Rhetoric and Logic

Hoot-hoooot, hoot-hoooot.

Quick-slow, quick-slow.

High pitch, low pitch.

Instructions for how to download a Youtube video using VLC on Reddit

FIRST LAW: This character must be a woman.

SECOND LAW: This character must be a loser, but not in a way that can be pinned on her gender. Misogynistic response from the audience does not disqualify the character.

THIRD LAW: If the audience does not enjoy this character, then it becomes impossible to enjoy the show/film/book/game altogether. It is not possible to ignore this character, for better or for worse.

More monsters, can you believe it? It’s like I have shelf after shelf of monster books or something.

This is The Beasts of Never (1968), by Georgess McHargue, and, to my knowledge, it’s her first published book. It’s illustrated throughout by Frank Bozzo in expressionistic watercolors that I quite like but would probably not cut it in terms of preconceptions about quality in a similar sort of book today (more’s the pity about modern publishing, honestly). There’s a second expanded edition from 1988 that got nominated for a National Book Award, but there is something about the look of this edition that I prefer. Perhaps it was the fact that it was on my library shelf, though when I was a kid, I wasn’t super interested — that “Never” business was too contrary to my deep wish for monsters, even something like Bigfoot or Nessie, to be real.

She covers Nessie, though, at the end of the book, as a way to suggest perhaps there are monsters out there. Along the way, she also devotes time to dragons, both Eastern and Western, the Phoenix, the Basilisk, the Unicorn and a myriad of creatures of the sky and sea. She is most interested the meaning of the monster, not necessarily in the context of myth or legend, but what it might have meant to a person telling the tale beside a campfire. She ruminates and the book is poetic, even if it isn’t poetry. Speaking of the Phoenix, she says, “We will never find answers which are true in the same way the answers to mathematical problems are true.”

Morgoth and his Lieutenant

"Is this yours?" he asked. "May I borrow it?"

"You want to be a seal?"

"No, but when I take it off, I'll be a woman, right?"

Gilded and etched comb morion from Nuremberg, Germany, circa 1580