making stuff up. or not. part one

I need to find the book given to me by my dear friend Susannah Koerber, who still needs to publish her painstaking research on Midwestern Catholic folk art and Southern Protestant folk art, regarding semiotics and pumpkins. Pumpkins and squash, actually; the full title is Nature and Language: A Semiotic Study of Cucurbits in Literature.

This is because a note in the New Yorker review of the new annotated edition of Dracula has reminded me of the curious place that cucurbits occupy in the European imagination.

The reference is to Joan Acocella's purported quote from Matthew Beresford in terms of vampire folklore, and the quote sounds too precise for Acocella to have made it up, though Beresford very well may have (research, anyone?): 'Matthew Beresford, in his recent book “From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth” (University of Chicago; $24.95), records a Serbian Gypsy belief that pumpkins, if kept for more than ten days, may cross over: “The gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like ‘brrl, brrl, brrl!’ and begin to shake themselves.” Then they become vampires.'

Note that magazines put book titles in quotes because it saves time for typists entering copy. For the same reason, I have used British conventions regarding single and double quotes so I don't have to go through and change them all when I enclose the quoted passage in quotation marks.

Anyway, this reminded me of the oft-repeated claim (never footnoted as far as I can recall) that when the medieval Schoolmen were tired of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (an argument which was about the nature of what the Eastern Church had already decided were the Bodiless Powers), they debated whether, if God had chosen to incarnate in the form of a pumpkin, a pumpkin would be able to work miracles and be crucified for the sins of mankind.

making stuff up. or not. part two

I have been reminded recently of the lifelong puzzle of the oeuvre of Him Who Is Not To Be Named In This Journal (because if you don't find the books of some use in your own life, they are likely to be a huge waste of your time). He engages in a great deal of what appears to be systematic mystification, and makes demonstrably untrue claims dropped casually into the middle of stories about why one should not put uncritical faith in demonstrably untrue claims, but he never quite makes the flat-footedly preposterous assertions associated with intellectually disreputable folks of one sort or another...some of whom pinched stuff from very reputable sources indeed. (And I've been reading again about such suspect folk, though not very much...there being too much else to keep up with in the world.)

As he remarked, folks from our supposedly sophisticated parts of the world are inclined to lust after stuff just for its strangeness value, a value that merely entertains us even when we think we are learning (there are other possibilities for encounter, but let us pursue one line of argument at a time). And we generally do not bother to learn the academic disciplines that would allow us to evaluate the truth claims found in such strange locales, claims that are there because the creators of the tales in question had figured out the same things that, say, sociologists of knowledge would figure out and put into a European-originated academic discipline.

No teacher can teach more than he or she has learned. And that learning is always partial, and always distorted by the teacher's own personality quirks and neuroses, even when the purpose of the teaching is to diminish or eliminate psychological barriers.

So the problem we are always up against in evaluating such claims is what they knew and when and how they knew it. And often enough they just made stuff up, which does not change the fact that it works anyway.

I presume the Serbian Gypsy folklore was meant to keep the idle from letting piles of pumpkins sit around till the pumpkins rotted, since I have seen that phenomenon on occasion and have yet to be attacked by a vampire cucurbit. Yet.