Stories for All Hallows Eve

Having stood up for All Hallows Eve as a legitimate time of spookification, it seems only right and proper to suggest some appropriate short stories and novels that deal with ghosts and other such creatures.

High Spirits, by Robertson Davies is a collection of ghost stories the celebrated Canadian novelist told at Christmas gatherings at Massey College, of which he was Master. These are humorous ghost stories, and among them can be found: "The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees" about a truly perpetual grad student; "The Kiss of Khrushchev", in which a Russian bass finds himself under the evil eye; "The Cat That Went to Trinity" about a Frankencat; and "Einstein and the Little Lord" in which the ghost Little Lord Fauntleroy appears.

Expiration Date by Tim Powers is set in the streets and suburbs of modern Los Angeles, among the sub culture who trade in vials containing ghosts. If you inhale a ghost, you can experience in a rush the memories which compose this cast of shell of a soul which long ago left the world. A typical Tim Powers novel, Expiration Date describes a world shot through with the supernatural, yet imagined a way that leaves you wondering if this is indeed how the real world works.

Hobberdy Dick by Katherine Briggs is the best window on classic English superstition and folklore that you'll ever find -- perhaps not surprising as Briggs was a serious academic folklorist. The title character, a hobgoblin, is guardian of country manor, which has just been taken over by a Puritan family after its Cavalier owners found themselves on the wrong side of the English Civil War. Anyone with an interest in the real English folklore traditions, of hobs and lobs and grims and ghosts and witches, should read it.

Face In The Frost by John Bellairs begins so lightheartedly that one little imagines how seriously terrifying it will become at times as wizards Prospero (not that one) and Roger Bacon (that one) seek to find an enemy who seems to be bringing the world to an end. Though the novel definitely shows much of Bellairs characteristic humor (and background in writing mysteries and ghost stories for young readers) Face in the Frost holds up as adult reading as well.

Feel free to post your own suggestions in the comments.

A Short Halloween Rant

Today is Halloween, or for those traditionalists out there, All Hallows Eve. Not a bad day to put a jack-o-lantern in the window, put out a bowl of cream for your local hob or nob, and read some ghost stories around the fireplace. (Except here in Texas where it'll be 80 degrees today.)

The girls are eager to go to the parish Halloween party and lark about with their friends in princess costumes. And here, unfortunately, is where the rant comes in. Because the party at the parish tonight is not a Halloween party -- it's an All Saints Day Party. One is not supposed to come as a princess or fairy or night or (as our eldest ambitiously proposed) Lyle the Crocodile, but rather as one's favorite saint. Every year some people flaunt this and come in normal custumes, which is probably what will happen with us this year, but I'm assured by the daughter-in-law of one of the organizers that, "It really drives them nuts when people do that."

I don't have anything against the idea of having a saints themed costume party on All Saints Day -- there's no real tradition behind it, but it's not a bad idea. However, All Saints Day is Nov. 1st, not Oct. 31st. And I'm not really sure why we as Catholics should feel the need to counter-program against Halloween parties. Certain Protestant groups, certainly, are convinced that all that surrounds Halloween is evil superstition, but there's no reason for Catholics to go off the deep end about this stuff.

Indeed, as a Catholic, it annoys me a bit to see All Hallows Eve (with all of the cultural texture that originally surrounded that day) turned into an All Saints Day party. Not that modern American Halloween is much in touch with older traditions surrounding All Hallows Eve, but if we're going to insist on changing it as Catholics, we should get in touch with some original All Hallows Eve traditions, not do a All Saints counter program to American Halloween.

Don't be panic!

This is made of awesome, especially if you watch it at 1:00 in the morning, after offering moral support while your husband writes a powerpoint deck in corporatese. But it's also funny just because.



And this one too.



Because everything Spanish is dangerous!

These are by the same guy who made Baby Got Back -- Gilbert and Sullivan style, but Darwin won't let me post that one.

Immigration Thoughts

Unless you are a loyal reader with clear memories of the stuff I was putting out back in 2005, this piece up today at American Catholic on the immigration issue is probably new to you.

This one's for you, Dad

The Phillies won the World Series. They're opening the sweater drawers in Hades.

I said to Darwin, "If the Phillies win the series, my dad can die happy." Darwin suggested that it might be nice to have him around for another forty years. That sounds about right: he can die happy the next time the Phils are world champs.

Cheesesteaks on me, guys.

Why Read Fiction

Quite some time ago, bookmarked a posting on the First Things blog because it reflected comments I'd heard from several other quite intelligent people my age that I've run across:

A few days ago our editor, Joseph Bottum, observed with a shake of his head that none of the many Junior Fellows at First Things in recent years reads novels with any regularity.

I had to confess I was no exception, thus perfecting his despair. “The dominant Western literary form for the past two hundred years” he said “but you all say, ‘Nope, we’re done with that.’”

Why is this? I can’t speak for anyone else, but, for my part, I just don’t get drawn into fictional narratives the way I did as a child.

I turned towards the philosophical and historic in my mid-teens, which gave me Plato’s kind of impatience with lying poets. At some point I found that I had to force myself to turn the next page because I really did not care in the least what happened to imaginary persons. The only narratives I now read with easy pleasure are travelogues, histories, and biographies, packed as they are with the red meat of the real.

But I’m making a good-faith effort to regain a taste for novels. I’ve started with Jane Austen, hoping that the goodly helping of edification will help me painlessly transition from my addiction to propositional truths to a healthy appreciation of the formal properties of a well-wrought story. I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and am now in the middle of Persuasion. She’s quite as wise, perceptive, and delightfully ironic as everyone says, but I’m still having the hardest time staying interested in the plot.

Now, I don't share Mr. McDaniel's hang up in this regard at all, though I do find that I don't read as much fiction as I used to as a teenager. But as I say, several good friends have surprised me by expressing similar opinions. Helene Hanff who wrote 84 Charing Cross Road and Q's Legacy, two of my favorite books about books, observes at one point in 84, "I never can get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived."

Some of this is, I think, simply a matter of personal taste. However I wonder if some of it also has to do with a modern idea of what fiction is. There are two contradictory ideas of fiction which I hear often:

1) I am the author and I have created this story, which is mine and is precisely what I say it is, for your entertainment. Read it and be diverted.

2) The author has created a text which does not necessarily have an inherent meaning. You as the reader must encounter this text and determine what it means to you.

Both of these, if one actually internalizes them, strike me as rather boring. If a story is simply something which a particular author thought up in wholly artificial fashion and presents to you for amusement, what exactly is the point? Why should I care that that author made up that particular sequence of unreal events? If the story does not have meaning in and of itself -- if meaning is something that I apply myself -- why should I care about the story? Clearly, anything worth knowing is already in my head, and reading the story is like staring at an uncarved block of stone and imagining a sculpture.

On the question of why we read and write fiction, the works of ancient authors like Homer and Virgil have always struck me as interesting. Both to some extent, I think, believed in the myths they were recording. (Virgil less so than Homer, and neither in a literal sense, perhaps.) Yet both knew they were making up the details of these stories as they went along. And their readers in the ancient world both knew that the stories they were hearing or reading had been composed by human authors, and also believed that they in some sense reflected real stories about the gods and heroes.

The key insight here, I think, is that worthwhile fiction describes something that is at root true -- indeed it shows reality in a more distilled fashion than actual observation -- even if the details are made up. When fiction ceases to be seen as describing something true, it ceases to be worth reading.

The story of my prayer life

The truth is the Rosary can be a real chore. St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, was being more honest when she said, “I am ashamed to confess it, but the recitation of the Rosary costs me more than to use an instrument of penance. I feel I am saying it so badly. Try as I may to make myself meditate on the mysteries, I never manage to fix my thoughts on them."

This is a quote that speaks to me as I'm trying to make the rosary novena for the elections.

(h/t to Matthew Lickona)