Review of Breath

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Five stars. Would keep breathing.

Just kidding.

My sister gave me this book. I don’t know how she knew it, but I’m a horrible mouth-breather. I also have a habit of holding my breath when: in pain, concentrating, doing a delicate task, listening to someone talk. (I exhale when they finish the sentence. So don’t pause.) Turns out, breath-holding throughout the day might be causing a lot of people chronic anxiety and also causing them to “overbreathe.” Since reading, I’ve been at work to change my ways.

It’s rather shocking to realize the extent to which breathing through the nose affects nearly all other aspects of our health, even aspects that you wouldn’t expect, such as biochemistry and bone structure. But on reflection, it makes sense. We were designed to nose breathe; there is a reason for the way the air is routed through our sinuses; there is even a reason we have two nostrils. (Did you know that air taken in through the right nostril has a different effect than the left … and that your nostrils naturally tag-team throughout the day? Wild!) It makes sense that the more restricted supply of air coming in through our nose compared to our mouth is not only adequate but optimal, even though it doesn’t feel that way for recovering mouth-breathers.

It also makes sense that we were designed spend many hours a day chewing on tough foods (fruit, nuts, wild game), and that this regular daily workout of our jaw muscles would result in wider facial bones, flatter palates, and wider nose-breathing passages. It also explains why so many people in the modern age have crooked teeth: it’s not bad genetic design, it’s that we aren’t chewing enough and our face bones are literally atrophying, making our mouths too narrow. So those cave people who didn’t have orthodontists, also didn’t need them. (Shoutout to my characters! Keep eating game, guys!)

Ahem. Back to the book …

You have to watch out for the usual non sequiters that we have come to expect from Darwinian materialists. Almost any place that Nestor writes, “We evolved to …”, you can safely substitute, “We were designed to …” and come up with the same conclusion. There are a few long paragraphs about how “early life” was anaerobic and how “we” started using oxygen in “our” metabolizing. I skipped those; you can read them if you want to find out how bacteria do things differently from human beings.

Then there is the section on prayer, which finds that the repetitive prayers from all around the world get their practitioners breathing at the ideal rate for humans, which to Nestor’s mind can account for all the health, mind clarity, and relaxation benefits of prayer. (I have long been aware that my breathing changes when I pray – even silently – but this is not to say that there is nothing else going on during prayer or meditation, or that it matters not to whom or to what you pray.)

As someone who doesn’t believe that the spiritual world is a thing, Nestor is free to try – and qualifiedly endorse – all the yoga practices that, he says, are merely applied medical knowledge about breathing and posture. They certainly include some of that, but yoga is also a serious attempt to commune with spiritual entities, and we ignore that at our peril.

There is a helpful appendix that catalogs all the breathing techniques Nestor encountered on his ten-year journey. My big takeaway: breathe through your nose. Tape your mouth shut at night if you have to. Breathe a little slower … you won’t choke. Exhale completely before inhaling. See how many health and emotional problems that clears up for you. I’ll check back in and let you guys know whether I lost any weight. 

Misanthropic Quote of the Week from P.D. James

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

He knew even better than she did that you could never predict, any more than you could completely understand, what human beings were capable of. Before an overwhelming temptation everything went down, all the moral and legal sanctions, the privileged education, even religious belief. The act of murder could surprise even the murderer. She had seen, in the faces of men and women, astonishment at what they had done.

The Murder Room, by P.D. James, p. 219

“He’s learnt better”

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[Tally needs to pick up her young handman, Ryan, who might be in trouble. She is giving him directions on the phone.]

“There’s a church, Ryan, All Saints, Margaret Street. Walk up Great Portland Street towards the BBC and Margaret Street is on the right. You can sit quietly in the church until I come. No one will worry or interfere with you. Or you can kneel. No one will speak to you then.”

“Like I’m praying? God’ll strike me dead!”

“Of course He won’t, Ryan. He doesn’t do things like that.”

“He does! Terry — my mum’s last bloke — he told me. It’s in the Bible.”

“Well He doesn’t do things like that now.”

Oh dear, she thought. I’ve made it sound as if He’s learnt better.

The Murder Room, by P.D. James, pp. 237 – 238

Best Rhyme of the Summer

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There’s just some things that leave a man no choice

Like a compass needle needin’ its true No-o-orth

some country song

I didn’t know that choice rhymed with North, did you?

But they do! Once you have heard them in this song, you cannot deny that they do!

And those words will rhyme for you forever after.

This is my favorite kind of rhyme — unexpected, gutsy even, but once you hear it, it clicks into place and feels so natural.

Here’s my professional, I-used-to-be-a-linguist analysis of why choice and North do, in fact, rhyme.

Both have an /o/ followed by a sound that narrows the vocal cavity but doesn’t stop the air (/i/ or /r/, which is a liquid), followed by a voiceless fricative articulated near the front of the mouth (/s/, or theta).

In case you are wondering, the country song in question is Love You Anyway by Luke Combs, which is in the subgenre of Self-Pity (Male Singer).

The Adventures of Jane Wayne

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Jane Wayne, the sole survivor of the Great Chicken Massacre of 2023, did not appear outwardly traumatized. She hung out in the cool darkness under the lilac bushes just as she used to do when her sisters were alive, taking a dust bath and watching the humans dash around cleaning up blood and feathers. She remained in the yard all day, making periodic forays to her usual haunts, scratching in the pile of grass clippings, hiding under the camper. But when night fell and it was time to put Jane in the coop (and make it secure this time!), she suddenly was nowhere to be found.

My son and I wandered all around looking for her: first our yard, then the farm and machine yard, then as far as the bridge over the irrigation canal. Our hearts were sinking. We figured that the predator had probably returned and dragged Jane off as well. We were still raw from the massacre, but had been taking comfort in the fact that we still had one chicken to care for. Now, with heavy hearts and against the background of a brilliant red Idaho sunset, we trudged home.

The next morning, clinging to some faint hope, we wandered to the back to see whether Jane had reappeared. And there she was! Roosting in the upper branches of the lilac bush by the wood pile! Jane had apparently spent the night in the bush. This is normal wild chicken behavior. We are not sure whether Jane found the coop too full of distressing memories, or whether, without the crowd to remind her, she has forgotten that her normal routine is to go into the coop at night and rest on its upper rafters. (Another theory is that she had already been spending the night in the lilac bushes, and this is what enabled her to survive the massacre. This theory is disfavored, because we would usually do a visual check that the Barred Rocks were in the coop, and there were always four black butts faintly visible, perched up in the peak of the structure.)

Since her newly acquired status as Only Chicken, Jane has continued retiring to the lilacs on a nightly basis. Ordinarily, the humans will pluck her down from there, put her in the coop, and close the doors. (The small human is particularly good at this.) We want her to get used to spending the night in the coop, so that she will lay eggs there when she starts laying, and as an example to the next batch of chickens we already plan to buy. Once or twice, she has evaded us of an evening. There was a second vanishing, and a second despairing walk to the bridge and back along the canal. She may have a hiding place that we still haven’t discovered. Jane has unexpected depths. But so far, she can still be counted on to show up when a human emerges from the house bearing something tempting, like yoghurt.

Misanthropic Quote of the Week from Garrison Keillor

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In the Sanctified Brethren church, a tiny fundamentalist bunch who we were in, there was a spirit of self-righteous pissery and B.S.ification among certain elders that defied peacemaking. They were given to disputing small points of doctrine that to them seemed the very fulcrum of the faith. We were cursed with a surplus of scholars and a deficit of peacemakers, and so we tended to be divisive and split into factions. One dispute when I was a boy had to do with the question of hospitality towards those in error, whether kindness shown to one who holds false doctrine implicates you in his wrongdoing.

Uncle Al had family and friends on both sides of the so-called Cup of Cold Water debate, and it broke his heart.

Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor, p. 155

Good thing this never happens outside of tiny fundamentalist Christian churches.

The Tragedy of the Chickens

On By Jennifer Mugrage9 Comments

So it was my fault.

Now that I no longer have to get up early to teach, I like to sleep in a little bit in the mornings. In the summertime, this means that I am getting up well after it is light outside.

I didn’t want the chickens to be trapped in their tiny run for two hours between 6 and 8 when I finally got out there.

I thought they would be overcrowded and start pecking each other.

So I left the door to the run open, allowing them to let themselves out in the morning.

*deep sigh*

That worked great for a few weeks. Then, disaster struck! A raccoon, a raider, a being of violence, came in the dark of the night, in the wee hours of the morning, probably around 5 a.m. He slaughtered my poor girls in their beds. I feel the worst about my three sweet silky bantams. Their heads were bitten off literally in the coop where they sleep. They were the only ones who had started laying, and who would crouch down when they saw a human, in case the human wanted to pick them up.

The Barred Rocks put up a fight. One, either Ginny Cash or Andrea, was dragged away without a trace (possibly she had been taken the day before). Another was found, partially eaten, near the lilac bushes.

But the rooster — ah, the rooster. Meriadoc Brandybuck. He seems to have fought the predator. His carcass was found, mostly eaten, in the small tunnel-like pass-through between house and garage. Damp raccoon tracks led away from it towards the front of the house. And … still alive, hiding under the lilac bushes, was the smallest of the Barred Rocks, Jane Wayne.

We don’t know, but we imagine that he gave his life for her. “You go! I’ll hold him off!” he cried, dashing into the gap while Jane, clucking and shedding feathers, fled. Merry, as we call him, had previously shown signs of behaving like a rooster in the sense of pushing the hens around a bit and being selfish about the food, but he had never yet displayed any protective behavior. But in the darkest hour, Meriadoc rose to the occasion – so we imagine – and showed his quality: the very best.

Tears were shed. Carcasses were gathered up. Blood was cleaned from the inside of the coop, which looked like a crime scene, which in fact it was. Certain members of the family wanted to give the chickens a “Viking” funeral, where we would put them on a small, flammable boat, push it out into the irrigation canal, and then shoot an arrow (this step was unclear) to set the boat on fire. This was felt to be impractical, so we settled for a pyre in the burn barrel that involved firewood and a little bit of gasoline. A funeral was held. Prayers were said. The brave deeds of Meriadoc were recited (this is how stories help us make sense of tragedy). We also recalled the endearing little habits of the dead, particularly Jasmine, the black bantam silky, who was our sweetest, the most reliable layer, and will always remain “the bestest of chaekens.”

And, lesson learned. Just because a predator hasn’t come so far, does not mean that one never will. I will make the coop more secure, and will lock it in the future.

I’m a Luddite, all right. A really, really bad one.

Book Review: The Sweet Sister, by C. David Belt

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

Fun story about how I discovered this book: I was at a Fantasy Faire as a vendor. A fantasy faire is sort of a like a RenFaire, but calling it “fantasy” opens it up to more time periods and more imaginative costumes. This Faire took place in southeast Idaho, so quite a few of the booths were from Utah. As I wandered the booths on the first morning, a banner on one of them caught my eye: “Strangely uplifting LDS horror.” In case you don’t know, LDS stands for Latter-Day Saints, which is the more respectful term for Mormon and what the Mormons usually call themselves. I am not Mormon, but I could not help but be intrigued by this advertising phrase. Horror, written by someone from a community that is mostly known for wanting to keep everything in life PG if not G? That’s going to be some interesting horror. Also, I do like my horror uplifting.

So, long story short, I missed meeting the author, but I bought the book. He has a lot of others, but I went for this one because it was a stand-alone.

The LDS horror did not disappoint. The opening scene takes place at fantasy convention, very similar to the event I was at when I started reading. (Nice.) The main character is LDS, and she is a tall, big-boned, plain-faced 30-year-old woman who has a secret crush on her handsome, also LDS, coworker. In short, a very relatable female lead. Being a lonely, not conventionally attractive 30-year-old woman is tough for everyone, but it’s even worse in the LDS community where there is so much emphasis on marriage.

So, the contemporary main characters are Peggy, whom you met above, and Derek, her crush, who is happy to go to conventions and watch fantasy and sci-fi movies with Peggy, but doesn’t like her “that way” and does not see her worth.

But very soon, we get into the spooky stuff. This is not exactly a time-traveling book, but it has characters who move through time by spending decades in a state of suspended animation brought about by eating an apple-like fruit from a magical tree. So, the mysterious, princess-like young woman on whom Derek gets a hopeless crush really is a woman from millennia ago who doesn’t quite know how to function in the modern world because she has been skipping through time.

I don’t want to give more spoilers than that, but let me just say that the research on this book impressed the heck out of me. The author has taken a deep dive into Celtic mythology, Arthurian legends, British/Roman history, and fairy tales, and he ties it all together. Although the main characters do not travel back in time, the story takes jaunts into the past to reveal to us the sleeping princess’s back story. We see how she gave rise to the “sleeping maiden” fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but what actually happened was … much creepier. These reveals are tantalizingly done. They are not info dumps, and the whole story is not revealed until the very end.

This author takes a unique approach to paganism, one that I really appreciate. As a Mormon (which he understands to be a version of Christianity), Belt does not endorse the ancient Celtic religion and he doesn’t whitewash it either. He is perfectly willing to portray the darkness and terror and human sacrifice that come with Cernunnos and Morrigan. This is very different from most modern fictional treatments of Celtic paganism, which tend to portray the pagans as harmless, live-and-let-live, nature-loving types whose religion has no down side. However, although Belt mines paganism for horror, he passes the “love test” (the author must love the culture he’s writing about). He writes about the ancient pagans with sympathy and seems to understand their point of view. They are real human beings to him, and their gods are real entities.

And that’s why this horror is “strangely uplifting.” Unlike some horror writers I could name (ahem Stephen King), there are actually good, admirable characters in this book alongside the horror.

If you like fairy tale re-tellings, Arthurian legends, Celtic paganism, or modern-day horror, you might like this book. If you like all four, this book is definitely for you!