Pilgrim in a Rainy Country

[Taking a Break | Pilgrim in a Rainy Country | Street Music | On Black Dogs, and Their Hollywood Appearances | B-Roll in Ireland | Desperado Film-Making]

As much as I enjoy England’s company, I think the time is fast approaching for us to take a little break. I’m not saying it’s forever, by any means; just a bit of time away for us to think about things, and see whether we’re as compatible as we once thought. If you want the truth, it’s the emotional problems — this country can’t decide whether it wants to rain or shine, so it does both every five minutes.

All jests aside, that really was the theme of my morning. I ate breakfast by a window that afforded a promising view of a sunny street — people strolling arm in arm and smiling, as though to advertise the good weather. By the time I made it out to start filming B-roll in the middle of the morning, low gray clouds had begun to roll in, fat-bellied and menacing, and I knew I was in for a real struggle with the weather.

What I wound up getting was periods of cloud-gloom lasting ten or fifteen minutes. Then there would be a period of relief as the cloud passed, and the sun sailed across one of the bright blue rifts between the bad weather cells. During these breaks — which would last two to three minutes, on average — I’d have just enough time for a steady zoom shot or horizontal pan before the sun would go behind a cloud, and then we’d be back to square one. These big clouds liked to drop rain, too — nothing that was really troubling, but just enough that I’d either have to put the camera back in its pack, which involves unscrewing the microphone and a few other adjustments; or to crouch over the camera and protect it, which basically just made me look like a goofball out there on the sidewalk with people passing. All in all, it was a trying morning for footage. I spent an hour or so in the shops weathering out the day until the worst of the clouds were out of sight, and sunlight became the rule rather than the exception.

And luckily, there was plenty going on. Despite the intermittent bursts of precipitation, people had turned out to stroll and picnic on the green outside the Exeter Cathedral, and I was able to capture people out with their families, or lunching, or talking to one another. Street musicians also turned out en mass on Exeter’s High Street, which meant I got good footage of some African drummers (who were all French, oddly enough) and two guys playing blues guitar, one of whom was simply out of this world. I’ve made it a point to try to get as much footage of street musicians as possible; not only does it provide good atmosphere and setup for each city, but it’s also audio that I can use for music, which gives me plenty to work with in both departments as I begin taking stock of what footage I have.

And speaking of taking stock, I’ve been doing just that — looking at possible options for content to include in the documentary. There’s the footage I’ve gotten, of course, including interviews and B-roll, and also the copy I’ll write for narration. I’ll also be able to use the stills of Black Dogs that I’ve gotten from one book or another, and there are a boatload, which leaves me covered in that department. Not to mention the handful of video clips that come out of popular movies involving the Black Dog, or a variant of it. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has a few great sequences featuring the Grim, a death-omen dog rooted in Black Dog folklore. And let’s not forget the 50’s adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles, or that cult classic, An American Werewolf in London, which owes so much — in both setting and inspiration — to the Black Dog tales of Yorkshire. These will be excellent tools in reaching out to the audience, and also clarifying the ways in which the legend has inspired so many artists in so many media, from literature to film. Plus they’ll just be fun to revisit. I’ve been piecing together a soundtrack for the production, and there are plenty of supernatural-ish songs that will fit in nicely with the subject matter without being too campy, “Strange Brew” by Cream being the first one that comes to mind.

In other words, things are looking better and better for the documentary as I start pulling it all together. It’s strange to think that even after I’m done in the field and I return home, in theory for some R&R and time to decompress from being abroad for almost seven months, the real work will begin — taking the raw materials of the documentary and beginning to craft what will flash up on the screen at UNC in a couple of months. Looking over everything, though, I think I’m ready for the task, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

After the weather stopped acting up, I was able to get plenty of B-roll of the city in sunshine, including the building up at the university where I did my research in the Theo Brown collection. I had the thought when I closed the camera and began to pack up this afternoon that this is it, really; the last B-roll I’ll need to do for the documentary. I’m sure I’ll get some more in, since I love the feel of filming so much that I’m sure I’ll miss it before long; I’ve also got a tape or two left over, and there will be plenty of opportunity to take shots of the Irish countryside when I’m there for a week finishing up with research. I’ll also be able to storm Dublin with my newfound cameraman skills, as the footage I took when I was first starting out isn’t exactly Hollywood quality.

Tomorrow will be the first step in post-production work. I’ve been scoping out a few nice cafes downtown where I’ll be able to hole up in a corner with my camera, a notebook and two fully charged batteries, and start logging the footage. This is a practice I hadn’t heard about until I started consulting some of my camera-wise friends, but basically, it involves going back through all the film you’ve made and making note of shots you might use for the documentary — thus, if you have a good-looking horizontal pan that lasts a minute, from 12:34 to 13:34, you put that in the notebook and make a note of it so you’ll know to go back to that point on the tape when you’re loading footage onto the computer for the documentary. I’ve heard that when a team of people is doing a documentary, there’s an official logging person who just does this all the time. All the more reason to do this with several people next time I get it into my head to make a documentary.

Then again, this method of one-man, desperado film-making has been helpful — and supremely fulfilling, in addition — because I’ve been able to acquaint myself with every single aspect of the process, from the proposal to going out and filming, to coming back and putting together what I have left. All in all, it’s been one of the most valuable and instructive experiences of my entire life; I have much to be thankful for. More notes on that whole logging process to come tomorrow, when I’ve had time to review the footage I’ve made. I’ll be in a better position to talk about how things will come together, and my plans for getting the documentary off the ground.

More Mountains: Theo Brown, cont.

[In the Center | A Portrait of the Folklorist | Papers in Order | The Birth of a Legend, and Its Study | The Chase | An Interview | More Talk of Weather | Praying to the Sun God]

Sometimes things have a way of working out. When I stayed in Exeter last, it was in a district of the city called Heavitree — you can work out from the name just how central it is (not at all). That meant travel time, which cut in on research a bit. So it’s wonderful that completely by accident, I find myself a ten- or fifteen-minute stroll from the library where I’m doing research in Theo Brown’s collection, which is just enough time to get my daily dose of America with podcasts from Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers. Simply incredible. It’s just as long to the city center (convenient for B-roll purposes) and to the train station, which is how I’m getting to London soon.

I went back to the Special Collections section today to immerse myself for several more hours in Theo Brown’s collected papers on Black Dog stories all across England. When I heard mention of it during my itinerary-building time, I thought it would make a neat side-trip; I didn’t realize that I was headed for is the mother lode of studies on the subject, and what I considered to be just another stop on the trip would in fact turn out to be one of the most vital, and irresistibly fascinating, legs of the journey.

As I’ve been going through her correspondence, notes (her penmanship resembles English only under intense magnification), and preliminary drafts for articles and books, a kind of Theo Brown trajectory has begun to take shape in my head. Almost unbelievably, she was officially a lay folklorist — she didn’t hold a professor’s post at any university, or have  official backing of any kind, besides the support and help of friends in academic circles. She didn’t even travel to half the places she writes about in the stacks of papers I’ve been reading, even though her appreciation of Black Dogs spans both time and space: all the way back to the Paleolithic Era, meandering through mythology and lore from Roman times to the present day; and to every corner of the globe, from the United Kingdom to the Far East and the New World.

What she did is write letters. Inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles story, she joined the Folklore Society and started meeting people who would become lifelong correspondents. That she was able to conduct a study of such great depth and duration basically from her writing-table is nothing short of astounding. If one had the time and the inclination to set all the letters into order, it would be possible to see whole relationships bloom like flowers there on the page. Connections begin to emerge — one person referred to another, a key account from an eyewitness sparking a new series of theories and debates — and before long, you have a moving tapestry of words, a series of dramas played out over almost 50 years, and ten times as many pages. She did a fair amount of field research, but the amount of correspondence that flooded in as she did her studies took care of so much work for her, with the result that she was able to range over almost every inch of the island, it seems, by having the island come to her, on paper.

So in many ways, doing research in her collection has been like reading a penetrating, if disordered, novel by Márquez, or one of the Brontë sisters. An entire genealogy of the birth of Black Dog studies emerges, demanding the dutiful keeping of a scholarly family tree. Time and resources permitting, one could conceivably go back and pull from these many boxes of notes a cohesive narrative about the birth of an entire field of study, with its own special rules and regulations, the grand drama of its history focused on the interactions of a few key players who loom as large as the tale itself in the scheme.

Why do I keep referring to the need for time and resources? As one of the Special Collections people pointed out today, Theo seemed to have trouble getting her thoughts in line for a final wrap-up of things. Among the papers in the collection is an entire unpublished manuscript, several drafts of it actually, of a book to be published on Black Dogs. It would have been the definitive study of them so far, snatching smaller ones out of orbit and assimilating them into its greater argument (with a nod to their creators, of course — if there was one thing the history of Black Dog studies didn’t have, it was animosity). But some quality of Brown’s character, probably her diligence in rewriting and revising her arguments as each piece of evidence came in, got in the way of her producing anything in the way of a final thesis on Black Dogs, even though the Lord knows a book could have come out of her studies. Several probably could have. There are various pieces of the manuscript lying around in one of the boxes, divided by chapter into transparent folder sheets, a scheme devised by a scholar bent on bringing some kind of order to the collection. I took yesterday and today to comb through the sixteen chapters, because they provide a great synthesis of everything else in the collection, and a good many of her notes from the introduction especially will help as I begin to put the documentary together. It makes me ache to think that she never got to see so much time and effort through to fruition — although I have to admit that it seems the study of these legends was the important part for her, and whatever scholarly cravings the pursuit satisfied for her, her well-being didn’t seem to suffer much over the failure of her manuscript to launch. It was the chase that sustained her, curiosity in its purest form.

Because the Special Collections section has a small staff, they break for lunch, so I went to seek refuge in (you guessed it) another library for the hour. I don’t know what convinced me that it would be a good idea to take a break from reading by doing more reading, but it seemed to work, and I returned to the table refreshed and finished up with the manuscript. I deliberately set aside some time to get some B-roll of the Special Collections area for the documentary, and I even scored an excellent interview with one of the archivists there. Luckily, her husband is a T.V. cameraman for BBC, so I didn’t have to do much explaining about the camera and what I was there to do. (Note to self: next time you decide to film a documentary, forsake this desperado approach for some good old-fashioned teamwork, because it’s hard to interact, film, and worry about audio all at the same time. More to come on that, when I sit down at the end of the trip for an overall wrap-up.)

I will say this about England: whatever else it might be, it’s rainy. I must have gotten lucky with the first three quarters of the trip, because ever since I got down here to the South, I’m lucky to get the odd day of sunlight for filming. It is, of course, necessary to have some rainy shots, both for the sake of accuracy (I’m not in Bermuda), and also because an iron-colored sky and chilly gray flagstones are a better backdrop for a film about ghost dogs than a sunny stroll down Exeter’s High Street might be. But still, the weather does take its toll, especially for a Georgia boy, and I won’t be all that unhappy to get back to cutoff shorts and air so thick with humidity you can swim down the driveway to get the mail.

So cross your fingers for me, because tomorrow’s the best B-roll opportunity I’m going to have. Exeter’s an extremely photogenic city, with its historic quayside district, rambling river, and a cathedral just on the edge of town. It would be a blessing to have twelve hours — just twelve hours, England, and I’ll trouble you no more — of good filming conditions. I’d be plenty happy with that.

Bringing Things Up To Speed

[An Awkward Salutation | Black Dog and Lyme | Such is Life | The Eagle Nebula | Ralph Said It Best, But Hear Me Out Anyway | The Bus Stop | Coming Up Next...]

Well. You know what I’m going to say, but really, there’s nothing to be done about it: it’s been a long time since I got to write. (I hate this part of the blog. It’s like confronting someone from a previous romantic relationship. What do you say, after all, besides that it’s been a long time? That much is obvious. “You look good” is an equally popular one, and probably just as unhelpful.)

I’m writing from Exeter again, and while it might not seem as though much has passed since my last Exeter entry, I’ve been on the road for several weeks, and had a host of wonderful, and often strange, adventures. My itinerary took me for a week or so to the town of Black Dog. To call it a town is a bit of an exaggeration — more like a single inn at a crossroads (the Black Dog Inn, obviously), and one long street that has turnoffs to several houses, a B&B or two, and a bunch of farms. It was here that I spent a good bit of time talking to the locals, and visiting with a kind and staggeringly talented artist who had a Black Dog sighting of his own to tell me about, and getting some B-roll when the rain wasn’t making a complete bloody mess of my prospects, which it constantly was, onward and forever and ever, amen. I got several good interviews in Black Dog, and a few tapes’ worth of footage — of course it was a mandatory stopping point, being named the way it is.

The road next took me down to Lyme Regis, a little town on the edge of England’s Jurassic Coast, where fossils from prehistoric days may be found in abundance, along with vendors willing to part with them for a few English bills. I stayed in the Black Dog Inn, run by a wonderful couple who gave me all the information I needed on the local legend, even photocopying some entries from little folklore encyclopedias they had lying around. Their inn is right on the border of the counties of Dorset and Devon, which seems like no accident, as Black Dog spirits are known to haunt crossroads (check — their inn lies on one), and borders where one place fades into another (check again). I took some wonderful B-roll of the seaside at all hours of the day, and managed immediately to get a sunburn so bad on my face that people are constantly remarking on it. (Although, given the scarcity of sunlight in this country, I can’t imagine how they’re familiar with what happens when you spend too much time out in the hot weather.)

There are so many stories to share from both of these journeys, and luckily, I kept some good notes while I was out on the road. (What do you think I do when I don’t have access to this blog? Go out and meet people? Converse? Don’t be silly.) Here are a few of my favorite scenes from the past several weeks, just to give you an idea of where I’ve been and what’s been going on.

I remember having one of those moments driving down from Black Dog to Crediton, a proper town a little ways outside Exeter. I was driving down a long stretch of the winding road, which was just wide enough for my car and maybe another to pass in the opposite direction, if both drivers sucked in our breath at the same time. The tree cover on either side would break now and then, affording a glimpse downhill of the rainy fields, where waist-high grasses waved. I realized suddenly that this is what I’d expected the trip to be like, back when it was a rather formless list of dates and places in my head back in December — I had pictured these fields, the grass blades studded with tiny diamonds of rain, the sun couched overhead in a soupy layer of cloud.

My introspections were immediately interrupted by voices on the radio: a Christian fundamentalist and the editor of an alternative lifestyles magazine arguing over gay marriage in the U.K. The real world has a charming way of butting in sometimes, I suppose. But such is life.

In one of the innumerable seaside shops of Lyme Regis, I happened across a place where astronomy-themed paintings hung in the windows. The man behind the counter was a deaf artist who could read lips and had a hearing aid, but my American accent troubled him, and it was several minutes before we were able to stumble through a conversation, after which we sailed through pretty nicely. I came up to the counter to pay for something, and noticed he was working on a painting of the Eagle Nebula, sometimes called the Pillars of Creation, that seminal shot taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The piece he was working on — commissioned, it turned out — looked better than the photograph that inspired it. If I’m ever able to do anything half that well, no matter what my age, I daresay I’ll be quite pleased with the way my life is headed.

As I walked down the streets of Lyme with my camera in tow, my mind wrangled a fragment of Emerson from somewhere, buried like a coin in the distant and cloudy past. I must have read it in high school, or maybe earlier — it’s that famous part from Nature where he talks about being an eyeball.

Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball — I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me … In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Emerson, of course, said it best. But this is an inkling of what it feels like to travel with a camera through a foreign country. There’s a total lack of self-consciousness, even self-awareness, in the endeavor. One feels almost undetected by passerby, quietly observing, recording sights and sounds for further study. There is a sense of becoming part of the camera, almost an extension; a lens of a lens. I thought of this days ago, but didn’t want to commit it to print until I’d found the quotation. Suffice it to say that there have been moments of great personal meaning in the past several weeks.

I got up and polished off a good breakfast this morning before saying goodbye to my wonderful hosts. I’ve had a great time in Britain, and the only real complaints that I harbor with any sincerity all involve travel. In no other country in the world, for example, have I ever waited for a bus that is half an hour late, with no explanation. (The one from Suffolk to London was a full hour, and when half the passengers missed their train connections at the other end, none of the uniforms had anything meaningful to say about it.) I was standing on the curb with a herd of older beach folks, and when the bus finally pulled up to the sidewalk, they surged ahead like white-headed players in a rugby scrum, and the driver had to exit his cab and almost physically push them back so the passengers could all get off. Unbelievable. Such whooping and hollering from elderly lungs I have never heard before. I thought about asking what the holdup had been, but the guy looked harried enough, so I payed for my ticket and got on.

I have two more days this week to examine Theo Brown’s collection of papers in the university library, and then the weekend to do B-roll and see whether I can put a dent in logging my footage from the trip. I’m going to have a pretty substantial amount of footage by the time all this is over; it looks like I’m going to need pretty much every minute at home to get the documentary rolling. All these things are good, of course. I’d rather have too much than too little, and anyway, it’s even better than taking pictures as far as making memories goes, because I feel like I’m bringing back little pieces of this journey with me, in as pure a form as I can carry them.

All’s well on the road, to conclude. Consider yourself mostly caught up; I have some footage from Lyme Regis that I’m working on, and once I get that all wrapped up, you should have some pretty shots of the seaside to look at, and some calming wave noise as well.

Update from Lyme Regis

Looking back at my last couple of posts, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I put an entry up here. The problem, of course, is that I’ve been visiting places where Internet access is quite scarce, particularly in the small village of BLack Dog. I only have four minutes left on my connection here at the library, but I’ll try to fill you in as best I can.

I’ve spent the past couple of days in Lyme Regis, a little seaside town up the shore a ways from Cornwall. They call this part of England the Jurassic Coast because the land has coughed up a good deal of prehistoric relics in the past century or so — fossil stores everywhere, not to mention enough dinosaur toys in the shop windows to keep a seven-year-old busy for hours. (There’s still a little kid somewhere in my brain, so needless to say, I’ve flourished in these surroundings.)

Lots of stories to tell when I get back to a suitable connection, including some dynamic filming on the haunted Haye Lane behind the place where I’m staying, and a theory that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stole the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles and murdered its creator to avoid a scandal. More on that when we return!

Exeter Update

Apparently England is no stranger to Murphey’s Law. I had set aside yesterday to be my day for B-roll in Exeter, so it made sense, of course, that it rained from nine in the morning until seven last night. And we’re not talking the usual English rain, a light curtain that puts a wet sheen on leaves and buildings, a slick veneer that actually comes off as quite pleasant. We’re talking wind in scimitar gusts, and slashing rain at all hours.

Nevertheless, I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to try for a few rainy shots, because they can be a welcome addition. So I slogged down to city center and set up the tripod in the main shopping distract, and got a few shots of people passing, and the buses chugging out woolly grunts of steam as they trundled up the hill to High Street. I got some neat footage of rain-slick statues and the mushroom-forest of umbrellas on the street, but mostly the day was a wash in every sense of the word, and I retreated to Waterstones, the U.K.’s answer to Books-A-Million, and spent some time there till the rain let up.

The bad weather was probably a blessing, because it gave me some time to work on a brief article I’m doing for UNC on gender issues in a few Irish plays that are hitting the stage this fall. I’ve never written anything on gender issues before, and our curriculum in Dublin was a bit light on that aspect of Irish literature, so I was a little terrified. But I think I got through it okay. I just sent it off to the folks back home, and the sun is shining fiercely this afternoon, which means this might be my shot. I’m going to see if I can take advantage of the good weather and get some shots of the city.

To top it all off, I just got a package in the mail with fifteen blank tapes for the camera — that’s 15 more hours of footage to make these next few weeks. I would tell you how excited I am, but we don’t have that kind of time right now.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Theo Brown Collection

[Internet Again | A Roomful of Vintage | Famous Fountain Pens | Mingled Sensations of Intimidation and Awe | Future Plans | Requiem for a Wall Plug]

It’s that time again, when the cyber-stars of the Internet align, giving me a brief window of wireless so I can bang out an update on the Black Dog project.

I’m writing now from the basement of the Old Library at Exeter University. It’s probably one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen — although good old Wilson back home can look quite pleasant when the sun’s out. The library houses a large archive of Arabic texts, as well as a bunch of special collections, most of which have to do with film. To continue this theme, the stairway and rooms leading down to the basement are crammed with vintage movie merchandise going all the way back to the early 1900s. I’m sitting under a framed first-edition promotional poster for Shakespeare in Love, and ten feet to my left is an original advert for Othello, with Orson Welles’ imperious mug looming above an army ready for war. Farther down, a pint-sized Shirley Temple, and enough vintage Alfred Hitchcock posters to pay for a Ferrari.

I would like to get some pictures of these displays, because they’re fantastic — a display case in one of the rooms upstairs also has original Star Wars merchandise from the late 70s, which is nearly impossible to find these days. But this place has security cameras like Fort Knox, and I don’t think they like photography in the exhibits. (I looked over the desk attendant’s shoulder in Special Collections, and saw that the words on my laptop screen, written in size 12, were pretty much visible. They’re not payed to fool around, I suppose.)

My main objective in Exeter is examining the Theo Brown collection. She’s been an oft-mentioned reference in the blog thus far (take a look at that pretty map of England I posted not too long ago), but I’ll recap by saying she’s probably the most famous scholar of Black Dog lore ever to stuff a printout in a Manila envelope. She got her start in folklore at this university, and I recently learned she collected more than 400 examples of B.D. lore in England alone, and that says nothing of the studies she did outside of the U.K.

I’ll put it this way: the collection comprises seven boxes of material on Black Dog lore, in addition to the other 31 boxes of general English folklore that she also donated. I wasn’t sure what was meant by a “box” when I filled out the form online, but I gamely assumed it would be something like what I’d encountered in museums, perhaps an assortment of personal items as well as scholarly ones. Thus, as far as my thinking went, a box might include a collection of papers, but also some personal effects: “Here’s the fountain pen Theo Brown used for all her important letters!”, or “Check out the seal-and-wax kit she used to close her correspondence! It has a Black Dog on it, breathing flames!” Because just how many papers could somebody have, after all, to fill up seven boxes, right?

… Right?

Apparently, the answer is plenty. I got started on box #1 yesterday shortly after eleven, and by the time the place closed up at five (there was a one-hour lunch break, so that gave me 5 hours or so to look through things), I had gotten through the first box. Barely. And my brains felt like mashed potatoes. This might sound like some kind of triumph, but to be honest, it was a rather breezy look through the papers. Ms. Brown’s handwriting is, in places, only slightly less comprehensible than the records kept by an ancient cabinet of spider monkeys; and there was plenty of material I was able to skim because it didn’t quite jive with the goal of my documentary, which is to create a kind of primer for the folks back home about what I discovered this summer, which means I should stick mostly to general topics.

To put it in perspective, I found myself confronted by a mammoth collection of information, a wealth of references, letters and scribbled scraps collected over a half century of research. To say this woman was dedicated is gross understatement; she was driven, almost propelled, in a way that brings to mind a human rocket engine. The sheer volume of the work is nothing compared to the minute attention with which is was examined, analyzed, and processed in her mind; some of the boxes contain draft after draft of a lecture or article diligently flayed down to its leanest and most necessary components. I quickly came to realize that studying this collection in detail would be the work of a year, if not longer, and my trip would only count as a very brief survey, a short dip into an ocean of concepts and exchanges, some of them written more than twice my lifetime ago, in a script that requires a magnifying glass and a great deal of patience to comprehend.

That has been one of the greatest rewards of delving into the collection. I’ve come across pages bound by paperclips that are turning mealy with rust; sheets of paper grown almost transparent with time, so I have to let them rest on the tips of my fingers as I read them; newspaper clippings that crackle in protest when I slip them from envelopes, having lain in peace, untouched by hands and unseen, since before I was born. It’s a giddy feeling, a humbling, hush-inducing one, that one gets only from looking at things much older than himself.

Apparently there’s been no effort to make a typed version of all these papers. A few people have come through to classify them, but only on a layman’s basis it seems, and not for any great length of time. I can see why; when you’re a library, even one at the university level, it’s hard enough to handle day-to-day business without flinging yourself onto a mountain of papers with a typewriter and grappling with one sentence at a time: “All right, this looks like a ‘G’. But it could be a ‘C,’ because of the funny twist…” All the same, it would be a grand adventure to be the one to sift through all these documents, even if it would take at least a year to make sure everything was typed correctly, and each sub-reference followed back to a book tucked away somewhere in an obscure reference section of the national British library. I toyed with the notion that if another grant followed this one somewhere down the line, I could do much worse than spend some quality time in Exeter (which is a lovely city, anyway), and dissect the collection into something more palatable, even searchable online, and therefore greatly to the benefit of scholars, and the merely curious. Having been both of those myself, the first only recently, I can see how either party would get plenty of use out of such an undertaking.

I’ve learned a great deal about folklore collection and Black Dogs, probably more than is possible to talk about in an hour-long lunch break. But speaking of, it looks like the reference workers are back from the deli, so it’s time to dive in once more. Wish me luck; hopefully there will be something in the way of another update soon. But since I seem to have acquired a nasty habit of losing power adaptors (I think I donated one to the library just yesterday, by mistake), it could be a while.

Summer Summaries

Amy brought up something yesterday that I’ve noticed, but so far failed to address: my blog posts are long.

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you’ve noticed this too. “Everything’s so long, I practically need a summary,” she said.

Brilliant.

[Edit: She has since remarked that she wasn't this curt in mentioning it. Probably not. Suffice it to say that whatever she told me made me get on my horse.]

So for the next couple of days, I’ll be going back for the longer ones and doing that, reasoning that a little navigational help might actually be in order.

It’s Been A While

[Notes from the (London) Underground | "Tourist Misinformation" | Progress | Thoughts from Halfway Down the Road]

(Does anyone remember that band Staind? Did they make it through Y2K, or burn up upon entry? And did anyone else think of that single when they read the title of this note?)

The point being that it has, indeed, been a while. We’re coming up on the midpoint of the journey, and to start things off, I’ve got a few remarks about that travelers’ mecca, that center for social and cultural growth in Europe for the past several centuries: London.

If you want a handy piece of advice about traveling in London, don’t. I say this because you won’t know where you’re going, London being the size of a small country; and worse than that, no one will be able to tell you. On the way home from the concert, Amy and I asked a pair of police officers where the Green Park underground station was, and they said: “Good question. We’re looking for it too.” Which I found a bit odd, since they’re getting paid to know these things, and I was under the impression that they lived there.

Getting out of London and out to Northampton was a similar fiasco: I got three different answers from three different Tube employees. Which station has the rail service to Northampton? Victoria? King’s Cross? Euston? All of these, apparently. I’ve come to the conclusion that most Tube employees must have a.) been underground so long that they’ve forgotten anything exists beyond Piccadilly Circus; b.) failed to understand that London is actually under the control of a single government, and therefore has a contiguous geography that can be studied and understood; c.) sunk so low that their only form of entertainment is luring unsuspecting tourists into doing laps around the city; or d.) some combination of all these things.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, if you’re thinking of going to London, make sure you stay in a place where everything is within walking distance. (There is none.) Better yet, find a hotel with big windows and a restaurant, so you can see all of London without actually having to venture out into it, and the only chance you have of getting lost is missing the sign for the restrooms.

I finally did make it down yesterday to Northampton, the next stop on my journey. Because I’d gotten out of London a little late and it was a Sunday, I knew the tourist information center would be closed. But I followed the signs for it anyway, because at least it was something to follow, and I thought I might find a map of the city nearby. Unfortunately, the tourist information center (normally unfailingly helpful, as I’ve mentioned) turned out to be a set of three displays that read “Tourist Information,” and displayed fliers for theater productions that had finished up the previous week. Not only was I lost, therefore, but I didn’t even know what would be going on at the local playhouse, should I choose to take interest.

A man on the corner asked me whether I needed help. He had a half-empty bottle of gin that looked like it had been full recently, and a glazed expression that seemed to confirm this. I told him I was looking for the tourist information center, to which he nodded and replied, “Yep. You’re looking at it,” and shuffled off.

It didn’t take long to find a map that helped me locate my B&B, which was on the other side of town. I didn’t mind the walk, even with my suitcase. The weather was sunny and just warm enough, the streets quiet, nearly deserted, on the slow Sunday afternoon. I stopped at an Internet cafe, checked email in case the B&B didn’t have wireless, topped up my mobile phone, and moved on. I found the B&B on the edge of Abington Park, a wonderful little spot where families come to spend afternoons, and my sweetest hosts yet led me up to my room. I took what felt like my first shower in too long a time.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to call today the most rewarding and productive I’ve had on the trip so far. I met up with a professor at Northampton University who has studied Black Dogs for a number of years. His web page was one of the first sources I encountered on Black Dog lore when I was researching all this at the end of last year, and my itinerary is roughly modeled on a series of trips he took around England doing research. He has given me a great deal of guidance during the whole process, and shuttled me around the city today showing me spots that have traditions of hauntings, which made for excellent B-roll and will fit nicely into the whole picture of the project. He also gave me a smashing interview, which I’m planning to use almost in full in the documentary.

This was the perfect time to see him. With half the journey behind me, I had plenty of things to share about my travels, and I was also able to ask him questions about the things to come, so I’ll have plenty of direction as I head into the second leg of the journey and explore the Devonshire area. It was also just good to talk to someone else who has studied Black Dogs in such depth, because from what I understand, we’re kind of few and far between, and it’s always great to be able to swap notes and compare theories on where these tales might have come from, what they might mean. My folklore professor in Dublin calls Black Dogs the best folklore party icebreaker: nobody knows much about them, but everyone knows just enough to speculate.

He also provided me with a wealth of references about Black Dogs, including several helpful books and some snippets of DVD programs that feature Black Dogs. I’ll get a good bit of use out of both. The books have already gone into my Manila envelope, which continues to shred itself in earnest and beg for another folder to help carry the load. The DVD footage will come in handy for information purposes, but also because I plan to splice a good bit of video into the documentary. (I’m devoting a section to literature and film, and have a pretty sweet lineup of clips that I want to include. I’d divulge some information, but what’s the fun in ruining the surprise?). Anyway, it’s enough to say that I got a lot out of today, and it was kind of him to put aside so much time for me.

It’s hard to believe, but my trip has reached the halfway point. I talked to my buddy Adam about this not too long ago, as he’s going through the same thing. It’s a time to pause and reflect, to look over what’s happened so far and also to look ahead.

I’m proud of all I’ve learned from my travels so far. One of the most immediately noticeable changes is my hand with a camera; I recently went back to the footage I took on the Isle of Man and the opening B-roll I tried as practice in Dublin, and I can’t believe how much I’ve improved in a little less than a month. I also feel as though I’m becoming smarter as a traveler: I don’t make quite as many mistakes when it comes to getting from place to place, and when I do, I’ve learned to make less of a deal about it, because I’ve survived up to this point, and as long as you know you’re going to get through it, it’s a lot easier to keep your cool.

I think it’s true with any documentary that you feel like you don’t have enough. But when I take stock of how things are going, and hear the rattle of tapes in the bottom of the camera bag, I’m starting to see that I’ve put a great deal of good work into this, and I should be on track. I’m also getting a huge shipment of Mini DV tapes in the mail from home, since they’re cheaper in the States by a ridiculous amount, and that will give me license to take B-roll like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s also the matter of what kinds of content I plan on putting in the documentary. B-roll’s going to be a big part of it, and I have several good interviews. I’ve started working on a list of film clips and still shots I also want to use; I haven’t had as much experience with this kind of multimedia work in Final Cut, but I know between reading the manual, my own experience, and the help of tutorials and advice I’ve gotten that I’ll be able to incorporate everything. As I look back over what I’ve gotten in each place I’ve been, I’m getting more and more excited to see the project coming together.

So in short, it’s with excitement and optimism that I look forward to what’s coming up in the project. Tomorrow is strictly B-roll, going around Northampton for some background to the audio I got today in the interview. I’ve got a few things on my plate at the moment: making plans for the next few legs of the journey, finishing up an article I owe about Irish literature for a UNC publication, and further study and synthesis of all these materials I’ve pulled from all these places. There’s still much work to be done. But completing this project is beginning to seem more like a reality than a dream, no longer quite so elusive as the strange and slippery beast I’m studying.

Briefly, from Bungay

Found a little Internet place downtown, so I’ll have to make it short. Bungay is a wonderful little town with Black Dogs all over the place — signposts, store signs, even the gate to the tourist information center. You name it.

But I must say this: I was in the Black Dog Antique shop just now, and the woman there told me that sightings of large cats on the moors have been reported for the last couple of years. The local tribune apparently prints notices from time to time.

This sounds oddly familiar. I don’t know what to say about it.

More on that when it comes. For now, it’s off to the Bungay museum, and perhaps a few other spots.

Out with the North, in with the South

[Train Station Doldrums | Cats and Dogs | "Only One Doll" | A Town for All Seasons | The Envelope, and What Must Be Done About It | On Cameras, and Manning Them]

A sentiment that might win me some respect where I grew up in the States, actually.

With some hours to kill before my train to Suffolk tonight, I’m camped out in the train station back in York. They’ve apparently got an initiative to provide free wireless in the station, and on all the trains. I’m not sure whether they’ve got it all fleshed out or not, but I plan to put it to the test by Skyping someone on the way down south tonight. We’ll see. Anyway, I have some serious downtime, which means it’s time to look over my shoulder at Whitby, and over the horizon at my next destination.

The leads in Whitby came to the surface immediately, but the chase proved to be more than I bargained for. When I last updated, I had three solid points to investigate: the history and lore behind Whitby’s locally brewed Black Dog ale; a man in town who had published several books on local folktales, including several well-done sections on the Barguest; and several sightings of large black cats (we’re talking pumas or panthers, probably) in nearby Robin Hood’s Bay. All good leads that yielded their own fruit after a while, but meant much investigating in the meantime.

The ale was a difficult one to follow because ownership of the label has changed hands several times in the past couple of years. The three people I talked to, after much head-scratching, gave me three different answers about where it was, and who might be brewing it. The most recent local owner, who had bought all the equipment to continue the business on his farm outside town, was supposed to be a local at a downtown pub, but the bartender there told me he hadn’t seen the man in months, so that was a dead end. I finally tracked the new brewing site to Thirsk, a town near York, but it’s in the hands of a bigger company now, which puts a bit of a damper on the local angle. I settled for taking some good footage of the tap in the Station Inn bar; probably I’ll slot it in as a curiosity in the final presentation, and use some of the information in the narrative part of the documentary. It’s not as much as I hoped for, but given its relative value in comparison to gathering actual tales, I’m not that upset about it.

The black cat connection went better. I called a contact in Robin Hood’s Bay and didn’t hear from him, but I called back the next day and set up a meeting in one of the town’s little tea shops. He’s the editor of the local tribune, and he very helpfully provided me with a couple of the editions discussing the recent sightings, including a column from his nature writer that’s going in next month’s publication. (He told me I wasn’t allowed to say much about it, as it’s going to be a month before it hits stands in Yorkshire, so I’ll save specifics for the documentary.) Suffice it to say that, in my opinion anyway, the black cat sightings have a great deal in common with Black Dogs, and are rapidly becoming a part of local folklore. Like Black Dogs, they only come out at dusk, and are usually reported by a single witness. This makes sense, as this nicely fits the profile of large predators who want little to do with humans. (Ghosts also, if you want to operate that way.) One of the main views on the subject seems to concern recently instated exotic animal regulations in the U.K., and how those have possibly contributed to sightings of several animals that aren’t exactly local, big cats being only one example.

Which leads us to make some conclusions about folk stories that involve large — often supernatural — creatures in remote areas. I have no doubt that the similarity between local Black Dog lore and this new wave of sightings is coincidence; I think these two beasts, real or imagined, fit the basic profile for small, isolated communities. It makes sense that one or two people at a time would see them, or seem to see them: when your house is on the edge of town, or out-of-town altogether, you’re quite likely to be out walking as day wanes (if you’ve spent the evening in the pub), or driving home, if you haven’t had the chance to grab a swift one that day.

I’ve come across a book, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, in several bookstores recently. Apparently it ties biological field research of predators in the wild into the science and lore of predatory animals — read the description to find out more. Anyway, it sounds as though it might shed some light on what I’m doing, so I’ll probably pick up a copy when I get back to Dublin, if they’re still floating around.

So, in sum: black cat sightings, a success.

Tracking down the local folklore expert proved to be a touch more difficult, but it was just rewarding, if not more so. I popped into the bookshop where he was supposed to work at least once a day, but to no avail — the shopkeepers had seen neither hide nor hair of him. My only clue was that he sometimes liked to busk down by the harbor, and he was the guy “with only one doll,” as one of his co-workers told me — some of the other buskers apparently have more than one, or none at all. (The hierarchical arrangement of Whitby street artists is beyond me. Maybe I should be doing a project about that.) Anyway, what I mean to say is finding him was difficult, and I was growing dispirited as my stay in Whitby drew to a close.

I was walking through city center after I dropped off my laundry, my mind caught up in a hundred details of accommodation and train itineraries, when I spotted him. He stood next to the rail, playing an accordion and singing (quite well, if I can say so) one of those spirited sea shanties that have enough verses to keep three songs busy. He’d rigged up a frame that made a little doll (one doll!) dance as he tapped his foot to keep the beat. After he’d finished, I edged up and asked him if he was the one who worked at the bookshop. I was half-afraid that he would disappear into smoke on the spot, or that the man himself would be just another, larger marionette, and its operator would leap out at the last minute and run for the moors, laughing at how he’d given me the slip yet again.

None of these things happened. He shook my hand. We went and got tea, he gave me a smashing interview, and then presented me with three folklore books he’d written, one of which has yet to come into print. Two of them had good stories about the Barguest. In other words, an afternoon that might have gone bust brightened in an instant, with the result that I left Whitby feeling satisfied. It took some digging, but I finally scraped the bottom of the pot with my searching. I felt comfortable moving on.

I mentioned in the last post that I spent the down-time between these encounters doing B-roll, which is mostly true. I have shots of Whitby in all its seasons — mist and rain, bright sunlight, and brooding dusk. I’m coming to realize that this is the best thing you can do for a documentary, because it gives you footage for every mood you might need to express. I’ll have plenty to go along with the narration once I get it all put together.

I also put in some time with my research, and discovered something startling. During one of the quieter nights in Whitby, I dug the Manila envelope marked “Black Dogs” out of the bottom of my suitcase. I’ve kept all my findings here. When I get a photocopy or a little pamphlet that’s related to Black Dogs, I put them in here. I noticed two things this particular night. One: the envelope was getting heavy. And two: it was beginning to rip. This means a lot of things, the need for a new envelope being the least of them.

Thus far, I’ve been focused mostly on the documentary. Developing my camera skills and getting good footage is the best way for me to bring back a piece of this experience for everybody back home. I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’m not such a bad hand with a camera anymore, if I do say so myself. But throughout all this, I’ve nearly overlooked how much work I’ve done in another, equally important area: tale-gathering.

The printouts in my envelope, to name a few: several references from books in the university library at Dublin; copies of the two most influential Black Dog texts from Folklore magazine, published in the 50s; the booklets from my friend in Whitby; and what printouts I’ve been able to make of the stories I collected myself, in the Isle of Man and Yorkshire. That’s just to name a few.

This opens up a new line of thinking for me that wasn’t there before. I realized for the first time that the documentary, although an important part of my journey, isn’t the whole mission. If I get an interview in a noisy pub that doesn’t give me the crisp audio I need, the whole thing hasn’t gone down the chute — I can just file it away with the rest of the book research. In this way, I’ve come to understand that every piece of information I get can be useful, toward one end or the other.

Now, the obvious question: what to do with all this?

I’ve been thinking that over for the past couple of days, and I have yet to come up with an answer. There’s a small problem with Black Dog research. Writing anything about them after Theo Brown’s seminal article from 1958 is a lot like starting to play blues guitar after Eric Clapton’s seminal… existence. Her study of Black Dogs is overwhelming in both scope and detail: I mentioned in an earlier post the collection she left behind at the University of Exeter, which has to have something like 80 boxes. She’s the one who penned that helpful map I posted a few entries ago.

But I’ve also collected new tales that don’t appear in her collection, or many other collections I’ve seen. The Isle of Man only has brief mention in her report, for example, even though it’s rich with tales. (Not surprising that this is the case — apparently the most recent reported sighting happened in the 50s, which is almost unbelievable, because the oldest legend on the island goes back considerably longer, to 1577.)

At the risk of being redundant, this is a poser. Especially because the stories I’ve gotten from the Isle of Man (and there are at least three more that I don’t have, from what the two guides there told me) are really cool stories, and I’d like to share them somehow. What’s the solution? A little encyclopedia about Black Dogs, and what they look like in different places? Something more along the lines of a narrative analysis? A séance with Theo Brown? Finding and domesticating a slavering Devonshire Barguest? The possibilities are endless, and generally more absurd as you go along.

Anyway. That’s just another one of those things turning around in my brain at the moment. The documentary is self-explanatory — it’s coming along great so far, and I think I’ll have enough to put together a good solid final product for the fall, which is more exciting than I can tell you.

(One small note that I might talk about at more length later, or not: I’m thinking about becoming a cameraman. I enjoy it. I’m not bad at it. I like documentaries, especially the ones that would mean traveling to new places. I don’t know; just an idea.)

Anyway, that’s about it for me. I’ve got a little while longer before the train comes in, and many important things to attend to — sorting through these Black Dog printouts being paramount among them, probably while listening to this Eric Clapton DVD. More updates to come when I reach Bungay.