; they were always delicious. I could make hot chocolate or coffee, which I’d always drunk at home. There was a screen behind the sunken tub that changed scenes periodically, sometimes looking like a misty forest, sometimes like a pool on the edge of a cliff with an awesome view of the ocean, sometimes like a nook at the base of a waterfall. It had sound effects, too: the singing of tropical birds and the splash of cascading water, or sometimes the sound of rain dripping off leaves. 

After a couple of days, the streaming service began to work on the stereo system. I never had to change the station, because it always seemed to anticipate what I might like to hear next. There was no news at all from Earth, an omission the space people said was for the best, but I could get Netflix, VUDU, Redbox, and Amazon Prime as well as TCM. They were all re-runs, but I had never seen any of them anyway. I shot baskets on my mini-basketball court and used the weight equipment and treadmill to get in shape. I could go out on my balcony any time and watch the shooting stars and the constellations wax and wane, as if they were on a giant scroll unwinding above my head.

The only real problem was the not knowing, the uncertainty of whether it would be months or years before anything changed. I had so many questions, and so few answers. I had felt my crippling shyness fall away, as if the shock of my new existence had suddenly revealed another much less anxious person who had always been inside me. I enjoyed talking to the space people; I learned to cook lasagna; I listened endlessly to the Putumayo World Music Hour (syndicated); I taught myself to play the electric guitar. I was rarely bored.

But sometimes in the evening (there was no real difference in space between morning and evening, but evening was when I went to bed), I would find myself thinking of my family and of Carlie, and in the moments before I went to sleep, about how much nicer it would have been to have her there with me. It seemed sort of a shame that I had to be deprived of sex right after I had learned how to do it, with the first girl who had ever told me I was a knockout. (I never knew that, and I still like to think about it, even though there is no one here now to think about it but me. God will probably strike me dead for vanity one day.) It’s a comfortable life but a lonely one. In my head, I can hear my aunts chastising me for being selfish and vain and any number of other things. But the truth is, I know: I’m a very lucky boy, and I really can’t complain. My fondest hope is that Carlie made it through somehow, and that I might see her again one day.

Rapunzel Rap

An Annotated Fable

Yo, ya’ll, once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a small town at the edge of a forest. She made her living as a baker’s assistant, delivering fresh bread and rolls to the people of the town six mornings a week on her bicycle. One morning, which started out like any other, she was nearly finished with her deliveries for the day when she was surprised by a sudden blow to the head, which knocked her unconscious right in front of the shoemaker’s shop. [We assume from this intro that the young lady is on her own in the world, since she obviously fends for herself. Probably an orphan. That’s how a lot of these stories start.]

When she came to, she was lying in a strange bed, wearing clothes that were not her own. [Kind of creepy, at the get-go.] She wasn’t hurt other than having a very sore head, but she found that not only could she not remember how she got there, she couldn’t remember anything at all, including her name. [Right away, you know this isn’t going to be good, OK?] She was in a small house and could see trees through the windows and hear an occasional bird calling, but otherwise, everything was silent. That is, until she heard heavy footsteps outside and a sudden loud knocking on the wooden door. A very tall, very thin older woman came from the back of the cottage to open the door, which was fastened with a padlock. She unlocked it with a large key hanging from a chain around her neck, and the door swung open, revealing what could only be an ogre: tall as a middling tree he was, with unkempt hair and a beard.

He said to the girl, “I see you’re awake at last. It’s about time you got up and started doing your share around here.”

The old woman whined, “I tried to make dinner, but I couldn’t find the kettle.” [This woman has the beginnings of dementia and is not as dangerous as the ogre but still dangerous enough, due to her strength. She was a fierce ogress herself before she went through the change and started to lose weight and her bearings.]

The ogre began stomping and cursing her stupidity and said to the girl, “You. You’ll have to get the oven going and all. Get started or we’ll never have anything to eat today.”

“But who are you? And where am I?” The girl said wonderingly. [As well she might, you feel me?]

“Where are you? Who am I? I’m your husband, that’s who. Don’t tell me you’re getting as addled as the other one. I can’t afford to have two addle-pated wives. Now get up and get cracking before I have to knock some sense into you again. Where’s Anna?”

Now, none of this sat well with our heroine, who was equal parts dismayed and confounded, for although she was presently not even in possession of her own name, she was pretty sure she was not someone who would have agreed to a group marriage. But seeing no choice except to play along until she could figure things out, she got up, rubbing her head. “I don’t know where Anna is. Who is Anna?”

The ogre cursed again. “Your daughter, you dingbat. You can’t remember your own daughter’s name? Sophie, you’d better take her to the kitchen since she probably doesn’t remember where that is either.”

Now, having a daughter also came as news to the girl, who was as sure as she could be of anything that she would have remembered having a child afoot. She was even more convinced when she came upon the child, who was probably five years old, playing in a pile of grain she had knocked over in the kitchen, lifting it with a wooden spoon, then letting it fall, over and over. [In another story, our heroine would be tasked with having to sort the grains to find the one speck of gold hidden among them or some such thing, but I’ll set your mind at rest—this is not that story.] The child turned a sneering faced toward the girl and began to whine. “Where’s dinner? I’m hungry. You’re so lazy, mama. I don’t know why father keeps you.”

“The kettle’s around here somewhere,” the older woman mumbled, with a vacant smile, as she wandered around the kitchen, bumping into things, without, however, making any progress on finding the kettle—which our heroine immediately retrieved from the shelf in a corner where it was sitting in plain sight. “All right” she said, adopting a surly tone herself. “If it’s dinner you want, you’ll be getting out from under my feet so I can hear myself think.” The other three looked a bit taken aback but left the kitchen with ungracious muttering and stomping about, encouraged, perhaps, by the thought of dinner. [Guerrilla Psychological Warfare 101.]

The girl looked around and found a few carrots, some old potatoes, an onion, and a bit of what looked like leftover mutton, heated some water for broth, and then threw in the vegetables. She remembered, while she stirred, that she knew how to make bread and cakes but decided to keep that to herself. [Kids, this means she didn’t care to cast her pearls before swine. Quite wise.]

After taking bowls of the steaming soup to the dining table, she went back to the kitchen to eat her own dinner in silence—so she could plot. The situation was obviously untenable. She would have to get away somehow, but since she didn’t know where she was, she would need to get the lay of the land before she ran out into the woods and got lost. She opened the back door to sweep out the leavings from the kitchen and saw a road winding over the top of a distant hillside. It was several miles away at least, but a road nonetheless. It had to go somewhere. And she would have to plan her escape before things went too far here. The longer it went on, the more difficult it would be to get away.

When she went out to the main room, it was already dark, and the little girl was asleep in a corner cot. The ogre stamped around, causing the whole house to shake, locking first the front door and then the kitchen door with keys of his own. Having first tamped down the fire in the hearth, he climbed the ladder up to a loft where she could see the edge of a large bed stuffed with straw. “Come to bed, wives, it’s time to sleep,” he called over his shoulder. The girl, pleading dizziness, said she would sleep on the downstairs bed near the kitchen door. Sophie lingered, offering to help her change into her nightdress, her cold fingers probing and picking at the girl’s buttons. “Annabel, my dear, let me help me, you must be so tired.” Her fingers were surprisingly strong and persistent, but the girl merely pushed her away. “Don’t worry about me; go on to bed,” she said, a bit concerned that Sophie meant to climb into bed with her. But Sophie finally turned away and followed her husband to the loft, murmuring to herself.

Once the house was quiet, the girl sat up with a start. The woman had called her Annabel, but she knew that was not her name. She suddenly remembered that her real name was Jessie. She could remember nothing else, but that was a beginning. She lay back down, deep in thought. She would have to get up to make breakfast, which would no doubt be expected early. Then she could set her plan in motion, though she wasn’t sure yet what that was. As she tried to settle into the somewhat lumpy bed, it shifted, and she heard something slide down the wall. Once she heard double snoring from the loft, she reached her hand quietly down the narrow gap between the bed and the wall, reaching blindly until her fingers brushed against a bag with a strap. Pulling it up quietly, she saw that it was a purse—her purse! They had hidden it but not had time to get rid of it, which they most certainly had planned to do. She had probably been here less than a day. Rather than risk drawing any attention by opening it, she slipped it back beside the wall. She would not sleep at all that night in case someone remembered the purse and come to take it from her. [Of course she has a purse, sillies! What self-respecting girl of any era does not have a purse. It probably contains a cell phone and a lipstick, too, at the very least. And maybe some Kleenex and allergy medicine.]*

She lay awake all night and watched the dawning light seep slowly into the darkness of the cottage, taking it from pitch black to a dim gray light, until finally the ogre began stirring and griping upstairs. She heard him put his feet on the floor, one after the other, BAM, BAM. Then he was calling down to her, “You. You’d best get the breakfast going. I can’t wait around all day.” That was what she was waiting for, and she had to stop herself from springing up too quickly, remembering that she was still supposed to be an invalid. She slipped her purse underneath her jacket, where it was invisible, and pretended to be dressing herself, though she had slept in her clothes all night. Forcing herself to walk slowly, she went out to the kitchen, putting the water on to boil. When it was ready, she threw in some oats along with a goodly number of crushed Benadryl tablets she’d found in her purse. [What do you think this is, the Middle Ages?]

Worried that the others might notice the small pink bits amid the clumps of oats, she chopped up some pieces of an old apple with the skin still on and added that to the pot. The medicine was now indistinguishable from the apples, and she hoped the bitter taste would go unnoticed since the oats were already pretty rancid. She had ladled a bowl of oats for herself before putting the crushed pills into the pot, and she now carried the three other bowls into the main room, making a show of putting another log onto the fire and building it up, being sure the others were eating before she went back to the kitchen. She was nearly certain they would shovel everything in before they noticed anything, and that is precisely what happened. The ogre began yelling for his coffee, and Jessie took that opportunity to pick up their bowls and head back to the stove, where the old tin coffeepot, laced with additional Benadryl for good measure, was a-boil. Carrying a large mug of it out to the dining table, she received the fright of her life when the ogre suddenly clapped his hand on her wrist, shouting that maybe, just maybe, she might be good for something after all. [Sophie made terrible coffee, so his standards were very low.] Counting to ten, she said nothing, simply pouring the rest of the coffee into a smaller mug for Sophie.

“The coffee isn’t as bitter as it normally is,” muttered the latter. “I always get the grounds into it. Oh well. Amelia!” She cried suddenly to the child, who was shaping the last bit of oatmeal in her bowl into a lump prior to sticking it on her nose. “Finish your porridge and go outside to play, child! Annabel has a lot of work to do in here. Father said she had better start earning her keep, or else. Go on, child. Shoo.”

“Or else!” Echoed the child, who stuck her tongue out at Jessie before heading out the door, dragging a dirty-looking rag doll with her. “Father won’t feed her if she doesn’t do what she’s supposed to.”

“That’s right,” said Sophie, “Go on, little angel. Don’t worry, I’ll see that Annabel does her chores.”

Jessie wiped the table and carried the mugs into the kitchen. She washed the dishes and scoured the pot, which was none too clean to begin with, and forced herself to eat just a couple of bites of undoctored oatmeal. Once the counters were wiped and the cobwebs swept out of the corners, she took a quick peek through the kitchen door. Both the ogre and his wife were sound asleep on the table, snoring loudly. Through the open door, she could see the little girl asleep near the wood stump, her rag doll collapsed in a heap beside her. Moving quickly, Jessie pinched the key to the back door padlock, made her way silently through the kitchen, and slid the key into the lock. It came open in her hand, and she slipped out quick as could be, running all heggedy peggedy through the woods in a straight line in the direction of the road she had seen before. She wasn’t sure how long it would be before the ogre family woke up but estimated she had several hours at least. [What a resourceful girl! Why wasn’t she running the bakery herself instead of just making deliveries?]

It took her less than an hour to get to the road, where she soon caught a ride with a gypsy family who were heading into town to sell honey. It was not the town she was from, but another larger town two counties over—the ogre, with his giant legs, must have carried her away in record time, but she could never have made her way back there as quickly. Once the wagon arrived in the town, she opened her purse for money to give to the gypsies and noticed that there were messages on her cell phone. Inside her wallet, she found her credit card and ID, and there was her name, plain as the nose on your face, Jessamyn Cashel. She remembered it all now.

Even her checkbook was still inside. Apparently, they hadn’t destroyed her purse because they hoped to get some use out it, but no matter now. When she checked her bank app, her account was untouched. She walked into the nearest shop, bought several shirts and pairs of pants, walked to the town hotel [the Hotel d’Ville, for your records], reserved a room, went upstairs, and washed, throwing the old clothes into a trash bin once she was finished. Then she sat down, her hair in a towel, to weigh her options.

She could go back to the bakery, but the fact that she’d been kidnapped in the middle of a public street without anyone apparently noticing was making her question the wisdom of her life choices. Maybe Piddlebrook wasn’t quite the town for her. The baker liked her, but she knew he could replace her easily. She had actually never been very far from Piddlebrook until her abduction, but now that she was here, in this bustling market town, the world was beginning to seem a little wider. She glanced at her phone again. There were a couple of texts from someone named Jem Ainsworth.

—Hey, hope you are well. [the first one read] I hope you remember me. I was passing through that summer when my engine died and I ended up staying for three months to save up money to fix the car? Val’s cousin. [Jessie did remember him. A polite boy who knew nothing about groceries but worked in the general store all summer and sometimes hung out with her and Val when none of them were working. He was never a big talker, but they all got on well and the months had gone by a little faster when they had someone new around to break the monotony.] I’m coming your way, thought I’d say hi, I know Val moved with his family, but thought you might still be there. Later.—

The second one had been sent only this morning. —Hey, still heading your way. I’ll stop by the bakery to see if you’re there. Otherwise, shoot me a line if you ever get a chance. I live out on the coast now, and I’m heading back there.—

Jessie pictured his sandy hair, always falling into his eyes. She remembered him, although she had never expected to see him again. [Fate steps in to pull you through, once in a while, maybe. There’s a song to that effect.] She texted back —I’m at the Hotel d’Ville in Earlytown. Are you in Piddlebrook?—

Three minutes later —Hey, I’m almost there. What takes you to Earlytown?—

—Long story. YWBT. I was hit in the head and kidnapped by an ogre. An actual OGRE, not just someone who looked like one. I got away and came here.—

—Dude, are you serious.—

—I’m afraid so. I’m not hurt. I got away fast. The guy was apparently looking for another wife.—

—F—k that. You’re sure you’re OK?—

—Believe it or not, I’m mostly OK. Just in shock. Hit me on the head when I was on my delivery rounds and no one stopped him. It’s like something out of fairy tale. Just a random ogre from the woods.—[Fact: Being self aware does not necessarily mean a character is not in a fairy tale. Just like being self aware in a dream does not mean you’re not dreaming.]

—F—k that s—t. Well I’m on my way over, probably be half an hour. Can I give you a ride anywhere? Sounds like maybe you should blow out of here for a while in case he decides to come back.—

Jessie was now realizing what a real possibility that was. The Seven Counties were not that big an area, and who knew how many people were actually against ogres, now that she thought about it. She’d always taken it for granted that no one really liked them, but now—

—Yeah, I think the bakery can get along without me. I think this is a sign that I need to set my sights on something else.—

—Think you could be right. I always wondered if you’d really be happy in that little town. Some people are, tho.—

—Where are you headed?—

—I’ve started a bookstore with some friends. It’s a co-op, too. We finally bought the building and have some living space upstairs. In North Beach. It’s cool. You ever thought of going out there?—

—It sounds great, actually.—

—I’m still in touch with Val. He’s coming out in a couple of months. We could hang out, you’ve def got a job if you want. We need help actually. We pay for help, though. We don’t knock people in the head and drag them off the street. ;-) No pressure, just an option.—

—I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.—

—OK. I’m on my way.—

—Hey, Jem, would you mind pulling around to the back of the building. I just can’t face any more ogres today. Just in case he’s on my trail.—

—No worries, man. See ya.—

Jessie was looking out the window 20 minutes later, but she heard the van coming before she saw it, an old Volkswagen bus with a sunroof, blue as the sea. She waved to Jem from the window, and he waved back. She picked up her newly purchased weekend bag with all her clothes and her purse and put one leg over the window ledge. Out on the fire escape, she pulled the window sash down and then ran down the rickety stairs. Jem had parked the bus, no questions asked, directly under the fire escape. When she got to the bottom, it extended down to just above the sunroof, so she tossed her bags in and then climbed down.

Jem looked about the same, though he wasn’t quite as thin as he had been four years ago. He was smiling. “Full points for style on that entrance.”

“Well, I did pay my bill. And maybe it wasn’t strictly necessary to leave by the fire escape, but—”

“You wanted to make a dramatic exit,” he agreed. “It’s understandable.”

“I guess I am a little spooked,” she said. “It’s not every day you get kidnapped by an ogre.”

“Let it be the last time, then,” he said, putting the van into gear. There was a bauble hanging from the rear-view mirror that said SEE OSGILIATH. The backseats were piled with gear and clothes and small pieces of furniture. “Picked up some hand-me-downs from home,” he said. “I’m glad you answered my texts. I won’t be coming back this way for a long time.”

“Seems like it could be fate.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’d like to think so.” [You may be thinking to yourself, oh, no, not another story where some guy has to rescue a damsel in distress. I would merely point out that she did a pretty good job of rescuing herself. Technically, all he did was give her a ride out of town. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.]

And they all lived happily ever after, except for the ogre and his family, who are still asleep out there in the woods, since Benadryl has the side effect of turning ogres into stone. Jessie didn’t know this when she gave it to them, but if she had known, she would most certainly have done it anyway. So there you go.

*The technical term for this is foreshadowing.

Moral: Gaslighting is mean, and mean people suck. Don’t gaslight, and maybe you won’t ever have to worry about being turned to stone by Benadryl.

Amarillo

A Short Story

It was early evening on a summer day, and the road was nearly deserted—which seemed strange, since it was a major east-west interstate. Nonetheless, she saw few vehicles, only—now and then—large trucks. As the sun was setting behind the mountains, the light hardened to a deep orange, then dimmed into a purple twilight. This part of the country had deep folds in the land, which would continue until it flattened out near Amarillo, her immediate, but not final, destination; she did not remember it taking this long to reach the town after crossing into Texas, but she now realized she probably wouldn't make it before dark. Just before she turned on the headlights, something crossed the road in front of her, some unknown creature that seemed almost to float like a wisp of smoke, not identifiable by any means of locomotion she had ever seen. A roadrunner?

Gradually, the land smoothed out, and she recognized a gas station, calculating she was perhaps 30 minutes from the outskirts of Amarillo. She was tired but alert and saw nothing else moving through the dry landscape except for other vehicles, the occasional RV or truck, on the road itself. As she neared the city limit, the wind picked up, and in the rear-view mirror, she saw that what had looked like a distant mountain range was actually an enormous steel-gray cloud encroaching over the desert and emitting an occasional flash of lightning. It was still some miles away.

She had no hotel reservation, had not eaten since breakfast, and knew nothing of Amarillo except for the long strip of hotels along the interstate corridor. She needed to find an ATM, a gas station, some food, and a place to stay, which seemed a reasonable plan until the wind turned cyclonic once she left the highway to look for an ATM. It whistled around her head while she punched buttons at the bank machine and steadily rose in volume as she dashed through the drive-through at Wendy’s, starting to feel somewhat frantic. The wind was actually shrieking as she made her way back to the interstate and attempted to navigate an access road that led first to a dead-end field, where the grass lay nearly sideways in the wind, and then to an expensive hotel that she could not afford. Coming out of the parking lot, she saw the familiar logo of a moderately-priced chain a mile down the road and sped toward it, expecting to spot a tornado at any moment.

The hotel was new and clean and had vacancies. The deep purple color scheme and Pierrot-inspired decor had a curiously deadening effect, but she just shrugged. Probably designed by a committee. There was even an available luggage cart on which she piled her suitcases, fearful that her car might be destroyed overnight in the cyclone. In the elevator, her breathing began to slow to a more normal level as the sounds of the wind were muted, but when she stepped into her room, the full force of the storm made itself felt once more, a giant body-slamming the building. She looked out the window before closing the curtains and saw an enormous sea of darkness next to the hotel, as if the building were perched on the edge of a deep canyon. With a small shudder, she turned away. Her Wendy’s had gone cold, but she ate it anyway while watching an episode of Fixer Upper that she had already seen. Despite the ferocity of the storm, the nearly constant lightning and pounding hail, the lights never flickered until she turned off the TV and pulled back the bed covers. Then all the lights went out at once.

This won’t last, she told herself. The hotel is bound to have a back-up generator. She walked over to the door, checking to make sure it was locked before lying down. It was only then, with the TV silenced, that she noticed a repetitive sound coming from outside her window, the sound of one hard object pounding another. Fearing that an adjacent window shutter had come loose and was about to crash through her window, she risked a quick peek and found herself face to face with a human-sized winged creature, with red eyes, gray skin, and sharp claws. Although she had difficulty processing what she was seeing, she had no trouble realizing that the creature was trying to open her window from the outside.

Stay calm, she said to herself, amazed that somehow her mind had switched to an automatic pilot mode. She reached around in the dark for something to use as a weapon, picking up a wooden chair just as the window latch came open and the creature put one wrinkled foot over the ledge. She pushed at it with all her might, using the chair to throw it off balance, so that it had to scrabble with one claw to maintain a hold. The coffeemaker on the desk was full of boiled water from the hot tea she’d forgotten to make; she grabbed the pot and threw the contents into the creature’s face. With a piercing cry, it let go of the ledge and fell into the darkness of the chasm.

In shock, the coffeepot still in her hand, she noticed that the wind was much less desperate-sounding than it had been a few minutes ago; then the lights came back on. How long had they been off? Two minutes? Five? The curtains blew in toward her along with some cold rain. Numbly, she latched and locked the window, which was completely intact; stumbling away from it, she hit the TV remote with her hand, and HGTV switched on to a discussion of shiplap and the choice of a door for an excited couple’s walk-in pantry, followed by a commercial for Lowe’s summer sale. It was incredible that even in the face of an incursion of the fantastic, the rational part of her brain could still take in details about custom doors and tile choices, could still tell her to straighten the chair and return the coffeepot, now empty, to its place. It was as if nothing had happened, as if she had just awakened from a nightmare without realizing she had ever gone to sleep.

Maybe that’s it, she told herself. I’m overwrought, I fell sleep while watching TV. It's all this pressure from the sales meeting. This will all fade to nothing in the morning. Still, she decided to leave a couple of lights and the TV on before lying down. To her surprise, she was suddenly exhausted and fell asleep with no difficulty, though she woke several times during the night. In the morning, she awoke to a bright daylight seeping through the curtains. All seemed normal, except for the damp places in the carpet near the window.

When the pleasant middle-aged woman at the reception desk asked if everything had been alright with her room, she took a deep breath and asked if the woman was aware of any large birds native to the area, really large, like a condor or possibly a harpy, that might have been noted around the hotel. The woman frowned with thought, as if contemplating an unexpected but pleasant puzzle, before saying no, not that she was aware of. “Although I’m not from around here,” she added, handing Cass’s receipt to her. “I’ve only been here for about six months. Why do you ask?”

“I just thought I saw a really big bird outside last night. But the storm was so wild, I probably imagined it.” Cass made a mental note that this was now the official story she would take with her from the incident, when anyone from the office asked about her trip.

Once she was behind the wheel of her car, she sat for a moment, thinking of the many miles she still had ahead of her. She still needed gas. She tried not to look toward the chasm at the rear of the hotel as she pulled onto the street. Everything looked ordinary in the morning light, which helped quell the unease that lingered in her mind. It simply had to have been a dream.

She filled up at the gas station and went inside to pay. The gas station did not serve breakfast, so she grabbed a package of crumb cakes and a bottled tea before going to the counter. She was the only customer. The clerk had the radio on to a morning news show; a stack of newspapers sat on the counter with a photo of a presidential candidate in a headlined story. Morning in America.

She had paid the clerk, taken back her change, and was saying thank you before she noticed how ashen the clerk’s face was. When he nodded to her thanks, his movements were stiff, and there was fear in the glance he flicked at her. The inside of the gas station was as conventional as could be, but somehow the slant of light wasn’t quite as it should be. It was as if he knew, as if she was marked in some way. She had never seen him before. Still, that look.

As she walked slowly out to her car, the miles and miles ahead of her seeming to stretch into infinity, she began to wonder for the first time, strangely, if she would ever make it home.

Shakespeare Camp for the Uninitiated

Last week, I finished M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, a novel about a group of theatre students in their fourth year of a drama program at an exclusive arts college. Their curriculum consists of all-Shakespeare, all the time, and by the beginning of their senior year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, they are both a well-trained theatre troupe and a close-knit group of friends (or, in some cases, frenemies). Things look promising at the beginning of their senior year, and at the start, I was almost envious of their situation, their ability to focus and train in exactly what they love best with a group of like-minded fellows at a small, idyllic-sounding Midwestern campus.

Actually, Dellecher is not at all unlike Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I studied mythology and Jungian psychology, and I can attest that my program had some of the same idyllic qualities—a beautiful natural setting, a program with a particular focus, and a tight campus community, though PGI is in SoCal and has a definite California vibe rather than the strict regimented intensity of Dellecher as described in the novel. Of course, even in paradise, real life goes on; in the midst of trying out for roles and navigating romantic entanglements and friendships, Dellecher’s seven seniors are looking forward to auditions and professional careers once they graduate. They seem on track to accomplish that and are on top of the world at the beginning of the term.

As you would expect, there’s plenty of interpersonal drama and competitiveness among these students. Some of the tensions that already exist intensify as one of their professors focuses on having each student identify and expose his or her greatest strength and greatest weakness to the group in an acting workshop. Sounds fairly harmless, right? I don’t know if this method is common in acting circles; I suppose it makes sense in terms of having actors get in touch with their own motivations, aspirations, and fears so that they can become better actors, but it’s also fairly brutal because it strips away their defenses. In any event, it marks the beginning of the end of the Dellecher idyll as it leads to psychotic breaks among the students. Instead of merely playing their roles, the actors can no longer quite contain what they are meant to be enacting, and Shakespeare’s rivalries, jealousies, and murderous impulses (which are really their own) spill off the stage and into their lives.

Jungians often discuss a technique called active imagination, which is a way of getting in touch with the contents of your unconscious to spur creativity and personal growth through the use of symbols, images, meditation, and other tools. It can be very beneficial but also, perhaps, destructive, if you’re not on solid emotional ground to begin with. To me, being immersed in the myth traditions of cultures around the world for several years of study was one long exercise in active imagination that was tremendously freeing as far stimulating the imagination goes. To me, it’s difficult to think of anything more beneficial for a writer or an artist. In the case of the Dellecher students, all of the wide world as presented by Shakespeare—while deeply beloved as a discipline—has been largely academic until the lines between role-playing and real life are breached. Once the students’ emotions begin to interact in a serious way with the roles they are playing, life begins to imitate art, and real-life tragedy is not far away.

Jung believed that the type of growth people strive for with analysis and active imagination often takes place naturally in the second half of life as people reach a stage in which their undeveloped capabilities, dormant in the first half of life, begin to make themselves felt. It’s generally a very positive thing. The Dellecher students in the novel, of course, are barely out of their teens and not really equipped to deal with so much emotional flooding, especially in the same context as substance abuse and tentative sexual exploration. Previously unimaginable events overtake the students as rivalries and resentments spill into violence and collective guilt.

At the beginning of the novel, I thought that of all the subject disciplines taught at Dellecher, theatre seemed the most rewarding because it has the potential to teach practitioners so much about psychology and human nature. This is true, I think, but as the plot in If We Were Villains unfolds, the downside to all this exploration of the psyche becomes apparent. If Richard, who has always been something of a bully, can become a full-on murderous sociopath, then James, previously the “good guy,” and Alexander, who has always been ready with “bad boy” behavior, can also cross over to the dark side once murderous impulses find a channel to the surface via a staging of Macbeth or Julius Caesar.

Obviously, this isn’t a common occurrence, and you can probably attend your community’s Shakespeare in the Park performances in relative safety this summer (if you were worried about it). Nevertheless, the dynamic the novel describes of unconscious impulses spilling out uncontrolled once they’re no longer contained is accurate, I believe. A witches’ brew of dark emotions in the plays of Shakespeare, a bit of unlicensed therapy from a teacher a little too oblivious to the dangers of probing complexes and insecurities, and a group of talented but still immature students struggling with all the usual problems of young adulthood—what could go wrong? Probably a lot.

What Drifted in on the Wind

The air quality here in Kentucky is back to what the Air Quality Index considers “Good” (under 50) for the first time since June 1st. We had rain yesterday and last night that seemed to help clear the air, and I woke up to blue skies this morning minus the feeling of hazy oppression we’d been living under with the wildfire smoke. It wasn’t bad here compared to the East Coast and the Northeast, but it was bad enough to make you reconsider your normal activities. I noticed fewer people swimming in the community pool all week until yesterday afternoon, when things began to clear. I myself wasn’t enticed to either sit on my porch or go for a walk during much of this AQI event; I wasn’t sure if I was a member of a “sensitive group” who might be affected more easily by particulate matter or not (I suspected not, but why take a chance?)—so I sipped my iced tea and read my books inside.

Author Stephen Pyne, whose book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, describes the new era that he says our management of fire has created. While Dr. Pyne believes we can take actions to ameliorate some of the effects of the mega-fires that are probably our new normal, there’s no getting around the consequences to our long-term health and well-being that this era has ushered in. I can remember when wildfires out West were a fairly regular occurrence before the scale of them shifted so wildly. They were distant events we would hear about on the news, destructive and concerning, certainly, but not nearly as monstrous as they are now. 

The scenes coming out of New York City during this past week were very nearly apocalyptic, as have some of the wildfires in California and the Northwest been over the last few years. Sometimes I’m glad my move to California was so short-lived because I’m not sure I’d want to be there now. The last time I was there, for a job interview, fires erupted the day before I got there and resulted in my interview being cancelled. While it was not the first time I had been in California while fires were raging, these were closer to where I was than the previous fires I’d seen. I remember walking down a street in Santa Monica and seeing a few people near a hospital wearing masks. It didn’t occur to me at first that this was because of the air quality, but indeed the smoke grew worse over the next day. There was nothing to do but watch the coverage on TV in my hotel room and worry. By the time I left two days later, I almost felt I was fleeing Armageddon by the skin of my teeth.

I was thinking tonight about the symbolic meanings of fire in world traditions and was reminded that fire is associated with the Manipura chakra, located at the solar plexus and associated with organs in the abdomen. If this chakra is blocked, it’s said that one suffers from a lack of agency, confidence, and the will to achieve, the energy from Manipura being the engine that drives self-esteem and purpose. It may be a coincidence, but I noted that several of the symptoms the yogis ascribe to a blocked Manipura chakra were symptoms I had been unable to shake over the course of this past week. I had a strange stomach ache after drinking an iced coffee (which normally doesn’t bother me) and felt rather sluggish throughout the week, oppressed by the haze that seemed to hem us all in. Reading the situation symbolically, I would say that the imbalance created by the fires raging out of control almost seemed at some psychic level to have stolen my own personal fire, leaving me at a standstill, though I wasn’t completely aware of the reason.

I hope we can collectively summon the will for the hard work it will take to stave off some of the worst effects of climate change, but I admit it isn’t looking good at the moment. Perhaps that will change. Meanwhile, I did one of the worst things I possibly could have done to reset my personal sense of agency by picking a library book this week that deals with the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophic event. Granted, it had nothing to do with climate change; it was a flu epidemic, but all that did was bring up memories of the recently lifted COVID-19 emergency. Wisely, I think, I decided to put that book aside and find something more fun to read. There’s only so much catastrophe you can reasonably expect to cope with in one week, even in the name of reading events mythically.

We Interrupt Our Programming on Dark Academia to Bring You . . . Two Families

Wordplay has published a number of book reviews recently, but it turns out that a week sometimes isn’t long enough for me to finish a book. This could lead you to believe that Wordplay is just a lazy bum who doesn’t care about disappointing its readers. This isn’t true, and that includes all six of you! To make it up to you, this week I have two books to share, both of which, as it turns out, deal with the subject of grief and loss in a family context. I didn’t know that’s what I was getting when I started reading them; it was probably NoveList that put both of these books on my reading list when I decided to take a break from Dark Academia for a little while.

Sue Miller’s Monogamy (2020) is a story of a happy marriage that ends in grief with the death of the husband. Graham and Annie have been married for decades when Graham’s unexpected death leaves Annie devastated. She slowly recovers from her loss with the support of a large circle of family and friends; it’s months before she suddenly realizes that Graham had been having an affair with a woman of their acquaintance just before he died, a realization that turns sorrow into rage. What had been a deep but fairly uncomplicated grief is transformed into a second loss as Annie struggles with feelings of betrayal.

The background to all of this is that both Graham and Annie had been shaped by the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s and had each enjoyed casual sex. Graham’s first marriage was an open one in which he thrived but his wife did not. Graham had had another brief affair early in his marriage to Annie, and Annie had had a brief adventure of her own with another man while already married to Graham. Thus the use of the word “monogamy” is a bit relative as applied to their marriage: it was mostly monogamous. 

Annie and Graham move in sophisticated Cambridge circles; dinner parties, art shows, and author readings are part and parcel of their world. Theirs is the East Coast intellectual version of what I think of as the “Santa Barbara” lifestyle, ruled by Aphrodite, the goddess of gourmet sensibilities, wine, good food, and sexual love. Graham is a bit of a Dionysus character, with a large frame as well as large appetites—always the life of the party, generous, gregarious, and loving—which is exactly what draws Annie to him in the first place. Her only reservation is a fear of being “swallowed up” by his larger-than-lifeness. Her character is cooler than his, as she tends to observe and record life. Both of them are “nice” people, but they are in some ways opposites. I suppose the main question the novel raised for me is, can you live in a world of Epicurean appetite and not be tempted to indulge those appetites in more than one direction? Another question would be, is monogamy possible for a Dionysian personality whose very lust for life is what’s so attractive about him to begin with?

Probably, I am reading this novel wrong. I found the story compelling, but perhaps there is some working-class snobbery in me that made me a little less sympathetic than I was supposed to be to Annie’s predicament. Annie and Graham had an idyllic life together, an existence of relative ease and comfort, fueled by doses of hedonism. They are interesting people, but perhaps a bit self-absorbed, taking all of the wonderful things in their lives as simply their due. It didn’t seem surprising to me that monogamy wasn’t quite possible for them.

On the other hand, I was unexpectedly blown away by Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, a 2022 novel about a family trying to hold themselves together after the death of one of their daughters in a tragic accident. The story is told from the point of view of the younger daughter, “ugly duckling” Sally, who idolizes her older sister Kathy even as she suffers in her shadow. Both girls are fascinated by the athletic and charismatic Billy Barnes, who becomes Kathy’s boyfriend while Sally lives out her crush vicariously. The Holts are a typical American family with a comfortable but not luxurious Connecticut life that’s turned upside down by Kathy’s death. What saves them is quite simply the fact that they stay together and tough it out.

One of the things I liked about this novel was the fact that it refused to sugarcoat the horror of the accident and its effects on the survivors but also maintained a sort of effervescent sense of humor on the part of the narrator. Events in the novel can be both terribly sad and funny at the same time, and they often are. There’s a messiness to the emotions in the novel and at the same time an honesty about them. Nothing is going to resolve what’s happened, and there’s no pretense that the family isn’t struggling, even years later. They’re almost destroyed by grief. 

Sally slowly comes into her own as she grows to adulthood but realizes that her life, successful as it seems from the outside, lacks authenticity. Sally’s mother tries to console herself with wine and regular visits to a psychic (who may actually know more than Sally gives her credit for); Sally’s father simply refuses to give up on his family even in the face of overwhelming pain and unforgiving anger. The needs of the family members clash at times, and they often fail to support one another, but they hang on.

It’s difficult to write about this novel without giving too much away; there is an emotional drive to the story that carries it forward. I admired Sally’s authenticity and humor, which persist in spite of a difficult adolescence and young adulthood. Although the financial circumstances of the Holts are probably not that different from those of Annie’s and Graham’s family, they seem worlds apart. The Holts seem more of a functioning family; you see how the tragedy affects all of them separately and all of them together. The novel is really a portrait of the family’s dynamics. In Monogamy, Annie and Graham seem more like ambitious people who just happened to have children; everything that happens with this family seems to happen to each of them individually, as if they never quite coalesced. It is a portrait of individuals.

Aside from that, there is an anarchic bedrock of truth in Sally’s narration that I found irresistible. In such an ordinary life, you would perhaps not expect to come across such extraordinary emotional courage, but there it is, right in the midst of high school Latin club, visits to the dentist, and dead trees that need to be removed lest they fall on the house. I actually gasped once or twice while reading this novel, a little in awe of how persistently it aimed straight at the heart of things.

How Much Will You Take for That Mermaid?

This week, Wordplay is once again visiting the topic of mermaids. You might recall my review of Imogen Hermes Gowar’s slinky and mysterious The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018) on the Wordplay Facebook page last year. This time, it’s Julia Langbein’s serio-comic American Mermaid, a 2023 novel about mermaids, the creative process, matriarchy and patriarchy, world domination, Hollywood, and the ways in which the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious inform and reflect one another.

The two novels are very different in tone but somehow share an underlying sensibility: both acknowledge the danger of trying to capture the natural forces moving freely through the world and trying to use them for mere profit or selfish ends. Ms. Langbein’s book made me laugh out loud several times while Ms. Gowar’s book was wreathed in watery darkness, but both novels have something to say about the sexual allure of the mermaid and female commodification. While the allure is natural, the failure to understand the power it represents is the real culprit. 

In Gowar’s book, a dead mermaid “specimen” put on display for exhibit-goers is an evil-looking creature with sharp teeth, and a living mermaid turns out to be impervious to attempts to hold it against its will. In Langbein’s book, men who succumb to the sirens’ song quickly find that is they who are being used and that the mermaids are indifferent to their fate (though they will do the men the honor of naming their progeny after them). An attempt to bring the mermaids into a corporate scheme to re-make the world through a planned global disaster backfires due to their ferociously independent nature. But it would be reductionist to say that both novels are simply polemics about the foolhardiness of failing to respect nature, in the same way it would be to say that of Moby-Dick, which in some ways is their spiritual forebear. All three novels paint a complex portrait of nature, including its destructive side: nature is ultimately creative, mysterious, spiritual, conscious, and very much alive.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ms. Langbein’s book, for me, was her depiction of the creative process of her heroine, a high school teacher and writer of fiction named Penelope Schleeman, whose first novel draws the attention of Hollywood filmmakers wishing to turn it into popular entertainment. Penelope’s novel draws heavily on her own life experiences, and because it’s an honest attempt to work through issues important to her, it simultaneously offends her family and catches fire with the world at large. Penelope’s adoption of a mythological creature, a captured mermaid, to stand in as a sort of alter ego, whether simply a fortuitous choice or not, actually invites the eventual intervention of real-life mermaids (yes, they turn out to be real) who subvert attempts to turn Penelope’s novel into a fatuous screenplay.

As with The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, American Mermaid paints what I think is a true portrait of the protean nature of mythology. Mythology is a human construct that reflects our understanding of the world around us but ultimately springs from a deep, indeterminate place where the human and non-human meet and are not so distinct from one another. Penelope’s writing draws from the collective unconscious, and she, in turn, has an effect on it. It’s both painful and hilarious to watch her struggle with the Hollywood handlers who love her book but want to turn it into something trivial. Once she begins to realize that her main character, Sylvia, has a life and power of her own, she becomes less and less bankable and can only watch as her subconscious/alter ego unleashes chaos to save her novel.

Personally, there are a lot of things I like about Los Angeles, but the novel’s description of the film business and Hollywood people rang true based on the little I know about it. I imagine it would be painful to see something you created turned into something completely different than you intended. At the same time, money and flattery are great temptations, and film is a business like any other. People are in it to make money. In American Mermaid, a sort of clash of the titans occurs when the honest businesspeople of Hollywood invite the wrath of the mythological world by attempting to use it in a bland moneymaker that won’t challenge anyone. In the end, this novel says, the mythical world will always win in a battle like this.

Matriarchal and patriarchal values are both given a place in American Mermaid, and if the matriarchy eventually has its way, that isn’t to say she is more benign. She can be cruel and heartless, too, even if in service to the continuation of life, which might give you an idea of the reason the patriarchy tries so hard to keep her down. Better for both to live in harmony with one another if only they could figure out how, but that is one of life’s continuing unresolved stories.

A Bunch of Magicians Gathered in a Manor House, and . . .

It took a while, but I finally finished Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six, and let me tell you, people are throwing around the term “Dark Academia” pretty loosely in applying it to this book. From what I’ve seen, the genre has some very indeterminate edges to begin with, but usually some combination of a Gothic setting, exclusivity, occult knowledge, and sinister happenings need to occur in proximity to one another to qualify. In The Atlas Six, the exclusivity is there, but by the book’s own logic, magical knowledge is really just a form of super-advanced scientific acumen that some savants (“medeians” as they are called in the novel) have the ability to wield according to their specialties. They are basically physicists, naturalists, telepaths, and even psychopaths, if you will; they are simply way ahead of the general population in their knowledge of how the universe functions and their ability to manipulate it.

In most of the other Dark Academia novels or TV series I’ve come across, the question of what magic is isn’t nearly so cut-and-dried as it is here. Magicians may be quite skilled at casting spells and capable of doing spectacular things in the wider world of D.A. without really being able to pin down what magic is . . . there is some mystery to it, something that defies explanation. Magic is often set in opposition to the normal, everyday world, and the people who practice it do so on the fringes of society or in some secret corner of it, as if there has to be something a bit wrong with them to give magic the ability to leak through. 

To say that The Atlas Six doesn’t fit this pattern isn’t a criticism of the novel, but I think it reads more like a quirky sort of science fiction crossed with a bit of Agatha Christie than Dark Academia. Magic is a commodity in this novel, something to be used, bought, and sold, so that skilled practitioners essentially rule the world in a very hard-headed, unsentimental way. While some of the characters are fighting their own demons, the main characteristic nearly all of them share is being highly competitive.

I had difficulty relating to the characters throughout the first few chapters, as none of them were particularly engaging or sympathetic. But once the novel takes off, it really takes off; I have to give the author credit for taking a group of prickly, somewhat self-absorbed magical geniuses that I didn’t especially like and placing them in circumstances that suddenly became compelling once I realized what they were actually up against. The novel has a few English “murder mystery” tropes in it, with its small group of oddballs tripping over one another in a manor house setting and matching wits to survive what only appears to be a genteel competition. The weapons at their disposal—the ability to alter time and space, disappear into one another’s psyches, and alter the perceptions and thoughts of their fellow initiates—make for a very lively academic year.

Miss Blake followed this novel up with its continuance, The Atlas Paradox, which I haven’t yet read; a third novel, The Atlas Complex, is expected next year. In the way of a cliffhanger, The Atlas Six ends in the middle of an action-packed sequence in a somewhat different manner than the reader has been led to believe is possible, but OK, yay for that! This popular series takes the magical academia trend in its own idiosyncratic direction with a group of somewhat disaffected characters who practice magic not for personal reasons but for professional ones, with all the competitive edginess found in any highly selective academic program with a limited number of seats. Imagine an English graduate department with a prestigious fellowship program and only a few open slots and picture the chaos when the applicants can see around corners, read one another’s minds, perform battle magic, and contemplate murder to achieve their goals. 

Come to think of it, is this really that different from the actual real world? Doesn’t seem that different from some of the academic settings I’ve known. I often feel that someone is trying to read my mind or figure out what I’m thinking before I even know it myself, and I’m an independent scholar. Imagine the mayhem in the halls of academia, then, if someone were to throw magic into the mix. Oh, wait, they already have, haven’t they—it’s called technology.

How to Be a Magician

“Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.” —Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

After watching the Syfy series The Magicians, I started reading the novels from which they were adapted and just finished the last of the three, The Magician’s Land. In previous posts I discussed The Magicians as an example of the Dark Academia genre, but it’s also a little bit science fiction and a little bit urban fantasy. The TV series diverged in many ways from the books but is true to it in spirit. 

It was ambitious of Syfy to undertake an adaptation of this multiverse-spanning work, but they pulled it off, actually adding complexity to an already complex narrative. The author supplies transitions that help you, the reader, keep track of where you are in space/time with regard to the plot, but the TV series sometimes meanders without ceremony from one space/time labyrinth into another. I kind of liked that about it, the way it could jump abruptly from one world to the next by way of very shifty portals and occasionally leave you wondering where exactly you were. It was very existential, though it sometimes had me wondering if I’d missed something I was supposed to know about the transition. Well, haven’t we all been landed at one time or another in the middle of a world that looked like the one we’re used to but very palpably wasn’t the same thing at all? Of course we have. This series gets you to feeling that that’s just the type of thing a reasonably intelligent magician has to get used to.

In the novels, Mr. Grossman gives a more explanatory diagram of how various segments of the multiverse are enmeshed, particularly in the episode of the prank in which Plum discovers interconnected worlds behind the walls at Brakebills. In the TV series, it’s often unclear, especially later on, if the characters are in Brakebills (where they appear to be) or somewhere else, some anteroom slightly removed from current reality. In my mind, Brakebills serves as baseline reality, which is actually a joke, since Brakebills is itself separated—by a thin membrane only, but still, separated—from the actual modern world of the northeastern United States in New York State. The Hudson River is visible from the campus, but no one on or near the river would be able to see Brakebills; invisible wards shield it from the eyes of non-magicians.

Some of the characters in the TV series are exactly as Mr. Grossman wrote them, brought to life by a talented cast who seemingly stepped straight out of the pages. Some of the characters have been changed somewhat, or bear different names or roles than they do in the books. One character, Penny, bears only a modest resemblance to Penny in the novel, being much more compelling and dynamic in the series (and actually one of my favorites); I mourned his fate in the series and never really got over his separation from Kady. Penny eventually becomes (in both the books and the series) a Librarian-Magician, and although librarians are not as benign in The Magicians as many people think them to be in real life (having a rather complex relationship with magic that sometimes places them in opposition to magicians), Penny manages both roles, though more satisfactorily in the TV series, I thought, where he was quite a bit more manly.

In previous posts I talked about the idea of magic as psychological agency, and The Magicians is possibly the purest example of this idea that I’ve yet seen. This idea first came to me after I watched a filmed production of The Tempest some years ago, and to my delight, that’s the way Quentin Coldwater, The Magicians’ central character, also sees it: he thinks of the world he wants to create using magic as a kind of Prospero’s island, where he can arrange things to be safe and peaceful. If you ask the question, “What exactly is magic?” I would say, as I think The Magicians does, that it’s a lot like creativity, and not only the kind that spins fantasy worlds and creates symphonies and paintings. It’s also the kind you use in homespun ways when putting together a home or cooking a meal. It’s you putting your stamp on the world, taking what it has to offer and making something out of it that wasn’t there before.

Most, if not all, of the characters in The Magicians are broken in some way or another, and learning magic constitutes a way for them to heal themselves while they are trying to heal the world. They often make things worse, at least for a time, since magic is a messy business limited not only by the magician’s skill but by the material he/she has to work with and the fact that magic has a mind of its own. If you want to get Jungian about it (you may not, but here goes anyway), it’s like the conscious mind, the ego, working with the unconscious, the invisible place of power from whence spring all manner of things, both good and bad. Ever wondered why that spell you cast created a prison world instead of the paradise you wanted? Well, what about that leviathan swimming around down there in your unconscious that shaped your intent in ways you weren’t aware of?

Of course, even going off course with magic can be beneficial in the long run, as Quentin and the others discover. The cliche about the journey meaning more than the destination turns out to be true when you’re jumping worlds as well. You keep trying things out and learning until something sticks, and you suddenly realize you’re home. In the world of The Magicians, it’s only those with an aptitude who ever even learn that magic exists, but I’m not sure Mr. Grossman and I are in disagreement over this. A lot of ordinary people in our world never truly learn what they’re capable of, either.

Wordplay Goes to the Alamo

I’m back home after several days of pop culture immersion at the PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio. I hadn’t traveled anywhere since well before the pandemic, so this was a little bit of flexing my writing muscle, a little bit of pursuing various interests, and a little bit of finding my traveling legs once again. I loaded up with hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, and face masks but discovered—to my surprise—that I seemed to be one of very few people bothering with extra precautions. I thought more people would use masks on the plane, to be honest, but I saw only one or two other people wearing one.

I had decided in advance that I preferred to divide my time between attending sessions and exploring San Antonio, a new city for me and one I was looking forward to seeing. The last time I attended PCA/ACA, I focused on fitting in as many sessions as I could (to get my money’s worth, I guess) but found that strategy to be pretty exhausting. It may be that when participants are representing an academic specialty, they simply go to the sessions related to their field, but my field is probably represented by at least half of all the topics offered, so I consider all of them before choosing. Sometimes I’ll attend a wild card session just to get out of my comfort zone, so the scheduling alone requires a lot of thought. The end result of all this was that attending fewer sessions this time made for a more enjoyable experience.

Unlike my last PCA/ACA experience (in Chicago), this event seemed friendlier and more relaxed. I don’t know whether to put this down to the conference itself being quite a bit smaller this time, to other people besides myself being overjoyed to get to travel again after several years of strictures, or to the location itself. I have always found Chicago to be somewhat chilly (literally and figuratively), though I know some people love it. I found that San Antonio both was and wasn’t what I expected before I arrived, and that I had to feel my way around a bit more thoughtfully than usual. My initial impression on arriving downtown was actually one of surprise that I felt such a sense of disorientation and a little bit of dismay. I wasn’t expecting San Antonio to be bland but the fact that it’s such a popular city for conferences and tourists hadn’t prepared me for an edginess I thought I perceived in my surroundings.

At the hotel, I asked if the surrounding area was safe at night and was told very definitely that it was. Because I was presenting on the first day, I spent my first night and most of the following day focused on getting ready and never really ventured outside the hotel again until after my presentation. I had a little bit of trepidation (that never fully dissipated) but found that, as is sometimes the case, things overall did look brighter with the sun shining and the wind in my sails as I went for a celebratory walk and discovered the Riverwalk, the Alamo, and other sights within walking distance. 

Personally, I found the physical environment to be an unusual mix of the graceful and historic along with the raucous and rough and thought it surprising that none of the guides I’d consulted ahead of time mentioned this dichotomy. In all my travels, I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a place quite like San Antonio. My conclusions are based on the scant observations of a few days mostly spent downtown and don’t necessarily encompass the entire city, but I think at least a couple of factors account for the complex experience I had: there is a strong military presence because of both U.S. Army and Air Force bases in the area, and the Mexican culture is stronger in San Antonio than in any other place I’ve ever been.

I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that both of these things lent a certain machismo to the atmosphere that I found daunting. I don’t take well to feeling that I have to curtail my activities or do things differently than I normally would to feel safe, but that’s what I did in San Antonio. One night only did I stay out after dark, and even though it wasn’t much past dusk when I got back to my hotel, some of the activity on the street had me feeling less than comfortable. On the one hand, I experienced an absolutely magical walk down Houston Street, with grackles clamoring overhead and colored lights in the trees lending an air of enchantment to the growing dusk. It was wonderful. On the other hand, there was crude shouting in the streets. I don’t think I’ve ever been so self-conscious about being a woman on my own as I was in those few days.

Most people I encountered were charming and friendly, and if any of them looked askance at this gray-haired lady in sneakers flitting around their city, few of them showed it, except for a surly bus driver or hotel clerk here and there. Some people object, I know, to applying archetypes like “masculine” and “feminine” to describe things, but that seems to me the best way to convey the city as I saw it. San Antonio itself, with its beautiful historical buildings and graceful winding river, seemed very feminine to me, but it has attracted a strong masculine presence. There are positives and negatives to both archetypal qualities, but the real crux is the way they interact. The feminine element certainly doesn’t have to be passive, but somehow it did seem to be in San Antonio, in deference to a sort of untamed, insistent masculinity. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that “boys will be boys” is the pervading but perhaps unspoken ethos in the city.

For a reintroduction to the world of travel, San Antonio was in some ways a bit of a challenge, and a bit of a contradiction. I had a better experience at the conference, where I felt an openness and friendliness that was lacking the last time I went. I enjoyed my explorations of the city, which boasts some pretty impressive efforts to revive and preserve its historical buildings and places. I also felt “out of my element” to a degree I wasn’t expecting. Of course, I wouldn’t say I felt “safe” in Chicago either, but it was in more of a “this-is-a-big-city-with-a-high-rate-of-gun-violence” way, not because I felt out of place. The dangers in Chicago wear a more impersonal face, perhaps, than they do in San Antonio.