Troll Towers: the view from the ground floor

When I sneaked back into troll-collecting, I know not when or how (or why), I had to find a place to stash them. I saw these pictures of massive collections, seemingly thousands, all lined up on shelves on the wall, and didn't want that. It seemed to me you wouldn't be able to find a specific troll, and I didn't want enough room to let my collection get that big. So I racked my brains for something I could use, something with shelves, something I could put on my desk and look at and access so I could have trolls right beside me all day.

So I came up with this. I didn't even have to buy anything! Old CD racks, gathering dust in the corner. I came close to painting them, as they looked kind of  jail-ish, but someone in my troll group (yes, I have a troll group) told me to leave it alone, it had an Elvis jailhouse rock/'60s discoteque feeling to it and made it look pleasingly like trolls a-go-go. The clear shelves make photographing them from the bottom floor kind of interesting.

This is an earlier model, and since then I've added trolls, and added a breezeway between the two towers, mainly for more shelves. I soon had to reinforce the middle ones (made from more empty CD cases) because they kept flying out the back. 

Bentley, yes, Bentley does love these trolls, and he sometimes grabs one by the hair and makes off with it (though lately his interest has waned). I peruse Amazon and Etsy sites to see what I'd love to have, and can't afford. I think I wrote about Trollina already (didn't I?). She was a rescue, and I had the predictable reaction of bonding with her. Since then I've become, if not a serious collector (can't afford it), then a fairly serious obsesser.

My troll Facebook page displays things that would cost me hundreds of dollars, if I could even find them. They aren't supposed to buy and sell on that page, but most of the posts seem to be in the nature of, "Look at this gorgeous thing. I am looking for a forever home. Are you interested?" Sometimes I think it is set up to incite troll envy. But never mind, I post Trollina in hand-knitted things, and so far no one has thrown me out. I will never be able to afford a 17" Dam giant - hell, even a 7" is a hardship for me. 

Why am I doing this? I collected "Dam things" when I was ten, the best year of my life. I associate it with two significant friendships (both of whom I am still in touch with on Facebook).  I also think it's a sort of echo of empty-nester syndrome: the grandkids are now either pre-teens or adolescents, and the sense of loss is palpable. 

I look at videos of reborns, some of whom move, breathe and make sounds, and even pee. It freaks me out, but I am still drawn to it, the "morning routine", the "shopping trip", the "temper tantrum" and reborn toddler getting sick and running a fever and even throwing up. There is even realistic poop - I don't know if you make this yourself or buy it. I am sure there are recipes.

I am not that far gone yet, but sometimes I wonder. I will do almost anything to dodge the clinical depression that nearly finished me through most of my life. You can't cuddle a troll or make it talk (or, at least, if you hear it talk you're in trouble). But they tweak something in me, something I like. I want to dodge the elitism I already see, which seems to be part of human nature. A lot of my trolls, the majority in fact, cost me $4.50 at the dollar store. Then I make them over with new hair and eyes.

Where does it end? I guess, when I get tired of it. It hasn't happened yet.

For she has seen aurora

O roar a roar for Norah

Norah Alice in the night

For she has seen aurora

Borealis burning bright.

Songs of the Pogo

Troll Valley

Making jello while waiting for my husband to sneeze

                               Not one of my best videos, but here it is.

It's the Ajax lady! (animation)

 

That's advertising!

The loudest sneeze IN THE WQRLD!

                    This actually got some views. It IS pretty funny.

The one, the only - Jeff Paterson!

                             
                                   And Daddy of two of my grandkids.

Boyhood Photo of Thomas Edison

           Boyhood photo of Thomas Edison

Comments (from The Vintage News)

This is what a young theif and con man looks like.

 A con man and a thief? Are you sure this isn't Elon Musk?

I'm sure there's always been stupid people. But with the emergence of social media in recent times, you actually get to see firsthand exactly how dumb and gullible some truly are…

General electric and Edison ruined Nicola Tesla. History is always written by the victors regardless of whether they are thieving psychopaths or not.

So much rancor for the man! As a boy he was my hero. Working on the Grand Trunk railroad on the baggage car. His chemicals starting the fire and the conductor throwing him off. It was all so brave.

Probably thinking about how he can take credit for other people's ideas.

Thinking about profit his own selfishness and screwing the rest of the world.

I bet he stole the camera for that picture too

Show me the picture of Thomas Edison as a girl too!

For people who believe everything "The Oatmeal" claims about Edison and Tesla

Edison's ideas came from a think tank. It's safe to say he "stole" from a wide variety of people.

Teddy he sure did

Quiet.....Bet most of you thought Tesla was just a car and had to Google to learn otherwise

A hero renowned for his infamy as grand thief of someone else's genius.

That face you make when you know you can steal well.

The smiling face of a future con man, before he became a thug and a thief.

What a smarmy looking little shitbird.

Probably stole that outfit.

Sweet favorite boy of the banksters.

He looks radiant in this photo

Would he be anything else?

He dreamed of 'Westinghousing' an elephant.

someone should’ve punched the kid in the face

I was just about to say that.

He later claimed to have invented the scarf. 

And Bell may have been a thief as well.

"Here I go stealin' again"

What s bright spark

He got old young.

Original mugshot.

As opposed to a girl

Bully.

Lookie that lil thief

Legendary!

Looks like Oliver

Dodgy lil prick

Relative of yours?

Wanker

A thief and a crook

Stop hating

of course! 😂😂😂😂

Look at that smile. What a piece of garbage

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I needed a laugh, and I got one. I have always hated pompous assholes who steal other people's ideas for their own glory, so this actually made me laugh out loud. I'd have to include on the list Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and (yes!) Walt Disney. My generation would have been horrified to see these comments. My generation was full of shit. Everyone disses comments sections, but in this case I think they're right on the money.

The Little Ash Girl: what lies beneath the story of Cinderella

I remember this recorded version of Cinderella much more vividly than the Disney movie. For one thing, it's strung together by the music from Prokofiev's ballet, one of my favorite orchestral pieces. It's weird, because the music must have made an impression on me in my childhood - as much as the story, at least - but it sort of faded out of my mind until a couple of decades ago, when I stumbled on the ballet music again and felt my scalp prickle from the stirring of memory.

This record, or records (two 78 rpms) gracefully incorporated the quirkily gorgeous Prokofiev ballet score. The narrator might as well have shut up and let the music tell the story. Listening to it as an adult, there is a certain edge, a pleasing tartness in the music that cuts the sweetness, and a real sense of irony, of tongue-in-cheek. Cinderella is almost - not quite, but almost - a madcap figure, a sort of puppet acting out her fate because "that's how the story goes". Then there are those stepsisters, nasty spinsters spinning their nasty webs. In a TV version of the ballet, one of the stepsisters was around 180 pounds, twice the size of the standard ballerina, and took her pratfalls with good humor (though it was obvious she was a very good dancer). In contrast, the other stepsister was a menacing rack of bones.

Once you start digging into the deeper layers of fairy tales, you find yourself gasping and floundering. There is just too damn much "meaning", too many layers, and some versions are wildly conflicting. The earliest Cinderella story was some Sumerian thing from the Fourth Dynasty (or whatever), and the story involved fish. It took place on boats and in tombs. How could the two be linked? I was also surprised to find that the Grimm brothers, known for telling stories too gory and disturbing for children, were known to sanitize these primal folk tales to make them more palatable (and sell more books). But even their cleaned-up versions are so shocking they are almost in poor taste, at least for children.

With Cinderella, the Grimms were somehow connecting us to a stranger, older and darker story (and much longer - each of these fairy tales would fill a  book) than the stereotypical and sugary version we have today. A fairy godmother? Not a chance. That would make it too easy. Here is how Aschenputtel (Cinderella in German, which literally translates as the nasty nickname The Ash Fool) gets her gold-and-silver ball gown:

As no one was now at home, Cinderella went to her mother's grave beneath the hazel-tree, and cried,

"Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."

Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She put on the dress with all speed, and went to the wedding. Her step-sisters and the step-mother however did not know her, and thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress. They never once thought of Cinderella, and believed that she was sitting at home in the dirt, picking lentils out of the ashes. The prince approached her, took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never let loose of her hand, and if any one else came to invite her, he said, "This is my partner."

Right away, I think of My Fair Lady, and how no one recognized the "draggletailed guttersnipe" Eliza Doolittle because Henry Higgins passed her off as a Hungarian princess. It's such a direct hit that it makes me shiver. G. B. Shaw was no fool, knew his fairy tales, and knew how to hit a nerve.

So is the Ash Girl's ball gown a disguise, or something else? Perhaps her grimy sackcloth was some kind of veil, and the shimmering gown she took from her mother's grave a reflection of her deeper self. It literally turns her into someone else, or back into the person she was meant to be - someone even her family doesn't recognize. The storyteller plays with identity here in a way which is downright spooky.

There's no stroke-of-midnight in the story, but Aschenputtel must beat a hasty retreat after the ball. She hides in a pigeon-house or something - what an odd place to hide! In this strange version there is more than one ball - one version claims, "the Prince had three balls", which I thought was pretty funny. So she must return to the graveyard for a new dress each night.

Cinderella's dead mother figures large in this story, as do those enigmatic white birds. Where Disney got all those mice is anyone's guess. I could find no pumpkins here either. There is a controversy around the slippers, whether they were made of glass or not (the Grimms seemed to think not), and some versions even suggest they were made from fur. It's hard for us to picture our heroine clomping around in comfy bedroom slippers at the ball. But let's press on.

Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, no one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits. Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were obliged, however, to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off your heel, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, the two pigeons sat on it and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

The repetition of rhymes, incantations and spells is an indispensible part of this kind of storytelling, usually in threes (the "turn and peep" shows up three times). Characters come and go as if through a revolving door, in and out of reality. The mystical significance of birds can't be overemphasized in this version, particularly the two white pigeons, who play a more active role than many of the humans. 

All sorts of analysts have tried to figure out the slippers. Some say they are representative of female genitalia, which I don't really get (though they do get bloody in a way which suggests the female fertility cycle). Shoes allow one to walk in public, be mobile, go forth. Dance. In contrast to the slippers (whatever they're made of), there are also big heavy wooden clogs, low-status peasant shoes,  made for those who toil in the dirt.

Walk a mile in my shoes. The old woman who lived in a shoe. If the shoe fits. . .

He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. "This also is not the right one," said he, "have you no other daughter." "No," said the man, "there is still a little stunted kitchen-wench which my late wife left behind her, but she cannot possibly be the bride." The king's son said he was to send her up to him, but the mother answered, oh, no, she is much too dirty, she cannot show herself. But he absolutely insisted on it, and Cinderella had to be called.

I can't help but feel this is a reference to virginity, an absolute must for marriage, particularly to nobility. To marry, and particularly to "marry up", one absolutely had to be pure. The mother seems to be saying in so many words that her daughter is too "dirty" to be considered. And her own father is calling her a "little stunted kitchen-wench", a mere leftover from his first marriage - "wench" being a term for a "loose woman". Is this why white doves swirl and flutter around the story as proof of Aschenputtel's unassailable virginity?

She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed down before the king's son, who gave her the golden shoe. Then she seated herself on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and put it into the slipper, which fitted like a glove. And when she rose up and the king's son looked at her face he recognized the beautiful maiden who had danced with him and cried, "That is the true bride." The step-mother and the two sisters were horrified and became pale with rage, he, however, took Cinderella on his horse and rode away with her. As they passed by the hazel-tree, the two white doves cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

There's so much here that I can't begin to get into it!  Bloody shoes, false brides, hazel trees and white pigeons which have somehow, mysteriously, become doves. And dead mothers, and a maiden's tears having the magical power of  healing and summoning. Sliding her foot into that slipper does have a sexual feel to it - the perfect fit - casting off virginity and stepping across the threshhold into womanhood. Of course this version is a translation from the more stolid German, so some expressions may have been extensively reworked. The magic incantations were probably quite altered, as they had to rhyme, scan and make sense. But all those bleeding, chopped-up feet - . Isn't this a desperation to escape one's station in life, to move on up or social-climb, even at the cost of being able to walk? Only Aschenputtel has the grace to hold off and allow the Prince to recognize her face. Yes, her face - not her foot.

I skipped the part where the Prince sets a trap for the Little Ash Girl by spreading pitch on the stairs of the ballroom (so at least one of her furry slippers will get stuck). I skipped the nastiness of the stepmother throwing lentils into the ashes on the floor, each grain of which Aschenputtel must pluck out by hand (probably digging into the skin on her knees). And when did ashes become cinders? Cinders are almost like live coals, not quite burned out, and quite dangerous. Don't get a cinder in your eye.

I also stumbled on a version in which the stepsisters were actually beautiful, but deadly. In other words, they were beautiful to look at but had nasty personalities. I've always had a lot of trouble telling little girls that "ugly" characters in fairy tales are "bad", and "beautiful" ones are "good". Just what does that mean? How much effect does it have on the average impressionable girl?

At any rate, my beloved 78 rpm version has no amputated toes, nor does Prokofiev's. But the ending of the Grimm version is a killer. The magical doves have alerted the Prince to Aschenputtel's true identity:

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

And when they had cried that, the two came flying down and placed themselves on Cinderella's shoulders, one on the right, the other on the left, and remained sitting there. When the wedding with the king's son was to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favor with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards as they came back the elder was at the left, and the younger at the right, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.

Yoicks! Blindness all their days! This isn't very merciful, is it? Very forgiving? But it interests me that the Little Ash Girl doesn't have to do any of the dirtywork - the white doves are her unlikely agents of revenge. Even a symbol of peace is full of hidden menace.

Though we often hear that these stories are too ancient to trace down to their roots, somebody must have thought of them, started them at some point in antiquity. Versions swirled around and were added to and (obviously) sanitized, but then it all sort of hardened, like the glass slipper. So even this relatively-modern Grimm tale of blindness and bleeding feet is about as far away from the Disney version as it gets.

FOOTNOTE! More on the glass/fur controversy:

The illustrated Antique Fairy Tales book sums up the argument in a footnote:

“There is no doubt that in the medieval versions of this ancient tale Cinderella was given pantoufles de vair – i.e. [slippers of] fur … probably [from] a grey squirrel. Long before the seventeenth century, the word vair had passed out of use… Thus the pantoufles de vair of the fairy tale became, in the oral tradition, the homonymous pantoufles de verre, or glass slippers.”

Forever Ringo

O Happy, Joyous Eastertide!

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

William Wordsworth


Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Spring-loaded

April’s where I live,

            the place my heart opens

                    rose-burgeoning, shinyleaf-new

a smell of bursting peonies,

              bumble-dizzy bees bumping

                       butter-and-eggs

swollen buds thrusting

             in the lovesick air.

Leaden, laden, leavened, lavendered, loaded,

one big quivering nose, a moist surprise

hatched out in the nest of my body

April Pegasus-leaps

      in my pulse,

sun-shot                 Pan-piped

           heady, relentlessly

tender,

recklessly

sweet.

Margaret Gunning                                                                

Reborn or undead: the Edison talking doll

I hated dolls as a kid and never went near them, though my mother bought me something called a Debbie doll - she was brunette, with a large head, much larger than Barbie's. I think my mother was afraid I would be a lesbian if she didn't do something pretty quickly. Obviously I wasn't a proper little girl at all.

Now I am dragged as if by hypnotic persuasion to the idea of dolls. I watch "reborn" videos obsessively, even though I think the dolls are insanely creepy and most of the women who own them borderline-unhinged. Some of these dolls actually pee (I've seen footage), some cry and coo, move, and have a heartbeat and an internal heating system. All this is to reproduce, as closely as possible, a Real Live Baby. Reborn videos commonly show the baby being "sick" so the "mother" has to hover over it and pretend to take it to the doctor, or going on shopping trips where "Mom" takes them out in public expressly to shock people and weird them out. (The video of the woman "giving birth" to a reborn has, unfortunately, been deleted.) I don't know if this is just a nasty prank, or a form of casual sadism.

The true glory of the reborn, as with all dolls, is that it never changes. The agony of watching your child grow away from you never needs to happen. That little vinyl blob in your arms is forever in your thrall. In fact, it is under your complete and total control at all times. Think of the power. Women actually weep when they lift seven pounds of quivering silicone out of the cardboard box from eBay. They sob and gasp and whisper to the "baby" for the whole 15-minute video.

I don't get it. Except that I do, or I want to. I'm collecting trolls again, enjoying it hugely - trolls, to me, weren't really dolls, they were a little too weird and subversive. My mother wasn't pleased and did not consider them real dolls, and still wanted me to play with my Debbie doll. My Debbie doll sucked rocks, as far as I was concerned.

I played trolls with two friends, both people who "got" me, and I don't need to explain to you what that means. I don't think it has ever happened to me again. I was ten, and that was my golden year, though I didn't know it at the time. It was my year of the Beatles and having a horse of my own, and being in the special advanced class in which I did not learn a royal rip because I did not have to. We all "learned at our own pace", which means we learned doodlysquat. It was total anarchy, and we literally gave our poor greenhorn teacher a nervous breakdown. He had so been looking forward to teaching this avant-garde, even prestigious class.

I was ten, and there were trolls, and now when I go back to trolls I see they are different, and yet the same. They have come and gone in waves, disappearing for 20 years after that first crest in the '60s, surging again in the '80s, then disappearing, until that Godawful movie came out.

But never mind. I ramble. I was going to talk about the Edison talking doll, but there isn't much to say, is there? It was a hideous thing. Edison was an arrogant asshole and thought he could make fools of the public just by putting out something with his name on it. It didn't happen. The dolls had a tiny version of his new-fangled gramophone embedded in its hard tin carapace. The tinny distorted recordings of nursery rhymes that issued forth when you turned the crank were nothing less than demonic. Curdled dulcet tones waver and shriek, making you wonder just who was  paid to spew this stuff, and how long they've been dead by now.

The dolls worked for about five minutes, which must have broken a lot of little girls' hearts, and most customers angrily demanded refunds. They stayed on the market for less than a year. Edison was known to refer to this project as "spilled milk", another way of saying "writeoff". And yet, and yet. A few must have remained in working order, or we wouldn't still have these blood-chilling horror-movie sounds.

I even wondered if the sound had been recreated artificially, like that wretched so-called recording of Au Clair de la Lune where some electron microscope scanned a very old piece of black paper, fed the random scratches into a computer and came up with The Very First Recorded Sound. It's a known fact that we hear what we expect to hear. I could write a whole piece about that, but I won't. A few years ago my granddaughter had a baby doll that talked, and one of the things it said was, "Allah is great!". Of course, what it really said was "gagamamamblllllgagmmmm", but once the rumor got around, EVERYONE heard the doll say"Allah is great". The dolls were soon pulled off the market. Allah, as everyone knows, is the embodiment of evil.

This video has the largest collection of talking doll horrors I've heard. I won't tell you to enjoy it. Just prepare yourself.

Glorious

Grandma didn't just have cups and saucers. She had CHINA,  the delicate teacups and fluted saucers edged in gold, plates festooned with roses and peacocks and even elaborate hunting scenes. I won't get into the Delft blue-patterned china, because that deserves its own post. My mother had a twelve-place setting of blue Wedgwood china with raised white grape leaf borders, which we only brought out at Christmas, and a gold-edged milk pitcher with a dog for a handle. (She wouldn't serve milk out of a bottle because "the neighbors might see it"). Once when Bill and I went to a 1920s museum in Burnaby, we kept crying out, "My grandma had one of those!" "So did MY grandma!" We came to the conclusion that we both had the same grandma, which fortunately wasn't true in a genetic sense.

These are miniatures for looking only, but must have taken forever to make. Our plates are from Walmart. They're also our "good china". Or should I say, our dishes.

P. S. I just thought of something. The mustard! Or at least I think it was mustard. It was in a little thing that looked like a white china beehive, with a bee on the top. I've looked, and there are similar images, either for honey or mustard (this must have been mustard - we were Irish and that kind of family). 
I never used it, so  it was one of the million-and-one things I wondered about, but never figured out.

Comfy, cozy cat

Cats are either double-jointed, or have such flexible bodies that their bones turn into water in a state of total relaxation. Bentley has assumed most of these positions at one time or another. I don't have too many of these, because I usually take action/beauty shots, but here are a few.