Have a horrifying Halloween

Halloween.  (Or, as we were taught to spell it in school, Hallowe'en.)  The eve (e'en) of All Hallows Day, or as we now call it -- when we call it at all -- All Saints Day.

A time, traditionally, when bad things came out of the woodwork. Remember "Night on Bald Mountain," as interpreted by Disney's Fantasia?  Disney at least got the tradition right, as the Satanic Halloween orgies expressed through Mussorgsky's music segued with dawn into the purity of Schubert's "Ave Maria."

Halloween in later years became a day for kids to go trick or treating and to scare themselves visiting grave yards and haunted houses.  In our own time, adults also have gotten into the act.  I can't imagine any adult dressing up in a Dracula costume when I was a kid, but, nowadays, grown-up gotta have fun, too.

So what does the well-dressed adult Halloween reveler wear these days?  According to USA Today, the ten most popular costumes for adults are:

1.  Harley Quinn
2.  A character from Star Wars 
3.  A super-hero ("Take your pick and find some Lycra.")
4.  Pirate
5.  Batman (I guess he wasn't a super-hero)
6.  Minnie Mouse (?!)
7.  Witch
8.  Minions
9.  The Joker
10.  Wonder Woman  (see comment to #5)

Well, I have no idea who Numero Uno, Harley Quinn, might be, let alone #8 Minions.  But I dressed up as #7 Batman when I was about ten, so I can see the appeal there. 

But shouldn't there be a greater representation of the supernatural, the spirits that traditionally come out to play once a year?  No ghosts?  No one wants to just throw a sheet over his or her head?  I guess nowadays, everyone would rather be a pop culture figure than Frankenstein's monster or a dancing skeleton.

But #7, the Witch, represents the true spirit of Halloween.  Not the misunderstood and heroic witches of The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight, which I reviewed earlier in the month.  But witches as they were perceived by those who lived in fear of them.

I'm talking, for example, of the 19 witches who were hanged in Salem in 1692, as described in an article in this month's Smithsonian magazine.  The colonial prosecution's prime witness alleged that witches flew through the skies at night, and had animal "familiars," including "translucent cats."

She had seen a hog, a great black dog, a red cat, a black cat, a yellow bird and a hairy creature that walked on two legs.  Another animal had turned up too.  She did not know what it was called and found it difficult to describe, but it had "wings and two legs and a head like a woman."  A canary accompanied her visitor.

Now these were true terrors, something that made your skin prickle and your hair stand on end, if you lived in a tiny Massachusetts village surrounded by the howling wilderness.

I suggest to you that Minnie Mouse and the Joker and Luke Skywalker don't embody the true spirit of Halloween, the seeing of things unseen and the fear of Evil with a capital E.

So I was relieved to see that witch costumes were still in vogue.  Until I read the suggestions for appropriate witching dress:

What you need: Anything goes. The witch costume is a classic, in part, for its versatility. Go seamlessly from cleaning to trick-or-treating (carry that broom right out the door!). Go old-school with green face paint or a wart. Go low-maintenance by not plucking that chin hair. Pointy hat and striped socks are a plus.

Gentlemen, you make a farce of witchcraft, and a travesty of the true spirit of Halloween.  May you wander drunkenly by accident into a graveyard at midnight and stub your toe on a tombstone beside an open grave. 

Feel free in that moment of truth to exorcise your fear and horror by irony and whimsical utterances.  If you're still capable of speech. 

Leitmotifs in New York

Central Park

As a teenager, when I first began listening to classical music, I far preferred bombast to subtlety. Themes from Wagner were therefore high on my list of preferences, including, of course, the overture to Tannhäuser.  But opera was still an unknown land, and these stirring themes were largely divorced in my mind from the operas for which they were written.

I had the opportunity this past weekend, during a brief visit to New York, to attend the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Tannhäuser. While Wagner might have devised a more compelling illustration of the conflict between sacred and profane love than a minstrel's inability to choose between enjoyment of eternal subterranean orgies with Venus on the one hand, and high-minded and musically uplifting raptures with the Blessed Virgin on the other -- still it was an impressive, memorable, and certainly musically stirring experience. 

The opera's various musical themes, including that of my beloved overture, kept running through my mind for the rest of the weekend.

That evening was topped off, after 4½ hours of musical exaltation, by my discovery that my alma mater's football team was ahead by 17 points at half time on the West Coast.  A more contemporary contrast between the sacred and the profane, perhaps.  But I grab happiness wherever I can find it.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn

I make these quickie jaunts to New York fairly frequently.  I've seen most of the major tourist destinations, but I now enjoy just immersing myself for a few days in a world that is similar to the Northwest Corner's (as opposed to, say, Mumbai), but just different enough to be interesting. 

In a constant quest for affordable housing, I keep seeking hotels ever farther north, but still within my favorite part of the city, the Upper West Side.  I was up to W. 95th this time, an area of the Upper West Side that is only slightly less opulent than that twenty blocks farther downtown.  Same small, interesting shops, same busy sidewalk life, same well-dressed, well-behaved children walking hand-in-hand with a parent on their way to school.  

Brooklyn Bridge
Pedestrian deck

Sunday, I walked from my hotel up to Columbia University.  I wandered around for a while in that attractive Ivy League school, its (for the most part) traditionally-styled architecture sequestered from the urban world about it by a fence with open (but guarded) gates . 

I then re-walked the High Line from the just-opened No. 7 subway stop at Hudson Yards (behind Penn Station) down to 14th Street in Chelsea.  The High Line's landscaping is growing ever more mature and attractive, but the crowds of tourists are becoming ever more oppressive as it becomes a "must-see" destination.  And the on-going construction around the High Line -- in what had been a somewhat derelict post-industrial area of town -- is truly amazing, illustrating how public works of this sort can attract private investment in surrounding residential and office construction.

I spent a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum, in the 19th and 20th century paintings area. Later, I did my traditional tramping about and photography in Central Park, and did similar walking and clicking in a return visit to Brooklyn's equally beautiful Prospect Park.  I didn't walk across the Brooklyn bridge this time, but I did stroll out as far as the tower on the Manhattan end of the bridge to take a couple of photos.

In addition to all of this walking, I plowed a substantial amount of money into the MTA subway system, enjoying not only the convenient travel but my observations of my fellow passengers -- "a million stories waiting to be told."  You may recall my review a few years ago of Lowboy, a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who essentially lived on the New York subway, learning all of its moods and secrets intimately.  Hey, I could do that.  You don't have to be crazy to love traveling hither and yon through the subway's labyrinthine tunnels.

I don't think.

Eastern European nationalism

Day by day, heart-breaking images of Syrian refugees appear in the newspapers.  Syrian families pour into Europe, reminding us of those photos of immigrant hordes who once passed through Ellis Island.

Why can't today's Europe make room for them, we ask, just as we once made room for refugees from yesterday's Europe?  We understand, of course, that we had (and still have) enormous empty spaces, compared to Europe's far greater population density.  We also are silenced by the noisy opposition expressed by so many Americans to the relatively lesser inflow of Latin American migrants across our own southern border.

But I suspect that Europe has another reason, besides lack of room, for resisting the entry of large numbers of immigrants, especially immigrants pouring in through southeastern and eastern Europe. 

The United States is a nation founded on certain principles:  first, its geographic separation and its fought-for political independence from Britain, and second, self-governance as a democratic republic.  Even in 1776, we were not ethnically homogeneous.  We didn't see ourselves, at least consciously, as a homeland in the western hemisphere for people of British ancestry.

But European nations are all about ethnicity.  Each country's distinct language, customs, religion and/or "blood" are the reasons each nation exists.  A century ago, eastern and southeastern Europe were governed by two cosmopolitan empires -- the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman.  Each granted varying amounts of autonomy to different nations within its empire, but subject to the ultimate sovereignty of the emperor or sultan. 

Beginning at least with the Greek war of independence in 1821, subject nationalities struggled to govern themselves, free of tribute to an imperial government.  "Nationalism" increasingly became the ascendant ideology throughout the nineteenth century, and led eventually to the assassination of an imperial archduke by a Serbian nationalist -- and the beginning of World War I.  At least five of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points dealt with recognition of national sovereignty along ethnic lines.

Yugoslavia was the last entity in Europe to attempt to bridge ethnicities -- and even its ethnicities were all Slavic.  Yugoslavia's breakup in the early 1990s, along with the independence of the three Baltic states, finally accomplished the goal of nation states of single ethnicity throughout the region.

We may not feel that creation of such states is a particularly admirable goal, but -- especially among the more recently created states -- it is a goal for which they had long strived.  Diluting their ethnically uniform populations now with the influx of a large number of new Syrian residents may seem to undo in part that accomplishment.

It's notable that the European nations most certain of their long-time and well-established ethnic unity and sovereignty -- France and Germany -- have been those most willing to accept new residents from Syria.

I have no solution to the Syrian refugee problem.  No one seems to have a solution.  But a feeling for the history of eastern Europe should help us understand fears and emotions of the region's citizens and rulers.  Eastern Europeans are no less caring or empathetic than we in the West; they don't resist helping the suffering Syrians simply out of cruelty or lack of charity.

Now she is six

When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever. 

Maury at 2 weeks

My eldest great niece, Maury, turned six this week.  It hardly seems possible that it's been six years since I posted my first greetings to her, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson's greetings to his godchild.  Or that -- in that blink of an eye -- she has covered almost half the distance from birth to teenager.

If I greeted her birth with words from R.L.S., it seems even more fitting to celebrate her Sixth Birthday with Milne's poem, "The End," from his book of children's poetry, Now We Are Six.  The poem marks "the end" of Milne's book, but only the beginning of Maury's exciting life to come.

Golden autumn

Autumn -- in our poetic tradition -- generally symbolizes waning, aging, ending, a premonition of death.

And yet it's so beautiful.  A beauty not always shared by our own waning and aging human bodies.

I mulled over these thoughts this afternoon while making my daily four-mile walk through and around the University of Washington campus.  We've had a warm year, here in the Northwest Corner, and the warmth has continued into the fall.  A day of rain now and then, finally, but the "rainy season," as we know it in these parts, still hasn't begun.

It was sunny, as I left the house shortly after 3 p.m.  Not the blazing sun we have at that time in summer, but a golden sun filtered through additional layers of atmosphere.  But sunny, nonetheless.  The sky was blue, the sun was gold, and the shadows were already lengthening in mid-afternoon.

I wore a t-shirt and a light sweater, because my phone told me it would be in the mid-50s outside.  But the sun was still warm, and when not in shade I felt a bit overdressed.  Some folks on campus were wearing coats and jackets they probably had grabbed before leaving home in the chilly morning; others were wearing shorts and t-shirts.

The light was golden.  Autumn flowers -- I always forget how many flowers bloom in autumn -- colored the landscape.  Horse chestnuts (buckeyes if you're from the wrong part of the country) rolled underfoot, reminding me of childhood wars and battles.  Leaves on some trees were just beginning to change yellow, pink, red.  The air was crisp, even as the sun was warm -- that same peculiar combination of temperatures one experiences at high altitude. 

The campus was crowded with students.  These days, students' faces display seriousness of purpose combined with displays of quiet friendliness among themselves.  Observing them makes me happy, relieved that whatever future lies ahead probably will be in good hands.

As I often do, I stopped at the coffee shop just inside the front door of Suzzallo library, and ordered a coffee and muffin.  Kids packed the room, drinking coffee, talking, and poring over electronic gadgets in what -- back in my day -- was, as I recall, a "reserve book room" where students were granted short-term checkouts for certain books assigned in classes.  Books to be read in a hushed atmosphere.  In those days, I would have found it incredible that coffee drinking would be not only permitted, but enabled -- on the first floor of Suzzallo. 

After a half hour, I resumed my walk, circling through the dormitory areas on the eastern side of campus, looping back to Suzzallo, and then toward home through the recently renovated Rainier Vista. 

The campus has changed much since I first began graduate school -- but in many ways it has remained remarkably the same.  I enjoyed it in the spring time of my life, and enjoy it even more, perhaps, now in the fall.  I arrived home feeling happy with school, happy with the students, happy with myself -- and happy with the beauty of Seattle in Autumn.

Oliver Sacks, a month before his death this past August, recalled the story of a friend who had gone out for a walk one beautiful day with Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, et al.) -- that same cheerful fellow who directed that his tombstone should be "any colour, so long as it's grey."   Sacks's friend casually asked, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?”

Beckett replied, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.” 

I love the story, but I'm totally with Oliver's friend.  Today, I realized, wasn't an autumn day for worrying about waning or aging.  It was an autumn day that made me supremely grateful to be alive. 

Flying high

Being manipulated by advertisers to buy something I don't really need is nothing new.  At least for me.

But I'm only now getting used to being so manipulated, knowing exactly how I'm being manipulated, accepting the manipulation -- and enjoying it.

Like most airlines, Alaska Airlines has an "MVP" status for flyers who accumulate a certain number of miles on Alaska and on partner airlines with which Alaska has some sort of treaty arrangements.  In recent years, this has been no problem for me.  I travel overseas at least once a year, which in itself -- together with the domestic flying I have to do just to keep in touch with family members -- has given me the necessary miles without my thinking much about it.

In 2014, for example, I traveled round trip from Seattle to Johannesburg on Air France -- an Alaska partner -- which alone gave me nearly all the miles I needed, and at a surprisingly low cost.

That -- and many trips by others like mine -- may have been the final straw.  The airlines are getting wise.  MVP status was intended as a special anointing for their valued business clients -- not a freebie handed out to moochers who used the internet to find low-cost, high-mileage flights for their once-a-year vacations.

As a result,  most of the major airlines have begun awarding elite status based on amount of cash spent rather than miles flown.  Alaska hasn't done that.  Yet.  But its partner airlines are allowing Alaska mileage plan members  only "partial credit" for flights bought at bargain rates.

This year, I flew to London on British Air, and to Beijing on Delta.  Until this year, those two round trips probably would have pushed me into MVP status easily.  But not this year.  British Air gave me only one-fourth of my actual miles flown, and Delta gave me only one-half.  As a result, as 2015 comes to an end, I'm scrambling around for enough miles to continue MVP status next year.

After adding up all the qualifying miles I've earned this year, and those anticipated for my remaining travel, I discover that I'll still fall 610 miles short.  What to do?  If only I needed a one-way trip between Seattle and Oakland -- a frequent destination of mine -- I told myself -- I'd be over the top.

To make a boring and crazy story short, I've booked a December Amtrak trip down to Oakland, arriving in the morning, and flying home that same evening on Alaska.  That will give me my MVP status, and also fulfill my recent craving for a train trip somewhere, anywhere.

What do I get out of this legendary MVP status for which I work so hard?  Not much, really.  I just like the idea, really.  I do get first crack at a certain desirable section of the cabin reserved for MVP flyers (I choose seat 7A whenever possible).  I get early boarding.  I'm allowed to check two bags without paying a fee.  I occasionally get bumped up, at the last moment, into first class -- an always unexpected treat.  I'm yanked out of the sordid cattle car of the rear section into paradise.  Sort of a secular version of the Rapture, I guess.

It ain't much, but I fly fairly often, and just the early boarding -- together with my TSA Pre-check -- takes a lot of the stress out of the experience.  And even if it didn't?  Well, I guess I just enjoy the quest for MVP, a quest that engages my competitive instincts.  I enjoy it,  even though I know it's ridiculous.

Witches in Seattle

Charlie is 15 years old.  He lives a quiet, almost reclusive life just outside a small town in the California Sierra foothills.  He goes to school, he does his homework, he works hard helping Elizabeth, his young single mother, raise and harvest the vegetables that end up on their dinner table.  His family is poor and his social life is limited, but he feels reasonably happy and content.

Then one day, a large dog appears at the door and demands, in good English, "Give me the boy, Elizabeth."  Elizabeth refuses, a fight ensues, and mother and son flee north to Seattle.

Charlie -- understandably, in a state of shock -- quickly finds himself living with an aunt and uncle in a large, upper middle class home in West Seattle, near Alki point with views of the Sound and of the coming and going of the ferries.  He is enrolled in "Puget Academy," a private (fictitious) West Seattle school, where, although excruciatingly shy, he is quickly befriended by Diego, a popular student leader.

Within the first week or two of his arrival in Seattle, he discovers two upsetting facts about himself.  He may be gay.  And he is definitely a witch.

In The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight, Seattle native Jeff Jacobson has written an original and absorbing fantasy novel in a powerfully evoked Pacific Northwest setting.  Charlie learns that "the community" of witches exists everywhere, in every nation, and that he himself is a witch's son.  The community consists mainly of good men and women who simply want to live inconspicuously, keeping their powers to themselves, without bothering or being bothered by others. 

But, as in every group, there are bad apples who use their unusual abilities for evil, and who seek ways to increase their power at the expense of others.

Jacobson's writing is forceful and absorbing.  His main characters are well fleshed out -- not cardboard heroes and villains -- and his descriptions of the natural surroundings in the Northwest are vivid and help carry the plot.  The author himself may well be a "foodie," because meals are described in mouth-watering detail.

Similarities to the Harry Potter books are obvious.  But, to my mind, Jacobson's writing is richer and more sophisticated.  While the Harry Potter saga is a rollicking good adventure, it tends to be a bit cartoonish.  Jacobson's book, on the other hand, entices the reader into almost believing that witches could well exist.  And not only exist, but exist all around us, right here in Seattle -- in West Seattle, Madison Park, Seward Park, Belltown, and the Pike Place Market (all of which serve as locales for the book's action).

Charlie's romance with his school classmate --the relationship between Diego and Charlie teeters for some time between love and friendship -- is serious to the boys, and is treated seriously -- but described lightly and with restraint.  This is more an adventure story than a romance, and Charlie's eventual coming out seems to serve primarily as an occasion for Charlie, a novice witch, to demonstrate his willingness -- despite his shyness -- to be completely honest, honest with others, certainly, but especially honest with himself.

The plot seems to slow a bit around the half-way point, as Charlie is mastering the mumbo jumbo of how to be a witch.  But we do learn with some excitement during these sections how Charlie learns to fly on a broom (yes, despite cell phones, witches aren't entirely creatures of the 21st century). We are told of the aerodynamic qualities of different types of woods, the way in which the "ignition" spell must be recited (not just spoken, but "felt), how to go up and down, steer left and right, and how to handle the occasional air pocket. 

A nighttime training flight by Charlie and his aunt out over Elliot Bay and the Sound, with a quiet broom landing for a picnic on Blake Island, appears breathtakingly idyllic.  I don't recall Harry Potter's quidditch lessons being described as lovingly, or in such realistic detail.

The final quarter of the novel races forward faster and faster, as Charlie and his adult friends within the witch "community" face life and death dangers to themselves, to other witches and their children, and to earth itself.  Charlie is forced to overcome not only his shyness, but his own normal teenage angst, angst that feeds upon and enhances psychic confusion from his encounters with his own newly awakened witchcraft powers and his ability to sense the evil in the minds of his enemies.  The plot reaches a temporary resolution at the novel's conclusion, but the scene has clearly been set for a sequel already being written.

This YA book is appropriate for any kid in middle school or older -- especially for those who find themselves tongue-tied with shyness, or who suspect they might be gay.  Or, of course, for those kids who wonder if they might be witches.  Also appropriate for all you adults who secretly read and loved your children's Harry Potter books whenever the kids were away from the house.