Briefly Noted: ‘Joyland’ by Stephen King

I have never liked occult movies and novels because I tend to see them as twisted versions of actual religions from people who don’t like or understand those religions.

For example, many occult films and movies use, as their source book for witchcraft, the propaganda of some churches that would have us believe witches worship the devil and that they murder innocents to obtain blood for rituals. This slander is so pervasive that a lot of people believe it in spite of the fact that the devil is an invention of Christianity and has nothing to do with the ancient craft religions that pre-dated it.

On the other hand, paranormal novels, those dealing with ghosts, psychics and other “strange” phenomena are often on my reading list. That brought me to become a first-time Stephen King reader with his new novel Joyland. I love the cover, for it reminds me—as King intends—of the days of pulp fiction covers that had bold colors and lurid images.

The cover, however, is slightly misleading. It implies more graphic horror than King delivers or had any intention of delivering. This book, as others have also said, is a gentle, coming-of-age novel about a young man who, after being dumped by his girl friend, leaves home to work at a the kind of old-line carnival that would soon be supplanted by theme parks.

King does a good job plunging his protagonist into the carney atmosphere of Joyland, and place where everyone quickly learn to talk the talk, where pretty young women wear short green dresses and take photographs of visitors, where there’s a constant undercurrent of rough edges even though the attraction is in business to sell fun, and where there is also a ghost story surrounding a murder in the haunted house ride some years before.

The book is very much character driven. We learn a lot about Devin Jones and his fading-into-the past girl friend Wendy. We learn about Devin’s landlady at a rooming house near Joyland. Erin and Tom, other greenies at Joyland have important parts to play, as do the full time employees. There’s also an attractive young woman on the beach with a child. Devin sees her and waves on his walks to and from work. The child waves back. The woman does not. The ghost story is a constant presence, though King is in no hurry to confront it directly any more than he’s in a hurry to tell us about the woman and child on the beach.

Like many coming of age books, Joyland has a bittersweet ambiance, in part because the protagonist is telling the story many years after it happened. Young people learn to talk one kind of talk or another, deal with the harsh as well as the precious realities of life, and decide which side of every fence they are on. King’s story contains all of that along with a heavy helping of nostalgia.

I had fun reading the book.

–Malcolm

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Book Snippets – passages I’ve liked, from Haruf to Allende to Helprin

Sometimes, words, sentences and paragraphs stand out in a book and I find myself thinking about them long after I’ve put the book down and moved onto the next one. Some books have so many “favorite passages” that I read them again and again. Here are a few of my favorites, including a snippet from my new novel The Seeker:

• “So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.”  ― Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, in A Scots Quair [Yes, you can write in second person.]
  
• “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” ― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind [This book is so haunting in English, I've wished I could see what it was like in it's original Spanish.]
  
• “There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.” ― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides [I wasn't happy with the way the movie adaptation for this book came out. However, Conroy's prose is so memorable, I can see a movie of my own making when I read it.]
  
• “He daydreams in the center of the old range, where the land rolls like a sea in slow motion, where substantial water is a treasure, where bluebunch wheatgrass and rough fescue have long served, where the sky detests fences, where the seasons are taskmasters, where predators and gods strip the impractical from the bone.” – Malcolm R. Campbell, The Seeker [I like the wide open spaces of Montana's plains almost as much as I like the shining mountains.]
  
• “Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to Northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells.” ― Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale [Though Helprin has written books of greater depth than this one, this one is still my favorite.]
  
• “Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.” ― Kent Haruf, Plainsong [The minimalist style of this book conveys a great deal of depth and beauty.]
  
• “I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.” ― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits [This remains my favorite of Allende's books, though I continue to be captivated by each new novel.]
  

I expect you have some favorites, too, some lines you cannot forget even though you can’t quote them or even find them if you started tearing apart your bookshelf in search of the words that changed your life or gave you the best laugh ever or set you to thinking about the deeper.

–Malcolm

Looking Back: The Most Difficult Novel to Write

Only $4.99 on Kindle and Nook

Released in 2011, my contemporary fantasy Sarabande was the most difficult book for me to write.  While it’s a sequel to The Sun Singer, it can also be read as a stand-alone novel.  The book was a departure for me, for I had never written from the point of view of a female protagonist.

The title character, Sarabande, faces two assaults in the story, one in the mountains and one on a lone section of highway two in Montana’s plains. I dreaded writing those. I liked the character a lot and didn’t want to see her hurt. I also worried about writing the scenes, and her subsequent feelings, correctly. By that I mean, they had to ring true. I like the way the scenes ended up, but I don’t like reading them because I still feel bad for Sarabande.

She triumphs in the end but she’ll always be a survivor, stronger perhaps, but always with the memories of the bad times.

From the publisher: After her sister, Dryad, haunts her from beyond the grave for three long and torturous years, Sarabande undertakes a dangerous journey into the past– to either raise her cruel sister from the dead, ending the torment…or to take her place in the safe darkness of the earth.

Sarabande leaves the mountains of Montana for the cornfields of Illinois on a black horse to seek help from Robert Adams, the once powerful Sun Singer, in spite of Gem’s prophecy of shame. One man tries to kill her alongside a deserted prairie road…one tries to save her with ancient wisdom… and Robert tries to send her away.

Even if she persuades Robert to bring the remnants of his magic to Dryad’s shallow grave, the desperate man who follows them desires the Rowan staff for ill intent… and the malicious sister who awaits their arrival desires much more than a mere return to life.

At night, this is a very isolated road in Montana

From my favorite review:  In her review, Zinta Aistars writes that “Campbell describes a rape scene that is difficult to read, yet at the same time, earns my respect with his skill in describing this scene, and its aftermath on the woman. Indeed, I had to keep reminding myself I was reading the writing of a male author. It is rare to find this ability in an author to cross genders even in everyday basics such as conversation, mannerisms. To do so in describing the effect of rape on a woman’s body and psyche is nothing short of amazing. Campbell nails it: her anger, her pain, her humiliation, her ferocity that eventually takes her from victim to survivor to avenger.”

Since then, my novel The Seeker has been released, and later this month, The Sailor will be released. As I mentioned on my Facebook page, Asking a writer which book is his favorite is about like asking parents which of their children they like best. I like all of my books. I’ll always remember The Sun Singer as the oldest and Sarabande as the most difficult one to write.

Each novel presents its own challenges and each one of them changes the author in ways he cannot predict when he begins to write. In yesterday’s post called “On Bluebeard,” Theodora Goss wrote, “If you’re a woman, and you’ve lived for a while in the world, you’ve learned to be cautious. You’ve learned that you don’t know who people are, or what they’re capable of, until you’ve known them for a long time, and sometimes not even then.”

Writing Sarabande changed the way I react to that kind of statement. Assaults still anger me, but now I have a greater sadness about them and what survivors have to go through to survive.

–Malcolm

On Location: Upcoming Novel ‘The Sailor’ Set on Aircraft Carrier

“Somewhere behind the haze-gray façade of bulkheads there are people, people too important to be likened to small cogs in a massive non-human machine. Each man has a distinguishable face and personality, a specific job to perform and memories of a world an ocean away.” —Malcolm R. Campbell, Cruisebook, USS Ranger, 1969–70

When I served aboard the USS Ranger during the Vietnam War, my introduction to the ship’s cruisebook focused on people rather than equipment. Cruisebooks, which are very similar in design and intent to high school and college yearbooks, include individual photographs of each sailor as well as group shots for each of the departments.

Since an aircraft carrier’s mission involves planes, most feature films and books from Tora Tora Tora to Top Gun feature fighter jets and pilots. Top Gun, part of which was filmed aboard the USS Ranger (pretending to be the USS Enterprise), is typical of the derring-do action of fiction set on aircraft carriers. One of The Sailor’s main characters is a pilot. David Ward, the protagonist, however, is an aircraft mechanic. The story uses the ship as a setting for personal dramas rather than combat dramas.

As the publisher’s description notes, Unlike his pilot friend Jack Rose, he’s more vulnerable to letters from home than from the war. His fiancé ignores him, a close friend callously tells him to kill bad guys and have sex in every port, and an old flame sends devastating news that wrenches his life from its foundations.

The old salts were right: a catapult launch is like a kick in the butt. The C1-A Trader had a crew of 3 and carried 8 passengers.

Shipboard stories provide unique settings whether they’re disaster movies like Titanic or allegories like Katherine Anne Porter’s allegory Ship of Fools,  place characters into an insular arena where it’s possible to look at their lives under a microscope because–with the exception of port calls–they are confined to a relatively small space. The dangers of sea travel and/or combat situations add to the mix.

My experience aboard the USS Ranger was that of a journalist working in the ship’s public affairs office. In addition to the cruise book, I worked on the ship’s newspaper and magazine and wrote news releases about shipboard activities for the navy and civilian press. My focus was on people rather than on shipboard operations, aircraft and equipment maintenance, the launch and recovery of aircraft, or rescue and recovery. While I saw and heard planes every hour of every day for nine months at a time, I flew only once when I left the ship while it was at sea to return to the United States.

Floating City

Calling the ship a floating city was both lame and true. The ship’s press kit and news releases used this term as one way of telling the public what shipboard duty was like. It was a city with an airport. Its anchor chains were so large, they could lift multiple locomotives. When the squadrons were on board, the population of this city was 4,500 people and, in addition to meals (from the mess decks) and fresh food and provisions (from underway replenishments), the sailors had TV, air conditioning, movies, religious services, sports events, touring shows, mail call (via the C1-A), and a variety of tours and other experiences in liberty ports.

Aircraft Carriers, especially in combat zones, a very dangerous places. Other than prospective aircraft accidents, the flight deck presents major safety issues. Like any ship, a carrier is vulnerable to storms and potential mechanical and navigation problems. Every sailor aboard was part of a damage control party and had a job to do if the ship were disabled by bombs, collision, or fire. As a combat airport, a carrier transports a fair amount of bombs, missiles, jet fuel and aviation gasoline in addition to the oil burned in its own engines. All of this is a backdrop for shipboard life in reality and fiction.

There was a bomb assembly area right outside the door of the berthing compartment where I slept. It was quite a noisy place. Before the bombs and missiles made their way to the flight deck, it was impossible to come and go from one’s rack (bunk) without climbing over or shinnying around the weapons of war. This made a strong impression on me at the time and was an aspect of daily life I blended into the novel.

Those of us who worked in offices right below the flight deck could hear the thump of each aircraft landing and the squalling whine of the arresting gear as the incoming birds’ tail hooks caught one of the cables; we heard the hiss of steam from the catapult with each launch. The ship’s engines added their own constant sound and then, day and night, the ship’s 1-MC pubic address system barked out an endless series of announcements and orders. The sights and sounds then, are important to the book and punctuate the personal dramas of the characters.

The Lone Ranger, AKA the public affairs officer

Since I didn’t use the USS Ranger’s name in the book, I had to leave out our shipboard horse. It was a life-sized fiberglass horse named Silver used by the public affairs officer or special services officer (dressed up as the Lone Ranger) for a whimsical tradition every time the ship finished taking on ammunition, fuel and stores from another ship at sea during an underway replenishment (UNREP). When the unrep ended, the ship’s loud speakers pumped out the sounds of the William Tell Overture associated with the Lone Ranger while a squad of sailors (including me) pushed a cart across the deck carrying the horse and officer. He fired off his guns, stood up in the stirrups and shouted “Hi-Yo Silver, Away!” as the carrier and the supply ship broke away from each other. While I found plenty of subject matter for yarns and screwed up conditions, I had to leave the horse and masked man out of the book.

Response to Conditions

In the novel as in life, people were lost. Jobs were carried out. The mail came and went. People stood in chow lines awaiting meals. General quarters drills and emergency conditions interrupted sleep. Port calls occurred about once a month. Holidays were celebrated in the South China Sea and other faraway locations. And other than our escort destroyers, the sea stretched out forever around us as an infinite and empty place. Depending on a sailor’s shipboard role and the issues impacting his or her life from the outside world, life aboard an aircraft carrier changes a person in multiple ways.

If was successful in creating The Sailor, then readers will experience a bit of shipboard and liberty port life while watching the protagonist become a different person by the time his tour of duty is over.

-

Note: Since the horse was found for Ranger by the people of Lander Wyoming, the horse’s brand (which meant TOP GUN BAR NONE) was a legally registered brand in the State of Wyoming. It was great publicity and from it, I wrote one of my favorite press releases called “Branding at Sea.”

All shipboard pictures this page are U.S. Navy photographs.

You may also like: Navy to Scrap Historic Aircraft Carrier Next Year

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–Malcolm

Must I Care Why I Write?

“I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time. ” – Cormac McCarthy in a Wall Street Journal interview

I’ve read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels and think he’s one of our best writers. He’s rather down to earth in his stories and his interviews. When he says a blank sheet of paper is heaven, that’s about as sentimental as he gets. I agree with him. It is heaven.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t write. I would do something else what’s heaven. I’ve had ides about what over the years. While I never wanted to be a fireman or a policeman, I did want to be a railroad engineer on a passenger train.

It’s hard work. I know that from working at a railway museum and running a locomotive on our short track. Would it be heaven if I sat in the right hand seat (the engineer’s seat) for five hundred miles? I thought so, but I don’t know.

Otherwise, I don’t know why I write. As a child of the 1960s, I come from a time when a lot of people said a person should simply be. We had lots of examples: roses, long leaf pines, whales, clouds from both sides, and gurus. The idea was: be who you are without concern for who you are. You don’t need a reason.

I have read a lot of author interviews and feature stories. One question often comes up: “Why do you write?” The answers are varied, the better ones usually including a joy of storytelling and/or creating imaginary worlds. Not bad.

Personally, I don’t care why I write because “why” isn’t part of the process any more than a rose (so we’ve been told) analyzes why it’s a rose and what it needs to do to become and remain a valued member of the community of roses. Our small magnolia in the front yard has had limbs fall on it, winds blow it over and deer nibble at it. It has a strong presence and when I stand next to it, I think it’s aware that I’m not there with ill intent. Otherwise, does it observe its magnolia-ness complete with goals, objectives and flow charts?

I don’t think so. If it does, I still like the idea that it doesn’t, that it simply is. That’s how I feel as a writer. The joy is in the writing. That’s it. I don’t know why I feel joy and I don’t want to validate it or romanticize it with lofty rationale. Caring about the why of the process gets in the way of the process. Then the blank page ceases to be heaven.

–Malcolm

The Great Silence of the Sea

The sea conjures up many images. At this time of the year, images of beaches come to mind. Later in the summer some of our attention will turn to hurricanes and typhoons. The most frightening images of the sea are usually related to tsunamis,  storms and sinking ships. Yet, that frightening sea also brings us the sound of gentle waves on a beach at high tide and moonlight reflected across great expanses of water.

Aurelia

I grew up on the Florida Gulf Coast. For us, the sea was constant part of our dialogue with nature. We sailed, fished, swam, skied, seined for aquarium fish and built sandcastles. We saw our fair share of storms and we spent our fair share of beach cottage nights on screened-in porches overlooking the water where our lullaby came from the real thing rather than a white noise machine.

While the sea is alive, always changing, and never at rest, my most memorable moments of the sea came at night while standing on the deck of a ship. I’ve made one transatlantic crossing by passenger ship and two Pacific crossings by aircraft carrier.  The passenger ship carried about a thousand people and the aircraft carrier had a crew of about 4,500. Neither ship was conducive to quiet.

The former M. S. Aurelia had a festive atmosphere late into the night. The carrier USS Ranger launched and recovered aircraft many hours a day and then at other times came alive with activity during underway replenishments that brought fresh supplies of ordnance, fuel, stores and other supplies.

Ranger

However, I found the great silence of the sea on calm nights beneath all phases of the moon by standing on decks and catwalks when almost everyone else on board was asleep. If you saw the movie Titanic, perhaps you remember a shot of the ship taken from a distance with an overhead camera. The ship was a flyspeck in the middle of a wide screen that was otherwise filled with a dark, cold ocean. The shot was a lonely one and it illustrated how isolated the ship and its passengers were.

Under favorable conditions, I welcomed that vast quiet ocean and its silence. On both the Aurelia and the Ranger, a night owl standing on a catwalk could feel the pulse of the engines through his shoes. That pulse was almost like a shaman’s drum. The Aurelia crossing was a ten-day trip and that was very short compared to being aboard Ranger for nine months at a time. Nonetheless, there was plenty of quiet water between New York City and Southampton.

I saw the Pacific during Autumn, Winter and Spring. Sometimes it was foggy. Sometimes it was warm. We saw storms, and ice clinging to the railings, too. But mostly, it was quiet between San Francisco, Hawai’i, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. In my upcoming novel The Sailor which was inspired somewhat by my experiences aboard the Ranger, I wrote that the ship steamed 86,000 miles a year. That provided many hours of silence.

The sea speaks within that silence. No, I can’t give you any memorable soundbites. But the words, or perhaps my impressions of words, were there and they were always immensely personal, loving and transcendent as one of Mother Earth’s voices. I found myself again and again within the great silence of the sea and, during hectic and troubled times, those images and memories are still potent.

-

Built in 1938, the M.S. Aurelia sailed under the flag of the Cogedar Line at the time I was aboard. The ship went through many re-builds and usages over the years and, sadly, was destroyed by a fire in 1997. Built in 1954, the USS Ranger (CVA-61) was in service in the western Pacific when I was aboard. It last saw action in Desert Storm before being decommissioned in 1993. The ship now sits in Bremerton, Washington. 

You May Also Like:

• Navy to Scrap Historic Aircraft Carrier Next Year
• Spring Fantasy Novel Giveaway for ‘The Seeker’ – Fourth Excerpt (leave a comment on that post by May 31 for a chance to win a free copy of my latest contemporary fantasy novel.

–Malcolm

The Magic of Old Memories and Working Things Out in Writing

Would I fit in here? It no longer matters – wikipedia photo

Like many authors, I write stories by stirring  up a mix of real locations, imaginary characters, and things that could probably never happen in real life with a liberal dash of old memories. I change the memories for the stories because saying “it’s true” doesn’t cut it if the material doesn’t read well and because I don’t want real people saying, “hey, that’s me and all of my friends know it’s me so I’m going to sue.”

While the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike, I think that on the off chance anyone “who knew me back then” were to read one of my books, they might well not recognize themselves or the events. Of course, since people know my fiction often refers to things that really happened, they often take some of the more over-the-top scenes and say, “you really didn’t do XYZ, did you?” In most cases, the answer is “no.”

Even when the answer is “yes,” I might cross my fingers and lie about it.

I’ve mentioned before the notion of saving old memories and long-gone locations and circumstances by placing them into fiction. In some ways, it keeps them alive, allows others to witness them, and to know such things once happened and/or were they way things were years ago. However, I wrote the following sequence into my novel “The Seeker” because it’s an event I never came to terms with. I was very much against the Vietnam war and strongly considered, as my protagonist does in the novel, going to either Sweden or Canada. Both countries were safe havens for war resistors.

While I have changed the names and otherwise fictionalized the circumstances, the following is essentially true. It happened almost fifty years ago. Nonetheless, until I wrote this scene, I was not sure I made the right decision. I was more or less sure, but I had doubts whenever I happened to think back on it. Yes, I was nostalgic for the magic of old memories. But I was also using one of a writer’s handiest tools: writing something down as a way of knowing how I truly felt about it.

The following scene occurs in the novel in 1967, a year before protagonist David Ward will be drafted into the military for probable duty in Vietnam or leave the country:

Excerpt from “The Seeker”

Brita Lind told him while they lay on the beach drinking Oranjeboom beer and watching the skûtsjes sailing on a wind-filled day at Lemmer that she was sure kind angels persuaded Tom to detour through the Netherlands for four weeks of business meetings on their way home from Pakistan.

“Did we not climb higher than K2 on still nights in the Drouwenerzand wood, on the shore of the Ijsselmeer, and in our room at Elahuizen?” she asked just before she boarded a ferry boat in Groningen to return to Göteborg without him.

“I will miss you,” he said.

“Did we not hold hands over breakfast and say jag älskar dig—I love you—until our uitsmijters were cold? Did we not listen to the Beatles singing ‘Yesterday’ and share ourselves with each other while ignoring the skinny bridge, the wonders of the Rijksmuseum, the beer at Heinekens and the chewing tobacco at Niemeyer’s?” she asked as though he needed to be reminded.

“Yes we did, but we made no promises.”

“You are right. Consider hearing me again, though,” she said, “when I say you may come to Göteborg with me right now and share my home as long as it’s standing, my bed as long as you want me, and my life as long as it pleases you.”

“That would please you?” he asked.

“It would,” she said. “We fell in love quickly. It’s real, David. I know it’s real even if you think you are rebounding from your Florida swamp lady.”

“Jag älskar dig! I love you for you, Brita Lind. I will cherish you for the rest of my life for inviting me into your life.”

“I have read in the newspapers,” she said, hooking a foot around his right ankle, “when your name is called by the American military, a step forward constitutes induction.”

“It’s an efficient method of making a commitment,” he said.

She pulled gently on his right leg. “Taking a step forward now is an efficient method of boarding a ferryboat without having to make a commitment.”

“But it is a commitment, Brita. While Sweden will accept me with open arms, the United States will consider me a criminal who will never be able to go home again without facing a prison sentence. If my family supported me, I would board this ferry with you in a heartbeat and I would marry you, if it pleased you, and I would learn Swedish, even if my grammar and my accent were horrible, and I would be ecstatic in the knowledge that I finally found everything I was looking for.”

“You’re making me cry.”

“Please don’t. I can’t say goodbye to my family forever without their blessing. That’s what it would be.”

“I think you’re making a mistake that you might regret one day.”

“I regret it today.”

The Mystery of the Many Worlds

The Many Worlds version of reality – Wikipedia photo

Some quantum theorists and kabbalists believe that reality splits into multiple worlds at the defining decision points in a person’s life. They would say that one Malcolm came home and ended up on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam and that another Malcolm in a parallel universe went to Sweden.  I tend to believe this. Naturally, most people think the concept is ludicrous and that even if it’s true, it doesn’t matter because no knowledge or information is knowingly transferred from one universe to another.

The theorists believe that we know about alternate universes subconsciously and/or that one day we’ll be able to communicate between them. If I had a magic telephone that would allow me to call the Malcolm who went to Sweden, would I do it? Would I want to know how it went? Prior to writing the Brita scene for “The Seeker,” I probably would have picked up that magic phone to ask Malcolm #2 how he liked Sweden.

But now, I wouldn’t call even if such a magic phone existed. I no longer have the need to know what would have happened if I had stepped on the ferry boat. It just doesn’t matter anymore because writing the scene flushed all the “what if?” questions out of my mind. As a writer, I have quite often felt that writing about old memories is the best way to enjoy the good ones, banish the bad ones, and put to rest old ghosts.

–Malcolm