It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

About a month ago a friend of mine slipped me a CD-ROM that had research materials from a ghost tour my department used to run in October. Mostly it was a collection of urban legends surrounding the campus where I teach. My intention was to use it to collect just a couple I could hand out to my students for a group activity. I downloaded all the files to my computer, but had no intention of actually reading all of them.

But then I started opening the files. And even though I had allotted only fifteen minutes to this activity I just couldn’t stop myself. I started opening the file labeled “Dorms”. First I opened all files referencing the dorm where I taught, because, you know, I’m an evil enough teacher to enjoy freaking out my students. That was all well and good, but then out of curiosity I had to check out the dorm where I taught the year before. And then there was that other dorm that I’d heard had creepy stories, but had never heard details…

And it’s not like I could stop with dorms. Because there was a whole folder labeled, “Academic Buildings.” Who doesn’t want to know if a building they’ve been attending classes in was the site of a grisly murder? And if that folder didn’t eat up enough of my time there was a whole folder just for my department. One that contained not only ghost stories themselves, but a chain of emails detailing the investigation that created one of said ghost stories.

But after that I should have stopped. I had plenty of material for my class, I had read about all the buildings with which I had a strong connection. But I was looking for one story in particular: There’s a standard university urban legends about a sorority house where people hear the sounds of babies crying. Everyone thinks it’s just a few people with over active imaginations until a workman doing some maintenance underneath the house uncovers some small bones. It turns out that in an earlier era when unwed pregnancies were not acceptable and abortions not available, sorority girls had hidden unwanted pregnancies and then buried the babies underneath the house to avoid the shame. I’m not sure if this has ever actually happened, but you hear it about nearly every university, and I had heard rumors it was told about at least one sorority at my school. So I wandered into the “Greek” Folder to locate it. Not knowing anything about Greek organizations I had to open all the Sorority and Fraternity folders. I never did find it.

And that’s about when I realized this “quick class prep activity” had sucked up several hours of my time. It was a Time Vampire tailored specifically to my weaknesses.

Would we drink coffee with Johann Gottfried Herder?

Kristy: Well… I spent the morning reading about him for the umpteenth time and historiography really isn’t my thing, so off hand I kind of want to say no. But on the other hand, my academic discipline owes him a huge debt, which means that I owe him a huge debt. Many of his assumptions about the Volk were hugely problematic, but you have to recognize what a huge deal it was at that time for someone to actually see value in their artistic expressions. And I’m particularly interested and impressed by some of his ideas about vernacular languages. Also, it’s hard not to be amused by a guy who was so entranced by reading Ossian that he didn’t notice when the ship he was on nearly sank. (I realize this story is likely apocryphal, rest assured I will ask about it.) So yes, I will share a cup of coffee with the man. I’d be interested to hear how he feels about the present state of ethnology and folklore. I’d like to know how he feels about his legacy–his ideas have led to great things and horrific things. Was it all worth it?

Cammy: Dude, he’s absorbed in all things German which means I would definitely love a chance to pick his brain. It seems like he was trying to boost German self esteem even before they had their current national self esteem problem brought on by the Holocaust. Rather ironic given that his original attempts to bolster some pride in the German language, history and culture was later perverted to justify and support the shit Germany pulled in WWII. Like Kristy, I’d like to have him talk about that one. And, he had a hand in influencing Goethe, which means I owe him coffee since Goethe is to German literature as Shakespeare is to English literature. As far as discussion of Volk, I’m pretty sure I’ll leave that anthropological-folklore-historiography-other-big-academic-words lifting top Kristy, but even then I’m sure I can take something away from listening in.

In ethnomusicology they have a saying:  Radio happened.  It’s basically short hand for pointing out that you can spend all day lamenting the fact that radio interfered with the age old face-to-face methods through which music used to be passed, but it won’t do any good.  The world changed and we need to come up with new ways to study it.  Rather than fighting the radio, we’re better off incorporating it into our studies.

I’ve recently decided we need an equivalent in folklore:  Disney happened.

This became clear to me this week when I was discussing ABC’s new show Once Upon a Time with a colleague.  Now I didn’t find the show to be particularly great; it has more cheese and cliché than are probably helpful.  But keeping in mind that pilots are often the worst episodes of a series, the pilot entertained me enough to make me watch a second episode.  But not so much that I’ve added it to my DVR.  My colleague on the other hand has higher standards.  Her response was, “OMG, it was horrible.  The writing sucks, the acting sucks (I’m not sure they suck worse than most of what you see on TV, but she’s not totally wrong) and OMG they used DISNEY VERSIONS of the fairy tales.”  (Please note: this is a bad paraphrase of what she actually said)

Putting aside her use of the totally non-scholarly term “fairy tales”; she’s not wrong.  They did use a fair amount of imagery and variation that, to my knowledge, is found only in the Disney versions of certain folktales.  For example, Snow White (or her modern day incarnation to be precise) has a bird land on her hand.  (I admitted it was cheesy)  No, that wasn’t in the original.  Except… wait… what was the original?

And here we get to my point:  folk tales have always changed.  Hell, variation across time and space is one of the major things us folklorists study about folk tales.  Given that most folk tales probably circulated in some form in oral tradition long before the earliest written versions we have (there are some who debate any folk origin for folk tales, but… such theories are not widely accepted) it’s a fair bet that what we think of as “the original” form of a given folk tale is not completely accurate.  And if we don’t know what the original is and we know the tales have always evolved, how to do we crucify Disney for continuing the process?

Yes, I understand complaints that Disney sterilized their tales to appeal to modern sensibilities and children (like for example, taking the whole rape-mance out of Sleeping Beauty).  But it’s not like Disney invented that idea either.  That too was a process that goes back at least as far as the Grimm brothers.  When we look at variations in folk tales we generally analyze them as reflections of the particular culture that produced them.  They are a product of when and where they were told and tell us a lot about those cultures.  Like it or not, Disney variants do the same damn thing.  Maybe it’s easy for me to say this because I don’t have the emotional connection to folk tales that a lot of folklorists do.  I never had a collection of Grimms Tales as a kid and I didn’t even watch the cartoon versions very much.  But sometimes distance helps give perspective.

And no matter how sad we think it might be, the Disney versions are the ones most familiar to most Americans today.  So if you’re trying to evoke a folk tale and get a contemporary American audience to recognize it, of course you’re going to reference Disney (unless you’re afraid of getting sued for copyright infringement*).  The fact is that the writers of Once Upon a Time also had to deal with the fact that Disney happened.  If you really want your television show to educate contemporary American audiences on the “real” versions of these stories, that’s great.  But it’s going to take a lot of exposition.  And given the infant mortality rate of primetime shows, who has time for that?

So anyway, while the writing and the acting and the high cheese content may be totally valid complaints about the show, I think we have to let the Disney one go.  It may be sad, but those movies happened and were watched and beloved by many.  We need to accept that and work it into our analyses.

*MTVMPB concedes there are many legitimate reasons to hold a grudge against Disney, most notably their control of our copyright code.

I’m not a purist with much.  I’m not a purist with food.  Generally speaking, the more wacky culinary combinations you come up with, the happier I am.  Cucumber basil lime sorbet?  Yes, please!  Pineapple black bean enchiladas?  Delicious.  I have my limits.  I’m willing to try bacon in my ice cream, but not oysters.  But generally, I’m very flexible.

But I think we all probably have some dish that you just can’t mess with.  Back in college I once made something with red potatoes, I couldn’t even tell you what it was anymore, but I remember Cammy thinking it was a crime against nature.  Her comment on trying my dish was something along the lines of, “It’s good.  But this is not what you’re supposed to do with red potatoes.”  For me a big one is the use of whole wheat tortillas in enchiladas.  Or brown rice or whole wheat pasta in dishes that normally call for their whiter counterparts.  It’s one thing if you make a whole new dish and throw some whole wheat spaghetti in there.  But don’t just throw marinara on there and expect me to not taste the difference.  Then there’s my mother’s tendency to add salsa in dishes where it doesn’t belong.  Like lasagna.  It’s just not right.

Well I discovered a couple weeks ago, that Canadians have a recipe you don’t mess with: Nanaimo Bars.

If you haven’t tried Nanaimo Bars before, let me recommend that you go out and try them right now.  There’s an official recipe online, go try it.  We’ll wait.  They are that good; you don’t want to miss them.  I love Nanaimo Bars, but, of course, being an American, I didn’t grow up with them. I didn’t discover them until I was in my late twenties.  (I first heard about them on a soap opera message board of all places.  Incidentally, new rule: anyone who makes fun of my soap obsession cannot eat my Nanaimo Bars!)  But it seems for Canadians (and I have a whopping sample size of two) they have a special place in their memories.

The first time I made them after coming to Indiana my friend S. walked into a party and gasped, “Who made Nanaimo Bars and can I hug them?”  She practically got misty over them talking about how they were just like the ones her grandmother used to make (her grandmother is from Nanaimo).  I felt all warm and fuzzy at helping her revisit nostalgic memories.

What I didn’t know, because no one told this hapless American, is that you really shouldn’t play around with that recipe.  And here’s the thing: the interwebs are full of all sorts of different flavored Nanaimo Bar recipes.  My Newfie friend sent me a bunch of variations (all folklorists have at least one Newfie friend—Newfies actually care about folklore) from a bakery someone in her family used to own.  So when my friend D threw a tacky party I decided to make Cherry Nanaimo Bars.  They use maraschino cherries, which, let’s face it, are inherently a little tacky, and the middle layer of the bars turns an almost neon pink color, so they look extra tacky.  Also, they are delicious.

Except the reactions from my Canadian friends, S and K were much like Cammy’s response to my red potatoes.  “They’re good, but this is not how you’re supposed to make Nanaimo Bars.” Now I don’t think either was that offended; both ate several.  K’s favorite part is the bottom later, the recipe for which was unchanged.  But you could just tell from their faces they were thinking, “Why would you do that to a Nanaimo Bar?” K informs me that mint ones have become common enough to be acceptable.  But neither had seen cherry ones before and… let’s just say no one asked to hug me for making them.

Clearly in our culinary experimentations, we need to be careful not to tamper with other people’s childhood memories.  No matter how well we do it, they will not thank us.

To make me feel like I’m back in the Midwest, Mother Nature has decided to pelt us with thunderstorms all day and night and I’ve only just felt comfortable turning on the computer to type this, so this will be brief.  Today It’s My TV, It’s My Peanut Butter is going to teach you an important term in folkloristics:  FOAF

You actually know this term, but maybe you don’t know you know it.  It’s one of the defining characteristics of Contemporary Legends (you may call them Urban Legends because maybe you haven’t noticed they don’t always take place in urban locales).  It’s an acronym.   It stands for “Friend of a Friend.”

And by now you’re probably nodding or rolling your eyes at the fact that I actually thought you needed this explained to you.

The importance of the FOAF factor is that Contemporary Legends, in order to have that “keep you up at night with a heavy object by your bed listening for footsteps on the stairs” appeal need to hit close to home.  Things that happen to some random chick a million miles away might be creepy, but not as creepy.

But if they hit too close to home they are too easily proved false.  If you say the event happened to your friend instead of a FOAF inevitably someone’s going to ask “What’s her name?”  Then you either have to make up a friend no one’s ever met or say it happened to an actual friend and hope said friend will play along if questioned.  Or panic under the pressure of being asked about the lie you just told and blurt out, “Foot massage!” thereby ruining the whole thing.  And if you know the story isn’t true it’s far less terrifying.  Which means you’ll be less likely to pass it on to others and the story will die out.  Also, an assertion of truth is a major dividing lines between folktales and legends, so from a scholars perspective it’s very important.  So it doesn’t happen to a friend.  Happens to a FOAF.

So next time you hear or tell that creepy story and assert it happened to a Friend of a Friend, just remember you’re not a cliché.  You’re part of a major socio-cultural phenomenon and somewhere you’ve just made a folklorist very happy.

A woman was driving home alone one night when she noticed a truck tailgaiting her.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, it kept flashing its lights at her.  It started to make her nervous so she turned off the road, hoping to lose him.  The truck followed her and continued flashing its lights.  She made a series of complicated turns but the truck kept following her.  She didn’t know what to do (presumably this was before cellular phones), but she finally drove home, hoping her husband would be able to protect her.   When she pulled in the driveway she honked her horn several times to get her husband’s attention then sprinted to the door.  The truck followed her into the drive as she expected, but to her surprise (and that of her husband who came running out the front door) the driver got out and opened her back door then began hitting something with a baseball bat.  “Call the police!” he ordered the woman.  It turns out there was a man hiding in her backseat.  When the trucker flashed his lights at her it was because the man was raising up a knife to stab her!

Sound familiar?  It’s the urban legend commonly known as “The Killer in the Backseat” and if you’re like me you probably heard it from your slightly paranoid mother around the time you started driving.  But it’s just an urban legend.  Right?

Well… mostly.  In Kokomo, IN last week a woman came out of a convenience store and got in her car, only to be grabbed from behind by a man hiding in her backseat.  The good news is she got away.  The bad news is there’s some evidence the man may have done this before.

But the folklorist in me thought this would be a great time to educate you all about a fun folkloric concept:  Ostension.

Ostension is when someone hears a legend and acts is out in some way.  Put another way: When I told my sister that the “Killer in the Backseat” story was just a legend she said, “Yeah, but you never know who will hear it and get ideas.  I’m still checking my backseat.”

Now it’s not clear whether this was actually ostension or just a crazy guy who hid in a woman’s backseat.  But the point of ostension is to keep in mind that no legend is ever just a legend.

I just finished reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse; a book which is notable mostly for one reason:  It’s the one where Zora meets a zombie.

Nope.  That’s not a metaphor.  This is actually an ethnography in which Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist and author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (a book I hate to an irrational degree.  Rabies?  Seriously?) meets a real live (er… undead?) zombie.  And talks to her.  And takes a photo of her.  It’s in the book.  It nearly gave me nightmares.  (random tangent:  I found out yesterday that Zora Neale Hurston once worked as a librarian at the Air Force Base where I lived as a child.)

I thought this might be a good prompt to give you all a poorly researched and even more poorly cited lesson on the history of zombies.  The Zombie Zora met, Felicia Felix-Mentor, did not eat brains.  She had, however, been dead for twenty-nine years before she was found wandering naked on the side of the road.  No seriously.  I’m not making this up.  Zora may have been, but if she was she did a good job of it.  Felicia was a voodoo zombie.  In voodoo tradition zombies are more exploited undead slaves than mindless brain eating villains.  They’re to be pitied more so than feared (though being made into a zombie is certainly to be feared).  They’re controlled by the person who made them into a zombie and generally wind up being used for menial labor.

So what happened?  How did we get from Felicia Felix-Mentor to Shaun of the Dead?  The answer is fairly obvious:  Hollywood.  When zombies first appeared in films they were a little closer to voodoo tradition.  They stayed in their roles as menial goons which evolved slightly into goons and henchmen.  Then Hollywood did what Hollywood does and sexualized it.  Oh yeah, there was a whole group of B horror movies with zombie sex slaves.  (Random tangent #2:  but in the Middle Ages they thought semen was your brains leaking out.  By that logic zombie sex slaves could do a whole different kind of brain eating.  Ew.)

Our modern, mindless, brain craving, apocalypse causing Zombies are a fairly recent invention in the grand scheme of things.  I feel like it started in the 1960s or 70s, but I’m honestly too lazy to look it up at the moment.

The important lesson I want you to take away from this is:  Your mother lied to you when she told you there was no such thing as zombies.  They’re totally real.  Zora had the pics to prove it.

Would we drink coffee with John Millington Synge?

Kristy: Yes.  Well let’s face it, I kind of have to.  He was a folklorist AND a playwright AND an Irish nationalist.  And right now he seems to be popping up all over my life:  loyal reader and former roommate Bridget was just in one of his plays, I just got assigned to read The Aran Islands and they he popped up in a song one of my colleagues is writing (derived from a Yeats poem).  So I think the universe is telling me I need to have coffee with him.  But honestly, there’s a lot I’d like to talk to him about.  How he became so enamoured of the poor, rural, Catholic population even though he was an educated, urban, Protestant-raised atheist. I’d like to see what he has to say about Ireland now; I think his “kinder, gentler” Irish nationalism would be happy to see the relative peace they enjoy now.  And honestly, I’d like to hear him elaborate on his specific political views since it’s hard not to suspect that some of his political allegiances were based on making the personal connections he needed.  I’d like to be nosy and ask him why he was hung up on  Cherrie Matheson for so many years and who the lady referenced in some of his later letters was.  And not that I know how I could delicately ask this, but I’d love to know at what point he realized he was terminally ill.  The doctors knew for eight years before telling him, but you have to wonder if he was really as clueless as they thought.

Cammy: Erm, sure.  Admittedly, I never heard of the man until just now (perfectly willing to admit my ignorance here), but nothing Kristy’s said (or Wikipedia has told me) has rendered him too disturbing, annoying or offensive to avoid coffee with him.  Sounds like Kristy might elicit some rather interesting (and maybe juicy) conversation from the guy, so as long as she does all the talking, I’m happy to listen (after all, he’s Irish, so if nothing else I can be entertained by the accent).

Today’s time vampire is unknowingly brought to you by loyal reader (and canning/kitchen goddess, check her out) Christina.  Or rather, she brought it to me.  It was apparently brought to her by fangirl celebrity Cleolinda.  But Christina had to go and tweet about it and then I had to go and check it out… and then… suddenly it was three hours later.

Our vampire… and he might actually be a vampire; no one’s really sure… is The Slender Man.

If you’re not already familiar with the Slender Man, he is a testament to the internet’s role in developing tradition.  It’s a supernatural creature that was created on Something Awful in a thread inviting people to post fabricated paranormal images.  User Victor Surge posted what the internet tells me are the first images and “information” about The Slender Man.  The images were so creepy, and the idea seems to have struck enough of a chord, that other people started posting their own.  Most of the time with “excerpts” from reports or narratives that were made extra eerie by their vague, elliptical nature.

Here’s the catch in case you missed it above:  it’s all made up.  (There’s an academic term for this incidentally: fakelore.  You say “fiction,” I say “fakelore.”  You say “tomato,” I say “tu madre.”)  Somewhere out there the ghost of Richard Dorson is shaking his fist and saying, “I warned you!”  But this is the internet, where just like in the real world, people come in halfway through a conversation and get the wrong idea.  Images get taken out of context.  And the next thing you know some guy in Japan swears he saw the Slender Man hanging out near a playground.

And more importantly, posts about it online where a google happy folklore nerd like myself can read all about it.  What the internet has that oral tradition lacks is it keeps a record of itself.  So you can actually go back and find the origin of the story (“Ur-type” is what us folklorists call it) and trace its evolution.  It’s a combination of supernatural creep and folklore nerdgasm that will never not be entertaining for me.  (By the way, thank you google: enabling time vampires since… whenever you started being so thorough.)

So anyway, this time vampire is also like a game of telephone (or perhaps an STD).  Cleolinda gave it to Christina who gave it to me who is giving it to you.  Enjoy the powers that photoshop has to keep you up at night and the power that the internet has to insure legends never die.

A couple of nights ago I woke up to a man standing beside my bed with a knife against my throat.  I was terrified, unable to move.  He pressed the tip of the knife into the skin of my neck, just hard enough to compress the skin a bit, but it didn’t seem to break the skin.  I could feel the knife clearly—it was cold and sharp.  He gave me an evil smile and, for a moment, I was absolutely convinced I was going to die.  And then suddenly I was able to move, and he was gone.  I was alone in my bed, safe and sound.  It wasn’t a dream—there was no sensation of waking up before the man disappeared.

It was scary, but, for me, not at all unusual.  I suffer regularly from what is called Sleep Paralysis with Hypnogogic Hallucinations (SPHH).  Generally with SPHH a person wakes up unable to move and with the sense of some kind of presence in the room with them.  Often he/she will see a figure which seems to be the source of this fear.  A common theme is for the figure to climb on the person’s chest and inhibit breathing.  Then after a period of time which can be as little as a few seconds or as long as fifteen minutes the person will find him/herself able to move, and the figure and the fear will be gone.  Many people will have this happen at least once in their lifetimes, and regular occurrences are more common than you might think.  To be honest, my experiences tend to be a bit atypical, but there is remarkable similarity in the stories which are recounted by people from all over the world.

The best explanation that science can come up with is that it’s caused by an irregularity in the sleep cycle.  Normally the brain paralyzes the body during REM sleep to prevent you from moving in response to your dreams and hurting yourself.  Scientists theorize that in SPHH part of the brain wakes up while part is stuck in REM; you are paralyzed and still dreaming, but you are also awake.  Thus far science has not come up with much of an explanation for why we all seem to be having the same or similar dreams when it happens.

The big problem inhibiting scientific research is that this is the sort of thing people don’t talk about.  We live in a society which likes to be grounded in the rational and scientific.  While there might be a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for SPHH, as an experience it does not fit within our normal perception of a rational reality.  Because of this, many people will not talk about their experiences.  To give you an idea how strong this compulsion to silence is:  My sister and I shared a room growing up.  We slept in the same bed for years.  And only last month did I find out that she also suffers from SPHH.  She had no idea what it was, but her hallucinations frequently involve spiders crawling on her chest.  (My sister’s also arachnophobic, which makes me wonder if SPHH is like boggarts and tailors itself to an individual’s fears.)

It’s an interesting phenomenon—science being inhibited by science.  For the record, I don’t generally believe that my SPHH is supernatural in nature (with one or two exceptions I won’t go into here), but it annoys me that it’s being dismissed, rather than studied because of social prejudices.

David Hufford who has studied the phenomenon can put it even better than I can.