Neil Gaiman and John Keats, An Anatomical Album, and a Demon from the 70s Looming Over Your Bed
A Monthly Newsletter
A Book I’ve Been Reading…
Recently, I was uprooting the foundations of the internet for books similar in style to Neil Gaiman’s writing and found a little-known book in a small pocket of Reddit: The Memory Theater. Acting on impulse, I bought the book and hoped for the best. But to my immense delight, this dark fairytale of a book made it’s way to my list of favorites, so let’s talk about it’s whimsical charm. This is the first English-written novel by Swedish fantasy and weird fiction author, Karin Tidbeck and it centers around two self-proclaimed siblings, a child-servant named Thistle and a half-girl, half-mountain, Dora who are stuck in a time-bending dimension of eternal revelry and feasting. One day, they escape with the goal of returning home (whatever home is) and retrieving Thistle’s real name which was stolen from him the moment he ate an apple that bound him to the infinite dimension. Along the way, they encounter numerous characters from Swedish folklore, a time-traveling theater troupe, and a peculiar man named Nils Nilsson with a past parallel to their’s. The most beautiful element about this story was it’s strong motif of remembrance. Remembrance of stores, of oral tradition, of your identity, of relationships, even of the events of the universe which would have otherwise been forgotten. It is an homage to memory and homesickness for a home that is undefinable. Even a character in the book, Mnemosyne, is named after the Greek Titan of memory. What I also really appreciated is that after finishing the book, I felt compelled to write a poem about the theme of memory. It is extremely rare to find an author that makes you fall in love with their story while simultaneously motivating you to create your own. Out of the seven books I read this month, I have nothing but the highest regards for The Memory Theater and I hope that if you do decide to read it, you have the same enjoyment from the experience.
A Poem I’ve Been Reading…
I’ve never read much from poets of the English Romantic period, let alone the second generation, but my interaction with John Keats’ ballad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, has left me wondering what else these creatives can offer. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, or The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy is a short piece about a medieval knight who encounters a faerie who seduces him with her eyes and singing, without him knowing she plans to condemn him to death. This poem examines the turn of love to obsession on two levels— draining emotional energy (as exemplified when the knight falls asleep) and the lack of appreciation of beauty except the object of desire once the admirer is only left with their beauty (as when the faerie abandons him when he wakes up). There are many folkloric references in the poem such as when the faerie takes the knight to her “Elfin grot” and offers him “roots of sweet relish”, “honey wild”, and “manna dew”. Many mythological tales warn of consuming food in a supernatural being’s realm as it allows their total control over you (Some mythological examples include Hades binding Persephone to the underworld with pomegranate seeds or the warning given in the Scottish fairytale of Childe Rowland. An example in modern media is in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away), which we can see evident in the story as the faerie is able to lull him to sleep. The religious allusion of manna, the food supernaturally provided by God to the hungry Israelites on their escape from Egypt, implies that the knight’s mortality is dependent on the faerie’s actions. The mention of a “cold hillside” that the knight has a dream inside of could be a reference to a faerie mound which, in Northern European folklore, are said to be the dwelling place of faeries. I enjoyed the little allusions and the enchanting atmosphere of the poem, so much so that I feel encouraged to pick up more from English Romantic poets.
A Song I’ve Been Listening to…
My favorite singer, or at least one of my favorites, is AURORA, a Norwegian singer/songwriter whose genre is described as “electropop, folk, and art pop”. After waiting in agony for months, AURORA graced listeners with another emotional and profound album, What Happened to the Heart? on June 7th. I set aside the evening of it’s release to listen to it in my garden while watching the sun set and the moon rise with the stars. It was a truly magical experience, one that I look back on as one of my fondest memories with music. This experimental and earworm-y album is centered around how corrupted our society has become, following a slow melancholic beginning to a rage-filled climax, and ending with a soft acceptance of our “invisible wounds”. In an interview with NME, AURORA said that in 2022 she read a letter written by indigenous activists called “We Are the Earth” which spoke out against society’s apathy towards taking care of the environment and each other. She claims that this “instigated the process” of the album because humanity is “just acting with [their minds]” and not “with [their] hearts”. It is almost addicting and healing to listen to the songs from the album which plays with synth-pop, medieval-like tunes, disco, and traditional folk music. I encourage you to sit alone with yourself in nature as you listen to What Happened to the Heart? and let the magic of art wash over and into the cracks of your heart.
What I’ve Been Learning…
Theseus and the Minotaur. It’s a classic story you’ve probably heard even if you aren’t passionate about Greek mythology. Theseus and fourteen other Athenian youths are sacrificed to the Minotaur, a half-man and half-bull, as commanded by King Minos of Crete. On the island, Theseus catches the eye of Ariadne, the Cretan princess and half-sister of the Minotaur. She gives him a ball of yarn (called a clew) to help him find his way through the labyrinth where the monster lives to slay him and in return, Theseus promises to take her back to Athens and marry her. But that’s not what happens. After the Minotaur is killed, Theseus, the Athenian youths, and Ariadne do escape but stop on the island of Naxos for a night’s rest. The next day, Ariadne is alone on the island. Although authors of antiquity differ in their tellings like Ovid in his Metamorphoses insisting that Dionysus (the god of wine) marries Ariadne after she is abandoned or Plutarch claiming she hanged herself from the grief of Theseus’ betrayal, scholars have noticed something strange about Ariadne and it all began when British archeologist, Sir Arthur Evans dug up an entirely unheard of civilization on Crete in 1900. What he found was the Bronze Age Minoan civilization (named after the mythical King Minos as what they called themselves is unknown) and it’s still unreadable language, Linear A. What he unearthed consisted of giant palaces, golden axes, depictions of a goddess with snakes entwined around her arms, and lots of bulls (art of acrobats jumping over bulls, bull horns, bull bones, all the works!). Since then, scholars have tried to reconstruct their religious pantheon which seemed to have consisted of a supreme female deity that reigned over everything from vegetation to death. This figure is often depicted with a labrys, or “double-headed ax”, the origin of the word labyrinth. Many Hellenistic goddesses like Demeter, the goddess of harvest, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt, have strange parallels to this character. Interesting, right? A lost civilization on the island Crete populated by a bull-obsessed and secret labyrinth-building ancient people who revered a goddess called “the Mistress of the Labyrinth”. Stay tuned and I’ll post on my Substack about why that matters so much to us today…
What I’ve Been Watching…
A couple of weeks ago, I came across the 1974 folk horror classic, Penda’s Fen without knowing too much about the plot. I saw a haunting, three-minute clip from the film of a masked incubus looming over the main character’s head and decided it would be a disservice to deprive myself of a possible favorite. The story centers around a pastor’s patriotic son on the cusp of eighteen in the English town of Pinvin named Stephen Franklin. Stephen speaks passionately about the ideal Aryan and Christian family of England and his future is set: go to school, ace his exams, and earn a military scholarship. But when a socialist writer arrives in Pinvin and defends the common worker while putting up a harsh mirror to the face of government-funded projects in the local rural region which have resulted in casualties, Stephen is forced to confront everything he knows about England’s pagan past, his own Christian morals, and his sexuality. As reality blurs with fantasy, Stephen meets England’s last pagan king, encounters a ritualistic chopping of hands, and the ghost of composer Edward Elgar who created a song about Purgatory Stephen is hypnotically attracted to throughout the film. Soon, his almost idol-like worship of the ideal family seems to waver as Stephen continues his introspection and discussions with his father, a pastor who knows a great deal about paganism and Manicheism, and when asked if he believes in God, he answers with “I believe in truth”. At the climax of the movie, the “mother and father of England” approach him on a hill and call him a “child of light” in an attempt to coerce their views on him to which Stephen responds to by declaring, “I am nothing pure. Nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed! Mixed. I am nothing special. Nothing, nothing pure. I am mud and flame!”. Later in that same scene, the last pagan king of England, King Penda, places a hand over Stephen as if to crown him and says, in an almost fatherly manner, “Child, be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame. Our dawn shall come”. Loaded with symbolism, historical allusions, and religious references, Penda’s Fen is about the battle of identity in a lost culture.
Question of the Month…
If your fear took the form of an object, what would it be?
Thanks for reading! I hope that my post gave you a new book to read, a new movie to watch, or a new topic to research.
Keep telling and collecting stories,
Ava Behjat
More of this, please!