More about the Squonk

 Season 2, Episode 9: The Squonk

The squonk is a fearsome critter from American folklore.  The earliest written account of the squonk is from William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods--a book from which I take a lot of monsters.  The squonk lives in the forests of northern Pennsylvania, and it's one of the many creatures that arise out of lumberjack tall tales.  Lumberjacks' jobs were grueling and dangerous, and they were isolated out in the forests.  Out in the wilderness with physically taxing jobs and no women-folk around, they did a lot of manly man activities like cutting down trees and wrestling and spitting.  And since they were such manly men, their story telling had a competitive edge where they would constantly one-up each other. 

Paul Bunyun was so big--How big was he?--He was so big that it took four storks to deliver him when he was born!

Paul Bunyun was so big that when he was three weeks old, he rolled around too much and knocked down five acres of timber!

They told stories to entertain on nights they were too exhausted to arm wrestle, but also to give some explanation to the mysterious tragedies that took place around them. Jeff wandered off into the woods and never came back? Eaten by a monster.

The squonk fits in this first category of tall tale.  It doesn't kill or maim or lure people into the woods.  It's just weird and maybe funny if you think about it in a certain light. 

The squonk was so ugly--How ugly was it?--It looked like a pot-bellied pig, but with ill-fitting skin that wrinkled and bunched like a rhino.  It was covered in warts and blemishes and clumpy patches of wiry hair.  It was so ugly that it hid so no one could see it its ugliness.  It was so ugly that it spent all its time crying.

The squonk can avoid capture by crying so hard that it turns into a puddle of tears.  In almost every description of the squonk, it's mentioned that one time some guy caught a squonk in a bag, but by the time he brought it home/back to camp/to is competitor naturalist to prove the squonk's existence, the squonk had turned to liquid.

Even though it arises out of such a manly man tradition, and the squonk's ugliness and its over-exuberant emotions about being so ugly is meant to be a joke, you can guess that I latched onto something else in this story.  People--especially women and especially young women--spend so much emotional labor on worrying about how ugly they are.  Feeling so ugly that you just want to hide and cry constantly?  I've been there.  Feeling like you'll cry so hard, so focused on one single flaw that you might as well just turn into a puddle of tears?  Yeah, I remember junior high. 

There's a lesson in there, which is basically "don't be a squonk."  Don't let your vanity get the best of you.  Don't be so consumed with your perceived ugliness that it's the only thing the "More about the Squonk" post talks about.  But then there's also a lesson in there about not focusing on other people's looks until they feel they have to hide away and lose themselves.

I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

 This week's novel is The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, weird time travel by Stuart Turton.

Our narrator wakes up with amnesia, outside a dilapidated estate, convinced he just witnessed a murder.  Over the course of the day, he learns that all the guests are gathered at the house for a big masquerade ball that night, no one wants to be there, and everyone has secrets. At the end of the evening, he goes to sleep, wakes up, and he's in a the body of a different person, reliving the same day again.  He has eight days to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, and eight hosts from around the estate to help him get different angles on the mystery.

This book must have been such a pain to write.  It's a big tangle of continuity, which can be altered from day to day if the narrator can manage it, but the problem with that is that if he alters it too much, he won't be in the right place to make things happen for his other hosts.  Mysteries pop up and then get solved three days later, and then they turn out to be unrelated to the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle--even though they often solve a different murder.  (So many people are murdered in this book.)

Maybe it was because I was in the midst of trying to tie together all the loose ends in my own novel, and trying to keep track of a million tiny threads, but I could not stop thinking about the process that must have been involved to write this.  My novel had multiple charts of what everyone was up to from one day to the next.  This must have had an Excel spreadsheet and a cork board with strings connections.

I got to wondering if it was good to see the evidence of that process, to see the hand of the author.  It's kind of fun to think about, but it also causes me to feel pity and low level anxiety thinking about what he had to go through.  Maybe this is not a problem other people have or that even I would have if I'd read this a month later.  And the book was still exciting, and it was fun to play along with the mystery and fun to bask in the time loop.

The Stories They Tell: The Legend of Slue-foot Sue

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 4: The Stories The Tell

Episode 3: The Legend of Slue-Foot Sue


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More on Slue-Foot Sue

Season 4, Episode 3: The Legend of Slue-Foot Sue

The stories of Pecos Bill are what's known as "fakelore."  A guy named Tex O'Reily claimed that he had collected stories about Pecos Bill, which were told by cowboys (much in the same way stories were told about Paul Bunyun by loggers) in the Southwest during westward expansion.  However, there weren't any cowboys telling stories about Pecos Bill, and it seems O'Reily made them up and presented them as if they were folklore.

I have to applaud this.

Pecos Bill was a cowboy known for his supernatural riding, roping, and shooting abilities.  Some examples of his adventures: He fell out of his family's covered wagon as an infant and was raised by coyotes until reunited with his human brother, who eventually convinced Bill that he wasn't really a coyote.  He roped and rode a tornado.  His horse was named Widow Maker because no other man could ride him, but then sometimes he rode a cougar instead.  His lasso was a snake named Shake.  And so on.  I like Pecos Bill stories.  They're all really silly.

I based this episode on the time Pecos Bill met Slue-Foot Sue.  And that goes like this:
Pecos Bill was camped by the Red River when Slue-Foot Sue rode by on a giant catfish.  Pecos Bill was so impressed that he proposed on the spot and shortly thereafter they got married.  As soon as they got married though, she asked her groom to do her a favor, and he said, "Anything!" and she said, "Let me ride your horse."  Now, as I said, Pecos Bill's horse was the wildest horse ever, and Pecos Bill was the only one who could ride him without being killed.  So it was with a heavy heart that he let Slue-Foot Sue ride the horse.  The horse immediately bucked her so high she bumped her head on the moon (or had to duck to avoid hitting the moon).  Now, since she was in her big, poofy wedding dress, when she hit the ground again she bounced, and just kept on bouncing for days and days, crying and screaming the whole time.  One version of the story says that Pecos Bill lassoed her down, rescuing her, but she was so shaken that she refused to ever see Pecos Bill again and demanded an annulment.  Another version said that after two weeks of not eating, Slue-Foot Sue was on the verge of starving to death, and Pecos Bill shot her to put her out of her misery.  Yet another says that she actually landed on the moon and lives there now, and coyotes howl at the moon in remembrance.  Whichever way, Pecos Bill never loved again.

I think that's a pretty raw deal narratively for someone skilled enough to ride a giant catfish to get bucked off the horse immediately and then cry about it.  Something about it doesn't make sense to me.  I feel like she should dust herself off and say, "That is truly the greatest horse."  Or if she were to cry, it would be from embarrassment rather than from the trauma of bouncing in a big, poofy dress.  Something is fishy here, and I started thinking how maybe someone adjusted the story and why they would do that.  Who would gain from Slue-Foot Sue's portrayal as a damsel in distress?

I read Spinning Silver

This week, I read Spinning Silver, the latest fantasy novel from Naomi Novik, who wrote the tremendous Uprooted.

Miryem's father is a money lender, who is so bad at collecting debts that his family lives in poverty.  When Miryem takes over the family business and ends up doing a great job, she doesn't understand why her parents are so heartbroken when she can turn silver into gold--you know, figuratively.  But the Styrk--winter monsters who hunt the forest--don't understand metaphors and set Miryem the task of turning a chest of silver into gold for them.  Or else.

This story is told from the point of view of several people you meet throughout the story, mostly girls Miryem's age who bring the reader through several plot lines.  it's a compelling story in terms of plot, but my favorite part was watching different characters deal with the same issues from different angles.  Miryem is dedicated to making deals and following through on them, as are the Styrk.  The Styrk make bargains and get offended if the bargain you offer doesn't seem fair, even though their sense of fairness seems unreasonable to humans.  They make deals so they will never be in someone else's debt, so acts of kindness and thanking someone for following through on their part in a bargain are seen as offensive because these put them in your debt.  So the way Miryem and the Styrk both make and handle bargains is interesting.

But even more interesting is when Wanda, who works at Miryem's house to pay off her father's debt and who has a terrible home life, also hates to accept acts of kindness.  When Miryem's family offers her anything, she thinks this must put her further in their debt.  She's surprisingly okay with being in their debt, because every day she spends at their house cleaning is a day that she's not at home.  This interest in being in debt and the mistreatment she gets at home feeds into her misunderstanding of basic kindness.  In this way she's like the Styrk too.

I also really like it that Miryem's family is Jewish. Even in this completely fictional world with magic and demons.  They're not even a lightly veiled allegory for Jewish.  No, they're straight up no work on shabbat, praying over challah, dealing with antisemitism Jewish.  People give a lot of crap to second-world fantasy stories that hold on to aspects of our world, (Except the patriarchy.  We have to keep the patriarchy or it wouldn't be realistic!) so including a real world religion is a bold move and an important move, and I love it.

More on Unicorns

 Season 2, Episode 1: The Wooded Island

Unicorn stories are all over the place.  Unicorns have appeared in stories and on artifacts for millennia.  There are unicorn-like animals in the folklore of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.  With a history this long and stretched over such a large area, it's not surprising that there's no one common story of what a unicorn is or what it does.  The episode "The Wooded Island" focuses on more European interpretations of this creature, so I'll mostly be talking about that in this post.  However, I hope someday to write about the kirin or the shadhavar or the okapi. (One of these things is not like the others.)

For the most part, unicorns are horse-like (although some look like goats) with a long, spiraling horn coming out of their foreheads.  The horn has all sorts of magical properties like being able to cure illnesses and clean tainted water.  In Europe, shady merchants used to sell narwhal horns, saying they were unicorn horns, thus convincing people unicorns existed in the wild. 

The Throne Chair of Denmark is said to be made out of unicorn horns

This emphasis on purification ties in with the only way to catch a unicorn: for a virgin to lure it up close so the unicorn will lay its head in her lap, at which point knights would rush out of their hiding places in the woods and kill it.

But towards non-virgins, unicorns were wild and vicious.  They'd use their deadly, powerful horns to impale people.  Not only that, but they refused to be captured to the point where if capture were imminent, they would throw themselves off a cliff and land so that they impaled themselves on their horn.  Since they'd rather die than be captured, they became an important symbol in Scottish heraldry.  

Both the emphasis on purity and the gruesome horn stabbings have taken a back seat in contemporary American folklore about the unicorn, which now focuses more on the unicorn's cuteness and ability to fart rainbows. 

Visiting my dad over Christmas, he'd bought a unicorn coloring book to keep my three-year-old son occupied.  My favorite page was of a donkey with braces and a unicorn horn.  My second favorite page was an iced doughnut with sprinkles and a unicorn horn.  I think I might prefer this Lisa Frank-esque version to the version that's a terrifying stab monsters who slut-shames.

My favorite unicorn story of all time is a chapter in the Once and Future King (Book 2, Chapter 7) where Queen Morgause arranges a unicorn hunt for the visiting King Pellinore, who is feeling down.  Morgause announces that she's going to be the virginal bait, despite the fact that the chapter follows the adventures of her four sons.  Pellinore knows better than to point out any flaws in this plan.  The boys, suspicious of the visitors, decide they're going to catch their own unicorn.

Also of note is the Shel Silverstein poem/song "The Unicorn," which explains how there are no unicorns today because they didn't show up to board Noah's arc.

More on the Twelve Dancing Princesses

The Twelve Dancing Princesses is a fairy tale.  Like many fairy tales, there are different versions, but I based this episode on the one collected by the Grimm Brothers.  That version is in the public domain, and you can read it for yourself here. 

Here's how it goes:

A king has twelve daughters, who lately have been sleeping well into the afternoon and turning up with their shoes worn to pieces.  Even when he locks them all in their communal bedroom, they still seem to be getting out to go dancing.  He really wants to know where they go, but apparently doesn't ask the daughters, or maybe he does and they refuse to tell him and the Grimm Brothers didn't find it necessary to put it into the story.  The king offers a reward that if anyone can figure out where the princesses go, they can marry one of the daughters.  But if the suitor doesn't figure it out within three days, he'll be beheaded.  So a bunch of guys try, and they all get beheaded one after another.  One day, there's an old soldier walking through the woods when he comes upon a woman who's obviously a witch.  She says, "Where are you going?" and he says, "I was going to go try to figure out where the princesses are going."  And she says, "Well, take this cloak of invisibility.  And also don't eat or drink anything the princesses offer you.  Good luck!"  When he gets to the castle, and announces he wants to figure out where the princesses go, the oldest princess offers him some wine.  He thanks her and pretends to drink it.  Then he pretends to pass out.  Pleased with themselves, as soon as they're locked in their room the princesses open up a secret passageway behind the oldest sister's bed. 

I guess the old soldier was staying in their room, and that's how he saw this and was able to follow them into the tunnel even though they were in a locked room.  I also guess this is why all the guys were beheaded: because they'd all spent three nights in the princesses' bedroom?  It's unclear.

So the soldier puts on his invisibility cloak and follows them.  First they go through a cave of silver tress, then a cave of gold trees, then a cave of diamond trees.  The whole way, the youngest princess thinks she hears someone following them, but the oldest princess tells her she's being paranoid, and they keep walking.  They get to a magical lake where a fleet of boats comes up, each boat piloted by a prince.  The princes take the princesses to a magical castle where they dance all night until their shoes get worn out.  The old soldier snaps off some branches from the magic trees and then steals a golden goblet from the party, and when he announces to the king where the princesses are going at night, he presents these as proof.  The king asks which princess he wants to marry, and he says the oldest, because he's pretty old himself.

I guess he didn't mind that she'd tried to drug him.  I guess it doesn't matter whether or not she has any thoughts on this situation.

I also guess the king was able to do something to stop these nighttime excursions to a magical dance castle, but that's not part of the story.  Or maybe the dad didn't care about the shoes, he just wanted to know what they were up to, and now that he knows the eleven remaining princesses can carry on.  Do the princesses go back to the magic castle minus one sister?  Are they barred from re-entry after being discovered?  If so, do they miss it?  Did their father deny them their only means of escape?  And why did they need an escape in the first place?

The Stories They Tell: The Legend of Margot

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 4: The Stories The Tell

Episode 2: The Legend of Margot


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