Lately I've been reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien again and The Making of Modern Japan by Marius B. Jansen. Those are both heavy hardback books so when I need something lighter to take on the train I've been reading Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' Stardust. In one of the boxes of my old books that my grandmother sent to me was my trade paperback copy of the novel with the original Charles Vess illustrations. It was a lucky find many years ago at a Barnes and Noble. I wish it were the hardback, though, because the cover's become a bit delicate over time.
The novel was adapted as a film in 2007 starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes, with Peter O'Toole, Robert DeNiro, and Michelle Pfeiffer. I've only seen it once and didn't hate it but I greatly prefer the novel, particularly with the Charles Vess illustrations. His aesthetic along with Gaiman's Lord Dunsany inspired narrative tone provides a vastly different experience to the film's big budget Princess Bride concept.
Now I have to read it amid the controversy of "sexual assault" allegations against Gaiman. I put that in quotes because one thing I find especially creepy about the coverage is how strong language is applied to matters that really aren't resolved and definitely aren't clear. But the novel, which includes at least one scene of a young man kissing a woman who does not express her consent beforehand, would be seen as a smoking gun by some critics. Such critics would be arguing in bad faith since spontaneity has been a part of romantic portrayals since, well, always. The madness of modern western Puritanism, which the results of the recent presidential election were largely a reaction against, as usual assumes not only the obvious correctness of its new moral dictates, but retroactively applies them to the whole of preceding history.
The sad thing is that the one paraphrased quote from Gaiman that seems to have the most traction is his characterisation of his pushing writer Julia Hobsbawm onto a sofa and kissing her. He says it was a young man misreading a situation. So he feels he acted wrongly, that he made a mistake, but has apparently over the years forgiven himself. One might detect some indignation in his response at the idea that a public who are not participants in a piece of his private history feels entitled to pass judgement on it. Which I'd say is reasonable. But woe to the celebrity who dares question the public's right to pass judgement on any celebrity's private life, however biased and incomplete the coverage.
I've been reading The Maltese Falcon lately, Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel. I hadn't read it or The Thin Man despite having read all of Hammett's other novels. I suppose I figured the famous films made from both titles were perfectly fine substitutes. But I was jonsing for some Hammett so I started in on the Falcon. I'm enjoying it, of course.
The biggest difference from the 1941 film so far is a long story Sam tells Brigid about a man who abandoned his wife and kids to start over with another life with another name in another state. He does this after a near death experience when he's almost brained by a falling beam at a construction site.
Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.
It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life.
I should hope all of us would take such inspiration from nearly dying. He was kind enough to leave his first wife and kids with enough money to support them, so it's not like he completely shirked all responsibility--though Sam describes this as an act of love, just not "the sort that would make absence painful."
One thing I thought was especially relevant for young people to-day was the reaction of the man's first wife when she found out the truth behind his disappearance:
She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her--the way she looked at it--she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.
You see, ghosting is unattractive. I think some people do it under the theory that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and see it as a way of wrapping a someone around their little finger. I'm happy to say that I've gotten to the point in my life where, if someone pulls that kind of thing, it has the effect of them espousing a love for Gallagher or Paul Haggis; I'm actively repulsed and I don't much sweat their lack of attention.
"WHOM THESE CHAINS BECOME NOT SO", by Caitlin R. Kiernan, is the new Sirenia Digest story I read to-day. It's good. It's a sort of mash-up of the ancient Greek Andromeda story, altered so that she can expect no rescue, and a vignette of an author for the story discussing it with a friend and sometimes lover. The imagery in the Andromeda story is lovely and horrific. Equally so is the friend/lover's description of a strange dream.
Whether or not the author in the story is meant to be Caitlin and the other person someone she happens to know is never clear. It did get me thinking about the community that surrounds a group of writers and artists, such as the Beats, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the group around Henry Miller and Anais Nin. There must be many such groups and many, even for some that contain successful and famous writers, that are beyond living memory. I was sort of thinking about the extended group of fantasy and horror authors that includes both Caitlin and Neil Gaiman. If the sexual assault allegations do spell the end for Gaiman, it's going to suck for a lot of the people he was routinely generous to. I shouldn't be but I kind of am surprised by how quickly some readers are ready to wipe their hands of Gaiman. I've been coming to the opinion, though, that the reason Gaiman and his close friends have been publicly silent is that he plans to sue. And I think he has a great case and the more people who swear him off, he better case he has. Tortoise Media has taken some very suspect accounts of ex-girlfriends and couched them in malicious language and put what little substance they have behind a pay-wall. Sadly, there are many people now willing to "cancel" at the first use of the word "allegation". So Gaiman has plenty of ammo to claim damages.
Speaking of writing, I was watching Willow a couple nights ago and it occurred to me it's really badly written. I realise that's hardly a revelation to most people but I loved that movie when I was a kid. I was even really stoked for the Disney+ series. Everyone was feigning shock when Disney recently cancelled The Acolyte but the Willow series was a much bloodier execution. Not only did they cancel it, they removed it from the streaming service. Do you know how many crappy movies and TV series are still on the service? Air Bud is still on Disney+. Remember the one about the dog that plays basketball?
Unlike The Acolyte, which seemed to be made up of people looking for paychecks and status, the Willow series seemed more like a labour of love. Warwick Davis had been wanting to come back to the character since forever and he really seemed to have bonded with new cast members--all of whom I thought were perfectly fine.
All that love and camaraderie and Disney didn't just cancel they show they insulted them with a removal from the service. TaleSpin can stay, Willow the series has to go. Willow the movie is still on, of course.
And yes, I know Disney is using legal fine print from the Disney+ subscription to get out of paying damages to the family of a woman who died in a Disney restaurant, so I know they've done worse. But art is the primary topic for this blog, okay?
Anyway, yeah, the Willow series was indeed badly written. Though I don't blame Jonathan Kasdan and Bob Dolman who wrote the first couple episodes which I still think were fine.
Bob Dolman was screenwriter on the original Willow. As I was dozing through it a couple nights ago, it occurred to me how much the story is dependent on coincidences. There's the coincidence of the baby coming to Willow on the river, the coincidence of the brownies flying over Willow on the hawk once again carrying the baby. The coincidence of running into Madmartigan the second time in that tavern, of Bavmorda's daughter being there to personally inspect the place moments later. That kind of thing makes a fantasy world seem small. I mean, that's what you say when you meet someone who coincidentally knows someone you know; "It's a small world." The more coincidences you pile on, the smaller the world gets.
Take Star Wars: A New Hope as an example of the opposite. Now, let's ignore the fact that Anakin built C3PO and owned R2D2 in the prequels. Ignore the fact that Anakin grew up on Tatooine. In fact, let's ignore the prequels entirely. There are otherwise no major coincidences propelling the plot forward in A New Hope. Leia's blockade runner was going to Tatooine specifically with the intention of seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi. The droids are just droids on the ship among many--we see another protocol droid in the background. Leia probably chose R2D2 because he was closest at hand. Now, it was improbably good luck that C3PO and R2D2 weren't shot when they walked across the corridor in the firefight but, in terms of the plot, that could just as well have happened as not have happened--it doesn't move the story forward, it's just a bit of garnish.
The two wander the desert and they're both picked up by Jawas. It's not clear how much time passes from the time they land on the planet to the time the Jawas picked them up but it's not unlikely that the Jawas, being scavengers that roam the wastes, would have spotted the two shiny mechanical beings sooner or later. It's a bit of a coincidence that both droids meet again on the same sandcrawler but not a huge coincidence.
It would be a big coincidence for the droids to wind up with Leia's brother, Luke Skywalker, but I suspect Lucas hadn't thought of that yet. At any rate, it was far from anyone's mind who first saw the movie. When the movie first came out, as far as anyone knew, Luke's father was a Jedi who was killed by Darth Vader. And Vader killed a lot of Jedi. So it's not a big coincidence. So this all contributes to making the fantasy world fill big, composed of various people with various motives which would usually only coincide due to intent or natural flow of circumstance, making everything feel more credible and therefore lifelike.
I do like the prequels but I think my biggest problem with them at this point is the inclusion of C3PO and R2D2. Lucas was originally inspired by Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress which is told from the point of view of two peasants who are just trying to survive while the clans fight around them for reasons they don't comprehend. They have their own motives separate from those going on all around them. The first part of A New Hope is from the droids' point of view and it therefore makes sense we don't have much of a grasp of what motivates the parties at war. But the prequels are all about those politics--and, anyway, the way they're shot, they're clearly told from the points of view of the Jedi.
Anyway. I'm rambling a lot to-day. That probably means I'm procrastinating. By the way, here's a YouTube version of my Top 20 Pirate Movies post:
It took 24 hours to upload during which time I couldn't use the internet for anything else so do please watch it. Thank you.
X Sonnet #1874
Remember thirsty skulls control the woods.
So walking late, refuse to carry wine.
For ghosts recall the taste of spirit goods.
The afterlife a palate doth refine.
Contestants name a spotted cat as king.
The second bachelor brought a lively fish.
For singing pawns, the queen bestows a ring.
For swimming prawns, the princess grants a wish.
It's Pan whose appetite surrounds us all.
We know a film in truth is just a tree.
Remember words to make a stronger call.
A wasp is not a thin and longer bee.
You shouldn't tighten helmets through your brain.
A smaller skull is but a dodgy gain.
To-day I read what I think is the newest Sirenia Digest, number 214, containing "Night Fishing", a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story. It's a nice blurring of the line between a multiverse story and an unreliable memory story, centring on a narrator menaced by some entity that shifts shape and temporal location in his recollections. It put me in mind of Lost Highway, especially when the narrator talks about whether or not he's a murderer.
Last night I fell asleep watching To Kill a Mockingbird. It's included free on Japanese Amazon Prime with Japanese subtitles I can't turn off. The film's Japanese title is アラバマ物語, literally "Alabama Story". After lousy translated titles for Ghibli movies like "Spirited Away" and "The Boy and the Heron", I guess it's nice to see it cuts both ways. I was sorry I slept through Atticus' closing statement so I went back and watched the last half of the film this morning. I seem to be really sensitive lately because all of the strongest moments in the film hit me really hard. I almost cried when Scout first sees Boo Radley.
There's a movie about perspective. You have two instances of community taking justice into its own hands, first when the racist jury condemns the innocent Tom Robinson, then when the sheriff and Atticus decide they're going to protect Boo Radley. The truth was concealed, some might argue changed, first for a bad reason and then for a good reason.
While I was reading the Sirenia Digest story, I was surprised to find myself thinking of this lecture on Dragons from Gresham College I was also watching this morning. The lecturer, Ronald Hutton, discusses the possibility that some tales of dragons could have been based on actual encounters with snakes, crocodiles, or extraordinarily fearsome people. Perhaps it was the dragons that became snakes, crocodiles, and people?
A lot of the subtitles on To Kill a Mockingbird were wrong, I noticed. Unsurprisingly, there's no translation for "Nigger". "Nigger", "Negro", "Coloured", "Black", are all translated as "黒人", literally "black person". This renders totally different the dialogue in the scene where Atticus tells Scout, "Don't say 'niggers', Scout." This line is translated as "何て言い方だ", which roughly translates as "How can you talk that way?" There are two reasons I can see for this. One is to discourage the dissemination of bad English, the other is the fact that Japanese has no swear words, therefore, no Japanese viewer would understand why Atticus wouldn't want Scout to use any particular word. What the translator ought to have done is rendered the word faithfully and offered a brief note. Or they could have simply translated it directly. An intelligent viewer should be able to glean the cultural meaning from context. A willful mistranslation is symptomatic of the kind of cultural insulation that I believe more and more is at the heart of Japan's failure to learn English. Whatever the motive, though, poor translations like this help create a fantasy "Japanese America" that exists only in the Japanese collective imagination.
Anyone out there still worshiping Roman gods? This entry might trigger you. It occurs to me right now that being triggered sounds exciting and pleasurable.
I've been reading Saint Augustine's The City of God again. I'd read parts of it before, parts that seemed relevant as research for Dekpa and Deborah, but now I'm ploughing through the whole thing. It's amazing how much time he spends trashing the Roman gods. It's so hard to imagine now a functioning religion around that pantheon but maybe it's Augustine we have to thank for that. He spends 400 pages on the topic in my paperback copy which, if memory serves (I don't want to get up and grab it), is just over 1000 in total. So many of his arguments seem a bit silly, some of them because I have the benefit of knowing the bloody history of Christian kings, crusades, and inquisitions in the centuries after Augustine's death. So his claim that an innate peacefulness makes Christians less prone to violent conflict is pretty weak. Though, even in his own time, someone might have pointed out that Christians hadn't had as much time in positions of power for any such propensity for peace to be tested.
He spends a lot of time griping about how numerous the Roman gods were, and how silly it was to have a whole god devoted to every single, minuscule subject. Why is it more reasonable for one god to be doing everything? I got to thinking, a lot of his arguments would fit atheism and then I got to thinking monotheism was kind of the atheism of the first millennium. If you think about how much people knew, it makes sense. A God whose plans and deeds seem contradictory or strange actually makes a lot more sense than Gods who are supposed to have predictable personalities. The mystery of God is a perfectly fitting concept for an existence that defies human ideas of rational progression.
In the midst of all the pantheon bashing, Augustine takes a moment to talk about free will versus God's knowledge of everyone's future. Augustine's thoughts on the subject were foundational to the debate over predestination. He argues that the Christian concepts differ from fatalism in that humans are free to make their choices entirely separate from the fact that God already knows what choices they're going to make. It's easy to see why this argument has never settled the dispute since, God being the one who created everybody, and therefore knowing the futures of everyone he created, He therefore created the choices of the people He made, which would be the opposite of free will.
Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. (translated by Marcus Dods)
Augustine follows this with an argument that indeed departs from reason (and so why make an argument? one may ask). God knows causes but maybe not the order of them except He does but maybe not the influence of wicked will except He does. I was reminded of Milton's God in Paradise Lost.
They therefore, as to right belong’d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
It's a big part of the reason God in Paradise Lost comes off as oddly weak, even confused, like someone pathetically trying to cover his mistakes with bluster.
X Sonnet #1811
A mounting bill would build the pier again.
Decisive coins ennoble leather bags.
The lender's bowler floats a rainy spin.
Benignly look to see the letter sags.
They don't believe the crane was ever there,
The team assembled late by Pepsi brass.
Consorting shades resolve a phantom bear.
A weathered page was burnt from leaking gas.
Remembered moons were deadly orbs at night.
For seven daggers dropped the curtain low.
Condensing soup they'd salt with sweetened spite.
Contagion cracked the lover's trusty bow.
The thinking apricot was cut to brains.
In spring, the ghosts remember candy canes.
Reading MR James has gotten to be a seasonal tradition with me. This year, my mother sent me a hardback collection of his ghost stories, which makes the experience of reading them even better. When you're reading stories about antiquarians poring over manuscripts and carvings and abnormal adornments in abandoned churches, it's nicer to do so on real pages instead of on an electronic screen.
Yesterday I read "The Diary of Mr Poynter", first published in 1910. A young man and his elderly aunt move into a new manor so the young man purchases a diary of someone who resided in the neighbourhood over a century earlier. Inside the diary, he finds a scrap of cloth with a pattern that enchants his aunt who insists that drapes be made from the pattern. Like all of James' stories, he finds ways of letting the horror elements subtly creep in while you read about a fairly normal, but slightly unstable, academic or domestic situation. This one ends up being a bit more explicit than usual and delightfully so. The ghost that manifests reminded me of Sadako from The Ring or any number of other Japanese movie ghosts with long hair veiling their faces. Or Cousin It, I suppose, but effectively eerie.
Previous to "The Diary of Mr Poynter" I read "The Residence at Whitminster", a story about a young Irish lord who comes to stay in England and brings some kind of shiny tablet with him he apparently procured from a witch. The story ends in a remarkable way with a housemaid, speaking with transcribed colloquial dialect, rattling off suggestive reminiscences. That one may have been too subtle but it was entertaining.
Usually I prefer reading fiction but, being between fiction novels now, I've gone back to the books of movie criticism I got earlier this year. I finished Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and have continued reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies. Tarantino's book was a great companion to the movies he talked about, a charmingly personal tour of '70s cinema. I certainly didn't always agree with him. I can't share his love for Paradise Alley and I was a little surprised he considered Sylvester Stallone's inspiration for the film to be entirely The Dead End Kids. I thought it was at least partially inspired by Night and the City. But his views on Steve McQueen films and on Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse really enhanced my appreciation for them.
Kael's book, largely written in the '50s, is less interesting to me for the insights Kael has into the films she's talking about and more as a specimen of opinion pieces from the era. Of all the books I've read from the '50s, hers is the most directly expressive of conservative opinions and it gives me a clearer impression of how politics were polarised at that time than I've ever had before. This is from her chapter on New Wave British films:
The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics--the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in which so many films are appraised for the director's degree of commitment to a social point of view (good if left wing, bad if not), you will discover that in this ideology, location shooting, particularly around working-class locations, is, in itself, almost a proof of commitment. In judging works from other countries, the English will overestimate a film like Marty, and they'll suggest that a film that is stylized or that deals with upper-class characters is somehow "evasive"--that it doesn't want to come to terms with the material. This attitude gives the critics an extraordinarily high moral tone.
Imagine what she'd have thought of Jeanne Dielmann getting voted number one on Sight and Sound's greatest films list.
The British films she talks about in the cited chapter include some I admired myself--Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, and Look Back in Anger--and Kael is not entirely negative about them. She seems to have liked Room at the Top best of all. But she makes a good point that realism or focus on working-class characters does not, by themselves, make movies great.
X Sonnet #1746
The mad and restless horses prowl the heath.
The whites of violent eyes demand a light.
Obtrusive fog descends like monster teeth.
Pervasive chill compels the blood to fight.
A giant toe could span a couple trains.
Surrounding forests dropped their leaves of cash.
Cavorting ghosts convened for growing pains.
When life arose, 'twas over barley mash.
Where falling trees arrive at leaves it's late.
The autumn weather's nice for cleaning floors.
But faeries giving birth'll make you wait.
Despite the fact you never cared for bores.
A fleet of ties eclipsed the collar sun.
Across the leggy plain the trousers run.
Last night I dreamt I played this song for a class in Egypt at the base of a pyramid. I said, "And that's Kenny Rogers!" but none of them knew who that was. Then we investigated the pyramid, looking for a tomb.
I drank wine and watched The Big Lebowski last night. It was an end to a rambling day. It's summer break right now but I went to one of my schools looking for the groundskeeper I befriended so I could return some blu-rays and DVDs he lent me. But the school was closed. There was a baseball game going on there so I sat and watched them a while, letting the sunburns get worse on my arms. I left at around 11:30 and walked to a nearby McDonalds for lunch and had a big mac, large fries, and an orange juice. I don't really like fast food but I had a dream about McDonalds last week. It's much nicer in Japan, too. Cleaner and they bring the food to your table.
To complete my American nostalgia day, I walked to the Starbucks and drank coffee and read for two hours in the beautiful air conditioning. I had two cups of coffee, the second one at a discount because I kept my receipt. The cashier, when she saw me come back, told me to look for my receipt so she could give me the discount. That illustrates a key difference between Japan and the U.S. In the U.S., she wouldn't have mentioned the receipt, she'd have just given me the discount because obviously she'd seen me there the whole time and she'd rung up my first coffee. But nothing's real in Japan if there's no paperwork.
At Starbucks, I was reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a book that's getting talked about a lot lately and I realised I should try to live in the modern era sometimes, even if this particular book is thirty years old. It's time is now, though, and I'm developing theories as to why that is. I'll say more when I've finished (I'm about two thirds through). So far I feel it's a bit overrated. It's kind of like an episode of Columbo without Columbo. Parts of it benefit greatly if read with alcohol; such parts are kind of cosy.
One of the things I love about The Kind of Elfland's Daughter is that, for most of the book, none of the characters have any agency. It's not that I'm against characters having agency, but lazy critics so often tend to reach for it as a point of criticism nowadays that it's kind of glorious to read a novel in which all characters, mortal and faerie, are tumbled about in a world of sensory experience.
It is like a dream. Characters take action but the effects of those actions are so arbitrary and have such limited or unpredictable bearing on what follows, they may as well be rolling dice. The book begins with the kingdom of Erl deciding to have the young Prince Alveric marry a princess of Elfland in order to bring magic to the mortal realm. So he gets himself a magic sword, invades the magic realm, kills some antagonistic trees, and meets the beautiful princess. All that sounds like the plot of a novel but it's all dispensed with in the first few short chapters.
As pure luck would have it, the princess, Lirazel, is willing and able to abscond with a total stranger from a strange country. She's the title character and yet the novel spends perhaps the least amount of time with her--and she's also the character with the most agency. Of all the characters, she's the only one who's able to consistently achieve desired results from her chosen actions.
She has a child with Alveric whom they call Orion before she becomes bored with the human realm and her husband's desire that she honour their religious practices. She leaves for Elfland where time doesn't seem to pass. So the bulk of the novel, which is about Orion as a young man, learning to be a great hunter, and Alveric, wandering a wasteland with madmen as companions, takes place over the course of many years while virtually no time passes in Elfland.
Orion learns to hunt and kill unicorns. He enlists the aid of a band of trolls. Alveric is seeking Elfland, which the King of Elfland has caused to recede from Alveric's approach, leaving barren desolation in its wake. In your standard novel, this would all be building to something. Orion would prove himself to his parents and achieve something great for his people by hunting. Alveric would eventually enter and conquer Elfland, perhaps. But the novel's never about that. It's not the effects of their actions that matter but the experience of their actions.
It's a mighty feat for Orion to hunt and kill a unicorn but the achievement has little real meaning. Lord Dunsany beautifully describes the animal, paying particular attention to its powerful neck. But killing it doesn't take magic from the world or anything like that. It's just a really nice trophy. We never know if Lirazel appreciates Alveric's efforts to find her or even understands the sacrifices he makes. They just don't matter next to the glorious, arbitrary and sensual will of Elfland.
One gets the impression that Dunsany worshiped women as beautiful but distant and capricious beings. The only other female character in the book is a witch, also the only other character with real agency.
There's a minor plot about the parliament of Erl becoming suspicious of the magic they invited into their realm yet, like Alveric and Orion's stories, their desires and actions ultimately have little meaning. The book leaves you feeling this may be for the best.
I've been reading Walter Scott's 1820 novel Ivanhoe again lately. I read about half of it a year ago and got distracted reading other things so I started it again. I'm enjoying it much more, which I partially attribute to reading it in paperback instead of on my Kindle. The physical paper and ink somehow suits the dignity of the novel better. That dignity is certainly integral and part of the reason I found it difficult to read before.
Scott is clearly in love with The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene among many other medieval and romantic works. Sometimes it prevents Ivanhoe from breathing its own life and even when I'm enjoying it it's certainly on a more nostalgic, distant level than I enjoy the more red-blooded Shakespeare plays Scott quotes from. Nonetheless, the jousting tournament Scott describes has many thrilling, even cinematic, moments.
The trumpets had no sooner given the signal, than the champions vanished from their posts with the speed of lightning, and closed in the centre of the lists with the shock of a thunderbolt. The lances burst into shivers up to the very grasp, and it seemed at the moment that both knights had fallen, for the shock had made each horse recoil backwards upon its haunches. The address of the riders recovered their steeds by use of the bridle and spur; and having glared on each other for an instant with eyes which seemed to flash fire through the bars of their visors, each made a demi-volte, and, retiring to the extremity of the lists, received a fresh lance from the attendants.
And I do share Scott's sentiment in moments where he drags the action to a halt just to muse on the things that have come and gone.
At length the barriers were opened, and five knights, chosen by lot, advanced slowly into the area; a single champion riding in front, and the other four following in pairs. All were splendidly armed, and my Saxon authority (in the Wardour Manuscript) records at great length their devices, their colours, and the embroidery of their horse trappings. It is unnecessary to be particular on these subjects. To borrow lines from a contemporary poet, who has written but too little:
“The knights are dust,
And their good swords are rust,
Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”
[Scott quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
Their escutcheons have long mouldered from the walls of their castles. Their castles themselves are but green mounds and shattered ruins—the place that once knew them, knows them no more—nay, many a race since theirs has died out and been forgotten in the very land which they occupied, with all the authority of feudal proprietors and feudal lords. What, then, would it avail the reader to know their names, or the evanescent symbols of their martial rank!
I also appreciate some of the extensive detail he goes into when describing clothing and faces, particularly in the early chapters. If you slow down and really work with him, you'll find he conjures some really vivid pictures. And some of it really conveys a unique sense of medieval places. I particularly liked this bit:
No fewer than four silver candelabras, holding great waxen torches, served to illuminate this apartment. Yet let not modern beauty envy the magnificence of a Saxon princess. The walls of the apartment were so ill finished and so full of crevices, that the rich hangings shook in the night blast, and, in despite of a sort of screen intended to protect them from the wind, the flame of the torches streamed sideways into the air, like the unfurled pennon of a chieftain. Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort there was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed.
I finished reading Allan Quatermain (1887) yesterday, H. Rider Haggard's sequel to his own King Solomon's Mines. I think Alan Moore had the right idea when he essentially painted this second book as partially fabricated by the "real" Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines. This second book is a sometimes engaging, occasionally thrilling, but ultimately light adventure compared to the complex wonder at work in the first book.
As I wrote in an earlier entry, when I was about a third of the way through the book, the best part is the beginning when Quatermain and his friends, Curtis and Good, are just setting off into the wilds of Africa. Their skirmishes with a group of deadly Masai hunters are genuinely enthralling. But the book loses momentum it never quite regains after the silly kidnapping plot--I thought of it again watching The Mandalorian last week in which the plot around an alien dinosaur absconding with a child was remarkably similar. At least in Allan Quatermain, it really was a kidnapping for ransom.
The bulk of the novel, the main plot, concerns a lost civilisation of white people somewhere in Africa called the Zu Vendi. This story is somewhat reminiscent of She, particularly since the Zu Vendi are ruled by Queens--two Queens, unlike She. But the Zu Vendi, aside from the fact that all the women normally wear clothing that exposes one breast, aren't nearly as interesting as the Amahaggar and the relationship between the two Queens with the Zu Vendi is not nearly as fascinating as the one between Ayesha and the Amahagger. She presents really thoughtful scenarios exploring methods of rulership, which is one reason the character of Ayesha comes off as so complex. The Zu Vendi are mainly civilised and the two Queens are neatly divided into a Good Queen and an Evil Queen.
Quatermain's friends, Curtis and Good, are also less interesting than they are in King Solomon's Mines. Though Good is occasionally entertaining due to his vanity in Allan Quatermain, though the fact that he's able to change into a full naval dress uniform after the group has gone through a perilous boat ride through lava heated caverns was a bit silly.
The only really interesting character is Umslopogaas, the Zulu warrior with the peculiar axe, who made any scene better whenever he was involved. Haggard knew what he had, I think, because he made Umslopogaas the hero of the book's satisfying climax.
Last night I read the new Sirenia Digest which contained "PASSAGE OF VENUS IN FRONT OF THE SUN", a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's good, beginning with sort of a drowsy mood and becoming a story about a very gentle alien invasion of Earth.
The aliens are primarily concerned with stories, their society somehow not being able to generate such things. The discussion then becomes about censorship and the destruction of works of fiction. It's a timely topic when people from both political sides these days have started to endorse the destruction of texts. Caitlin makes reference to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Francois Truffaut's film adaptation of the book. I think the two great works to read on the topic are that and Milton's Areopagitica. Milton gives the devil his due (as usual) and famously describes books as living things, capable of exerting real influence on people's minds. But he just as famously said that he cannot praise a "cloistered virtue", a person whose virtue is due entirely to never having been exposed to challenging ideas. The fact that people are so quick to fear works of fiction these days is surely a sign of rampant cowardice, cowardice being something that used to be regarded as a negative trait.
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary." - John Milton
This is the most Japanese looking Christmas tree I've seen. I saw it yesterday at Kyoto Station.
There are hundreds of restaurants and cafes in Kyoto Station. All of them were packed and there were people queued outside every one. I ate some ramen at the mall across the street where I had trouble finding an empty seat in the food court. People sure like to eat out in Japan.
On the long train ride to and from Kyoto, I read from a Dostoevsky short story collection. It seemed Christmasy somehow, not just because one of the stories I read was "The Christmas Tree and a Wedding." Which isn't much of a Christmas story, actually.
I also read one of my favourite works of Dostoevsky, a short story called "White Nights" about a lonely, introverted young man who strikes up a passionate friendship with a seventeen year old girl he meets in the street. This section seems remarkably to describe many internet denizens:
"There are, Nastenka, though you may not know it, strange nooks in Petersburg. It seems as though the same sun as shines for all Petersburg people does not peep into those spots, but some other different new one, bespoken expressly for those nooks, and it throws a different light on everything. In these corners, dear Nastenka, quite a different life is lived, quite unlike the life that is surging round us, but such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us in our serious, over-serious, time. Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic, fervently ideal, with something (alas! Nastenka) dingily prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar."
"Foo! Good Heavens! What a preface! What do I hear?"
"Listen, Nastenka. (It seems to me I shall never be tired of calling you Nastenka.) Let me tell you that in these corners live strange people—dreamers. The dreamer—if you want an exact definition—is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail, or, anyway, he is in that respect very much like that remarkable creature, which is an animal and a house both at once, and is called a tortoise.
In his solitude and dreaming, the speaker in "White Nights" conjures a world and the world is, most of the time, the only reflection he has. Just as the internet provides anonymity or a greater amount of control over how one is perceived, leading to the person achieving a strangely amorphous sense of self. That quoted translation is the old Constance Garnett translation. The book I have, translated by David Magarshack, translates what Garnett renders as, "is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort," instead as, "is not a man, but a sort of creature of the neuter gender." The original Russian is, "не человѣкъ, а, знаете, какое-то существо средняго рода," which Google translates as, "not a man, but, you know, some sort of neuter creature." Garnett died in 1946, my book was printed in 1992, it's hard to say which way the political influence may have swung the thing but it looks like Magarshack is closer to the original meaning. It makes sense, too, since the narrator's discussion of himself greatly concerns his relationships--or lack thereof--with women.
What I admired most about the story is just that it's about two people really talking. Really opening up about their ideas, desires, hopes, and concerns. It's been years since I've known someone I could do that with. Both in college in the U.S. and here in Japan, most of the people I've met are so guarded, so busy figuring out the opinions they're supposed to have, the things they're supposed to say. It's exhausting.
The ending of the story is bittersweet. The narrator may ultimately get his heart broken but Nastenka is never villainised. If you put yourself in her shoes, it's hard to imagine a better way for her to behave. I remember the first time I read it, years ago, leaving it with the firm feeling that I would rather be alone than be someone's backup choice. I still feel that way.
Twitter Sonnet #1651
Across the frozen ground's a dozen dogs.
The brothers met about a lonely flame.
A tangled path diverged in icy bogs.
A fuse ignites beside the captured dame.
The shreds of plastic trashed the winter coat.
The extra scarf confounds the angry kids.
A million hands could hold the leaky boat.
A paper cup secures but zero bids.
Forgotten geese could fill a plate of food.
A time for leaves invites the tree to grow.
Elastic pants result in dampened mood.
A broken wire carts the fallen snow.
The famous pine was taken ev'ry way.
The rabid dancer's racing ev'ry day.
Several students pointed out the setting sun to me as I left school yesterday. So I took a picture.
On the train home, I read MR James' "Martin's Close", a short ghost story from 1911 mostly told in the format of a murder trial transcript. James takes his usual penchant for suggestion to new levels as hints of the murdered woman's ghost turning up are mentioned casually as incidental aspects of the evidence presented to establish the murderer's guilt. James really knows how to make the reader's imagination work for him.
Then the Lord Chief Justice called upon the prisoner to make his defence; which he did, though at no great length, and in a very halting way, saying that he hoped the jury would not go about to take his life on the evidence of a parcel of country people and children that would believe any idle tale; and that he had been very much prejudiced in his trial; at which the L. C. J. interrupted him, saying that he had had singular favour shown to him in having his trial removed from Exeter, which the prisoner acknowledging, said that he meant rather that since he was brought to London there had not been care taken to keep him secured from interruption and disturbance. Upon which the L. C. J. ordered the Marshal to be called, and questioned him about the safe keeping of the prisoner, but could find nothing: except the Marshal said that he had been informed by the underkeeper that they had seen a person outside his[315] door or going up the stairs to it: but there was no possibility the person should have got in. And it being inquired further what sort of person this might be, the Marshal could not speak to it save by hearsay, which was not allowed. And the prisoner, being asked if this was what he meant, said no, he knew nothing of that, but it was very hard that a man should not be suffered to be at quiet when his life stood on it. But it was observed he was very hasty in his denial.
But my favourite part is in a witness testimony, a woman from the inn where the murderer, Squire Martin, was staying:
S. Sir, it was this. It was about nine o'clock the evening after that Ann did not come home, and I was about my work in the house; there was no company there only Thomas Snell, and it was foul weather. Esquire Martin came in and called for some drink, and I, by way of pleasantry, I said to him, "Squire, have you been looking after your[305] sweetheart?" and he flew out at me in a passion and desired I would not use such expressions. I was amazed at that, because we were accustomed to joke with him about her.
L. C. J. Who, her?
S. Ann Clark, my lord. And we had not heard the news of his being contracted to a young gentlewoman elsewhere, or I am sure I should have used better manners. So I said nothing, but being I was a little put out, I begun singing, to myself as it were, the song they danced to the first time they met, for I thought it would prick him. It was the same that he was used to sing when he came down the street; I have heard it very often: "Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?" And it fell out that I needed something that was in the kitchen. So I went out to get it, and all the time I went on singing, something louder and more bold-like. And as I was there all of a sudden I thought I heard someone answering outside the house, but I could not be sure because of the wind blowing so high. So then I stopped singing, and now I heard it plain, saying, "Yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk with you," and I knew the voice for Ann Clark's voice.
Att. How did you know it to be her voice?
S. It was impossible I could be mistaken. She had a dreadful voice, a kind of a squalling voice, in particular if she tried to sing. And there was nobody in the village that could counterfeit it, for they often tried.
What I liked about this is the blending of the suggested ghost encounter with the flirtation of a suggestive song being sung. It seems to connect two unrelated things that were living in the same part of the brain all along.
Allan Quatermain calls himself timid and even a coward but that's somewhat contradicted by the fact that he leads the expedition of 1885's King Solomon's Mines across impassible deserts, through a lost civilisation, and finally into those dark and ancient mines of the title. It's a terrific and obviously influential adventure.
I'd heard it influenced Tolkien and it's very easy to see. Quatermain and his companions hire a man in Africa who turns out to secretly be the rightful king in exile of the secret Kukuana people, hidden across the desert. Allan and his companions receive indestructible chain mail shirts similar to the one of mithril Bilbo and Frodo wear. Of course, this all makes it sound a lot like Black Panther, too.
Like She, a big part of what makes King Solomon's Mines work is the narrator, in this case Allan Quatermain. He's natural and flawed, an unreliable narrator, at least in estimating himself. Author H. Rider Haggard never overplays it, though, allowing Allan to say something nice about himself now and then, as when he describes being able to go toe to toe with an enemy combatant in war before being knocked out like Bilbo in the battle at the end of The Hobbit.
Haggard does a masterful job building suspense around the politics of Kukuana and its sinister, imposter King Twala. When civil war erupts, Haggard's poetic language, and choice to make the Kukuana language translate as old-fashioned, courtly English, really gives it all a sense of epic proportions.
“Ah, these are men, indeed; they will conquer again,” called out Ignosi, who was grinding his teeth with excitement at my side. “See, it is done!”
Suddenly, like puffs of smoke from the mouth of a cannon, the attacking regiment broke away in flying groups, their white head-dresses streaming behind them in the wind, and left their opponents victors, indeed, but, alas! no more a regiment. Of the gallant triple line, which forty minutes before had gone into action three thousand strong, there remained at most some six hundred blood-spattered men; the rest were under foot. And yet they cheered and waved their spears in triumph, and then, instead of falling back upon us as we expected, they ran forward, for a hundred yards or so, after the flying groups of foemen, took possession of a rising knoll of ground, and, resuming their triple formation, formed a threefold ring around its base. And there, thanks be to Heaven, standing on the top of the mound for a minute, I saw Sir Henry, apparently unharmed, and with him our old friend Infadoos. Then Twala’s regiments rolled down upon the doomed band, and once more the battle closed in.
Recently I've been reading Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. With this book, Sagan attempts to explain to the layperson why science gives us a method superior to religion and psuedoscience for interpreting the world. I needed a voice like that because lately I've been feeling overwhelmed by the prevalence of shoddy reasoning and blatantly biased discourse masquerading as cold truth.
Sagan's guilty of some bias himself. In talking about those scientists who fail to adhere to the pure philosophy of the scientific method, he implies they're not representative of true science, while he assumes the worst examples of religious practitioners are representative of religion. But it is a balm to hear someone extol the virtues of critical thought which I really think is scarcer now than in the mid-'90s.
Do we like being criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don't reply to critics, Wait a minute, this is a really good idea, I'm very fond of it; it's done you no harm, please leave it alone. Instead, the hard and just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away.
The benefit to science is obvious. But I've noticed people have a harder time accepting real criticism of art now, too. Art critics have always garnered some amount of hatred, and certainly critics are often capable of bias, presuming their subjective dislikes provide evidence for objective flaws in a work of art. But so often now I see perfectly reasonable criticisms attacked with mobs of people accusing the critic of simply being hateful and mean. This has led to a widespread phenomenon now of YouTube critics prefacing their videos by saying they're not telling people they can't enjoy the work being criticised. People shouldn't have to be told, but they very clearly do need to be.
An old man risks his life for his livelihood in Ernest Hemingway's final completed work, the 1951 novella The Old Man and the Sea. Just an average old man in Cuba, going out to sea to catch fish. But extraordinary because of all he knows about the sea, because of all he's able to endure not just for his age but for anyone. And, yet, again, this kind of extraordinary must be kind of ordinary in such a fishing community.
We're treated to little snippets of the man's past. Maybe he's not so average. He reminisces about winning an arm wrestling competition and about the Canary Islands and lions on an African beach. Mostly he's alone throughout the story and Hemingway uses a nice technique for dialogue, having the old man give a back and forth between what he speaks and what he thinks. It's one of the most natural internal dialogues I've ever come across in fiction.
This one old man manages the tiller and the sail on his little skiff while worrying about his harpoon and the line that finally connects him to an enormous marlin. He's old and he can't do this forever. But what else can he do? Anyway, it's a magnificent way to live as well as wretched.
Another box of my old books arrived a few days ago, this one a very small box containing just a few of my Caitlin R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, and Neil Gaiman books as well as a book about Dahomey. There were also fragments of another box in the box as well as a stamp indicated the item had been received in a damaged state in Nevada. I suspect the original box somehow fell apart and my books were scattered. I also suspect some of my books were lost considering I received only about twenty pages of Caitlin's Low Red Moon. I remember that book fell apart while I was reading it but I'd had it carefully packed between a couple other books. Who knows when I'll ever know what books I lost? I kept no record of what books went in what box.
Anyway, speaking of Caitlin R. Kiernan, I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day, containing a portion of a novella she'd started a few years ago. It's about the world after a plague has devastated the planet, doing something sinister to human women that somehow prevents or distorts natural birth. It's an interesting story brought to life with Caitlin's colourful use a colloquial fantasy dialect. It begins with a bit of rumination on the Garden of Eden, the sort of thing I'm always bound to find interesting after years of studying Milton.
It's supposed to finally be a bit warmer here to-day in Kashihara, Japan, so I think I might go for a walk. Here's a little sign of spring I spotted a few days ago:
Twitter Sonnet #1526
As fish, we drank the water fast and full.
But now the desert sells a house for song.
So mix an apple, big and sauced and cool.
The core is short but who's-your-friends're long.
The swinging bat's a quiet switch to wind.
Before the shaking pitcher, mitts were cold.
The score to-day has edged around the bend.
Before the second inning, hope was old.
A certain time restricts the sacred wrist.
The arm's distraction fit the panty bill.
Explain to vapour all the air you missed.
We stuffed a day's supply beneath the gill.
The scattered pages rode Pacific winds.
Across the marsh, a sickly lantern wends.
I took this blurry photo of Anne Rice, who passed away yesterday, in 2011, ten years ago at Comic Con. Thank goodness for my blog which preserves my memories better than my brain does.
I stood there a moment and watched her autograph a small stack of comics with a silver pen and thought about what to say, having the distinct feeling that she's someone it's probably very easy to accidentally say the wrong thing to. When she handed the stack to the vendor, I finally said something like, "Hi. I just wanted to tell you your books meant a lot to me--I used to read the vampire novels over and over."
"Thank you," she said, but I could see her eyes glaze over as she mentally tried to check out of the whole convention.
My tone in the blog entry sounds slightly like my feelings were hurt because she didn't acknowledge my presence more but they weren't, really. I can't imagine how long she'd spent in that booth signing things but having waves of people tell you they love your work must numb you to it after a while.
A lot of people, for as long as I can remember, and even to-day, talking about her sudden death, seem only able to pay her back-handed compliments, to grudgingly acknowledge what she accomplished. Maybe she did seem a little arrogant--her books are filled with the implicit philosophy that some people are meant to live in wealth and luxury, and obviously she considered herself one of those people. She died in Rancho Mirage, California, in Riverside, not far from my hometown of San Diego, where she also lived for a time, in La Jolla, the most expensive part of town. For someone whose association with New Orleans was so famous it's somewhat surprising that she spent her last years in southern California. Except, of course, that's where the luxury is.
You see, even I'm being backhanded. But let's be honest for a moment about what she accomplished. When I saw her at Comic Con, I noted the irony that massive crowds were gathered there for Twilight and True Blood, two franchises that arguably wouldn't exist if not for her. What else owes her a debt of gratitude? Virtually any and all vampire fiction published after Interview with the Vampire. But more than just that. For many years, even people who wouldn't now rank Interview with the Vampire as their favourite work of gothic fiction would still have to admit it was their gateway, back when they were first discovering this stuff, to other things in the genre.
Interview with the Vampire was also part of a wave of postmodernist fiction in the late '60s and early '70s that reexamined famous works of fiction by writing new works from the point of view of the villain. Books such as Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea, which recontextualised Beowulf and Jane Eyre, respectively. The success of Interview with the Vampire eclipsed all other works of the genre, perhaps because, of all of them, it most has its own identity, its own thematic drive outside the context of the original fiction it's riffing off of.
It so happens I'm in the middle of reading Interview with the Vampire again. I'm about halfway through the book and last week I reached the part where the interviewee, the titular vampire, Louis, recounts his first trip to Europe, along with the eternal vampire child, Claudia. Searching for answers to their own origins, they travel through eastern Europe, only to encounter zombie-like, mindless specimens of the undead, terrorising villagers. This section wasn't included in the famous film adaptation by Neil Jordan, possibly because it's the part of the novel that feels the most conventional. It very much has the tone of a Hammer horror film and I'm reminded now of what Rice wrote when Christopher Lee died--I can't find the exact quote but I remember she called him sexy.
This is to say, Interview with the Vampire may have its genesis in postmodernism but it lacks the self-devouring, cynical quality postmodernist fiction usually has. She really loved vampires and the genre and this was her story with her heart in it.
The book was written shortly after the death of Rice's young daughter and it's easy to see how this influenced the character of Claudia. Moreover, the driving impulse of much of the book is an implacable grief. Louis and Claudia's search for answers to their own existence has, for Louis, a spiritual quality. His unsatisfying encounter with a Catholic priest underlines it. Here he is, this extraordinary, terrible creature, and there seems to be no reason for it. Every attempt to find reassurance or a sense of order is met with signs of bleak emptiness. The vast period of time with which he must live with this, the natural brutality of his own nature and the cosmic silence in regard to it, must have in itself been a heavy part of the burden. And I can only imagine all the time Rice dwelt with frustrating silence. It's not unlike Bergman's The Silence or Winter Light.
I was reading Interview again because I think it's a great novel about death and it was what I thought of when my grandmother passed away earlier this year. My grandmother was about the same age as Rice. Interview with the Vampire was the only Anne Rice novel I didn't sell before moving to Japan and it ended up with me in Japan entirely by accident, being in one of the unlabelled boxes of books my grandmother sent to me. It's the same old paperback I read in the '90s when I was in high school. And Anne Rice died near San Diego. Should I look for meaning in all this coincidence? It would be nice to think there is.
I guess "The Miller's Tale" is the best known of The Canterbury Tales. It's the one literature professors hope will draw some interest from a sleepy classroom, boasting, as it does, a fart joke. The tale is sometimes invoked as a defence of scatological or lowbrow humour. It does show how futile it is to get on your high horse about this stuff--people will laugh at what they laugh at, sometimes against their own moral preference.
Just how often students laugh when Nicholas lets one rip in Absolom's face is another matter. The comedy is robbed of its timing by an audience whose grasp of even their contemporary English grows weaker every year. The same obtuseness makes the setup difficult to grasp. Part of the comedy is in how smooth Nicholas usually is and how fussy Absolom is. Yet, there is a timelessness about these gags.
"The Miller's Tale" is a rebuff to "The Knight's Tale", not only of its arguments, but its very premise. It rejects the notion that human nature resembles what the Knight depicts in his tale. The Knight spoke of two men vowing undying love for a woman at a distance. The Miller speaks of two men immediately seeking to fulfill physical urges and nothing more. Nicholas and Absolom don't even care that Alisoun is married, implying they don't really care about marriage or vows.
Knocking the legs of moral presumption out from under the Knight inevitably pokes holes in his tale's ultimate statement about fate. Gods and dukes may control the fates of the two rivals and the woman but that's only because they choose to place themselves above the moral chaos of "The Miller's Tale".
But is chaos all it's cracked up to be? You might call me a snob that I don't tend to laugh at lowbrow humour. I do appreciate it, as I do "The Miller's Tale", as part of a portrait of humanity. God knows people could benefit from taking themselves less seriously nowadays. Twitter Sonnet #1493 A glowing paper passed the shady pen.
Where nothing drinks the food was ever dry.
For pleasing signs we rent a printed hen.
Upon the egg we swore to never die.
The myst'ry book was waiting near the beer.
The optic glass beheld the cooler stoop.
For nature's truth the plastics clearly fear.
We gather fruits to sell the rusty coop.
The pretty coat was crazy like a cape.
The second drink was juice or soda salt.
The city's small beside the giant ape.
The pointy building housed a golden vault.
The southern town was taped to western shows.
The gaudy head was thick with glowing bows.
