In my youth – a period which ranged from sometime before my teens to sometime after I dropped out of Washington University – I was a Marvel Comics fan. We need not recount the various titles I followed, because this post is about only one of those titles, only one member of the Marvel pantheon. I speak to you of the mighty Thor: God of Thunder, son of Odin, golden-tressed prince of Asgard…

What’s that? Thor of the Norse myths had red hair, you say? Well, yes, and good on you for knowing that, but that was a different Thunder God. You see, Thor of the Æsir was the redhead, Thor of the Asgardians was the blond(e). It’s all explained in the Celestials saga which culminated in Thor #300; you might want to go check it out. However, we’re wandering well off-topic, and must now go back.

So: me, youth, Thor. One of my favorite Thor volumes, one which I read more times than I care to share, was a 1976 reprint of four issues from the fabled Stan Lee/Jack Kirby days, issues 154 through 157 originally published in 1968. This oversized reprint was Marvel Treasury Edition #10, and its cover price in 1976 was a whopping $1.50. This storyline concerned the coming of the indescribable Mangog, a monstrous creature possessed of the strength of a billion, billion beings (yeah, that’s right) and possessed by one single objective: the death of the entire universe.

Loved that book. Years after buying it, I could recite it for you, line for stirring, bombastic line, down to every quasi-Shakespearean ‘thy,’ ‘thine,’ and ‘thou.’

I actually owned and enjoyed another Marvel Treasury Edition featuring the Thunder God – #3, guest-starring Hercules and that whole Greek/Roman crowd – but the Mangog epic was the more compelling of the two. So, of course, that issue was the one I lost due to unforgivable negligence on my part.

Years passed. About twenty years, I think, bringing us to, oh, just a few days ago: I sat at my desk at work, processing the stuff I process while at work. My mind wandered, as it will at times, and I found myself thinking of my long-lost Thor reprint.

A thought came to me then: I was working. That is, I had a job. Which meant that I had income. Also, I was an adult – nominally, at least. I could spend my hard-earned dollars on anything I wanted. Even a long out-of-print comic…assuming, of course, that I could find it for sale.

Enter eBay.

Having this comic restored to me, after so many years, makes me happier than you might think reasonable for someone who is closer (much) to fifty than he is to fifteen.

Now: if only I had time to read it.

Note: The cover of Marvel Treasury Edition #10 is extremely misleading, as it features Thor battling not Mangog, but rather Ulik, mightiest of the Trolls. In fact, Ulik plays but a brief (and, for the universe, rather unfortunate) cameo role in the events of this storyline. The following image is a proper introduction to the true villain of this piece:

I did try reading Liberal Fascism. I didn’t try as hard as I might have, to be honest. In the end, I realized that there are some books that just aren’t worth one’s time. And even though I am a blue fascist according to author Goldberg, I decided that some books aren’t even worth the gasoline it would take to consume them. The recycling bin, on the other hand…

Better that than a landfill, I reasoned, as the Earth would probably just vomit the book right back up. This way, one hopes, Goldberg’s work might do somebody some good.

Bide a while with me, child, and sit by the fire. I will tell you a story from the older days, a story of the witch Baba Yaga who dwelt in the forests of vast Russia. What’s that? You know of Baba Yaga, you say? You have heard the stories, told you as you sat at the knees of your grandparents? Well, perhaps you know the old witch, and perhaps you don’t. Sit now and listen, and you shall judge.

There once lived, in a little hut at the edge of a great forest, a young husband and his wife. The husband did labors for villagers who lived a mile down the river, while the wife tended to the house and the little garden. They lived alone, but this had not always been so. Once they had a daughter, a child who laughed and smiled and filled their hearts with delight. The girl had met with a terrible end; she fell into the river while playing, and so she drowned. The husband and his wife could not be consoled, and their little home was now dark and silent.

Everyone in the village knew of the death of the little girl and so were kind to the young husband as he came into town to perform his labors, and to his wife when she came to barter or buy. The sadness of their loss could not be lifted, however, and so the long months passed.

On a day when the husband came into the town to repair a door at the church, the old priest there looked on the sadness of the husband and pitied him. “It is still hard for you, the loss of your child,” the priest said.

“It is hard, especially for my wife,” said the husband. “She does not speak, and we are lonely. Happiness is lost to us.”

The priest nodded, and was quiet for a time. Then he looked at the husband and said, “I speak to you now not as a steward of God, but as a man and a friend. You should go and seek aid.”

“But who can aid us? There is nothing that can be done, there is no one.”

The priest looked around as though afraid to be overheard, though it was only he and the young husband in the church. He stepped closer and said, “There is Baba Yaga.”

The younger man laughed. “Baba Yaga!” he said bitterly. “Fine talk from a priest!”

“You mock what you do not understand,” the priest replied sternly. “Do you think I speak lightly? I know more than a tradesman of such matters.”

“You speak of stories meant to frighten children.”

“Tales are often words wrapped around truth. So it is with Baba Yaga. She has been seen and heard, here and there, by those who are no longer children. They know it not, or else they tell themselves that it was but the night mist, or the howl of the wild wind.”

The young husband paused, and no longer laughed. “But she is fearsome – as the stories go,” he said.

“Fearsome, yes, and older than the world. She is a grandmother, and a demon. Only the desperate seek her, driven by need.”

“But what will she do?”

“Whatever she will,” said the priest. “Her judgment is harsh. The choice is yours – seek her, or do not.”

The husband put away his tools. He looked at the priest. “How shall I find her?”

“Into the deep heart of the forest you must go,” the priest replied. “If your need is great, you will find her – but it is easier by far to seek Baba Yaga than to return.”

In his home, the young husband pondered the words of the priest. He looked to his wife who knelt tending the fire, her face pale in the flickering light. Grief came over him as though for the first time, and he knew that he must do something.

“There is work for me at the woodcutter’s, beyond the hills,” he said to her. “The axle of his waggon needs repair. I must leave in the morning.”

This was not true; the woodcutter’s waggon needed no repair. His wife could not doubt the tale, however. “I will prepare a lunch for you,” was all that she said. The husband felt a keen of guilt within him. He had deceived his wife, and not for the first time. But as men will, he told himself that it was all for her good.

Before the sun rose the next day, the young husband took his leave. His pouch held biscuits and salted meat, and his flask was filled with water. He turned once to wave to his wife who stood in the door of their hut, then walked along the path and did not look back again. After a turn of the path, where he could no longer been seen from his home, he turned to his right and entered the forest.

(To be continued…)

Just thinking aloud on the musical question “So what does St. Louis need?” and coming up with a myriad of answers ranging from “more people” to “better schools” to “an enema.” Any of those responses is correct – some more than others – but none of them are intriguing me at the moment.

“A web magazine,” on the other hand, does sort of stick in the mind just now.

Trying to decide just what I mean by that. Is it a city-centric publication with an established staff of writers and editors? Or something more fluid – an aggregation of local bloggers, perhaps? Or something in the middle?

Is it focused on hard news? Arts and lifestyle? Off-beat stories on little-noted aspects of the St. Louis metro area? What exactly?

Is it a venture meant to augment the publications already available here, or is it intended to replace them? Is it supposed to be journalism? Or something else?

Are efforts like The Morning News and Gapers Block models to emulate?

How much would this cost?

Most important to me at the moment, perhaps: Is it something that I should be thinking about right now, considering that I have enough to do already? Wouldn’t be better – for me, that is – if someone else (you, maybe) came along and executed this idea?

See, this is what comes of idle moments. You start wondering about, er, stuff.

Better to leave off thinking about this and go back to work. For now.

Upon hearing of the Allendale, South Carolina funeral home accused of severing the legs of a tall man’s body so that it would fit into a coffin, I was immediately reminded of a classic 1925 short story by H. P. Lovecraft. As the story appears to be in the public domain, I present it here. Shiver, and enjoy.

In the Vault

There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy tale which George Birch’s death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.

Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.

Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley; and was a very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly “laying-out” apparel invisible beneath the casket’s lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function – thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.

Just where to begin Birch’s story I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch’s inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.

My story ‘Waitresses’ survived the first round of readings in the most recent Black Warrior Review contest, but not the second. “C’est la vie,” say the old folks.

At least I got a year’s subscription for playing. BWR is a good magazine, so yay.

Elsewise: Back to work.

Tee-hee! Got a rejection letter from the editors of a short story contest. Just now!

It begins:

Dear Philip Barron

Followed immediately by:

Dear (Author Name)

Someone needs to tweak that mail merge function just a wee bit.

That is all.

In emulation of Bitty’s participation in the Fourth Annual Bloggers Silent Poetry Reading, I present this 2004 post from the old blog:

I will confess that poetry is not my native language – I gravitate more towards prose – but even I can recognize when verse sets off sympathetic vibrations within. The following work did that for me; it is by the celebrated poet Philip Lopate. Hope he doesn’t mind that I post it here. I first ran into it while reading Bird by Bird, the writing guide by Anne Lamott.

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

Begin Steering the Craft (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) by iconic author Ursula LeGuin. The subtitle, please:

Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator* or the Mutinous Crew

This will be the first thing of LeGuin’s I’ve read since The Dispossessed.

The author approaches writing here as a craft rather than an art or a means of self-expression (or therapy). Good enough. I need a reintroduction to thinking about writing – it feels like such a foreign landscape these days – and stumbled upon a recommendation for the LeGuin book while browsing around. I have faith in serendipity.

LeGuin includes in her book a writing task for fledglings which she calls the Chastity Exercise – no adverbs, no adjectives. She says this of the exercise:

I invented the Chastity Exercise for my own use when I was a very Lone Navigator of fourteen or fifteen. I couldn’t give up chocolate milkshakes, but I could do without adverbs for a page of two. It’s the only exercise I’ve suggested in (I think) every workshop I’ve taught. It seems to be useful to us all.

*Lone Navigator, c’est moi.

Begin Steering the Craft (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) by iconic author Ursula LeGuin. The subtitle, please:

Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator* or the Mutinous Crew

This will be the first thing of LeGuin’s I’ve read since The Dispossessed.

The author approaches writing here as a craft rather than an art or a means of self-expression (or therapy). Good enough. I need a reintroduction to thinking about writing – it feels like such a foreign landscape these days – and stumbled upon a recommendation for the LeGuin book while browsing around. I have faith in serendipity.

LeGuin includes in her book a writing task for fledglings which she calls the Chastity Exercise – no adverbs, no adjectives. She says this of the exercise:

I invented the Chastity Exercise for my own use when I was a very Lone Navigator of fourteen or fifteen. I couldn’t give up chocolate milkshakes, but I could do without adverbs for a page of two. It’s the only exercise I’ve suggested in (I think) every workshop I’ve taught. It seems to be useful to us all.

*Lone Navigator, c’est moi.