Category Archives: wolves

On "The Game of Thrones"

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I stopped reading this book on page 218, disgusted by George R. R. Martin’s total disregard for either his readers or his characters, so if that’s what you like about him, stop reading now because I’m throwing him under the bus. Perhaps some people find it refreshing to have every single good character in the book killed or maimed in some hideous way, but I find it boorish. Good characters do die sometimes, no doubt, verisimilitude has to be a part of any good novel, but Martin pushes the envelope just a little too far in dashing his readers hopes and expectations for any kind of happy resolution. In a certain way, he is a writer/conman who just keeps pushing his readers down the road of desperation and depression. Some readers like their novels dark and depressing, bereft of any hope or sentiment, maybe that’s what they expect out of life so that’s how they pick their novels. I don’t mind if my hero is in danger, that she has a challenge to resolve, that he suffers hardship or even dies, but there is a strange cruelty in Martin’s writing. His sadism as a writer transfers to a novel that makes people–his readers–suffer through all sorts of misfortunes and tragedies. The idea of dystopia is fundamental in the literature of the 20th and 21st century, and there is a long history of dystopic writings such as On the Beach, Brave New World, and 1984. Those are only three, but one might add Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to that list. Dystopia is certainly an important part of the Martin post-post-modern world, but it should be ingested in small dosis–too much, all at once, and it will make you a very dark person indeed. Martin’s world is a dystopia, no doubt, a decadent pseudo-medieval setting of wrecked castles, corrupt and traitorous rulers, and heroes who are not heroes. Martin’s dark take on his society was at first, for me, refreshing, mysterious, filled with interesting characters, but after 200 pages, the handwriting is on the wall. Why should I bother to depress myself with this kind of writing? Just when you think he’s letting one of his characters succeed, he kills them in some horrific way. He has a sadistic twist in his writing where he allows the evil people to wallow in their excesses while at the same time he punishes the good with nasty tragedies and unjust punishments. Novels, no matter how dark, need to allow their fictional inhabitants a chance to succeed and breath, and if the world does work, the evil will be vanquished and punished because in the real world we don’t get this kind of satisfaction very often, so we look for our heroes in books. The real world is a valley of tears, where the good people fail, our friends get sick and die, our relatives suffer from unemployment and exploitation. I have no doubt that many readers are right at home in Martin’s novels and do appreciate my comments, but I would have it no other way. Hundreds of thousands of readers like his books, but I am quite sure that there are plenty of readers out there who feel tricked, fooled, sad that they read all of those pages only to find that the bad guys have flourished, the good are all dead, and there really was no point in reading this in the first place. Life is too short to read novels that depress and sicken you. The ironic part of this is that when I started out reading this first novel I thought it was pretty good. No, I was wrong.

On "The Game of Thrones"

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I stopped reading this book on page 218, disgusted by George R. R. Martin’s total disregard for either his readers or his characters, so if that’s what you like about him, stop reading now because I’m throwing him under the bus. Perhaps some people find it refreshing to have every single good character in the book killed or maimed in some hideous way, but I find it boorish. Good characters do die sometimes, no doubt, verisimilitude has to be a part of any good novel, but Martin pushes the envelope just a little too far in dashing his readers hopes and expectations for any kind of happy resolution. In a certain way, he is a writer/conman who just keeps pushing his readers down the road of desperation and depression. Some readers like their novels dark and depressing, bereft of any hope or sentiment, maybe that’s what they expect out of life so that’s how they pick their novels. I don’t mind if my hero is in danger, that she has a challenge to resolve, that he suffers hardship or even dies, but there is a strange cruelty in Martin’s writing. His sadism as a writer transfers to a novel that makes people–his readers–suffer through all sorts of misfortunes and tragedies. The idea of dystopia is fundamental in the literature of the 20th and 21st century, and there is a long history of dystopic writings such as On the Beach, Brave New World, and 1984. Those are only three, but one might add Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to that list. Dystopia is certainly an important part of the Martin post-post-modern world, but it should be ingested in small dosis–too much, all at once, and it will make you a very dark person indeed. Martin’s world is a dystopia, no doubt, a decadent pseudo-medieval setting of wrecked castles, corrupt and traitorous rulers, and heroes who are not heroes. Martin’s dark take on his society was at first, for me, refreshing, mysterious, filled with interesting characters, but after 200 pages, the handwriting is on the wall. Why should I bother to depress myself with this kind of writing? Just when you think he’s letting one of his characters succeed, he kills them in some horrific way. He has a sadistic twist in his writing where he allows the evil people to wallow in their excesses while at the same time he punishes the good with nasty tragedies and unjust punishments. Novels, no matter how dark, need to allow their fictional inhabitants a chance to succeed and breath, and if the world does work, the evil will be vanquished and punished because in the real world we don’t get this kind of satisfaction very often, so we look for our heroes in books. The real world is a valley of tears, where the good people fail, our friends get sick and die, our relatives suffer from unemployment and exploitation. I have no doubt that many readers are right at home in Martin’s novels and do appreciate my comments, but I would have it no other way. Hundreds of thousands of readers like his books, but I am quite sure that there are plenty of readers out there who feel tricked, fooled, sad that they read all of those pages only to find that the bad guys have flourished, the good are all dead, and there really was no point in reading this in the first place. Life is too short to read novels that depress and sicken you. The ironic part of this is that when I started out reading this first novel I thought it was pretty good. No, I was wrong.

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.

On horror stories

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Human beings are fascinated by horror stories–obsessed, one might say. From our earliest times we have created narratives filled with monsters, ghouls, trolls, ghosts, and creatures whose only purpose seems to be threatening or killing people in out of the way places, dark houses, empty castles, lonely highways, cold mountain passes, haunted spaceships, lonely planets, and creepy little towns. The very space created within the horror narrative is menacing, ghastly, deserted, dusty, filled with cobwebs, forgotten spaces. Both attics and basements are particularly hazardous spaces, but empty jungles, strange swamps, and wind-swept mountains can also be problematic, especially if you are a scientist in an out of the way place such as Antarctica, a space ship on its way to Mars, an old freighter navigating a long way from its home port, at the bottom of the sea. All of these spaces are a long distance from a safe port and speak to the inherent danger of far away places, places that are unknown and unsafe. Strange beings–half man, half reptile–inhabit these places waiting for their next meal to come along. Most of these narratives begin innocently enough with calm seas and smooth sailing, blue skies and light winds, before things start to go wrong. A crisis ensues, a problem arises, a computer goes haywire, a storm blows up, somebody ignores a warning, and the bottom falls out–a ship sinks, a monster gets loose, communications break down, an earthquake occurs, a volcano erupts, a typhoon strikes, and the characters start to die in horrible and miserable ways. In the middle of these narratives, a hero arises who must fight to overcome the obstacles, monsters, and spaces that lie between him/her and safety. We consume these stories as if there were no tomorrow. They seem to reflect some of our darkest fears of abandonment, of the unknown, of the dark, of technology, of power, of the future, of change. We fear that we are poisoning our world, that technology is moving ahead too fast, that space is a dangerous place, that there are unexplainable supernatural things that are not dreamt of in our philosophy. The archetypal ghost stories seems to be a paradigm inherent in any serious discussion of the genre–a strange place, a vengeful ghost, isolation, mayhem. Perhaps horror stories haunt our collective psyche because the raise existential questions of the highest order: who are we, what is our purpose in life, what does all of this (life) mean? So we let the vampires, werewolves, and mummies run through our nightmares, hoping against hope that they will stay there.

On horror stories

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Human beings are fascinated by horror stories–obsessed, one might say. From our earliest times we have created narratives filled with monsters, ghouls, trolls, ghosts, and creatures whose only purpose seems to be threatening or killing people in out of the way places, dark houses, empty castles, lonely highways, cold mountain passes, haunted spaceships, lonely planets, and creepy little towns. The very space created within the horror narrative is menacing, ghastly, deserted, dusty, filled with cobwebs, forgotten spaces. Both attics and basements are particularly hazardous spaces, but empty jungles, strange swamps, and wind-swept mountains can also be problematic, especially if you are a scientist in an out of the way place such as Antarctica, a space ship on its way to Mars, an old freighter navigating a long way from its home port, at the bottom of the sea. All of these spaces are a long distance from a safe port and speak to the inherent danger of far away places, places that are unknown and unsafe. Strange beings–half man, half reptile–inhabit these places waiting for their next meal to come along. Most of these narratives begin innocently enough with calm seas and smooth sailing, blue skies and light winds, before things start to go wrong. A crisis ensues, a problem arises, a computer goes haywire, a storm blows up, somebody ignores a warning, and the bottom falls out–a ship sinks, a monster gets loose, communications break down, an earthquake occurs, a volcano erupts, a typhoon strikes, and the characters start to die in horrible and miserable ways. In the middle of these narratives, a hero arises who must fight to overcome the obstacles, monsters, and spaces that lie between him/her and safety. We consume these stories as if there were no tomorrow. They seem to reflect some of our darkest fears of abandonment, of the unknown, of the dark, of technology, of power, of the future, of change. We fear that we are poisoning our world, that technology is moving ahead too fast, that space is a dangerous place, that there are unexplainable supernatural things that are not dreamt of in our philosophy. The archetypal ghost stories seems to be a paradigm inherent in any serious discussion of the genre–a strange place, a vengeful ghost, isolation, mayhem. Perhaps horror stories haunt our collective psyche because the raise existential questions of the highest order: who are we, what is our purpose in life, what does all of this (life) mean? So we let the vampires, werewolves, and mummies run through our nightmares, hoping against hope that they will stay there.

On Dark Shadows star Jonathan Frid/Barnabas Collins

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Jonathan Frid, the Canadian actor who played the melancholy vampire of the ultimately campy and strange soap opera, Dark Shadows, died Friday in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. The production values were low, the dialogues were melodramatic, and the special effects were horrific, but not because the show was scary. For an eight-year-old, the show was incredibly spooky, frightening, and creepy. I guess the production values for a daily soap opera lent themselves to a campy, gothic, soap opera about witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, curses, the undead, and general supernatural salad that probably invented a few new ghouls and goblins. The best part of this outrageous production was watching all the actors play their roles straight as if they believed every word. One often did not know whether to scream in terror or laugh because it was so funny. The show was a parody, a complicated riff as it were, on the whole idea of soap operas: people fall in love, they fall out of love, they are greedy, they fall in love with the wrong person, violence ensues, people disappear, they reappear, somebody gets their arm cut off, there is a fire, a monster lurks somewhere in this dark old house, at least one character turns into a werewolf, somebody lets the vampire out of his coffin, someone gets pregnant, another fire ensues, and so on. Soap operas are played with no specific end in mind. They are continuous, which is particularly interesting if you are a 175 year-old vampire who is looking for a lost love who has been reincarnated, conveniently, in the ravishing 21 year-old daughter of the creaky (creepy) mansion’s patriarch, the great-great-great grandnephew of said vampire. So now we can add incest to the list of creepy behaviors crawling through this soap. Frid fell into this role and became an instant pop icon of the period. In an era before video-taping, people would stay home to watch the soap, which was filmed and shot in a very tantalizing way: never show the monsters or the blood, unless it’s the Friday episode and you want to leave people hanging. The show would be immersed in the most inane dialogues about ghosts and witches and such and the thing would never really progress. Show me the monster! Yet it would progress just enough to keep it interesting, a kind of soap opera striptease. Frid played the role of the melancholy, misunderstood, but blood-thirsty vampire probably better than he ever wanted to. Fangs, cane, strange bangs, ruddy cheeks, he oozed vampire from every pore, and of course, the women watching from home could only guess what those fangs might feel like on their own throats. The show was a campy romp through repressed Victorian sexuality that played quite well on television, and Frid starred in more than six hundred episodes before it finally burned itself out, which is the only logical end for a soap opera this strange. Tip-of-the-hat to a great actor who turned into a pop icon vampire, and only ever flashed a smile when he knew lunch was about to be served. He never drank…wine.

On the dead of winter

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Since we are not having winter this year, I thought it might be nice to eulogize winter for a moment. It isn’t cold out, there is no snow, the days are getting longer, baseball players don’t need an extra long-sleeve t-shirt to stay warm, the robins are headed north, and flowers are blooming everywhere. There is no chill in the air. Yet, it is still winter, the cruelest time of year when hearts and souls are at their lowest point, when just facing another day is a challenge, when your reserves are all that you have left, when making ends meet is not a possibility. It is that time of the year when Mother Nature does a little house-cleaning, calling the oldest, the sickest, home one last time. Winter and death have always gone hand in hand, and the white snow signifies the eternal sleep of the ages as it covers everything and everybody, the just and the unjust alike. Snow erases color and shape and memory, sweeping away life and silencing the sounds of living. Winter has been just another part of the eternal cycle of the seasons, symbolic of the end, the end of everything. Winter is here to remind us all of our own mortality, of the finite nature of life, of the struggle we all make to get to the next day. Many animals will sleep during the cold dark quiet days of winter, their body temperatures dropping into a state of hypothermia that allows them to comfortably hibernate until Spring and food return. The trees lose their leaves, the grass turns gray and the whole world puts on a tunic of browns, grays and whites in order to wait out the winter. Winter is too much for some, and spring is too far away. The sun is not warm, dimly sitting on the horizon before it too disappears. The icy temperatures of winter are completely contrary to the warm hearts that beat within us. Ice, snow, darkness creep in on all sides like a pack of wolves waiting for their prey to fall one last time. The dead of winter are silent; their pain is gone and suffering is over, and then they are gone, leaving only a memory behind. But the days pass, the sun gets warmer, the days longer, and the gray, rainy days of March turn into the sunny, breezy and warm days of April. The birds are back, the daffodils are blooming, the tulips are red, and the heavy jackets go back in the closet. Winter is over, again, for awhile, and she goes back to her cave and lets the living have their world back–at least for a little while.