Norse Men Tell Tales of Thor in Drag: Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology

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Book Review, Circles, Edith Hamilton, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, Freya's Unusual Wedding, gods, Heimdall, Humor, Literature, Loki, MJolnir, myth, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology, Odin, Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Ragnarock, Reimagined Narratives, Sexy Norse Gods, story, The Sandman, The World Tree, Thor, Writing

I believe there is a quote that says, “A fool and his money are soon parted,” but that sumbitch never read Neil Gaiman.

I was annoyed and frustrated with myself a few weeks back because Neil Gaiman and David Sedaris were both giving public readings in Dallas this year, and by the time I discovered the where and when of the venue the performance halls were already sold out.  This was painful because not only were two of my favorite authors coming close enough to me to actually hear them read and speak in public, but every person attending these events were going to receive a free signed copy of their most recent books with a purchase of a ticket.  So probably not actually free, but it feels free.  I have no one but myself to blame for this missed chance, and since I already suffer from undiagnosed depression and give myself a pretty hard time I needed something to lift my spirits.

To Amazon I went.

Now I was aware of the fact that Neil Gaiman had started a new book, and once some of the early advertisements started appearing I knew I had to read Norse Mythology.  I was originally just going to pre-order it, but then life happened I forgot, but once I started working at the Tyler Public Library and saw that we had ordered a copy I placed the first hold.  Ever since I’ve begun working at the library my compulsive book shopping has, no stopped exactly, but at least dwindled to manageable levels.  Why purchase a book when I can simply check it out and know that it’s there just a ten minute drive away?  The book came in and I just devoured it, but halfway through reading it I realized that I needed my own copy.  And so one night while searching through amazon I spotted, not just a hardback first edition,  but an autographed copy.  I’m a poor man, but also a fool, and so I proved the philosopher correct and divorced myself from 60 of my hard earned dollars.  I don’t regret a thing.

Norse Mythology as a book has been a revelation because, like many people who went through the educational system in the United States I assume, I never learned much, or anything really, about the Norse Gods.  Going to the school I did I was steeped in the classical tradition.  We read The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Aeneid, Medea, Julius Caesar, and in the seventh grade I was assigned Edith Hamilton’s standard Mythology.  This book, which still sits in my shelf today, was a great resource and a wonderful opening to the complicated world of Greek Myth, but I noted at the time that there was a small portion in the back of the book that my teacher never got around to assigning to us.  In the back of Hamilton’s book is 24 pages (I counted) dedicated to the Norse Gods and their mythos.  I forgie Edith Hamilton for the sparseness of this section since hard written records of Norse myth aren’t as prevalent as Greek or Roman records, but something has always irked me about the way this section of myth feels simply tacked on, when an in-depth reading and study of these myths reveals a great bounty of lore and stories.

As soon as my copy of Norse Mythology came in I showed it to my friend TJ, the founder of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of, and we both briefly compared the book, and it’s ambition, to Edith Hamilton’s work speculating that there now exists the possibility that within a few years it could be assigned in schools for a similar purpose.  I honestly believe this, and after completing the book my assessment remains.  Neil Gaiman has achieved through his efforts a beautiful book which has made me slap my head repeatedly wondering why it took me so long to read, and enjoy, Norse Myths.

To begin with I have to briefly mention “Freya’s Unusual Wedding” which is the story of how the god Thor lost his now iconic hammer Mjolnir.  Though Gaiman opens the book with individual descriptions of each god and their affinities and powers, each story on occasion provides some background material.  The chapter that covers the “wedding” begins with such a description of Thor’s Hammer.

Thor’s hammer was called Mjollnir.  It has been made by the dwarf’s Brokk and Eitri.  It was one of the treasures of the gods.  If Thor hit anything with it, that thing would be destroyed.  If he threw the hammer at something, the hammer would never miss its target, and would always flay back through the air and return to his hand.  He could shrink the hammer down and hide it inside his shirt, and he could make it grow again.  It was a perfect hammer in all things except one: it was slightly too short in the handle, which meant that Thor had to swing it one handed.

The hammer kept the gods of Asgaurd safe from all the dangers that menaced them and the world.  Frost giants and ogres, trolls and monsters of every kind, all were frightened of Thor’s hammer.  (109-110).

As it turns out the giants stole Thor’s hammer one night while he was asleep, and Heimdall, the guardian of Asgaurd who sees all, comes up with a plan on how to infiltrate the giant’s keep and steal the hammer back.  The gods are discussing how to retreave Mjollnir when the most hilarious passage in the book is related:

“Well?” said Loki.  “What about you Heimdall?  Doyou have any suggestions?”

“I do,” said Heimdall.  “But you won’t like it.”

Thor banged his fist down upon the table.  “It does not matter whether or not we like it,” he said.  “We are gods!  There is nothing that any of us gathered here would not do to get back Mjollnir, the hammer of the gods.  Tell us your idea, and it is a good idea, we will like it.”

“You won’t like it,” said Heimdall.”

“We will like it!”

“Well,” said Heimdall, “I think we should dress Thor as a bride.  Have him put on the necklace of Brisings.  Have him wear a bridal crown.  Stuff his dress so he looks like a woman.  Veil his face.  We’ll have him wears keys that jingle, as women do, drape him in jewels—”

“I don’t like it!”  said Thor.  “People will think…well, for a start they’ll think I dress up in women’s clothes.”  (115-6).

I noted that this passage was one of the most hilarious passages, rightfully so I would argue, and that distinction is important for too often in myth there seems to be an absence of humor.  Perhaps it’s just the education I received growing up, but myth seems to be steeped in relentless tragedy, violence, rape, depravity, or anguish.  I cannot recall any real humor in the Greek Pantheon, and seeing as how that was the only real pantheon apart from the Egyptians I was exposed to, the fact that a moment of humor could exist in mythology was a breath of fresh air.  Thor eventually gets his hammer back after a long series of jokes and gags that rely on the uber masculine worldview of the ancient Nords, and promptly slaughters the giants.  Still no word though on whether the catering was good or not.

Gaimans Norse Mythology relates the world and the gods and creatures that inhabit the world of the Nordic mythos, however unlike Edith Hamilton, who seemed to retain a kind of academic distance from her topic, Neil Gaiman allows his retelling of myth to be imbued with a little more character.  Gaiman has explored these characters before and so this gives him a great edge.  Any and all readers who have ever taken the time to read his graphic novel The Sandman Season of Mist is sure to remember the blustering oaf that is Thor and the sly demonic figure of Loki who would aid the Dream King in a way that would not be made entirely clear until the later Sandman volumes.  I’d relate more but I’m preparing myself mentally to review those books one by one by one so the reader will have to be patient.

Now I can hear the contester.  By the sounds of it Gaiman is taking a self-indulgent exercise by simply retelling the stories of the Norse Myth, why should I bother with that?  If I want the stories of the Norse gods I should just read the Poetic Edda or the Prose Edda if I hate myself and life in general?

I should first remind my contester that if you hate yourself, you should really be reading the collected works of James Patterson.  There’s a great difference between crap and art, and then there is work which tries to be neither because it is really nothing at all.

But as to the real complaint Neil Gaiman himself provides some response in his introduction to the work as he notes the fate of the original written materials and oral tales:

We have lost so much.  (14)

He goes on to say:

I’ve tried my best to retell these myths and stories as accurately as I can, and as interestingly as I can.

Sometimes details in the stories contradict each other.  But I hope that they paint a picture of a world and a time.  As I retold these myths, I tried to imagine myself a long time ago, in the lands where these stories were first told, during the long winter nights perhaps, under the glow of the northern lights, or sitting outside the small hours, awake in the unending lights, or sitting outside in the small hours, awake in the unending daylight or midsummer, with an audience of people who wanted to know what else Thor did, and what the rainbow was, and how to live their lives, and where bad poetry comes from.  (14-15).

Gaiman’s book is not an academic reproduction of the Norse Myths, and if the reader is truly interested in such a work translations exist and are constantly being produced.  Gaiman is honest in the fact that he just wants to retell these stories, and that’s all the creative justification he needs.  Because he is working with myth, and not a more contemporary story, he can rewrite these stories and incorporate more personality and dialogue into them, and while some might argue that that is “corrupting” the original myths they fail to see that this is a fallacy.  Myths by their very nature are fluid beings that have shifted and altered over time.  They adapt and change depending on the teller, and while written documents are considered sacred, it’s important to remember that when readers encounter such written documents, particularly ancient ones, the conflict of authorial intent becomes tricky and messy.  I’m trying to say, sloppily, is that because these are myths Gaiman doesn’t have to make these a new Prose Edda.  Instead he can, like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, simply tell the stories that have been told over and over again, but bring a new life or light to them that feels relevant to the age he’s writing in.

That’s what’s marvelous about myth is that it can change.

I was taught in school, briefly, that Norse Myths were dark, gloomy, depressing stories in which every god was ultimately doomed to die.  This eventual end, referred often to as Ragnarock, is inevitable and Edith Hamilton briefly describes this reality in her Mythology:

The World of Norse mythology is a strange world.  Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of.  No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss.  It is a gave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom.  The gods know a day will come when they will be destroyed.  (443)

She continues this gloomy description a few days later:

All the best Northern tales are tragic, about men and women wh go steadfastly forward to meet death, often deliberately choose it, even plan it long beforehand.  The only light in the darkness is heroism.  (446).

This being my only real exposure to these myths at first I honestly thought that Norse Mythology was going to be a dark read of nothing but hopelessness.  Obviously, I forgot every Neil Gaiman story I had ever read.  Gaiman’s retelling of the Norse Myths can be dark, but each story is told in such a way that the reader is able to see Gaiman’s passion and dedication to these stories and that energy translates into a beautiful story that, even at it’s most grotesque or horrifying, still manages to sound lovely.

But what’s important ultimately is the way in which Neil Gaiman completes his book.  Rather than end on Ragnarok, and end with death and destruction, Gaiman demonstrates his lasting importance as a story teller for he leaves these characters not with death, but a circle.

After the final battle in which Odin, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, and all the gods of Asgard are destroyed there is left a small party including the gods Balder and Magni who are looking over the battlefield.  Balder spots something:

They go down on their knees in the long grass, the gods like children.

Magni, Thor’s son, is the first to find one of the things in the long grassm and once he finds it, he knows what it is.  It is a golden chess piece, the kind the gods played with when the gods still lived.  It is a tiny golden caring of Odin, the all father, on his high thrones: the king.

They find more of them.  Here is Thor, holding his hammer.  There is Heimdall, his horn at his lips.  Frigg, Odin’s wife, is the queen.

Balder holds up a little golden statue.  “That one looks like you,” Modi tells him.

“It is me,” says Balder.  “It is me long ago, before I died, when I was of the Aesir.”

They will find other pieces in the grass, some beautiful, some less so.  Here. Half buried in the black soil, are Loki and the monstrous children.  There is a frost giant.  There is Sutr, his face all aflame.

Soon they will find they have all the pieces they could ever need to make a full chess set.  They arrange the pieces into a chess game: on the tabletop chessboard the gods of Asgard face their eternal enemies.  The new-minted sunlight glints from the golden chessmen on this perfect afternoon.

Balder will smile, like the sun coming out, and reach down, and he will move his first piece.

And the game begins anew.  (280-283).

At the end of this review I think back to the conversation I had with my friend about the future readers who find Gaiman’s book.  I was assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, but I’ve never gotten rid of my copy of the book, because no matter how many times I’ve tried I’ve yet to find someone who made the Greek myths so accessible.  Having a book like Mythology allowed me the chance to actually understand and process the myths that have inspired thousands of years of writers, poets, playwrights, and artists who have shaped our culture.  The Norse Myths have often, it seems, fallen upon deaf ears, but in the last few decades I have observed new legions of people discover and invest themselves in the characters and stories of Thor, Loki, Balder, Freya, and the old clever Odin.  Gaiman’s book then is a boon to a new generation, and humanity period because it, like Mythology, will expose a generation to these myths which have too often been ignored or written off as hopelessly bleak.

Yes the gods die, and yes their stories are filled with bloody mahem, but the final image reveals, to me at least, a far more final conclusion than the Greek pantheon.  Rather than simply live on a mountain and occasionally step down to rape the local girls, the Norse gods are aware of their ultimate end, but as Gaiman reveals it there is no real end.  The gods die but are then ultimately remade.  Their stories end and then start anew meaning that there is no true end or true beginning.

The stories continue ever afterwards, and there is no better testament to the quality of myth.

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman were taken from the W.W. Norton & Company hardback first edition.  All quotes from Mythology by Edith Wharton  were taken from the Little, Brown & Company Paperback.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

For the record Red of Overly Sarcastic Reviews still probably has the best rendition of Norse Mythology after Gaiman and most of what I knew before reading his book came from this video.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73y4oUG_YgA

 

***Writer’s Note***

While looking up images to include in this article I stumbled upon, what appears to be a sexy pin-up calendar using the Norse Gods, all of them men.  I couldn’t find a good place for them in the article, so I included them here.  Enjoy…how could you not?

 

Pissing on Myth, While Making It New: A White Tower Review

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Appalachia, Book Review, Deliverance, farting, folklore, fuck, fucking, He did it with a bucket, Hillbillies, Humor, Literature, mythology, Orgasm, Pissing in the Snow, procreational, pyramus and thisbe, sex, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Short Story, The Baby Lost Weight, Vance Randolph

I distrust someone who admits to not enjoying sex or fart jokes.  Part of this is because the individuals who profess such opinions typically reveal themselves as elitists.  There’s an attitude that only uneducated people enjoy hearing stories about people fucking or farting or farting while fucking, and of course nothing like that would ever happen in real life.  Anyone who has actually had sex before however knows that that’s simply not the case.  Beer exists and seeks to make fools of us all.

Speaking of beer, it’s partly because of that that I stumbled across the book Pissing in the Snow & Other Ozark Folktales.  Two years ago I attended an academic conference for members of Alpha Chi, an academic fraternity that spans the entire United States.  Students from chapters all across the country came to give lectures and presentations from virtually every field.  Lecture topics could range from Pre-Med students discussing the nature of telomeres in DNA to discussing the Indian Boy in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  For my own special I brought in a lecture about Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger which was rather eventful given the fact that one of my slides dealt with blackface and one of the moderators in the room was black.  It was a fun couple of days when I wandered through the streets of Chicago (feeling the mean bite of “The Hawk”) with a few friends and a man name Jim Koukl.

Somewhere between the Jazz Bar (where I wrote the start of poem that would eventually get published) and on the ride home, Dr. Koukl mentioned a book.  I admit freely that part of the impulse to look the book up was some kind of fan-boy on my end.  Most of my friends new Koukl and had dozens of fun stories about him and so I think I just wanted him to like me.  In the car, tucked between the driver and a fellow SI leader I pulled up a story called “He did it with a Bucket.”  Describing the story wouldn’t do it justice, so instead here’s the whole story:

One time there was a boy got arrested for screwing a girl, and they claimed he done it standing up, behind the door at the schoolhouse.  But the girl stood pretty neat six-foot-tall, and the boy was a little bit of runt.  The Justice of the Peace says he don’t see how the boy could reach high enough.  The people said he done it with a milk bucket.  The constable fetched the biggest bucket in the town and made the boy stand on it, but he still lacked a foot.  So the Justice of the Peace says the whole case looks fishy to him, and they turned the boy loose for lack of evidence

After the whole thing blowed over, the girl told some of her friends what really happened.  “We was both standing up,” she says, “and it was the damndest fucking I ever had in my life!”  The ladies all wanted to know how little Johnney could reach that high.  The girl just laughed.  “The little booger put the bucket on my head,” she says, “and then he hung onto the handle like a woodpecker!”  (14)

There wasn’t anyone in the car who wasn’t laughing and I scrambled to Amazon to immediately buy a copy.

Pissing in the Snow is the work of Vance Randolph, an American folklorist who published around five books over the course of his life.  All of his books dealt with the Ozark region, an area of hilly forest region found in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri (pronounced Mizz-ur-ee or Mizz-ur-uh depending on what part of the state you’re from).  This region is probably familiar to the reader who has ever watched the film Deliverance and believed that that is a good representation of entire South of the United States.  For the record Deliverance took place in Georgia, however it has unfortunately come to embody the imagery of the “hillbilly” who is in fact not a gap-toothed lunatic who enjoys raping people in the woods.  Well, okay, there’s probably one of those out there, but I promise you that ass-clown is in the minority.  Also ass-clown was probably the wrong word to use there and now I’m going to have nightmares.

Randolph’s work is important because it collects the sentiments, moods, feelings, and general humor of a people who lived and made a life in the woods of Ozarks.  The reader may wonder what value such stories have to the general culture given the fact that most of them are nothing but stories about people fucking, talking about fucking, or horny priests, prostitutes, or men measuring their dicks.  I suppose this concern is a fair criticism and the first story from the collection doesn’t necessarily help that much:

One time there was two farmers that lived out on the road to Carrico.  They was always good friends, and Bill’s oldest boy had been a-sparking one of Sam’s daughters.  Everything was going fine till the morning they met down by the creek, and was pretty goddam mad.  “Bill,” says he, “from now on I don’t want that boy of yours to set foot on my place.”

“Why what’s he done?”

“He pissed in the snow, that’s what he done, right in front of my house!”

“But surely, there ain’t great harm in that,” Bill says.

“No Harm!” hollered Sam.  “Hell’s fire, he pissed so it spelled Lucy’s name, right there in the snow!”

“The boy shouldn’t have done that,” says Bill.  “But I don’t see nothing so terrible bad about it.”

“Well, by God, I do!” yelled Sam.  “There was two sets of tracks.  And besides, don’t you think I know my own daughter’s handwriting!”  (5).

It took me three readings of this one before I realized Lucy used Bill’s son’s penis to spell her own name.  This story at first appears to be a simple joke, just a random story about two teenagers engaging in a little debauchery for the sake of it, but upon reflection I’m struck by the fact that my first thought is the myth of Piramus and Thisbe.  Growing up in a private school I was exposed to mythology early.  Despite the fact it was a Christian school it was also a college prep institution and so they wanted you to excel.  Once we hit eighth grade we were assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.  That dense tome that can always be found in your local college book-store or else the book section of Goodwill, and of course always bent back with a broken spine and riddled with doodles or highlighting.  Before my teacher assigned us A Midsummer Night’s Dream to read in class she covered the myth of Piramus and Thisbe, and I was already familiar with the book because I had read Romeo & Juliet the year before and we had gone over the myth.  To those who don’t know there are two warring families with a son and a daughter named Pyramus and Thisbe respectively.  The pair fall in love but can only communicate by sending messages through a crack in the wall that separates both families.  Eventually overcome with lust Piramus arranges to meet Thisbe and tun away with her.  She says yes, but of course because this is myth everything goes wrong.  Thisbe spots a lion and runs away dropping her sash, Pyramus comes upon it later and spots lion tracks.  Believing his lover is dead he drives his sword into his side, and when Thisbe discovers him slain by his own hand she removes the sword and kills herself with it.

My reader may read this and wonder immediately: how the fuck do you get Piramus and Thisbe from a story about Pissing in the Snow?  That’s absurd.

My response: Is it though.  Folk-lore and myth and divided by time and repetitive story-telling.  Looking at Hamilton’s Mythology in hindsight I was also taught at the time the legends or folk-lore of Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Johnny Appleseed.  Unfortunately, these heroes have not lasted the way Zeus, Aphrodite, and Hera have, nevertheless both pantheons linger on in their own way.  The stories of Pecos Bill, like the stories of Zeus, and also the stories contained in Pissing in the Snow are perpetuated by story-tellers who were inspired by some original action.  Was there ever a god named Zeus?  Of course not, but there was a storm where a man was struck by lightning.  Was there ever a Pecos Bill, of course not, but there was most likely a man who was a sure-fire shot and who was great at breaking horses.  Were there ever two kids who spelled their names in the snow using piss?

Yes there was, that one probably happened, but over time the names and situation changed.

Stories develop over time to fit the world views of the audience that preserves them and enjoys hearing them.  Jokes then follow myth, however the fundamental difference being they are often designed to reaffirm or subvert reality.  Pissing in the Snow isn’t interested in that however, for even if the stories are imbued with humor their aim is to present human beings at their most fallible.

The stories almost all center around sex in some form or fashion, and while some border on the crude there are others which are fascinating from a feminist perspective.  Take for instance the story Have You Ever Been Diddled:

One time there was a town girl and a country girl got to talking about the boys they had went with.  The town girl told what kind of car her boyfriends used to drive, and how much money their folks has got.  But the country girl didn’t take no interest in things like that, and she says the fellows are always trying to get into her pants.

So finally the town girls says, “Have you ever been diddled?”  The country girl giggled, and she says yes, a little bit.  “How much says the town girl.”  “Oh, about like that,” says the country girl, and she held up her finger to show an inch, or maybe an inch and a half.

The town girl just laughed, and pretty soon the country girl says, “Have you ever been diddled?”  The town girl says of course she has, lots of times.  “How much?” says the country girl.  “Oh, about like that,” says the town girl, and she marked off about eight inches, or maybe nine.

The country girl just set there goggle-eyed, and she drawed a deep breath.  “My God,” says the country girl, “that ain’t diddling!  Why, you’ve been fucked!”  (110-11)

A story like this is an excellent opportunity for folklorists to dig into the rhetoric of everything.  The use of the words “town-girl” verses “country girl” as a way of expressing familiarity with the world.  Then there’s also the class element as the “town girl” seems to enjoy high priced objects.  And of course there’s the linguistic opportunity to observe how the scene culminates in the “fuck” to deliver the powerful finale to this brief exchange, but that gets into far more academic territory than I’m willing to explore here, and besides why should I put rhetoricians and folklorists out of a job?  They’re good people with great unions but lousy tippers.

This story seems to present the total essence of Pissing in the Snow, partly because it’s the least fantastic.  There are stories ranging from the dick measuring contests of locals, the horny priests being wooed by windows, prostitutes enacting vengeance, and endless stories of young lovers winding up embarrassed or mocked by the community they live in but the final component is everything.  Pissing in the Snow feels communal while the reader actually reads it, and in fact the only real way to read it is out loud.  These are recorded stories by average everyday people who had these stories memorized, who lived with these stories that had most likely been passed down by generations.  Their earthiness and near-constant crudeness reveals a people who lived and interacted with sexuality  without any kind of real shame, and while some would suggest that this is wrong, Pissing in the Snow shows a people who wouldn’t really care about this response.

And to be honest I don’t care much about it either.

These stories show a people who were able to find a beautiful absurdity in the body.  Penises, vaginas, breasts, and butts are what drives these narratives, and while this at first doesn’t seem to reveal much intellectual potential, I would argue otherwise.  Reading Pissing in the Snow is a chance to see how another culture has framed sexuality in its own paradigm.  The people of the Ozarks are not prudes about it, they recognize that people fuck, and, clearly, they enjoy doing it.  While some members of the community sometimes suffer from it, what is constant is that the people of the Ozarks recognize sex as something natural and more important, a source of amusement.

Take for instance the story The Baby Lost Weight:

One time there was a young woman fetched a baby into Doc Henderson’s office, and she says it is losing weight.  Doc examined the baby awhile, and asked the woman about her victuals, but she says, “What I eat ain’t got nothing to do with the baby being skinny.”  Doc figured she must be kind of stupid, so he didn’t ask no more questions.

Doc examined her mighty careful, anyhow.  And he pulled her dress open, to see if something is the matter with her tits, first one and then the other.  There wasn’t no milk at all.  Finally, she says, “That’s my sister’s baby, you know.”

Old Doc Henderson was considerable set back when he heard that, because he never thought but what it was her baby.  “Hell’s fire,” he says, “you shouldn’t have come!”  The young woman just kind of giggled.  “I didn’t,” she says, “till you started a-sucking on the second one.”  (130).

I honestly found myself laughing while I read this book, and too often it becomes undervalued that reaction.  Books are an intellectual exercise, and if I wanted to I could sit down and find real intellectual merit beneath the endless penis and fart jokes in this book, and in fact I already have.  Human beings have progressed in their evolution and that is partly because of the way sex has become something recreational rather than simply procreational.*

That’s a fancy-pants way of saying people enjoy having sex not just because they want to make a baby.

Because our species has developed an imagination, and because that imagination is often employed constructing sexual fantasies, it makes sense that a rural people, people who lived off the land and would know the proper way of breeding livestock, would eventually come to see sex as something funny and absurd, but ultimately uniting because in the end these stories helped shape a community’s, as well as a region’s, attitudes about sexuality.

Laughing at sex is the sanest way to begin talking about it and teaching it.  And if you can start by telling a story about an old man masturbating while across the way a young man is porking a rabbit, it’s gonna be a whole lot easier telling people about condoms later.

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

For the record “procreational is NOT a word, but I liked the way it sounded.  If you are repulsed by this invention of mine petition Websters and Oxford to add the word to the dictionary so that your disgust is unmerited.  Prude.

Blue Vaginas and gods in the Stars

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Academic Book, Alan Dean Foster, alien, Gary K. Wolfe, Joshua Jammer Smith, mythology, Novel, science fiction, still life, tea, The Known and the Unknown, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, Times Literary Suppliment, zebra pencil

Blue Vaginas and gods in the Stars

[DATE UNKNOWN]

The Owl’s Aren’t What they Seem, But That’s Still DAMN Fine Coffee

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"Fire Walk With Me", "Once a day everyday give yourself a present", A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Agent Dale Cooper, aliens, American Horror Story, Blue Velvet, Bob, coffee, Corruption, Corruption of Small Town America, Dale Cooper, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, David Lynch Keeps His Head, Evil, Evil as a Force, Failed Hero, Film, film review, Forrest, Gay Porn, gif/jif?, Good vs Evil, Hero, horror, I know too many Michaels, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Palmer, Literature, Mark Frost, mythology, Nature of Evil, Novels, Owls, Philosophy, reflection, science fiction, Surreal, television, The Black Lodge, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks

 

**WRITER’S NOTE**

Though I hate personally doing this, I want to warn the reader that this review has information which may “spoil” the ending of Twin Peaks for the reader.  If you have not seen the ending, and do not wish to know it, please do not read any further.  However, if you do not care, progress slowly.  The path is strange and wonderful.

 

 

Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other.

–The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Mark Frost

 

It may seem a cliché, but really and truly, I have to drink coffee while I write.  Ever since I’ve lost my taste for beer, coffee has stepped in and replaced that precious elixir which supports my spirit after a day, or really evening, of work at the library.  And that idea of spirit is everything as I approach the impossible and write about Twin Peaks, because as I leave the town for the first time, I wonder at the experience because, much like wonderful oddities that appear in the show, the appearance of the program seems to come out of nowhere, and nothing of what I remember is what it seems.

To be honest, I can’t even trace my awareness to any solid origin other than my friend Michael.  As I’ve mentioned, some might argue too much, I’m part of a bi-weekly Graphic Novel Book Club and it’s through these meetings that I have managed to become exposed to some books, movies, and materials I almost certainly would never have been exposed to on my own.   Part of that is simply the diversity of the company of the group, the other is the fact that I’m a fucking social recluse who would probably never leave his house given the option.  It was through these meetings though that I first heard the term Twin Peaks, and initially I treated it the way most people treat friend’s pictures of their children: I nodded and smiled understanding that this show meant a great deal to my friends, but I honestly didn’t give a shit about it because it had nothing to do with me.

That, and I was still going through grad school and planning on becoming a teacher.  Words like “the black lodge” or “Agent Dale Cooper” or “The owls are not what they seem” were words and nothing but that.

But one day, after a meeting, I asked Michael about Twin peaks.  I think part of it was that I had written a review of David Foster Wallace’s essay David Lynch Keeps his Head(which I’ll get to in just a moment).  Michael had offered some thoughts about Lynch as a director, informed me that I had to see Twin Peaks to understand why the man was brilliant, and then another friend of mine (also named Michael) shared a gif (jif?) of Kyle MacLachlan drinking coffee.

I stopped drinking beer, and one night, while looking through Netflix I saw the word again.  It was like the scene in Muholland Drive when the blue box opens.  I was drawn in and found a new world.

That, and I’ve found myself more and more drawn to the taste of damn good coffee.

This essay is a difficult task because I’m not entirely sure how best to approach it.  Reacting intellectually to the show is a dubious proposition because how the flippity fuck do you react intellectually to a show that seems to constantly try to avoid any clear explanation.  The alternative is to react emotionally and I worry about this because when it comes to the world of Twin Peaks (especially in the aftermath of Fire Walk with Me) there is already a great number of people offering up their emotions.  And this also creates a conflict because there are people who have waited 25 years for the conclusion, or at least continuation) of the show, and in that time mountains of fan fiction, fan theories, and fan-based analysis has been generated.

What am I?  A mere flea that’s just hopped on the back of a big dog’s ass.  Yet here I stand willing to offer up my voice terrified of what I shall wrought.  But as a great man so beautifully expressed:

Dale Cooper: Harry, I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.

My own intellectual conclusion after finishing the series is that in its own right it is complete.  I hear the objection immediately.  You haven’t even seen Fire Walk With Me, and there’s a new season coming out in May, how could you possibly argue that it is complete.

To this objection I simply state that I’m looking at the television show alone.  This may be performing some blasphemy on my part, but again this is just reflection, not outright critical declaration. 

Now Let’s Rock.

To the reader who’s never watched the show, Twin Peaks takes place in a small logging town in Washington and begins when a young woman named Laura Palmer is found murdered and wrapped in plastic beside the river.  From there any and all kind of clear plot narrative is difficult because rather quickly the show becomes a surreal melodrama about the lives of the various characters that inhabit the town of Twin Peaks, and an FBI agent assigned to the town named Agent Dale Cooper.

On one side note there is also a gay porn-star named Dale Cooper who is kind of dreamy.  I have no idea if this is his real name or else if he chose that as his porn name because of Twin Peaks, this aside is really just a warning to some Twin Peaks fans who might stumble upon this while googling pictures of Kyle MacLachlan.*

Twin Peaks follows the creative trend of David Lynch which is the corruption found within the supposed innocence of small-town America, and while some would argue that this is a cliché, I would remind that David Lynch helped make this trope in the first place.  If you’re the first person to do something it isn’t cliché, it’s simply foundational.  Agent Cooper discovers quickly that Twin Peaks is another world, a small community that revitalizes his spirit, and not just because the Double R Diner has the best Cheery Pie in the world.  As Cooper works alongside Sherriff Harry Truman, Deputy Andy Brennan, Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill, and receptionist Lucy Moran, he discovers that the small town is hiding more than just local political and economic corruption.  There is, as Sherrif Truman states clearly, “Evil in the woods.” And this is where ultimately the show Twin Peaks made its mark.

On the one hand this evil is manifest in the fact that characters have secret lives that sometimes involve crime, over time the supernatural powers that live and exist and manipulate the people of Twin Peaks become more and more apparent.  A being known as Bob becomes the figure responsible for the death of Laura Palmer, however it’s revealed eventually that Laura Palmer’s father Leland was possessed by this creature and forced to rape and murder Laura.

Watching the scene when Leland/Bob confesses remains one of the most horrific and dramatic scenes in television, if not cinematic history ,largely because of the way Lynch establishes his universe.  The question at first appears, is Leland really crazy or is there actually a creature named Bob controlling him.  As this is being discussed Leland bellows out a passage that appeared once before in a dream Agent Cooper’s had not long after arriving in Twin Peaks:

Leland Palmer: Through the darkness of future past / The magician longs to see / One chants out between two worlds / Fire walk with me. I’ll catch you with my death bag. You may think I’ve gone insane, but I promise I will kill again!

At this point I wholly accepted the fact that Bob was real, but part of that conclusion was because of David Foster Wallace.  If the reader has never heard that name he’s the author who wrote such books as Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  He’s also known for several non-fiction books such as Consider the Lobster, This is Water, Both Flesh and Not, and finally A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again which contains a vital read for Lynch fans called David Lynch Keeps his Head(Told you I’d get to it, and you doubted me).

My reader may wonder what this has to do with Twin Peaks.  I promise there’s a message here, just be patient.  The essay was an assignment for a magazine in which Wallace received the opportunity to be on set during the filming of Lost Highway.  While at first the essay is mostly Wallace talking about the actual filming, as it continues he manages to break-down the creative structure of Lynch’s movies and tries to define the term Lynchian.  There’s long passages full of insightful commentary but my focus is Twin Peaks and so one passage in particular seems terribly important.

Wallace discusses the idea of evil in Lynch films and how it manifests.  He writes:

Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing.  Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force.  This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of nourish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movie’s world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead.  It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally possessed.  […]  And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgement of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications.  People can be good or bad, but forces simply are.  And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere.  Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now.  And so are Light, Love, redemption […].  (204-5).

Reading this passage, especially after finishing Twin Peaks, and taking the time to watch Blue Velvet not long thereafter, I confess I had an “aha!” moment for everything seemed to fall into place.  Rather than treat evil as a kind of abstract force that is inherent to the human condition, Lynch’s films seem to attack the viewer in a way so that it’s impossible to escape from evil and the way it can impact the people that suffer from it, and The Black Lodge seems to embody this idea perfectly.  As Cooper enters it, trying to save Annie he finds himself at the mercy of the very idea of evil, and ultimately succumbs to it.

Watching the last episode of Twin Peaks, and watching Bob/Coop chuckle I confess that I was grabbing my laptop and screaming “No!  No!  No fuck no!  That can’t be it!”  The rage inspired by the idea that that could possibly be the end, that the hero and purely good hero at that, could succumb to the evil’s found in the Black Lodge disturbed me.  I felt that there had to be a resolving, or a redemption in which the figure who seemed to embody so much strength could not possibly fall to evil.

But that confession reveals everything.

Again, looking at Wallace’s commentary, I realize that what keeps Lynch so interesting is the fact that he seems to recognize that evil is a force, that even if it is spawned within ourselves, it can still work outwardly as a force which can compel and destroy people.  Leland Palmer was a good man, or at least he seemed to be a good man, that outward surface mirrors the reality of true life.  When you remember that most rape victims tend to suffer under the hands of people close to them (usually family members) rather than outside strangers, the idea that Leland could do that to his daughter is more plausible, but nonetheless still retains its horror.  Likewise, with the character Dale Cooper, who, over the course of the series, becomes some kind of extension of the viewer.  As I watched Twin Peaks I identified more and more with Coop.  Part of this is simply because I’ve always wanted to be intelligent and charming and charismatic, but also because he was a genuinely good person.

He also gave me the greatest lesson in life:

Dale Cooper: Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.

This man would eventually fall prey and fail against the pure forces of darkness.  It’s not fair.  It shouldn’t happen.  And watching the very end I was angry and sad and terrified after what was surely the most terrifying 20 minutes of television ever recorded.  And before anyone tries it, No.  American Horror Story is nowhere near as terrifying as the Black Lodge.  I don’t care how many clowns or gimps in leather suits they throw at me.

Part of this horror on my end was because of the characters and Wallace notes this in his essay:

When his characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to cut the distance and detachment that can keep Lynch’s films at arm’s length, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier—we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves.  (167).

He also offers one more assessment which I feel is perfectly valid:

This may, in fact, by Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head.  (171)

If such is the case this certainly works.  I know that I’ve offered a lot of extraneous material and haven’t so much dug into an episode by episode analysis but in starting this essay I did some internet research and it appears much of the fan-base has already done that for me.  Besides I prefer to step back and observe the general trend and impression something leaves me with.  And as I look over my opinions and assessment of Twin Peaks I find more and more that I stand by my original declaration.  The first two seasons can stand alone as an art product because ultimately it seems to validate the trend of Lynches’ oeuvre.

Evil is a force that exists and it corrupts absolutely, and when looking at the small community the capacity to fall prey to darkness seems all the more terribly valid.  In the case of Twin Peaks the characters are held by their own resolve and personal wills, but ultimately Lynch reminds the viewer that evil can manifest in such ways to break even the strongest people.  Sometimes our heroes are not what we need them to be, and sometimes good people are destroyed.

The lingering image then of Twin Peaks for me is Bob slowly crossing the living-room toward Mattie.  It’s not a dramatic shot in terms of camera angling.  It’s simple and it holds for exactly the right reason.  The aliens, inter-dimensional beings, the forces of evil are not what they seem.  They can be cackling lunatics, dwarves in red suits dancing to jazz, they can be owls, or they might even be someone close to you, someone who you’re supposed to trust and love.

These is no experience like Twin Peaks.  And while it may sound at first as if the show ends on the note of hopelessness, but I would hope that after the reader finishes my essay or finishes the show for themselves they would take care to remember a line from the novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost which offers a far more satisfying sense of closure than I could ever hope to give:

The owls may not be what they seem, but they still serve an important function – they remind us to look into the darkness.

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

While writing this review I found a picture of the pair of Dale cooper alongside Dale cooper.  It led to an article which had confirmed that Dale Cooper named his porn name after Dale cooper the character.  While I find this hilarious, it also leaves me curious if anyone has yet proposed a Twin Peaks porn parody and whether or not David Lynch would direct it.

…

Never-mind.  Just Googled it.  It doesn’t exist…but it could.

http://www.dailydot.com/upstream/david-lynch-twin-peaks-porn-parody/

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

Here’s a brief snippet from the Charlie Rose interview that helped get David Foster Wallace on my radar screen.  This snippet is where he discusses how Blue Velvet appealed to him originally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wie8uPgQOYE

And here also is the Charlie Rose interview with Lynch himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcJ-DVq25-Q

 

***Writer’s Note***

The famous Owl Line has echoed after the show and come to define numerous interpretations of the show and what the owls actually are.  For my own part I like this interpretation one random blogger offered, though I am ALWAYS happy to hear other people’s ideas.

https://www.quora.com/Twin-Peaks-TV-series-What-is-meant-by-the-statement-the-owls-are-not-what-they-seem

 

 

****Writer’s Note****

And here, because I like offering people more and more resources, are a few sites dedicated to Twin Peaks:

https://twinpeaksrevival.wordpress.com/

https://garmonblogzia.wordpress.com/

http://welcometotwinpeaks.com/

http://www.twinpeaks.org/

http://twinpeaksarchive.blogspot.com/

http://twinpeaksfans.com/

https://www.twinpeaksfest.com/

http://www.glastonberrygrove.net/main_l.html

http://www.twinpeaksrestaurant.com/blog/

http://twinpeaksfanatic.blogspot.com/

http://twinpeakspodcast.blogspot.com/

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qp9FaBcano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKkrrtwnjU8

 

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

Look at this shot.  Look at it.  This is the shot that confirms my bias.  There are no monsters, or killers, or jump-scares, there’s only a shot of a ceiling fan slowly turning, but this ultimately is David Lynch’s power, because this shot scared me more than four seasons of American Horror Story Combined.  Great horror should always attempt to draw a viewer into another world, but while the viewer is being entertained the master of horror tries to get into the viewer’s world.  There’s something behind me, there’s nothing and I know it objectively, but if a director can actually create the sensation that there just might be something there, then they have succeeded.

And then there’s Bob.

 

How To Talk, Ain’t as Important as Listening

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American Gods, Ananssi Boys, Art, Book Review, Daytripper, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, graphic novel, How To Talk to Girls At Parties, masculinity, myth, Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman's Guide to Getting Girls to Like You, Novel, Sandman, Science, science fiction, Sexuality, Short Story, speculative fiction, Take a chance and ask that girl to dance you won't regret it, teenage boys, The Doll's House, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

It’s a lesson I’m not sure if I’ve learned yet, which might explain why I bought the book.  It’s not that I have problems talking to women, I’m married so obviously I have some skill (though my wife might say otherwise to spite me) it’s just that I never really learned how you actually talk to girls when you’re at a party.  Because of this I figured I would learn from Neil Gaiman how exactly you do this, and instead I got a rather odd, wonderful, beautiful book about a boy who meets goddesses, suns, and universes.

Amazon is the ultimate temptation for me, and minutes, sometimes hours, that should be spent reading or writing are instead spent following the trails of recommendations of books I was just looking at.  The Sandman: The Doll’s House leads to the graphic novelization of The Graveyard Book which leads to American Gods which leads to Anansi Boys which leads to Coraline which leads to Endless Nights which leads eventually to an odd book with three beautiful women on the cover (more about them later) beneath the title How to Talk to Girls at Parties.  As I said, wrote, before, I wasn’t a social creature growing up, and the only reason I acquired any confidence was because I had to get out of my shell for a job, also I got a girlfriend that tends to help.  Still despite when I was looking at the cover I had an odd moment of reincarnation when I began to recognize I had become a teenage boy again.  Not only that, one of my favorite authors had written a guide for me so that, should it occur, if I was invited to a party I could now just follow a guide.

I bought the book and read it mystified by the experience because it was nothing of what I thought it was.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a story about a young teenage boy named Enn who is dragged to a party by his friend Vic.  Enn is the kind of boy that is obviously just the younger avatar version of the writer, or else the every-man nerd that eventually grows up and becomes an accomplished author who writes about every-man nerds growing up to become accomplished authors.  I recognize that that sounds like I’m being bitter and that the work is good but you misunderstand me, I write out of hope.  If Neil Gaiman was the nerdy loser who got lucky there’s still a chance for me.  Enn and Vic arrive at a house that isn’t the party they’re going to, but when the door opens a beautiful girl answers the door, and when she invites them inside the party is nothing but beautiful women.  Vic is the go-to suave, confident jock who immediately hits it off with one of the girls and Enn is left to himself wandering through the house where he meets and “talks” to three women who, while they talk, speak as if they aren’t really women, or human for that matter.  The exact word one of the girls uses is “tourist.”  As the book goes on it’s clear that these women are either aliens, goddesses, or even universes made manifest into human form.  Enn eventually talks to one and begins to kiss her, realizing that the girl is using him as a conduit so that her “story” will live on when Vic grabs him and tells him they have to leave.  The girl he was going to sleep with glares after them, her head become an exploding sun, and as soon as they’re out of the house it’s clear that Vic became terrified once it was clear that the girl was using him and not the other way around.  As for Enn, he forgets the “poem” almost as soon as they leave the house, and as they walk away it disappears slowly becoming as fleeting as music.

This plot description is important because anyone who buys the book thinking what I thought originally should know what they’re really buying, and while this isn’t just a lecture series by Gaiman (“Neil Gaiman’s Guide to Scoring Babes” is currently in development as a Great Courses series by the way) by the end the book had taught me exactly how to talk to girls.

You don’t talk, you just listen.

In hindsight I wish someone had just told me that when I was thirteen that this is the way you talk to girls, it would have made high school a far easier experience than it was, but we all must fight through the slough of despond that is puberty and emerge victorious.  Part of that struggle is finding your own path through it.**

Most, if not all, of Gaiman’s books on some level tackle the nature of stories and narratives, and you could make the argument that his entire creative ethos is simply an effort to tell one really long story about stories period.  Whether it’s the stories of myth in American Gods, the stories of old houses and children who find themselves caught in them in Coraline, or whether it’s the very story of the narrative existence in his Sandman series, Gaiman’s creative writing, and even his non-fiction, all seem dedicated to telling, unravelling, and then recreating the structure of narratives period while telling amazing stories.

At this point my reader will interrupt and ask what’s so damn special about How to Talk to Girls at Parties then?  If Gaiman isn’t bringing anything new to the table, why bother with the book at all?  And what if I already know how to talk to girls at parties, what then smarty-pants?

To begin with let’s avoid the name calling.  Greg.

Second there are at least two significant reasons for reading this slim graphic novel and the first is Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.  My regular reader may recognize those names, and if you have never read any of my work you still might have heard about them.  Moon and Ba are the creative team behind the book Daytripper, a graphic novel which has won several Eisner awards (basically the Oscars of graphic novels) and a wonderful story about a man who wants to be a writer.  Apart from the spectacular writing of Daytripper the lingering impression of the book is art which, and I know I’ve used this word several times already but it’s the best word that works, is simply beautiful.  Daytripper is illustrated and colored with the stuff of dreams, and while reading that book I was struck by the thought that such work couldn’t possibly be replicated, I found myself fortunately corrected in How To Talk to Girls at Parties.

Gaiman’s words make the Moon and Ba’s colors, lines, and girls become some of the most radiant images collected into one small book.  As Enn travels from room to room listening to the three women tell their story I felt as if I had left the world I knew, and as the women told their story I carried their words, and beings, long after I had closed the book.  Ba and Moon are what helps make the book what it is, because their colors make each woman unique, and quite possibly the most beautiful women in comics I have ever seen.

As for my second response to my contester I would remind my reader that even if Gaiman is continuing his process of anthropomorphizing stories, gods, feelings, emotions, or non-living beings like stars or the internet, this is no reason not to read his work.  In fact, given the fact that it’s Neil Gaiman this should only provide more impetus to actually read it.  Gaiman is a writer who does not half-ass his reader, and even in his most esoteric (Sandman Overture was about something, I’m still working on not drooling while staring at the art) he manages to write characters and settings, and events into being that feel true.  Normal human beings with their own lives, who are trying to figure out the oddity of mundane reality become swept up by supernatural events or creatures.  Ultimately his characters are forever impacted by these experiences, and while most forget the sights and wonders the way a person might immediately lose a dream when they awake, they still feel the experience long after. His prose is where this wonder takes place, and as he wraps his reader in their dream he leaves the lasting impression.

Looking at the exchange between Enn and the last girl, a Grecian red-head named Triolet, the reader hears her story and is carried away to a different realm:

“We knew that it would be soon over.  We knew…so we put it all into a poem…to tell the universe who we were and why we were here and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for.  We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.  Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern could be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.”  (43-45)

If I can break the fourth wall for a moment, while transcribing this passage I have a video playing titled “underwater whale songs.”  Humpbacks and the sound of the ever roaring waves echoing through the infinite abyss of the ocean just seemed to make the words feel real.

Aside aside, moving on.

This small exchange, rendered magnificently by Moon and Ba, is the typical anthropomorphizing that Gaiman fans are used to, but looking deeper into the passage I realized at this moment that Gaiman had achieved a miracle for blending science fiction with myth.  Myth as a term has fallen on hard times, and shows like Mythbusters have only perpetuated this tragedy (and it is a tragedy because the show is great and a wonderful way for people to become interested in science), but at its core myth is about explaining reality through narrative rather than empirical means.  Triolet may be a goddess, or a star, or an alien, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because at this moment what matters is that she’s telling the story of her people, what they used to be and were and what they believed.  The act of speaking to Enn, and having him listen, is in essence recording her culture.  And while the reader may immediately question why that is so important I would remind them of the necessity of recording history, myth, culture, philosophy, history, science, and stories.  It’s a romantic thought, but crucial to remember, that nothing in this world ever really matters until someone has written it down.

Record seals memory and so Gaiman achieves something really interesting by not only telling a story about an alien race keeping themselves alive by telling their stories to young men looking to get laid, there’s also a fascinating possibility for the future.

In the introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes about science fiction as a genre and what is the ultimate creative goal.  She also tries to clarify the idea that science fiction is a genre trying to “see into the future.”  She writes:

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…. In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrodinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to shwo that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.

My reader may be getting impatient at this point, but hopefully this quote will explain one of my lasting impressions of reading How to Talk to Girls at Parties.  Science fiction isn’t about predicting future technology, or predicting how the world will eventually die.  As Le Guin says, the entire genre is built upon the concept of the “thought-experiment.”  Imagine a set of conditions and let it just go.  Explore an idea through imagination.  And so listening to Triolet’s story I see a beautiful science fiction possibility.  Already humanity is moving more and more towards a paperless system of record keeping, in which every action, thought, belief, and art product is contained in formless data streamed through wires and eventually through waves.  Ba and Moon’s art shows the species collecting their culture into a “poem” before containing it in a sun and sending the signal out to be discovered by some new race that might study their species and carry their memory on.

How to talk to Girl’s at Parties isn’t just about learning how to speak to that girl across the room who keeps smiling at you, it offers a deeper understand of what such an interaction actually is.  Walking across the room, feeling your tongue swell up and your palm getting sweaty as you think of something to say to the girl you’ve seen everyday in Algebra I for the last year is like encountering a new world.  You’ll never be the same after you ask her a question, and you’ll never be the person you were when you see her smile and listen to her talk about finding her blouse at Goodwill.  The small act of listening to a girl tell you about her clothes or day may not be the grand thought experiments of writers like Le Guin, Clarke, Dick, Adams, Asimov, or even Gaiman but in its own way it does forever leave what you knew behind.

So long story short, take the chance, talk to the girl, and just listen carefully.  You’ll find yourself in a different world.

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

The quote from Le Guin’s introduction can be found ACE Science Fiction paperback copy, as well as by following the link below:

http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

 

**Writer’s Note**

Upon finishing the essay I remembered that my father had actually taught me this lesson, but like most young men receiving advice from their dad’s I didn’t listen to it.  So thanks dads, and sorry I didn’t pay attention.

The Comics Classroom Presents BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM

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Batman, Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth, Champion of Unreason, Classical Hero, Comicosity, Comics, Dave McKean, Flawed hero, Grant Morrison, graphic novel, Grotesque, Identity, Individual Will, insanity, Michael Greenhale, mythology, Postmodernism, psychology, Psychosis, The Comics Classroom, The Journey, Underworld

 

This is the first publication I have to my credit.  When this essay was written I was still working on my B.A. and the idea that anything I wrote could be published was a bit of a revelation.  I had given a presentation over Arkham Asylum at a school event alongside several other students who had created presentations about Graphic Novels, and a year later, when given the opportunity to write about anything I wanted to, I decided to write down my ideas about Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s beautiful graphic novel.

My friend Michael Greenhale, who regularly writes a post entitled The Comics Classroom for the site Comicsosity, offered to publish it, and it stands as I said before as the first published essay of mine anywhere on the internet.

If you want to read the entire article simply follow the link below

 

Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth remains in my mind the greatest graphic novel ever written due to its complexity, its classical tradition, the way it helped re-create the character of Batman to ensure his cultural relevance to a new generation, and the flawless execution by both the writer Grant Morrison and the artist Dave McKean.

Recently I was given the opportunity to present my views concerning the graphic novel and in this presentation I explained why I felt this work stands as such a triumph by comparing it to the classical oral traditional structure. I will attempt to condense my ideas here and demonstrate that one of the core themes of the work is the journey, and its role in re-creating Batman for a new age.

 

 

If you want to read the entire article simply follow the link below:

The Comics Classroom Presents BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM

Hubris Blinds Even Batman’s Eyes

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A Rose for Emily, Batman, Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth, Batman: The Court of Owls, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Book Review, Circles, City, Comics, Edith Hamilton, Eyes, Gotham, graphic novel, Great Expectations, Hubris, Julius Caesar, Literature, Medea, mythology, O, Brother Where Are Thou?, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, Play, Polis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sophocles, The Aeneid, The New 52, The Odyssey, Tragic Flaw

Batman has become an archetype, and because of this making additions or alterations to his character or universe is not only a daunting task, it’s damn near impossible.  I remember a few months back the Graphic Novel Book Club that I’m a part of finally decided to read Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean.  I’d been lobbying for the book because, apart from Fun Home, I had never read a graphic novel that was so dense with symbolism and meaning.  I’d actually written an essay that a friend of mine published, presented a paper on it at a small academic conference, and even written two papers for school on it.  As such, when the meeting came, I gave my rating (10 means you have a shrine for it, 1 is you burned it and cursed the ashes) and then shortened my multivolume lecture on the book to a 10 minute ass-kissing monologue explaining why I thought the graphic novel was brilliant.

The remainder of the group didn’t share my views and proceeded to thrash the book apart.

Contrary to some though I actually enjoy it when I receive criticism because it forces me to consider new angles and either drop my old perceptions or reconsider my position to strengthen it.  After the meeting one of my friends approached me and apologized, “It’s just that Batman is an archetype you know?  He has to fit a structure or he isn’t Batman.”

This idea intrigued me, but it also made me wary about writing about Batman books or movies lest I suffer the eternal and unforgiving wrath of the internet.  Whoever has suggested that nerds are meek clearly had never met one for the last decade has demonstrated that nerds can be vicious and cruel when so inspired, and speaking as one I can attest to this fact.  Still though it’s getting to a point when scholars are able to sneak in copies of The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One to conferences and classrooms and the eyebrows of the academy are not so ruffled.  Batman always was art, and now that people have the venue and gumption to argue it as such I want to contribute in any way I can.

One of my favorite Batman stories is The Court of Owls.  Around five years ago I went through a Comics explosion after one of my colleagues in the SI Office dropped ten comic books on a table and went to work.  The first book I picked up was Detective Comics #1 of something called The New 52.  DC comics had just rereleased their entire publishing line starting over from number 1 and so comic fans everywhere were both ecstatic and cautiously optimistic, or, as so often happens, waiting for somebody to mess up.  I read the books on the table and immediately acquired directions to Ground Zero Comics, and from there my life was changed.  I didn’t just read comic books, I inhaled them.  It was about eight months later when I picked up Scott Snyder’s Swamp Thing run (impressive in itself for being the first good thing to happen to that franchise since Alan Moore), and from there I went to Batman which had been following the Court of Owls storyline.

What’s impressive about the series is not just how beautiful the actual books are, it’s the level of detail packed into every frame, every dialogue, every character.  The resulting strength of the two volume story line made it quickly surpass every book in terms of sales of The New 52, and it has effectively established Snyder as one of comics’ greatest contemporary writers of the medium.

What makes Court of Owls unique is not just reinventing Batman’s badass badassery, it’s something far more ambitious.  The first page of the book creates it:

In this one page Snyder has introduced a newspaper and a civilian populace alongside the architectural structures that make up Gotham and in this effort there is an attempt to create a real landscape of Gotham city.  My reader may immediately protest, Gotham always had a landscape.  I would argue however that Gotham was more of an abstract plain.  Reading books like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Hush, and even Batman Arkham Asylum there was a pronounced lack of physical space concerning Gotham and this first page is only one example of it.   Snyder regularly begins each chapter at a landmark, a social group, a historical scene, etc. and each of these opening passages brings out Gotham city not only as an urban hub, but a city with a rich history and culture that often gets ignored because Green Lantern’s in Gotham and needs Batman’s help.

It’s fair to say the history of Gotham city has largely been ignored because of such distractions, and while they were fun and interesting, the effect was to turn Gotham into an arena in which the gods were often fighting and dueling.  Snyder himself isn’t immune to this, for in the Endgame saga when Joker returns he plays on this very idea pitting Batman against Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Superman employing references to opera in order to solidify the presentation.  Before the reader gets the idea that I feel this is a cop-out it’s important to note that I actually don’t mind this.  Superhero’s by nature have always been melodramatic and archetypal, and while realism is slowly infecting the genre (sometimes to its benefit but often to its misfortune), the figure of superheroes in the collective imagination remains god-like.

Still, The Court of Owls succeeds as a story because of it’s grounding of Batman as a man with faults, particularly as it presents him as a man who felt himself master of history.  In the graphic novel’s second opening Bruce Wayne narrates the history behind Wayne Tower, one of the city’s cultural landmarks:

The original Wayne Tower.

If you came to Gotham city today, right now, and took a tour of the building, here are some things your guide would tell you:

The tower was constructed in 1888, under the watch of my great, great grandfather Alan Wayne.  He built the tower to serve as a symbol of welcome to people coming to Gotham.  And, as your tour guide will point out, from the ground up it’s designed to give visitors like you the feeling that they’re cared for and protected.  For example, your guide will say, the building has twelve gargoyles or “guardians” as Alan insisted they be called—one to watch over each passageway into the city.  The five guardians at the first tier were placed there to watch over the five original gateways to the city—the three bridges and two tunnels.  Higher up the tower is a ring of seven guardians, one to protect each of the seven train lines that converge at union station, below Wayne Tower’s base.  And at the top of the tower, is the observation deck in which Alan insisted remain free and open to the public every weekend, all year round.

This is a long passage, and remember that this is only one page with several shots of a tower silhouetted against a sunrise.  The Court of Owls is rife with presentations of the urban landscape, and while part of that is to hint at the idea that someone is watching from afar, another rhetorical effect is to place the figures in question against the size of the city and legacy of Gotham.  Bruce Wayne is Batman, but he is just a man, and as the end of this chapter demonstrates he’s plagued by hubris:

Whoever it was that just tried to kill me, he was good.  But he made a mistake.  He tried to use Gotham’s legends against me.  But I’m the only legend this city needs.  In many ways, it’s my oldest and truest friend.  And it knows me better than anyone, just as I know it.  Which is why I can say that there is no Court of Owls.  Not in Gotham.  Not in my city.

The words “my city” betray the man, not the god that’s often presented.

While I was originally going to simply review Court of Owls, as I wrote and researched images for this essay I began to observe more and more how much Snyder presents Bruce Wayne as a man who believes himself totally in control of his city and its history, and as this pride becomes more and more apparent there is constant references and attention paid to eyes.  Because I’m that kind of writer, connections between works are always being made apparent.  The combination of eyes, hubris, city, and owls all lead eventually to Oedipus the King, sometimes if inaccurately referred to as Oedipus Rex.

Oedipus the King is a play I had to read originally in High School, and I don’t mean the summarized portion of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.  Freshman year of high school was when we had to read the classics such as Medea, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Julius Caesar, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and watch the film O, Brother Where Are Thou?  We also got to read Great Expectations and Faulkner’s short story A Rose For Emily, which in hindsight still doesn’t make much sense but at least both of those of those texts got me permanently hooked to Dickens and Faulkner.  Oedipus the King was the first on the list, and It was all very Greek to me.

That’s a joke, and a reference to Shakespeare you see.  See?  I should never try to be funny.

Oedipus the King, just in case the reader was sleeping during class when they should have been paying attention, is a play written by Sophocles and the inspiration Freud’s famous Oedipus complex.  He’s also the figure of a brief mention in Disney’s Hercules movie.  Oedipus is considered a hero of Greek tragedy because the man’s downfall essentially defined tragedy in drama.  King of the city of Thebes during a time of great plague, Oedipus calls out to the citizens of the city-state that he will discover the cause of the disease and punish those responsible.  Consulting with the city’s oracle Tiresias he discovers that someone has violated the royalty of the city.  It becomes clear to Oedipus, and his wife Jocasta the wife of the former ruler, that he has performed the atrocity.  Clues and prophecies eventually lead the viewer, as well as Oedipus himself to recognize that he is the culprit of the offense until at last he recognizes that the plague has been caused because Oedipus has killed the former King of Thebes and taken his wife, who is also Oedipus’s mother, into his bed and sired two children from her.  Jocasta hangs herself at the revealing of this fact, and Oedipus upon finding her puts out his eyes with the pins that holds up her garment.  The play ends with Oedipus being sent out into exile from the city state with Creon assuming control of the city.

At this point the reader may wonder what significance or relevance Oedipus has to the Batman graphic novel currently under discussion.  If my reader will be patient, I will demonstrate how the stories mirror one another.

Throughout the play Oedipus the King there are brief allusions to eyes, often used in both the figurative and symbolic sense.  In one scene the blind oracle Tiresias is summoned to the palace and gives the following prophecy:

In name he is a stranger among citizens but soon he will be shown to be homegrown true native Theban, and he’ll have no joy of the discovery: blindness for sight and beggary for riches his exchange, […].  (93).

Oedipus himself makes numerous allusions to sight during his investigation, but the most damning is near the end when he describes the death of the man who would become his father:

O no, no, no—O holy majesty of god on high, may I not see that day!  May I be gone out of men’s sight before I see the deadly taint of this disaster come upon me.  (110).

Oedipus eventually makes his wretched discovery and a second messenger relays what occurs after he discovers his mother/wife has hung herself:

Second Messenger: He tore the brooches—the gold chased brooches fastening her robe—away from her and lifting them up high dashed them on his own eyeballs, […] he struck his eyes again and yet again with the brooches.  And the bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his cheeks—no sluggish oozing drops but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.  (132).

Before I suffered my first dream about my teeth falling out, there was nothing that bothered me so much as damage, specifically damage by needles, to the eyes.  Oedipus’s tragedy was ultimately his hubris because it “blinded” him to the reality of the fact that he believed himself a kind of god or blessing to the city of Thebes, and that blindness was due in part to the fact he was blind to the history of his lineage and city.  Looking back to Court of Owls there’s a similar predicament as Batman discovers that not only does the Court of Owls, a secret society responsible for the covert assassination of respectable citizens over the entire history of Gotham, exist but that it has existed seemingly hidden from him despite multiple efforts during his life to find it.  He’s also blind to the fact that a man by the name of Lincoln March is growing ever closer to him eventually appearing to say that he is Bruce’s brother.

Eyes hold a special significance to the human species and Ralph Waldo Emerson explored it in his essay Circles:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.  It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.  St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.  (403).

Snyder uses technology to show Batman’s blindness, for at the start Bruce demonstrates a contact lens that acts as a kind of supercomputer.  This is the stuff of Batman technology that, while a first outlandish, is actually based in real or upcoming technology not that far away.  But more than the “super-computer contacts” is the constant closeness of Bruce’s enemy that, like the truth of Oedipus’s past, ultimately attempts to destroy him by revealing that he has been blind to the true nature of the city.

Gotham and Thebes are the plains from which these two characters emerge because in the classical drama the city, the polis, is everything.  Human beings are social creatures by nature, and reading many ancient and pre-modern texts one often sees that the punishment of criminals is often not death, but banishment.  Human beings establish their identity and comfort in relation to one another, therefore when the hero suffers exile he experiences the ultimate punishment because he is denied the chance to find comfort and happiness by interacting with his friends and fellow citizens.

A conflict emerges however.  Oedipus is ultimately destroyed by his blindness by actually blinding himself and becoming exiled.  Batman, being Batman, cannot be exiled from Gotham (unless they’re doing some kind of “event” storyline, but even that doesn’t really mean anything when there are around six to seven Batman books on the market), but by the end of the Court of Owls Bruce’s ego has been broken and then eventually restored.  And it’s rather telling that the final panel in the graphic novel is Bruce’s eye containing Gotham.

By now it should hopefully be clear what my actual thesis is.  Batman: The Court of Owls follows in the tradition that my friend Anthony spoke of earlier.  Batman is an archetype in the vein of a classical hero, however rather than Oedipus who is destroyed by his tragedy, Batman satisfies the new paradigms concerning the hero.  Batman is a superhero, a figure who overcomes his mistakes and survives through it and so what is happening here is a kind of alteration on the traditional narrative.  The reader of Batman is different than the citizen of Greece who would have watched Oedipus and felt a kind of catharsis from the tragedy.  Hero-worship and hero-fantasy have become the norms of contemporary narratives; people like to watch the hero win and overcome. Rather than mourn a man’s tragedy, the contemporary reader wants to see Batman overcome and conquer the enemy that seeks to destroy him.

What unites these two works however is the idea of the city as a place of power where men find their destiny and greatness.  Snyder’s gift to the Batman universe is not just a great new villain for fans to enjoy, his gift is giving the city of Gotham new details and features from which new writers and story tellers will be able to draw inspiration from.  While the character of Batman will remain the superhuman tactician with enough gadgets to give James Bond penis envy, The Court of Owls has brought new life, energy, and most importantly a new Gotham City for Batman to discover.

The hero’s ego has been damaged, but bats always return with a vengeance.

 

*Writer’s Note*

If the reader is interested in seeing Oedipus the King performed much the way it would during ancient times there’s a brilliant version from 1957 which involves elaborate costumes and masks.  You can see it by following the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZUCgq8LfhY

 

**Writer’s Note**

All passages from Oedipus the King were taken from the David Grene translation published in the University of Chicago Press book Sophocles 1 edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore.  The passages from Circles was published in Emerson: Essays and Lecture The Library of America Edition.

 

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t mention it in the essay, but in case anyone was interested the riddle of the sphinx is as follows:

“What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?”

 

Answer:

“Man.”  When he’s born he crawls on four legs, when he grows up he walks on two, and in the evening of his life he walks with a cane making three legs.

The Sheild of Achilles

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Achilles, Art, battle, Grecian Urn, Hector, heroes, Original Drawing, The Sheild of Achilles

2 April 2016

Sheilds and Urns and Beauty and Misery: What Wonders Were the Greeks

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Annie Hall, Art, Artificial Landscape, Christopher Hitchens, H.D.F. Kitto, Hitch-22, John Keats, Literature, mortality, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Poetry, Postmodernism, Romanticism, Stephen Fry, Sublime, The Greeks, The Iliad, The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, The Odyssey, The Sheild of Achilles, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writer’s in the Public Sphere, W.H. Auden

This essay was originally published on The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s blog.  The full essay can be read on their home page by accessing the link at the end.

I want to say it was Stephen Fry who argued that John Keats might have gone on to become the next William Shakespeare had he lived a bit longer, though it may have in fact have been Christopher Hitchens.  It’s odd not knowing the origin of that quote, because I get those two mixed up rarely—then again, the accent and a general contempt for belief in any sort of divine being are traits common to both these men, so I’ll cut myself some slack.  It is an interesting statement when taken from afar, because at first I’m willing to agree with it.  Upon reflection, however, I feel that this is in fact a real disservice to John Keats as a poet, for while Shakespeare is a standard that I think many writers should aspire to (or at least would appreciate as a lovely comparison), I think Keats as a writer managed in his own way to attain his own identity.

Speaking of which, as of late, that idea has begun to become more and more complicated.  It may be just part of the student complex, but I’ve blossomed in the academic setting because the world has provided me with a sense of structure, organization, and purpose.  School has given my life direction which in turn provided me with the confidence to begin writing again, or at least push the writing I was doing in a more productive route.  I’ve now spent the last six years working and writing, and with a recent acceptance for a publication I’ve gotten to the point I don’t flinch at admitting I’m a writer.  School and regularly writing for this website as well as my own has given me an identity…and it’s about to be over, as I transition from graduating to starting something new.

Since this is my last essay for this organization, I struggled to figure out what I was going to actually write next.  Since it’s the last essay, I felt I should end with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner since that was what my first essay for this site was about, but honestly that felt a bit kitsch and I hate sentimentality.  The worst part about transitions is the way ritual so alters our reality, and rather than just pushing forward we have to stop and let the end totally consume us so that we can achieve some kind of closure and process that we’ve done something with all this time.

Don’t get me wrong, we should enjoy and relish in our achievements, but I’d rather have this last post honestly say something than be a long drawn-out goodbye.

W.H. Auden is a poet that I learned about through Christopher Hitchens, for he is cited regularly throughout Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 (the index lists him on 16 pages, I counted), his epigrams appear in numerous essays, and he was the focus of Hitchens’ entire article The Long Littleness of Life* which was published in the New York Review of Books and my copy of Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere which I’ll be reading as soon as I finish this essay.  I trust Hitchens to never disappoint (unless we’re talking about whether women are funny or not, but that’s another essay), and so when I began reading Auden here and there I was always floored.  The man’s ability with language is everything one should want in a poet, and given the fact he was a postmodernist he was right up my alley.  The Vintage Paperback Press W.H. Auden: Collected Poems remains on permanent reserve in my personal library.

My reader may ask what a postmodernist has to do with the Romantics; slow down, I’m getting to it. I like to talk and hear my own voice as I write and I’m also a big fan of lead-ins, don’t forget.  Thinking of Stephen Fry, which might actually have been Christopher Hitchens, speaking about John Keats made me think of Auden because both Keats and Auden both have written poems involving Greek reliquary.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON THE NASSR BLOG FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW:

Shields and Urns and Beauty and Misery: What Wonders Were the Greeks

 

Worship at the Shrine of Priapus: Or, The Folly of the Masturbator

Tags

Art, Masturbation, Original Drawing, Penis, phallus worship, Priapus, Sexual politics, Sexuality, symbol

20 October 2015