November 2012 – Page 2 – Ceridwen Anne

Review: Walking Dead: Killer Within

Whooo-ey. Spoilers EVERYWHERE. Both hark and behold.

I said somewhere in my reviews for this season that the writers were punishing me for my bitching about last season, and that holds with a bullet this episode. They pretty mercilessly take down both T-Dog and Lori, the first who has been a walking punchline of tokenism – a fair number of reviewers have been doing a T-Dog line count, which is not pretty – and the latter a fan un-favorite to the n-th degree. On the one hand, that’s probably nifty, clearing the ground of characters like the rotting walkers that the Rickocrats are working on clearing in the opening scenes, so they can plant the ground for new crops. On the other it’s a bloody chicken out on characters who the writers generally suck at writing, and forget trying to improve on them, take ’em down.

Oh wait, nevermind.

I mean, we have already two other poorly sketched black characters, so buh bye Theodore Douglas. We didn’t know shit about your life previous to the zombie apocalypse, we could rely on you to stand blackly in the background, and maybe utter a line or two that literally anyone else could for the entire show. Sniff. Smell you later.

Which brings me to Lori. Her arc with the pregnancy has been riddled with some gender bullshit, down to whatever magical drug she sent Glenn off to get in whatever episode when she made the baby Jesus cry for even considering abortion in the zombie apocalypse. And Walking Dead isn’t the first or the last show that pulls out the egregious birthin’ babies scenes, but come the fuck on. The average labor takes twelve hours, which doesn’t do when you’re parceling out some ham-fisted dialogue and bloody body horror. OMG!! TEH BIRTHIN’ BABIES.

Okay, whatever, I’m calming down. I wrote on an envelope near my computer the following lines, spoken by The Guv: “The scenery has changed, the landscape, but the way we think…” He doesn’t complete the thought, but my widdle ears perked up at this statement because of some personal wacky theories that are mine and mine alone.

Zombie stories are on some level landscape pictures that run the slow pan over the American landscape and take our pulse or the lack thereof about what we think about soil and race and movement and teh wimmens. Landscape pictures tend to be male holdouts, Alamos of homosocial enclaves – like a prison? Just saying – and it’s not a huge surprise that a show that is setting up a soft-spoken lunatic against an ironically not-so-effective badass – seriously, Rick, make sure the dude is dead when you consign him to death, lest dramatic irony bite you (or T-Dog) in the ass – would spend this domestic death this way. Zombie narratives are hell on domesticity – they tend to make it shallow and worthless – but it really could have been something if Lori could stick around to do something other than die valiantly and womanly in a big freaking gross out. Jesus Christ.

Ugh.

I’m acting like I hated this episode, which isn’t really accurate. Lincoln continues to impress, with his near wordless reactions that cut more deeply than his wife’s loss, though Carl’s flinty-eyed pre-teen of death routine I could do without. I thought most of the scenes with The Guv were unnecessary – Andrea is being a big dumb girl; Michonne can scowl and make lamely leading statements – but other than my usual racial and gender bitches with the writing, the action in the prison was taunt and fun to watch. And I’m going to give the writers mad props for writing in this level of character death on episode freaking four. Let’s just hope it isn’t for nothing. Killing Lori off certainly clears the ground, but we’ll see what they plant in her place.

The Animal Family

I am not going to do The Animal Familyby Randall Jarrell justice, I know. This is incredibly beautiful, powerful, sad, wonderful stuff. My brilliant friend Georgeanna (and next door neighbor – Lyndale neighborhood represent!) pushed this into my hands when I freaked out about how wonderful The Last Unicornwas. She’s right – this is just as amazing, heartbreaking, literate, and poetic as Beagle’s stuff. Add in art from Maurice Sendak, and I am in hook, line and sinker.*

I am a land-locked soul, which is funny, because if I have a soul, it resides somewhere on a rocky beach on the north shore of Lake Superior. My soul watches the water, but it can’t swim, and spends its time trying skip rocks over the glass of the lake. Maybe this is why I freak out all day about selkie stories – freak out completely beyond the bounds. This isn’t necessarily a selkie story – she, who has no name, is referred to as a mermaid – but there’s something selkie-ish about the way the hunter and the mermaid find their connection on the spit of land between meadow and sea. Selkie stories** are about miscommunication and alienation and how they can be the basis of love, and how that is the most profound paradox to ever blow my mind.

But she is a mermaid, not a selkie, and that works because selkie stories are usually massive bummers and this is not. I know from reading that if I am ever caught in an undertow, I am to swim at ninety degree angles against the pull, so that I may find myself in still waters. I’m not sure I would remember this if I were caught and drowning, but I know this now on land. I’m not a sea creature, and I can learn through telling, but that knowledge is incomplete and it always will be. I don’t know much about Randall Jarrell. I had this boyfriend once who loved him, and I hair-tossingly did not understand that love. (I was young. Shut up.) I associate him strongly with the WWII poetry that he is best known for:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I guess he was also a critic, but criticism has a faster expiration date than poetry even. (Sorry, no offense all of Goodreads. We’ve lit our candles at both ends.)

So a mermaid and a hunter find their strange love on a beach, and then they adopt a family of animals over the years: a bear, a lynx, a human boy. I can’t put my finger on why, but I found myself near tears at the oddest of points. And that’s weird. This isn’t the kind of tale that is determined to work your tear ducts – in fact, it is sweet and comic in its tone – but there’s this sorrow to it, an affectionate sorrow, an everyday sorrow, but a sorrow nonetheless. I don’t even know how to describe it. Here’s a passage, where the lynx is scratching the hunter accidentally in play:

“Velvet paws! velvet paws!” The hunter would cry warningly.

The mermaid had got used to his saying it, but the first time she’d asked perplexedly: “What’s velvet?”

“I don’t know,” the hunter said. “But it’s what you say to a cat to get him to keep his claws in. My mother used to say it on the boat.”

So the hunter said it and the mermaid and the lynx understood it, each in his own way – a little scrap of velvet between the forest and the sea.

Omigod, do you see it? Do you see how this is everyday, happy and sad all in the same smooth movement? I think I may be done reviewing for now. I go to freak out.

*So I can’t decide whether I want to use the Oxford comma or not. Sue me.

**I recently saw the movie Ondine, which is a selkie story set in modern Ireland. I loved it like crazy.

Review: Sailor Twain: Or: The Mermaid in the Hudson

I took the kids to the zoo on Friday because sometime late Thursday, I discovered they had the day off and we were suddenly at loose ends. The Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in St Paul is an old school, Victorian zoo, a municipal pasture that was fenced in to hold three deer gifted to the city in 1897. Various attractions were added over the years, such as the ominous sounding “Monkey Island” which must be where the flamingos live now in the summer, or Archie Brand’s Seal Show featuring a succession of sea lions named Sparky. There’s a statue of the original Sparky, as well as one of the first resident lowland gorillas, a male named Don, who lived out his days at Como Zoo. He’s currently stuffed and in a case at the Science Museum of Minnesota across town.

a woman in what looks like 1920's garb with a huge fur wrap around her shoulders feeds a black bear

Watch your fingers.

The zoo has changed a lot since I was a kid. Mum used to joke that you more or less pulled open a fridge to see the penguins, which continues to be true, but the polar bears recently got a multi-million dollar upgrade on their previous, frankly appalling enclosure. Two black bears and a grizzly were visiting from someplace upstate that had been washed out by flooding. But I like how the Victorian bones of the zoological garden are still showing at Como, all this post-Civil War Age of Industry and Expansion, that drops a fence over a pasture and then calls it tame.

an undated black and white photograph that shows three large metal enclosures in a grove with lots of people milling around and looking. It's not possible to tell what's in the cages.
(The two above photos are from the Como Zoo website, and do not have dates.)

My kids and I stood out in the weak November sun and watched sea lions circle their rocky tank. They were the only seasonal animals still out; the single desultory ostrich and his warm climate peers disappeared into basements or wherever they go when not on display – and the flash of the dark body, knifing silently through the water to nose up with the sound of breaking surface tension (not a splash) and then disappear again moves me in that enclosed way of all zoos. They remind me more of dogs than anything, with their big brown eyes and doggy snouts, but I can feel the fur just under my skin, like I could strip off my hairlessness and dive in. Lord, but do selkies do it for me.

Mermaids are a little different. They aren’t layers of wildness and domesticity, but a bifurcation of the two, an uneasy stitch between scale and skin. Sailor Twain: Or: The Mermaid in the Hudsonby Mark Siegel takes place slightly earlier than the founding of this zoo, 1887, on the Hudson river. Sailor Twain (“Don’t call me captain”) plies the river in his steamer in the employ of a drunken Frenchman named Lafayette. The story starts with layers though – a broken Twain sought out for his story by an enigmatic woman, all shadows and cloaks, and then tells the tale lappingly, incidents building, reversing so that you apply new information to old assumptions, reimagine as you imagine. The Hudson, like the Thames, is a tidal river, and it flows both ways depending on the moods of the tides. Twain’s recountings start with his offhand observation of a stag in the river, and then the discovery of mermaid on his boat.

My husband called the art here “sophomoric” because he’s a jackass, but I do see his point. Twain is rendered almost naively, his big round eyes and unruly hair under his captain’s hat offset by his almost Puritanically dark figure. The mermaid – her name is unpronounceable, but translates to South – is both fishily sticky and voluptuously sexy. They enact their doom on the charcoal canvass of Industrial Revolution America, all smog and late evening. It took me a while to cotton to Twain’s rendering – why so cartoonish, so simple? – but I eventually dug it for its childlike lack of wonder, its earnest simplicity.

[Image removed]

I’m waiting for someone to flag this image, because Goodreads has a no nudity clause (something which I generally agree with – the pornbots are bad enough without encouragement) and I’m pretty sure that’s a nipple slip there. But it gets really tricky with creatures like mermaids. Their strange unconsummated sexuality is the seam of their existence – it’s what holds them together. The mermaid in Sailor Twainis bare-breasted in most of the panels she occurs, and it is frustrating me no end that I can’t replicate them here. I went and dug around the history of the Starbucks mermaid for a while this morning – I knew she had run into trouble in places like Saudi Arabia and with Christian groups for doing things like having breasts and being a woman-ish creature.

Now I’m just being a scofflaw.

Like the strange Starbucks mermaid with her fishy “legs”, there are a lot of doubled storylines and doppelgangers – Twain’s wife convalescing from some unnamed illness that has her legs tucked unworking into a blanketed wheelchair, her church solo like the siren song of the mermaid, but pious and tamed. Siegel makes use of all the metaphorical possibilities of a steamer captain named Twain – so much so, that I occasionally laughed at how they were deployed. But I think I was supposed to in these little odd moments of levity. Mark Twain himself wasn’t afraid of the narrative wink – although his tended to be whole body gestures.

I pretty much loved this story because I love inevitable tragedy – mermaid stories never end well – and doppelgangers, and Industrial Revolution America, and strange sublimated sexuality and doom. I love it like watching sea lions in an enclosure thousands of miles from the sea.