Beautiful Music: Drops in the River

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For this month's Beautiful Music we have Fleet Foxes' Drops In the River, from their 2008 album Sun Giant.

From the mysterious opening sounds of a cello string being dragged across a mandolin, to the tight harmonies sung with raw emotion, this song has the golden quality of late-summer sunlight, evoking images of lonesome countrysides and road-worn travelers.  

Like most Fleet Foxes songs, the lyrics are cryptic, and perhaps even nonsensical.  However, when you listen closely, it's easy to imagine a story to explain it.  What that story might be depends entirely on the listener, which is one of the reasons this group has become one of my favorite artists over the last year.   

And now, without further ado, I give you the song in question, Drops in the River.

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-Emmarayn Redding

(DISCLAIMER:  Copyright Fleet Foxes.  No copyright infringement intended.)

Book Review: Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus)

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I would say it's probably a safe guess that most people have heard of Frankenstein.  Or at least, Frankenstein's Monster.  He's only one of the top most famous literary monsters in history.

But the true monster of the novel is not the  monster we're all accustomed to seeing in the monster movies.  This becomes almost immediately apparent in Mary Shelly's original and brilliant novel, Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus)

Frankenstein is one of those books that made me wonder, why haven't I read this before?  It's one of the best books I've ever read.  Of course, it's hard to replace Mr. Tolkien's works in my heart, but Frankenstein up near the top of the list for me.  

The story opens with letters written by a Captain Robert Walton, an explorer in the Antarctic, to his beloved sister back home.  Walton is possessed of a passionate thirst for discovery, and this desire has pushed him beyond whatever obstacles have plagued him until he finds himself stranded in the ice.  He is faced with the choice of pushing onward, or turning back.  But in the midst of his own drama, he witnesses two mysterious men pass nearby his ship on dog-drawn sleds, one pursuing the other.

When one of the men collapses, Walton brings him into the ship and there attempts to nurse him back to health.  The man, Victor Frankenstein, begins to forge a close friendship with the captain, and relates his sorry tale, which then leads us into the main story.

We are taken through a detailed account of  Victor's childhood, which at first seems like a simple sentimental backstory for our protagonist, but trust, me, almost every detail of this backstory becomes important later on in the story.

As a young man, Victor is influenced by his intent and passionate personality, his desire to learn and experiment with God's creation, and by the outdated science books he reads without knowing how flawed they are.  His early wondering soon flower into a solid idea once he reaches college, and he begins his quest to accomplish the impossible- to create life using the mysterious scientific process he has discovered.

After two years of obsessive labor that takes him to increasingly darker places, Victor is finally successful in building his 'perfect being', which he designs to be beautiful.  But as soon as the creature awakens, Victor is struck by the horror of what he has done.  He has gone against nature and God in one of the most blatant ways possible, and now he cannot take it back.  After a harrowing night spent hiding from his monstrous creation, Victory manages to elude it and finds it gone in the morning.  He believes his troubles and sins are safely buried... but soon finds that he cannot be so easily free from the dreadful crime he committed.  

This book, though technically a "horror" novel, does not read like one.  It's a slow burn from start to finish: and though the plot in itself is fairly predictable in this day and age, its mastery is in its prose, and the feelings that prose invokes in the reader.  Victor, the narrator, often waxes poetic on morality and philosophy, which makes this quite the  thought-provoking piece as the story progresses.

I think my favorite aspect of this novel is the characters.   They have a stasifying depth to them- even the Creature which Frankenstein creates.

Victor Frankenstin is a charming, likable young man with a loving, devoted family.  But his hubris, and his obsessive personality leads him down a road of self-destruction that he could have easily walked away from had he had the sense to look around him.  I got the sense that Victor may or may not have always been just a little bit insane, because of the way his mind works.  He's a strange fellow, but the reader comes to both love and despise him as the novel goes on.

As for the Creature (whom I came to think of as "Adam", since that's who Victor intended him to emulate), he was a surprisingly compelling character as well.  He is not the groaning, lumbering, Hulk-like beast as most movies tend to portray him.  No, the Creature quickly proves himself to be not only intelligent, but cunning.  His primary education, once he had taught himself to understand both language and reading, were Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Greeks, and Goethe's Sorrows of Werter.
  
He is strong and quick, even graceful.  He is intuitive to human nature, and once he becomes Victor's foe, sets out to systematically drive his creator mad with grief.  But before that, I as a reader had already come to greatly sympathize with the Creature, for when he first awakened into the world of the living, he had a childlike innocence that, if nurtured, could have shaped him into quite the heroic figure.

Furthermore, I was surprised when I read this book to find that the physical description of the Creature is completely different than the classic aesthetic with which we are familiar.  Far from the flat-headed green monster, Victor describes having built the Creature to be beautiful; limbs in perfect proportion, long luxurious black hair, perfect teeth, handsome face, etc... it's just the fact that the Creature has been instilled with an unnatural life that makes him ugly.  Granted, when the Creature finally blinks to life, his skin is grayish and shriveled, his lips black, and his eyes a disturbing dun-white... but aside from those things, what truly makes him vile is the fact that he was not ever mean to exist.

For this review, I can't think of enough cons to do my usual PROS and CONS section.  Victor's ambitions border on the blasphemous at times, but the point of the book is to show how wrong he was.  There are a few instances of God's name in dialogue, some of which are undoubtedly in vain- but many of them seemed to me as being actually spoken to God in a kind of plea.

If you're looking for a book that transports you to another time and place, that questions the roles of hero and villain, look no further than Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus).  It's well worth the read... and another read... and another.

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By the way, for any who have read the book and are frustrated with the fact that there are so many blatantly inaccurate adaptions, check out Hallmark's 2004 two-part mini series.  Of all the adaptions of this novel, that one is by far the most accurate.  It deviates from the book in several places, of course, but for the most part they got it right, though it being a film rather than a book, they had no means of delving into the moral and philosophical musings that characterize the original.  They get the Creature right (he stole the show!), and I very much approve of the casting for Victor and his friend, Henry Clerval.  

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-Emmarayn Redding

I'm Back! | My Summer

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Whew, man, has it been a long time since I blogged!  I feel terrible.  0_0  It was just the other day that I was opening a new window in my browser that the blogger icon caught me eye, bringing the memory that I've been meaning to post here jolting back to my mind.

Life has been pretty busy since I got back from Montana, but there'll be more on that later.  First things first, let me tell you about my experiences at Trails End Ranch!

My summer in 2017 was a wonderful experience.  First of all, the camp where I worked is located in a beautiful spot, partially in the Custer National Forest as I mentioned in my last post, but there were plenty of open, rolling hills that, once you climbed high enough, you could look over for miles and miles.  The waving grasses and Ponderosa pines permeate the air with an enchanting scent reminiscent of vanilla, and blue birds light the forests with their bright feathers and lovely songs.  

The Medicine Rocks lay not far from the camp, and that place is probably the most enchanting and inspiring place I've ever been.

This summer, I ended up working as the Arts and Crafts Director, of "Craftmaster", as I referred to myself.  When I went there, I had expected to be made a counselor for one of the older kids' cabins.  But, due to my plantar fasciitis (a condition that makes it extremely painful to walk/stand for long periods of time) I ended up using crutches for the first several days of staff training.  I knew I wouldn't be able to handle following a group of kids around those hills for very long, and the camp directors, Jim and Kim, knew it too.  So they put me in charge of crafts all summer, which turned out to be the perfect job for me.

In the mornings, I would get up and walk across camp, email my family using what little internet connection there was, then head over to the dining hall for a cup of coffee.  I would do my devotions, and sometimes play a few tunes on my pennywhistles.  The way the music echoed off the hills was so surreal, I could have gone on for hours.

As Craftmaster, I went to the craft cabin each day and prepared art projects for the kids to try throughout the day.  Usually, after breakfast, I'd get a couple groups of Trailblazers, which were the youngest groups of kids we got (third grade and up).  With the help of their counselors, I'd set them up with whatever projects they wanted to do, then once their hour was up, I'd clean everything up and get it all ready for the next group.

In the afternoons, if any of the older kids (Explorers or Adventure Teens) had chosen Art as their 'path' for the week, they would come in and I would teach a special art class for them for three hours.  We covered all sorts of fun things in that class, from drawing realistic portraits to doing Fresco  and creating our own Super Hero characters.  Sometimes I would take them all outside and we'd find something from the hills to sketch.

In the slow hours, when I had no kids in the art room, I would set plaster molds (by far our most popular project), or create example crafts for kids to copy.  I spent a lot of time wood-burning two large signs for the camp.  The signs were to indicate the place where campers were supposed to set their things when we were preparing to go on a special campout under the stars once a week, and required a lot of painstaking detail with a tiny wood-burning pen.

Speaking of campout, I'll talk about that for a minute.  Every Wednesday, rain or shine, we would take all the kids out of the main camp area and set up in various forest glens, and spend the night there.  No tents, no pre-cooked food (unless it was a dry week when there was a Fire-Ban)  just us, our sleeping bags, and the stars.

On these campouts, I became a story-teller.  I bought a ratty old blanket I didn't mind getting soiled, and when I spread it out on the ground the kids knew it was time to listen to whatever tales I had for them that week.  Whoever was interested would come and squeeze onto whatever room there was on the blanket.

Inevitably, they would ask for scary stories.  As it turns out, I know waaaay more scary stories than I thought, and most of it is thanks to the fairy tales I've read.   Those old fairy tales are creepy things, man!  Bluebeard was a favorite, as was the Taily-Po.  The Luck Child went over well.  One story I made up on the spot, based on Native American monster tales, and called it The Wendigo's Hunt.

I also did a retelling of Tell-Tale Heart, told as much in the style of the original story as possible, which was a ton of fun.  This one kid got so into it, his eyes looked like they were going to pop out  of his head.  Someone walked up behind him and grabbed his shoulders, and he nearly jumped out of his skin!  It was hilarious.

As Craftmaster, I actually spent a lot of time alone, and didn't have nearly as much of an opportunity to minister closely with the children as some of the counselors did.  But there were a few kids with whom I formed a close connection.

During the course of the summer, I became extremely lonely.  Not because of the amount of time I spent alone in a craft shop, but because I wasn't with my family.  But this sense of loneliness is not entirely unfamiliar- I've felt it many times before, and I think it might be God's way of drawing me closer to Him.

Now for some reason, a lot of the kids who chose Art Path were kids who were super homesick or painfully shy.  But as it happens, I was a really good person to help kids who were feeling that way.  I'm not shy, but I'm a good listener, and I'm usually pretty good about bringing people out of their shell.  And with the loneliness I was experiencing, it gave me the perfect starting ground for connecting with the homesick kids.

I was able to lead one girl to Christ this summer.  I can't tell her story here (I told her I wouldn't), but it was something that I will never forget.  I pray for her still, and I hope that if I ever meet her again I will be able to see how much she had grown in the faith.

Over the course of the summer, I met and got to know a ton of really cool new friends.  My fellow staff members were awesome, and came from all kinds of different backgrounds.  The mix of personalities is not something you'd find many other places, but we all got along and it was great to get to know so many people in my age group.  We had adventures and misadventures, conversations that could be both hilarious and touching, and a whole lot of "you-had-to-be-there" moments.  I'll probably reference them in future posts, so be prepared for the occasional Camp Story here and there.  :)

Overall, the summer was a fantastic experience, and I hope I can go back someday.

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Since I've been home, I've settled back into ordinary life pretty well.  As soon as I returned, I got what amounts to a promotion in my job at the library, so now I work every day with the title  Assistant Librarian, and am the primary employee there.  

My family and I went to the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which was great.  The ark especially was fascinating to me, particularly the parts where they had detailed life-sized models of the animals that may have been housed in the original for the year of the Flood.

I've been dong a lot of writing.  I try to write every day, and though I don't always meet that expectation, the writing sessions have been very productive, so I'm making a lot of progress in my book.

I'm working mainly on Rise of Ralienah, but I'll talk more about that in another post.  I'm very excited that the story is coming along so well.  I can't wait to finish the manuscript.  

In the coming weeks, I'm going to try to post a little more often.  No promises, but the truth is I miss blogging and it's sort of important for the work that I do, so it starts today.  :D  

I'm thrilled to be back with you guys, and I'm looking forward to the rest of 2018!

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Some pictures from my summer before I go...

Me during my first week there.  This was taken from the balcony of the cabin where I stayed during staff training.

On a women's retreat during staff training, I took a walk by the river.  I met a baby rattlesnake not far from where this picture was taken, and promptly decided I didn't have enough leg protection to go on any further...

More from the river...

We took a trip to see Mount Rushmore towards the end of the summer.  You can't see much because my phone's camera is awful, but there you go.

My desk in the craft shop.  I shared the building with the snack shack, so it worked out rather well for me.  That glass window you see to the far right is the ice cream display freezer.

Me in my craft shop.  You can't see it well, but I arranged all the paints according to their color values, and it looked great.  

We went to the Medora Musical after camp ended, and it was a lot of fun.  This is before the show started, but the set was super cool. Those buildings in the back are on tracks, so they slide in as the band stand slides forward.  

-Emmarayn Redding