Influences

Augoustos Sordinas, Bronze Age, caves, geoarchaeology, Ionian islands, Kephalonia, Mesolithic period, Neolithic period, Northwest Greece,Palaeolithic period, prehistoric research, Sidari, Stone Age, stone tools,Thesprotia

He drove a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He was old by the time I met him, but still driven to teach. He was distinguished and kind and invited me to go on one of his personal field trips. He told me that I wrote the most interesting essays. (Laughing and maybe one day I'll post the one he liked the most.) Today I was reading all my papers from his classes and I knew I would find him online somewhere. He died many years ago, but his work is still used through-out the Anthropology community. He knew everyone and traveled everywhere.  He was not only my teacher but my advisor. And a huge influence. I was always interested in caves, mainly because I feared them.  As a young girl I had been in several, some very primitive and wet and dark and haunting and I told him about them. In turn, he showed our class a great many personal slides of caves that he had visited all over the world. Caves fascinated me in a way that they fascinated him, the idea of people living in them or using them for magical purposes. I was very interested in how prehistoric people thought about magic, primitive religions, personal possessions, the idea of sympathetic magic and if primitive cultures thought about that in the same way that modern people did. We used to talk about that a lot and I still think about those conversations, I still know that if I had gone that way in life, I would have focused on sympathetic magic, that would have been my thing, because I had seen it in so many of his slides and I felt a deep connection to it.

Beautiful Monsters

Penny Dreadful is a beautiful, Gothic masterpiece. Until it appeared, I forgot how much I loved good vampire fiction, so I am reading as much of it as I can this year, or books with faeries rooted in the original folklore. After all, fairies, vampires, angels, they are all pretty much the same thing. Monsters. The Uncanny. And yes, The Dead. It's no secret that I prefer Monsters to the serial killer folks out there. Serial killers and related murderers are not really evil in the sense of Monster evil, they are part of human psychopathology, which is grounded in mental disease. Monsters, on the other hand, are not human. They reflect the shadow world of our fears. It's a whole new ball game.

On Penny Dreadful, there was a character named Fenton, a Renfield-like character, serving his Master, the powerful Vampire/Dark God. I found Fenton absolutely gorgeous, and the casting of Olly Alexander worked perfectly. Isn't he a beautiful Monster? Of course, he is.  I was so disappointed when he died. I believe he could have had a much longer character arc.

There is something appealing to me about the Fentons of dark fiction, the young, vulnerable, partly human Monsters who are caught between worlds. You ache for them, understand them, in a way you cannot let yourself care for the others. You know they are doomed, too, which makes it worse. I am sure there is a whole Jungian element to loving these beautiful, young, carefree Monsters whose fates are sealed the moment they are chosen. Maybe it's the fact that most of these Monsters are chosen and do not really choose. Maybe it is their youth and vulnerability. I don't know. Must think about it.