Deer magic, mermaids, and Egyptian geese
With Patrick Galbraith, Sacha Coward, and Jim Moir
About two years ago, on a bitterly cold December day, I drove down to Bristol to have lunch with a tutor who I got to know well when I was an undergraduate. He writes a lot on ekphrasis, but his real brilliance is as a teacher and lecturer. He was, and I believe still is, one of those people who can make even the most disinterested students care deeply. When he read poetry to us there was silence. Nothing, in that moment, mattered more than the words on the page and the thought of the many things they might mean.
We had lunch and he told me that since I was there, a little over a decade ago, applications for the literature course have waned. Literature, he reckoned, just isn’t what young people want to do any more. Who knows why? Maybe, he suggested, they are concerned with other things or maybe it’s about the job market – what good is a comprehensive knowledge of The Lyrical Ballads, when our heads are all being turned by AI.
And yet, things have changed. A fortnight ago, I was at the launch (the second launch I think) for Leo Robson’s new, and much-talked-about book, The Boys. There were kids there – people of 17 who wanted to hear what Robson, a well-known London-based critic, had to say. They sat – not on their phones – but listening intently while Christian Lorentzen, the New York critic, introduced Robson. ‘That’s Christian Lorentzen’, a girl in front of me whispered as though it was remarkable to be in the guy’s presence. It was as though the guy is a star. I guess, to a small but possibly growing number of young people, figures like Lorentzen are stars.
Across London, with the only the vaguest whiff of irony, literary salons are cropping up. Big names read their writing, alongside new names. People hang out, people spill out onto the pavement afterwards, and some people (I’m told) go home with each other. Literature is sexy now.
It’s hard to say, culturally, exactly where we are or why we are where we are, but for all the doom-mongering and cultural naysaying, there is light. Just last week I was in a new book shop in Camberwell and a girl, who can’t have been much more than 20, walked in and asked for a copy of Orlando. ‘Oh I’m sorry’, the lady behind the desk replied, ‘we just sold out of Orlando’. She did, she told the lady, want anything else by Woolf cos she’d ‘basically read them all.’
Patrick Galbraith
Editor
Some kind of deer magic
Patrick Galbraith heads to a new literary festival and comes away thinking a little differently
The journey from Norfolk to the Wasing Estate in Berkshire had been a boring shitshow. I’d left myself a good five hours for what should have been a three-hour trip but on account of 12 people, in six separate incidents, deciding it was a fine day to rear end the car in front of them on the soulless A43, I turned up at the event I was due to speak at with some three minutes to go until the curtain rose.
As for quite what the event actually was, I wasn’t really sure. My literary agent had put me onto it some months previously. “Oh, you really must go and speak at this new event in Berkshire. It’s on some sort of estate or farm there.” Naturally, I had expected there to be girls in horsey girls in white trousers and men in gilets who had studied Land Economy drinking lukewarm pints out of those plastic cups. But it was not, it became clear as I jumped the queue and ran through the turnstile, pursued by a young guy with dreadlocks and a clipboard, that sort of do.
There seemed to be no alcohol at all, plastic cups or otherwise. There was a kombucha stand, children ran barefoot, and the more I looked the more I realised I was an oddity in not having a bindi on my forehead. I was there to speak alongside the author Lucy Jones, and Lulu Urquhart, a herbalist and biodynamic land worker. Jane Owen, who once won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show, for a rainforest garden, which highlighted the plight of indigenous people, was to be the event’s chair.
Why mermaids?
An excerpt from Sacha Coward's Sunday Times bestseller, Queer as Folklore, which has just been released in paperback
Sacha’s Coward’s Queer as Folklore has been a huge hit. He has taken the book on tour to museums and bookshops up and down the country, where it has gone down brilliantly.
Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new, from Classical Civilisation to RuPaul’s Drag Race.
PG
I can picture myself at seven years old, sitting down in front of the small television in my parents’ cigarette-stained living room on a Saturday morning, remote in hand. I was watching, rewinding and rewatching a particular section of my well-worn VHS tape of Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
Although this was my favourite Disney film, starring Ariel as the titular mermaid, the particular scene that enthralled seven-year-old me featured Ursula, the large and vivacious cecaelia. Years later I would learn that a cecaelia is a half-human, half- octopus hybrid; it is a mermaid spin-off. The sea witch of the original fairy tale was written as a traditional mermaid with a fish tail, but the Disney writers and animators wanted Ursula to be something more sinister and visually different from Ariel. Ursula therefore appears as an enormous spiky-haired woman with six curling black tentacles instead of human legs. Eight legs would be normal for an octopus, but Disney animators baulked at the idea of having to animate so many limbs. Still, the cecaelia is more or less an entirely 2000s take on the classical mermaid. While terrifying seafood-hybrid monstrosities like the ancient Greek Echidna and Phorcys or medieval drawings of sea monks might come close, true octopus people appear mostly in contemporary fantasy writing and art. Ursula is a mermaid with a camp gothic twist; a mermaid in drag.
The scene I watched over and over again depicts Ursula as she gloats about stealing Ariel’s voice in exchange for granting the mermaid legs. Ursula belts out ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ with feigned empathy to mock all the lives that she, shrewd businesswoman that she is, has ripped off and destroyed. This one musical sequence had such a strange impact on me, watching it to the extent that the tape began to stretch, so that while playing the tape back in 1994, lines of black and white static would occasionally cut through the footage and the sound would warp and burble.
In case you missed it: Do listen to Erica Wagner talking about her book Chief Engineer, a biography of the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge, which has been in the news lately for a terrible reason (the bridge, not the book)
Friday’s bird
Egyptian Goose: Alopochen aegyptiaca
First introduced to Britain in the early seventeenth century, the Egyptian Goose – which is really a species of duck – was finally included on the official list of British birds in 1971.
Jim Moir's More Birds was published by Unbound in November 2024