Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions

My post about "serial epic fantasy" a few weeks ago has gotten more (non-robot) hits than most of my recent posts, so I thought I would revisit the topic, which is, after all, a perennial one on this blog. In fact, it goes back to my second post ever, when I threw down my gauntlet before the literary world.

At the time I wrote that, I had just despaired of ever finding an agent or publisher for my gargantuan first novel, which was 150K words after trimming it down by half and seriously boring. It was about autism, autogyros, quantum mechanics, and various characters that eventually found a home in my Enoch stories. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was too inwardly focused to be readable. I ultimately relegated my autistic recluse to the void in favor of a sanguine pugilist who leaps before he looks and basically does everything I would never do.

So that post was (and is) a kind of manifesto. Manifestos are fun, especially when they're full of hyperbole and self-importance. So let's do another! I'll begin with an unapologetic catalog of my twenty favorite fantasy novels, listed in chronological order:

• Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916)
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)
• The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) 
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (1938)
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
• Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1983)
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984)

Well, okay, that was twenty-one. To get on that list, you have to have made a permanent impression my imagination, and I have to have reread you as a guilty pleasure at least once. A list of my favorite short fiction would include pieces by George MacDonald, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore. I tend to gravitate toward the weird and ornate, like "The Repairer of Reputations" or "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" or "The Tower of the Elephant" or "The Demon in the Flower."

So I think it's fair to say that I'm biased toward the what came before the Tolkien watershed. When I read what other people have to say about pre-Tolkien novels, I often get the feeling that they're viewed as ungainly precursors, as the dinosaur skeletons at the museum entrance. They're the work of primitives who didn't quite know what they were about, Giottos and Fra Angelicos to our modern Raphaels and Caravaggios. They're tolerated or even admired, but as a kind of academic curiosity that one delves into occasionally as an act of literary penance.

My preferences are quite the opposite. I do read modern fantasy. I discover hidden gems that way. They're out there, to be sure. But my first and only real love is the pre-Tolkien canon. How many times have I read A Voyage to Arcturus or Phantastes or The Worm Ouroboros? Too many to count. If I read modern fantasy, it's because I'm looking for something to satisfy the hunger whetted by these works.

But, more often than not, genre fiction cheats this desire. It's got no bite, no danger, no weirdness. It's tame. To put it in galline terms, it's caponized and clipped. It lacks the grotesque stylistic bosses, the glowing digressions, the awkward framing devices and dumb shows of the classics.

I could point to myriad ways in which the works of the pre-Tolkien canon influenced one another. But each draws far more from philosophy and science and mythology. They were part of a real literary movement rather than a genre. A literary movement is a living thing that grows according to its own inner logic and is necessarily bound in time; a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements. The difference between fantastic literature and a lot of genre fiction is the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a McMansion.

And in case I seem entirely dismissive of more recent efforts, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about everything that's out there right now. I've read things that I've liked very much. But just look at the sheer quantity of it all. The kinds of works I like can't be mass produced or made to order. They're like lightning strikes. And one thing I note about the majority of the authors I listed above is that their primary career was not fiction writing. If it had been, they would have starved.

Let me also emphasize that I'm not into nostalgia. I have no desire to try to "get back" to anything. If a true fantasy novel is to be written in our time, it must take root right here in the twenty-first century, drawing its nourishment from the world around us even if in reaction against it. There are no "good old days" to hearken back to. The world in which fantasy first flourished was a dirty and brutal place, and the master fantasists were people of their time. Even the one author most responsible for creating the modern fantasy novel, the aggressively backward-looking William Morris, was a social activist whose efforts in manufacture reform were echoed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus half a century later.

As Tolkien points out, the Escape for which fantasy is often blamed has "Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt" as its companions. True fantasy is not safe. It's revolutionary. But genre fiction can't be revolutionary. It mixes and matches the established tropes, making novel arrangements rather than creating new worlds. It might, if quite certain of its audience, cautiously advance a few progressive or conservative talking points, but it will never ever do anything that makes it unclear which tribe it's supposed to appeal to, because that is the one unforgivable sin.

It's easy enough to talk about all this on my blog, and I do often enough. The quality of my novels is debatable, but at any rate they're out there. Sometimes you just have to get up on a rooftop and shout about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Plus, the robots were getting kind of rambunctious in my absence. Go away, robots. Dance somewhere else.

Related: A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art

House by Niggle

J. R. R. Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle" is a fairy tale about a Sunday painter whose devotion to his craft leads him to neglect his duties in life, despite the fact that he works in complete anonymity, in his shed, with his neighbors' contempt as his only recognition. When it comes time for his "journey," he must set out unprepared, and undergo a long period of penal servitude (painting board after board the same boring color) to rectify his many failings. But in the end he's granted the reality of what his faltering art has always aimed at without ever achieving it.

Really, the story is a parable about purgatory (cf. Of Rodents and Ashes), and captures a great human truth: time does something to the soul, something that can't be replaced by any amount of wishing or willing. It's has always had a special significance for me, because I seem to have a lot in common with its protagonist. Tolkien appears to have had himself in mind. But his "tree" has, in fact, gone on to become one of the marvels of modern times.

Anyway, one of the duties I've neglected while spinning tales and painting pictures is the decoration of a doll house we bought for my daughter two and a half years ago. It started in a plain-jane, raw-wood condition and has progressed by fits and starts. A dresser here. A floor there. No hurry. But gradually the conviction has grown in my mind that, should I happen to die unexpectedly, the first 200 years or so of my afterlife would be spent painting thousands of identical doll houses the same uniform white. So, overcome by my conscience at last, I've put in some serious man-hours, and gotten the darned thing playable.

Now, don't worry. I'm not going to bore you by showing– Wait, what's that? You want to see pictures? You're twisting my arm, but...okay!

*

We bought the house unpainted and unfinished. It's not fancy or anything – it's made to be played with by little kids – and we got a set of blocky, unpainted wood furniture to go with it. So, here's the finished exterior:

There's a brick stoop that didn't make it into the picture for some reason. Thin slats of wood and a coat of silver paint on top sufficed for a metal roof, which the houses all have around here. We live in the old part of town, and decorated the house to resemble some of the ones around our neighborhood. We don't know what the chimney is for, as there's no fireplace inside, but no matter.

The interior was decorated in the shabby chic style, in consultation with world-renowned designers. Actually, we copied things out of interior design books from Half Price. But it is shabby chic. As you can probably tell from the background, it's made to look a bit like our house, and a bit like we would like our house to be.

We begin our tour in the master bedroom. Note the distressed antique finish on the nightstand and chest of drawers (or "chester drawers," as people around here like to spell it). That's a genuine natural-fiber jute rug you see on the floor, carefully hand-crafted from a place mat I bought at Wal-Mart. The edges are coated in Dritz Fray Check, in case you're wondering. I think I'll glue some rafters to the ceiling one of these days.

And here's the loo. My daughter informs me that the red pan on the floor is the cat's litter box.

Here we have the upstairs hall. I made the wood floor from popsicle sticks craft sticks which I cut square, glued together in a movable mat, stained, and varnished. Everything made specifically for doll houses is super expensive, so I improvised where possible.

The kids' bedroom. We followed instructions from a furniture refinishing book to give everything the antiqued look. We're still working on the lace curtains and blankets and pillows, but that's my better half's department. We're also working on some paintings for the walls, and that, of course, is my department.

The living room, where I think we really do need some more work, plus a big throw rug. Unfortunately, the Plastic Ordoñez family resembles the Real Ordoñez family in that every available horizontal space is stacked with books. We both need more shelves.

The kitchen, where the bareness of the walls is felt most keenly. Note the chunky vintage appliances: pure shabby chic. Disconcertingly, my daughter has given the Plastic Ordoñez family the gender-reversed names of the Real Ordoñez family, with the exception of my wife, whose name has no masculine version. I'm told that they dine around the coffee table, as there's not enough room in the kitchen. At least they don't have a TV.

Thank you for visiting Chateau O., where you're always greeted by a chicken on the roof.

*

My grandmother, who in my own mind ranks among the great matrons of antiquity, became an expert miniaturist in her later years, despite her arthritis and rapidly failing eyesight. She would make scale models of the cane-bottomed chairs built by her carpenter father, who was also blind, and crochet tiny sweaters with tiny crochet hooks. A good but reserved and terrifyingly critical woman. The story is that whenever her adult children gave her handmade gifts at Christmas, she could later be seen surreptitiously giving the handiwork a critical examination.

I recall once driving her around town as a teenager; my truck had a standard transmission, and, impressed by her silent presence beside me, I did my utmost to ensure that my gear-shifting was as smooth as cream. And she was watching carefully, because later on she expressed approbation of my skills with the clutch to my mother.

Her nine children are scattered across the country now, a race of eccentric misfits who might make for a good screwball comedy in the style of You Can't Take it With You, if you could get them all in one place, which only happens when someone dies, and sometimes not even then.

She, alas, would be less than impressed with my accomplishment here, despite being the inspiration behind it. It is a bit crude. But my daughter is sitting here playing with it as I type, which is very rewarding. We'll keep adding to it, too, and no doubt our next endeavor will be finer.

I've always loved models – I had a dinosaur diorama and an HO-scale train set when I was a boy – and I think my son and I will start railroading sometime in the next few years. That's what's great about having kids around: you get to play with really cool stuff, and people act like you're all virtuous because of it.

What now? Hm, I think the backyard may need mowing...

*

Many thanks to whomever has been buying my books, incidentally. I hope you enjoy them! And if you haven't bought 'em yet, go get 'em! See the links on the sidebar for more information.

Oodles of Doodles

I have an art show coming up in September and am working to make a few quick pieces to fill out the exhibit. I've gotten two done in one week, which must be some kind of record for me. (Lately, anyway; in my tumultuous youth I used to dash paintings off in an hour or so.)

My art shows generally attract a few of my math students, so I've been under some pains to make mathematical art, dangerous though this is, beauty and truth being distinct transcendentals, &c., &c. A while back a student sent me a YouTube video about topological doodles. Being both a doodler and a student of topology, I added one technique contained therein to my Long Meeting Repertoire. Begin with a squiggle, turn each crossing into a twist, and, Voila!, you have a surface with boundary. In the fullness of time, this led to the advent of...the Chicken Man:

Chicken Man, 5" x 7", watercolor and ink on hot-pressed paper.

Born from a drawing completed on my mother-in-law's kitchen table. Is he a chicken? A man? An indeterminate embryo? A once-punctured non-orientable surface of genus 10?

He is, at any rate, inspired by Paul Klee and the ideas expressed in his highly mathematical Pedagogical Sketchbook. I regard Klee as one of the great artistic geniuses of all time; that I might link the present discussion back to the main topic of my blog, perhaps it would be apposite to recall that time I received the following disapprobation from the famous sci-fi author and political commentator John C. Wright for my opinion:

You sound very reasonable, but then I looked up the works of Paul Klee, and they were so abominably ugly and deranged that I admit the gulf between us can never be crossed. Artistically, it is the same as trying to reason out the sound of one hand clapping: you are looking at something meant to hinder the ability to admire art, to blind the eye and benumb the brain. It is garbage, pure and simple, and even simple drawings by comic book artists or commercial artists doing magazine covers show far more skill, sanity, proportion, color, composition, and execution. [...]

Why do you vainly tell me to ignore the evidence of my eyes, which I trust, and believe the conclusions of your judgment, which even the limited experience of this exchange proves is execrable.

Had you pointed me to some painting that was merely odd or incomprehensible to me, my reaction would be different. I could continue to give you the benefit of the doubt. Instead you have pointed me to the most absurd, ghastly, and disproportion bits of ugly lunacy imaginable, pieces that make me physically sick to look at, and call them good work. [...]

I am an artist. I know what art is because I can do it. I also know when I am looking at something far better than I do because I lack the skill, and I can see the garbage you like and I know I could draw as well with my left foot after my foot was run over by a tractor and I was pumped so full of painkillers that the lower half of my brain was sloshing.

It is also obvious that no further comment is needed. Why do you think words can make me see beauty where there is nothing but filth?

I like to look that over every so often, as a message addressed to me personally by a famous person, and a perfect specimen of some art form of which the name escapes me. Good thing I'm so indefatigably ebullient, or it might have hurt my feelings. But, as my father-in-law says, opinions are like, well, you know. Everybody's got one.

My Long Meeting Doodle Repertoire is quite extensive, and consists solely of mathematical explorations. That way, when my colleagues look over and see me doodling during an important meeting, they'll just think I'm a brilliant mathematician working out some new theory. Actually, I have to draw so I can listen attentively and recall what I hear, a fact that my fifth grade math teacher didn't fully appreciate. These days my sketches consist mainly of Platonic solids and the like, as I've been developing a graduate course on regular polytopes. Here's a few sticky notes:

My aunt bought me these "Dr." sticky notes for graduation, incidentally; I don't buy them for myself.

Why, you ask, am I showing you doodled-upon sticky notes from my office? Perhaps, my friend, you are looking for one of those "sensible" blogs.

Anyway, inspired by such, I spent the first part of this week super-doodling a sketch of the rhombic triacontahedron:

Triacontahedron, 5" x 7", watercolor and ink on hot-pressed paper.

The triacontahedron is a zonohedron, which, well, I won't bore you with the details. It's formed from thirty golden rhombi and is the basis of that cool lampshade you see in coffee shops sometimes. The coloration is determined by five intersecting cubes contained in the solid. The layout shamelessly mimics Leonardo da Vinci's polyhedron illustrations for Luca Pacioli's Da Divina Proportione. Pacioli is one of my mathematical ancestors – I am "descended" from him, advisor to student, down through the centuries, along with about two hundred thousand other mathematicians – so this is something of an homage to him, as well as to H. S. M. Coxeter, from whose book Regular Polytopes I first learned of zonohedra.

My multicolored sketches were the wonder of my graduate algebraic topology class, so perhaps I'll continue to produce a few more watercolors along the same lines, for old times' sake.

Metapost: 2015

Another year, another retrospective metapost.

Let's see. I suppose the most significant event in my authorial career in 2015 would be the publication of my novel Dragonfly by Hythloday House, a small but discerning publishing company.

Joking aside, Dragonfly is a self-published novel. It's self-published for what I assume are the usual reasons. Perhaps I might have eventually found someone to take it, if I had waited long enough. But all that time I was waiting, I could not be moving on to other projects. I make something like $2.50 on each copy I sell, electronic or paperback. At this point I've more than recovered the cost of production (due mainly to the large number of sample copies I ordered to get the cover just right), but sales have never really taken off. Which is unsurprising, as I don't go out of my way to promote it (or myself). Some people are very good at that sort of thing. I am not. My promotional method is to go on making new things in relative obscurity.

That said, a number of people have taken the trouble to buy my novel and read it, and I have gotten some positive feedback (see here and here, for instance), for which I cannot begin to express my gratitude. It's made me feel that I'm not wasting my time, artistically speaking, even if my audience remains relatively small. And my audience will surely continue to grow as I bring my series to completion.

So much of my energy in 2015 went toward the writing of a sequel, which I completed late in December, under the title The King of Nightspore's Crown. As it currently stands it's slightly longer than the first installment. Taking place against a truly amazing number of backdrops, it's the most significant juxtaposition of neolithic cultures with space-age technology since Yor, the Hunter from the Future. I hope to have it out sometime around the middle of 2016.

In other publication news, two of my stories, "Day of the Dragonfly" and "The Scale-Tree," appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. My story "At the Edge of the Sea" appeared in the Best of 2014 anthology. Another story of mine, "Salt and Sorcery," was accepted for publication sometime later this year. It seems only fair to mention that I make far more money selling short stories than copies of my novel, so, if you like what I do around here and wish to support me and people like me, I hope you will consider supporting BCS through the purchase of subscriptions or anthologies.

I managed to do some art in 2015, despite being extremely busy. A number of paintings and drawings were directly related to my writing endeavors, but I also did some illustrations of local history. My favorite item was probably my map, shown to the left. I'm looking forward to doing a more extensive map for The King of Nightspore's Crown, though I'm not certain how it's going to work yet.

In August I had a one-man exhibition in Del Rio. It featured a sort of shrine to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and to vintage mass-market paperback art in general. Unfortunately I am quite isolated in my predilections here. I did, however, share the front page news with Donald Trump, which is something, I guess. An interview about my art appeared over at greydogtales in December.

The main complicating factor this year was the birth of my daughter. A joyous occasion, to be sure. But, in this vale of tears, joy is seldom unalloyed with grief.

Longtime readers will no doubt recall my adopted rooster, Pappagallo, who literally dropped into my yard out of a stormy April sky. I noted the last time I wrote of him that, while seemingly intelligent, he lacked the street smarts that the neighborhood feral chickens need to survive. Despite this, he managed to thrash the alpha male of the resident flock, an event he celebrated with an obstreperous hours-long crowing session.

But why, you ask, not without some trepidation, am I speaking of him in the past tense? Alas, while we were off having our baby, and a neighbor was watching our animals, Pappagallo vanished, never to be seen again.

The unseasonably warm weather at the time ended with a cold snap after we returned from the hospital. I observed the hatchling brood of a feral hen shrink from seven chicks to a single one over the course of several days. Burdened as I was with the grief of Pappagallo's presumed demise, it was too much to watch those little peeping fuzz balls vanish one at a time. So I captured the last of them, bought some chick feed, and began raising it in a box in my kitchen.

Over the next few weeks our chick (named Lucky by my children) grew and grew. One evening as she saw me passing by she began cheeping most piteously and insistently. I finally rolled back the mesh covering her box, and, much to my surprise, she flew up to my shoulder and perched there. After that it became a settled routine for Lucky to emerge each evening and sit on my shoulder while I washed the dishes. She was very affectionate, and liked to nestle down in a warm spot and pick at the loose threads on my clothing and tug at my hair with her beak, or walk back and forth from shoulder to shoulder across the nape of my neck.

Eventually our little hen moved to the back porch, after which she was released into the yard. She steadfastly refuses to join the feral flock that brought her into the world and remains very tame. Sometimes she still allows me to handle her. She comes into the house when coaxed, and flies up on my shoulder, which drives my wife crazy. Every day I go out the front door to find her waiting for me. She eagerly runs at my heels to receive her dish of feed out back.

In just a few weeks both Lucky and my daughter will be one year old. How the time flies!

An account of my doings this year would be incomplete without the list of books that I read; actually, the reason I started doing these retrospectives was to keep my lists written down somewhere. So here it is, my 2015 reading list, not including works in progress:

• Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson
• Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Stuart Little by E. B. White
• The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• The Book of Genesis
• The Book of Tobit
• Geometry: Euclid and Beyond by Robin Hartshorne
• The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen
• Quest for the Future by A. E. van Vogt
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The African Queen by C. S. Forester
• The Spiritual Canticle by St. John of the Cross
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles Saunders
• Imaro by Charles Saunders
• The Moon of Skulls by Robert E. Howard
• Two Hundred Million A.D. by A. E. van Vogt
• The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard
• The Life of the White Ant by Maurice Maeterlinck
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• History of the Conquest of Peru by William H. Prescott
• Fourier Series and Orthogonal Functions by Harry F. Davis
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
• The Last Hieroglyph by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron
• The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Maze of the Enchanter by Clark Ashton Smith
• Crime Stories and Other Writings by Dashiell Hammett
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Playback by Raymond Chandler
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
• No Holidays for Honeybees by Mervyn Kaufman
• The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald
• The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake by G. E. Bentley, Jr.
• The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Quite a few of these are read-alouds with my older kids, who are five and seven. Their favorite was A Wrinkle in Time, which we read twice. In my own reading, I note numerous jungle stories and histories. Many, perhaps most, of the books I read this year were things I'd read before but, for one reason or another, wanted to revisit.

Most of the time I find reading to be its own reward. This year my reading paid off in the form of a raffle through the town library's summer reading program for adults. However, the coveted prize consisted of dinner for two at the local country club, of which I am (somewhat pointedly) not a member. A zoning board meeting gone bad (me vs. my filthy rich neighbors' contractor over an eight-foot-high security/velociraptor fence along our mutual property line) made me even less enthusiastic about hobnobbing with the upper crust of my little South Texas town.

As a result, I waited until the expiration date, which was December 31, to use my gift certificate. I took my five-year-old daughter as my dining companion. She was a perfect lady. I wish I could say the same of the woman who stopped by our table to introduce herself to my daughter (though not to me!) and kept insistently asking her name, despite the fact that my daughter had just taken a bite, and was requesting (with a demure smile and graciously upheld little hand) a moment in which to swallow. The lady's husband proceeded to ask my daughter if I was her "grandpa." My daughter's correction of this bizarre misapprehension (I'm in my mid-thirties and haven't a wrinkle or gray hair) produced an odd reaction, a mixture of surprise, suspicion, and/or condescension. I'm not too good at reading people, but these little incidents can occur only so many times before you start noticing a pattern. Here I suspect I committed the faux pas of being a hirsute Puerto Rican dining with a fair-skinned, red-haired little girl in the very place where some people go to see local categories preserved and distinctions maintained.

But let us not dwell on such anachronistic unpleasantness. The management was extremely hospitable, and overall it was a pleasant way to end the year. Of course we toasted (she with her sparkling cider and I with my whisky sour) Francisco Pizarro and William H. Prescott, to whom we owed our dinner.

On Chickens

During a heavy thundershower last April, my wife was washing dishes, looking out the kitchen window, when she saw a big white bird flutter down from the sky. I came home from work that evening to find a white rooster with a ruby-red comb rushing up to me, an eager expression on his face. Reflecting that my grandmother once took in a similarly storm-brought chicken, I poured a little birdseed on the front walk, which was eagerly pecked up.

Now, we have always had feral chickens in our neighborhood. It was once home to a vice president, and also a state governor, and local lore has it that our feral flock is descended from the fowl of one of these VIPs, though opinion is divided as to where the praise/blame is due. The chickens are singularly beautiful: the cock has feathers of rich red, brown, gold, and dark green, with long, metallic green tail feathers. They spend most of their time in the easement behind our property. Sometimes they nest in the brushy area behind our shed, and they like to sit in trees, which reminds me of this song:

Believe the credentialed rooster, not your lying eyes.

Anyway, our white rooster is very obviously not one of the flock. He is, I believe, a leghorn rooster (as in Foghorn Leghorn). He's much larger than the neighborhood fowl. But despite his size and strength, he lacks street smarts. You see, after generations of fending for themselves and dodging cars, the feral chickens can pretty well take care of themselves. Survival of the fittest. But our rooster, no. I guess he was someone's FFA project. On his own he's pretty pathetic.

In his first days with us, I just gave him birdseed in the front yard, considering him a temporary boarder. He took to standing on our stoop, with his beak to the glass of our storm door, awaiting his next feeding. Fellow townsfolk would drive by and see him there, and everywhere we went we'd get all kinds of remarks. "Is that your chicken? What's that chicken doing on your porch? Is that your chicken?"  It got to be kind of embarrassing. So, birdseed being expensive, we started buying sacks of chicken feed at the Tractor Supply, and feeding him in the privacy of our backyard.

We were, from that day forward, His People. When we go outside, he rushes up to us, whether he's hungry or not, and follows us around the yard, making gentle little clucks and moans, and scratching at the dirt in a negligent way. He's actually pretty smart (for a chicken) and, ever since the first time I mowed the grass/weeds/dirt in his presence, runs up when I get the mower out, anticipating a feast of bugs. His lusty crow awakens us (and, presumably, the rest of the neighborhood) every day before dawn.

We named him Pappagallo, which basically means "Daddy Rooster," after the idealistic-and-well-spoken-but-somewhat-ineffectual compound leader in The Road Warrior. This is pronounced as in Italian, though everyone around here corrects the ele to an elle, which I subtly correct back. (Sometimes we call him Chanticleer, which also seems appropriate.)

As I said, though, he's got moxie, but lacks street smarts. He used to go roving around the neighborhood at night, until he got into several tangles with dogs, which run as freely in my town as dingoes in the Outback. He would return in the morning, quite crestfallen, bloodied, with feathers missing. One time he was gone for a week or two, and we thought he must have died. But he came back, though missing all his tail feathers, and apparently unable to crow. For months he remained silent. Was his throat injured? Or was it his pride? I suspect a combination of the two. For everyone knows the pride of the cock. But eventually he did start crowing again.

Now, he's quite a fine-looking fellow, and it's no surprise that several of the little beauties attached to the feral flock fell for his strut and glory. There's one red-brown hen in particular (Chickie, I call her) that he allows to share his feed. She's warmed up to me considerably, and lets me approach her now, which I take as a compliment. But once the other hens started gorging themselves at my expense, the feral rooster (The Lord Humungus, the Warrior of the Wasteland, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah) decided to take over, and claim the rights to the food for himself.

I don't know if there was any physical altercation, but Pappagallo began behaving most obsequiously toward this usurper. He'd give me this kind of pathetic, helpless look as The Humungus began pecking up his breakfast, and I'd have to chase the feral flock out of the yard, energetically flapping the wings of my jacket (which is black leather, naturally). This has been going on for weeks now, and it's been most vexing. There's no galline Max Rockatansky to help us, and, though an excellent human (I hope), I make a poor chicken. I'd sometimes give Pappagallo these little pep talks, but he'd just reply with an enigmatic, sad, knowing look, and rrrrrr in his throat.

Well, all of that changed yesterday. I was sweeping the back porch when I noticed that Pappagallo was in the easement, crowing as though to wake the dead. I went back there, thinking he was just trying to get my attention so I'd let him through the gate. He does that sometimes. Actually, he's always getting himself stuck in peculiar places, much to my wife's annoyance. Anyway, there's a little free-standing metal roof, partly on our property, mostly on the easement, which used to be on four legs, but now dangles on one, with the opposite corner on the ground.* The chickens like to sit under it when it's raining. So when I got back there, I saw that The Humungus lay beneath it, an apparently lifeless heap. As soon as I lured Pappagallo away with some food, I went and looked again, and The Humungus lifted his head and gave me a miserable glance, but didn't get up. He was thoroughly thrashed, possibly dying.

I do hope he's not dead. I never wanted that to happen! I just wanted him to go back to living on cockroaches and crickets in the cemetery, and leave our feed to our rooster. At any rate, if he is alive, I suspect that things will be a bit different around here. And can I be blamed if I admit that I'm proud of Pappagallo? I knew he had it in him.


* The remaining post is actually a hackberry tree growing through the welded pipes, so the thing is impossible to move without cutting the metal or chopping the tree down. This guy on our block who once owned our house used to always bug my wife about it, asking if he could come cut it out for his junk collection. She'd tell him that it was on the easement, so he'd have to contact the owners of that property. This happened I don't know how many times. It started to get to her. Finally I told her I'd take care of it. Next time I saw him, I said, hell yeah, come and haul it off, any time you like. Never heard another word about it.

When I went through the back gate yesterday – something I suppose I'd never done – I realized that there's a big yellow "We Shoot All Trespassers" sign hanging on the outside. I'd never known it was there. No wonder utilities people ask before they come on our property!