From Gilgamesh to Snow White, from Beowulf to the Pink Panther, every culture has had its myths and legends. But while the props and settings may change, the spirit remains the same, because the spirit is imprinted on our very souls (according to the fossil record, the soul evolved into its present form sometime between 200,000 B.C. and Descartes’s pronouncement “Cogito ergo sum”). Now, for the first time ever, renowned scientist and author Robert Pritchard goes deep undercover to bring you the secrets of narrative hard-wired into every human brain. In his forthcoming tome, he reveals the seven basic plots to which all stories, no matter how outré, must conform. So come, Mesdames et Messieurs, on a magic carpet ride to find the secrets behind “Once upon a time. . .” Read more
The Seven Basic Plots
I wrote this the other day, intending to polish it later, but on further examination of the SBP book, I don’t feel the book is worth the investment. Here, therefore, is an unfinished polemic.
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In 2004 Christopher Booker, a British journalist, published The Seven Basic Plots, a book that purports to show that all stories conform to one or more of seven basic archetypes. Everything is either Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Rebirth, or a combination. (There are also two auxiliary plots: Rebellion and Mystery, bringing the total to nine.) Aside from some of these being rather broad, one of the biggest problems is he’s never entirely clear if he’s saying that other types of stories can’t be written or that, if written, they will not be “resonant.” Read more
Fingerprints of the Secret Masters
The scene: a lavish corner office, at night, high above the sparkling lights of Manhattan. Everybody else has gone home, but one man remains. He is David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker. He paces, chews his nails; perhaps he smokes, stubbing out on cigarette after another, filling up the ashtray.
The phone rings. Remnick answers it. “Hello?”
The voice on the other end is digitally altered. “Mr. Remnick.”
“This is he, sir.”
“George Balanchine. You know him?” Read more
Pritchardian Exceptionalism
My fellow Americans, I am a firm believer in Pritchardian exceptionalism. As the greatest individual in the world, I have unique responsibilities and moral obligations. Responsibilities and obligations you probably don’t understand, as you are not as great as I. That’s why some have questioned my recent action of pushing a fourth-grader to the ground when he tried to take the last slice of quiche at a funeral last week. Hence, I’d like to take a moment to explain what I’ve done, what I plan to do, and why this matters to me.
When my interests and values are at stake, I have a responsibility to act. As the most indispensable person in the world, if I am weakened in any way, all hope is lost. Such was the situation that confronted us when little Jonathan reached for the quiche. I wasn’t really hungry, but I knew if I didn’t eat something I might become hungry later. True, I had already eaten six of the eight slices, but I wanted another. It was no selfishness that drove me, but an honest appraisal of the necessity of me having one more slice.
Some would claim that because it was his grandmother in the casket, I should have simply let him have the quiche. Some would say I wasn’t entitled to the food at all, as I didn’t know the deceased or any of the bereaved and had in fact merely wandered into the funeral home to use the bathroom. Clearly they are not as exceptional as I. The truth is I would not be living up to my sacred and moral obligation to continue to live and eat if I did not use all necessary measures.
Some have criticized me for excessive force. But truly, one must ask oneself, was not the amount of force used, if anything, the very essence of restraint? This time-limited, scope-limited physical action was judiciously conceived and executed, in less than one second. Besides, I think Jonathan is milking that elbow injury.
Ask yourself, if what I did was so bad, who would you rather have done it? The Chinese? The Russians? You’re lucky I was the one to shove little Jonathan, because they would have shoved him much harder.
Also, I happen to know that Jonathan is a bad little boy. Even though his grandmother just passed away, I detected that he wasn’t crying with enough fervor. How could he even think of eating at a time like that? In fact, that I should have shoved him aside on my way to the buffet table is truly karmic, an act of divine justice, of the naturally self-correcting mechanism of the cosmos.
I know there are those who would seek to blame a Pritchard first. These elitists, acting from a deep-seated hatred of me, would deny that I am the greatest force for good the world has ever known. They see me, it seems, as being somehow imperfect. This is wrong. The crux of the issue is this: we must never accept any limit on the right of me to do whatever I want. Anyone who apologizes for my actions is only giving aid and comfort to my enemies.
Thank you. God bless you, and may God bless me and keep me safe. (Cue for applause.)
Goldfarb Chooses an Angel
Goldfarb leafed through the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and debated, which of the models should he fantasize about while masturbating? First he went through the catalogue quickly, giving each model a brief but fair appraisal, and noting with a tick made with a red felt tip pen in the corner of each glossy page the ones he thought the most promising. Then he returned to the first page and went through the catalogue again slowly, looking at all the models but paying special attention to the ones he had marked. Read more
Life and Times of the “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” Bro
If, years ago, you had told me that I, a mild-mannered bro, would someday become a minor celebrity for my star-making, Three’s Company-esque turn as the unemployed stoner housemate of Gary Sinise in the Kevin Costner witchcraft trials and then, later, for being tased by security guards at a forum with John Kerry at the University of Florida, I would have said, “You’re crazy,” and “Who’s John Kerry?” Yet I swear, everything I have written here is 100% true, except for this sentence.
I had just come off a widely praised Broadway revival of The Importance of Being Ernest, having been singled out for my “transformational*” (*Nathan Lane) performance as Bunbury. Read more
Tales of Mystery
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We [Blank] You
Do you have a moment? Let’s step over here so we won’t be disturbed. Y’know, a lot of people around here have been noticing what you’ve been doing, and I just want to let you know how much we—excuse me, I have to take this. Hello? Yes, nothing is in the intellect which is not first in the senses. No, cut the green wire, don’t cut the red one. Goodbye. Now where were we? Ah yes, I was just saying how we all really—just one second. Jimmy, hail fellow, well met! Just chilling with my peeps. You know Jimmy, right? Hey, what about them Steelers? You know it, my man. Catch you later. Anyway, we all feel that you’re—is that man over there wearing a brown belt with black shoes? Excuse me, hello I say, are you wearing a brown belt with black shoes? That, sir, is a faux pas. Well, same to you. Listen, we wanted to say that we think you—y’know, in the Jonny Quest episode “The Devil’s Tower,” when Dr. Quest gets out of the plane on top of the plateau, he takes a rifle with him, but the gun is never seen or mentioned again. It just disappears. That always bothered me. Wait, was I about to say something to you? Why are you standing there with that look on your face? Do I know you? No, I will not give you a quarter. Read more
Russell Brand Does Not Exist
Some of you may have caught British comedian and actor Russell Brand’s cameo on The Simpsons on February 20. What you may not have known is that the yellow “Simpsonized” cartoon image of Brand is, in fact, his original form. The truth is that Russell Brand has no more reality than does Bart Simpson.
My friends, we have been victims of a hoax of mammoth proportions—Russell Brand does not exist. The planes of his face, too smooth to be human, and the raster graphics of his tangled hair, unmistakably identify him as a simulacrum, an image conjured up by a computer. In the following photographs, I will take you step by step through the irrefutable evidence that shows that Russell Brand is an animated computer-generated construct, like Schrek. However, unlike Schrek, Russell Brand is infecting everything around him with his essential unreality. Read more
Unter Klaus und Dunkelnacht.
“Unter Klaus, Unter Klaus, keep me safe.”
Your first Dunkelnacht. Papa helped you move your bedding but you took your favorite carved soldiers, holding them close enough to leave red spots where their edges pressed. The stone room is not as cold as the house above, but it is vastly more frightening. Down here passages cut through stone the way you cut through snowdrifts in winter. But no sun glows here, nor ever has. This is the land of the broken kobolds.
The stone room with your bed is brightly lit and the two doors have heavy bars. The buzzing scent of kerosene cuts through smoke and must. You don’t want to leave the room, but you have a task to do before you can go to bed.
Taking your papa’s glass outside you follow the rope down into darkness. You stand at the edge of the lantern light and look into the blackness, trying your best to walk forward. The kobolds are down there. Papa told you Unter Klaus would not let them get you so long as you’re a good boy, but what if you’ve done something wrong that you don’t know about? You’ve often been paddled for things you didn’t understand. When you turn your head you can see your breath clouding in the wan light.
“Unter Klaus, Unter Klaus, keep me safe!”
Squeezing the glass tight you step into the darkness, running the rope over your forearm until ten long steps in you find the spigot. The water that gushes out is icy cold and stinks terribly of metal. With all your will you force yourself to walk one foot at a time back to your room. You imagine the kobolds watching you in the dark with shining black eyes and your feet hiccup into a run. Only a little water spills.
You bar the door, still catching air in desperate gasps, still certain that the tiny feet of kobolds are filling your footprints.
Maulwurfstein is a small town straddling the border of Saarpfalz and Saarbrücken, themselves small districts sitting on the border of France in southwest Germany. You could say that the region has been politically active1 in much the same way that you can say that Mauna Loa is geologically active. The districts and towns have been traded back and forth between dukes and potentates for hundreds of years.
The exact date of the founding of Maulwurfstein — literally Mole Stone — is unknown, but its above-ground portions were built in the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire2. Based on markings in the underground it housed the Celts before the Roman invasion and the tunnels themselves might predate that.
The village of Maulwurfstein exists as two connected but separate towns. At one time the under town served as a way station for coal miners. The locals believed that the mines were inhabited by terrifying broken kobolds who kidnapped miners and took their place above ground in order to sire half-human children. All miners endured four days in the under town before they were allowed back into the village above.
In modern times the under town serves as a tourist attraction and cultural center. A gift shop sells locally crafted kitsch — hard candies, carved houses and kobolds and a wide variety of Unter Klaus dolls.
Every year on December 24th, Dunkelnacht festivities begin in the above town and wend their way into the tunnels and rooms below. Now there are tour guides for out-of-towners and even a couple of stone rooms to that you can rent.
A hundred and fifty years ago it was a more solemn affair. All the boys above the age of five were expected to spend the night alone in one of the family’s stone rooms.
They were given strict instructions to collect a cup of waste water, bar their room and put out all the lights. Good boys could count on Unter Klaus to protect them from the kobolds. The creatures were described in folklore as meter-high men with skin like anthracite and a ragged hole in their chest. Typical mine kobolds had a bright light where their heart would be3, but the broken kobolds had only the cavity where light had been. They whispered in the dark of the mines, even when they were being worked by miners. Only Unter Klaus could keep them at bay. Bad boys were not protected.
A good boy would find a cup of clean water where the arsenic-poisoned waste water had been. A bad boy would wake to a tug on his ankle. String tied by Unter Klaus trailed deep into the kobold tunnels. The tug meant they’d found it and were following the trail up to the secret door in the boy’s room. Once Unter Klaus tied them, the boys would be frozen in their beds and unable to light a lantern or candle. They could only wait in the dark for tiny cold hands to pull them away from home and hearth.
It was the great commercial illustrator Thomas Nast4 who fixed the popular image of Santa Claus as a figure of folklore and advertising in the American consciousness. The man invented huge swathes of visual metaphor that persist now a hundred years later. His iconic representations have remained a part of the national psyche, from Uncle Sam to the Donkey and Elephant. Before Nast drew Santa Claus, he was more likely to be seen as a lanky man in a ragged coat.
Gerhard Buell, another German immigrant, attempted to bring his childhood Christmas figure to the United States only a few years after Nast’s first Santa Claus on the cover of Harper’s Weekly. On December 20th, 1867 Buell illustrated a story for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. His Unter Klaus appeared as a spidery half-man with stick-like arms and legs, long claws and the arched back of an angry cat. Unter Klaus, lit by the lantern of a terrified child, held a squirming kobold against the floor with one foot while preparing to tear its throat out. Held daintily above the fray is a cup of water.
“That is no jultomten! Why you are printing monsters for Jul?”
“When I was five, I saw Kertasníkir5 stealing the candles. This creature you have drawn is wrong.”
The story and its illustration were not popular. Shortly after publication, Buell and his three brothers returned to Germany.
With the covers pulled up tight you shutter the lantern and the room vanishes. In the dark your bedclothes shield you from the steel-eyes of the kobolds. You pull the covers over your head, but they are too warm for the stone room and soon the wet heat of your breath makes you pull them down again. Are the shapes moving within the blackness in your eyes or in the room? You rub your face and press on your eyes. The pressure makes green-purple trails through the darkness.
The fear is exhausting.
Down here, the darkness and silence are absolute. You can feel yourself floating. The emptiness becomes the surface of a lake, holding you up, drifting you. The darkness flows and drips. The sound growing louder and louder until you realize it is not a dream. It is a sound in the room with you.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
“Unter Klaus, Unter Klaus, keep me safe!”
Or is that a drip? You can’t tell. It could be something tapping very slowly. There’s a terrible scraping sound from the foot of your bed.
You know where the lantern is but you do not dare reach out for it. Whatever is there in the dark might be able to see you. So you hold as still as you can.
There is a sound like crunching through ice crust on deep snow, a hiss and a rumbling laugh.
Unable to stop yourself, you reach a shaking hand for the lantern and slide back its mantle.
- See History of Saarland.
- The Holy Roman Empire: Germany, from Flags of the World.
- Britten, Emma Hardinge – Ninteenth Century Miracles Page 32.
- From the Thomas Nast portfolio at the awesome Ohio State University Cartoon Library & Museum, Santa Claus in Camp.
- The Candle Beggar, from the Icelandic tradition of Yule Lads
Sarah Palin is. . . Modesty Blaise
It was a warm day in Washington DC, but Glenn Beck was perfectly comfortable in a dove-gray Ermenegildo Zegna suit, Brooks Brothers shirt, and Pierre Cardin tie as he stepped into the elevator and inserted the key that gave access to the 150th floor of the Vulpine Inc. skyscraper, which afforded sweeping views of the DC metro area. Whenever his thoughts turned to Modesty Palin, he was filled with admiration and awe. Here was a woman who, with only the help of John McCain and Rupert Murdoch, had clawed her way to the top of an organization spanning several continents. Read more