The Powwow of Myth
My little audio experiment after listening to Stephen King read one of his own books
So by the time I started grad school, I had long been a fan of recorded books, especially the ones produced by Recorded Books. Among my early favorites were those narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, George Guidall, and the incomparable Frank Muller. I also listened to many books written by Stephen King, the best read by Frank Muller, the worst not read by Frank Muller.
I had also spent a lot of time nearly every day reading aloud while on my way to and from work with my brother. The one I remember most clearly was Dune by Frank Herbert. When I lived in the Dominican Republic, I read El Leon, la Bruja, y la Guarda-ropa to Spanish speakers and the seven volumes of the Narnia series, Gentle Ben, and a couple of others to English speakers. I also read The Bronze Bow (Elizabeth George) to a group while in NYC Urban Corps during college. So after starting grad school and hearing that a blind German student in the human nutrition PhD program needed to have texts read, I went over to the school’s recording studio to do that. Let’s just say that reading textbooks about nutritional physiology and nutritional biochemistry wasn’t as fun as reading Blubber or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I guess all the prior reading came in handy because the women running the studio were really happy; I think mostly because they almost never had to punch in to record over errors. They told me that I should read professionally. Yeah, sure, right after I finish my seven year PhD program and four year post-doc.
Anyway, during that time, I finally got a desktop computer that I could connect to my little Yamaha mixer (now stolen, sort of a theme lately). And about that same time I was listening to Stephen King reading either Needful Things or The Drawing of the Three from his Dark Tower series and thought that I had to be able to do a better job of reading than that. So I looked for something I’d written that I could record. In one of my journals, I found my story I later referred to as the Powwow of Myth (reference to Joseph Campbell) adapted from a campfire story I had told that scared the shit out of those who had heard it; actually, it scared them so much that they refused to use the single seater outhouse and resorted to the bear in the woods approach to sanitary relief.
And discovering that called to mind other instances of strong reactions to stories I had written by three English teachers; the first, a science fiction story in junior high in 8th grade (Passage), the second, a short story experiment in radically swerving the narrative in 10th grade (Daddy’s Big Surprise), and the third, a short story that could have been a pre-ja vu in 10th grade summer school of the My Lai massacre (no, not called How I Spent Last Summer and not as a result of that pissed-off 10th grade English teacher but the second semester English teacher, the one who had a student teacher named Bateman we could get to blush by calling him Master Bateman).
How times have changed in the character of American English teachers.
Imagine, a male student teacher in English that you could get to blush by calling him Master Bateman or a male English teacher who would get angry over a student writing a story that would dare to suggest that any of our honorable military would ever engage in war-time atrocities (I’m guessing he never read Andersonville like I did in 6th grade). And after reading The Road to Bataan in 7th grade, I guess I figured that it was more likely than not that human nature in war time could probably lead to bizarre shit despite the overall (relatively) exemplary nature of the American military. I wish I had been able to bump into him a year or so later when the My Lai story came out and ask him if he wanted to change my grade on that short story.
The tenth grade English teacher actually took me out of our portable classroom about the surprise ending of Daddy’s Big Surprise (I’m guessing he’d never read Sredni Vashtar or the less horrible but still literary whiplash endings of the O’Henry stories). He was red-faced and shaking in anger over the fate of little Snowball in Daddy’s Big Surprise; though, what John Lennon said later, “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans,” was a pretty apt description of what happened to Snowball. He actually raged, saying several different times, “Don’t you ever do that to a reader—don’t ever lead him in one direction and then do that to him!” He wasn’t the least little bit clued-in by the word “Surprise” in the title?
I thought, but didn’t say, “Wow, so what you’re saying is that the written word can be pretty powerful.” The only thing better would have been to know at the time whether he was a Presbyterian or a material determinist and then ask, “So what are you complaining about?”
Maybe he was a lover of—well, cats, and maybe that final sentence describing what happened after the kids (not named Dick, Jane, and Sally), having discovered just how much Snowball loved chasing balls in the back yard, decided to really gratify Snowball (Daddy’s Big Surprise) by enthusiastically rolling the ball in what turned out to have been an errant toss too far and Snowball, living up to the challenge, pursued it through the opening of an animal trail in the hedge, all the way down the hill, and up onto the highway—maybe that’s what resulted in the male English teacher equivalent of a vapors-induced swoon.
But, come on, the description in the story of the ever longer tosses of the rolling ball, Snowball pursuing and pouncing on it again and again and again, ending with the ball disappearing through a dark hole in the hedge that separated the huge suburban back yard from the county highway should have been telegraphing the hell out of the probable outcome that just happened to be coincident with the kids reaching the hedge and seeing Snowball’s final pounce only seconds before being crushed to a bloody pulp beneath the fat, greasy tires of a fourteen wheeler screaming along the highway from the big city. Given that obvious set-up, there really wasn’t any necessity of calling the story “Snowball’s Final Pounce” or “Pussy-Killing Murder Balls.” Of course, the shock could have come from having adjusted sentence lengths in such a way that the bloody denouement of the story awaiting the turning of the page was, much like Snowball’s fate, just out of sight. It was an example of the structure of the story mirroring the action in the story.
And poor Miss Daniels in eighth grade, she with the unchanging vertical equivalent of a bun, asking her students to write a short story using the plot of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (of Dead Souls fame). Two things: One, back then in 8th grade we were reading a story by frigging Nikolai Gogol about someone desiring so badly something he needed to survive and working so hard to obtain it that it killed him. Two, the teacher was giving us an assignment to write a similar story.
Okay, the weirdness of the prim, elderly Miss Daniels doing that is a lot more like the weirdness of English teachers today, except that Miss Daniels was only asking us to write something merely despairing and nihilistic. She wasn’t asking us to write a politically-correct story from the viewpoint of a persecuted trans student so overwhelmed with angst that he decides that the perfect way for him to show he’s really a chick is to do the chick “suicide as a cry for help” thing. If she had, I probably would have ended it with the boy forgetting that such chicks rarely kill themselves while he, ironically, pursued that goal just like boys do: that is, doing it in such a way as to get the job done thoroughly and irremediably, thus demonstrating to the world that, no matter what he believed himself to be, he was still a boy, and his dedication to a fantasy denying his essential nature as a boy was just not sufficient to offset that essential nature, which ended up killing him instead of giving him hours and hours talking to a gullible junior high counselor. I probably would have gotten a bad grade on that one, too.
Anyway, here’s an overview of my science fiction story that got a D- and a note less than a third of the way through it, saying that she would read no farther because it was NOT what she had asked for. Had she finished it, she would have seen that it was exactly what she had asked for: the main characters working so hard to get something they desired above all else that it was the death of them.
Two cousins of a space-faring civilization had long dreamed of being the ones who would finally discover one of those long-rumored lost cities where everything was left in place and still functional. You know, the stuff of legends that all the kids on their side of the child/adult divide dream about as they slog through all the seemingly meaningless work of their apprenticeship in order to be allowed to join what they will discover too late to be their actually meaningless existence as junior adults too busy even to talk about what they had so desired to find as youth.
The two cousins are finally allowed to go out by themselves in a scout ship while on one of their ship’s cataloging planet-falls and actually find such a city. In the course of exploring one of the five mile-high spires on the shore of a western sea more than a thousand miles from where they’re supposed to be doing their junior explorer thing, they realize that there is nothing at all that gives any direct evidence of what the former inhabitants looked like. All the artwork is abstract, nothing representational. Sure, there’s the structure and function of the building and some furnishings that offer clues, but bipedal lizards could just as easily lie on beds or sit on couches or even hold high government offices.
After an unproductive run to a lobby full of heaps of furniture rotting from the effects of windows split open from the weight of untended vegetation and finding nothing more interesting that the top end of a lab flask, though without wondering why, they return to explore the higher, undamaged floors. A fully functioning swimming pool and one apartment later, the door of which just happened to be ajar—hey, there are swimming lizards, so why not swimming lizard people—they discover what appears to be a video room where they find what they assume to be video media next to what appears to be a player that already has one video block in the slot. They press enough surface features that appear to be controls to activate that one and see from the initial minutes of the video that whoever had built the structure had to have been as human as they are, though they didn’t see the point of the video.
And it was here that I got the D- and Miss Daniels (who hadn’t gotten the point of the video, either) note saying she was refusing to read any farther because I had not written what she had assigned me to write. More on that later.
The older cousin gets up and starts switches out for one of the others left next to the video station. His younger cousin has remained in his seat. What they see next is also something they don’t understand. It’s a horror video. To the older cousin who had started it before he went back around to take his seat, it looks 3D. But to his younger cousin, who had remained seated from the time it had initialized, what he sees looks not only 3D but seems real in every way.
He has no sensation of sitting next to his older cousin in a video room. He has no knowledge of anything outside the video in which he finds himself, flying along at night across a desert landscape with a storm building in the distance behind him. As he flies along, the wind around his body unmakes the seams of his clothes until he is flying along naked under a full moon. He feels the moon light hitting him like cold silver, most of it running along his body and down his legs like bright liquid, beading on his toes and flying off into the wind behind him. Some of it, though, soaks through his skin, collects in his nerves, and flows up his spinal cord like glowing liquid to fill his brain and his eyes. As this happens, he is able to see far ahead a strange dark figure in a cape, running and stumbling across the sand and rocks of the dark desert, occasionally looking back over its shoulder, but never up.
As the younger cousin flies along, the increasing load of the moonlight he has absorbed pushes him closer to the ground at the same time it increases his forward speed in the same direction as the running figure, ever downward and ever closer. But accompanying that is the even more quickly approaching storm. The booms of thunder buffet him in the air, the cracks of lightning illuminate him, activating the accumulating moonlight that is filling him more and more and crawling across his skin in crackling, flickering blue static. The moonlight and the thunder and the wind and the lightning push him farther toward the ground and propel him forward ever faster. He draws ever closer to the caped figure in black that appears to be getting ever more frantic about whatever it’s trying to get away from. The desert land begins to rise up in elevation as the figure draws nearer to the crest of a hill covered in bare, black trees, all their branches, reaching into the sky, being tossed wildly about in the wind of the storm, looking like grasping black fingers, eager to snatch from the sky anything that could be flying by.
Hey, maybe just like him who was flying by, chilled and alone.
The figure in black scrabbles up the scaly slope of the desert ridge toward the tossing branches of the black trees. The younger cousin is pushed ever more quickly farther down and forward by the lightning and moonlight and wind. He is finally so full of moonlight that it streams from his eyes and ears, nose and mouth and flows coldly around his body from his head to his toes.
The figure scrambles up onto the ridge and into a tree. The younger cousin, now full of moonlight, can see everything that happening out ahead and down below.
The figure’s fingers grasp the branches but not to pull itself into the tree. Instead they began to elongate and darken to match the branches of the trees. The cloak, being blown up around and over the figure, seems to attach itself to the lengthening fingers and arms. The moonlit vision of the younger cousin sees the head and neck and body of the dark figure begin to melt and shift and reform under the influence of the light of the silvery moon pushing the younger cousin ever faster along and downward and forward.
The figure looks back and then around and finally up. A crack of lightning illuminates its eyes. The gusting wind and booming thunder make its lips tremble as it opens its mouth unimaginably wide. A crack of thunder blows the boy down into a mouth that stinks of storm and blood and darkness and death.
Except then he finds himself still in flight, this time on the back of something huge and dark, his arms stretched around its neck, swooping and rising and falling but then blown by the wind ever higher.
Queue seeing the approach of a huge castle through echo-location, being blasted off his ride by lightning, lifted by updrafts to a stationary position, and then spiked by the storm’s blast against the castle’s wall.
Except that he finds himself passing through the stone of the castle’s wall like it’s mist or maybe like he’s mist.
Except that he finds himself hanging by his wrists by chains in a huge horror flick laboratory, swaying toward a fire and back against the wall like a pendulum, marking out his remaining time.
Except that he observes the laboratory equipment in great detail, including the bench with crystalline tubework and spirals of glassware beyond the very large marble dissecting slab, next to the giant case of shelves crowded with mysterious looking bottles and glass canisters filled with unknown but weird substances, the crisp white towel lying to one side of the dissecting slab crowded with every imaginable cutting instrument of every imaginable shape.
Except that he hears and then sees a nearly dead horror shuffling out from one corner toward the bench looking for something that will halt the process of its dissolution, finding only enough for a temporary stay and yet enough clarity to figure out what else it needs to return to its powerful, former existence.
Except that he sees the moment the now much more dangerous thing at the bench standing with its back to him becomes aware of the solution that’s hanging behind him, its back straightening while one hand all on its own crawls toward the surgical cutlery and caresses each piece with long familiarity.
Except that he sees the other hand on its own grasp the neck of a lab flask and casually flip it up into the air over its shoulder to come crashing down onto the stone floor releasing a bright chemical tide that he watches flowing toward and between his toes, the coldness climbing up through his body and progressively immobilizing him.
Except that he looks up to see the thing bent down, scooping up the unbroken end of the lab flask with one hand, slipping it over the forefinger of the other hand like a ghastly ring.
Except that he looks up even higher and beholds the thing beholding him, raises his eyes past his hands clasped in irons, following the chains until they disappear into the darkness above, no escape coming from that direction, is then seeing his toes dragging slightly back and forth through the chemical mess on the stone floor, no escape from that direction, either, then looks up to see the thing standing directly before him and using the claw of its lab-flask ringed finger to scratch him from throat to nuts and bolt, drawing what he knew had to be a sketch, a map to be followed using what he had seen on the slab and then he kicks out and feels himself falling.
Except that he feels himself rising until the cold stone wall that had been pressing against him is replaced by the cold marble slab holding him up and he knows the thing’s intent and his own purpose in fulfilling that goal.
Except that he manages to summon enough of something beyond fear to grab something from that crisp white cloth and lash out.
So his older cousin has been seeing generally the same creepy shit, but as an observer, not as one experiencing it. He recognizes the lab flask end that he had found in the lobby earlier and had tossed aside as inconsequential and feels the beginning of a doubt.
He watches long enough until his younger cousin screams and pitches out of his seat onto the floor, screaming, “It’s here. It’s going to get us” and then goes into convulsions.
The older cousin jumps up and yanks the video block out of the machine.
The younger cousin abruptly falls silent as though he’s been switched off or, maybe, even killed.
The older cousin goes back around and pats his cheeks and calls his name.
Suddenly the younger cousin is awake and screaming, “It’s here. It’s going to get us!” and looking wildly around.
The older cousin is thinking, Jeez, little cousin, creepy, yeah, but you’re just way too fucking dramatic.
The younger cousin says they have to go back to the roof immediately to try radioing their uncle again, having not gotten through earlier after the older cousin had crash-landed them on the roof.
When they reach the top and the elevator doors open, there’s only the fading light from the sunset illuminating just the top edges of their wrecked scout in the northwest corner of the roof against the retaining wall in the direction of the cliff they had flown over what seems ages ago, the plants covering the cliff faintly illuminated by the afterglow of the sunset. But the distance from the center of the roof to the crashed scout against the retaining wall around roof’s periphery is equal to at least two city blocks and lies in solid black shadows.
They look back to the bright interior of the elevator, around to the still- warm glow from the western, and up to the heavy foliage on the cliff. They can detect the faint smell of the harbor and ocean to the west, the delicate scents of night blossoms on the cliff since, by then, the wind has shifted to an offshore breeze. They glance up at the clear sky brilliantly illuminated by the rising galactic center to the east over the dark cliff’s edge and feel relieved to be back in the big outdoors and everything familiar, not some creepy video 140 floors below inside a building that was many, many times greater than their ship.
They start trotting toward the scout craft all relieved as hell when, from the direction of the scout craft, they hear a loud shriek that sounds just like what the younger cousin had experienced in the video and what his older cousin had heard.
They bolt back to the elevator and catch the door just as it’s closing.
They’re asking themselves where do they go, what do they do? To the lobby and outside through that big crack in the window? No. Who even knows what’s out there. To the floor with the swimming pool? No. No cover there. Back to the apartment they had found earlier after the pool but before the video room? Sounds good and with an entrance relatively small enough to defend.
On the way down, the older cousin hits the button for the floor with the museum, darts out, returns, and then hits the apartment floor and several others, ending with the ground floor to give, he hopes, the impression that they’re choosing the great outdoors.
The younger one asks what he got in the museum and the older holds up a couple magazines for the guns they had found and had been shooting earlier when it was light and they were still the brave explorers who had finally found IT.
They do what they can to block the outside door and then barricade themselves inside a bedroom in the apartment they had been wishing earlier in the day could be theirs and wait, the tension severely jacking them up. At the point it’s unsustainable and they finally relax, they hear the apartment door being shoved open.
Now they are totally freaking out. After a few minutes they hear something making scratching sounds on the bedroom door and a voice like the one that had begun to do horrible things to the younger one on its dissecting table to steal his life essence to restore its almost dead monster self to full power.
“I know you’re in there,” it says.
They both freak out and wonder if even bullets can stop it—because now the older brother is a believer, too.
They hear it try to open the door, push it, meet resistance, and start throwing its weight against it.
Apparently one or the other cousin had not been practicing proper trigger discipline, probably the older one, given the way he’d crashed the scout, attempting a flashy rooftop landing, and the gun goes off.
Whatever is pushing against the door goes really nuts and gains entry to the room.
Too late, they see it’s their uncle.
The whole thing had been a set-up, an initiation kind of thing to mark their formal transition from space cadet to junior adult status.
Their uncle makes it across the room and over to them just in time to see them realize, “Shit, so that’s why no one cared any more about finding IT after becoming a junior adult!” as they bleed out in his arms, too sorry, too late.
So, see, I fulfilled the assignment. Something the main characters had wanted more than anything else in life had, at their own hand, ended up killing them.
What Miss Daniel’s had found objectionable was the plot device, or whatever it’s called, which the clinical and chaste description of a striptease video to let them know what was actually going on.
A year or so later, I bumped into her at the high school and told her how wrong she had been and why I had actually fulfilled the assignment. I’m wondering if her stopping with the innocent non-graphic strip-tease saved her from whatever the truly horrible parts could have done.
Since then, though, I have reworked the story so it’s not so boringly nihilistic like Gogol’s story and so much of the earlier horror fiction I had read; but it’s still pretty horrible, but with hope and humor.
________
So after wondering whether what I heard in Stephen King was a Maine accent or a speech impediment, I thought I had to be able to do a better job of reading than that. And my recording of The Powwow of Myth was my experiment to see.
Things I learned:
It’s easier said than done.
You can set things up as carefully as possible for each take but still have unexpected differences.
Oh, yeah, there’s something called compression and limiting that can be done to maintain a more constant volume without having to sit without moving a half an inch toward or away from the mic.
I knew there were pop filters, but I had none, so I had to learn to avoid plosives, mostly by speaking by, not directly toward the mic.
The format of a fireside tale gives one a LOT of leeway in many different respects.
It’s really funny, in an almost weird, yet gratifying, sort of way, how the voices of characters can pop out almost as fully formed as the music I used to be able to generate before the TBI robbed me of that.
I recorded aif files that were still noisier than expected. I guess I should have built a foam-lined cubicle in my dorm room. In the decades since then, though, iZotope has made a great suite of recording and editing software that enabled me to greatly reduce the noise level and increase the vocal quality. I’m sure there are some even more advanced tools they have to improve it even more, but, eh, I’m not going to wait even more forever than I already have.
There are 13 episodes, more or less 4 or 5 minutes long. I’ve made ACC copies so they won’t be so huge.
Here’s the track order:
01 Powwow, The Second Day of Camp
02 Powwow, Lunch After the Colonial Village
03 Powwow, The Hunt for Firewood
04 Powwow, My Fireside Tale
05 Powwow, Mudboy’s Instructions
06 Powwow, Powwow’s Moral Choice
07 Powwow, Rolling Rock Tempts Powwow
08 Powwow, The Fish Gang Ridicules Powwow
09 Powwow, Powwow Summons the Fish
10 Powwow, Not Everyone Dies
11 Powwow, Mudboy Brings Good News and Bad News
12 Powwow, Mudboy’s Gift to Whitey
13 Powwow, Whitey’s Demise
That’s about the first 55 minutes of the story and is pretty self-contained. The rest of the story is about 250,000 words and nearing completion.