The Neverending Story

You know, one fantasy novel I never hear much talked about these days is The Neverending Story. Published originally in German as Die Unendliche Geschichtein in 1979, it became popular here in the United States in the eighties thanks to that terrible, terrible kids' movie of the same (except for a capitalized E) name. Of course I loved that movie (which is terrible) at the time, and especially that sweet theme song. But just read the book (which I did when I was a teenager) and you'll see what a hatchet job the movie is. The author, Michael Ende, would seem to have agreed with that assessment. Let's not even discuss the sequel.

I recently read the book to my kids. I'd forgotten what a mind-bending piece of meta it is. We read it as originally published, with the page-size capital letters at the beginnings of the chapters (from A for Chapter 1 to Z for Chapter 26) and the dual colors of ink (red and green) to help you navigate between metafictional modes. I'm not exactly sure what Ende was getting at with all those layers of self-reference, so here's where you get to see me puzzle that out.

If you haven't read The Neverending Story, watch out, because I'm about to spoil it all, though I don't think it's really the kind of book that gets spoiled by your knowing the plot ahead of time.

Bastian, a doughy, wimpy schoolboy with a deceased mother and an emotionally frigid father, steals a strange book from an enigmatic dealer, and holes up with it in the schoolhouse attic. In it reads the adventures of Atreyu the Greenskin, the chosen savior of Fantastica, which is being devoured by the Nothing while the Childlike Empress languishes from a mysterious illness. (Unlike in the movie, the Nothing literally looks like nothing, as though you'd gone blind.) (The clouds in the movie look pretty cool, though.) The Empress, it seems, must be given a new name by a human, but humans have stopped coming to Fantastica. We gradually learn that the purpose of Atreyu's quest and all his sufferings are solely to get Bastian, the human reader, interested in the book. At the Magic Mirror Gate, it's revealed that Bastian and Atreyu are, in some sense, the same person.

Bastian, in his reluctance to say the (slightly goofy) name he's thought up, forces the Childlike Empress to go to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and have the story told again from the beginning, within the story itself. Here (and elsewhere) I catch just a hint of both Nietzsche (the eternal return) and – just maybe! – The Worm Ouroboros. AURYN, the talisman borne by Atreyu and the symbol of the book as a whole, consists of two snakes biting one another's tails…

Once Bastian says the name (I'll let you read the book to find out what it is), he finds himself in Fantastica. In 100% green ink now, he cuts an impetuous and increasingly disturbing swath across a succession of bizarre landscapes in an adventure that reminds me a bit of A Voyage to Arcturus. The one command laid upon him is DO WHAT YOU WISH, which seems great at first. But it turns out that each wish costs him a memory. He starts to become insufferable as he forgets what he once was.

What everyone tells him, though, is that he has to go right through Fantastica, making whatever wishes come to him and following wherever they lead. Whenever he stops wishing, he starts going in circles. He tries to make himself emperor (no one can see the Childlike Empress twice), which doesn't go too well, and almost results in his becoming the demented resident of a city of mad would-be emperors superintended by a creepy monkey. Eventually the wishes divest him of everything – his very last memories – and leave him an empty shell.

The strange thing about The Neverending Story is that, despite its having more layers than a premium nacho plate, it's enjoyable as a story in its own right. The world of Fantastica is convincingly portrayed, and Ende's powers of invention are seemingly inexhaustible. One of the main pleasures in reading the book is experiencing all the surprising and beautiful things he comes up with. The story ends with…well, with something heartwarming and sentimental. I won't knock it, but if that were the point of the novel then it wouldn't have the power it has.

To me a lot of it seems to be a parable about storytelling. Bastian is the one person in Fantastica who can tell stories. The stories he tells come true as the tells them, but there are always unintended consequences: dragons that cause suffering, clown-butterflies who vandalize. What's more, Bastian's path of wishes and growing lack of self-knowledge make him less and less capable of telling stories at all.

The Childlike Empress is portrayed as indifferent to good and evil, but her mandate, to go on wishing, while not exactly "good," is fitting, appropriate, right. It's what Bastian's got to do. Similarly, telling a story is a spiritually draining process, but the teller must go where it leads. If it's worth telling it's got a certain logic that has to be obeyed. In her indifference, I think the Empress is merely Story personified. Morality for the characters in a story is one thing; the "morality" of the storyteller (which is neither more nor less than the virtue of good craftsmanship) is another. Someone I follow online recently said something to the effect of, what kind of person takes pleasure in the misery inflected upon a character by a cruel author? I suppose it's possible to get a sadistic thrill in reading a novel, but for me it's really more the pleasure of seeing a pattern fall into place.

As I said, telling a story is a spiritually draining process. Literally, perhaps: it sucks something out of you. It's also fraught with peril. In setting yourself up as the emperor of your (invented) world, you  may find yourself doing violence to your own conceits and being relegated at last to the city of demented might-have-beens.

But maybe I'm just saying all that because I've been going in circles myself lately…

Heart of the Hollow Earth

I recently watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. It is undoubtedly the best and most beautiful film I've seen in some time. People generally regard it as the best Vietnam film. Though gritty and realistic in its details, and, to some extent, inspired by real events, it represents an almost mythical vision, floating from The Ride of the Valkyries to Dante's Inferno and man's primordial roots in the jungle.

What made me want to see it was a comparison someone made between it and my Tashyas story. Actually, as I've said, I was thinking about Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As is well known, though, Francis Ford Coppola cited both of these as major influences on Apocalypse Now. As a matter of fact, it's fair to say that Apocalypse Now is nothing more than a film treatment of Heart of Darkness, translating the Company's involvement in equatorial Africa into that of the United States in Vietnam, each presented just as imbecilic, futile, and destructive as human endeavors tend to be.

I've started to regard Heart of Darkness as a kind of modern myth. It has two basic motifs: the dark journey inward, and the great man who goes native and betrays humanity. The moral is that civilization is a veneer over something very dark indeed. Like the plot of Red Harvest (which I regard as another modern myth), it seems to have become part of the dream-logic of our culture. Aguirre and Apocalypse Now have been mentioned; I'm reminded also of Ridley Scott's Alien (whose ship and shuttle are named from Conrad stories) and James Cameron's popcorn-selling sequel. And, as a very recent and not-quite-legitimate descendant, we have Kong: Skull Island, which I went to see at the $4.00 matinee last week.

It's pretty plain that the makers of Skull Island were wanting to evoke and/or perfectly willing to plunder the visuals and general atmosphere of Apocalypse Now. It opens at the close of the Vietnam war, and the first scenes are chock-full of in-your-face historical details that let you know exactly what era you're looking at, while the jungle scenes are overlaid with the predictable rock songs so that you don't forget that this is the Vietnam era despite the overwhelming chronological ambiguity. (Me, to my eight-year-old son: "They played a Creedence song in that movie I just saw. Can you guess which one?" Him, without a moment's thought: "'Run Through the Jungle'!")  It's one of those movies where the older, uglier, and/or more annoying actors tend to meet grisly fates, and the young, pretty, highly paid actors do not. There's one guy I knew was destined to get picked apart by pterodactyls or something from the first moment I saw him.

Well, so, kind of a stupid movie.* But, as you may know, I'm a sucker for movies about little people running from giant monsters, and this one is pretty awesome in that department.

One really cool aspect is the hint that all these weird creatures are coming out of gigantic caverns beneath the earth's surface, where MUTOs have apparently been thriving for millions of years. Skull Island is set in the same universe as that Godzilla movie that came out in 2014 (also stupid, but also quite enjoyable), and it seems likely that we're looking at appearances by Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidora in the near future. Bring on the MUTOs! All monsters attack! I'm giddy with excitement!

But back to the hollow earth thing. Since my earliest childhood, I've known deep down in my heart that the whole earth-is-just-melted-rock-until-you-get-to-China theory is false. I mean, no one has actually been down there, have they? It's much more likely that there are massive caverns inhabited by gigantic prehistoric creatures and forested with huge mushrooms. Otherwise, the planet would be mostly wasted space, and, if there's one thing we know about Nature, it's that she hates for things to go to waste.

So I was very interested to read some of the amazing hollow earth theories recounted by Ryan Harvey over at Black Gate in some of his Pellucidar posts. Clearly, I'm not alone in my deep-seated convictions. But the most interesting, I think, is the theory of Cyrus Teed, an amateur scientist who founded a religious sect (Koreshanity) in the belief that we are already living on the inside of the world. From his Cellular Cosmogony:

The sun is an invisible electromagnetic battery revolving in the universe's center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial discs that float in the sphere's center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; the third, an aboron atmosphere at the center. The earth's shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.**

Teed established a commune in Florida in 1894, which finally fizzled out in the 1960s. The place is now a state historical site. Strangely enough, soon after reading Mr. Harvey's post, I met a professor who lives near the site and takes his students there on occasion. So when he started talking about this theory that we live on the inside of the earth, I actually knew what he was talking about and could respond intelligently. It's called social networking, people. "You see?" I told my wife. "Reading weird stuff on the Internet isn't just wasting time after all!"

But it's strange, isn't it, how many "alternative" scientific theories (hollow earth, Atlantis, spiritualism, etc.) of the turn of the century gave birth to subgenres of fantastic literature? One wonders what theories Burroughs was familiar with in creating Pellucidar. At any rate, he was apparently unfamiliar with the shell theorem, first proved by Isaac Newton, which states that, at any given point in a spherically symmetric distribution of mass, only the mass closer to the center than the point contributes to the gravitational force at that point; all other mass can be ignored because its gravity cancels itself out, so to speak. The upshot is that, inside a perfectly hollow spherical shell, there would be no gravity at all; if, as in Pellucidar, there were a massive sun-like body at the center of the hollow, everything would fall into that body and burn. Of course, there would be nothing to keep such a body in its place at the center.

Speaking of Pellucidar and stupid movies, I recently watched At the Earth's Core, an Amicus production starring Peter Cushing and Doug McClure, with my kids. ("Hi! I'm Doug McClure! You may remember me from such films as At the Earth's Core!") Not so great, but the kids loved it. We also recently watched The Valley of the Gwangi, a Ray Harryhausen film about cowboys trying to capture dinosaurs for their wild west show in Mexico. It has same basic plot as King Kong (another modern-myth candidate) and ends with an allosaurus stalking a cowboy, his girlfriend, and a boy named Lope through an empty cathedral, which is pretty awesome.

Kong-derived stories seem always to feature some kind of dark journey upriver to primordial beginnings, which we saw as a key element in the Heart of Darkness myth. And so we're brought back to the primordial beginnings of this post, that is, Apocalypse Now.

* At one point, a search party happens upon a letter that a guy who got eaten was writing to his family. They make a big deal about how they're going to see that his widow gets his things. It's a solemn moment, but I couldn't help but imagine how that would go: "Ma'am, I'm very sorry to inform you that your husband was killed in action. Well, no, actually it wasn't in Vietnam. No, he survived that. What happened was, we were sent on this special mission to a secret unexplored island inhabited by prehistoric monsters, where he was eaten by a giant lizard creature. I'm so sorry for your loss."

** Actually, I imagine that there's probably prehistoric creatures on the outside.

Animated Princesses

My family is not what you'd call up-to-date. We don't watch television. We do watch movies together, but it tends to be older stuff. We're not entirely out of pop culture, but at best we're usually a couple of years behind.

A big giant movie like Frozen comes and goes, and it's not even a blip on our radar. I see news stories about "viral videos" of people dressed like these two big-eyed girls singing some song called "Let it Go," and kind of scratch my head, and move on to another Mental Floss video, or maybe watch Mothra vs. Godzilla with my daughter.

But well-meaning adults tend to assume that Disney movies are some kind of universal touchstone that you can use to gain instant rapport with any child. Alas, that doesn't work with mine. They'll change the subject to the giant black leeches on The African Queen.

A friend recently gave my daughter, who's six, a shirt with the two princesses from Frozen. She wore it somewhat tentatively, but stated every time she did so that she felt awkward wearing a shirt for a movie she hadn't seen. Eventually she requested to watch it, telling us that she wanted to decide whether she liked it. So my wife rented it for the kids on a rainy day when I was away at something.

For several days afterward my daughter refused to say what she thought of it. She evaded the question when asked. It was plain that she was deep in assessment. At last, however, she dispassionately declared that she didn't like it, that she wouldn't be wearing the shirt in the future, and that in fact she wanted to place the shirt in our next yard sale. But she still wouldn't explain why she disliked it. After several weeks, however, I asked her again while we were alone, and she told me, somewhat exasperatedly: "Of course I didn't like it because it has too much love."

Now, I can't say whether my daughter's assessment is fair or accurate, because I haven't seen the movie. But my kids tend not to like any Disney/Pixar fare, and I can't say I blame them. They're all so bland, so repetitive, so perfectly smooth and rounded. My attention just slips right off them.

In the past several weeks, however, two animated movies have come to the rescue to prove to my kids that not all cartoons are meh: The Last Unicorn and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. They're both so well known in certain circles that anyone reading this has probably seen them, but I'm going to talk about them anyway.

Visually, both are products of Japanese animation. The Last Unicorn (1982) was produced by Rankin/Bass, of whose stop-motion Rudolph fantasies I'm rather fond. The screenplay is by Peter S. Beagle, the author of the novel, and it has excellent voice acting. I would describe it enchanting, sad, and whimsical in equal parts. My children were struck with its beauty from the first few frames. They told my wife afterward that it was "a cartoon but not really a cartoon because most of it is painted." I'm not sure exactly what they meant by this, but I think they were just struck by the freshness of its hand-drawn, hand-painted animation as opposed to the slick computer-generated stuff they've seen in more recent movies.

Flaming demon bulls and vicious harpy attacks don't faze my kids, incidentally, but there's one scene I don't quite understand, and wish hadn't been handled as it was in the film: the one involving the, er, tree. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. What were they thinking?

On the other hand, Nausicaä (1984), directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki and based on the manga by the same, is just about the most terrific animated film I've ever seen. I've watched it twice now in a single week, and I think I'm in love with it. How could I not have seen it sooner? High-speed battles between giant airships. Ruined cities. Monstrous biomechanical warriors. Ancient disasters. Jungles of poisonous fungi. Ceramic blades. Gigantic, intelligent insects. Swords and tanks together.

Most of all, a brave, kind, intelligent, resourceful, independent female protagonist. I mean, she's a princess who actually acts like one, as opposed to, say, an entitled tween with indulgent parents. She single-handedly brightened my daughter's dim view of the breed. The main themes – peace, harmony with nature, self-sacrifice – are straightforward enough for a child to grasp, but movingly and profoundly presented.

And it's all done in the loveliest animation I may have ever seen, accompanied by a delightful score that's sometimes enchanting, sometimes almost religious, and sometimes pop, Plus, the English-dubbed version features the voice talents of actors like Patrick Stewart, Edward James Olmos, and Uma Thurman.

Oh, yeah, and my kids liked it, too. Tonight, after watching it for the first time, my eight-year-old son said, "That's the best cartoon movie I've ever seen."

 I'm definitely going to be reading the manga sometime soon.

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.

Sorry, but C. S. Lewis is Kind of a Weirdo

I have lately spoken somewhat irritably about C. S. Lewis. This represents the last stage in a slow revolution in my mind. There was a time when I adulated Lewis. I first read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was in the fourth grade. They shaped my imagination, and even now I often find lines from them in my own stories. I discovered his religious works as a college student, at a time when I was the "disciple" of a delusional "apostle" who took me hunting for Hare Krishnas in Mexico (it's a long story) and desperately in need of some rational input. I'll not go into what made me less enthusiastic about the latter works, because I doubt many people who find their way to my blog are particularly interested in my religious opinions. But I will discuss why I've become increasingly uncomfortable with his fiction.

The long and short of it is that C. S. Lewis has a problem with little girls. To be honest, I doubt if I ever would have realized this unless I'd had a daughter of my own. People do talk about it from time to time. Neil Gaiman is a famous (and, to some, an infamous) example. But there's a tendency among some groups to revere Lewis almost as a sort of saint, and to regard any kind of criticism of him as an attack on the faith. And, beyond this, we all have our blind spots. It's part of being human. I can only say that I hope I'm becoming less blind (and more human!) over time.

In reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud with my kids – we've read the first, second, third, and sixth (in the traditional ordering) – I've come across several passages that never bothered me before, but now seriously put me off. Here's one example that stuck out to me as we read Prince Caspian last year:

Then she saw the Lion, screamed and fled, and with her fled her class, who were mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs. Gwendolen hesitated.

Gwendolen, we may suppose, was not dumpy or prim, and had slender legs. What a thing to write in a book that little girls might read! Even dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs! Did Lewis have any idea of how hard girls can be on themselves about such things, or how vicious to one another? I've read his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, in which he describes his inordinately nasty boys' school, where a kind of Spartan pederasty was a routine part of the social structure (ah, the good old days), so it's hard to imagine that he was simply naïve. But I don't know. I can only speculate.

And then there's this, from The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader":

"—And unhorsed many knights," repeated Drinian with a grin. "We thought the Duke would have been pleased if the King's Majesty would have married  his daughter, but nothing came of that—" 

"Squints, and has freckles," said Caspian. 

"Oh, poor girl," said Lucy.

Delightful, delightful. Imagine reading that to a little girl who has freckles and is already self-conscious about them. (For the record, when I read this book aloud, I censored this passage. As supreme co-dictator of my house, I have that authority.)

And here's the Big One, from The Last Battle, a pleasant little conversation at the threshold of the Narnian heaven:

"Sire," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?" 

"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia." 

"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'" 

"Oh, Susan!" said Jill. "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." 

"Grown up indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wanted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."

O the humanity! Nylons and lipstick! No heaven for her!!! Here I must confess myself strongly urged to repeat Edmund's words in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: you pack of stuck-up, self-satisfied prigs! And what is there in Susan's character as presented in the earlier volumes to merit this universal condemnation and head-shaking? She's a bit tiresome, yes, and a bit cowardly, too, but Edmund the traitor and Eustace the epic brat get their rehabilitations, don't they? And yet it's Susan, whose sin is wanting to wear lipstick, who loses her prospect of eternal salvation. It staggers the mind.

I could come up with similar examples in many of Lewis' other works – in The Great Divorce, for instance, where he makes it very plain which are the right sorts of women and which are the wrong sorts, and what exactly it is that's so wrong with the latter. But the examples in his books for children are, to my mind, more egregious, because of the tendency in some girls to take such little jabs to heart.

I happen to know a little girl like that. A very earnest and serious-minded girl who catches lizards and plays at being a warrior queen but who also likes to look pretty on occasion and who is deeply sensitive to remarks on her looks. Do I want her thinking about whether her legs are fat? Do I want her fretting over her freckles? Do I want her to be ashamed for wanting to grow up into a woman who wears lipstick?

*

What sparked this little tirade was a piece of Lewis' correspondence that I came across in trying to research another post I've been working on for almost a year now.* It's a letter written to one Jane Gaskell, who at the age of fourteen wrote her first fantasy novel (Strange Evil) and actually saw it published and favorably reviewed. (Gaskell is mentioned in Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds; she is a grandniece of Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist, and went on to a career in journalism and astrology.) Lewis took it upon himself to write Gaskell a letter, in which he praises her novel faintly before tearing it to shreds. (She was about sixteen at the time, I believe; she was born in 1941, and the letter is dated September 1957.) Let's take a look.

He begins:

My wife and I have just been reading your book and I want to tell you that I think it is a quite amazing achievement – incomparably beyond anything I could have done at that age. The story runs, on the whole, very well and there is some real imagination in it.

So far, so good, though perhaps a bit condescending. At the second paragraph we get to the criticism:

On the other hand, there is no reason at all why your next book should not be at least twice as good. I hope you will not think it impertinent if I mention (this is only one man's opinion of course) some mistakes you can avoid in the future.

This "mention" of mistakes goes on for the rest of the letter. Lewis enumerates six points. First he takes Gaskell to task for making the "economic politics and religious differences" too much like our own world.

Surely the wars of faerie should be high, reckless, heroical, romantic wars – concerned with the possession of a beautiful queen or an enchanted treasure? Surely the diplomatic phase of them should be represented not by conferences (which, on your own showing, are as dull as ours) but by ringing words of gay taunt, stern defiance, or Quixotic generosity, interchanged by great warriors with sword in hand before the battle joins?

Fair enough, I suppose, though I think it could go either way. I do seem to recall some rather on-the-nose religious dialogues in the Space Trilogy which do at least as much to dispel the spell of faerie, but no matter.

The second point is related to the first: Lewis objects to commonplace objects in Gaskell's romance:

[E]ven a half-fairy ought not climb a fairyhill carrying a suitcase full of new nighties. All magic dies at this touch of the commonplace. (Notice, too, the disenchanting implication that the fairies can't make for themselves lingerie as good as they can get – not even in Paris, which wd. be bad enough – but, of all places, in London.)

So, (a) I'm not sure I agree with him about climbing the fairyhill with the suitcase full of nighties, which sounds just bizarre enough to be quite enchanting in its own way, and (b) um, writing letters to teenage girls about lingerie. Yeah.

The next two points have to do with the mechanics of style. Point third:

Never use adjectives or adverbs which are mere appeals to the reader to feel as you want him to feel. He won't do it just because you ask him: you've got to make him.

Point fourth:

You are too fond of long adverbs like 'dignifiedly', which are not nice to pronounce.

Both excellent points. All writers would do well to adhere to them. But the next point, the fifth, is the one that really set me off:

Far less about clothes please! I mean, ordinary clothes. If you had given your fairies strange and beautiful clothes and described them, there might be something in it. But your heroine's tangerine skirt! For whom do you write? No man wants to hear how she was dressed, and the sort of woman who does seldom reads fantasy: if she reads anything it is more likely to be the Women's Magazines.

The ease with which Lewis identifies a woman who might be interested in the color of a character's skirt with the brainless, frivolous creatures uninterested in fantasy and devoted to (gasp) Women's Magazines that haunt his imagination simply takes my breath away. (Actually, lots of women like that kind of detail, and lots of men, too; Raymond Chandler, for instance, is usually pretty good about telling you, not just the color, but the material and cut of his female characters' attire.) Anyway, Lewis goes on about the Magazines:

By the way, these are a baneful influence on your mind and imagination. If you can't keep off them, at least, after each debauch, give your imagination a good mouth-wash by a reading (or wd. it be a re-reading) of the Odyssey, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, […]

Which, to be honest, might be very good advice in its way, but it's phrased in an excessively moralistic, lurid tone. ("Debauch"?)

Sixth and final point:

Names not too good. They ought to be beautiful and suggestive as well as strange: not merely odd like Enaj (wh. sounds as if it came out of Butler's Erewhon).

Here he seems to be in a hurry to wrap up. Immediately following this admonition, with no further nuggets of sparing praise, he hastily concludes:

I hope all this does not enrage you. You'll get so much bad advice that I felt I must give you some of what I think good.
     Yours sincerely
     C. S. Lewis

Again, bear in mind that this is a letter he sent to a sixteen-year-old girl who had just written her first novel. Am I crazy, or isn't it a little bit weird?

*

Last exhibit: "The Shoddy Lands" (1956)**, a bizarrely misogynistic story which describes a man's phantasmagoric journey into the psyche of a young woman – a reader of Women's Magazines, no doubt – where almost everything is vague and ill-defined, with the exception of daffodils, men's faces, women's clothing, and shops selling jewelry, dresses, and shoes. Toward the end he's confronted with the monstrous apparition of the girl's own self image:

The gigantic Peggy now removed her beach equipment and stood up naked in front of a full-length mirror. Apparently she enjoyed what she saw there; I can hardly express how much I didn't. Partly the size (it’s only fair to remember that) but, still more, something that came as a terrible shock to me, though I suppose modern lovers and husbands must be hardened to it. Her body was (of course) brown, like the bodies in the sunbathing advertisements. But round her hips, and again round her breasts, where the coverings had been, there were two bands of dead white which looked, by contrast, like leprosy. It made me for the moment almost physically sick. What staggered me was that she could stand and admire it. Had she no idea how it would affect ordinary male eyes?

After his return to the real world he concludes:

My view is that by the operation of some unknown psychological – or pathological – law, I was, for a second or so, let into Peggy's mind; at least to the extent of seeing her world, the world as it exists for her. At the centre of that world is a swollen image of herself, remodelled to be as like the girls in the advertisements as possible. Round this are grouped clear and distinct images of the things she really cares about. Beyond that, the whole earth and sky are a vague blur. The daffodils and roses are especially instructive. Flowers only exist for her if they are the sort that can be cut and put in vases or sent as bouquets; flowers in themselves, flowers as you see them in the woods, are negligible.

Various interpretations have been given to this story. I'll let it speak for itself, merely remarking that it seems consistent with the other things I've mentioned here, and not particularly wholesome from a psychological point of view.

Sure, I have a low opinion of the kinds of trash you find in the supermarket check-out line. I want my daughter to be formed by stuff that's worth reading, not garbage. But I also want her to have a positive view of her own body, and Lewis' weird tendency to attach moral weight to superficialities is just as calculated to make her self-conscious as any Photoshopped Cosmo cover.

The upshot is that we're on an extended (and possibly permanent, so far as my reading aloud is concerned) C. S. Lewis hiatus at our house. I continue to owe him a tremendous debt in many ways, but right now I have other things to think about.

* The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950 – 1963, Walter Hooper (ed.), HarperCollins, 2007.

** "The Shoddy Lands" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1956), and can be found in The Dark Tower and Other Stories.

Mad Max in Lego!

"On the road it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive."

 

 

As I have mentioned before, one of the unexpected joys of parenting is the fact that you get to play with your kids' cool toys – nay, you are lauded as a good parent for playing with your kids' toys – at a time when you can do way awesomer things than you could ever have done when you were a kid yourself.

So, with summer vacation winding down to a close, my son was wanting me to build some Lego cars with him. Naturally I was not content with building mere Legotown jalopies. Naturally my mind ran immediately to Mad Max.

Here we have Max Rockatansky himself in his V8 Interceptor pursued by the vermin of the wasteland across the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is my dining room buffet, with lace curtains billowing desolately in the background. (Pretend that that scalloped cloth made by my great-grandmother is actually a salt pan.)

It isn't perfect, but you have to work with what you're given, being in this case my son's Lego bucket. Still, look at all those cool pieces. I made a fairly crude blower out of this and that, and was proud of my work, only to discover that my son actually has several Lego blowers. It was a bit of a let-down, in fact. But it's hard to argue with something that ups the coolness factor by an order of magnitude at least.

My creation doesn't come from any one Mad Max movie in particular, mostly because I was constrained by the limitations of my son's collection. But it's easy to imagine making, say, the Gyro Captain's autogyro, or the Mack truck used to haul "that fat tank of gas," or Pappagallo's rocket-car, or the hedgehog attack shovel, or the dump/drum truck with its bungee-jumping flame-throwing guitarist, etc., etc.

If only there were Lego mohawks!

Lego Chess!

 

As a general rule I hate playing board games, but I make an exception for chess. I don't pretend to be anything but an amateur, and I've never played anyone but family members and friends, but I enjoy it quite a bit, and read about it from time to time. I've been playing chess with my son since his fifth birthday and my daughter since well before her fifth. My son has almost beaten me several times; I don't know whether that says more about me or about him! We're also reading Through the Looking-Glass, having just finished Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The latter is definitely the superior of the two, but the kids are amused by the chessboard conceit of the former.

Another thing we three do together is play with Legos. You see, the awesome thing about having kids is that you get to play with toys all over again, but now that you're older you can do way cooler things with them. Plus, people think you're a devoted parent, etc. Anyway, when I was a kid, I was really into Legos. I eventually had this enormous plastic tub full of them. And my parents, who save everything, from my umbilical cord (carefully coiled in a little pouch) to a piece of my finger I chopped off in high school, naturally kept these stored in their garage like the Ark of the Covenant in a top-secret government warehouse. And now I have them all – cord, finger, and Legos.

It was quite an experience sorting through the tub, which hadn't been touched since my brother and I got too old for them. The Lego Movie is, naturally, quite a favorite around here. Best movie of 2014. Part of it takes place in a hall of "relics," which include a dirty Band-Aid and other nasty little bits of trash. The joke here, which only a person with lots and lots of Legos would get, is that all kinds of weird things end up in the bucket. Well, going through our old bucket was like opening up a time capsule of relics. The helmet of a G.I. Joe; the leg of a Parademon; the eraser-end of a pencil bitten so as to make the eraser protrude just a little bit further; the wrapper from a clandestinely consumed piece of candy; a plastic cockroach; a rusty binder clip; and so on.

Well, being the systematic person I am, I washed each and every Lego and sorted them into colors. That done, what was I to do? I made several increasingly grand gothic imperial space palaces, but, you know, that gets old. So at last I hit upon the awesomest idea of all: Lego chess! A bout with a stomach virus over the Christmas break gave me just the opportunity I needed.

Here's a picture of the white side:

Which makes me think of the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet:

The king is accordingly called Hamlet, and his wife, Gertrude. One of the bishops wears the sign of the shell, selected as being an ancient symbol of pilgrimage, and also because I ran out of red capes. The black side has more of an Iron Crown of Witchland thing going on:

Naturally, white represents Order, and black, Chaos. It's hard to see in the pictures, but the white king holds a sword across his lap for Justice, the black king a whip for Tyranny. The latter (King Gorice XII) has a fierce spiky cross:

His queen we call Semiramis. Just for good measure, here's another view of the white side:

The set is inspired partly by Battle Chess, which I loved watching on autoplay in Radio Shack in the late eighties. The horses' heads, alas, protrude beyond the edge of their squares, and they thus must sometimes be turned sideways. I could build a more traditional-looking knight, but what fun it is to use real horses!

And yes, the pieces are a little cumbersome to play with. But the kids and I derive considerable enjoyment from it nonetheless. As you can probably tell, I'm inordinately pleased with it. The Lego bricks are all from the late eighties / early nineties, the very latest having been bought by my younger brother after I'd moved on to other things. So they're not as specialized as what they make now, and the white ones are slightly discolored.

No arena of combat would be complete without spectators:

Most are from my old sets, but several of my son's make an appearance as well. As you can see, quite a few celebrities like to stop by. From left to right:

• Row 4: Blacktron Future Generation spaceman; Larry from Newhart; morning news anchor; Chima bird-thing; one-eyed cutthroat; M:Tron spaceman; Redbeard the Pirate; Blacktron spaceman; Jolly Roger pirate.
• Row 3: Burt Reynolds; Bane; the Toecutter; crossing guard; Justin Bieber; Lizzie Borden; airport worker; greasemonkey.
• Row 2: General Zod; General Zod's minion; doctor; Sally Ride (it's hard to tell because of the helmet); Sir Bruce sans Pitie; Shell gas station employee; rioting peasant; barbarian warrior; hardened criminal.
• Row 1: Emmet Brickowski; Batman; Super Mario; Commissioner Gordon; Robin Hood; Little John; Benny the retro eighties spaceman; Superman.

We keep ourselves entertained.

Works & Days

In the midst of various mundane tasks, such as working toward tenure and preparing for a coming baby, I've had little opportunity to post lately, but, naturally, I've continued to write and to paint. If I didn't do these things I would swiftly find myself in the Slough of Despond. In the past I've tended to be a single-focus kind of person, and this lifestyle of getting up early, painting and/or writing, going to work (until nine p.m. a couple days out of the week), then coming home, spending time with the fam if possible, and staying up late to paint and/or write again, does not come natural to me. Somehow, though, I feel that if I were under less pressure and had more free time, I would get less done, not more.

In the midst of all of this I have found some time to read. I recently finished Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, and, surprisingly, was somewhat disappointed by it. I've read his Book of the New Sun avidly several times, and have written about it once or twice, but somehow Long Sun never really clicked with me.

For one thing, the plot moved forward at a glacial pace, reminding me of those anxiety dreams where you're about some task but nothing seems to get anywhere, and strange, irrelevant events happen for no reason at all, leading you further and further from your goal. It's written in an elliptical style – and this style is one of the things I love about Gene Wolfe – but I didn't feel like the parts really coalesced. The fourth and final volume just kind of falls apart, with long, long scenes where people ramble and ruminate and discuss and seem to forget what they were talking about, separated by scenes of action that are hinted at but not shown. The gaps get longer and longer, as though Mr. Wolfe were under contract to write four volumes but found the story stretching beyond these limits, as can easily happen.

Another thing that made it a difficult read was the constantly shifting viewpoint. Half the third volume is spent shifting to and from a party of people wandering around in dark tunnels without much happening in each scene. The book has a tremendous number of characters (there's a catalog of proper names) and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who, partly because I went a number of months between volumes two and three. The whole thing has a rather Dickensian feel, as opposed to the Melvillesque feel of New Sun. It reminded me a bit of David Copperfield or Bleak House or something like that.

The world of the Whorl is certainly an intriguing one to explore. That's what really sustained me through to the end, I think. It's a generation ship, but it's unclear how much the people inside it, who live in a Balkanized assortment of city-states, really understand or guess. The slow revelation of the Whorl's true nature is what makes the book an interesting read, but it closes without a clear resolution or elucidation, not even elliptical. New Sun closes with all lines converging upon an as-yet unrealized point; Long Sun just seems to end with a big splat. But then again, possibly I just need to read it again. It's quite possible that I'm simply missing the point.

The protagonist, Patera Silk, begins as a priest in the official pagan religion, dutifully obedient to the pantheon of AI gods that preside over the Whorl, but is enlightened and increasingly drawn to the Outsider, whose identity I'll let you guess. The details of life in his "manteion" are drawn from the life of the Catholic parish priest. Aside from the whole blood-sacrifice thing, he could be my own parish priest, who inhabits a tiny set of rooms at the back of the parish office with a temporary parochial vicar, and works with three sisters (our sibyls) who live in a house a block away and run a center that provides tutoring to at-risk students. Anyway, Silk is an interesting, charismatic character, who falls in love with and marries a shallow, unfaithful, somewhat cruel narcissist. Strange.

Mr. Wolfe's next series, The Book of the Short Sun, apparently continues the narrative to some extent, but sounds like it has a style more closely approaching that of New Sun, so I suspect I'll like it more. I've tried to find it in used bookstores, to no avail.

On the reading-books-out-loud front, I'm currently working through George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin with my kids. I always use my four-year-old daughter to gauge our books, because if she's interested then she'll soak the story up like a sponge and be able to repeat every minor detail weeks or months afterward, but if she finds it boring (which is to say, incomprehensible), then she just squirms around and makes trouble and can't recall anything afterward. Well, Princess is definitely a hit. My son is also into it. The "scary" chapters simply terrify them (naturally, I ham it up a bit), and the other night I had to spend time comforting my son as I tucked him in, because our chapter had ended with the hero, Curdie the miner boy, locked in a room with an arrow wound and a high fever. So you see, it's very real to them.

It has me thinking. I've mentioned that we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe over the summer, and both my kids loved it. My daughter remembers all these crazy little details that we haven't talked about since. And she was the White Witch for Halloween. (Obviously she wasn't going to be someone boring like Lucy or Susan.) My son was Curdie, pick-ax and all. They chose their costumes for themselves, so clearly these books in particular have made an impression.

But Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Meh. I've made it no secret that I've never cared for Prince Caspian, but Voyage was definitely one of my favorite books when growing up. The reading level is higher than Wardrobe, one might argue, but I personally don't see a great difference in difficulty. And look at Princess, which is a Victorian novel and quite wordy. (Though I cut out the annoying meta passages that address the reader, of which there are few, thankfully.) So, why exactly are Wardrobe and Princess hits, while Caspian and Voyage are not?

I'll have to ponder that one. But this I can say. My kids love a straightforward, linear story that states the facts and events simply and plainly, without cute self-referential fripperies, and they love dialogue in which people mean what they say and say what they mean, and they love curious little details and descriptions that combine the familiar with the strange, like a fire of glowing roses. Oh, and they hate being patronized.

On a wholly unrelated point, my blog is about to reach its twenty thousandth visitor. To all you loyal readers, occasional visitors, random strangers, roving bots, Ukrainian referrer spam, and the rest, my humble thanks is owed.

Why Prince Caspian Sucks

So, I've been reading the Narnia books to my kids. We're reading them in the proper order, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, followed by Prince Caspian. Last night we started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my second favorite of the series. (My favorite is The Magician's Nephew.) When I was a kid, Prince Caspian was my least favorite. After reading it to my kids, I now know why.

It kind of sucks.

The reason it sucks is that it's basically the same story as Wardrobe, but told in a convoluted way, with a several-chapters-long backstory break in the middle of the novel. What possessed Lewis to write it like this I can't say – I suppose it was his feeling that the boy Caspian was somehow the real protagonist, but that the story needed to be told from the viewpoint of the four children (P, S, E and L), beginning in England as in Wardrobe – but it makes it much harder for little kids to follow than the straightforward, linear Wardrobe. What's worse, the focus is split between the four children and Prince Caspian, resulting in a certain amount of narrative dullness, and there's a lot of secondary characters to keep track of for such a short book. The fairy tale manner of Wardrobe is here replaced with a more contemporary (hence, dated) idiom, with slangy bickering, and cute tongue-in-cheek jokes that have to be explained to young readers. (My children demand that every single thing they don't understand be explained to them, which makes even a short chapter a pretty long read.)

But I guess what really gets me is the self-conscious smugness with which Telmarine society is upended by Aslan, Bacchus, and the rest. Lewis had a lot of axes to grind as an author, and he really lets himself go here. First a bridge is destroyed. I guess that's neither here nor there, but what, after all, is wrong with a bridge? It's a nice stone bridge, not a nasty modern truss bridge. Then there's a girls' school. The one girl of whom Lewis approves joins the throng; the rest, who, we're told, have plump legs, all run away in fear with their mean teacher. A boy is being beaten by a man. The man then turns into a tree, and the boy runs away laughing. (Is the man his father? "Sorry, Dad, you're a tree now! Ha ha!") Then there's a boys' school, where the piggish boys who like to bully their teacher are actually turned into pigs. There's all this wine-drinking and partaking of tasty snacks and dancing and wild chanting and wanton destruction of private property.

Which is not surprising, considering that this is Bacchus, after all. You know, the Bacchus whose maenads ("madcap girls," Lewis calls them) tore the grieving Orpheus to pieces. What is slightly surprising is Lewis' decision to link Bacchus so closely with Aslan, who is (apparently) an incarnation of Christ. There's an old tradition of opposing Dionysus to Apollo, the ecstatic subhuman to the serenely rational superhuman, the bacchanalia to the logiche latreia of Romans 12:1. In The Spirit of the Liturgy Joseph Ratzinger makes the case for siding Christ with Apollo, against Dionysus. Dionysian worship, he says, is dehumanizing, an irrational intoxication that frees the votary from the "burden" of being human, leading ultimately to madness and death. It forms a closed circle, with the worshipers all facing one another, as in the Israelites' ecstatic adoration of the Golden Calf, rather than facing outward together, toward the Shekhinah of the Lord. But Lewis indicates again and again that he takes the opposite view. There is only one formal, liturgical religion in Narnia, and that is the worship of Tash the Inexorable.

Lewis, though no seer himself, comes of a long line of heterodox visionaries, like Boehme, Swedenborg, Blake, Novalis, and MacDonald, all in reaction against ossified human institutions. The Kabbalah is referenced explicitly in That Hideous Strength, implicitly in Wardrobe. Plato, the father, or step-father, at any rate, of Gnosticism, is cited on the threshold of heaven in The Last Battle. To tell the truth, I'm sympathetic toward these strands of human thought, taken in their original context. I would want to rebel against a gray and sterile state church or a tyrannical government, even if it meant going a bit overboard on the other side. I can understand the need to feel like you're escaping from the Matrix. At the same time, well, you know, we need institutions in order to live in a community. Institutions are indifferent; they can be bad or good, or, like most things human, a mixture of the two.

Well, Mr. Lewis is welcome to his views; I'm not really trying to argue for the rightness or wrongness of any particular idea here. It's just that, as a father and a citizen, I try to make the best of the institutions with which I have to deal, like the parish church, the city council, and the public school, and it's kind of demoralizing to have a book I'm reading to my kids be so very negative and subversive about it all.

More irritating, perhaps, is his handling of Susan. Here I tread cautiously, as this is a sensitive topic. I'm familiar with the Neil Gaiman story, &c., though I've never seen fit to read it, having better things to entertain myself with. But I can also see why people are bothered by Susan. She's portrayed from the very first as being whiny, craven, and tiresome. Her besetting sin is trying to be a grown-up. When she doesn't make it to the Narnian heaven in The Last Battle this is explicitly stated as the reason. Lipstick (oh horror!) is mentioned. It's a strange streak of vindictiveness that runs through the Chronicles and, in my opinion, greatly mars their innocent beauty.

Lewis was, in fact, a bit of a misogynist. I use the word in the sense that the narrator of H. Rider Haggard's She (who also happens to be a don) uses it to describe himself, namely, as someone who has little understanding of or use for females, through without specific rancor. A lot of Lewis' apologetic works (and I read them all, many years ago) single out certain personality types that I suppose struck him as being worthy of having their foibles and sins analyzed. The "womanish woman" is the type handled most exhaustively.

My daughter is a bit of a tomboy, but she also likes to look nice and practice ladylike manners on occasion. It's just part of growing up. I don't want to make her feel like she's foolish or frivolous or bad for acting like a lady. I don't really want her to be self-conscious about it at all. And that is precisely what that little remark about Susan's lipstick would do.

So, I suppose we'll have to skip The Last Battle, at least for a few years yet. I have some philosophical objections to it anyway. How I'll do it without making a big scene I don't know, for my children aren't ones to let little inconsistencies slip by, and I don't really want to go into my reasons at this point. I guess the old Blank Wall of Vague Parental Reluctance will have to come into play.

On Reading Fairy Stories

I've read fairy tales to my children off and on for several years. I've always enjoyed such things myself – I have most of the Andrew Lang collections, and some of my short stories are inspired by them – so it pleases me greatly that my kids enjoy them.

And they do, considerably. As I've mentioned before, we don't watch television here at Casa O., so their play generally comes from what we read. Every tale we've gone through works its way into their make-believe. But naturally they each have their own preferences.

My six-year-old boy, who enjoys piano, chess-playing, and math, prefers stories that have some kind of repetitive pattern. His favorite is "The Fisherman and his Wife." We of Casa O. are obstinate papists, and the enormity of the wife's demands bowls my kids over every time and makes them howl with laughter. When we last read it, my boy said that some stories make him wonder whether he's hearing them or actually there as the events are unfolding, and that "Fisherman" is one of these. How glad that made my heart! They were both excited when we saw a flounder at the aquarium last week – I'd forgotten the fish-prince was of that species – and recited the incantation from memory.

It's a funny thing, but "Fisherman," which really is a very simple and repetitive tale, hooked me when I was a kid, too. At one point my junior high language arts class had to write and perform modernized fairy tales in front of the whole school; at my suggestion, my group chose "Fisherman." I played the husband, who discovered a talking fish filet inhabited by the reincarnated soul of Elvis at Luby's Cafeteria. We even had a brown paper fish-puppet that danced to "Don't Be Cruel."

But I digress.

My four-year-old daughter, on the other hand, likes "Rapunzel" most of all. She loves whimsical ideas and often makes up such stories on her own. She's told me about Nobody the friendly giant, who's invisible (nobody knows Nobody but Nobody knows everybody, she says), and about the tree that gives eggs instead of fruit, eggs that hatch into "clear" cats, which can only be seen with special goggles, and fly through the clouds over the city. She likes witches, bad fairies, and ogresses, but doesn't have any use for princesses; once I called her Princess (as I'm wont to do) and she said, "Never call me Princess. I hate princesses. I like dinosaurs, sharks, and every animal that's scary." She also has flaming red hair, and (in a remarkable display of good fashion sense) refuses to wear pink.

In one of his introductions, Lang asserts that "Is it true?" is the great question children ask. My children have certainly done so. Chiefly, though, they ask about the scarier things, and from a strictly practical point of view. For instance, when we read about an ogress-queen who tries to devour her son's wife and children, they like to know – quite sensibly, in my opinion – if there's any danger of that happening to them. I remember Tolkien saying somewhere that his children were more wont to ask "Was he good?" That has been my experience as well. They want to classify each character as good or bad and are bothered when someone's actions are ambiguous, as they often are in fairy tales.

Incidentally, I don't care for the writing in a lot of the stories in Lang's collections. I guess the writers thought it cute to ridicule the story they were telling, but over the children's heads, so that they could share a smug little smile with the adult reader. Such condescension disgusts and angers me. When I read with my kids I want to be right down on their level. They – my daughter, especially – tend to find stories with little jokes and witticisms extremely tiresome. By contrast, the Blue Fairy Book contains Lang's own retelling of the Perseus myth ("The Terrible Head"), which uses simple, unadorned language, but plays it straight. They've never sat so still as they did last night when I read it to them, clinging to their respective arms of the big green chair where they perch for bedtime stories.

My son, who's very sensitive in some ways, has always been afflicted with strange spectral fears. For instance, he used to be terrified of a certain pair of framed child's handprints at my parents' house. Stop signs and lamp-posts with globes also made him hysterical – he said they were "happy," which still gives me the shivers. Certain images make him extremely uncomfortable.

I experienced similar fears when I was young, and am rather careful about the movies I watch. What's interesting is that the same sort of terror doesn't attach to fairy tales, for him or for me. They may involve the most monstrous crimes (as the mother's in "The Juniper Tree") but they play the role of symbols, as it were, in an abstract pattern, and actually produce a kind of pleasure at their appearance in the larger context of the story.

Then again, right now my kids desperately want me to read "Bluebeard," because I mentioned it at some point as being too creepy, but I don't think I shall, not for some time yet. I can't abide the thought of their working through that in their games.