Snake in the Bucket

Welcome today's guest, Camille Minichino, a retired physicist turned writer. As Camille Minichino, she's the author of the Periodic Table Mysteries. As Margaret Grace, she writes the Miniature Mysteries, based on her lifelong hobby. As Ada Madison, she writes the academic mysteries featuring Professor Sophie Knowles, college math teacher. The Probability of Murder will be released March 6. Soon, every aspect of her life will be a mystery series. 


I don't trust anything that can't be described by an equation and/or plugged into 120 VAC. So you can imagine my delight when Gigi told me that the Pens, my bookmarked, read-daily blog, would be talking about SNAKES!

An equation-based theme; what a dream!

The snake curve is one of my favorites. Also called active contours, snake curves are the wave (so to speak) of the future. They're able to track motion in a way that holds great promise for cool apps, like tracing the history of a person's smile, or the action of a heart valve. The full progress of the smile in the picture, as well as other apps that are sure to revolutionize medical image processing, are given in this report from the International Journal of Computer Vision.


OK, I know for some people the snake curve may not be the first thing that comes to mind for this topic. More often, the word SNAKE evokes an image of a scaly reptile, or a plumber's tool, or an ex-husband. 

Thinking about this blog has made me realize how much snakes have to do with my life. Many items on my Anti-Bucket List (things I hope never to have to do before I die) have to do with snakes, including but not limited to

1. Visit a zoo (the only place where snakes should exist)
2. Hike (where there might be snakes);
3. Garden  (where there surely are snakes)
4. Eat outside (where the risk of snakes is great)
5. Sleep outside (see 4, only more so)
6. Bring a plant into my home (thus, a possible snake embryo)
7. Enter a pet store (where all species thrive, indiscriminately)

I could save a lot of time by simply putting NATURE on my Anti-Bucket List.

But NATURE includes  technology, which I love and want more of. Unlike snakes, technology is an extension of ourselves, from scissors as an extension of our fingers (not just for Johnny Depp!) to printers and books as an extension of our thoughts, to cars as an extension of our legs, and so on.

Snakes do nothing to extend our abilities. Not even Juliet Blackwell's earlier post, with its symbolic pokes in that regard changed my mind.

I get really tense if I inadvertently walk down the pet food aisle in the supermarket, where they sell 25-pound bags of snake food. In fact, I'm getting tense writing this blog.

Excuse me while I plug up all the vent holes in my house.

Even Indiana Jones is Afraid of Snakes. It Must be a Guy Thing.

When I was a little kid, I had a theory that girls were afraid of spiders and boys were afraid of snakes.

My best friend, a little boy who lived across the street, would torment me with spiders. Spiders didn't seem to scare the boys. Even though I was a tomboy—matchbox cars, a skateboard, and a constant coating of dirt—spiders freaked me out.

But when the couple who lived down the street told us there were snakes in their large ivy lawn, I wasn't the least bit afraid. Who cared about snakes? But my best friend was terrified, as were the other little boys in the neighborhood. (Looking back, the couple probably told us about the snakes so we'd stay out of the ivy.)

Around that time, the first Indiana Jones movie came out. And he, too, was afraid of snakes! If brave Indy was afraid of snakes, little-kid-me knew I was onto something. All men must have an irrational fear of snakes. But women? We knew better.

I was too young to have it occur to me that most *people* were creeped out by snakes. I just didn't happen to be one of them.

Because of my childhood theory about the gender divide of the fear of snakes, I grew up even less scared of snakes than I otherwise might have been. Since I assumed little girls didn't fear snakes, I had no reason to be afraid. Snakes are cool, not scary. But spiders? That's another story.

—Gigi

Martha Sleeps With Snakes (literally)

I mean it.

I've slept with snakes.

Literally.

Not a, "Omg that was so funny I literally died laughing" literally which is not literally at all. But a, "Me, a bed, and some snakes!" literally.

In high school my friend Joy owned a couple of snakes. And by "owned" I meant she went into her desert backyard in Arizona, saw two snakes, and thought "I'd like to own these."

Weirdly enough, the snakes didn't seem to mind. They became quite petlike. They let her hold them. They let her feed them mice. They didn't run (slither?) away.

The snakes even did this cute thing (yes...cute...bear with me) where they would slither themselves into our belt loops and extend their heads all the way to the ground between our legs as we walked. (Talk about having a third leg, hardy har har.)Joy could even pull it off inline skating (ah, remember inline skates?) so she would zip through town with a little snake hanging out between her legs.

And one time, when I slept over, the snakes crawled (dammit, still slithered, isn't it?) into bed with us.

It was, ya know weird. You'd feel the sheets moving and then something scaley would slide over your calf or up your arm. Who knows what the snakes did once we actually fell asleep or if they did anything at all.


(Followup: One of the snakes eventually made its way back to the desert while the other died of...whatever snakes die of. Being owned by humans, most likely...)

A Snake in Eden

...or the Fictional Villain
by Lisa Hughey

Michaelangelo's Adam and Eve

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got as a writer was about the snake in your story. The hero or heroine is only as strong as their strongest opponent. So if you craft a weak villain, your story is going to suffer for it.

All fiction is derivative. There are only so many stories that exist and genre fiction really only has so many plots. Our task as writers is to find the details, to define the characters so that the story becomes original within our voice. Part of that originality comes from developing the villain's character. Particularly fascinating to me is the idea that in the villain's reality their world view is right and just. Serial killers, mass murderers, politically motivated assassins, whatever their poison may be, the villain truly believes that they are working for the greater good. Their conviction in their actions is what makes the story believable and gripping.

But it can't just be that the villain is properly motivated and righteously just. The hero/ine must be smarter, stronger and faster than the villain. What makes a seriously satisfying read is the book that delivers a strong villain and the even stronger protagonist who triumphs over that villain. As readers we need that payoff. Our hero needs to vanquish that fictional snake and be the victor. Otherwise, as a reader we have the sense of being let down, disappointed in our main character.

So the next time your hero or heroine is tempted by the apple, let go of that compulsion to stop them, and allow them to embrace the snake in their Eden.

With that, I'll leave you with the scene where Clarice meets Hannibal for the first time. (couldn't find a video to embed but follow the link)

http://youtu.be/pXJx5mORmMI

Lisa

A Snake in a Cast

L.G.C. Smith

Before I started dreaming about rattlesnakes biting me, I was friends with a garter snake who lived under my grandparent’s front porch. One Easter morning, my grandpa called me outside to see something. I was three, I think. My grandparents lived in a brand new house they had built in Spearfish, South Dakota where my grandfather was a school superintendent. The house was on a green hillside with a small creek at the bottom of the property. When my grandpa pointed to something long and narrow in the grass, I was too little to do anything but walk right up to it. It looked a little like a snake, but . . . not. More like the ghost of a snake.

“It’s a snake skin,” my grandpa explained. And he told me how snakes shed their skins, and that this one had belonged to a garter snake that lived under the porch.

I loved the idea of shedding your whole skin, and I wanted to meet the snake that had done it. So I waited and I watched. I remember sitting very still, and wishing for the snake to show itself. I have a clear memory of the snake skin, but I don’t remember seeing the snake. My mother says I did indeed see him, and I named him Ray.


Now Ray up on the porch or his shed skin in the grass was one thing. Later that year, I broke my leg and had a full cast on. I wasn’t four yet, and not so quick with the crutches, although my other grandpa, the self-sufficient rancher, taught me how to use them as soon as he got hold of me. But the day before that happened, I was carried down to sit beside the creek in Spearfish with my other grandparents. There I sat, stuck in one place because of that big old cast on my leg, and what came slithering through the grass but a garter snake, slender, green and wriggling quick.

It was too small for Ray, and its size was a problem. A big problem. That little snake was skinny enough that all it would take was one fast wiggle and it could slip into the narrow gap between my leg and the plaster cast. Then what would I do?!

Being three, I immediately threw a fit and got myself hauled back to the house. No one understood why I couldn’t see the garter snake by the creek as one of Ray’s tribe and be friends. When I explained about it getting into my cast, they insisted it would never happen. I didn’t buy it. If I could imagine it that clearly, it was possible. End of discussion.

From that point on, I was afraid of snakes. Cultural messages certainly reinforced that fear, and subsequent experiences with rattlers kept me on my toes (one even struck at me while I was walking in the alfalfa field surrounding my house in Mission, SD; hooboy, you’ve never seen a fat woman run so fast), but it was my own infant imagination that planted that seed of fear.

I wasn’t afraid of being bitten. I was afraid of a live thing getting trapped between me and something I couldn’t remove. I was afraid of it wriggling and maybe dying in there, and when they took the cast off, there would be a stinky moldering snake corpse, and I would be sad and disgusted. And scared. So scared. Of something I had liked a lot. Of life and death and moving and getting stuck.

Snakes carry heavy loads for us. We dump our most primal fears on their long backs, and off they slither, reviled and feared. But my fear of snakes is more about my fear of my own life and death, of all the things I can’t control, and all the things I’m afraid to do.

But I remember Ray. He was a good friend to a three-year-old girl, and he calls me back to a piece of my spirit from before I was afraid. I’m working hard to get all the way back.

When a snake is just a snake

-- By Juliet

I remember the first time I read that Freud believed snakes to be phallic symbols.

I was an impressionable high school student, and I was learning a little about a lot of things-- art and psychology and history. And as I flipped through my art books, well...there was something to be said for Freud's phallic theory. I mean, check out Lilith with the snake (to the right). She sure looks like she's about to have sex with that serpent. (Like so many students before me, I was largely intrigued by art history because I couldn't believe I was allowed to look at smut like this, right there in the school library! Ah, those innocent pre-internet days...)

And the truth was, at fifteen I hadn't had much experience with snakes, whether of the phallic or the serpentine variety. But frankly, looking at this painting of Lilith -- who was pretty kick-ass and much more interesting than Eve-- made snakes seem just a little bit...sexy.

And then there was this sculpture, entitled 'Femme piquee par un serpent - Woman bitten by a snake' by Jean-Baptiste Clesinger, known as Auguste.
You can certainly see how "bitten by a snake" might be a euphemism for something nasty, and yet wildly intriguing. Finally, I stumbled across this painting of a snake charmer, by Jean Léone Gérôme, in which it certainly does look like there might be something else going on right after the show:

But it didn't take long for my nascent feminism to assert itself: all these paintings had been created by men, and a lot of the boys I knew seemed to be a little preoccupied with all things phallic. And then it occurred to me: Freud was also a man, and therefore also likely preoccupied with anything he might consider to be phallic.

Without the sensual portrayals of serpents in art, I really didn't find snakes to be sexy at all. In fact, there was a picture that rather summed up my feelings for reptiles in general, by one of my favorite artist of all time: Medusa, by Caravaggio. Her hair was made of snakes, but there wasn't anything sexy about it, not in the least.