Krampusnocht

Until I joined Facebook, I had never heard of the custom or Krampusnocht, or the Krampus. The bogeyman, yes. The Christmas Krampus is a thoroughly Germanic pagan invention which could be related to the winter solstice. The dark side. 

Krampusnocht, Dec. 5, is really big in Austria—just remember Freud was from Austria. Lots of drumming involved. Apparently car gas tanks make the best drums to scare off evil spirits. The Krampus comes at dusk, on December 5th and leaves the morning of December 6th: he brings a birch stick to whip the kids. And if a child is really bad, they suffer an even worse fate. At any rate, they scare the bejazus out of the night.

Think I’ll stick with the Dutch Sinterklaas. Better speculaas cookies.

More Krampus images here in the comments section. The comments are worthy of a read. Lots on St. Nicholas info as well.

Friendship, Merrill Gardens, last day, freewrite

Friendship comes in like little like cat tongues. Write first thought, best thought. But that’s obviously wonky. Commenting upon it means I’m floundering on the surface instead of diving beneath the meta noun. 

My censor to self, the part that wants to sound reasonably smart, should’ve said friendship comes in like the tides. The sustained metaphor wants to hold, even though I’m stuck on cat tongues. Maybe it’s the vast ocean, or how friends are indeed like a ship, a life boat on a stormy sea.

Navigating the vagaries of life is hard enough as it is, and friends, laughing with them, even if for a moment, we leave it all behind. All the troubles and sorrows, the pain and suffering disappears.

Today as I taught my last class at the old folks’ home, I was struck by how deep the friendships had grown among us, without our even having noticed.

Our elders, some areyoung enough to be my grandmother, others are old enough to be my father, unlike the one I never had. But in this room, age has dissolved, and we are all one age between us.

Li says we are all like family sitting around this table. I know so much about each of you. We have traveled beyond the shore where student and teacher are forever divided. This is not casual garden-variety friendship. We have deepened with each other.

Sometimes I feel strange teaching my elders, but the young students I teach must think a vast gulf divides us as well, yet, we too are one. Friendship with 10-year-olds or with 90-year-olds is one thing. Unintentionally or proximity, it doesn’t matter in the end.

3/24/2007 Writers’ Group

Letter to the Montana Historical Society, Madeline Bedal, Memoirs with Maureen

Subject: Madeline Stannard Bedal

Hi

For over a year, I've been collecting the folk stories of Madeline Stannard Bedal (of Fielding, (Stannard Creek is named after her family), and, later, Whitefish. She would like to send her stories to interested folks. 

She is at the Westlake retirement center in Fremont, CA and was born in 1914. Her family homesteaded in Fielding. She's an excellent storyteller. I take down her stories verbatim (she's legally blind) and type them up, read them back, and she makes small corrections.

We've a class called Memoirs with Maureen. I have been trained in folklore collection at UC Berkeley with Professor Dundes. I have not applied analysis to the stories as they're folk narrative. 

I am a Montana Arts Council artist in residence and was listed with MAC during the 1980s and 1990s. I taught poetry to students in Laurel, MO.

Madeline Stannard Bedal Chapbook

Madeline Bedal was a student of mine at Merrill Gardens, an assisted living retirement home in Fremont, CA, where I taught a memoir class. It began as a poetry writing workshop but nobody was particularly interested. I tried out all kinds of writing exercises with them. I brought in Big Band music (a hit) and memorabilia, I worked with themes— anything to spark their creativity. So many of my elderly patients were very nearly brain dead from lack of stimulation. I struck gold when I stumbled upon the memoir process. 

Madeline, who was legally blind, and so she dictated everything to me, grew up in Whitefish, Montana, where she led a pioneer life, rich in memory and tradition. When she died, I was devastated as I had become quite fond of her. Her brother, Bill Stannard made a chapbook of her work, which I never knew about until after her death in November 29, 2006. Kudus, Madeline. Bill said that he sent the manuscript to Montana Arts Council, I don’t know whether or not he did that. I would like to think so. The Pruneyard in San Jose was once the Bedal Ranch. There is one tiny road named in memory of the ranch. I hope to find more of her pieces and post them, so this is a placeholder. Though he sent me the letter in 2006 I decided to post it in 2005 when he sent it out to all their relatives.

—Maureen Hurley (added 8/2023. I have so little work from 2005 to 2006, I don’t know what happened to it all. So every little thing I find helps me to flesh out those years. This becomes a diary of sorts.) See also: Della Madeline Stannard Bedal obituary 

Mayday (corrupt text—need hard copy) XXX

MAYDAY

When I was a child I remember the way light bent time like a stick in water. My grandmother always talking about the returning of the sun. Soon I was following every season, watching the sun through the trees, the way it crept back annd forth on the ridge.

One time I even took out a ruler and measured the speed of a shadow. I was lying in the front door. Our house opened to the east. No accident, that. It was an old house, people tgought like that then.

You know, seasons? I remember as a kid celebrating May Day. It was so exciting with our May flower baskets and the Maypole with it’s crepe paper ribbons, Once I got to be one of the maidens, but everyone got all off track and we bungled the weaving. 

But then we stopped doing it. someone must’ve complained. Some overzealous Christian type made nervous by all the little pagans running wild. You know the type who move to the country from urban ares and then immediately want to change everything? Destined to recreate what they were escaping? 

I mean what harm was it in gathering flowetrs and dressing a maypole? Who was it thrreatening? We were too innocent to have orgies.If that’s what they were afraid of. I don't get it.

Maybe they were afraid it would turn us into communista or something. Why did May Day become the day for the workers of the world anyway? Must’ve been the idea of red and fire. 

My grandmother said it was called Beltaine. The fire of Bel. The Bible named another god Baal, but I think he was after blood. But not our god, Bel was the beginning of summer’s fires. 

She said she remembers her grandfather rolling tar-filled barrels down the hill of this farm...but by May the summer grasses here are waiting for an excuse to burst into flame.

(missing text xxxx) grandmother was about the returning of the sun through the trees, and I never thought that the years would race by as fast as the sun did across the floor. The acrid smell of burnt dust in our nostrils, like the odor of nostalgia.

(missing text xxxx) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 they had the power. It wasn’t about freedom or fear of the dark side. The rights of the many were sacrificed to quell the nervousness of the few. And nobody though to yell mayday, Mayday customs are being destroyed,

 this time of year measuring light with a ruler.  

See? complained kind are charmed by the quaintness of a place then some area up are being destroyed

 We even named a city after Bel. How many people know what the name Baltimore means? The great fires of Bel? Should we rename it? 

Power corrupts. It wasn’t about sacrificing freedom or fear of the dark side. 

old are being destroyed in the name of progress 

Such was the warp and weft of our lives.

kids the 

 my ars 

would race by as fast as that little crepe paper ribbons. But then we stopped doing it. 

Sheathens

The great fires of Bel. Not like Ireland.

Ma Day absolutely

neuroses. 

Pointing it out its zenith. 

 from the big rock to the trees. 

or lit wagon wheels from the top of the 

his blonde in unfounded 

a glass of sliding back into heathendom

their The way a stick bent in a glass of water. 

As if magic was afoot. 

As if magic was afoot waaiting to trick us into something dangerous.

 But the danger was right in front of us all along.

CW 855 MFA Playwriting
Brighde Mullins, 4/17/ 02

Folklore Parody song to tune of Auld Lang Syne

Genre: Folk Song (parody?)
Mike Tuggle, male, 60s
poet and painter
American, born in Oklahoma
Nov 30, 2001
Cazadero CA (residence)
JOSEPHUS & BOHUNKUS
(Sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne)

There was a father had two sons
and these two sons were brothers.
Josephus was the name of one,
Bohunkus was the other.

Now these two boys to college went
for reasons quite specific.
Josephus was religious bent
Bohunkus, scientific.

Now these two boys are dead and gone.
Long may their ashes rest.
Josephus of the cholera died.
Bohunkus, by request.

I first heard Mike Tuggle sing this song to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, at a poetry reading he was giving in 1980, in Sonoma County, Ca. Since then, I have heard him sing it at dozens of readings; it’s become somewhat of a trademark of his. And though I’ve sung the song to many others over the years, no one else seems to have heard of it, nor is it in any of my songbooks including my Irwin Silber Songbook, and my Alan Lomax folk song collections.

Mike said that his father taught it to him when they lived in Oklahoma, and that it was passed down through the family. Mike is Irish-American and Cherokee descent. He thinks it’s a folk history of sorts, modeled after a real event. I agree. I think there was also a middle verse with mules too.

I like to sing the song, because there’s more of it than first meets the eye. Even though it has a biting, moral tone, it offers an interesting world view. Given that the song is at least 75 to 100 years old, it refers back to an earlier era, perhaps the early 1800s, and the idea of both brothers going to college would have seemed unusual (and expensive) for midwesterners. (It turns up as a college song in at least two midwestern colleges).

It doesn’t strike me as a particularly eastern song, it seems to fit within the cowboy lament genre, even though one brother is a scientist and the other, a preacher/scholar. And the fact that they’re cremated seems a bit fantastic. Most songs—laments of the funereal genre, like The Streets of Loredo—tend to have coffins and graves in them. I like the irony of the last stanza, whether they were good or bad, they both still died in the end.

Folklore: Step on a grave = death

Genre: superstition, American

Peggy Green, female, 31
nurse practitioner

American, born in Chico, Ca.
Sept 17, 2001
Collected in a car on the Bay Bridge, San Francisco (we were going to the Azores)

“Don’t step on graves”

Peggy, who now lives in Nicasio, West Marin, Ca., said: “When I lived in Chico, Ca., during the 1970s (until she was 17), my granny, Jane Mayfield, who was from Missouri, we’d go for walks in the cemetery. It was pleasant and calm. She would always say, ‘you’re not supposed to walk at the front of the graves, it’s disrespectful.” She made it sound so sacred, so holy. It was holy ground. She enjoyed it. It was very serious for her. I still won’t do it. We would pull weeds and discover new markers, she’d say, ‘It was somebody’s child,’ or ‘Never step on a grave.’ There were rules with perimeters.”

Peggy interrupts her story with a joke her granny told her: “You know why the have fences around the graveyards? ‘Cause they’re all dyin’ to get in!” Peggy said her granny would laugh and laugh. She’d sit in the mausoleum. She wasn’t afraid to examine that aspect of death, it was tradition. Dying seemed desirable. Rest and calm. Weightless, nothing. She was a hypersensitive woman and didn’t handle things well emotionally. She died in ‘82 and she was buried in that same graveyard. She had a plot all picked out, but she died in ‘82. The Chico cemetery in the middle of town. The Bidwells are buried there. The Kennedy plot had a mausoleum.”

I asked Peggy if her grandmother was religious, and if so, what religion she was raised in. “Religious? You bet. The Church of Christ, it was Pentecostal. I’m sure she believed in ghosts. She never discounted how someone would feel if you stepped on her grave. She knew she was gonna go soon too. She wrote a note with the date. It was a nice day to go, fair weather too. She was right too.”

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes

Intro to Folklore, Dundes, Medieval Welsh Language & Lit., Kla

Medieval Welsh Language & Literature; 
Prof. Kathryn Klar   (audited)
FALL 2001: Celtic Studies146A (4 units), 

A selection of medieval Welsh prose and poetry from medieval Welsh manuscripts: Culhwch and Olwen, the earliest Arthurian tale in any vernacular language, and Aneirin?s Gododdin, which has the earliest reference in the vernacular to King Arthur.  ther texts will include the Mabinogi and poems, The Gododdin (Canu Aneirin).Texts will be read, all or in part, in Middle Welsh; for those works read in extracts, translations of the entire work will be available. In-class translations will normally form part of each class and a reader will be made available. Grading based upon class participation, and final paper.

TEXTS:

Dafydd ap Gwilym

Owein, Chwedyl Iarlles Y Ffynnawn

Bran

Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet

Manawydan uab Llyr,(White Book, Rhydderch) Patrick Ford

Lear and His daughters (Red Book of Hergest), Strachan

Cyfranc Lludd a Llevelys, Ifor Williams

Intro to Early Welsh, Strachan

For some reason, I didn't do so well in the class. The events of 9/11 made me ADD; I don't even remember doing a paper.

            ...............................................

Intro to Folklore

Prof Alan Dundes  
FALL 2001: ANTHRO 160A  (4 units),
(Cross-registered, SFSU, grade A)

TEXTS:

The Study of American Folklore, Harold Brunvand

International Folkloristics, ed. Alan Dundes

Folklore Matters, Alan Dundes

Holy Writ as Oral Lit, Alan Dundes

The Study of Folklore, Alan Dundes

Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder, Alan Dundes,

Plus reader, reserved readings.
I collected and annotated over 60 pieces of folklore from informants in Portugal, Ireland, and California. They are in this blog and also in the Folklore Archives, Kroeber Hall, where Ishi once lived. I loved this class, I never wanted it to end. I am grateful for the time I got to spend with Alan; Neil was a special pet of Alan's, so we spent many an hour jawing  in Alan's office. Neil called him Papa Dundes. Alan's heart was big as the world.  WWDS has become my motto.

If I hadn't gone to Portugal right after 9/11, chances would be pretty good I would've dropped out of school. I was a bad state, no focus, no stamina, etc. So maybe this class saved me.

I eventually plan to transcribe my class notes, so this is a placeholder. A reminder. —MH 11/2015

GROWING UP IRISH, take one, (final v. missing)

ASCII destroyed final version!!!

It was one thing to grow up Irish Catholic in the Mission

where shamrocks were painted on the sidewalk

but after the Depression my family fled to the country 

and I grew up in the sticks

where everyone else’s grandmother was a member of the DAR,

my classmates were Rainbow Girls or Bluebirds; clubs for WASPs only.

Like the San Geronimo Tennis and Country Club.

No matter that most of us were too poor to join.

The same Protestant ascendancy right here in America.

You were labeled a freak once the nuns came in their penguin suits

asking us Catholics to raise our hands.

There we were, branded in grade school, while they—

the Bluebirds and Brownies got cookies and milk after school

while we were hammering nails into our martyred psyches

by stealing candy after catechism 

from old man deLacy at the Lagunitas store.

Having left one revolution behind,

we were facing the religious segregation again

diminished like those of the sidhe who shrank

during the centuries of Christendom

disappearing into particle theory 

only to became invisible quarks and muons....

10/2/2000

Big Russell Ranch, Yreka, Oral History

BIG RUSSEL RANCH

Edith Hazlan Howard remembers:

These hyacinths just keep growing but this ain't no lawn. Look at it all choked up with them damn hyacinths. I didn't know what I got into when I moved in here last July. 

See, I had my own ranch. Planted my own orchards. Took care of my own stock. Then I got too old. And lived with my daughter a while in Oregon. Then, when the cancer got too bad, I moved back to Yreka. The doc is real good here. 

I like to be out digging in the garden. I don't go to church much. Had to stay near the toilet night and day. It was something awful—my stomach. 

A young preacher man came by to visit me. He didn't mean no harm. I lived my life accordingly. 

Big Russel Ranch v.1. Edith Hazlet Howard, Yreka, CA, 1979-80 (from hard copy)

Hyacinths

We met Edith Hazlet Howard in Howard Alley, on the back streets of Yreka, as she was readying her spring garden. It was a warm spring morning. With a scowl that would have frightened the devil himself, she attached to those pesky hyacinths with a vengeance, glaring at our unwelcome approach. I was startled by the presence of this formidable woman – she was the incarnation of Macbeth's witches in her baggy black overalls, gum boots, and shovel – I must've said something to break the ice because suddenly she burst into a big smile, as if we were long lost friends, and so, began her tale.

This documentary transcript which follows, is an attempt to capture edith's convoluted nonlinear style of speaking, which at first, made little sense, but as the story began to unwind, the connections between things became clearer. I've made no attempt to turn this into a traditional prose piece, which would be easier to read but it would also be watered-down and change by my own aesthetics of what writing should be. The connections she made were very much the stuff from which poetry is made. The metaphor of hyacinths and cancer, the living and the dying, and the daily survival of a fiercely independent pirate pioneer woman facing the ultimate challenge.

Edith Hazlet Howard remembers: