Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 15, 1998

Following up a hunch that puns are quite common in the names of hairdressing establishments, I consulted my local, Glasgow North Yellow Pages. A partial listing of the punning names I found follows:

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Bill Ellis | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996

Texas A&M University is a notorious target for “numbskull” humor, as “Aggies” are assumed to be rural/blue collar as opposed to University of Texas grads who are (sub)urban and white collar. This application has been around in several formats. In their Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded (AFS 1975), Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter give several analogous items: a brief “Government Poverty Application” from 1966 and longer applications to join the NAACP (a Black organization active at the same time in the Civil Rights movement) and the Mafia (pp. 125ƒ131).

APPLICATION FOR ADMISSION TO TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Name:__________________________

Nickname:_________________________________

CB Handle:_____________________

Address (RFD No.):_________________ƒƒ_____________________________________

Daddy (If unknown, list 3 suspects):______________________________________

Mamma:_________________________

Neck Shade: _____Light Red _____Medium Red _____Dark Red

Number of teeth exposed in full grin: Upper_____ Lower_____

Name of Pickup owned:_______________ Height of Truck__________

Truck equipped with:

____Gun Rack ____4ƒWheel Drive ____Confederate Flag

____Cassette Deck ____Load of Wood ____Hijacker Shocks

____Radar Detector ____Mag Wheels ____Dual CB Antennas

____Spittoon ____Camper Top ____Air Horns

____Mud Flaps ____Toothpick Holder ____MudƒGrip Tires

____Raccoon Hide ____Big Dog

Number of empty beer cans on floorboard or in bed of pickup truck:_____

BUMPER STICKERS:

____Eat more Possum ____My other car is a piece of shit too

____Honk if you love Jesus ____If you ain't a cowboy you aint shit

____Redman Chewing Tobacco

Define the following (must be 90% correct):

1 Grits 6 Sawmill Gravy 11 Cobbler 16 Tater

2 Goobers 7 Turnip Salad 12 Fatback 17 Pig Skins

3 Pinto Beans 8 ShitƒonƒaƒShingle 13 Tote 18 Okrie

4 Collards 9 Redeye Gravy 14 Chickin' Fry19 Shonuf

5 Sidemeat 10 Soppin' Syrup 15 Poke 20 Chitlins

Favorite Vocalist:

____Reba McEntire ____Conway Twitty ____Loretta Lynn

____Hank Williams Jr. ____Randy Travis ____Ray Wylie Hubbard

____Tammy Wynette ____Slim Whitman ____Porter Wagoner

____Willie Nelson ____George Jones ____Box Car Willie

Favorite Recreation:

____Square Dancin' ____Possum Huntin' ____Skinny Dippin'

____Craw Daddin' ____Gospel Singin' ____4ƒWheelin'

____Drankin' ____Spittin' Backy ____Bill Chip Throwin'

____Honky Tonkin' ____Noodlin' ____Other

Name of Son(s): ____Bubba ____Jim Bob ____LeeRoy ____J.D.

Name of Daughter(s): ____PammySue ____Violet ____Paulette ____Daisy

Weapons Owned:

___Deer Rifle ___SawedƒOff Shotgun ___Varmint Rifle ___Log Cabin

___Tire Iron ___Power Chain Saw ___Pick Handle ___Hick'ry Switch

Number of Dogs:____ Type: ___Blue Tick ___Beagle

___Black & Tan ___Bird Dawg

Cap Emblem: ___John Deer ___McCullock Chain Saws ___Budweiser

___VoƒTech ___Skoal ___Coors

___NAPA ___Smile if You're Not Wearing Underwear

Number of Dependents: Legal:________ Claimed:_________

Number of Weeks Unemployed:__________

Number of Welfare Checks Received:____________

Memberships:

___KKK ___NRA ___Moose ___PTL Club ___AA

___Bass Club ___VFW ___Quiltin' Bee ___American Legion

___United Sons n' Daughters of the Confederacy

___John Birch Society

Length of Right leg:________ Length of Left leg:__________

Does your truck contain some part painted the offical state color of

Primer Red? ___Yes ___No

How many cars do you have jacked up on blocks in your front yard?_______

How many kitchen appliances will you keep on your front porch?__________

Will you wear mostly doubleƒknit polyester pants with snags?____________

Do you own any shoes? ____Yes ____No If yes, how many?__________

What year did you last purchase shoes?_________________

Are you married to any of the following:

____Sister ____Cousin ____Sow

Do you know her name?________________

Does your wife weigh more than your pickup?____________

Can you sign your name and get the spelling right every time?____________

Have you ever stayed sober for a whole weekend?________________

If so, why?________________________________________________________

Can you count: Past 10 with your shoes on?_________________

Do you know any words that have more than four letters?__________________

Have you ever had more than one bath in a week?__________________________

Medical Information:

Do you have at least two of the following:

___BO ___Head Lice ___Rabies

___Trench Mouth ___Runny Nose ___Bad Breath

Véronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 24, 2000

Gillian Bennett, Alas, Poor Ghost. Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse, Logan (Utah), Utah State University Press, 1999, 223 p.

Personal experience stories are the core of Gillian Bennett’s research into contemporary supernatural folklore, linked to widespread “informal belief systems, created and expressed through a network of interactions”.

This new edition, expanded and extensively revised, of Traditions of Belief. Women and the Supernatural (1987) includes a new chapter, (chapter 3 written with gerontological psychologist Kate Bennett) discussing “the experience of bereavement and the sense of presence which we believe are basic contexts for vernacular beliefs about personal contact with the dead” (77-114) and closes, on chapter 5 with a renewed presentation of the historical context of modern conceptions about ghosts: evocation of three famous ghosts (Hamlet’s father, the Cock Lane Poltergeists, the Vanishing Hitchhiker), two competing interpretations of ghosts at the end of the 19th century (that of rationalist Clodd and of “believer” Lang, both folklorists respectively illustrating the traditions of disbelief and of belief), “a history of belief in the power of the dead to witness and respond to the lives of the living” (139-172).

Chapter 1 presents the study briefly (a more extensive presentation is given in the appendices) and outlines the worldview of the respondents (9-38). Chapter 2 discusses the believers’memorates and presents their beliefs (39-75) while chapter 4 analyzes the memorates “to show how personal experience is transmuted into narrative form and shaped into philosophical debates between the narrator and an imaginary opponent”(115-137). For Gillian Bennett, this analysis shapes the picture of contemporary belief. These three chapters rely heavily upon the memorates collected and analyzed with great finesse by Gillian Bennett.

Never dogmatically defending a thesis, but scrupulously adhering to the narratives through which the Manchester women express their beliefs, this book delineates an intriguing picture of the complexities of contemporary beliefs in the supernatural and in the continued presence of the dead amongst us.

Véronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman. Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, London, Chatto & Windus, 1998; New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999, 435 p.

Marina Warner (novelist and historian, whose previous studies link cultural studies and folklore Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976 From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, 1995) gives here a very rich study on the figures of fear, mostly male, always very present in contemporary culture. This book has received the Katharine Briggs Award, in 1999.

Myths and lullabies, stories and songs, pictures and movies, all the expressions of learned and popular cultures are reviewed during the three parts of this book: Scaring, Lulling, Making Mock. MW takes the reader on a tour to the lands of fear, through cultures, eras and levels.

The chapters of the first part ‘Scaring’ review the themes of terror, emphasizing their extensions on the side of cannibalism: ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ (23-47), ‘My father he ate me’ (53-77), ‘The Polyp and the Cyclops’ (82-93), ‘The devil’s banquet’ (95-115), ‘Hoc est corpus’ [Corpus Christi feast] (126-135) ‘Now… we can begin to feed’ (136-159) ‘Terrors properly applied’ [Fear-based education] (160-183). They are intertwined with three interludes called ‘Reflections’, where MW comments a painting by Goya, ‘Saturn devouring his child’ (48-52), a sculpture representing the antique monster Scylla seizing Odysseus’s men (78-81), the feast ‘Patum’ a carnival filled with monsters, devils and frightening masks, of the small mountain town of Berga, Catalonia, in 1996 (116-125).

A detailed presentation of the first chapter ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ will show the extreme diversity of the themes approached in this book: an evocation of Goethe’s King of the Alders poem (1782), is followed by the presentation of a contemporary folkloric version in Devon (Dartmoor): the demon huntsman Dewer, and an evocation of one of Angela Carter’s tales in The Bloody Chamber (1975). Several tales and figures of “child-stealers, night-raiders, cradle-snatchers” are then reviewed (from the omo nero to the Baba Yaga going through the Pied Piper, the Sandman and, of course, the Bogeyman), MW discussing in parallel Classical myths, characters of folklore, and the multiple literary elaborations built upon them (Hoffmann’s fairy tale The Sandman (1817), Charles Perrault, Lewis Carroll, but also Michel Tournier (1970 Le roi des Aulnes revisiting the King of the Alders legend in a wartime German setting), Doris Lessing (1988, The Fifth Child), David Lynch (Blue Velvet) and Angela Carter). After a linguistic and phonologic detour upon the origin and evolution of ‘Bogy’ and ‘Bogeyman’, MW recalls that several folktales stage heroes that triumph over monsters, from Odysseus to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ through Tom Thumb. The chapter closes upon a picture of the fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter (hero of “Silence of the lambs”). [This description had to leave out several of the references alluded to by MW].

‘Lulling’ opens with ‘Reflections’ commenting Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The rest on the flight into Egypt’ (186-191). This part is fully dedicated to lullabies and their multiple functions, studied in the three chapters ‘Sing now mother… what me shall befall’ (192-207), ‘Herod the king, in his raging’ (208-233), ‘And thou, oh nightengale’ [Myths of the childish or adult female victim’s return as a nightingale] (224-237).

The five chapters of the third part ‘Making Mock’ will bring discoveries to the reader, especially in the cultural history dimension of the book. This part opens upon ‘Reflections’ commenting Desprez’s engraving of ‘The Chimera’ (1777), and another set of ‘Reflections’ on the well-known series of Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian portraits introduces the last chapter. ‘In the genre of the monstrous’ (246-261) reflects upon the promotion of the horrible and the monstrous, which have become entertainment in contemporary mass culture. ‘Circe’s swine: wizard and brute’ (262-283) evokes animal metamorphoses and presents the character of Gryllus, created by Plutarch, victim of Circe become swine who energetically refuses the return to human shape he is offered. Gryllus reappears in ‘All my business is my song’ (284-301), but under the shape of the cricket, perpetually singing animal, minute grotesque carved in antique gems endowed with magical powers, and also present in the edges of ancient manuscripts where it parodies men. The happy little singing animal has been utilized in literature, from La Fontaine’s cicada to il grillo parlante of Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883). These utilizations are detailed in this chapter that enlarges on to the role of monstrous characters in the fantastic genres. ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum’ (302-325) returns to folklore with an evocation of the folktales ogres and of the part they play in Basile (1633-36 Il Pentamerone) and Perrault (1697 Contes du temps passé) where they are frequently outwitted and killed by young heroes, male and female. At the beginning of the 19th century, the adaptations and commentaries of folktales by radical rationalist atheist philosopher William Goodwin (father of Mary Shelley) are, tells MW, an early example of political correctness, a strategy “to use fiction and fantasy to introduce children to ideas and thinking and to rationalize their fears”. ‘Of the paltriness of things’ (326-339) develops the figures of mockery and humour that set the ogre and the bogeyman in a ridiculous posture, reduced to nothing by laughter and ruse. The frequent identification ogre/stranger takes MW to examine racist humour, insults and jokes, and the replicas reversing the situation when the blacks accused of cannibalism “take the insults and turn them into a means of defiance” posing as cannibals in calypso songs for example. ‘Going bananas’ (340-373) follows the meanders of parodic inversion through the theme of the banana in contemporary humour. A multiple symbol: phallic signifier, epitomizing the natural plenitude assigned to the tropics (to their bountiful nature as well as to their oversexed inhabitants), the banana has been utilized since the twenties in music hall (they constituted Joséphine Baker’s costume in the Revue nègre of 1926) and the reader will discover the multiplicity of its contemporary uses: racist insult (some English football fans through bananas onto the pitch in abusive mockery at a rejected black player) but also elective food for athletes, base of an economical activity basic to the Caribbean and Central America, emblem of the tropical and musical movie comedies of the forties illustrated by Busby Berkeley and Carmen Miranda, etc.

The ‘Epilogue: Snip! Snap! Snip!’ (374-387) first discusses the mutilations inflicted to the devils in Uccello’s predella ‘The miracle of the profaned host’ (brought by a poor woman to a Jewish usurer and that miraculously resists the affronts he inflicts on the host, a theme close to that of the ritual murder) and cases of destruction of scaring images. Then childish terrors are evoked, especially those raised by the Struwwelpeter of Heinrich Hoffmann (1845) and its castrating character the scissor-man, who cuts the thumb of the child that persists to suck it. Hoffmann intended to mock the cruel and rigid educators of his time, but his books have terrorised generations of children unaware of his ironic intentions. [MW, who still sucked her thumb at seven, had personally asked her father to destroy the menacing book.]

After the austereness and the refusal of images of protestantism, our era is that of the return of the power of images, of the abandonment of verification for the acceptance of their magic and powers; of the raising to star status of great criminals, which incarnate the fears raised by the ogre or bogeyman in their atrocious actions.

Michael Goss | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996

Satan is stylish, sexy, fashion-conscious. He likes to wear sharp suits and to dance all the latest dances – and know these are what the young ladies like, as well. He catches their eye in a Texas dance hall by rigging himself out as a handsome young man in a dashing vaquero cowboy outfit; selects as his partner the prettiest, proudest girl in the room and struts out a master-class version of the polka. She is completely captivated until she notices that his flying feet do not belong on a human being. They are the feet of a chicken. At this point the Devil vanishes (into the men’s room) leaving behind him a cloud of smoke, a sulphurous smell and his unhappy partner fainting prostrate on the floor.

This is how Jan Harold Brunvand represented “The Devil in the Dance Hall for a brief section of his The Vanishing Hitchhiker. His closing and prophetic comment on the legend was that:

“Next, I suppose, we could hear of “The Devil in a Disco” if this Hispanic tradition should enter Anglo folklore.”

Which is precisely what happened, of course. Judging from the existence of an unsigned short story in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal for 3 July 1847, however, the Devil had stepped into Anglo folklore and out onto the dance-floor long before he considered cutting a few polka fancy steps as a Texas vaquero.

“The Stranger Of The Ball is the earliest version of the “Devil in Dance-Hall” type that I have found so far; which superficial honour aside, it impresses by virtue of its confident subversion of the expected plot. Set in a small country town on the west coast of Scotland in the “time when our respected grandmothers were young ladies”, the tale opens with those same young ladies jostling for the services of the only available hairdresser. A ball was to be held and, as the narrator explains, on such occasions it was inevitable that women should experience more anxiety over the state of their heads than about what they put on their feet.
So great was the demand that the local barber had to take on a temporary assistant This individual was a “smart, vain, ignorant young Cockney” and he soon fell foul of the story’s heroine, who much resented having to wait her turn for his attentions;

“Now Miss Bella, though an angel in beauty, was the very opposite in temper. She was proud, arrogant, and imperious…”

In addition, as the next paragraph informs us:

“She was not at any time very condescending to her inferiors in station; but on the present occasion she discharged all the vials of her pride upon the unfortunate young man, till she nearly sent him crazy, vanity and all.”

When the ball commenced, Bella’s temper did not improve for the lack of eligible dancing partners. The few present consisted of her former discarded or rejected suitors “and these, either in spleen or mortification, kept out of her way”. But when her friends plagued her with their sympathtic concern, she replied “wih a gay fierceness” that:

“I will dance tonight if my partner should be the –.”

No-one could tell how Bella meant to finish the sentence, declares the narrator… but surely we can. Here is what happend next:

“…there was a wild gleam in her eye while she spoke which frightened her audience, and they drew back with a faint scream. In drawing back, some of them nearly trod on the toes of a gentleman who had just entered the room at least no one had observed him till that instant. He was a young and handsome man, with the most exuberant curls and whiskers in the world, of a jetty blackness and contrasting strangely with the waxen colour of his cheek. The eyes of the stranger…were fixed admiringly upon the beautiful Bella; and walking straight up to her, he asked her to dance. He had not been presented to her; she did not know his name; and yet – with an obliviousness of conventional rule quite foreign to her character – she at once accepted his arm, and in another moment they were whirling together through the dance.”

The spectacle of this handsome couple – and the narrator stresses that they make up the handsomest couple in the room – excited considerable comment, most of which took the form of speculation about who the stranger was and where he came from. We cannot help but notice the dangerous departure from “conventional rule” here; Bella has shown marked favour to someone unknown to herself and to everyone else, emphasizing her lapse by continuing to dance with him when social mores warned that a young woman dancing successively with the same partner was giving him amorous encouragement. So it isn’t surprising that when Bella’s uncle made his belated appearnace, he insisted on knowing the identity of this stranger.

“‘Niece,’ said the old gentleman, ‘I shall request the pleasure of being introduced to the gentleman you have danced with.’

‘I did not catch his name,’ replied Bella; ‘the master of ceremonies will doubtless do what is necessary, unless the gentleman himself – where is he?'”

The gentleman had vanished completely, just as we – just as readers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, too – must have expected he would So far the plot has taken a famliar and very moral course, promising to conform with the popular mode wherein pride and vanity are reproved by a Satanic stranger in the sable but alluring guise of a handsome young man. And we are told that, thanks to Rumours way of embellishing simple facts, this is precisely how a good many of the folk presen~ at the ball interpreted events.

“.. at last it was reported and believed that Bella, in despairing of a partner, had summoned up a certain very old young gentleman to dance with her, who had come at her bidding, and at length vanished in smoke.”

The Old Gentleman has neither horns nor hooves – and certainly does not have chicken’s feet such blatantly diabolical detail would have closed off the story, making only one interpretation possible. The author does not want nor permit that to happen. Having undermined the Satanic element slightly by treating the clearest expressions of it as mere rumour or “report”, he or she proceeds to give sceptics in the audience a way out of the dilemma. Not long after the ball, ‘another wonder’ captured the attention of the small town. The Cockney barber had vanished from thc neighbourhood and prominent on a wax display bust in his temporary employer’s window was a set of jet-black curls and whiskers – an artificial hair-piece, in other words – which was “said to bear an astonishing resemblance to the decorations of the stranger at the ball”‘

Plainly enough, we are being invited to think the dancing devil was none other than the Cockney hairdresser in false wig and whiskers, bent upon avenging himself for all the insults that too-proud Bella had offered him. Of course, there is the inconvenient detail of how he could arrive at the ball and (more particularly) vansih from it without anyone registering those facts. The writer ignores such awkward questions, pretending that the real marvel is the permanent alteration wrought in Bella:

“Some old ladies…were still diposed to adhere to the supernatural theory; for how otherwise was it possible to account for the change which took place in the haughty beauty? Miss Bella became, from that day, an absolute personification of meekness and gentleness; and acquiring a perfect horror of the vanities of fashion, ever afterwards appeared in a plain crop of curls!”

In general stylistics – in refusing to endorse “the supernatural theory”, thereby injecting a certain interpretative ambiguity which weakens the exemplum-aspect of the narrative – “The Stranger Of The Ball” is well removed from being a folk-tale. That much is obvious, but not more so than the fact it is plainly based upon a folk-narrative type. Its author understands the conventions of such material and uses them to create something which is arguably more in keeping with modern (early Victorian) taste.

Narrators of traditional folk-tales were accustomed to accommodate the likelihood that the audience knew the plot of the story as well as they themselves; knew, that is, how the story would turn out and how it would be resolved, most of them having already heard it a dozen times or more. Accepting this and perhaps introducing no more than a few minor variations of his or her own, the performer met those audience expectations by providing both expected plot ond predicted ending. What we might see as a further constraint on the performer – the possibility that the narrative might predicate or canvass a belief in the supernatural – was actually not much of a constraint at all since the issue of strict credibility does not seem to have arisen. Regardless of the degree to which our ancestors “believed” in the supernatural once within the storytelling circle they could achieve temporary suspension of any scepticism they may have harboured about it with little effort, especially when guided by the narrator’s use of certain motifs associated with tales of the uncanny and magical.

But the Chambers’s Journal writer was an early Victorian writer. She may have been unhappy about the restrictions imposed by working with a standard plot whose action demanded a fixed ending, one that imposed a solitary (supernatural) reading upon the story. Equally, he or she may have felt that a relatively sophisticated audience would reject a tale too flagrantly glued to a hoary, credulity-stretching folk superstition concerning a materialized Devil, whereas it might appreciate a plot which enable them to retain a measure of scepticism. One major strength of the best Victorian ghost stories is the delicate management of the desire to believe and the desire to rationalise; their authors create a series of events which appear to lay beyond the possibility of explanation in real-world terms, yet simultaneously pretend that of course there must be some such explanation. Frequently, the success or failure of the story depends on this balance, recognizing the width of the gap between supernatural interpretation and rational exegesis.

Besides, the ostensible disadvantages inherent in working with an old, rigid plot structure can prove to be a strength. Any variation upon that plot, but especially a variation in how it is finally resolved, becomes more striking; the piece as a whole will seem more ingenious, more entertaining. The salient point here is that “The Stranger Of The Ball” was written with the assumption that readers would guess what is coming next. We are expected to pick up Bella’s ripeness for punishment, particularly when she utters the unwise promise that she will dance with the – (and here we automatically fill in the unspoken word, “Devil”). Just as certainly will be guess who the handsome mystery-man invoked by her words is meant to be. All this would only be feasible if the audience was already familiar, very familiar, with The Devil on the Dance-Floor prior to reading the story.

The ending’s divergence from expectation threatens to turn Satan in to a set of false whiskers and a Cockney joke, indicating perhaps that the writer is mocking the Dancing Devil legend – at least in part. Alternatively, this comically bathetic gesture towards rationalisation may be mocking itself and the “mystery explained” ending at the same time: as though the writer wanted to say “You’re too sophisticated to believe in the Devil aren’t you? You knew I’d come up with a rational explanation didn’t you? Well, here it is – and isn’t it feeble!”. Either way, this early Victorian short story is wholly dependent on – makes no sense without it – the older legend-type and moreover an audience which was familiar with it. All this evidence that the Devil must have been on the Dance Floor some time – and perhaps a long time – before he put in an appearance as The Stranger Of The Ball in 1847.

Note

1. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. (New York: Norton; London: Pan paperback edition, 1981). See pages 135-136 of the latter. Prof. Brunvand takes his version of “The Devil in the Dance-Hall” fromn Joe Nick Patoski’s “GGGhost Stories” in Texas Monthly (October 1978) pages 134-130. If I omit to mention here the numerous papers on this subject by Mark Glazer, it is chiefly because I suspect that any reader who is seriously interested in this topic will already be family with them. If not, see his “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American Examples”, in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend Sheffield, July 1982, edited by Paul Smith (Sheffield: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield, 1984) pages 108-126. Similarly there is Maria Herrera-Sobek’s “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of a Contemporary Legend”, in Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend III, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) pages 147-157. The footnotes to this paper suggest a number of furthe references which might be followed up.