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)

Weary of Wonkery

Whether the next four years are spend under an Obama administration or a McCain administration, one thing that may be said with certainty is that conservatives are going to have to do some serious thinking over that time in order to come up with an agenda that can bring conservatives back into political success -- and bring the GOP back into something like conservatism. Either administration will be enough to make principled conservatives cringe -- though I think that an Obama one would visit greater damage upon the country.

There are lots of contenders out there wanting present the new conservative policies that will bring the GOP back to relevance. Ross Douthat is very much at the forefront of that, with his Grand New Party out in bookstores.

And there are plenty of interesting proposals out there from a consumption or flat tax to a per capita income tax to private retirement accounts replacing Social Security to college scholarship programs for public service programs to proposals for a radical overhaul of the US elementary education system. Many of these are interesting, some of them are admirable, and perhaps a few are good ideas. And yet as one combs through all the contenders for the next killer platform plank, a certain weariness sets in, at least for this particular conservative. Because the fact is that policies are not our daily bread. Indeed, ideally, government policies should have fairly little impact on our daily lives. We should be able to go through most days busy with the doings of our families, churches and businesses and not really have it impinge on us often what state or country we live in.

This, it seems to me, is the dilemma of the policy wonk -- and the conservative one in particular. Perhaps this is otherwise for progressives (I leave it to our principled progressive readers to speak to that point) but for conservatives the activities and policies of the state ought not impinge on one's daily life much. The state should keep us from being attacked, but not involve us in unneeded conflicts; help those in desperate need because of natural disaster, unemployment or illness, but not insert itself and its programs into the normal and natural cycle of life, work, education and leisure; enforce laws and punish crimes for the common good, but not seek to proscriptively rule every aspect of citizens lives.

In this regard, the conservative movement is in a difficult position if it seeks to bring itself back to prominence through coming up with exciting new policies that everyone will love, because at a fairly basic level, the remolding society through detailed government policies is fundamentally un-conservative. (And also, I would argue, unrealistic.)

So conservatives are faced with a difficult task as they find their way again and seek to rebuild their movement: We must present a politically attractive and viable message while at the same time convincingly communicating to people that not every problem is a nail for which the federal government is the ideal hammer. This is hard, especially when running for federal office, in that one's message then becomes, "Vote for me. I'll present a vision for our country in which I can't fix all your problems."

When running against someone whose message is essentially, "Vote for me; I can fix all your problems." This requires that one be a much better communicator and a communicate a much more attractive cultural vision than one's opponent. And right now, the opposing candidate is a very good communicator.

[Cross posted]

Warts and all

So I figured it was time to get in shape, what with my sister getting engaged and knowing that I'll need to look svelte in a bridesmaid gown to impress all those people I haven't seen in years. (Darwin says, "What, it's not enough to look good for me?" Sorry, hon.) My plan was to go down to the rec center this weekend and renew my membership and start the sleek-ifying right away.

Actually, I spent this weekend limping around the house, yelping in agony and barely able to walk. Was my malady something romantic like a sprained ankle or an ingrown toenail? No. I suffered from plantar warts.

Even the word "wart" sounds disgusting. It conjures up images of frowsy crones muttering over steaming cauldrons and cackling, "Eat the apple, my pretty!" or "And your little dog too!" Well, I'm not ashamed to say it. Wart. Wart. One on the heel of my right foot, and one on the ball of my left foot.

The podiatrist, a fresh-faced fellow who admired my baby and told me all about his, swabbed something brownish on each spot and told me that by Saturday morning I might feel "a little sore". Understatement of the year, doc. By breakfast time my feet were burning and stinging and stabbing each time I applied any pressure to the afflicted areas (by, say, walking). The girls thought it was delightful that I hobbled around on the ball of one foot and the heel of another, and limped cheerfully around the house in imitation. "Does it hurt, mommy?" asked one, jabbing my heel. My voice rose several octaves. Clearly I had underestimated the importance of the bottom of my feet.

But at least I saved on the gym membership fee, what?

The One Percent Delusion

Last week a co-worker was explaining to me, in veiled terms, his exciting new business plan. "In five years, this will be a $40 billion dollar industry," he told me. "If I could get just one percent of that, I would be a rich man."

The one percent delusion is a common one for the drafter of a business plan -- it's one that I myself suffered from some years back when I was writing a business plan. People fall into it because it sounds so modest. "Only one percent." And yet if the reason one wants to achieve this goal is because capturing one percent of an industry means running a business with annual gross revenues of $400 million, it doesn't make it any easier to get to that $400 million figure that that represents "only one percent" of the industry. One still has to build a $400 million business, and that's very hard.

It occured to me the other night that there's also a personal version of this, which I think might be called the thirty minute delusion. I gazing at my bookshelf and noting all the books which I really ought to read or reread one of these days, I formed in an instant a vision of a system by which I would put together a list of great books that I would read over the year, and devote thirty minutes a day to working through these. Surely I waste thirty minutes in any given day, and yet this is three hours a week (taking Sundays off) and thus 156 hours a year. Think of all the great reading I could do in those 156 hours!

The problem, of course, is that although thirty minutes is a short period of time, and one does indeed waste thirty minutes several times over in any given day, that does not mean that it is actually easy to successfully schedule a thirty minute block in six days a week. The fact that thirty minutes is only 2% of a day does not mean that it comes free.

Certainly, you can pick a couple of activities which you'll fit into a spare thirty minutes here and a spare sixty minutes there. For me, clearly, one of these major ways I spend that time is writing. Bits also go to reading, studying Russian, walking, cycling, etc. But unless you're already massively uncerscheduled you really don't have thirty extra minutes every day to devote to some new project without deprioritizing something else.

Because the period of time (Just thirty minutes!) sounds so short, and because most of us don't actually have a very precise understanding of our schedules, we almost always feel confident that we must have that extra bit of time available somewhere. Sure two or three virtuous thirty-minute-a-day commitments could be added! But it's not so. Just because thirty minutes is only 2% of a day (assuming you never sleep) does not mean that you can simply grab those thirty minutes without cost.

Douglas Adams, Conservative

If someone was to ask me to sum up briefly why I am generally skeptical of government solutions to large social problems, I would be tempted to reply with this section from the original Hitchhikers Guide of the Galaxy radio plays:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

If you haven't heard the original Hitchhikers, or if you did long ago but don't have them on MP3, you can find them here:

http://www.sadena.com/hh/
[Warning: Google says this is a known attack site using javascript vulnerabilities -- though I downloaded the MP3s from here some weeks ago without any problems.]

Efforts to Stem Dropouts

Sorry things have been slow on the posts this week -- things have been getting busier for me at work lately, and I find that the authorial mind is best at producing ideas in whatever are one's mind has been on the most, which for me has been politics lately, resulting in lots of American Catholic posts, but few here.

There was an interesting article earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal about big cities attempt to stem the rising tide of high school dropouts:

According to one study, only half of the high school students in the nation's 50 largest cities are graduating in four years, with a figure as low as 25% in Detroit. And while concern over dropouts isn't new, the problem now has officials outside of public education worried enough to get directly involved.
...
"In a global economy, the single most important issue facing our country is an educated work force," says Houston Mayor Bill White. "Somebody who lacks a high school education will have lifetime earnings that are only about 60% of those of somebody with that education. That's just the impact on personal income. There are the social costs as well."
...
Detroit has the lowest four-year graduation rate in the study, at 25%, according to America's Promise. Officials there are revamping the high schools. So far, the school system has started a high school redesign at five sites. Among the steps being taken are better counseling services and efforts to design curricula at schools in particular locations geared to industries in the same area.

"The number of students are falling away at such a large percentage that you can't point to any one factor or any one solution," says Steve Wasko, spokesman for the school system.

Houston has embarked on a wide-ranging plan, including a program called Reach Out to Dropouts, where volunteers, including Mayor White and school superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, visit the homes of students who haven't returned to school.

Several things struck me reading this:

• It's rather inspiring, in a way, to hear about officials right up to the mayor of a major city taking these issues seriously enough to invest the personal time and effort in going door to door -- though the businessman side of my mind can't help wondering if that's the most effective use of the mayor's time when it comes to reducing dropout rates.


• I suppose I'd be considered a wishful thinker in regards to education -- especially considering the dire straights that many in Detroit and similar cities must already be in by the time they arrive in high school -- but I can think of few prospect more likely to inspire in one the desire to drop out (out of sheer boredom if for no other reason) than a curriculum geared to my local industries. Idealist that I am -- I can't help thinking that the best way to keep people in school is to teach them something interesting.


• To college-educated-America, this must be a nearly invisible problem. I recall being shocked to read that nearly seventy percent of Americans do not have a BA or above. If you'd asked me before, I would have guessed that half of Americans had completed college.

The Sound of Silence

It's struck me on a few occasions lately how little used I am to not having anything to do.

Earlier this today I arrived in a conference room three minutes after the start time for the meeting I was rushing to, and found myself alone. Knowing who else was supposed to attend, I was pretty sure that they would show up eventually, but I had nothing in hand but my cup of coffee -- my laptop and notebook having been left behind at my desk since I didn't think I would need them at the meeting. It was oddly disconcerting to sit there with nothing to do, to read, to listen to for five minutes until people showed up.

I think this effect must especially kick in when one is in a man made environment -- a white walled corporate conference room being a prime example. My car radio died a while back, and since my normal commute (when I use my car -- which due to laziness and tight scheduling is unfortunately most of the time) is under ten minutes, I haven't bothered to get it replaced. But when I have to drive in to Austin or otherwise drive more than ten minutes, I run into exactly the same sort of phenomenon -- with an urge to either call someone or put in one earbud from my iPod or otherwise do something to relieve the silence.

It's not exactly silence that I find difficult. I'd be perfectly happy in a silent conference room with a book to read or an internet connection so I could browse or write. But after a time one becomes used to always having some sort of mental or sensory input. Reading or listening to music or writing or talking or experiencing all the little sights and sounds of the natural outdoors -- all of these provide grist for the mental mill. But that unnatural silence of a blank white room -- or even the instinctual sights, sounds and reflexes of long distance driving -- leave someone used to the constant interaction of the modern world feeling curiously restless.

The Worst Since the Great Depression How?

As the Dow continues on its 8000 to 9500 oscillation/roller coaster, we continue to see more news articles solemnly observing that this is "already worst economic disaster since the Great Depression."

I'm certainly not enjoying the looks of the stock market, and I fear that unemployment and poverty numbers will get worse before they get better. (If you asked me to take a guess -- I'd predict that unemployment will climb, slowly, for about six months before leveling off and going down.) However, the levels of unemployment are unlikely to go much beyond that of 92-93, must less 82-83 when unemployment hit a high of 10%.

The Great Depression comparisons are made because of the large percentage and absolute point drop in the stock market (the high for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was over 14000 in October of last year and it's dipped down into the mid 8000s -- a 40% drop) and the dangers of bank failure.

However, while one doesn't want to sugarcoat our current situation, historical parallels out of context can get irresponsible. The US of the 1930s had an economy far more primitive than our current one. A much larger percentage of the population was involved in small scale farming, and when the sale price of farm produce plummeted, the "dust bowl" hit making it harder to grow food in many parts of the Midwest, and farmers who had been taking out mortgages against their farms in order to meet bills in bad years found themselves unable to meet their payments -- the sudden transition from small scale to large scale farming pushed large numbers of low skilled unemployed workers into cities at exactly the time that unemployment was at a high anyway. Because our country is simply so much richer, and so much more productive, and thus able to produce basic goods and services much more easily, we would not see a human catastrophe on the level of the Great Depression in our modern country without a total governmental and social collapse.

So while it's true that in terms of the percentage decline in the major stock market indices we're seeing the largest financial decline since the great depression, in terms of real social chaos and human suffering we will in no way approach the level of what went on in the 30s.

I suppose it may seem like a pedantic point to those who find themselves struggling to pay the bills right now, but I'm always in favor of keeping a sense of historical perspective.

Mother is not angry, dear.

Life lessons for two-year-olds:

1. This is number one. The most important thing. If you feel like you have to poop, do it in the potty. I cannot stress this enough.

2. If your diaper starts to leak, do not move around. Stay in one place, and I will come to you.

3. If you leak onto the kitchen floor, do not attempt to clean up the mess with a broom.

4. Do not hide your cleaning attempt under a kitchen towel.

5. Do not then step in the other mess, while I'm cleaning up the first, after I told you not to.

Ancillary advice for older sisters: When I ask you to watch the baby while I clean up his big sister, do not make him fly. For my sake, if not for his.

I feel like I'm always harping on the same damn theme.

Failures of Negative Example

Children seem to show a near immunity, at times, to the power of negative example. I recall a girl I knew well growing up who, immediately after reading Harriet The Spy, began a surveillance program listening in to her parents on the other phone -- until she was caught and roundly punished. Somehow the lesson that spying on people had got Harriet into trouble had been lost, and the fascination of eavesdropping and writing things down in a notebook had remained.

In similar vein, MrsDarwin recently attempted to give the girls an illustrative example of how she had, at a very young age, not understood the purpose of the mass, and had thought that she was being left out of a "snack" at communion time. That this was presented in contrast to the truth that we believe it is Christ who becomes present on the altar was lost on the girls, who proceeded to demand repeated: "Mommy, why did you want a snack in mass? Can I have a snack?" Quieting them down in time to actually go to mass proved a challenge. (Note to selves: No creative attempts at catechesis right before mass.)

This seemed odd to me at first given the numbers of fairy tales that center around the horrible consequences visited upon those who go astray. Surely centuries of negative examples would not have been dreamed up if the technique simply did not work upon the young. But as I thought about it, such stories are always simply and clearly constructed: Introduce character, the character makes a fatal mistake, the character suffers grievous consequences. This construction, children seem to understand quite readily.

The difficulty comes when an essentially sympathetic and realistic character does something which is, by adults, intended to be a negative example. If this character does not seem to be an essentially "bad" character, young children seem to have great difficulty in understanding that this is a bad choice and should not be imitated.

The boy who cried wolf can be readily understood as an object lesson for the very reason that there is no more to his character than that he cried wolf. But if that boy were named Brian and there was a whole children's novel about him, in the middle of which he carried out the crying wolf stunt, I suspect that many children would think it sounded like good fun and want to give it a go themselves.

Nasty Canasta

Seeing as posting has been light this week, here's one last classic for your Friday:

A Brief Workday Rant

I am informed that tomorrow is Boss's Day.

As it happens, I like my boss and indeed his boss as well -- but is there any more idiotic example of a Hallmark holiday that "Boss's Day"? At least with the other celebrations like Mothers' Day and Secretaries' Day and Peasants' Day and Political Prisoners' Day we celebrate those whom we forget, neglect or otherwise abuse the rest of the time. But Boss's Day?

Best. Thing. Ever.

You guys.



MY SISTER IS GETTING MARRIED.

Ohio peoples, I'll see you next year.

That is all.

Some American Catholic Highlights

If you haven't yet become a regular of The American Catholic, but enjoy a bit of Darwin political commentary every so often, you might want to check out:

"Preferential Option for the Middle Class?", on how both political parties strive to buy elections by pouring benefits on the middle class.

"Abortion Will Not Go Away", on how outlawing abortion would not end it -- and why we should outlaw it anyway.

and

"The Scary Thing Is, We Really Mean It" on the growing rift between beltway and flyover conservatives.

Also strongly recommended is:

"Humanity Without Limits" by Zach on the dangers of a society where every form of "progress" is seen as not only possible a very nearly a right.

"Tom Cruise, First-Rate Philosopher" by Chris Burgwald -- you'll have to click through to see what lies behind that delightful title.

And a heartwarming story about a Protestant and a rosary by Donald McClarey.