Mary Renault’s Brilliant Novel, “The King Must Die”

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Beautiful new Everyman’s Classics hardcover

For years I overlooked Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a historical novel published in 1958, based on the myth of Theseus. You could find crinkled mass market paperbacks in every used bookstore and crisp new editions in new bookstores.  Despite my love of Greek literature, the cover art put me off. I had no idea what the book was about, but the art sent a message:  Not for Me.

Pretty but enigmatic.

Here’s some old cover art:  on the first American hardcover edition (above), a figure balances on the back of a bull. Who knew what was going on with that?  On the cover of a 1970s Bantam paperback, an incomprehensible tiny bull is positioned in front of a giant head with a helmet and a rather small tower – at least I think it’s a tower.

I’m not keen on this one.

Here’s why I finally read it.

Everyman’s Library has published a beautiful hardcover edition of The King Must Die and the sequel, The Bull from the Sea.  It has two appendices by Mary Renault, a three-page summary of the myth of Theseus and a fascinating Author’s Note that examines the myth from a scholarly perspective and explains her complex interpretation.

All right, if they’re billing this as a classic, it’s for me.

This was exactly the kind of reading I needed after the holiday. I fell into the story, spellbound.  Renault writes beautifully, the plot is exceptionally clever and well-wrought, and her interpretation of the myth is a masterwork of imagination and scholarship. 

Those of you who love myth need not fear being bored by history, because the gods and religion are so intertwined in the ancient world that Theseus communicates mystically with Poseidon, the god to whom he is dedicated, and who is perhaps his father – though he learns in his teens that his actual father is the King of Athens, who is also connected to Poseidon.

 The bulk of the story revolves around Theseus’s adventures in Crete.  Yes, that is where the labyrinth is – but the Minotaur is not at the center of the labyrinth – he is a particularly nasty human being. No, Theseus follows a thread through the labyrinth of the palace to the quarters of Ariadne, a priestess and the king’s daughter, known as “the Goddess,” who has fallen in love with him.

 In Athens his father, King Aigeus, tries to prevent his participation in a gruesome lottery.  Every year King Minos of Crete demands seven boys and girls chosen in a lottery as hostages from Athens.  They will become bull dancers who dance and perform gymnastics on and around a real bull. No bull dancer has survived more than a year. Theseus gallantly insists that his name be submitted with this companions’. Of course he is chosen, and his leadership and courage unite the team.

It is a brilliant book, a fantastic “yarn,” the thread in the labyrinth!  Actually, it is a classic.  I look forward to reading more Renault.

Treat yourself to this magnificent novel during the hectic Christmas season, even if it’s not hectic.

The Age of Uprooting: Alienation, Cities, and High Tech

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“However we dissect it, though, I believe that the heart of the crisis that is enveloping so much of the world today – cultural, ecological, and spiritual – is this ongoing process of mass uprooting.” – – Against the Machine:  On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

In Paul Kingsnorth’s fascinating new book, Against the Machine:  On the Unmaking of Humanity, he writes about spiritual and emotional alienation in our age of high tech, climate change, and capitalism.  He believes “the Machine” is destroying humanity through increased state control, the growth of cities, the rise of AI, the internet and cell phones.

Kingsnorth talks about “roots,” often literally, in terms of his relationship to the land.  He tells a charming story about planting a field of wildflowers in Ireland and waking up the next day to find the birds had eaten all the seeds. (He is philosophical: farmers can’t control nature.) One day he tires of mowing with a scythe (a scythe! Good God!), and discovers that the hardware store now sells robotic lawnmowers.

Kingsnorth fascinates but he sometimes irritates.  “He’s not wrong,” I’d mutter to myself. “But there are other points of view.”

For instance, he rants against cities.  He lives with his family in the west of Ireland, and thinks it would be better if we all lived in villages, or small towns, or the country, closer to nature, which is good for human nature.

Well, I’m not much of a gardener, but I am a city-dweller by choice.  I was taught that living in a city is ecologically sound, especially if you live in a proper city, where you can take mass transit, walk, or bicycle, drive less or not at all, and pollute the air less.  It is the “uprooting,” the flight to the suburbs and the ex-urbs, that “drives” air pollution. (Driving cars and other light vehicles accounts for about 28% of the emission of greenhouse gases, according to the EPA.)

But, as Kingsnorth says, roots are important.

It took me years to put down roots. For years I felt my roots were still in my charming hometown. It was almost magical, its streets lined with elm trees, and a neighborhood grocery store on every corner. Alas, in the late ’70s many historical buildings were razed in the name of “urban renewal.”

Urban renewal was expensive:  it cost the town a department store, Woolworth’s and many shops and restaurants.  The town’s best bookstore went out of business because the owners could not afford the high rent of the prefab temporary building where they were relocated. And urban sprawl accelerated after urban renewal.  The new pedestrian mall became a bar-and-restaurant district.   People deserted downtown and went to the malls.

 Well, I have been a city dweller for most of my life. One city was old and beautiful, and had a lot of culture, but it was too expensive; another had some culture but was “visually challenging”:  flat, grim, polluted, gray, cold, and, to be brutally honest, ugly. We put down roots in one neighborhood, but, alas, it “went down,” as they say, rapidly, all of a sudden.  ALL THE NEIGHBORHOOD SHOPS CLOSED. And all of us moved out of our apartment house.  The turning point was the day we had to step over the drunken, passed-out john of our new neighbor, a prostitute with a thriving business,

Now we live in a very pretty city, which has a (partially) viable downtown, lots of trees, a few charming bookshops, independent theaters, rivers, lakes, and parks. I wouldn’t have thought of it without the prodding of Kingsnorth’s book, but I do have roots.  I’m no longer “unrooted.”

By the way, Kingsnorth’s book also deals with religion (a former Wiccan, he is now a Christian), our emotional alienation, and the history of mass culture.  His political roots are in the green movement, which he says has lost integrity.  (He explains this in detail.)

And, fascinatingly, he is also a novelist and poet:  his novel The Wake was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

So here’s to being rooted!

No, Really, You Want to Read about Nature!

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If you’re in holiday despair, if your industrial-farm turkey didn’t roast properly (the chemicals make it rubbery), if you got the wrong kind of cranberry sauce, there is only one solution:  go live in the woods.

The good news:  Henry David Thoreau did it first.  He lived simply in his cabin by Walden Pond.  “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” he writes in Walden.  That seemed profound when I was a young woman.

Nowadays, sitting on a pumpkin sounds very Cinderella.  Was her coach a pumpkin?  I honestly can’t remember.  But sitting on a pumpkin sounds uncomfortable.  How large was this pumpkin?  Did it come in small, medium, and large?  Could you put a velvet cushion on top?

There is a lagoon not far from us, but it is not Walden pond.  It is murky and weedy, and the ducks live there, and if they can, I can.  Except for one thing:  what would my source of drinking water be?  And there you’d be, ice-fishing at the lagoon, and the hikers would give you money, because they’d think you’re a homeless person living in a tent by the lagoon, and they might kindly tell you that there are no fish in the lagoon.

If you pretend to be Thoreau, as opposed to Cinderella, many will condemn you as a social misfit. It’s one thing to go to the ball in a magic pumpkin and enchant a prince-husband, but it’s another to escape the trappings of capitalist society and live off the land, i.e., the lagoon.

On a different note, I recommend Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel, The Light in the Forest, a compassionate novel about a young white boy, raised happily by Indians (Indigenous people) after being captured as a child.  He is very close to his Indian family, but his life is ripped apart when a British edict declares that the Indians must return the captives to their white families.  The story is touching, and very sympathetic to Indigenous culture.  Is it right to take the boy away from his family and culture twice?

Another great book for nature lovers is Louise Rich’s We Took to the Woods (1942), a chronicle of her family’s life in a rickety house – actually a former fishing camp – in the woods in Maine.  Rich takes each season as it comes.  In winter, she and her family are cut off from town for months because of the snow. They stock up on canned goods, chop wood, garden, fish, occasionally hunt game, and attempt to train their affectionate huskies to pull a dog sled.

Here’s an excerpt from We Took to the Woods:

Winter, to look forward to, is a long, dark, dreary time. To live, it’s a time of swirling blizzards and heavenly high blue and white days; of bitter cold and sudden thaws; of hard work outdoors and long, lamp-lit evenings; of frost patterns on the windows and the patterns of deer tracks in the snow. It’s the time you expected to drag intolerably, and once in a while you stop and wonder when the drag is going to begin. Next week, you warn yourself, after we’ve finished doing this job on hand, we’d better be prepared for a siege of boredom. But somehow next week never comes. There’s always something to keep it at bay.

Winter is just starting here. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your holiday!

Music at the Party

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Was there music at this cocktail party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

There was no music at cocktail parties in the late 20th century.  That’s because we chatted so much.

 We stood or sat, depending on the venue. In our apartment, there was much standing around, because furniture was sparse.

As the hostess, I kept an eye on cheating husbands. You have no idea how many of my friends had been shattered by their husbands’ affairs.  Out of the corner of an eye, I noticed a husband flirting with my sensible married friend, A. She was handling it, but I pitied the man’s wife, a colleague who’d been devastated by his most recent affair.  I briefly considered adopting Anna Pavlovna’s tactics in the first chapter in War and Peace.  When young Pierre talks too long and earnestly to a celeb guest,  she steers him away, saying, “You should meet the Abbé.”  

The problem was, there was no Abbé at the party.

There were some local celebs. The almost-famous novelist looked uncomfortably hot and hairy in his singlet, but seemed to enjoy an argument about jazz with a hip but impoverished Civil Liberties lawyer.  Then there was Polly, the editor of a poetry magazine which had a subscription of a mere 30 people. If you needed a quote on poetry, she was your woman, because she knew the local poets, had a Ph.D. in English, and had apparently memorized The Oxford Book of English Verse and The Oxford Book of American Verse. She said despairingly: “Nobody buys the magazine. I should only publish poets with friends.”

I murmured sympathetically. I understood the problem. Some of the best local poets would flunk the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test: they were essentially anti-social cavemen who drank too much and insulted people. Perhaps there were 10 charming poets who used the right fork – or any fork – at a dinner party. 

Many of my friends were writers. We gossiped about how The New Yorker had written an encouraging note on a rejection letter, or how an editor at The Atlantic had rejected an article on Howards End, claiming that they had already published something similar. We won awards in the local market, though.

Suddenly my white-haired magazine editor friend – why did I know so many editors? – rushed over to tell me that So-and-So was the most interesting man she’d met in years.  “Thank you for inviting me!”

I provided the necessary background.  “I should tell you he’s married.”

She looked me in the eye and said, “At my age it doesn’t matter.” 

Years later, when my hair turned white, I thought it did matter,

But at the party, there was hope for everybody.  A gallery owner had a crush on me, and I liked him, and the gallery, but I was already taken!  Thank God he was accompanied by a woman, probably a girlfriend, who stared with dagger eyes at me.  Stare away:  I was no threat!

So why was no one listening to music on the stereo?  Well, in my experience, only the upper classes listen to music at parties, usually Gilbert and Sullivan, played on the piano by the host or hostess. The guests magically know all the lyrics and sing along. Did they go to Gilbert and Sullivan school?

I recommend that you have a beer and sing along with the chorus, or at least mouth the words.

Rock Music & Natural Light:  Is It Over?

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R. Crumb

I was leaving town.  I left my vinyl records behind.

“Take them. I don’t have room.” My neighbor riffled through them and thanked me.

I was moving my stuff to store at Dad’s, because Mom had found a condom in one of the boxes and was devastated.  Was it really a mortal sin?  And why was there only one condom?  As a 22-year-old divorcee, I surely should have had more.  But actually I used a diaphragm and was monogamous, so the condom must have been ancient.

And so I moved away to a pretty town that was very much like the one I’d left, only now I knew nobody, and had no music to listen to.   I had planned to do my work at the library, but since it had no windows, and I couldn’t bear the lack of natural light, I worked at home, spreading out my books on the kitchen table.    

I bought a radio/tape player. I listened to college radio in the evening.  Perhaps they played alternative rock, perhaps it was hard rock, perhaps it was heavy metal: who knows?  Captain Nemo, my music mentor, didn’t move to town till December:  he was finishing one of his many degrees.

Without him, I would never have heard of The Kinks, The Smiths, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, The Pretenders, the Zombies, etc.

To this day, he instructs me in rock music.

Last night the quiz was about Canadians.

“Name two Canadian rock groups. C’mon.”

My mind whirred wildly.  “Does Neal Young count?”

It turned out that Neal Young is Canadian, and though not actually a group, he has played with many bands.  And that makes him the Canadian version of Eric Clapton, I think, another musician who plays with a lot of bands.

“Okay, just two more.  Even one.”

“Sorry.  I don’t know Canadian music.”

He told me that Rush and Guess Who are Canadian. 

“Guess what?” I said flippantly.  “I’ve heard of Guess Who.”

I had never heard of Rush.

And I doubt that I’ve heard any of their songs.

Here’s how you know I’m not musical:  the last time I went to a rock concert was to see Elvis Costello in the 1980s.  Talk Talk opened. 

Actually, I did see Crosby, Nash, and Stills at a baseball game around the same time.  But you know how it is:  that’s not the best venue.  It was literally between innings, so I’m not sure it counts as a concert. 

And wait – I just remembered.  I saw Bob Dylan in 2001 or 2002.  So the last concert I went to was to see Bob!  It was fantastic.

I have gone to rock festivals where local groups play.

But I should listen to new rock bands, if there are any new rock bands. 

Thanksgiving Prep:  Turkey or Trivia?

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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  It’s fun, but not too much fun.  You don’t have to play Charades or bring out the board games.  And that’s a relief, because everyone opts for Trivial Pursuit instead of Monopoly, and the only trivia you know is literary.  

Typical trivia questions will include: what state produces the most turkeys? And what is the capital of Venezuela?  Perhaps I should know the latter – is the U.S. at war with Venezuela or not? – and if Joan Didion were alive, she would know.  I recommend her brilliant novel The Book of Common Prayer, set in a politically unstable country in Central America.

Thanksgiving is a food holiday, more casual than that Saturnalia of food-and-gift holidays, Christmas. But if you’re dining at a friend’s house, you may need a hostess gift: we recommend designer chocolates. Our favorite hostess used to hide the box of chocolates because she “needs a reward” after making pies all week. “Thank you! I’m not sharing, OK?”

If you’re dining at home, you don’t need a hostess gift.  Perhaps someone will bring you day-old flowers, and that’s fine.  But you’re sort of in charge of decor. As usual, you didn’t order a centerpiece.  Can Harry & David overnight one?  No, it’s too late for that.

Don’t put up the old artificial Christmas tree on Thanksgiving.  It depresses everyone: its plastic branches are bent in all directions, and most of the ornaments are lost. The day after Thanksgiving is the official day for putting up Christmas decorations. And all really cool people wait till Christmas Eve.

This year I am not looking forward to the turkey. I gave up poultry, knowing just enough about industrial farms and slaughterhouses to be nauseated.  I’m sure the turkeys suffer the same fate as the chickens, but Captain Nemo won me over by either misquoting Dickens or Louisa May Alcott: “Thanksgiving won’t be Thanksgiving without any turkey.”

It’s only once a year.  

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thucydides and Me:  Why I Read Greek Historians

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“My own opinion is that when the whole state is on the right course it is a better thing for each separate individual than when private interests are satisfied but the state as a whole is going downhill.” – Pericles in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War

You may wonder, Why is she reading Thucydides? 

Or you may wonder, Who is Thucydides?

Or, Isn’t she bored by History of the Peloponnesian War?

Actually, I love Thucydides.

Long ago, in our challenging Greek composition class, we had an assignment to translate The Gettysburg Address into Greek in the style of Thucydides. None of us had read Thucydides but that changed before the day was done. 

The truth is, everyone delights in Herodotus, that most charming of Greek historians.  Herodotus, who traveled widely, interweaves myths and personal interviews in his accounts of history.

But Thucydides has another story to tell.  He was an Athenian general and war historian who documented the war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE. (It lasted 27 years.) Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides does not lull us with intervals of myth and romance. He sticks as closely to the facts as possible, though he does re-create speeches of famous generals. He also writes in the third person, which certainly sounds more objective, though it is not necessarily (Julius Caesar did the same in the first century BCE). 

Thucydides begins the History of the Peloponnesian War with a third-person description of himself: “Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta…”  

Rex Warner, translator

The modern Penguin uses Rex Warner’s translation, first published in 1954.  Warner is like an old friend, and I’m pleased to read him again.  He also translated Euripides, Xenophon, Plutarch, and St. Augustine.

In his Translator’s Note, he writes,

 It is difficult, pleasurable, and bold to attempt to translate Thucydides into English. There are difficulties of many kinds.  Not only is it a question of working long hours, since the work is long.  It is also the fact that, though the meaning of Thucydides is usually (though not always) clear enough, it is expressed in a style which is extremely hard to translate into another language.

And he adds, “As for the pleasures of translation, it is sufficient to say that, if one loves one’s author, one loves being in his company.”

A Neglected Masterpiece:  Rumer Godden’s “Kingfishers Catch Fire”

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Rumer Godden’s spellbinding novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, has somehow escaped the attention of twenty-first-century readers. 

Published in 1953, this pre-hippie masterpiece is set in a village in Kashmir. Sophie, a single mother, decides to move there with her two children in order to live cheaply. 

Sophie is impulsive. When she gets an idea, she sticks to it. No one thinks this move is a good idea:  not Doctor Lachinval at the Mission Hospital, who has nursed her through a serious illness; not Profit David, a merchant who has sold her antiques and is owed money;  and certainly not Sophie’s daughter, Theresa, who is tired of adventure and wants an ordinary life in England. 

Sophie is a dreamer: she imagines living simply near the beautiful lakes and mountains and making friends with the other inhabitants, who, she is sure, live simply and healthily. In reality, the villagers live not only simply but in abject poverty. 

But it’s not just Godden’s fascinating plot that makes this a classic:  it’s her linguistic acrobatics, her glorious descriptions, and her mastery of the fluctuations of time.  Her flights from one time to another embellish the richness of her style.  On page 4, Sophie of the near future looks back on her life in Kashmir when she was 35 with amazement.

Virago edition

…afterwards she often wondered how she had managed to reach that age and remain as insouciant as she was.  “Insouciant is the right word,” said Sophie.  “Careless and indifferent.”  It was not that things did not go wrong.  They did, very often, though she could never see why.  “But what did I do?” she would ask when they had.  “I didn’t mean it to turn out like that.”

In the village, things do not go well at first. She has hired carpenters to fix the roof and do some renovations and is astonished to learn that they are cheating her: they substitute bent nails for the new ones she has bought. 

And then there are the two battling factions in the village: the rule is that she must have business dealings with one group and not the other.   When she decides she wants to live in peace and be friendly with both groups, she unwittingly puts her children in danger.  Even Theresa has a greater understanding of village politics.

There are problems, but there is much humor, too.  In the summer Sophie organizes an herbal medicine business, with no real idea as to whether or not the concoctions heal.  But the women of the village have come to her for medical help, and benefited from the herbal tea, they think, and they enjoy growing the herbs, gathering wild flowers, and packaging them. It’s fun for all of them.

But it’s odd, isn’t it, how easy it is to make enemies when one doesn’t understand the rules?  Sophie is blithe but oblivious to social cues in a foreign culture. The villagers have minimal contact with the outside world.

Godden’s autobiographical novel could easily be set in the ’60s or ’70s, but Kingfishers Catch Fire, based on Godden’s life with her two daughters in Kashmir in the early 1940s, smashes our belief in the clear demarcations between eras.

Time is… shall we say fluid?  It also flies.

N.B. This book is difficult to find, but the Virago edition (pictured above) is in print and is available at Amazon and Abebooks.

A Cute Epistolary Novel: Virginia Evans’ “The Correspondent”

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The buzz about Virginia Evans’ first novel, The Correspondent, was hyperbolic. How could we not love a cute epistolary novel about a 73-year-old woman described by reviewers as “cantankerous,” “peevish,” and “feisty”?

Reader, beware. Cranky characters can be endearingly cute, yet they can also pall quickly. The heroine seems a bit quirkier at the beginning than in the middle, and an identity subplot takes us into (for her) more dangerous territory, and (for us) more conventional ground.

That said, the beginning is splendid. Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer and judge’s clerk, adores writing letters on high-quality stationery with her fancy fountain pen. She sits down at her desk four mornings a week to write letters, and occasionally e-mails. She corresponds with her brother, children, friends, and famous people, including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Needless to say, she gets a lot of letters.

Surprisingly, she and Joan Didion have an extensive correspondence. Sybil sent her a fan letter, and they hit it off. It is fine for Evans to make up letters by the late Joan Didion: the problem is that the style is lacklustre, nothing like Didion’s.

The letters take different forms. Sibyl’s letter to Ann Patchett takes the form of a brilliant review of State of Wonder, a novel which, if I recall correctly, features 70-year-old women in a South American tribe getting pregnant and giving birth, which would have been my nightmare even in my forties. However, Sibyl thinks it is Patchett’s best novel, written at the height of her powers. Despite my own harsher critique, I was so impressed by Sibyl’s review that I hoped to see other letters in different forms: reviews, articles, minutes on the garden club, etc.

But, alas, we soon become mired in conventional family matters. There is something vaguely cable-TV when Sybil’s son gives her a DNA kit for Christmas: Sibyl was adopted when she was a year and a half, and had wonderful adoptive parents, so she has never investigated her background. Of course we know this is going to expand her world and she will interact with new family members and …

That said, I did not finish this novel. It is not without charm, and I think many readers will like it. But it isn’t quite right for me, and I stopped at page 71.

The Pre-Loneliness of Holiday Chat

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I was looking for reading socks, which are essentially slippers, at B&N when a former employee approached and asked, “May I help you?”  

We both giggled.  I am startled to say that, after a certain age, I have become a “character.”  I famously have been known to mistake bookstore customers for bookstore employees.  “Could you help me find such-and-such a book?” They are always delighted to assist me.

This cracks up the former employee. “Are you trying to put people out of work?”

“Oh, well, I couldn’t find anyone on the floor,” I say vaguely. 

The Christmas cards are on the display tables, but I’m not thinking about the holidays.  And then… “What are you doing for the holidays?” he asked.

I blanched.  I panicked.  Oh no!  The holidays? Already?  “Oh, we’re having a turkey,” I said.  That, I find, covers Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Thanksgiving is about food, and Christmas is also about food.  Actually, Christmas is also about books:  we go to the store and each pick out a book to read on the holiday.

Most people travel, if only to Nebraska or some adjoining state.  Not us.  We stay home.  And I found myself saying inappropriately, “Well, we don’t travel because everybody’s dead.”  Then I gripped his arm.  “Sorry, I should not have said that.” 

And so I told him about the poinsettia greenhouse. That is my most cherished Thanksgiving memory.  After our turkey dinner, the hostess drove us to a vast greenhouse on the outskirts of town. (She knew the proprietor.) It was filled with what looked to me like acres of pink, red, and white poinsettias.  It was more beautiful than some historic gardens I have visited.

As for Christmas, well… That’s still far away.  But I may try to find Zoom book groups to take my mind off that perfectionist holiday where you must prove yourself by making your own wreath (I flunked the adult ed class), assembling a ginger bread house, trimming the tree, and learning the lyrics to the Christmas carols you used to know.