Category Archives: horror

On a stormy night

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Thunderstorms are rolling through central Texas. I do have to leave one car out in the chaos, but it's a little old and can handle it. The suspense is strange because we can watch the storms approach on radar. They look menacing, but will they really make it to Waco? We could use the rain, but we don't need hail or strong winds, and we certainly don't need tornados or damaging winds to knock down our homes, buildings, or trees. The fury of Mother Nature is quite humbling. She can manage to move enormous amounts of wind and rain, hail, and show us how weak and pathetic we really are. We put up all kinds of structures, pretending that they will last in spite of the weather and the passing of time. Putting up structures has been the story of mankind, but the ruins of those structures stand as mute testimony to the enduring power of Mother Nature to blow-off roofs, knock down trees, break windows, and shatter the dreams of builders and architects everywhere. In a sense, the normal state of any building or structure is a ruin. When we see or experience a building in its pristine or new, recently constructed state, we are experiencing the exception to the rule that all buildings will always end in a ruin. Whatever the architect's original dream was, all buildings will always end up in an archeologist's sketch book. Thunderstorms are an implacable metaphor for the destructive nature of time. The violence of lightening and wind, driving rain, are indicative of the giant forces that lie just below the surface of a beautiful spring day. Behind the moderate temperatures, blue skies, and light breezes lurk the life-changing destructive powers of nature. We make the error of thinking that we are in control with our beautiful homes, air-conditioning, and heating, but the sad truth is that this is nothing but hubris and wishful thinking. A beautiful day is really a simulacrum for peace and tranquility, and we all know that peace and tranquility are just a bit of wishful thinking that precede a dark night of disasters and broken dreams. Stormy nights like this one are made for contemplating the darker side of life, for thinking about the fragility of our plans, and how those plans can so easily go astray, run up on the rocks, go up in smoke. A stormy night is a reminder for everyone that we are not in control, and that all of our attempts to simulate control are both erroneous and pointless. We stand at the edge of a chasm without really knowing it or realizing it. We put on a good face, a mask of civility which hides the fear, the sadness, the doubts. A stormy night mirrors the internal chaos of each person--depression, melancholy, conflict, fears, and desire. Whether the rain and hail fall, whether the winds blow, whether the lightening strikes, is immaterial, it is the metaphor of the impending storm that matters. Who knows if it will ever rain again, but the threat is out there, the storm approaches, and everything is uncertain.

On a stormy night

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Thunderstorms are rolling through central Texas. I do have to leave one car out in the chaos, but it's a little old and can handle it. The suspense is strange because we can watch the storms approach on radar. They look menacing, but will they really make it to Waco? We could use the rain, but we don't need hail or strong winds, and we certainly don't need tornados or damaging winds to knock down our homes, buildings, or trees. The fury of Mother Nature is quite humbling. She can manage to move enormous amounts of wind and rain, hail, and show us how weak and pathetic we really are. We put up all kinds of structures, pretending that they will last in spite of the weather and the passing of time. Putting up structures has been the story of mankind, but the ruins of those structures stand as mute testimony to the enduring power of Mother Nature to blow-off roofs, knock down trees, break windows, and shatter the dreams of builders and architects everywhere. In a sense, the normal state of any building or structure is a ruin. When we see or experience a building in its pristine or new, recently constructed state, we are experiencing the exception to the rule that all buildings will always end in a ruin. Whatever the architect's original dream was, all buildings will always end up in an archeologist's sketch book. Thunderstorms are an implacable metaphor for the destructive nature of time. The violence of lightening and wind, driving rain, are indicative of the giant forces that lie just below the surface of a beautiful spring day. Behind the moderate temperatures, blue skies, and light breezes lurk the life-changing destructive powers of nature. We make the error of thinking that we are in control with our beautiful homes, air-conditioning, and heating, but the sad truth is that this is nothing but hubris and wishful thinking. A beautiful day is really a simulacrum for peace and tranquility, and we all know that peace and tranquility are just a bit of wishful thinking that precede a dark night of disasters and broken dreams. Stormy nights like this one are made for contemplating the darker side of life, for thinking about the fragility of our plans, and how those plans can so easily go astray, run up on the rocks, go up in smoke. A stormy night is a reminder for everyone that we are not in control, and that all of our attempts to simulate control are both erroneous and pointless. We stand at the edge of a chasm without really knowing it or realizing it. We put on a good face, a mask of civility which hides the fear, the sadness, the doubts. A stormy night mirrors the internal chaos of each person--depression, melancholy, conflict, fears, and desire. Whether the rain and hail fall, whether the winds blow, whether the lightening strikes, is immaterial, it is the metaphor of the impending storm that matters. Who knows if it will ever rain again, but the threat is out there, the storm approaches, and everything is uncertain.

On divination

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All divination is just so much malarky. All due respect for the Divination class at Hogwarts for which none of the other professors have any respect, by the way, but divination is a lot of hogwash, meaningless, empty, wrong, void. I think it is very telling that even in the fictional world of Harry Potter, characters which believe in and perform magic do not believe in divination, reading tea leaves, looking into crystal balls, signs, reading palms, tarot, bones, shooting stars, or anything else that might be read or construed as a sign of things to come. In Spain's 13th century, divination was a real problem because there was so little difference between what might be understood as science and what might be understood as pseudo-science--astrology, quiromancia, necromancia, fortune-telling, and a host of other "mancias" which followed everything from the shape of a dog turd to random feathers found on a street. Black cats, scorpions, bats, goats, any horned animal, a white dove, unicorns were considered in turn to be good, bad, evil, a blessing, all of which is completely meaningless. Unless you find lots of bugs in your house, which might mean you need to take out the trash more often and clean, but this has more to do with deduction and nothing to do with divination. The planets do not guide anyone's future, and their arbitrary alignment at your birth has nothing to do with who you are as a person. Perhaps I understand why people struggle with divination. Given the chaotic and unstable nature of life, we all want to know what is happening tomorrow--should we invest, look for a new job, buy a new house, get married, have children, break up, undertake a new project, accept a new position, advise someone on their uncertain future? Yet, the future is an unwritten script and will be ruled by the millions and millions of decisions which are made at any given moment as we move forward. The idea that the future is chaotic and unknowable makes people uncomfortable, but the markets will go up and down, students will fail or succeed, couples will get married and breakup, you will make mistakes or your plans will finally come to fruition, but all of that will happen not because you don't know what will happen, but because you work hard now to make things happen and come true. Everyday, however, people throw away hard-earned money to consult charlatans, quacks, and thieves who have convinced them that they can tell them the future. Predictions are general, over-reaching, non-specific, and the victims (or fools) fill in the blanks, thinking that they have finally found someone who can really tell the future. Why is it, then, that psychics never win the lottery? All psychics are phony, false, criminals. All divination is dishonest. No one has a gift, and all attempts to prove otherwise have proved that things such as ESP don't exist outside of what is statistically possible to predict. The fact that my colleagues in the 13th century had to wade through such a morass of conmen, fakes, phonies, charlatans is disheartening because the difference between science and non-science was confusing and unclear. No one had the great scientific vision of a Bacon or a Galileo. Questions of mystic visions or psychic revelations, diabolic incantations or black masses, necromancy or palmistry were everywhere because there was no scientific paradigm or orderly scientific method against which these weird and meaningless practices could be debunked. Even today, however, it is mind-blowing that so many people still waste their time and money with these empty and foolish practices. The future cannot be predicted, divined, or foretold--end of story.

On divination

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All divination is just so much malarky. All due respect for the Divination class at Hogwarts for which none of the other professors have any respect, by the way, but divination is a lot of hogwash, meaningless, empty, wrong, void. I think it is very telling that even in the fictional world of Harry Potter, characters which believe in and perform magic do not believe in divination, reading tea leaves, looking into crystal balls, signs, reading palms, tarot, bones, shooting stars, or anything else that might be read or construed as a sign of things to come. In Spain's 13th century, divination was a real problem because there was so little difference between what might be understood as science and what might be understood as pseudo-science--astrology, quiromancia, necromancia, fortune-telling, and a host of other "mancias" which followed everything from the shape of a dog turd to random feathers found on a street. Black cats, scorpions, bats, goats, any horned animal, a white dove, unicorns were considered in turn to be good, bad, evil, a blessing, all of which is completely meaningless. Unless you find lots of bugs in your house, which might mean you need to take out the trash more often and clean, but this has more to do with deduction and nothing to do with divination. The planets do not guide anyone's future, and their arbitrary alignment at your birth has nothing to do with who you are as a person. Perhaps I understand why people struggle with divination. Given the chaotic and unstable nature of life, we all want to know what is happening tomorrow--should we invest, look for a new job, buy a new house, get married, have children, break up, undertake a new project, accept a new position, advise someone on their uncertain future? Yet, the future is an unwritten script and will be ruled by the millions and millions of decisions which are made at any given moment as we move forward. The idea that the future is chaotic and unknowable makes people uncomfortable, but the markets will go up and down, students will fail or succeed, couples will get married and breakup, you will make mistakes or your plans will finally come to fruition, but all of that will happen not because you don't know what will happen, but because you work hard now to make things happen and come true. Everyday, however, people throw away hard-earned money to consult charlatans, quacks, and thieves who have convinced them that they can tell them the future. Predictions are general, over-reaching, non-specific, and the victims (or fools) fill in the blanks, thinking that they have finally found someone who can really tell the future. Why is it, then, that psychics never win the lottery? All psychics are phony, false, criminals. All divination is dishonest. No one has a gift, and all attempts to prove otherwise have proved that things such as ESP don't exist outside of what is statistically possible to predict. The fact that my colleagues in the 13th century had to wade through such a morass of conmen, fakes, phonies, charlatans is disheartening because the difference between science and non-science was confusing and unclear. No one had the great scientific vision of a Bacon or a Galileo. Questions of mystic visions or psychic revelations, diabolic incantations or black masses, necromancy or palmistry were everywhere because there was no scientific paradigm or orderly scientific method against which these weird and meaningless practices could be debunked. Even today, however, it is mind-blowing that so many people still waste their time and money with these empty and foolish practices. The future cannot be predicted, divined, or foretold--end of story.

On Robinson Crusoe

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Robinson Crusoe, just as fictional a character as Don Quixote or Sherlock Holmes, has come to be just as real as Ishmael or Harry Potter. Shipwrecked and alone on a Caribbean island, Crusoe must rebuild his solitary life as an Englishman, lost in a wilderness and with no hope of rescue in the near future. The idea of living for years, abandoned and alone on an island far from civilization, is a frightening one. Most people cannot even begin to imagine what it might be like to live in isolation from all human contact. Of course, there are those who might dream of such an arrangement, but for the most part, we are gregarious and need human interaction to be happy and productive. Human interaction gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Being a "castaway" with no hope of rescue is almost as horrifying as being walled up behind a brick wall. Our literature is filled with these surreal situations which firmly address some of the deepest and darkest human fears, one of which being the fate of Robinson Crusoe: to find oneself totally alone with no hope of relief in the near future. The very term, "castaway," seems to devalue the victim of an accident over which they may have had no control, such as shipwreck. To be a castaway is to find oneself alone and abandoned, deprived of the creature comforts, deprived of human interaction, deprived of the structures that give our lives meaning--law, commerce, culture, society, ethics, art, time, neighbors, family. The enormous challenge that the character must face is his own motivation for taking care of himself in the face of having to live absolutely alone forever. The idea of rescue is probably the only thing that stands between Crusoe and his own insanity. In other words, the hope of rescue, no matter how small, is that one little glimmer of hope that keeps the castaway from just lying down and dying where he has washed up on the shore of his desert island. What is curious about the novel and Crusoe is how he is faced with reinventing a series of technologies that he has always taken for granted: the wheel, a shovel, baskets, bottles, cooking dishes, barrels. Eventually, he will adapt what he has on the island to solve many of these sorts of problems, but he is very vexed at recreating a table and chair for himself, realizing that the skilled craftsman who create these common everyday items are very highly skilled and armed with the highly specialized tools of their trades. Alone with only a minimum of tools and raw materials, Crusoe must come to terms with his own inadequacy as a craftsman with no training and no skills. Crusoe cannot reinvent England on his island, although he tries very hard. When he is sick, he has no doctor, when he wants to make bread, he has no flour, when he needs advice, he is alone. He lives, eats, sleeps, hunts, works, and walks absolutely by himself. When the tide rises, the storms rise up, the earth shakes, the sun beats down, he must face all of these things alone. Crusoe's levels of desperation are real and frequently bring him to tears, but the power of self-preservation is so strong and so persistent that in spite of an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, he still gets up every day and stays alive, working, eating, cleaning, planning, inventing, solving problems. Crusoe's story is credible, verging on verisimilitude, in fact because the human spirit, even in the face of horrific odds, is indomitable and unbending, invincible as it were. Crusoe has lots of failures as he attempts to rebuild English society on his little island, but he also has many successes, growing grain, training a parrot, building his "homes." In the end, of course, he does leave his island with his man, Friday, but he has spent almost three decades on his desert island jail.

On cemeteries and graveyards

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What could I possibly say about cemeteries that has not already been said? Seriously creepy, still, morbid, sad, pastoral, cold, lonely, desolate, the destination from which no one returns but the gravedigger and the clergy. You can call the local bone pile anything you want, but it never stops be exactly that: a bone pile, a pile of bones. That which is left when we die, the mortal combination of bone and flesh, unmoving, unfeeling, unseeing, is not but the leftovers of a life that burned brightly for a short amount of time before the soul took its leave, leaving only ash and emptiness behind. I am not convinced that there is any point in burying bodies in the ground. There are health issues for doing it, but the mortal remains of any person are only what remains after death. In spite of what Dr. Frankenstein might have alleged at some point in the past, bodies cannot be regenerated or reanimated once the end has come. There is a limit to what modern medicine and empirical sciences can do with the spark of life, but then again cemeteries are monuments to defeat and the inevitability of death, an inevitability that gives us all energy and passion, knowing that all mortal things are finite. Cemeteries are clearly about memory, creating memory, creating a monument, mourning, loss, the past, and leaving it behind. We build cemeteries because we fear death and need to put it inside an official area where we normally don't go. Yes, we go to cemeteries to leave flowers, mourn for the dead, and to leave the newly dead, but otherwise our legends and mythologies are designed to scare away the curious and the foolish. The living know only too well that death is only always too close, but that by isolating death in a special place, death is far away and removed. The tombstones are iconic of both death and memory, and although they carry the names of the dead, the stones are a reassurance to the living that they are, indeed, alive because no stone yet carries their particular name. The cemetery is then both attractive and repellant to the living, a normal by-product of a healthy society which cannot conceive or understand the true nature of life's final mystery. All will go to the cemetery in their time, and so in our sadness and loss, we erect monuments and stones to the memory of the departed. The stones do nothing to alleviate the sadness of loss, but the simulacrum of funerals, burial, and departure are traditions and rituals which distract us from the business at hand, saying goodbye to a loved one. For outsiders, the cemetery is a completely different kind of place: an inscribed history of a place, the people who lived there, and the people who still live there. Cemeteries, when cared for, are pleasant, quiet, pastoral scenes which are good for thinking and relaxing. What is sad, however, are the forgotten cemeteries which herald changing times and displaced civilizations, forgotten families, the abandoned dead. Perhaps cemeteries exist because the living fear being forgotten at all. Yet the brutal reality of time and memory is the cruel truth that at some point in the future, we will all be forgotten. The physical never endures. Poetry endures, words endure, stories endure. The details may fade, but the essence of art, poetry, words, will endure even when the faces are forgotten. So we dig the graves and plant the headstones.

On January

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The first month of the year has always been a series of mixed blessings and curses for me. I love winter sports--skating and skiing, ice fishing, but twenty-seven degrees below zero, less than eight hours of daylight, icy roads, and cranky people make January a real challenge to get through. One has irrational dreams of Florida, the Bahamas, Mexico, while shoveling the latest dusting of snow. The wind nips at your nose and ears, daring you to put a hat on. Yet cold weather people make the best of it. They ignore the cold, don't zip their jackets, mislay their hats and gloves, all in an attempt to pretend that winter is really not there at all. January is also about getting back to work and school and burrowing into the routine. Perhaps routine is even harder to take than winter because routine will crush your spirit and bury your soul. I know that routine is also good, giving meaning and structure to our lives: we work, study, eat, shower, cook, do dishes, wash clothes, watch television, read books. Yet we are creatures of routine. Given a chance we always sit int he same chair, drive the same routes to work, eat the same lunch, wear the same clothes, drink the same drinks. We have so little imagination at times that it seems incredible that we have a creative bone in our bodies. But if January proves anything, it proves that the human spirit is indomitable. We are capable of almost unimaginable creative energy, writing books, doing research, inventing new machines, composing music, sculpting art, choreographing dances, dreaming poetry, singing songs, exploring unknown countries. So people are a complex mix of energy and creation and lethargy and routine. January, I believe, brings all of these strange and nutty tendencies to a head. Short days and long nights give people too much time to think about the darker side of existence--why am I here, what am I doing with my life, should I stop doing this and become a carpenter? January insists that you ask the hard questions about life, but ironically does not insist on any answers. You see, January is just there--cold, uncaring, desolate, empty, like a long hall connecting disparate subway stations illuminated only by a bitter neon that emphasizes the wrinkles, enhances the creakiness of your limbs, and chills your cheery outlook. The best approach to surviving January is to not look at it directly, but to squint, turn your head, and glance furtively at it without letting on that you might be interested. You have to flirt with January, play hard-to-get, but don't ask for its phone number or buy it a drink. January can run you over like a steamroller if you let it. I prefer a more non-chalant approach as if January were a rescue animal that you might take home if you think it's cut enough or that you might be compatible. And of course, January will hurt you, make you cry, make you regret ever having spoken or become Facebook friends. January will forget to call, throw you over for someone else, leave you out in the cold, shamelessly abandon you for someone or something else. A storm will come up, the snow will fall, the temperatures will drop, the sun will set early, and the dark will creep in from all sides to cover your little island of warmth and light. The bright side of this is February, so beware.

On the (not) impending apocalypse

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All jokes aside, the world did not end today, nor will it end anytime soon. Galactic time does work that way. That the Mayans made a calendar is wonderful and a tribute to their skills as mathematicians and astronomers, but nobody predicts the future, and neither did the Mayans. In fact their calendar was just that, a calendar, which reflected every human being's finite vision of their world. Calendars are by their very nature finite. Anything you can dream of and count, such as days, may only be limitless in the imagination of the dreamer. Anytime you write a thing down, such as a calendar, it will be finite, have a start and stop date, which does not mean, however, that the world ends just because the calendar ends. Many foolish people have made a big deal out of this imagined apocalyptic discourse because this particular calendar cuts off on December 21, 2012, which is nothing but poppycock and foolishness. I've hung plenty of calendars in my house and the all end on December 31st, but that does not mean that the world will not be there on January 1st. I just need to hand up a new calendar. For some, however, the end of the world might fulfill some sort of religious obsession about the end of times, but they should be careful, they might get what they wish for. For the rational empiricists in the room, all the apocalyptic talk is just so much nonsense and rubbish. Rational thought reminds us that all calendars are human constructions, reflecting political, social, and religious conventions that are all outstandingly arbitrary and completely subjective, having nothing to the galactic destiny of this little planet called "Earth." All human calendars are not created equal, some more or less accurate, but they all "do" the same thing--count days into other subjective units of measure--weeks, months, years, decades, centuries--that allow humans to wrap their tiny minds around. Without these units of measure our poor underworked brains would get all dithery and confused about when we need to show up for coffee or when Tom's birthday is, or even the fact that Tom has a birthday. I have always found birthdays to be a bit of a letdown, so let's just stop now. So the world has not ended, we have to continue to wash clothing, feed our pets, and get the Christmas presents bought and wrapped. In the end there is no end. The desire that the human business come to an end is a strange one which has been shared by almost everyone since the beginning of time, but the fire and brimstone of the end times is nowhere in sight. It's not that the world won't end someday. Eventually, the sun will go out, a sufficiently large asteroid will destroy life on Earth, the continents will drift together, California will slide into the ocean, the polar icecaps will melt, New York will be under ten feet of water, and Ohio will have an ocean front view, but not today or anytime soon. Our lives are too short for us to witness any of these wonders. In the meantime the apocalyptic crowd will have to find another date to obsess over. Perhaps they might scan the writings of Nostradamus or Columbus for some new clues as to the end of times. Maybe the Inca knew something? The Spanish? My favorite barista? Maybe Marilyn Monroe knew something? Anyway, nobody gets off the hook and when January rolls around, it will be back to business as usual.

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it's just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn't seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother's nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let's skip that ugly detail. "My, grandmother, what big teeth you have." " My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure." "My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!" Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother's clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother's cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy--the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life--sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf's skins. That is all the wolf has ever been--a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it's just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn't seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother's nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let's skip that ugly detail. "My, grandmother, what big teeth you have." " My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure." "My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!" Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother's clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother's cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy--the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life--sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf's skins. That is all the wolf has ever been--a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.