Fairy Tale Friday--Huldu-Folk

After seeing the movie Thale, I wanted to find tales featuring Hulder, seductive forest-dwelling women with tails. This book, Scandinavian Folk-Lore, edited by William Alexander Craigie, has several starting on page 162.  Unfortunately, it has no illustrations, but I've collected some from other sources. Note the tails sticking out from under the Hulders's skirts.

A Miraculous Bloom

This plant has been in our office for years; then suddenly it decides to bloom.  JB freaks out and insists that I put it on my blog. Okie doke!

Ghosts and Other Characters

On Sunday Laureen joined me for a viewing of the 1963 classic The Haunting. (See Laureen above with 2 of her fans, as well as Claire Bloom and Julie Harris.)  In a good (or even great) ghost story, the ghost is not merely something that says "boo," but a real (dead) character with psychological connections to the other characters.
 The Haunting is one of my favorite spook-flicks.  Every time I watch it I notice little things I'd missed before.  Of course, I can't think of an example now.

I continue to probe the mysteries of old TV shows.  I just finished seeing several episodes of Biff Baker, U.S.A. featuring character actor Alan Hale (aka "The Skipper").  Though still in his early 30s, Hale's signature character had already jelled into a hearty, jolly, joking, unpolished regular guy.  In this case, he was a regular guy defending American interests all over the world accompanied by his equally jolly wife.  It isn't very good, but it's a source for American post-war psychology.

Of course, when dealing with Alan Hale, the question that always comes up is whether he is related to Barbara Hale (aka "Della Street").  IMDB.com mentions nothing, but nothing mentioned is not proof of nothing being there.  The fact that they both appeared in The Giant Spider Invasion suggests a blood connection: why else would they act in that turkey of a flick?

Speaking of character, recently a research assistant approached our ref desk with a strange request.  Her boss wanted to do some kind of scientific psychological measurement of people who had just read various kinds of literature, such as fiction with characters and fiction without characters.  She needed to find some examples of fiction without characters: no human characters, no animal characters, no alien characters, and no anthropomorphized objects.  No characters.  Not surprisingly, she couldn't find any examples.

For the benefit of Science, I wish to fill this literary lacuna...

The House

A piece of fiction

There's a house on Maple St. with white aluminum siding and a dark green pitched roof.  It has a front door in the front and a back door in the back.  It has a front yard in front and a back yard in back.


Furthermore, it looks just like every other house on Maple St.  This house has no character.

Miscellaneous

I finished The Bones of Avalon.  I don't usually go for historical novels, but I love Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series.  So I was waiting for the next one to come, and instead out came The Bones of Avalon.  I did enjoy it.  It had many of the same themes as the Merrily Watkins series: mysticism, murder, church politics.  It takes place in Elizabethan times, but Rickman only slightly antiqued his language.  In his afterword he thanks various linguists for their advice which he ended up mostly not taking since, "a strict adherence to Elizabethan written structures and terminology would only have made it sound stilted in ways it never would have been at the time."  Fair enough.  He has a great talent for taking masses of material and making it into a riveting story

Speaking of stilted language, I was thinking about the pronoun thou, which is no longer used by most speakers of English, but which used to be the informal form of you--the form you'd use for family, close friends, or people you were insulting.  Nowadays we mostly hear it used in prayers and hymns, so that it has formal, exalted associations.   That's why The Philadelphia Story had this scene between Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and a Quaker Librarian

Librarian: What is thee wish?
Macaulay Connor: I'm looking for some local b - what'd you say?
Librarian: What is thee wish?
Macaulay Connor: Um, local biography or history.
Librarian: If thee will consult with my colleague in there.
Macaulay Connor: Mm-hm. Dost thou have a washroom?
[the librarian points]
Macaulay Connor: Thank thee

It's hilarious to use a holy, exalted word in the same sentence with washroom--at least from the Judeo-Christian viewpoint.

In other news, we had pizza for lunch in the office today.

I think this must be a magic mushroom pizza.

We've Gone Over to the Dark Side (of the Year)

Now that Daylight Savings Time is in effect, it's dark when I finish work.  I feel like I should just go to bed.

This is what it looks like from my office window shortly before five.  By the time I leave, the creatures of the night have begun to emerge.

A Ghostly Omen?

As my regular readers know, I recently bemoaned the absense of The Bird's Nest from the Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson's work.  Then, what should show up on the hedge in front of Lamont but an actual bird's nest!

Perhaps, as Steve suggested, a tree-pruner found the nest and placed it there.....or, could it be a sign from the ghost of Shirley Jackson signaling her agreement with me?
UPDATE:  The LOA is planning another volume that will include The Bird's Nest.  So I guess I will have to retract my haunting-curse on J.C. Oates.

What Are Ghosts Anyway?

Yesterday in the staff room Chris and I were talking about supernatural fiction.  He was saying that ghost stories were, in a sense, out of date, since people don't believe in ghosts anymore. How could a modern person get scared?  Only movies could do the job with their appalling special effects.

I was struggling to explain my own love of some supernatural fiction; fiction in which the ghosts are taken seriously as characters and there is real character development.  I kept getting stuck in my explanations.  I think the ghost has to have a psychological connection with a living character, but I don't want to say that the ghost symbolizes somebody's repressed something-or-other.  Then people are bound to think I mean it is just in the character's mind. "Just in somebody's mind" usually means, "It's not real."  It means one is taking a pitying or smug attitude towards that character:  "Poor thing!  She's obviously nuts." (I hate studies of The Turn of the Screw that take that attitude.)  I'm a Jungian; I believe in the reality of the psyche.  I think the mind is more than an epiphenomenon of the brain.  I believe in Rupert Sheldrake's "extended mind."  As far as ghosts go, I neither believe nor disbelieve that ghostly phenomenon are spirits of the dead.  So if a ghost in a story is acting out some unconscious complex of a living character, that doesn't diminish the reality of the ghost character at all.

And, speaking of supernatural fiction, I had been eagerly awaiting the Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson's work.  In particular, I was looking forward to owning her novel The Bird's Nest, which is not available new at a reasonable price.  (I read the Widener copy.)  I could have bought a grimey old paperback, but I would so much prefer to reread it printed on crackling fresh new pages.  But what a disappointment!  The editor of that edition, Joyce Carol Oates, didn't think The Bird's Nest was good enough to include.  In fact, in the interview of the LOA site, Oates admiration of Jackson sounded rather restrained. She also makes that distinction (which I disdain) between ghosts that are "psychological" and ones that are "real" I am pissed, and I hope Oates gets thouroughly haunted by Jackson's ghost.
UPDATE:  The LOA is planning another volume that will include The Bird's Nest.  So I guess I will have to retract my haunting-curse on J.C. Oates.