thebookishowl.com

Peter Nevin's album artwork

On November 20th, 2010, at 1:46 PM, I received an e-mail from C.S.E. Cooney titled, “I got walls to build, I got riots to quell, and they’re giving me Hell back in Hades.”

If you know Claire at all, you’ll understand why I received this intelligence with equanimity. Of course she does; of course they are. Poor fools. They’ll soon learn better, and be begging our Claire for one cool disdainful look cast from beneath her mighty lashes.

If you don’t know Claire at all, I highly recommend the acquaintance.

I confess, however, to being somewhat surprised by the body of the message, which went as follows:

Hades and Cerberus

You don’t even KNOW!

Unless you did — and you didn’t TELL ME!

Aaaauuggggghhhh!!!

Hadestown — a folk rock opera with GREG BROWN!

Why? Why not until THIS MORNING???

Francesca Forrest sent me this. Now I must own the rest.

Attached was an mp3 of a song called “Hey Little Songbird.” I listened. It was a duet between Hades and Eurydice, Greg Brown and Anaïs Mitchell. I liked it. I said, in reply:

He has a voice made of marrow and whiskey and deep-reaching, tangling roots.

I quite liked hers, too — short of breath, desperate, confused, attracted. Mmm.

May need to listen to whole thing!

"And I could use a canary…" – Hades

Do you see that? The contrast? I liked it — but Claire was passionate, drunk on her Greg, adoring, in the first flush of her love and need to share that love, and I was, I confess, a little wary of disappointing her with my lukewarm “like.” I mean, it’s a good song! Sure! I was interested in hearing more!

Then Claire sent me the album for my birthday, and I listened to that song in context. Context, my dears, is all and everything. Since receiving the gorgeously illustrated treasure of that album in the middle of December, I have listened to it, on average, twice a day, and am completely, unabashedly, extraordinarily in love with it.

Orpheus and Eurydice

I am not exaggerating. I have spared you a paragraph in which I calculated how I know it’s an average of twice a day. Just trust me on that.

According to the website, Hadestown is “a folk opera based on the Orpheus myth and set in a post-apocalyptic American Depression era.” The songs are written by Anaïs Mitchell, the score is by Michael Chorney, and it’s produced by Todd Sickafoose.

It features Anaïs Mitchell as Eurydice, Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) as Orpheus, Greg Brown as Hades, Ani DiFranco as Persephone, Ben Knox Miller (of The Low Anthem) as Hermes, and the Haden triplets as the Fates. Together, they enact the story of Eurydice’s descent into Hades—but set in a world where people have to choose between singing and eating, the freedom of starvation or the slavery of endless work.

"The trees are gonna lay the wedding table…" – Orpheus

Even having listened to the whole album through as many time as I have, it keeps finding new ways to surprise me: some musical nuance here, some new way to read the lyrics there. Writing this review is difficult because, so far, I have never had to explain to someone how and why it is brilliant; all I’ve had to do is gift friends with a copy, or point them towards the website and let them be seduced by Peter Nevins’ brilliant art. Nevertheless, I will try to do it justice.

Rather than sum up each song, I will point you to the libretto. Go, read it. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Back? Good.

"Our Lady of the Upside Down… Persephone!"

Let me tell you about their voices. Eurydice’s is balsamic glaze over melting chocolate, ache and sorrow and hunger and loss. Orpheus is a three-part harmony with himself; I think of his character as a cloud of bees, rising, settling, because his voice is so diffuse, otherworldly. Hades’ voice is subterranean, black rock and vibration that must be felt rather than heard. Persephone’s voice is a swaying of hips, a smile full of secrets, a wisdom and a joy. Hermes is a ragged gritty growl, the Fates are poised and perfect and enmeshed as loom-work.

Over the course of twenty tracks, Hadestown sets up a number of dichotomies: poverty and wealth, nature and industry, freedom and enslavement. These dichotomies are reflected in the relationships we’re shown: Eurydice is hungry, desires work and material wealth, while Orpheus airily says the river, trees, and birds will provide for them; Hades builds solid walls around his kingdom, while Persephone plies contraband stars, wind, and rain there unbeknownst to him.

The Return of Persephone (Leighton 1891)

These dichotomies never resolve themselves: they’re halves that need each other, keep reaching for each other, but never mix, never balance out. That’s the tragedy of the piece – that everyone fails to be anything but themselves alone, and we’re left wondering whether the world is as flawed as it is because of that, or whether their failures are the fault of the world that won’t allow them to succeed.

This is important. The first twenty or so times I listened to this, I was furious at Orpheus for being what Hades characterised him as: “some kind of poet, and he’s penniless…He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.” I thought Orpheus was weak, too dreamy by half, and resented his voice for being a chorus, for being something I couldn’t pinpoint solidly enough to confront.

But the more I listened, the more I discussed it with my sister, my father, my friends, the more I saw how many more ways there are of reading their performances: how much love is bound up with how much anguish, how many facets there are to the diamonds, the wine glasses, the bricks in the wall. Orpheus’ songs are among my favourites, now, and increasingly there is no one song that isn’t brushed by the genius of the whole. This is modern mythmaking: characters that allow us to see ourselves in them, our struggles in theirs, our hopes and failures in their actions and reactions.

"Nothing changes anyhow…" – The Fates

This is running long, so I’ll focus on just one song to rave about in depth: “Why We Build the Wall.”

If there was any song I’d choose as a single from the album, this would be it. It’s a recursive call-and-response song, in which Hades asks his worker-citizens why they are building the wall that separates Hadestown from the rest of the world. Every question he asks invites an answer: why do we build the wall? We build the wall to keep us free. How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy, and we build the wall to keep us free. Each answer is layered over its predecessor like so many bricks, with Hades’ voice the mortar that binds them together – until the very end:

HADES
What do we have that they should want?
My children, my children
What do we have that they should want?

WORKER-CITIZENS
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
We build the wall to keep us free

The wall is a closed circle of logic that permits nothing in or out. There is never any harmonic variance in this song, nothing to distinguish the mass of voices from each other as they all labour at the same task for the same nonsensical and self-fulfilling reason: to keep poverty out by means of walling themselves in, to claim freedom through enslavement. It’s the kind of song that’s jarringly relevant to any kind of conflict where language and perception are weapons to be manipulated and deployed—which is to say, just about all of them.

Hadestown succeeds on every level for me: musically, it is rich and complex, masterfully composed; lyrically, it is wise and knowing, every step calculated and deliberate, with shadows fore and aft rippling through it all; the performances are unbelievably brilliant.

If there is any flaw, it’s that it’s over too soon; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice having been so cleverly adapted in the first two acts, I thought the third would bring some further nuance yet – which it does, with the reverse elegy, but I felt there was, perhaps, just room enough for a little more, a little further unpacking and adapting of the myth to so original a setting.

This is a review wanting desperately to be a thorough and nuanced article. It is not. But this is the danger of Hadestown: if you want to get to the bottom land, it’s a long, long way down, and the getting out’s tricky: I haven’t been able to keep my back turned to it for more than a day.

Black Gate

We here at Romantic Circles recently received an intriguing email we thought was worth passing on, from one Vicki Parslow Stafford:

I would like to bring to the attention of Romantic scholars, historians and biographers a collection of letters held by the Somerset Record Office which establishes the identity of the father of Mary Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Mary Jane Godwin (nee Vial) and stepsister of Mary Shelley.

The letters span the period from 1797, when Mary Jane Vial’s daughter was conceived, until early 1814.  They were formerly held by Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Somerset, UK.  The collection comprises holograph letters from Mary Jane Vial to her former lover John Lethbridge, of Sandhill Park, Somerset; to his lawyer Robert Beadon; and to several others.  It also contains letters from Lethbridge to his lawyer, and sundry file notes and correspondence from Mary Jane Vial’s lawyer William Lambert White, of Yeovil.  The correspondence is concerned with securing financial support for Mary Jane, Vial’s daughter with John Lethbridge.  It includes a number of letters written by Vial between April and August 1799, when she was imprisoned for debt at Ilchester.

The documents are archived at Somerset Archive and Record Service http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/archives/, catalogue reference DD\DP 17/11, Papers of Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Lethbridge estate papers (correspondence concerning Mary Jane Vial).

The Somerset County Archives and the depositors have kindly granted me permission to transcribe the letters and make the transcriptions available to scholars and interested persons, through publication on a web site.  The transcriptions can be viewed on my website Claire Clairmont, Mary Jane’s Daughter, at https://sites.google.com/site/maryjanesdaughter/home

Please be aware that I am not a Romantic scholar or historian (I am an alumnus of the the University of Queensland but my professional experience is in disability policy and program development).  I have a keen amateur interest in genealogy, and came across this collection while researching an ancestor also named Mary Vial.  As a consequence, my website may well not meet the Romatic Circle’s rigorous standards for electronic resources.

Nevertheless, I would be pleased if you would take whatever steps you consider appropriate to advise your members and readers of the existence of this previously unpublished material. I am sure it will be of interest to many.  I would also be very glad to receive any criticisms of the content of the website and suggestions for its improvement.

With regards,

Vicki Parslow Stafford

vpstafford ~[at]~ optusnet.com.au

Romantic Circles Blog

Eric here!

I’m currently teaching an upper-division (advanced undergraduate) course on popular romance fiction at DePaul: my 20th course on the genre, or something like that. We’re reading a half-dozen novels over the quarter, loosely grouped under three broad topics: “Romance and Patriarchy,” “Romance and Religion,” and “Romance and Aesthetics.” The novels, in order, are:

Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation
Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down
Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love
Alex Beecroft, False Colors
Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer

I’ve taught all of these before, except for the Rivers–which was, I should say, a huge hit in the classroom, teaching extremely well in conjunction with Lynn Neal’s book Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction and with Catherine Roach’s essay, “Getting a Good Man to Love,” published in the first issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

I thought it might be interesting for those of you not taking the class to see the sorts of paper topics my students have to grapple with.

In my next post, I’ll give you the topics for paper #2, which focused on Rivers, Beecroft, or Herendeen. The first set of paper topics were focused on our first pair of novels–the Crusie and the Dahl. The paper was to be 6-8 pages long, double-spaced, in 11 or 12 point type, “with a clear line of argument throughout” (heh). Here are the options I offered:

1. As we discussed in class, Jennifer Crusie’s novel Welcome to Temptation can be read as a response to claims by first-generation romance scholars about the romance genre. Ideas from Janice Radway, in particular, seem to appear in the narrative; it may be that ideas from other early critics, like Tania Modleski and Ann Barr Snitow, can be seen there as well. Write an essay on Welcome to Temptation as a response to one or more of these critics. Does it offer a counter-theory of its own, perhaps connected to Crusie’s own ideas about the genre? Be sure to draw on specific passages from both the primary and secondary texts to make your case.

2. Starting in the the late 1990s, Jennifer Crusie set about defending the romance genre in a variety of academic and popular venues. Read the essays on the genre gathered on her website, and write an essay on Welcome to Temptation that shows how this novel illustrates (or does not illustrate, in some interesting way) this romance author’s theory of her genre, both as art and as feminist practice.

3. As we noticed in class discussion, Welcome to Temptation is a pervasively allusive and citational text. Crusie’s characters (and perhaps her narrator as well) quote from, mention, or echo movies, Dusty Springfield songs, and other material from popular culture; the novel also echoes or invokes canonical texts, including the Bible and, arguably, such 19th-century authors of American “romance” as Hawthorne and Poe. For your paper, please choose one of these sets of allusions and explore its importance to and implications for our reading the novel. OR, if you prefer, write an essay on what this pervasive citational quality suggests about the ideas that this novel embodies about romance fiction, romance reading, and / or romantic love.

4. In her essay, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” Catherine Roach discusses popular romance novels as, among other things, the promulgators of “erotic faith.” With her essay in mind, consider the dialogue with Christianity that we found in Welcome to Temptation, particularly the novel’s revisions of such topoi as temptation, the fall, the devil, knowledge (of good and evil, or of something else). Don’t forget the characters’ names! What exactly is the theology of this novel of “erotic faith”? How does it compare to or contrast with the ideas articulated by Roach?

5. In our early discussions of Wendell and Tan’s Beyond Heaving Bosoms, many of you were interested in the recurring hero and heroine character types to be found in popular romance fiction. Choosing either Welcome to Temptation or Talk Me Down—or, if you prefer, working by comparison and contrast—discuss how Crusie and / or Dahl work with these conventions to construct either the romance hero or the romance heroine. Feel free to think about how the male or female lead of the novel is set off by contrasting characters; for example, how might Molly and Brenda compare to the heroine / villainess pairs found in “old-school” romance novels, in the BHB description?

6. As we discussed in class, both Welcome to Temptation and Talk Me Down can be read as metafiction: romance novels about popular romance fiction, its readers, its effects on readers, and its reputation. What, though, does this reading illuminate in each novel, either as idea or as artistry? How can we use this approach to make each novel as interesting as possible? Choose one novel and read it through this lens; or, if you prefer, compare and contrast the novels as metafiction, with an eye to their differences at the levels of idea and / or artistry.

7. As we discussed in class, both Welcome to Temptation and Talk Me Down are concerned with the shifting, complex relationships between the world of our desires—fantasy, fiction, hope, romance—and the world of “reality,” which is often (though perhaps not always) a grimmer, more frightening, more frustrating, more disappointing place. Several scholars and defenders of the genre, including Tania Modleski, Janice Radway, and Catherine Roach, have discussed it in terms of “wish-fulfillment,” a “reparation fantasy,” a “safe space” in which anxieties and ambivalent feelings can be assuaged or healed; others, including Jennifer Crusie, have insisted that “romance fiction is reality fiction.” Choose one of the two novels and trace the evolving relationships between fantasy and reality in the book, with an eye to how these may shift from the start of the novel to the end. If you wish, you may try to extrapolate a theory about the genre more generally from your text; however, you do not need to do so.

8. Some of our most interesting discussions so far have circled back to the enduring debate over what it might mean to talk about romance fiction as “porn for women”: a debate that is re-opened rather explicitly (no pun intended) by each of our first two novels. Drawing on Snitow’s original essay, on Berlant and Warner’s essay “Sex in Public,” on contemporary debates about porn culture, “sex-positive feminism,” and feminist porn (did you know there are “Feminist Porn Awards”), write an essay on one or both of our first two novels. What do Crusie and / or Dahl suggest about the status of popular romance fiction as “porn for women,” or about what is at stake in the debate itself? How might ideas from outside the romance / romance scholarship community (i.e., the discussions of heteronormativity in Berlant or others) illuminate the explorations and the “policing” of female desire and sexuality in one or both of these novels?

9. E-Curious variation: using the same texts and topics, compare and contrast Dahl’s Talk Me Down, published in print by HQN, with The Wicked West, published only in ebook form and written at a double remove (by Dahl as Molly as Holly). How do the explorations and limitations differ when Dahl steps into the (perhaps) more open genre of “erotic romance” and into the (perhaps) more open arena of electronic publishing? How do the texts differ in their negotiations with heteronormativity?

10. Having read two romance novels, several of you wanted to discuss the differences that you saw between Crusie and Dahl in terms of literary complexity, writing style, “fun,” and other aesthetic categories. For this essay, use your subjective response to these contrasting authors to explore their contrasting aesthetics. Rather than rank the novels against some ostensibly neutral or objective rubric—good writing does X; good books do Y; good authors don’t (but I do)—try to identify the contrasting goals or projects of the two texts, and describe the way each author’s style and / or structure helps her achieve that goal. (For example, if you notice one or both of these authors using stock language or trying to provoke stock responses in the reader, don’t assume that these are always bad things, as creative writing workshop leaders often suggest. Rather, think about how and why each author might deploy them, in the particular context, and what that might tell us about the text.)

11. One of the topics that quite interested a few of you in the first few days of class was the Smart Bitches’ account of the sexual education—and miseducation—provided by popular romance novels. Each of the novels we have read so far might be read as a didactic text, one that aims to correct earlier romance pedagogy and teach its own sexual curriculum. Looking closely at one or both of our novels, what exactly does this didactic project look like in practice? What corrections to previous romance tropes do we find? What lessons are taught, either explicitly or implicitly? Given the themes of the novel, why might we see precisely these scenes of instruction, in this order? Feel free to move from this specifically sexual topic into a broader consideration of the novel (or novels) as didactic art. What else does the text seem bent on teaching its readers, and how is that lesson conveyed?

Teach Me Tonight

Read FBC Review of The Hammer
Read FBC Review of Blue and Gold
Read FBC Review of The Folding Knife
Read FBC Review of Purple and Black
Read FBC Review of A Rich Full Week (ss from anthology)
Read FBC Review of The Scavenger Trilogy

Subterranean Press keeps publishing wonderful stuff from KJ Parker, so after the two superb novellas Blue and Gold and Purple and Black, there are two short stories published in their magazine, one in the Summer of 2010 edition and one in the Winter 2011 one, as well as another story in their upcoming anthology Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 which will be published later in the Spring and has already a review from us done and scheduled tbp in April.

Here I will discuss these three stories and while the anthology one will be available only later, the other two are available free online so you can read them now!

************************************************

Amor Vincia Omnit (read it HERE) is a story set in the same milieu as A Rich Full Week with strong similarities with the world of The Fencer trilogy, where magic is both science – as the magicians see it – and religion as the regular people see it. There are “brothers”, “adepts”, the Studium, the curriculum and then on graduation the degrees of proficiency and adept ranks and the classically named spells that add so much to the depth: Choris Anthrop, Unam Sanctum….

Amor Vincia Omnit follows another Studium scholar sent to deal with a problem as in a Rich Full Week, though in this case, the issue is possibly of a truly exceptional nature: an untrained magician of great raw talent possibly solved “Lorica”, a far reaching conjecture in magic hoped to be unsolvable by the powers to be and became invincible for all practical purposes, though of course he does not realize it and behaves like a child with a match.

Our hero Framea, a bright rising star of the Studium is sent to investigate and solve the problem at all costs, and in the author’s expected style, at all costs means precisely that and we are treated to a suspensful but quite dark story that is as good an introduction to KJ Parker’s work as anything.

************************************************

A Small Price to Pay for a Birdsong (read it HERE) is set in a world similar to the ones of Blue and Gold, Purple and Black, The Folding Knife, The Company and The Hammer, which are what our world would have looked like were it to continue unbroken from the classical Greek-Roman world without a messianic religion and the idea of progress it brought.

So no magic, but a deep sense of history and priceless moments in which the narrator, a talented musician who scrapped his way up from the lower classes to a (non-tenured yet) professorship at the Academy, muses on the irony of fate when dealing with an unstable musical genius who tries to wiggle his way out of hanging for some stupid bar brawl killing…

Twists and turns including one at the end that I really did not see though it was hinted subtly in retrospect and a great story about art, society and the relationship between the two. Characters rather than action shine here and I strongly recomend this one too.

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A Room with a View is also set in the milieu of the Studium as the first story above and it is shorter and for the most part funnier though being a KJ Parker story it turns darker at the end. I really laughed out loud page after page at the musings of our hero, an underachieving “wizard” seen as of of great potential as a child, but who barely qualified as adept and on failing in job interview after job interview has become a “list freelance adept” called upon for the most unpleasant jobs the local masters need extra people with magic for.

In this case looking into the minds of thousands of imported dogs in a border town to make sure they do not bring “demons” in the country and to top it all, having to do a mentoring job which our narrator utterly hates; more than the dogs actually…

The story has the most detail about the magical system of the author with the “rooms” and what they are and how you move there and there are quotes after quotes that represent KJ Parker at the author’s best. The ending is twisty and darker as mentioned though I felt this story needed an extra page or two and it would have been perfect; still an excellent one!

“Fundamentally, I believe, comedy and tragedy are the same thing, right up to the end. At the end, in comedy they get out of the mess they’re in and live happily ever after. In tragedy, they all die. But there’s a tipping point, a moment when it’s so evenly balanced it could go either way”

Overall these three stories published by Subterranean confirm why KJ Parker is at the top of the genre today in terms of creativity, originality and subtlety!

Fantasy Book Critic

The much heralded First Official Pop Lit Story Opening Contest will begin next week, at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

The contest will start as soon as I post the official announcement at American Pop Lit. Writers can then immediately post their best Opening. The idea might be to be at or near the top of the line, though some strategists may disagree with this.

I have a few details to work out. I can mention now that there will be prizes for the three winners. There will be a scoring system. I hope to have a few judges, for fairness. The maximum length allowed to an entry will be 200 words– and I will be counting! Those entries which exceed the limit will be disqualified in red letters.

Stay posted to this site for more news.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Price: 2.99

Current Bids: 0

This is a Hardcover Book with Paper Dustcover Like New First Edition! Check out my listings for other Great Deals! Good Luck and Great Bidding!

doublefeature* science fiction

Fueled by several adult beverages, someone recently asked me what I would take with me, should I know in advance that I was about to be stranded on a deserted island.

The question was a set up, so this highly evolved individual could answer his own question with “beer.”

Partially to be a smart ass, but mostly because it was the truth, my answer was “a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and PEZ.”

PEZ immediately came to mind for tiny little bites of happiness that always lift my spirits, whether eaten out of my Wolfman dispenser or not. Hitchhikers, being one of my most often quoted book / TV epic / radio show is never far from being an answer to any query. However, I thought of it even quicker than usual being that I’m currently listening to the audio book for about the hundredth time.

It never, ever gets old, especially with the late, great Douglas Adams reading it to me.

I’m at the part where Ford Prefect, the alien from a small planet in the general vicinity of Beetleguise, is explaining to Earthman Arthur Dent, how Ford managed to get to the Earth in the first place. He hitched a lift with what Ford explains is a “Teaser.”

Ford tells Arthur that a “Teaser” is a rich kid with nothing better to do, who seeks out planets which have not yet made interstellar contact, then finds a poor schmuck in the middle of nowhere who no one will ever believe and lands in their yard wearing fake antennae, then parades up and down making ‘bleep bleep’ noises.

Though it’s meant to be a hysterical image (and it is), this story is only one of several profound observations in the book, and one which comes up a lot in the company I keep.

Are you ready? Because here comes the tie-in…

A couple of weeks back when I was telling you about Slash’s new horror movie production company, Slasher Films, I explained that one of his upcoming projects is about Stull, KA; supposedly one of the few places on the face of the planet where Satan routinely makes a visit.

On the surface this sounded like a fairly cool story that merited further investigation and so as I promised, here’s what I learned about Stull.

Stull, KA is a tiny community ten miles west of Lawrence, Kansas (see where I’m going now?). Stories claim the original name of the town was Skull, but was later changed to Stull in an effort to cover up tales of black magic by the early settlers.

The old church in Stull Cemetery containing the stairway to Hell

Historical documents show that the original name was Deer Creek Community, but was named Stull in 1899 after the first postmaster Sylvester Stull. The post office closed in 1903, but the name Stull stuck.

Stull has only a few houses today, with about 20 residents (you knew this was going to be the case didn’t you?) and atop Emmanuel Hill sits the Stull Cemetery and what is, since 2002, the rubble of the old abandoned church.

The cemetery has a long history of legends that include ghosts and witchcraft, and has been dubbed one of “The 7 Gateways To Hell”.

Folklore claims that the devil appears in the cemetery twice a year on the night of spring equinox, and Halloween. On March 20, 1978, 150 people went so far as to wait in the cemetery to see the arrival of the devil, and word spread that spirits of those buried in the cemetery that had died a violent death would rise from the grave.

Ultimately, the only spirits that showed up were in bottles and cans and the local sheriff’s deputies cleared the area before midnight.

Shortly thereafter, a chain link fence went up around the property along with “no trespassing” signs threatening a heavy fine.

But the “keep out” messages only threw fuel on the satanic fire and now there are several paranormal web sites that claim one or more of the following:

The devil returns to Stull Cemetery only on the Spring Equinox and on Halloween because one of his wives, a witch, is buried there.

• GC: Ironically there is a headstone near the rubble of the church bearing the name “Wittich.”

Supposedly, during a 1995 trip to Colorado, the Pope redirected the flight path of his private plane to avoid flying over the unholy ground of Stull.

• GC: I was unable to independently find any confirmation of this, though the story supposedly stemmed from a Time Magazine interview with the Pope, which categorically does not exist.

A stairway inside of the ruined church leads straight to Hell.

• GC: Clearly these Kansas people have never been to my In-law’s house.

When three of the four walls of the old church still stood, rain would not fall inside the walls even though the roof of the structure was long gone.

There are abundant reports of paranormal phenomena from residents of nearby towns: unexplained raps and banging, disembodied voices-often reported to be the voice of an old woman, and the sounds of children playing at night in the cemetery.

Stull was the reason The Cure refused to play in Kansas.

• GC: Not true. Robert Smith was severely harassed in Kansas City, and hit with a beer bottle onstage in St. Louis, thus the band’s refusal to come back.

Before the church was demolished, it was said that bottles thrown at the walls would not break.

• GC: Found several blogs with posts by people claiming to have tried this and found it to be true; including one local high school football team who went out to the property at dusk to give it their best shot, yet being unable to break a single bottle. No matter that they mention the bottles they were throwing were “empty Budweiser’s.”

Ruins of the old church in Stull Cemetery

So, to go back to the incredibly insightful observation of my beloved Douglas Adams, Satan apparently has not chosen to appear say, at an Ozzy Osbourne concert, or even at one of Marilyn Manson’s gallery openings; either being a place where he’d surely be welcomed by hordes of people and paparazzi.

He has instead, chosen to show up in the middle of Kansas, in a town with a population of twenty whom no one is going to really take seriously.

He has generally growled at, pushed and whispered only to thrill-seeking teenagers chasing around the cemetery on a dare, and who are likely finding their courage in contraband beverages.

Ironically, on the one night in 1978 when there was a healthy adult crowd to cheer him on, Satan was apparently desperately busy elsewhere.

That was also the same year that Smurfs appeared on TV; coincidence? You decide.

But for those of us who would love to believe in the existence of the paranormal, or extraterrestrial for that matter, wouldn’t it be great if something showed up in front of the CNN building or White House lawn for a change, say around 1pm CST?

It seems like we’re forever alone, or with someone who’s looking the other way; without a flashlight or with one that has dead batteries; with a camera that’s suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason, or armed only with our five fallible senses and no undisputable way to prove what we’ve seen.

As The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy states: “The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.”

Now pass me the PEZ.

Have you ever visited Stull Cemetery or seen something that no one is ever going to believe? More importantly, are you a fan of Hitchhikers and PEZ?

If so, you’ve come to the right place. Post a comment or drop me a line at sue@blackgate.com.

Black Gate

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In her own words, here is Margaret Roach’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road:

My “dropout memoir” has a soundtrack—though there is no movie deal. I made it myself to accompany the story about walking away from corporate “success” for solitude, a return to personal creativity, and a closer connection to nature and my first passion: the garden I’d been making on weekends for 20 years.

But a life of solitude can leave a writer short on characters; birds and frogs and a very large, wild cat and an even larger, wilder rattlesnake form the cast in mine. Another character: the WiFi radio I bought when I moved from Manhattan to a rural New York hamlet of 300, so I could keep listening to “my” station (WFUV), a familiar voice in an unfamiliar new life.

As I was trying to sort myself out the radio kept saying really important things—or so it seemed, in the neither-here-nor-there state I was in after leaving my 30-plus-year publishing career, most recently as Editorial Director of Martha Stewart. You could say I heard voices.

It must be a sign!, I told myself, over and again, when helpful one-liners kept spilling from the speakers as if just for me. Some became mantras—and lines in the book, for which I paid an unanticipated small fortune in rights, but it was worth it to “hear” them in And I Shall Have Some Peace There, whose title derives from a poem I’ve loved since college, William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

THE SONGS

“Young at Heart” (Tom Waits’s cover of Carolyn Leigh’s and Johnny Richards’s collaboration)

Though we all know the opening couplet, what I heard Waits growl most poignantly in my early dropout days were these lines: “You can go to extremes with impossible schemes/You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams.” Yes, and (mercifully) yes.

“Ring of Fire” (June Cash; performed by Johnny Cash)

I confess to being a sucker for a horn section, if not the burning flames of illicit love. But neither the mariachi touch nor the song’s intended subject matter made “Ring of Fire” seduce me in a new way when I tried to explain to the reader—and myself—how I’d veered so far from the decades-long dream of a dropout life in the woods. My own “burning ring of fire” (yes, “bound by wild desire”) had been promotions and raises, the trappings—and trap—of success. The tether that had so long held me was mostly financial, its other shiny-but-searing edge: ego-fueling professional esteem. “And it burns, burns, burns.”

“Rebel Side of Heaven” (Langhorne Slim)

Thanks go to another radio station, tiny WKZE in Red Hook, New York, for playing Langhorne Slim from the start. I’d belt out “Rebel Side of Heaven”—”We ain’t going to hell/We’re going to the rebel side of heaven”—while driving country roads in search of some rhythm to my new life. He made it sound like do-overs are possible; all sins forgiven. The promised land lies just ahead!

“Bold as Love” (Jimi Hendrix)

I am old enough to have danced to Jimi in realtime (visual: water-buffalo sandals, batik Nehru jacket, peace symbol). Just the title “Bold as Love”—could I be that bold, ever?—was enough to rate its being scrawled on an index card and pinned up on the corkboard I used as a homemade self-help kit. Ideas that bubbled to the surface for books, businesses, blogs—mashed up with a few choice bits of beloved songs—became a crazy-quilt echoing the discussion in my head.

“Rise” (Eddie Vedder)

Eddie Vedder’s invocation to rise quickly joined Jimi on the corkboard: “Gonna rise up, find my direction magnetically. Gonna rise up, throw out my ace in the hole.”

“You Can’t Hurry Love” (The Supremes)

In case money could after all buy you love, I hired a matchmaker to try to add Mr. Right to the life in development. But a “we should have waited” mix of mishaps culminated when he defied a blizzard to meet prospective suitors rather than postponing the ill-fated appointments. Diana knew: “You can’t hurry love.” No prince for me.

“Satellite of Love” (Lou Reed)

Speaking of princes…I live surrounded by frogs, every native species, and in multiples. Apparently a 25-year-old organic garden with water features is pretty sexy. Around the time I read somewhere that the Number 2 male frog in a given territory is called the satellite male (and gets any females the dominant frogboy can’t handle), Lou Reed came filtering through the wi-fi with just the lyric.

“(Nothing But) Flowers” (Talking Heads)

I’d never really taken in the phrase, “We caught a rattlesnake, now we’ve got something for dinner,” all the times I’d heard David Byrne sing it. Not until I nearly stepped on a five-footer on the kitchen doormat. (I am a 35-year vegetarian; the snake had nothing to fear.)

“The Boxer” (Paul Simon song; Bob Dylan cover)

Though I can identify many bird species, I have no ear for differentiating their songs. Is that one saying “cheer, cheer, cheerful, charmer,” or just “chir-lee,” as various guides strive to transliterate? Although I find bird sounds indescribable in English, I enjoy them anyhow. Which is where the line, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” from “The Boxer” comes in. Who needs the equivalent of human chatter when there is cooing, melody, and the drumming of a woodpecker?

“Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” (Johnny Cash cover of Carl Perkins)

Frogs and birds and snakes…oh, my. I simply wanted to be alone, but the stray cat decided he wanted to move in, and someone (and from the sounds of it, their expanding family) was living in the bedroom wall, scratching at night, as if maybe they had some message I needed to hear. All I kept thinking: “Everybody’s trying to be my baby.” So…

“Anthem” (Leonard Cohen)

…I tried mouse-proofing (and snake-proofing) but what folly, the idea of anything-proofing. There is always another way in, a loophole or an actual gash; I have my share of Buddhist texts here littering the place that tell me so. And I have Cohen, imploring us to honor the flaw: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

“Angel From Montgomery” (John Prine)

I’m not sure there has ever been a more sweetly smutty phrase written: “When I was a young girl I had me a cowboy.” (And a fireman, and a pilot….) What I was actually writing about when this made its way into the book were my (now-unworn) career clothes, including designer leather jackets…from which my mind tripped to how maybe I could sew fringe on them and join the rodeo, since no other paying gig was coming together yet.

“Catch My Disease” (Ben Lee)

At first I went out every day: to the Post Office, the store, somewhere. Soon, though, days and even whole weeks passed between openings of the big metal farm gate. “Aren’t you lonely?” everyone asked. I’d pull a Ben Lee: “My garden is a secret compartment, and that’s the way I like it.”

“Old Days” (John Hiatt)

“Old days are coming back to me…But I had nothing to live up to and everywhere to be,” the just-out song on the album “Same Old Man” proclaimed. With an eye in the rearview mirror myself, this one competed with “Rebel Side of Heaven” for anthem of the moment. Same old woman.

“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” (Bob Dylan)

Knowing that we are all repeat offenders, I worried I’d fall back into another version of my same old life. Dylan asks what price, “You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice.” Me, too.

“Tower of Song” (Leonard Cohen)

There’s no need to explain why someone in the liminal, or threshold, world of a life shift would latch onto, “I feel so close to everything we’ve lost.” As he has for me so many times since my teens, Cohen illuminated the heart of the matter.

“Heaven Right Here” (Jeb Loy Nichols)

It was the view out the window—the garden, the dramatic light on the bigger rural landscape beyond—that kept me mostly sane, and feeling this way: “Come on over to my yard/‘Cause right now heaven’s right here.”

“The Word” (Beatles)

At first, while I was sitting semi-lost on the floor alphabetizing my CDs and matching errant Tupperware containers with lids, the New York Times and Washington Post wrote about me as if I’d cracked the code to some life secret, the one of escape: “Say the word, and you’ll be free/Say the word and be like me.”

“Beautiful Boy” (John Lennon)

I suspect that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” is one of modern music’s most-quoted lines. I shudder to realize how often I have missed being in the moment.

“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (Beatles)

I tried to keep stories of lost loves to a minimum, but a story of solitude requires some context. By quoting, “Over men and horses hoops and garters, lastly through a hogshead of real fire” to describe how it went with my last boyfriend, I thought people would get the idea straight away.

POSTSCRIPT

There is always music, and mostly, it’s the word thing that sucks me in. It was Al Green on the boombox who helped me make my garden decades ago; Lucinda Williams, who always understood; so many more. I collect songs of hallelujah/alleluia from all cultures (not just Leonard Cohen covers but gospel and reggae and chants and world), and (being a gardener) songs about the elements, too: from snow to sunshine, birds to blooms.

Sometimes, though, lyrics must take backstage—especially when I am actually writing a book. I can blog to music with words, but I write long-form to one thing, and one thing only: Pablo Casals cello solos.

Margaret Roach and And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road links:

the author’s website
the author’s blog
video trailer for the book

Horticulture review
Kirkus Reviews review

Hartford Courant profile of the author
Matt Bites interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)

52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

I was reminded of Mills & Boon’s current “The Powerful and The Pure” mini-series when I saw the following call for papers, for a conference to be held in Dundee on the 8th and 9th of June:

Call for Papers: Ninth Annual English Postgraduate Conference
High and Low: Cultural Levels in Word and Image

High and Low is the ninth annual Postgraduate Conference held by the English Programme, University of Dundee, and runs in conjunction with the Scottish Word and Image Group annual conference. It will address configurations of high and low in literature and visual media and is particularly interested in the perceived distinction between highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment, and the ways in which middlebrow texts, and other amalgamations of these two categories, are able to negotiate the apparent gulf between them. Of particular relevance to this dichotomy are texts that have been subject to critical re-evaluations over time, works that mix the sacred and the profane, and artistically sophisticated products of trash culture.

Full details are available here. So, back to “The Powerful and The Pure.” Kate Walker has written a novel for this mini-series which contains

reworkings of classic romantic stories from literature. The other books in the series are by Sharon Kendrick – The Forbidden Innocent (Jane Eyre), Cathy Williams – In Want of A Wife? (Pride and Prejudice) and Kate Hewitt — Mr & Mischief (Emma) My own story is a reworking of one of my favourite novels of all time – Wuthering Heights — and it will be called The Return of The Stranger.

Here’s the cover of the first in the series (and hopefully I’ve copied the html properly, so that if you click on the cover, it’ll take you to an excerpt):



Since the conference is interested in images as well as texts, here are some covers for Jane Eyre itself. All three come from Penguin’s website: the first seems to me to position the novel as a “high” novel, the second looks as though it’s trying to appeal to a different market segment (maybe Young Adult?), and the third cover is from a Signet edition.

Here’s the cover of the Mills & Boon reworking of Pride and Prejudice alongside two covers for the original novel (the first is from Penguin, the second from Headline). The layout of the M&B cover and the Penguin one are rather similar, while the Headline version looks as though it’s hoping to convince readers that Austen is chick lit.

Stirling University’s The Gothic Imagination blog gives another example of interesting relationships between “high” and “low”:

The Twilight books are vaguely inspired by 3 novels: Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Romeo and Juliet. You’ll no doubt have seen the Harper Collins reissue of Wuthering Heights in 2009.

As well as being branded with the Twilight colours, Wuthering Heights is given its celebrity endorsement; it is, we are assured, ‘Bella and Edward’s favourite book’. There’s a quite fascinating process of framing going on here as a result of branding. Wuthering Heights, appropriated by Meyers in her series, is retrospectively reframed by that to which it gave issue, and constituted in a different way, for a different (and particular) readership.

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• Byron, Glennis. “©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight.” The Gothic Imagination. December 31, 2010.

Teach Me Tonight

Today is the street date for the Blu-ray release of The Last Unicorn, the 1982 Rankin/Bass-ITC Entertainment animated film version of Peter S. Beagle’s classic 1968 fantasy novel, for which Beagle also wrote the screenplay. After a poor-quality DVD release in 2004, which came from inadequate masters and was presented pan & scan, Lionsgate Entertainment released an excellent two-disc DVD in 2007 as a 25th Anniversary Edition. Now that version is making the leap to 1080 lines of resolution for the new generation of Hi-Def presentation.

But, if you plan on purchasing either the new Blu-ray disc (which includes a DVD copy) or the still available two-disc DVD, please buy them through Conlan Press, the company owned by Connor Cochran, Peter Beagle’s business manager.

Why? As Conlan Press explains on the page for the 25th Anniversary DVD:

Except for the copies that were purchased through Conlan Press via this website, or at Peter’s sales table at various conventions, none of the other Last Unicorn DVDs have ever paid him a cent. That’s right — at least 1.5 million DVDs have been sold around the world since 1999, and only the 4,000 copies sold here have earned him any money. From all the rest, Peter has gotten absolutely nothing.

The reason for this situation is a long legal tangle between Beagle and Granada International, the British company that currently owns the rights to The Last Unicorn, over non-payment of royalties from the movie and its ancillaries. A vocal outcry from fans across the world pushed Granada International into talks with Beagle and Conlan Press to resolve the situation. However, like many legal snares in the entertainment world, the progress is slow. Conlan Press reported in 2008:

There is a possible solution on the table, but it isn’t an easy one to pull together. In fact, it is really, really difficult, as witness the fact that we’ve spent more than a year on it so far without making any clear headway. And we can’t talk about it publicly without jeopardizing any hope of progress. So please be patient with us — we’ll post the news (either pro or con) just as soon as there is something definite.

But for the time being, there is a way for Mr. Beagle to receive compensation from some of the sales of The Last Unicorn on home video. Lionsgate Entertainment allowed Conlan Press in 2007 to sell copies of the DVD through their website, with over half the money from each sale going to Peter S. Beagle. As of mid-2009, over 4,000 copies of the DVD have sold through Conlan Press. A nice number . . . but only a fraction of the 800,000 sold through other outlets in the same time period.

When I heard about the upcoming release of The Last Unicorn on Blu-ray, I wrote to Conlan to ask if they would also sell the new format with the same benefit to the author. I received a response that they would, and it is already available for order on the website—although they don’t have their copies as of yet.

The Last Unicorn is one of my favorite fantasy novels, and the movie version looms large from my childhood. I haven’t owned any of the previous home video versions, so I am thrilled to get the chance to see it presented in the Blu-ray format and support Mr. Beagle at the same time.

Black Gate