So I had a dental appointment—just a routine checkup and cleaning, and I was a little nervous. Well, I’m always nervous when I go to the dentist—I’d rather go almost anywhere else. I usually carry a toothbrush and some toothpaste and some sandpaper with me to the dentist’s office and stop in the bathroom outside and give my teeth a thorough scrubbing in the hopes that the hygienist will look in my mouth and say, “Oh, nothing to do here, you can go,” but so far that’s never happened. And this time I really didn’t want to linger, but they reassured me with their masks and a check of my temperature and even my blood pressure, and I was really hoping they’d say, “So you’re 110 over 55, nothing to do here, you can go,” but that didn’t happen.
I also had a new hygienist which was nice, and I was the first patient of the day—maybe her first patient ever. She told me she’d been staying at home a lot and asked me if I’d been out at all.
And she said she’d call in the dentist and maybe another assistant because it sounded like I had serious problems and I said, “No, no, I’m kidding! Let’s not get any more people than we have to!” and then muttered, “Geez, really tough crowd here.”
Then she told me to open my mouth so she could start the examination and I said, “By the way, I’m sorry but I ate about six handfuls of ghost peppers before I came in.” She said that was okay and that I must really like spicy food.
The examination and cleaning went really well—I didn’t have any problems aside from a slightly bruised ego. When she was done she gave me some advice on brushing and flossing and said, “Really my goal is to have you in here and out again as quickly as possible.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “that’s what I want too. Heck, if I didn’t need regular checkups I wouldn’t come in at all.”
And as I was leaving I heard her mutter, “Gee, tough crowd.”
Tea is the second most popular beverage in the world so of course it’s got an image problem. No matter how hard you brew it, steep it, or boil it tea just isn’t dark enough. That’s why the tea company Brutaliteas has a whole line of horror-themed teas like Cranthrax and Screamsicle and, er, Vanilla Biscuits.
And they’re not the only ones. Pitch Black North, a “SATANIC TEA COMPANY”, according to their website, has teas called Throat Of Lucifer, Breath Of Demons (currently sold out), and, er, Vanilla Earl Grey.
Is there something terrifying about vanilla that I’m missing?
A New York Times article about these tea companies says that the marketing of tea “often seems intended to target kindly old ladies, taut wellness gurus and well-heeled gourmands”, but Pitch Black North’s founder Dominic Alvernaz says he’s “trying to get people interested in tea who normally wouldn’t be interested in it, because they have these pre-notions that it’s only for strict tea ceremonies and pricey hotels”. He’s trying to give his tea ““sketchy, sexy vampire vibes” which reminds me of a horrifyingly terrible joke that I’ll put at the end of this post with a warning so you can skip it if you want.
Pitch Black North is marketing teas with the band Cradle Of Filth whose vocalist says they were already “avid tea drinkers” because, obviously, they just like tea and don’t care how it’s marketed, although they promise their teas “swim abrim with genuine witchcraft, having been brewed under all the right stars” and if that weren’t dark enough the Sweetest Maleficia brew is made with vanilla.
There’s also Simpson & Vail’s Edgar Allan Poe tea which is made with beetroot that turns it a deep red, but I like to add milk to it which turns it pink. Maybe that spoils the effect, but I don’t care–I’m in it for the taste.
That’s the real heart of the matter–the dark, bloody, still-beating heart, maybe. It’s all in how you think about tea. It’s a drink with a long and often brutal history, and there’s tasseography, fortune-telling with tea leaves, which some people might consider dark or even dangerous. I’m going to go out on a limb–a black, slimy limb festering limb studded with poisonous fungus–and say that marketing is the real monster. That and vanilla.
AND NOW the joke which was told to me several years ago by my friend Andi who called me to share it and I’m pretty sure she knew I was eating dinner and knew it would ruin my appetite so consider yourself warned:
There’s a special bar for vampires where they all go on Friday nights to hang out and have a pint of blood. One night Dracula flew in and asked for a cup of hot water. The bartender was confused and checked the mirror behind the bar. No reflection so he was definitely a vampire. The bartender boiled some water and poured it into a cup. Dracula then pulled out a tampon and said, “Tea time!”
September 2014 feels like a long time ago, probably because it was a long time ago.
The conventional wisdom regarding cancer, if there is such a thing as conventional wisdom with a subject so broad and diverse, is that the five year mark is a big one. Some say five years cancer-free is as good as cured. So what am I supposed to think now that I’m about to reach year six?
Technically, the doctors will say, I wasn’t really confirmed as cancer-free until December 2014 when I had surgery to remove all lymph nodes that might have been harboring aberrant cells but which turned out to be completely clear. And technically, I’ll say, when I finished chemotherapy in late September 2014 I started my recovery, and I get to have some say in this because whose cancer is it anyway?
Anyway, for one thing I can’t say it’s completely behind me. Yes, I had a form of cancer that was easily treatable, and literally within a day of my diagnosis at least one doctor was telling me I had a good chance of being cured. If I hadn’t been so careless in the months leading up to that diagnosis, if I’d been paying attention to the obvious signs, “being cured” could have meant one surgery instead of three and I could have skipped chemotherapy. I made things worse by being lackadaisical about my health when I should have had a daisical, but that’s another story. Sure, there were some fun parts of chemotherapy, like the guy who came around every day with a cart full of candy bars and chocolate milk, and then there was the guy with a guitar who came to my room and sang “Edelweiss” and I asked him if he could play something a little more upbeat and he played “Surrey With The Fringe On Top”, and the best part of that is that he only came by once. Still I’d prefer to have skipped all of it.
The idea of being cured is also misleading. Even after five years cancer can come back. Or it can pop up somewhere else. When I wasn’t getting chemotherapy I sometimes went to the local Gilda’s Club, a place for people who’ve had cancer, who have cancer, or who know someone with cancer—in short, for everyone. I met people there who’d been cancer free for decades. Like them I’ll be a cancer survivor for the rest of my life. It helps keep things in perspective. There was a time when a little thing, like the grocery store being out of that coffee I like, could ruin my day, but now I can say, “But at least I don’t have cancer!” and I feel better, and as an added bonus when I yell about cancer in the middle of the grocery store people clear the aisle and no one comes around singing Rodgers and Hammerstein songs to me.
Sometimes I do wish I could go back and do it all again, although differently. I’d be more aware, I’d be more organized, I’d ask, “Hey, do you know any Sondheim?” I’ve even thought about how I would handle it if I have cancer again. That may sound like a morbid thought but the universe is a morbid place. Everything that lives eventually dies. That’s why we’re lucky to be alive, and if you don’t feel lucky to be alive try yelling, “I’m lucky to be alive!” Even if it doesn’t make you feel better it’ll clear the coffee aisle.
What cancer did for me was leave me with a deeper understanding of how the future matters. The past matters too, and so does the present—they’re all part of the same thing—because everything builds on what came before it. Every decision is a plus one.
This is a screenshot of just a fraction of the spam I’ve gotten in my comment feed lately. Fortunately there’s some wheat in all the chaff.
Like most bloggers I really appreciate comments. The late great Richard Sher, host of the radio show Says You! ended some episodes by saying “this show is best when we get your comments, when we get your contributions, and most of all when you show up.” In a blog, aside from tracking statistics, comments are a way for me to know you’ve shown up. And I say most bloggers enjoy comments even though I’ve never collected any formal data on that; most blogs just seem to allow comments and it seems like their owners appreciate the feedback. There have been a few I’ve run across that didn’t allow comments and there was even one where the guy who it belonged to had a statement over the comments section that said something like, “If you want to leave a long comment consider getting your own blog.” And I was seriously tempted to leave a really long comment telling him that was a great idea and he’d inspired me to do just that and I’d like to hear any suggestions he had, because it seemed like something he’d really appreciate, but that’s another story.
Anyway I like to reply to comments as well. Not everybody does and that’s okay. I know some bloggers don’t and that’s okay; I know some, like the infamous Bloggess, get so many comments they couldn’t possibly reply to them. It seems like even bloggers who don’t reply to comments still appreciate them, and that’s what matters.
All this got me thinking about what an interesting thing comments are, too. Never before in history has there been such spontaneous feedback between readers and writers, except possibly on a tablet of the epic of Gilgamesh where someone chiseled, “Utnapishtim rocks!”
I also know there have been technical difficulties at my particular blog and that some people who’ve tried to leave comments haven’t been able to. Earlier this week I was doing some housecleaning, or rather blogcleaning. I can’t give you a specific reason why but, while I’ve been able to keep up a pretty regular blogging schedule, I’ve been in kind of a weird head space and I realized it had been almost two months since I’d replied to any comments. I also found that some comments I’d read and really enjoyed and even “liked” went to the spam folder. It’s an odd thing that I get a fair amount of obvious spam in the comments that I then have to deal with like clumps of hair in a shower drain but legitimate comments, comments I approve and like, might slip down the drain.
I also haven’t been great about visiting some of my favorite blogs, and even when I have I haven’t always commented so it probably seems like I didn’t show up and I can’t explain that either. It’s like something changed in the past six months or so, but I have no idea what it could possibly be.
All this is just to say thank you for showing up and I’ll try to show up myself. After all this is a cooperative effort. Also this might be too long; it’s a good thing I’ve got my own blog.
There are a lot of rainbow flags flying for Pride Month in my neighborhood, and all around the city where I live, and beyond. I don’t have any pictures, mainly because I don’t like taking pictures of strangers’ yards without their permission—I leave that to Google Maps, but that’s another story. It got me thinking about how ironic it is that these personal celebrations of LGBT awareness and acceptance are so widespread even as current circumstances have forced most big Pride events to either scale back or go completely online. This is also a difficult moment not just for the LGBT community, which is facing serious rollbacks of rights, but other minority communities. And these concerns often overlap. As many have noted the 1968 Stonewall Riots, a marker of the modern LGBT rights movement, was started by transgender women of color who were fed up with police brutality. Nearly five decades later Andrea Jenkins would become the first Black transgender woman elected to public office, and she’s speaking out now about George Floyd, whose death happened in Minneapolis where she serves.This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride Parade. At the same time, though, it reflects how the LGBT community has become part of the larger community. Yes, LGBT people have always been part of the larger community—they’re neighbors, friends, family.
It’s only been very recently that there’s been real widespread acceptance. While I’ve seen local Pride events grow from small gatherings that were mostly met with protest to a big three day downtown party it’s only been in the past few years that rainbow flags in yards have become, well, almost ordinary.
It’s only been five years since the Supreme Court’s decision finally made same-sex couples equal. It’s a decision that seems a lot less controversial now than it did then, although even at the time it seemed like the controversy was fading. Still I remember how many arguments I had with people who were opposed to marriage equality. Just five years ago there were five basic arguments, some of them made by the same people as they shifted their reasoning in a desperate attempt to justify their opposition. Those arguments were:
“It’s a slippery slope.” Sure. I think the past five years have shown this one was never true. It was never an argument that made sense to me anyway. Every new law or change to an existing law is a potential slippery slope to, well, something else, with consequences that may or may not be intended. Most of the time when people made this argument they said it would lead to polygamy. It hasn’t, and it didn’t follow that it would. All that really changed is the law recognized a subset of couples who’d previously been denied the legal protections of marriage—protections like the ability to visit each other in the hospital, own property jointly, and parent children. Some of those protections were already available, but the law makes it easier for married couples to obtain them. And the emphasis here is on couples. Allowing polygamy would mean a major restructuring of the legal definition of marriage.
Some brought up the idea of bestiality or people possibly marrying an inanimate object, but until your goldfish or your floor lamp can sign a contract or make medical decisions that just wasn’t an argument.
“It’s redefining marriage.” This argument never made sense to me either. The meanings and rituals and rights and responsibilities of marriage have varied through time and from one culture to another. Depending on the time and place women were considered property of their husbands. It wasn’t until 1993 that all fifty states finally did away with the “marital rape exception” that prevented women from charging their husbands. There’s also historical evidence that there are early cultures that recognized same sex marriage. It’s not a new idea, but the wheels of the justice system turn slowly. Until 2003, again thanks to the Supreme Court, there were still parts of the United States where homosexuality was a crime. The first state to recognize same sex marriage was Massachusetts, in 2004. It took eleven years for the issue to reach the Supreme Court. Here’s an interesting side note, though: the term “Boston marriage” was used in the 19th and early 20th century to mean two women who lived together without depending on any men.
“It’s against my religion.” The marital rights and responsibilities that same sex couples were asking for in what ultimately became the case of Obergefell v. Hodges before the Supreme Court were those granted by the U.S. government, not any church or other group. It was and still is a legal distinction, not a religious one. No church has ever had to change because the government extended purely secular rights to same sex couples, and anyone is still free to believe same sex marriage is wrong if they want. Besides some churches were already recognizing same sex marriages before the Supreme Court’s decision. Some claimed they would prefer a different “civil union” for same sex couples, but “marriage” is a legal term used by the governmentandcreating a group that was separate, and probably not equal, was unnecessary. What it comes down to, though, is that if you don’t believe in same sex marriage then don’t marry someone of the same sex.
“Children need a mother and a father.” Biologically children need heterozygous parents, but same-sex couples have been legally adopting children since 1985 and the kids are all right. There’s never been any evidence that children do worse when raised by same sex parents. And generally speaking families come in all forms, and there’s no evidence that one type of family is inherently superior to another.
Also you don’t have to have children to be married. You don’t have to be married to have children either—as a friend of mine used to say “Drive carefully. Most people are caused by accidents.” But for those same sex couples who did adopt being allowed to marry gave their families a degree of stability they hadn’t had before.
“It should be put to a vote.” And in fact several states did vote on same sex marriage, but if one group of marriages could be voted on why couldn’t all marriages? Or for that matter all rights. Hey, there’s your slippery slope! Marriage, as far as it’s defined by U.S. law, is a contract between two people, and contracts don’t usually get voted on by the people. And here’s something to consider: the Supreme Court put an end to laws preventing interracial couples in their 1968 decision Loving v. Virginia, but a majority of Americans wouldn’t accept interracial marriage until some time between 1995 and 1998. Still the idea of putting marital rights to a vote was persistent. George W. Bush supported an amendment to the Constitution to ban same sex marriage, which would have led to a nationwide vote if it had gone anywhere. It didn’t mainly because it couldn’t get enough traction; even Dick Cheney opposed it.
It may seem strange that I, a cis guy happily married to a woman–today happens to be our anniversary!–spent a lot of time going over these arguments, defending same sex marriage and LGBT rights generally. Well, I never went to court—I never did any of the real work that LGBT activists put into winning their rights, although I argued, and continue to argue for LGBT rights. There have been a lot of gains, although there have also been some major setbacks, and I even think there may be serious attempts to overturn the same sex marriage decision, although it will be hard to take the status away from currently married couples, which is what led to the unraveling of California’s Prop 8.
Anyway, why should someone like me argue for the rights of LGBT people? To repeat what I said earlier, they’re neighbors, friends, family. We’re all part of one community.
Still I’ve wondered if I should say anything. Back in January of 2017 I attended a solidarity march that called for unity among minorities: people of color, LGBT people, and others who, understandably, felt threatened. Many worried that the gains they’d made in recent years would be rolled back.
As a white guy I was, for once, a minority in that group. I don’t mean I know what it feels like to be a minority, or even to be oppressed. I don’t. I was, however, conscious of my background. And I thought that perhaps just by being there I didn’t need to say anything. Still I wondered if I should say something. There was a stage and another white guy, a minister, got up and said something close to what I was thinking I should say. “I know people like me have spent a lot of time telling people like you what to do and how to be,” he said, “so I’m going to keep this short. I just want you to know I stand with you.”
Then he got down.
I worry too about saying the wrong thing. Many years ago, back when the internet was still fairly new, I was on an online discussion board where someone shared a list of insulting things women engineers hear regularly from their male coworkers. I was clueless enough to be surprised and I said, “I can’t believe women still have to put up with this.”
Someone replied, “Congratulations on your white penis.”
It stung but it was deserved. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I started to get defensive, to say that “I can’t believe” is just an expression, that I didn’t really mean it, but then I thought about how it sounded. It was, I think, my first lesson in privilege, and how it makes some of us ignorant and even dismissive of what others are going through. I realized that what I was really saying was, “I don’t believe you.” And there was no reason for me to say that.
It’s too late for me to keep this short but I’ll try to conclude now by saying that I realize how lucky I am to have a voice and to have a voice that’s often magnified by my gender, race, and even economic status. I hope I can be smart about how I use it. I hope that when I do speak I can do a better job of speaking up for other voices, voices who, for too long, have been silenced.
Have I mentioned that I really love short stories? That’s not a rhetorical question. I really can’t remember. I have the memory of a goldfish. At least I think I do. I think I heard once that goldfish have a three second memory, but I can’t remember where I heard that so it might not be true. Anyway I love short stories and I especially love flash fiction—usually defined as stories that are less than two thousand words. I even think flash fiction is my own preferred genre for writing, although I often find that the shorter I try to make a story the longer it ends up being, but that’s another story. Or rather another stories.
Anyway one of the contemporary masters of flash fiction is Etgar Keret, whose stories typically range in length from two or three to five or six pages, but within their compact size they deal with heavy issues: love, marriage, infidelity, life, death. It’s tempting to use the old cliché “deceptively simple” but there’s nothing deceptive about them. When a story opens with a man perched on a high ledge about to jump you know that, no matter how short it is, it’s a big moment. That, I think, is the beauty of well-crafted flash fiction: it reminds us that our stories don’t have to be epic to be important; every moment of every life is a story, and every story matters. In the title story of Keret’s collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God the bus driver, who wanted to be God but is happy because being a bus driver was his second choice, has had a career of terrible efficiency, has a sudden moment of compassion. How long does it last? Does it ever happen again? The story doesn’t say—and in the end it doesn’t matter. The point is that a bus driver who’s rigidly stuck to his schedule sees someone who needs him to stop, to take an extra few minutes.
Admittedly the bulk of this short story collection is taken up with the very long story Kneller’s Happy Campers, which became the basis for the movie Wristcutters: A Love Story, but even the long story is broken up into brief encounters between people and how those encounters change them, how their lives, or, more accurately, afterlives, are driven by moments of connection.
These moments are a recurring theme in Keret’s short stories, which can also be weird, even surreal—like a guy who works in a factory making long, twisting pipes and discovers that things disappear into it and never come out the other end, so he crawls in to see where it goes. And sometimes the twists are both poignant and hilarious. The best story in this collection, one of Keret’s best stories overall, is Breaking The Pig, about a kid who wants a Bart Simpson doll. His father decides this is an opportunity to teach his son the value of money, “So instead of a Bart Simpson doll he bought me an ugly china pig with a flat hole in its back.” The kid starts to fill the piggy bank but in the process comes to love it, even naming it Pesachson. When Pesachson is full the father hands the kid a hammer and says, “Go on, then, break the pig.” The kid gets understandably upset that he’s being asked to smash his best friend, and begs his father to let it go one more day.
I won’t give away the ending. I’ll just say that it’s funny and surprising but also completely believable, as well as sad, and completely unforgettable.
Big books intimidate me. I mean thick books—epic works. After all I have a book of reproductions of famous paintings with an eighteen inch spine, too big to sit upright on any of my bookshelves, but it’s only a little over a hundred pages and I’ve read or at least thumbed through it at least a dozen times. My fear of long books makes it odd that I majored in English in college, although back then I had a lot more time to read, especially since I didn’t have any math homework. What I’m eventually going to get to here, after making epic circles around the subject, is that N.K. Jemisin’s novels have been highly recommended to me by people whose opinions I trust, and yet I look at her book The Fifth Seasonin its nearly five hundred pages of glory, and it’s just part one of a trilogy, and I feel as frightened as I did when faced with having to read Great Expectations, for a class, although at least I wouldn’t be tested on Jemisin’s book. Also, and this is not necessarily an excuse, I love short stories. I’d even say I prefer short stories to novels. The beauty of a novel, especially a really long one, is, if you read before falling asleep like I do, you have something both familiar and new to look forward to each night. The beauty of short stories—and I have a lot of anthologies—is you can finish one before falling asleep and have something completely new waiting for you the next night.
So How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? was a good way to give in to my friends’ suggestion. It’s a short story collection, and even though some of the stories were pretty long, they kept me up until I finished and if I didn’t have to get up for work the next day I probably would have finished the entire book in a single night, and it’s probably just as well that I didn’t because I had something to look forward to.
And there’s something else. If I hadn’t seen a picture of N.K. Jemisin it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me that she’s a woman, or that she’s African American. Maybe I would have. The collection’s title, from an essay about Afrofuturism that Jemisin wrote, certainly implies it, although I might not have thought about it until late in the collection. The privilege of being a white guy makes it easy to overlook things like that. It wasn’t really until I started reading another African American science fiction author, Octavia Butler, several years ago that I realized most of the science fiction authors I read as a kid were white guys. I don’t remember when I figured out Andre Norton was a woman, but I didn’t realize she was until some time after I’d read a few of her books.
Getting back to N.K. Jemisin’s collection, the final story, Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters, is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that struck a wide range of people but disproportionately affected people of color. The same is true of COVID-19. And that brings me to another point. Fiction—especially science fiction—allows us to see the world from different perspectives. Because writers are influenced by their backgrounds there’s great value not just in reading diverse works but reading works by diverse authors. Imagination is great, and many authors can imagine diverse perspectives, but experience counts too; it might even count more. As much as we struggle with the past and present we are all part of a broad community, and understanding how different parts of the community, communities within the whole, see things can strengthen that. Admittedly it can also be misleading. Octavia Butler was surprised when people read her short story Bloodchild as an allegory for slavery, although she also said, “I feel that what people bring to my work is at least as important to them as what I put into it.”
So I didn’t just pick up Jemisin, or, for that matter, Butler, out of a desire to check a diversity box or as a form of virtue signaling, although I know I risk looking like I did just by talking about it. And, with the importance of diversity in mind, I felt a pressure to like Jemisin’s stories. This was an entirely internal and self-inflicted pressure, of course. If I didn’t like her stories no one would ever have to know. I’ve got shelves crammed full of other books I could talk about, and if diversity were solely a box to be checked there’s a pretty broad spectrum within those shelves. That is to say I wouldn’t be talking about How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? if I didn’t really like it, and in fact I felt the stories got better and better the farther I got into it, and that made me want to start reading again from the beginning.
But I’ve got The Fifth Season and its sequels to look forward to over several nights.
Even though shorelines around the United States are reopening my own vacation plans have been put on hold so I thought I’d take a bibliographic beach tour. After all my favorite place to read is next to the ocean or a lake—or any body of water, which has gotten me some funny looks at the swimming pool, but that’s another story. And Oscar Lobster’s Fair Exchange by George Selden ties in with my postponed plans to visit my parents in Florida. After all it was a book my mother gave me when I was a kid and wanted to be a marine biologist. Or thought I did. Science and the arts aren’t mutually exclusive—there have been scientists who were writers and vice versa, but I eventually realized I wanted to take more of a poetic view of nature. I think Selden’s book tapped into that with lines like, “There was no sound except the gentle ‘shhh’ of the water as it warned the world to be still.”
That’s from just a few pages in as Peter Starfish climbs up onto Turtle Rock, a spot just off the shore of Long Island Sound, where various sea creatures gather at night. And it’s where he meets Oscar Lobster, and Oscar’s friend Hector the Crab, and a fish named James. The book was published in 1966, so it predates Sesame Street by a little bit, but Oscar Lobster is a little like Oscar The Grouch: prickly and gruff on the outside but good at heart. Oscar’s outraged that humans are taking shells and other sea treasures. He’s especially upset about a couple of kids, Howard and Janet, who are spending the summer in one of the beach houses and are using ocean items to decorate their land garden. Hector likes the kids because they throw the crusts of their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the water, but Oscar wants more. He decides that if the humans are taking shells he’ll take a few human things for his own aquatic garden. Early on he even tries to make off with an entire beach towel full of treasures—suntan lotion, sunglasses, a clock—and almost becomes a lobster dinner.
Needless to say it’s a story that requires more than a little suspension of disbelief. Most marine biologists would scoff at the idea of crustaceans, echinoderms, and fish conversing, never mind cooperating. And bringing in the molluscs there’s an old periwinkle who’s a sort of authority on Long Island Sound, watching over it from his own rock and singing sea shanties at low tide. And just as needless to say it’s a funny story that brings in all the elements of a summer at the beach, including a trip around a lighthouse, a storm, a ghost story, and even a shipwreck.
I’d go on to read some of Selden’s other books, including The Cricket In Times Square, his most famous book, and the much more mature Irma And Jerry, about a dog and cat who play matchmaker to a couple of humans, bringing them together in an amateur production of—I kid you not—Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A real snake, playing the asp, gets in on the act. I liked his books so much I was sad to learn that Selden died the same year I went to college to major in English, just a couple of weeks shy of my birthday, in fact.
Still Oscar Lobster’s Fair Exchange is the only one I still have on my shelves, the only one I keep handy whenever I want to get back to the beach.
It’s too early for Christmas, or even Christmas in July, which some people celebrate because they can’t wait twelve months, and the way this year has gone I can’t blame them, but I’ve pulled out Sir Gawain And The Green Knight because, well, it’s one of my favorite stories. And the version by W.S. Merwin is especially good—it’s one of five I’ve read. It’s the easiest to read, even though it’s a really weird story with an ending that’ll leave you scratching your head and wondering what just happened, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Although getting ahead is exactly what the story is about. If you’re confused yet I understand. If you’re not maybe you can explain to me what’s going on.
The story opens on Christmas Day at King Arthur’s court at Camelot, and the monarch demands to see or hear something exciting. Exactly on cue a green giant, who’s anything but jolly, rides a giant green horse into the hall, carrying an axe and a holly branch. The giant calls all the knights weaklings and offers to let anyone who wants to strike him with the axe, on the condition that, one year hence, they submit to the same blow from him. All the knights look uncomfortably at each other and shuffle their feet until Arthur accepts the challenge. Gawain, the youngest knight, won’t let his king be put in danger, and steps up. Gawain takes the axe and wields it like a boss, beheading the giant. And the giant reaches down and picks up his head, which reminds Gawain that in a year’s time they’ll see each other at the Green Chapel.
Several months go by and Gawain gets more and more nervous, but, as Christmas approaches, he sets off in search of the Green Chapel. This is one of the funny details of chivalric stories that Mark Twain makes fun of in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, but that really is another story. Gawain has no map and no clear idea where he’s going, but he sets off anyway, trusting he’ll find the place by the appointed time. And this is part of the point. Gawain is young but confident; he’s sure of himself even though, as far as we know, he’s still untested.
Along the way he fights monsters and sleeps in his armor on bare rock. All this could be an excellent story in itself, but it’s skimmed over in a few lines—it’s not what the story is about, and Gawain’s virtue sees him through all hardships. Finally he comes to the castle of Bertilak de Hautdesert, who tells him the Green Chapel is nearby and invites Gawain to stay a few days, assuring him he can set off Christmas morning and make his date. In the meantime Bertie suggests they play a game over the next few days: whatever each of them gains during the day they’ll give to the other. He goes hunting and Gawain, visited in his bedroom by Lady Bertilak, gets a kiss from her. That evening Bertilak gives Gawain a deer and Gawain gives Bertilak a kiss—without telling him where it came from.
The next day Bertilak presents Gawain with a boar, and Gawain gives him another kiss.
The third day Lady Bertilak gives Gawain a green and gold silk girdle she tells him is magic and will protect the wearer from all harm. Since Gawain is looking forward to losing his head at the Green Chapel it’s a tempting prize. Lord Bertilak’s present is a fox and Gawain gives him three kisses.
Ultimately Gawain keeps his head but the swelling is reduced. It turns out he’s human after all. So is the Green Knight, but I won’t say anymore.
When I started rereading it I knew there’d been two film version of the story, but I haven’t seen either one. In fact I find it really hard to imagine how it could be translated into a screen version without losing most of what makes it such an interesting story. And I discovered there’s a new film version that’s scheduled for release at the end of May. It looks bonkers and terrifying and, well, really pretty good. Maybe Christmas comes early this year.