The Mangler, and The Great Appeal of Horror Fiction

I.K. (and I think his brother F.K.), R.M.B., and my father have asked, why do people like to read horror stories, or watch horror movies? Why would I ever want to be scared?

I think part of the fun is seeing how skillfully a master yarn spinner like Stephen King unfolds (unmangles? see below) a story. In the Introduction of Night Shift, an anthology of short stories by Mr. King, John D. MacDonald writes:

Note this. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge, and the occult turns funny.

So, part of the fun is just admiring how well a skilled story teller writes.

But this is only enjoying the horror story as a work of art, admiring a master’s expertise in his craft. I think there is a more visceral appeal of the horror story: the very experience of submerging oneself in a world created by the writer. (And it seems appropriate to evoke viscera when discussing horror fiction. Glistening internal organs sliding past one another…) Mr. King explains it better than I can.

One of my favorite short stories by Stephen King is The Mangler, which I have mentioned previously, and which appears in Night Shift. The Foreword that he wrote for that book is in itself a good read. There, Mr. King writes:

Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiousity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant.

We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear – an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We’re afraid of the body under the sheet. It’s our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths [italics mine].

I think Mr. King is onto something here. I think that the appeal of horror movies and horror stories, at least in part, is that it allows us a safe way to consider our own mortality, our own funeral, in an indirect and vicarious manner.

(I suppose I.K. might respond, “But that begs the question. Why would I ever want to rehearse my own death?” )

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Mr. King wrote a book entitled On Writing, subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, in which he recounts his career as a writer. I think that The Mangler is based on some of his real-life experiences with laundries. On pp. 19 and 24 of On Writing, he mentions that when he was a child his mother once worked in a laundry on the “mangler crew,” and hated it.

One meaning of the word mangle comes from the laundry business, which is “to press fabrics by means of heated rollers” (so a mangler is a machine which presses fabrics). But another meaning is “to mutilate or disfigure by battering, hacking, cutting, or tearing”. In The Mangler, Mr. King is playing on the two senses of the word. This is delicious, delectable; it is fun to toggle back and forth between the two meanings, one mundane and the other gruesome, in my mind.

On p. 58 of On Writing, we learn that as a college student Mr. King himself picked up a job working in a laundry. And then on the next page, p. 59, we read about this creepy incident in the laundry:

On one occasion I heard a strange clicking from inside one of the Washex three-pockets which were my responsibility. I hit the Emergency Stop button, thinking the goddam thing was stripping its gears or something. I opened the doors and hauled out a huge wad of dripping surgical tunics and green caps [apparently, local hospitals used the laundry's services -- M.], soaking myself in the process. Below them, lying scattered across the colander-like inner sleeve of the middle pocket, was what looked like a complete set of human teeth. It crossed my mind that they would make an interesting necklace, then I scooped them out and tossed them into the trash.

Try to imagine if you had unexpectedly been presented with a collection of human teeth, grinning up at you in a disembodied rictus. I think I would have felt a giddy, fleeting fear in the pit of my stomach. It would make me think of somebody being tortured, and getting his or her teeth pulled without anesthesia. And I would think of a dread voodoo that requires human teeth as an ingredient for some black magic spell.

And then on p. 60, we read that Mr. King had a “floor-man” (which I take to be a sort of supervisor) named Harry. Mr. King describes this guy as follows:

Harry had hooks instead of hands as a result of a tumble into the sheet-mangler during World War II (he was dusting the beams above the machine and fell off). A comedian at heart, he would sometimes duck into the bathroom and run water from the cold tap over one hook and water from the hot tap over the other. Then he’d sneak up behind you while you were loading laundry and lay the steel hooks on the back of your neck.

I think it is likely that these somewhat negative or creepy experiences with laundries inspired Mr. King to write The Mangler.

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Here’s an academic paper by poet Susan Stewart (now at Princeton University), in which she examines the inner workings of the horror story:

Susan Stewart, The Epistemology of the Horror Story, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 95, No. 375 (Jan. – Mar., 1982), pp. 33-50

Professor Stewart’s article starts:

NOWHERE ARE NARRATIVE’S IMAGES of unfolding, of hesitation, of the step and the key more thematically profound and more clearly worked on the level of effect than in the horror story.

Unfolding. There’s that word again.

4th Of July On The Mall

For R.M.B.

How long it take to get home?

If you’re talking about having to navigate the metro, it wasn’t too bad, despite the crush of the madding crowd. We used the L’Enfant Plaza metro station, which has three entrances. The entrance nearest the Mall was mobbed. But we walked about four more blocks to another entrance (the one that I used to leave the metro station earlier that day), which was much less crowded. I was able to get onto the orange line without problem, and from there it was a straight shot to Rosslyn with no transfers. I’d estimate that walking to the metro took 15 minutes and then getting to Rosslyn took another 15 minutes.

But the metro car was packed, and when we stopped at other metro stations (Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Metro Center) people were pushing to get into the car. Even when I got off at Rosslyn, people were pushing to get into the car. I guess at Rosslyn, people had been watching fireworks from the Iwo Jima Memorial.

I don’t know how I.K. and E.N. fared because they took the yellow line to Pentagon City, but I suspect that they were able to catch a train even before I did. They were running to catch a train that had just pulled in.

I.K. brought some stuff to eat: baguette, multi-grain bread, spreadable goat cheese, roast beef, smoked salmon, seedless green grapes, cherries, olives. I brought cherries, chunks of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese (which unfortunately neither I.K. nor E.N. ventured to try), chips, and some cookies from Switzerland that K.C. had given me. E.N. brought lychees (I.K. thought she had said “light cheese”) and ate only one; I ate all the rest! I.K. also brought a game named Loaded Questions, which we played after eating and before the fireworks started.

On my way to the Mall, I picked up a hard copy of The Onion outside the L’Enfant Plaza metro, and chuckled when I read this story: Area Grandmother Tries Indian Food. I showed it to E.N. and told her that it reminded me very much of her. I.K. agreed; he had independently read it and said that he, too, had thought of her. E.N. got halfway through the article, thinking it was for real, before realizing it was The Onion. She said that she had been asking herself, “What newspaper would print a story like this?” before looking at the name of the newspaper. She then read it, now with the understanding that it was a joke, and was chuckling, saying that it really did sound like her. (I’ll note that she declined to eat the salmon that I.K. brought, and the goat cheese was too sour for her. And when she tried Thai iced tea at Sala Thai this past Thursday, she recoiled, saying “No no no no no no…”)

Watching the fireworks on the Mall was surprisingly pleasant this time. In years past, I didn’t have such a good experience — it had been muggy and crowded, and might have even rained. But yesterday, we got there earlier, around 7 PM, and were able to find a good spot on the Mall half-way between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. And the weather was excellent — cool, not humid.

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A girl sitting near us had a shirt with this written across the front:
How Do You Catch A Unique Rabbit? We asked her to take our picture (below), and also asked her to explain the saying on her shirt. She had to admit she didn’t know what it meant, but she hoped it wasn’t something “bad”.

The motivation behind such a shirt is that it would make a good conversation starter. If a guy had wanted to flirt with this girl, he could ask her to explain the saying on her shirt, and she could deliver the punchline; and the two could share a chuckle over a silly, clean joke. The joke even has a follow-up joke, so if the conversation faltered the girl could bring up the second joke. So, the shirt is a device offering an easy way to break the ice.

Fourth Of July On The Mall

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Some of my answers in the Loaded Questions game:

Jessie Owens

The Singularity

fomite

Other answers (not necessarily mine): neck (body part currently aching), cytomegalovirus and zoology (longest English word you can think of), panda and emu (animal you most enjoy seeing in the zoo), two (number of fights one got into), six and fifteen (number of books read in the past year), Catcher in the Rye and The Canterbury Tales (book read in school), bad salty lassi (drink that makes you nauseous), a gun and a certain hamburger (product you wouldn’t endorse), McDonald’s and KFC (favorite fast-food chain), orange and coconut (favorite jelly bean flavor).

PubMed Fun

Two blogs dedicated to finding strange and funny papers listed on PubMed. Our tax dollars are funding this stuff ?!

NCBI ROFL (via MetaFilter)

A Good Poop (hmm, it has been a while since the last post)

Machines Versus Biologics

A machine that eats organic creatures; there’s something unsettling, disturbing, wrong about that.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Stephen King short stories, The Mangler. To my delight, they have made a movie based on this short story, and there’s even a sequel. I haven’t seen either movie yet, but they are in my Netflix queue. (As an aside, the Netflix Prize may have been won! Via MetaFilter.)

I just remembered — some years ago, there was a report about a robot that eats slugs, and uses the energy from the slugs to power itself. It was called the SlugBot. Maybe they can revamp one of those robot lawn mowers so that it is powered by its own grass clippings; it would be a sort of robot cow, so maybe they could paint it with the “cow spot” pattern.

Man versus machine is a recurring theme in science fiction. SF author Gregory Benford wrote a sequence of books called The Galactic Center saga; I think there are seven books in the series. In Benford’s universe, there is an epic galactic war between all mechanical life (the Mechs) and all biological life, spanning thousands of years. In the Matrix movies, you have the sinister machines that enslave humans, using them as a source of energy, as if they were living batteries. The Matrix scenario was very reminiscent of a short story by Dean R. Koontz entitled Wake Up To Thunder which I read back in the 80’s, in an anthology of SF short stories; here, enslaved humans were used for computational power, which seems more plausible than using humans as a source of energy (but I note that we already have robots that use flies and slugs as sources of energy!). SF author Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series also pits machines (the TechnoCore) against humans; I might be mis-remembering, but I think the machines used humans for computational power every time humans used teleportation technology that the machines provided. In Battlestar Galactica, you’ve got the Cylons. And of course, in the Terminator movies there’s Skynet.

Long-Term Immunologic Sequelae Secondary to Tea Tree Oil Allergic Contact Dermatitis

A long time ago, somebody (I forget who, but I think it was a family that is very close to my own family; they were classmates of my parents in medical school) gave me a small sampler set of four or five men’s cologne. I enjoyed using them once in a while, and noticed that within this small collection there were definite differences. One seemed to be floral; another seemed to be based on spices; and another seemed to be more musky, more animal. The colognes were not labeled, but I did Google searches and was able to identify most of them online (I have since forgotten what each of them were!).

Then one day (probably 2001 or 2002) I noticed a patch of dry skin, and self-diagnosed myself with ringworm, which I had when I was a child, and which is very easily treated with antifungal ointments. Instead of using conventional medicine, for some reason I thought I’d try “alternative medicine” and treat it with topical tea tree oil. The patch of dry skin seemed to redden, and I thought that maybe the ringworm was getting worse. So I kept applying the tea tree oil. The reddened skin got even redder. I kept applying the tea tree oil. The very red skin started to blister and ooze. Finally, I figured out what was going on. The ringworm wasn’t getting worse. It was the tea tree oil itself that was causing the skin reaction. I immediately stopped applying the tea tree oil, and my skin cleared up completely. And the ringworm was gone.

But the tea tree oil was not through with me. I discovered that ever since then, I am allergic to my colognes; the tea tree oil had induced some sort cross-sensitivity to complex aromatic (the word evokes carbon rings, with alternating double bonds) organic compounds. And I found that I could no longer use the brand of antiperspirant that I had been using; now I use a hypoallergenic one. Years later, I looked up tea tree oil on PubMed (the national database of peer-reviewed biomedical research literature, and discovered a case report that described my case almost exactly. This case report included graphic photos that looked very much like the skin reaction I experienced. Interestingly, the patient in the case report was Chinese, and I am part Chinese; I wonder whether certain ethnic groups are especially sensitive to tea tree oil.

And years later, every once in a while, I’ll try my old brand of antiperspirant. I am still allergic to it. The immune system can remember for a long time; it has memory cells.

One more tangential link in this Thought Chain: memory cells makes me think of the song Memory, the most famous number from the musical Cats.

Eight Orphan Ducklings

This past April 29, my mother telephoned from Fort Myers. Earlier that day, she had heard a racket coming from the small retention lake that borders property where she and my father live. She went out to the lake shore and saw feathers, but no dead body. And she saw eight little ducklings. She figured that some carnivore had caught the mother duck, and now the eight ducklings were orphaned. She tried to feed them (I think with crackers or bread crumbs), but the ducklings didn’t let her come very close.

The next day, after a few calls, she obtained a consult from the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife (CROW). A volunteer couple from Maine arrived with binoculars and a camera, and they documented the orphaned baby ducklings, still very young and fluffy. An adult Muscovy duck appeared for a few minutes, but then left; later, another duck appeared, as well as two immature tricolored blue herons.

The CROW volunteers said that a mature duck might adopt the orphan ducklings, but otherwise their advice was to leave the ducklings alone; the ducklings would fend for themselves, finding food among the wild grasses. The CROW volunteers warned that only 40% of these orphans will survive. The water in the retention lake is receding, and soon the water will be too shallow for the ducklings; and then predator birds will come for them. This is what happens in nature.

Later that evening, my mother met some neighbors who said they had seen a 200-lb (“small”) black/brown bear only a few feet from their car. My mother has seen unfamiliar animal droppings in the back outside the lanai, and now thinks that it was a bear that attacked and killed the mother duck.

The ducklings are dark brown with a yellow breast; it remains to be determined what species of duck they are. They “peep” loudly, are beginning to separate into smaller groups, and sometimes walk onto the embankment. They look like they’re doing well, so my mother will let them look for food themselves.

Her camera is currently malfunctioning, so she has no pictures yet.

Charity Work in Romania

My friend K.C. was in Romania, from April 17 to 27. Along with some other volunteers, she was there doing charity work in a poor neighborhood village named Tarlungeni in which many Roma families live, near the city of Brasov. The volunteers helped raise (not raze!) two houses for poor families. This work was done through the agency of the Fundatia pentru Asistenta Sociala si Tineret (FAST, or the Foundation for Social Assistance and Youth).

The lucky families selected for whom a house would be built are based solely on need, e.g., number of children, number of caregivers (usually the parents or grandparents), possible acute health conditions. When a family is chosen, they must agree for their children to attend the Ziurel community center for educational purposes, and the man of the house (if there is one) must help with building the house.

Of course, in addition to the charity work, K.C. had the opportunity to explore Brasov and surrounding environs. Below are some photos she shared with me.

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Outside the community center, 'New Day'

Arrival at Mica's (Grandma's)

'All Eggs In One Basket' - hand-painted Easter eggs for Orthodox Easter

Portrait of Family No. 3

Atop Mt. Tampa - K.C. and other volunteers

View of Brasov from 1600 Feet (atop Mt. Tampa)

Old City Hall, Brasov

At House No. 1, Day 1

Hard At Work

Village Kids

Former house for a family of 10

The Neighborhood

House In Progress (House No. 1)

Family for whom the house was built

Supervising drywall installation (House No. 2)

End of the project (House No. 1)

Bran Castle, of Dracula Lore

Divining Rods (Dowsing)

It is said that seeing is believing. Well, I have seen.

It was back in the 80’s, in my A.P. Physics class in Gilman High School. In retrospect my classmates seem so colorful, almost like legends: C.A., I.M., M.K., M.S., M.L., M.J., J.H., T.N., T.P., J.S., et al. They were all present, and they all saw.

The teacher, Mr. W.P., brought divining rods to class one day. They were made of a silvery metal, probably aluminum, and were L-shaped. The long arm of the L was perhaps 18 inches long, while the short arm was perhaps 6. You held the short arm of one rod in one hand, and the short arm of the other rod in the other hand. I believe that there was a sleeve over the short arm which allowed the rod to swivel freely, even though you were gripping the short arm tightly.

Mr. P. had us walk slowly across the front of the classroom with the divining rods. Other than that, we were given no instructions. In particular, we weren’t given any New Agey instructions like repeat a mantra or concentrate on world peace or “believe”. And what we all observed was that near the midpoint of the room, the rods would suddenly and forcefully swing outwards — not inwards, like I’ve read — so that one rod was pointing to the front of the room while the other was pointing to the back of the room. It felt like an invisible force, akin to magnetism, had gripped the long arm and pulled it. All students tried it, and the effect was completely reproducible. (Years later, when I related the story to a fundamentalist skeptic, he suggested that we were twisting our wrists to make the rods point where we wanted them to. That’s silly, and was definitely not the case. If one of us did that, the other students would have mocked him mercilessly.)

Mr. P. pointed out that there were bare pipes along the ceiling containing running water, and that the rods were aligning with the running water. From what I’ve read elsewhere, this is known about divining rods: they work only with running water.

M.K. raised his hand and asked, “But how do they work?” Mr. P. responded, “K., if you figured that out you’d win the Nobel prize!”

I don’t think that the effect is due to something like psychic powers. I think it’s simply some curious physical effect that has to do with running water, that we haven’t figured out yet. So, I’m filing this post under Science and Technology rather than Meditation and New Age.

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If the unknown physical effect is caused by running water, does it come into play with the circulatory system, where blood (which, after all, is mostly water) courses through miles of blood vessels? Perhaps it cancels out, because blood ultimately goes in both directions in the body, since it must return to the heart? (Here, I’m making an analogy to a hollow metal sphere that’s electrically charged; the net electric field in the interior is zero, because the contribution from one portion cancels the contribution from all the others when you compute the integral.)

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I realize that mainstream science frowns upon phenomena that don’t fit in with standard doctrine. Dowsing is one such phenomenon. So, I am not supposed to believe in something that I have seen. But I’m not going to disbelieve something I’ve seen just because an authority figure tells me that it couldn’t have happened. “Nothing to see here, move along.”

Missouri’s unofficial state motto is “Show Me.” I like that.

The Suitcase Buckle (Dream, 04/24/09)

In the second dream, my sister was cooking a chicken in the oven. We had to go somewhere, and she suddenly learned (perhaps through a telephone call) that she had found transportation. I am not sure what form the transportation was, although it may have been a taxi cab. We had to leave immediately to catch the transportation.

I asked my sister if it would be okay to leave the chicken cooking while we left. Surely it would get burnt? She insisted that it would be okay. I again asked her, are you sure? She was sure. We left the chicken cooking.

B.O. appears in the dream. B.O. is slightly annoyed at M. because he had suggested she use a suitcase that had a buckle on it, and the buckle somehow irritated her. Perhaps during her travels, it was pressing on her leg or her head, and it was painful.

(This may be a reference to my “real” suitcase. The night before, in what we consider waking life, I had lent it to a friend who needed it to go on a trip this weekend. And the buckle is very most likely a reference to a poem entitled My Papa’s Waltz that was discussed in the CD-ROM course on poetry that I sometimes listen to in my car.)

S.J.F.’s wife T.S.F. (who is expecting twins in May!) also appeared in the dream, briefly. She made a comment, but I don’t remember what she said.

Spring Cleaning (Dream, 04/24/09)

I had two dreams the night of April 23 (so they probably actually occurred in the early morning hours of April 24). At least, two that I can remember.

I remember only the general gist of the first dream. In this dream, for some reason I have decided to be less messy, and to throw unnecessary things away. In the process, I throw away two notebooks into the trashcan in the garage where I live. One of the notebooks was spiral-bound, while the other was my moleskin notebook that I often bring when I go on trips or to some function (e.g., a wine-tasting I attended April 8, or a musical event that I attended April 19) to take notes.

But later I suddenly had second thoughts, and decided in a near panic that I really hadn’t meant to throw those notebooks away. I decided to go back to the trashcan to retrieve the notebooks. I reasoned that they don’t empty that trashcan too often, so there would be a good chance that those two notebooks would still be there.

The notebooks were still there, although a little soiled, near the top of the pile of trash in the trashcan, with some other trash on top of them. I retrieved the notebooks, greatly relieved.