**Spoiler Alert**I don't think I've given away anything crucial about the movie, *Anne of Green Gables*, but if you want to keep yourself absolutely pure for the movie, well, now you know not to read this...
Once a week three buddies of mine (whom I've privately christened as War, Pestilence and Famine) and I* get together to watch a movie, often at my house, but we take turns choosing the movie. There is an unwritten rule that nobody criticizes another's choice of movie--at least until after the movie is over.** The usual pattern is this: first there is about an hour and one half of moronic macho posturing (done purely for ironic effect, I assure you). Then we get down to business and watch the movie. Well, I was a bit surprised a few weeks ago when one of the guys brought over *Anne of Green Gables* for the evenings entertainment. I managed not to say anything, despite the fact that I happened to know the movie was based on a book (not read by me) considered primarily as reading fare for girls in their younger teens--and moreover it was a Disney movie at that.
The movie is set in late Victorian Canada. It is the story of how a red-haired orphan girl named Anne comes to be adopted by a elderly brother and sister, who live on Green Gables farm. Anne lives hugely in her imagination (largely inspired by late romantic poets like Tennyson) and despite her straitened circumstances, has a touchy (and touching) sense of dignity. She is also a very talky child. The older woman who grudgingly agrees to take Anne in is played by Colleen Dewhurst Her elderly brother is played by Richard Farnsworth (he of the *Grey Fox*--another wonderful movie with the Chieftains on the soundtrack).
I don't recall if the church in the community is actually a Presbyterian church, but the people do seem like a dour Calvinist bunch, looking as if (as Dorothy Parker said of Calvin Coolidge) they had been weaned on a pickle.*** And, of course, the usual sorts of hypocrisy are rampant in the community.
The older woman throughout the movie is trying very hard first not to develop and then not to reveal her affection for Anne. Her brother, a shy old bachelor, is quiet and all but inarticulate, but his silent telegraphy is largely why Anne is not sent back to the orphanage, despite the fact that they had wanted a boy who could help with the chores.
I won't go further into the plot. I must admit that I found the both the young actor and the character she played engaging to such an extent that I experienced a gush of warm, human feelings & all that stuff. IT WAS A DAMN FINE MOVIE & I was forced to congratulate my friend on his choice. (If you want a good "Guy-Cry", movie, I recommend *My Dog Skip* I thought about citing *Il Postino* but that's an "Everybody Cries" movie)
I was struck by how sensitive Anne was about her red hair. She was mortified by having it and felt that it made her ugly. Teased about it by one of the boys, she developed a strongly held grudge against the lad that lasted for years. (I understood perfectly. I have a couple of 60 YO grudges myself--and I know where THEY live).
But a while back I had come across to references to how red-haired people in the UK were often subjected to harassment and some very rough teasing. In one case, a family of redheads was forced to move from their home allegedly *because* their red hair led the neighbors to make threats of bodily harm and to perpetrate actual property damage. Apparently, it is a common prejudice in the UK. It seems like a odd prejudice. But I heard a red-haired man in the neighborhood talk about the rough teasing he endured when he was a kid (his hair was much redder then). It all seems damn strange to me.
I have always felt that no matter how interesting a person was that if a person had red hair they were that much more interesting for having it. And that's even before my ex-sister-in-law, who was an artist, depicted me in a work as having red hair. I asked her why & she said it was because I was in fact a redhead. I had heard that once before but had not believed it. In my days as a flunky at the UT Classics Department, I got to know the young woman who was a library assistant in the Classics Library. She told me one day that she used to be paranoid about me, thinking that I was some kind of narc, because every time she went anywhere, "that red-haired guy,"--meaning me--was there. At my age now, of course, the color of my hair is not an issue for anybody (heaving deep, self-pitying sigh...)
As a student of high weirdness*** I am led by the logic of free association to a tale of a Lebanonese immigrant to Australia named Peter Khoury as recounted by Bill Chalker, a respected (if there be such) Ufologist from Down Under. The book is called *Hair of the Alien* As a result of Khoury's experience, Chalker claims to have the first (?) clearcut physical evidence of alien (?) visitation. (N.B. The question marks are mine but not because I have doubts about the story--although I do have some. They are there for other reasons. I do have some slight reason for believing in the possible truth of Khoury's story in at least one rather vague sense.)
Briefly, Peter Khoury was at home one evening around 7 p.m. about an hour before it was time to go pick up his wife from work when suddenly he became aware that he was not alone. He was lying down on a king-size bed in his bedroom when he noticed (!) that there were two nude women sitting on the bed with him. He noticed also that there was no sense of there being additional weight in the bed. One of the women was an extremely tall, very thin "blonde" woman with a head of fine, blonde-white hair that fell part way down her back and then was sort of swept back and up, as if blowing in a wind. The other was a somewhat more normal looking Asian woman of average height who was observing both the blonde woman and Peter as they interacted. Both women had very large eyes, about three times the size of a normal human, and very high cheekbones. The Asian woman's cheekbones were not only very high, but very large and puffed up. The blonde's face was also extremely elongated, with a pointed chin like that of a witch as depicted in children's stories. The Asian-looking woman also had the same kind of eyes. Peter believed that the blonde woman's eyes were a very pale blue although he is not certain. The Asian woman's eyes were black and the iris was so large that there was very little white of the eyes showing.
The women were silent but seemed to be communicating with one another. It was if the blonde woman was demonstrating something to the Asian woman. She grabbed Peter and began to pull him toward her. He resisted and she pulled harder. He continued to resist until she deployed a completely unexpected strength and pulled him into contact with her breast. (Peter worked in the building trades and was physically quite strong.) Not wanting to have contact with the blonde woman and not knowing what else to do, Peter bit the woman on the breast and actually bit off a small piece of her nipple and inadvertently swallowed it. The woman did not cry out or exhibit any sign of pain, nor was there any blood. The women exchanged glances, as if to say, this is not what was supposed to happen. The next thing Peter remembers was having to go the bathroom to urinate and also being in excruciating pain that was emanating from the glans of his penis. When he got to the bathroom and examined himself, he found that his glans had two strands of hair wrapped around it. One strand was almost transparent like very fine nylon fishing line, and the other was also very fine but was black. It felt as if the strands of hair had cut into his penis although they had not actually and there was no blood. He removed the strands of hair (a very painful process) and slipped them into a transparent storage back and put them in a back drawer. He did not know what to make of his experience and did not know how his wife would react when if he told her the story. When he picked her up, he told her than in a month or so he would tell her something after he recovered fully (he had been ill).
He did tell her later and she took it well enough. (As a cover story, it *does* seem excessively imaginative. If memory serves, Peter saved the strands of hair because he had already been somewhat involved in UFO circles because of some previous and apparently unrelated experiences and realized that the hairs might be evidence of some kind in an investigation.)
But it was not until five years later that Peter Khoury came into contact with Bill Chalker and his UFO circle. Chalker claims that his circle of ufologists includes some professional scientists who are interested in UFOs but maintain anonymity because they do not want their professional reputations tarnished. Among these scientists there are a couple who have access to DNA sequencing devices. Ultimately, Chalker got the DNA results on the strands of hair through these scientists. They were interesting indeed.
DNA from the "Asian woman" proved to be too degraded to test, but the DNA on the "blonde" was successfully recovered and mapped against a DNA database with 10,000 or more samples from all over the world. Even more interestingly, the DNA from the follicle or root was different from the DNA in the main shaft. The DNA in the follicle had an extremely rare gene sequence found only amongst the Basque and a few people of Celtic origin living in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales--a population that is fair-haired and has the highest concentration of redheads of any group on earth.
The DNA in the shaft contained another rare gene sequence found only among among the Chinese, and in particular a small percentage of people living in Taiwan. A further oddity was that normally this particular gene sequence occurs only in a population that has black hair, not nearly transparent blonde hair.
The hair generally was so thin as to barely be within the normal human range. Also, the individual had two gene deletions that confer immunity to most viral diseases, including AIDS. Such a gene deletion is found primarily amongst fair-haired peoples of northeastern European descent and Ashkenazai Jews.
BTW, the type of DNA tests that were performed were of mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely through the mother's line. Chalker speculates that the differences between the DNA in the shaft and the DNA in the root of the hair *could* be evidence of advanced genetic engineering. And the mutation rate found in the hair was such that it suggested the individual belonged to a group that split off from the rest of humanity about 10,000 years ago. Chalker gets off into speculations about inbreeding with aliens back in the day, and the role of the mysterious tuatha de danann invaders of ancient Ireland. There is a tradition that they came from Spain--you know, where the Basque live. Any way Chalker remarks somewhere in passing that the prejudice against ginger-haired folk in the UK may have something to do with an ancient unpleasantness that arose between this individual's group and other humans who were around at the time.
Barely relevant (if at all): Periodically, I re-read a book called the *Origin of Language* by Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen believes that it is possible, at least in principle, for linguists to trace back all the languages of earth back to a common origin in much the same way that linguists in the 19th century re-constructed ancient Indo-European by an analysis of the modern languages of Europe and India. Relying much more on grammatical features, particularly pronomial forms rather than vocabulary, Ruhlen has grouped all the languages of the earth into several families, super-families and super-super families. Basque is a mysterious outlier with no apparent links to any other known language. Ruhlen, however, places Basque in a language group called Dene Caucasian. Dene Caucasian is a super-super group that consists of several families of languages that include at the next level down the Na Dene language group, the Basque language and Sino-Tibetan. (Na Dene is a group that includes Native American languages such as Apache, Navajo and Aztec) The apparent lack of connection between Na Dene, Basque and Sino-Tibetan is because other peoples from a different langauge family long, long ago surrounded the peoples of the languages of Dene Caucasian and cut them off from one another so that they evolved in isolation away from one another.)
Well, then, do I believe this thing happened to Peter Khoury in just the way he said it did, and that it is not a matter of a hoax or a well-sustained psychotic delusion of some kind? Well, yes, but I believe its ontological status goes beyond a mundane matter of aliens interbreeding with humans. The explanation has got to be much weirder than that. In a later post, hope to riff on some thoughts that I had after reading some of Philip K. Dick's, *Exegesis*, my subsequent discovery of graphic novels, in particular Alan Moore's *Promethea* series, and a couple of current books I'm reading that include meditations on gender bias in neuroscientific research and the limitations of scientific thought, as discussed in the book *The Blind Spot*
I want to believe that somehow all the foregoing is somehow connected. I mean, rationally and coherently. I mean, it is, isn't it?
Later,
R.
*I think I'm Lost Internet Connections
**Or so I thought. A few days ago, I got into it with War over the issue of the host (me) showing movies that I had not seen before. War maintained that I should not expose the gang to a potentially bad flick by not screening it beforehand. "Look, War," I said, "I'm a peaceable man, but I have crochet hooks and I'm not afraid to use them" He grumped around a bit, but later admitted that the movie in question (*Queen to Play*) was a great movie & that he would trust my judgment religiously henceforward. As well he should.
***and some lower kinds too.
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