The Turn of the Screw ~ Henry James October 31, 2004

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too horrible.” This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful — dreadfulness!”

“Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.”

It’s amazing how much James does with so little. Even though The Turn of the Screw is more straightforward and more active than most of his other work (stuff actually happens in this story) it’s still full of his characteristic psychological subtlety. You can imagine how a tale of besieged governesses, menacing ghosts and posessed children would work out in the hands of another writer, but James sticks you inside the head of this harassed young woman and you don’t know if she’s extraordinarily insightful and courageous or completely crazy. That’s where the horror is. I love how James takes the Victorian ideal of children as angelic innocents and turns them into terrifying monsters. And I always forget how much I love his prose. It’s difficult but it’s worth the effort. He’ll have pages of complex, rambling paragraphs, and then finish with a short, sharp sentence that’s like a punch in the gut. The whole thing’s like that really, a slow build-up of foreboding and paranoia that just stops, suddenly, with a jolt. One of those books that should be read in the dead of winter before a roaring fire.

The Raven October 30, 2004

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore-

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

the rest of the poem

It wouldn’t be Halloween without a little Poe. In high school my friends and I made a video of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” complete with heart-beat sound effects. I got to play the murderer, slicked my hair back and really chewed the scenery, pounding on the floor and shrieking:”Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!” Great fun.

*Edited to add: Check out this book trailer for Coraline, made by some Italian film students.

The Indigestion of the Vampire October 29, 2004

Look at this red pear

Hanging from a good family

Where the butcher hung the rag on the tree.

The bat’s bloated again,

Hooked on his dark nimbus

Getting over it.

Here is the cure of pity

Upside down.

Elsewhere the laundry

Is buried,

The deer tracks left by his teeth

Look for the cross-roads,

The veins that are still good

Hold out their hands.

Here’s his story.

His bridges are not burned only folded.

In a while the swollen life

He calls his own

Will shrink back till it fits the mirrors,

No worse for no wear;

The eyes will come

To conceal movement again;

He will find his voice to fly by.

That’s how he does it: rock-a-bye,

Hanging there with his silence all wool

And others at heart,

Two pounds in his pound bag,

Shaped like a tear but

Not falling for anyone.

–W.S. Merwin

There’s a whole page of bat poetry here, everything from Roethke and Dickinson and Tennyson and Plath to poems sent in by grade school kids. Link found via Choriamb, a kick-ass poetry blog that I shall be linking to forthwith.

creepy folklore October 28, 2004

From ghoulies and ghosties

and long leggety beasties,

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us—Cornish prayer

Under earth I go,

On the oak-leaf I stand,

I ride on the filly that never was foaled,

And I carry the dead in my hand.—Scots traditional

For the moon’s shining high

And the dew is wet;

And on the mossy moor,

they’re dancing yet.—Cornish rhyme

–as found in Charles DeLint’s The Little Country

Coraline October 27, 2004

The old black key felt colder than any of the others. She pushed it into the keyhole. It turned smoothly, with a satisfying clunk.

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone as if they’d never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

She wondered what the empty flat would be like–if that was where the corridor led. Coraline walked down the corridor uneasily. There was something very familiar about it.

The carpet beneath her feet was the same carpet they had in her flat. The wallpaper was the same wallpaper they had. The picture hanging in the hall was the same that they had hanging in their hallway at home.

She knew where she was: she was in her own home. She hadn’t left.

She shook her head, confused.

She stared at the picture hanging on the wall: no, it wasn’t exactly the same. The picture they had in their own hallway showed a boy in old-fashioned clothes staring at some bubbles. But now the expression on his face was different–he was looking at the bubbles as if he was planning to do something very nasty indeed to them. And there was something peculiar about his eyes.

Coraline stared at his eyes, trying to figure out what exactly was different.

She almost had it when somebody said, “Coraline?”

It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only…

Only her skin was white as paper.

Only she was taller and thinner.

Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.

“Coraline?” the woman said. “Is that you?”

And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.

“Lunchtime, Coraline,” said the woman.

“Who are you?” asked Coraline.

“I’m your other mother,” said the woman. “Go and tell your other father that lunch is ready.”

The moral of the story: unlocking doors that usually open onto brick walls is always a bad idea. Don’t miss this MPR interview with Gaiman where he reads this excerpt and others. I mean, if you like getting the heebie-jeebies, that is.

Macbeth October 26, 2004

A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron. Thunder.

Enter the three Witches.

FIRST WITCH: Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.

SECOND WITCH: Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.

THIRD WITCH: Harpier cries, “‘Tis time, ’tis time.”

FIRST WITCH: Round about the cauldron go;

In the poison’d entrails throw.

Toad, that under cold stone

Days and nights has thirty-one

Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH: Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

THIRD WITCH: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf

Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,

Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,

Liver of blaspheming Jew,

Gall of goat and slips of yew

Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,

Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

Finger of birth-strangled babe

Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,

Make the gruel thick and slab.

Add thereto a tiger’s chawdron,

For the ingredients of our cauldron.

ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH: Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

Enter Hecate to the other three Witches.



HECATE: O, well done! I commend your pains,

And everyone shall share i’ the gains.

And now about the cauldron sing,

Like elves and fairies in a ring,

Enchanting all that you put in.

Music and a song, “Black spirits.”

Hecate retires.



SECOND WITCH: By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

–Act IV, Scene I.

Hope I haven’t just cursed my blog…

countdown to Halloween October 25, 2004

Halloween. My most favorite night in all the year, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury (I’m kicking myself for leaving From the Dust Returned at home). So I’m posting spooky bits and whatnot all week. Just finished Beowulf for class:

A few miles from here

a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch

above a mere; the overhanging bank

is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.

At night there, something uncanny happens:

the water burns. And the mere bottom

has never been sounded by the sons of men.

On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:

the hart in flight from pursuing hounds

will turn to face them with firm-set horns

and die in the wood rather than dive

beneath its surface. That is no good place.

***

On a height they kindled the hugest of all

funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke

billowed darkly up, the blaze roared

and drowned out their weeping, wind died down

and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,

burning it to the core. They were disconsolate

and wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

with hair bound up, she unburdened herself

of her worst fears, a wild litany

of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,

enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Seamus Heaney’s translation, of course!

I thank God I wore my corset because I think my sides have split.* October 24, 2004

For some mysterious reason, the university library has the Complete Blackadder DVD box set. So I’ve been spending the weekend with Darling and Melchett and Baldrick and trying to figure out what course could possibly require you to watch old Britcoms (is there an English Humor 101 or something?) If I had 100 bucks I’d buy the set; it’s worth it just for the scene in Blackadder Back and Forth, where our antihero hops in his time machine and has a run-in with Will Shakespeare (Colin Firth, in a cameo where pretty much all he does is wear tights and get smacked around by Rowan Atkinson):

Blackadder : [punches Shakespeare] That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years! Have you any idea how much suffering you’re going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find ONE joke in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”. Wearing stupid tights in school plays saying things like, “What ho, my Lord,” and, “Oh, look, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual.” And THAT [kicks Shakespeare] is for Ken Branagh’s endless, four-hour version of Hamlet!

William Shakespeare : Who’s Ken Branagh?

Blackadder : I’ll tell him you said that, and I think he’ll be rather hurt…

Just starting on the DVD for Blackadder III, where all the episode titles are spoofs of Jane Austen: Dish & Dishonesty, Ink & Incapability, Sense & Senility, etc.

god I wish I had BBC America.

*it’s funnier when Rowan Atkinson says it in a voice dripping with sarcasm, but I couldn’t think of a better title…

It’s official October 23, 2004

Once you’ve marched in the Rural Small Town’s Homecoming Parade with the local chapter of NOW, holding a LESBIAN RIGHTS NOW sign, you’ve earned the title of Big Dyke on Campus. I should make a super-hero cape or something. I intend to use my powers only for good! Got a few cheers from friends, and was otherwise met with a sea of stony glares, so it went well. The parade organizers had NOW marching behind the truck for our Republican congresswoman’s re-election campaign, and I can’t decide if it was intentionally ironic or not.

I ought to be working on a paper about Anne Bradstreet. She’s actually a pretty interesting anomaly, a Puritan proto-feminist poet, quite an “azoological beast” as Graves put it. And what’s more, she’s actually good:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits,

A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

For such despite they cast on female wits:

If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

–The Prologue

Which is more than you can say for her male collegues (seriously, if you can slog through Michael Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” with out passing out you’re a better student than I). I’ll either write on “The Author to Her Book” or “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”, both of which are pretty unusual. Especially the latter; I was expecting it to be all motherhood romanticism and warm fuzzies, but it’s actually a striking death letter to her husband.

But I’ll probably spend the day reading Evelina and finishing The Turn of the Screw, which is getting really good. The governess has just had her midnight show-down with the ghost of Peter Quint and it’s all very ominous and portentious.

blather October 19, 2004

via FrogBlog

Hardback or Paperback I have a thing for hardbacks, but I can’t usually afford them.

Highlight or Underline underline

Lewis or Tolkien Tolkein. He doesn’t hit you over the head with his religious themes.

E.B. White or A.A. Milne Milne

T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings Oooh gosh…I’m gonna go with Eliot right now. I’m quite in love with “La Figlia Che Piange” at the moment.

Stephen King or Dean Koontz mm. King, if I must.

Barnes & Noble or Borders B&N. fuckin’ Borders. they’ve got nothing in stock and their employees are obviously hired for their coffee-brewing skills and nothing else.

Waldenbooks or B. Dalton B. Dalton, but they both suck.

Fantasy or Science Fiction fantasy

Horror or Suspense suspense. I can’t handle straight-up horror.

Bookmark or Dogear both.

Large Print or Fine Print fine print

Hemingway or Faulkner Ugh. Hemingway, but only because I haven’t read Faulkner.

Fitzgerald or Steinbeck Steinbeck, no question.

Homer or Plato Homer. Give me a poet over a philosopher any day (sorry L).

Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser Chaucer

Pen or Pencil Pencil.

Looseleaf or Notepad looseleaf

Alphabetize: By Author or By Title by author

Shelve: By Genre/Subject or All Books Together throw ‘em all together

Dustjacket: Leave it On or Take it Off take it off when I’m reading, otherwise it gets all messed up

Novella or Epic well it depends on the epic, I think. But at the moment I only have time for novellas, really.

John Grisham or Scott Turow bleh.

J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket J.K. Rowling, though I’d love to try out Snicket

John Irving or John Updike again, bleh.

Salman Rushdie or Don Delillo excuse me, but where are the female authors? neither.

Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte Oh here they are! Good thing I added them in, huh? Both, of course!

Dorothy L. Sayers or Agatha Christie Sayers. I have a soft spot for M. Poirot, but there’s just no comparison with Lord Peter Wimsey

George Eliot or Edith Wharton Eliot, she’s less depressing.

Toni Morrison or Alice Walker Morrison, because Beloved is astounding and unfortunately I haven’t read any Alice Walker.

Fiction or Non-fiction fiction

Historical Biography or Historical Romance biography, if by “romance” you mean Harlequin bodice-rippers. But I’m a huge historical fiction geek.

Reading Pace: A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter wait, you mean I ought to put it down once in a while…?

Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay short story, especially if they’re written by Byatt.

Blah Blah Blah or Yada Yada Yada blah.

“It was a dark and stormy night…” or “Once upon a time…” Oh, Bulwer-Lytton all the way! “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets…”

Books: Buy or Borrow Borrow, out of financial necessity. Sending me into a bookstore is like sending an alcoholic into a bar.

Book Reviews or Word of Mouth Reviews, actually, but only from folks like Bookslut or Green Man.

The highlight of my day was not my birthday itself, though that was nice, but finding this screensaver of critical theorists. I don’t know about you but I know that as a kid I always wished I had Lego versions of literary critics; it would have made playing Make-Believe Conference of Post-Modern Academics so much easier!

I bought Melissa Etheridge’s new CD today; I like it, it’s good driving music. But I feel a little cliche all the same.