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Revisiting the Fantastic Classics: Of Boar Hunts, Seductions, and Medieval Underwear: Travels with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part 3, by Susannah Mandel (10/5/09): Column.; This is the third of four columns on magic in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” everybody's favorite raunchy, sexy, blood-soaked Middle English poem. The previous two columns discussed monsters, pentacles, and what it takes to shake up a Knight of the Round Table. This one gets into castles, hunting, chivalry, gender relations, and seduction—medieval style!
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah! Wolves, Winter, and the Wild Men of the Woods: Travels with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part 2, by Susannah Mandel (4/20/09): Column.; Gawain made a pledge to the knight, formally, in the presence of everyone in Arthur's hall: in exchange for striking the Knight with his ax, he accepted the Knight's terms, which were to come find the Knight in one year's time and bare his own neck to the ax. Whether Gawain thought he would ever actually have to fulfill his half of the bargain is irrelevant; since the Knight, improbably, survived their first encounter, Gawain is now honor-bound to perform what he has promised to do.
Revisiting the Canon With Susannah! Of Wonders and Mervayls: Travels with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Susannah Mandel (10/20/08): Column.; The description of the feasts goes on for a while. There is pretty much everything you could want from a medieval shindig here: a whole fortnight of feasting, complete with jousts, drums and caroling, trumpets, banners, and beautifully dressed lords and ladies engaging in flirting and love play.
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah! Wyrms, Wyrd, and Tolkien: Beowulf, Part 3, by Susannah Mandel (7/28/08): Column.; Bleeding and cowed, Grendel runs back to the marches to die. Is that the end of the story? Well, of course not. The poem would be a rollicking good tale even if that were the end, but it wouldn't be an epic.
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah! Formal Boasts, Magic Armor, and Watchers in the Water: Beowulf, Part 2, by Susannah Mandel (5/12/08): Column.; If your world-view was shaped by Tolkien, then it probably seems very natural to you that magic swords and talismans exist in the world. In Tolkien's world, and the worlds of his contemporaries and his imitators, such objects had usually been made by dwarves or elves, a Very Long Time ago; or by someone who used to be a dwarf or elf or angel before he turned bad – you know the drill.
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah! Blood, Gore, and Syncretic Metaphysics: Beowulf, Part 1, by Susannah Mandel (3/24/08): Column.; By the time you get to this point in the book, a few things have become glaringly clear to you. One is that every game of D&D you have ever played owes a gigantic debt to Beowulf. Another is that the only people who might possibly find this book boring are obviously people who don't like Tolkien, or video games, or fun.
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah: Fairies, Aliens, and Nature Magic, by Susannah Mandel (11/26/07): Column.; My favorite Shakespeare comedy is As You Like It, because I have a weakness for the "transvestite comedies," in which girls dress up as boys and go out to seek their fortunes. Unfortunately, with the exception of a minor goddess descending to deliver a few rhymed couplets and celebrate a marriage, As You Like It features no actual magic. A Midsummer Night's Dream, though, is full of magic.
Revisiting the Canon with Susannah: Armored Ghosts Walk at Midnight!!!, by Susannah Mandel (9/10/07): Column.; But I never felt comfortable acknowledging to the rest of my class that my greatest thrill had come, while reading a passage a passage from Beowulf about how a great dragon ravaged the land, I suddenly said (and I think I actually said it aloud) "Oh my God! It's Smaug!"
Attracting the Attention of a Cat Who Disdains to Acknowledge Your Existence, by Susannah Mandel (8/27/07): Poetry.; I see I fill you with contempt./I cannot prove your feeling wrong.
On SF and the Mainstream, or, Rapidly Changing Scenery, by Susannah Mandel (7/23/07): Column.; Crawling out from under my rock this year, I was eager to take a look at the current state of marketing to see if anything had changed.
Dispatches from Planet France: Châteaux, Part II - The Architecture of Ghosts, by Susannah Mandel (6/4/07): Column.; Sometimes, looking down an empty stairwell or wiping chalk dust off a board as the light settled through the pointed windows, it seemed to me that I was sharing my space with some kind of heavy presence, compounded out of history, time, ideas, ghosts.
Dispatches from Planet France: Châteaux, Part I, by Susannah Mandel (4/9/07): Column.; There's a romantic glow about them—they tend to look like exquisite fairy-tale castles from the outside, and on the inside they are full of rooms and corridors and entire huge wings, high ceilings and places that you could lose your way in.
Dispatches from Planet France: A Cheese Map of France, Part III, by Susannah Mandel (1/22/07): Column.; No matter how many times I look at it, it keeps reversing my expectations. It does not show bordering countries, it does not show river networks, and, strangest to my mind, it does not even show cities. Paris is not on the cheese map. I am not sure I have ever before seen a map of France that did not show Paris. Have you?
Dispatches from Planet France: A Cheese Map of France, Part II, by Susannah Mandel (12/4/06): Column.; It was not until that evening, when I took the Gouda out of the refrigerator to prepare the evening meal, that I noticed that the butcher paper wrapped around it was printed with an image, green on white. I opened it out and studied it. It was a map of France.
Dispatches from Planet France: A Cheese Map, Part I, by Susannah Mandel (10/30/06): Column.; The Carrefour occupies the entire western end of the mall, with groceries sold on the ground floor and household goods upstairs, and huge inclined moving walkways that carry shoppers between the floors with their carts. To cover ground more efficiently, store assistants zip around on Rollerblades.
Dispatches from Planet France: The Ontology of a Rock Star, by Susannah Mandel (7/24/06): Column.; Except that Johnny Hallyday is a rock star in France, and, somehow, that turns out to make all the difference.
Dispatches from Planet France: Me and the Giants (Part 2 of 2), by Susannah Mandel (5/15/06): Column.; For this reason I spent two and a half hours on a train, with a change at Brussels, for the pleasure of watching Goliath and his wife Madame Goliath parade through rainy Belgian streets under a looming sky.
Dispatches from Planet France: Me and the Giants (Part 1 of 2), by Susannah Mandel (4/3/06): Column.; You've come to live in a universe where giants in the wall are so familiar that nobody takes notice anymore.
Dispatches from Planet France: My Personal North, by Susannah Mandel (2/20/06): Column.; Last year, I kept overhearing my students in making jokes involving the number 62. I spent a long time puzzling over the possible meaning of this (pot joke? teen film? some French interpretation of a Kama Sutra position?) before it was explained to me that it was actually a post code.
Dispatches from Planet France: Curiosities and Wonders, by Susannah Mandel (1/9/06): Column.; And, not least, there was that morbid, embarrassed adolescent curiosity: What do the French really think of Americans? Do they like us? Do they think we're cool? Immature? Were they even following what went on with that freedom fries debacle? How do we look, from all the way over there?

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