Reynard the Fox

I've just finished Anne Louis Avery's "Reynard the Fox," a retelling of some medieval Flemish fox fables, told within the frame of court intrigue and trials.  It's well written, but it wasn't the book I expected.  The eponymous Reynard is an anti-hero, a scoundrel in an animal kingdom of flawed nobles, who is far more dangerous and deadly than the kindly Old Fox of Avery's charming and poignant Twitter microfiction.  So I was unpleasantly surprised when Reynard tricked Bruin the Bear into a kind of medieval industrial woodworking injury, followed by a gang beating.

I paused after that scene, but pressed on.  Unfortunately, this was the first of a handful of bloody, disfiguring, and disabling -- if not fatal -- acts of mischief Reynard manipulates his animal opponents into.  While "Reynard the Fox" isn't exactly GrimDark, it is Red in Tooth and Claw, and I was glad that I had not gifted this book sight unseen to my preteen relatives.

After some consideration -- starting with musings on Punch and Judy, which I've always found creepy and disturbing -- I've concluded that the Reynard stories are in the same vaudeville, slap-stick vein as Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.  Or Foghorn Leghorn and his nemesis, Barnyard Dawg.  Or Itchy and Scratchy.  Actually, a lot like Itchy and Scratchy.

I feel like I'm missing something, especially after reading so many rave reviews.  Maybe I'm just supposed to sit back and enjoy Avery's rich language.  Maybe I'm supposed to respond to the medieval fables like the "Bring Out Yer Dead" or the "Vorpal Rabbit" skits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: yes, it's shocking, but laugh, because the disconnect between the mortality and the nonchalance is also funny.  Or maybe I'm suppose to feel Grimm schadenfreude that various animals are getting their just desserts in the same way various step-relatives and witches do when the nail-lined barrels, red-hot dancing shoes, or gingerbread ovens appear.   Aside from Sir Isengrim, the Wolf, maybe I'm missing the cultural context of animals' symbolisms, which would ground me in their stories.

Still, it's hard to find equivalency between Bruin the Bear having his back flayed to make a travel bag and Daffy Duck getting his bill shot off.  The medieval retelling is more explicit and gruesome, whereas the modern cartoon violence is either screened behind a dust cloud or fence, or the Loony Tunes characters pick up their bloodless body parts and pop them back into place with little consequence.  Other comparisons, say, between Sir Tybert the cat getting partially blinded and maimed by angry peasants and Sylvester the Cat getting mauled by a pack of angry dogs protecting Tweety Bird are a closer fit. 

I had the same difficulties with the animal characters' motivations as I do with Sampson's in the biblical story of Sampson and Delilah:  someone tries to trick you into danger multiple times, and yet you still believe them, or even love them, and they lead you to ruin.  This is more a function of fable (and dream) -- where-in the characters' motivations are bound more closely to the plot needs than to their emotional and metal desires and abilities -- than it is a shortfall in Avery's writing.  

Between scenes of wickedness and trickery, there are luxurious, sumptuous descriptions of the countryside, clothing, jewels, and feasts.  I actually laughed during the description of King Nobel the Lion's multi-day festival.  Avery clearly renders medieval concepts such as Boethius's Wheel of Fortune and the calculus of forgiveness, sin, and animal nature.  Her language is an accessible mix of medieval, Flemish, and modern English; it's a bit like reading Shakespeare, but not having to stop and puzzle out some of the more antique or tertiary meanings of phrases.  Should you want it, there is a delightful glossary to consult at the end of the book.  

The hardback copy I purchased is sturdy, with magazines of quality paper and a plum colored ribbon to use as a place marker.  And there are oodles of footnotes. Who doesn't like footnotes?

Sleep and Dreams

Lately my sleep has been spotty.  I think some of the problem is the restless cats and dog who sometimes sleep (mostly) with us, or who park in the wrong part of the bed (or on me).  For whatever reason, I'm finding that I frequently awake around 3 or 4 AM; sometimes my shoulders or other joints are sore and I need to flip over, sometimes I'm blink awake thinking about work, or stories, or music lyrics.  If I'm particularly restless, I'll move to the couch so I don't wake up Mark with all my tossing and turning.   

It feels a little unfair; supposedly, everyone is sleeping much better now that Joe Biden is in the White House -- perhaps my unconscious hasn't caught up with the political news from NPR.   The other possibility, based on the increasing frequency of daytime naps,  is that my circadian rhythm is shifting to a weird, bimodal mode between diurnal and nocturnal.  

---

The other day I had a dream that I was supposed to be performing the harp along with a dream woman who is an amalgam of some Reed friends and various co-workers.  I want to say they were playing the accordion, kalimba, banjo, or other folk instrument.  

I didn't write the dream down at the time, so I've lost the detail settings other than it ended up in my old High School.   At some point, I realized that I wasn't wearing a Covid-19 mask.  Then I had set my harp down somewhere and didn't have it.   The dream progressed -- I think there was a locker room involved -- and the next thing I knew, I was standing at the school auditorium doors wrapped in a towel.  The performance had already been going for about five minutes, and the dream woman was alone on the stage, gamely plinking out the melody of some tune that I was supposed to be accompanying her with harp and voice.  If I went to retrieve my harp -- and clothing -- I'd be even more late.  I started to turn away from the door, then changed my mind and marched down the aisle, with only a towel wrapped around my middle. 

I have a sense a spotlight picked me out.  I jumped on stage and caused quite a stir.  "Hi everyone!" I said.  "You know those dreams you have where you're in public and you're suddenly naked?"  Semi-nervous laughter from the audience.  "Well, today's sort of been like that -- but at least I have a towel!"  

My sense is that the woman was kind of glad that I'd finally shown up, in a "finally" sort of way.

A bunch of six year olds ran up to the foot of the stage, and one of them said, in the breathles, excited, and bossy manner of six-year-olds explaining something that everyone should know, "You know, there's a way that you can wear a towel," and proceeded to demonstrate with her dress how to Gird Ones Loins.  

And then the dream went on to other things.

---

This morning I dreamed a poem.  Unfortunately, I don't remember what the poem was about other than a vague notion that it was about politics and gender identity, possibly in the mode of an Old English epic.  Or something.  This is probably what I get for flipping through the introduction of a monograph about Sappho before turning out the light.

Pre Ides of Winter Moon

 The Ides of Winter are soon.   As I was walking home from the grocery store, the moon and the clouds were all lit up with various hues of grey and blue, with a little bit of purple and red.  I wish I could have caught it on camera.  The moon seemed so much bigger, and the clouds more like a shell with the sunlight shining through them.  The whole sky appeared to be pausing between steps of a very slow dance.

After sunset, the moon shone in the middle of two rainbow halos for a minute before the clouds thickened and drew across the moon's face.  There were too many clouds to see Aldebaran or the Pleiades, which the moon visited two days ago.  

There's been talk of snow, but the actual snow levels are higher than the projected ones.  It is seasonal, especially if we're traveling to a weekend birthday celebration for my father, for there to be a thick coating of black ice on I-5 or for two feet of snow to besiege my folks' house.  Since his birthday is in the middle of the week, Oregon is spared (for now).

Reorienting To Writing

I've arisen early to write.  Well, maybe not so early.  And maybe it's blogging, but at least that is working with words.  

My writing has slowed down and I need to take steps to crank it back up.  I'll skip the excuses, and say that I'll have to be more disciplined both with and when I work with words so that I can increase my daily word count and stay engaged with the specific piece I'm working on.

I've currently got (counts) eight flash or short story pieces that are stuck, and a score of three-paragraph story stalls.   Stepping back, they're very long on description and character mood, but short on conflict and character choice.   They're vignettes or almost poems.  My old self would write "More Ninjas!" in red pen on the manuscript.   I think this is what happens when one doesn't budget enough daily time to write and keeps returning to start-up exercises.  

The other strategy is putting a screen limit on social media; my phone makes it too easy to nip in and the next thing I know I'm either doom-scrolling or schauden-scrolling.  

News and Reading

The news cycle continues to be disturbing.  Somewhere between the revelations about January 6th's insurrection, someone contrasted and compared Trump, the Proud Boys, and the D.C. Insurrection to Mao Zedong, the Red Guards, and the Cultural Revolution -- which resonated with me in a horrible way.  

At least Trump has been impeached twice now.  I can only hope that the Senate will convict him so that he is unable to hold office ever again.  

I keep thinking that once the inauguration is concluded, things will settle down... but I fear the damage to our social structures will take a long time to fix -- if only "The Scouring of the Shire" were so easy. 

I am finding that I need to step away from electronic devices after nine PM, or my sleep suffers.

On the more fun side:  

I finished "Beowulf."   I know that I should appreciate it more, but I don't.  I should contrast and compare it to "The Epic of Gilgamesh," because they both have that weepy royal bromance feel to them that isn't speaking to me.   I imagined asking my Old-English and Medieval Scholar friends, "Am I a bad person for not liking something in the canon?" (and "Am I an elitist for not being in raptures about this latest translation?")  but I couldn't imagine what their responses might be other than "This is a literary example of how one should lead a virtuous/good life" (and is the earliest existing example of literature with a fire-breathing, gold hoarding dragon in it).   Beowulf worked better for me when I read it in small snatches that would allow me to admire some of the more clever phrasing and word choice.  (Coincidentally, I had re-read the part of The Hobbit where Bilbo brings out a cup from Smaug's horde, and I noticed the parallels.)   I wanted to like the modern idioms, but ultimately the use of "bro," "fuck," "shit," "my main man," and "daddy" were too jarring and distracting to me.  

I've paused in "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books."  It's kind of fun--the spells and addresses spark all sorts of writing ideas--and kind of exhausting (we're blasting Apep, the Snake of Chaos again?).  I keep wanting to read the source materials, and it looks like I have to do some kind of Inter-library Loan to do so.

I've been reading "This Is How You Lose The Time War," by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and I've been enjoying it so much that it took me a while to realize that it's got a strong epistolary element, which doesn't usually work for me.  Part of the reason is that the formats of the letters--feathers, tree-rings, lava, seals--are intriguing; part of it is that the authors are having lots of fun with language.   I'm about half-way through.

I just got a hard-bound edition of "Reynard the Fox," by Anne Louise Avery, and, while I've only read the introduction and first chapter, the binding (with a purple ribbon sewn into it!), the dingbats, the footnotes, and the feel of the paper hits all the aesthetic points of owning a physical book.  I've been following Ms. Avery's Old Fox micro-fiction on Twitter, and I'm hoping the printed Reynard will equally please.

Harmonic Oscillation Pancakes

It's occurred to me that I haven't posted here about my attempt on the Third Day of Christmas to make Harmonic Oscillation Pancakes! 

I've seen pancakes where the batter is dropped onto a griddle to make letters or the Eiffel Tower or a smiley face.  What I wanted to do was load pancake batter into a pendulum, set it swinging over a hot griddle, and have math-artsy pancakes with harmonic curves on them.  

I was aiming for a family-friendly of mad-science-cookery, something that the entire family could eat and appreciate.  So it needed to be gluten-free.  After a failed attempt at making batter from an American Test Kitchen cookbook, I went out and got a gluten-free pre-mix.  

My first thought was that I could have a dual spout pendulum by using two plastic bags like frosting bags, hung far enough on a stick so that there would be two lines of batter spiraling around a common pivot point, which itself would be swinging back and forth over the griddle.  

The pendulum apparatus ended up looking like a found art installation from a beach-side hospital.  I hadn't really put the thickness of the batter into my calculations, so instead of a steady stream of batter coming out in a line, it was more like a dribble of Jackson Pollock-esque micro-pancakes. 

Part of the difficulty was that the batter was adhering to the sides of the bags and not really coming out.  I abandoned the plastic bags for a yogurt container with a hole drilled through it.  I had to drill the hole several times to widen it, and I ended up adding some more milk to the batter to try to thin it.  The end result was closer to what I was aiming for, but still didn't deliver pancake batter as quickly as I would have liked.  

By this time several hours had elapsed from initial pendulum setup to final yogurt container swing, and I could tell the mad-science cookery was getting on my family's nerves.   

The batter that did come out spread on the griddle more than I expected; so I didn't get a narrow, brown, and overlapping curve.  Instead, I got a twisted ring of batter that was fairly featureless.

I think if I'd turned up the heat on the griddle a little more, the batter might have cooked and browned more quickly.   I'll have to try with a larger hole in the pendulum, too -- or possibly a pendulum with two off-set holes that will allow me to have more interesting compound curves.   Or maybe a balloon or air pump to provide pressure that would expel the batter out more quickly....

I can neither confirm nor deny that I might have eaten all the results myself.

Return to Delta Ponds

 

Over the weekend, I took a break from Doom-Scrolling and went with Mark to Delta Ponds.  Although the evenings and nights have been overcast and rainy, we've been having clearish mornings.  It's been months since I've been.

 

Mostly, we saw coots, geese, cormorants, ducks, and heron.  We even managed to spy a hummingbird.  Off in the distance,  a bald eagle perched -- probably over the Willamette in hopes of catching a fish.  We saw no beavers, although Mark saw a nutria through his binoculars.

Because it was only about ninety minutes after sunrise when we got there, and because most of the leaves are off of the trees, the structure of branches struck me several times and I wished I had a loom or the graphic design ability to create a screen from the repeating patterns.

Later in the afternoon, before the sky became completely overcast, I got up on roof and took down the holiday star.  

 

Unfortunately, I did much too much Doom-Scrolling Sunday.

Doom Scrolling

The last few days have been filled with DoomScrolling the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.  

As I write this (Saturday) there's a small Pro-Trump rally at the Wayne Morris courthouse in downtown Eugene. 

I think everyone who stormed the capitol should be arrested and tried for insurrection, sedition, and murder.  I think Donald Trump and his enablers should be tried (at least) as well.

I'm attempting to draw parallels between the events of the last few days and the Crusades, based on my very sketchy reading of those events and the German darkwave version of the song "Palästinalied."  The song was written during the Crusades, and ends with the singer claiming that God meant the holy land should grant the land for Christians, and not for Jews or Muslims.   I have to wonder if the insurrectionists see themselves as crusaders.

I think the majority of them are are unmoored fools who wanted to feel special in their victim-hood.  I can't decide if their perceived victim-hood made it easier for them to believe the lies and conspiracies told to them, or if they know the untruths are untrue and are repeating them as an excuse.  They mostly seem disappointed that their white privilege didn't deliver on their expectations of worldly goods, position, fame, or respect.  And I have to wonder how many professional saboteurs and terrorists used the Flying Monkeys  as a cover for espionage or more lethal operations.  

Could the Flying Monkeys have made a different choice?  How could changing the offerings of our society changed their circumstances?  What could be done to deflect them from the ranks of -ismers?  Better education?  More showing of "South Pacific" and "The King and I?"  More Ethics and Civics classes?    Better job opportunities?   ... and then I think of comfortable, educated folks I know who I could imagine being in D.C. last week, who voted for Trump in the first election because they thought he would be good for the economy, and who were white and well off enough to look the other way at his promised domestic policies... and I don't have an answer for how can we make people less selfish.

Nothing New After 3000 Years

I spent much of the long New Year's Weekend reading "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books," by Darnell and Darnell.  I've gotten through "The Book of Adoring Re in the West," and "The Book of the Hidden Chamber."  I'm about to start "The Book of Gates."  

So far this is a scholarly read.  It's not a book for a discussion of hieroglyphics because -- aside from the black and white line drawings of registers -- the various books are presented in their already-translated form, with occasional references written in linguist's pronunciation marks (so no ankhs here, just something like ꜣnḫ).  There's interesting parts in the translations of spells, hymns, and litanies... and I wish I had copies of the author's previous works, and the works of Eric Hornung and Theodor Abt because the footnotes keep referencing discussions between the texts of these authors in passing, and it's apparent that that's where the work of translation is being shown.  (It's like reading an X-men comic, and every other panel has an editor's note from Stan Lee saying, "see New Mutants #43" or "As in Secret Wars #4", which gives one a sense that there's much more context that one is missing from the provided dialog.)

Technically, the tri-part book of translations that I'd hoped for in my previous posting would be difficult to do:  finding complete versions on tomb walls or on the insides of sarcophagi is rare, and, in addition, there are different versions of the same texts.  (Pause to imagine a lost copy of the books going up in flames at Alexandria, except, even then the books would have been a thousand years old...)  So one would have to cobble together an "original version" from multiple sites and sources.  

One insight I have is that there are lots of passages about bound enemies, foreigners, and other conspirators with Apep, the serpent trying to oppose the solar regeneration.  There's tons of decapitations, and disintegrations, and flinging into lakes of fire, and general smiting and punishment; it's enough to make one wonder how sadistic and xenophobic the ancient Egyptians were.  On the other hand, it's part of Western ceremonial magic to consciously call up and neutralize the negative and chaotic aspects in one's spells in order to insure the efficacy of the operation -- these are usually visualized as gods, angels, or some other spirits, though, and not groups of people (pause to reflect on some of the more phobic writings of Dion Fortune...).  

As I was reading later, I came across a statement in one of the litanies:  "there is no part of my body that is not inhabited by a god!"  (This was after shocking the family by reading aloud how such-and-such a goddess was within the phallus of the spell-reciter.)  Later, in an introduction, the authors spoke about how the reciter and the god Re were consubstantial, which had a parallel existence of "Flesh," the mummified earthly body of a god, and the celestial Re going through the stations of the netherworld.   The first reminded me of all those Wiccan books from the eighties and nineties saying, "for a vision of the Goddess, turn to the woman next to you." The second reminded me of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  

When I shared with Mark that since 1450 BCE there's been nothing new in magico-religious thought, he just smiled and nodded.  

Reading Ancient Texts

I'm having a quiet Sunday morning, the sun has just now broken free of the clouds rimming the horizon, and the day has gone from grey to golden; the felt swaddling of yesterday's rainfall has become gilded netting over the trees and grass.   The house is mostly quiet; Mark is uncharacteristically lounging in bed, The Child is sleeping in after a Very Late Night of Video Gaming, and the cats are happily going in and out of the garage after their breakfast.  Aoife has been mostly resting, curled up against me on the couch as I surf social media and listen to the Sunday Baroque radio program, and has only just now gotten up to bark at some intruder perceived through the drawn window shade.  

This has been a weekend of reading.  I've been alternating between Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of "Beowulf," and John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa Darnell's "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books."   I'm about a third of the way through "Beowulf;" Beowulf has just pulled Grendel's arm off.   I'm mostly liking it, it's very accessible, and the language choice and tone are putting me in mind of the musical, "Hamilton."  I am at times put off by the choice to use "fuck" and some other modern idioms, but this is more a reflection of my taste and not Headley's craft. 

I had extremely high -- and unreasonable -- expectations for "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books." Despite some forewarnings that there would be no images of the original texts, I was hoping for a lavishly oversized tome with panels of hieroglyphic text, underneath which would be phonetic translations of the words, underneath that which would be translations into English, and underneath that a transliteration.  In color.  Bound in the Coptic Style.   And footnotes with footnotes.   And a few more timelines and maps.  The book in reality is a textbook reference volume in the series (titled with the ubiquitous "I'm-a-book-about-ancient-stuff" Papyrus typeface), "Writings from the Ancient World," and is summary of a large body of separate works --  I'm wishing I had access to the publications in the lengthy bibliography, because that appears to be where the technical analysis is being done.  That said, the summary is interesting and the line drawings extensive.

 I've seen John C Darnell on YouTube demonstrate how cryptographic or ambiguous hieroglyphic writing's meaning is echoed in the accompanying imagery of certain passages, but so far I haven't seen that in the book.  Cryptographic hieroglyphs are kind of puzzle texts, where normally used hieroglyphs are swapped out for ones that look the same, or have a similar sound, or are puns; sort of like writing "B-leaf in trees" or "eye wood dye 4 U."    I'm not quite sure how they differ from biliteral -- like "djah" -- or triliteral   signs, and it may be that they are mostly a case of not using determinative signs.  It appears they were used to hide religious mysteries.   I'm only just through the general introduction -- which has an interesting survey of New Kingdom tomb architecture -- and am going through the introduction for "The Book of Adoring Re in the West."  I still have five more ancient netherworld books to go through, and my understanding is that the last two make more use of cryptographic hieroglyphs, so there may be more on them later.

I'm hoping there will be more contrast-and-comparison with the texts in "The Pyramid Texts," started (probably) in The Old Kingdom, and developed into the later "Coffin Texts," and still later "The Book of Going Forth By Day."  The Netherworld Texts seem to be an 18th Dynasty development, and between Thutmose III, Hatshepsut, and Tutankhamen there is a lot of variation in texts used in funerary architecture.

First Dream of 2021

I was in a large room, possibly a cafeteria or gym.  The room was dimly lit, and there was a large group of people dancing in a kind of mosh with lots of jumping up and down and churning of the crowd in general.   Apparently, this dream was physics-based, because there was a man providing off-stage narration. I had a small battery-operated race car in my hands.  

"Let's say you're at a dance," the narrator said, "and you drop your car battery."  

The small, silver battery dropped to the floor and rolled under the roiling feet of the dancers.  The battery appeared to be smashed into the floor.  Sometimes it seemed like it broke through the tiles, other times it seemed like it phased through.  I made some protest, and managed to find the battery, a little dusty, on the ground where some dancers has passed.  

As I picked it up, the narrator asked, "How do you know that's the same battery?"  The implication was that this was an illustration of how an electron's quantum state is probable after an exchange between atoms / ?the quantum foam?  

"Well," I said, the battery did look a little worn, and I wondered if it still had a charge, "presumably, there's only one loose battery on the floor, and I've just found it."  (In waking life I'm thinking of all sorts of problems with this assumption and my imagination is filled with Newton's cradles made of electrons...)

There's a break in the narrative.

I was in a lounge or living room.  The lighting was very dim, but there was a sense of a series of red, vertical, permeable planes sectioning off the room at regular intervals.  The planes gave off a ruddy glow, and cast a dull glow on objects or people between them at certain angles.  I was aware that the X, Y, and Z axes of the room were adjacent dimensions, and if one looked in the right direction, one was looking in the direction of time.

The narrator, a 50-ish man with short salt-and-pepper hair and beard, was explaining something (he had a science-hip, sexy-dad air of a TED talk presenter).  There was another man in the room, I think he was clean-shaven and in his thirties; he was more a shadow than anything.  The narrator had a small red ball.  I have an image of the ruddy ball moving between two red-tinged and transparent planes.  If he walked a certain direction, the ball turned white.   My sense is that when the ball was red, it was moving though space, but not moving on its timeline.  

The three of us walked through the room along different directions, and our paths crossed.  The Narrator tossed me the ball, which turned white.  I caught it, and tossed it to the shadowy man; the ball stayed white, but seemed to be floating in the air with no one holding it.  The shadowy man lobbed the ball from behind his back and the Narrator caught it.   The path of the ball between the three of us described a loop, and I understood that it had looped back to its starting point in time.

The Narrator finished speaking and turned to me.

"All I want to know," I said, "is what is time and what force is it that draws us through it?"  (In waking life, I wonder if forces like gravity and electromagnetism can propel objects through physical dimensions, could there be a force pulling us through an axis of time?  Are we living in a time-well analogous to a gravity-well?)  

This seemed to be the correct response, because the Narrator and the shadowy man both grinned like maniacs, and an influx of sound and light woke me.  

I swear, I fully expected a dream about Ancient Egyptian things, because I went to bed reading about the Coffin Texts, The Book of Going Forth by Day, The Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the development of ancient pharaonic tomb architecture as a physical map to the rituals involved in those texts.   Perhaps rumination on the cyclical re-birth of the sun somehow turned into a dream meditation on the nature of time?