c4 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAy, MARCH 19 , 2020
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top chef (Bravo at 10) the chefs must compete in an elimination
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17. (Pictured: judges Padma lakshmi and Marcus Samuelsson).
One way to test whether
satisfying one’s curiosity is rude
is to consider what would
happen if the tables were turned.
Imagine a white person’s
indignant response if a nonwhite
stranger asked his or her race.
Your advice to the always-
curious J should have been,
“Mind your own business.”
And the polite response when
strangers ask about your race?
“Human.”
— BarbaraBarbara: Perfect. Thank you.
December 2010amy’s column appears seven days a
week at washingtonpost.com/advice.
Write to [email protected]
or amy Dickinson, P. o. Box 194,
Fr eeville, n.Y. 13068. You can also
follow her @askingamy.
© 2 020 by amy Dickinson distributed by
tr ibune content agencya combo?” is obnoxious.
Referring to your daughter’s
racial identity this way is off-
putting. So is saying, “I bet I can
guess your race! No, really. I’m
very good at this!”
Some people aren’t going to
care about your motivations for
intruding upon them. This has
nothing to do with being
politically correct. This has to do
with you engaging strangers in a
personal conversation they
might not feel like having.
November 2010Dear Amy: “J” wrote that she
loves to ask strangers about their
race.
Should we feel free to indulge
our curiosity by asking strangers
about their gender? What about
their sexual orientation? Age?
Marital status? Religion? Why
not if they’re pregnant, or HIV
positive?I am outgoing, and when I
hear an accent or see someone I
think is a combo like my
daughter, I usually ask. People
are always curious about my
daughter, and I’m curious about
other people, too.
Am I being rude if I express
curiosity about a person’s racial
background? Some people like
the interest. Others seem to
resent it. A man in the
supermarket yesterday was
annoyed. He was from Sudan.
Should I keep my mouth shut?
It seems politically correct to
stay quiet.
— JJ: You should feel free to express
your abundant curiosity, but you
should also accept a stranger’s
right not to discuss his race or
ethnicity with you.
Charging up to a person and
saying, “Hi, just curious. Are youknow.”
If you want to let them know
why you take this personally,
your ethnicity could provide a
handy “teachable moment,” but
ethnic stereotypes are offensive,
no matter the ethnicity. If this is
an ongoing issue, then, yes,
speak with their folks.
November 2010Dear Amy: I am always curious
about people’s cultural and
racial background.
My 24-year-old daughter is
mixed-race (black and Korean). I
went to Seoul when she was
2 years old to bring her home
from the orphanage.
As a result of knowing her
racial makeup, I’ve sorted out
what various Asians look like
and can distinguish differences
between people from China,
Japan, Korea, Mongolia,
Vietnam and the Philippines.by. One of the boys made a
comment about how these men
had “probably just robbed a
house.”
I was shocked and didn’t
know what to say. Is it my place
to say anything? Should I talk to
their mom?
— ConfusedConfused: You should correct
the kids when you are with
them, because you are in charge.
This includes comments they
may make about old people,
overweight people or offensive
race-based remarks such as the
one you witnessed.
It’s okay to say, “Hey guys, it’s
not nice, and it’s not fair to make
assumptions about people. You
seem to think all Hispanic
people are bad or scary, but
you’re wrong. I don’t want to
hear you talk like that again
about people you don’t evenDear Readers:
Every year, I step
away from the
Ask Amy column
for two weeks to
work on other
writing projects.
To day’s “Best of ” column from
2010 deals with racial issues.
I’ll be back with fresh Q and A
next week.
Dear Amy: I am a 16-year-old
girl and have a part-time job as a
babysitter. Every day is an
adventure. Their life is much
different from mine, and I’ve
enjoyed learning about them.
Recently, I have become aware
of their stereotypes about
Hispanics. Coming from a
Hispanic family (although my
skin is white), I get offended by
this.
Recently, while walking home,
a van with Hispanic men passed
Teen babysitter wonders whether she should address kids’ hurtful stereotyping
Ask Amy
AMY
DICKINSON
BY MICHAEL DIRDAEscapism gets a bad rap, but
there are times — like now —
when the world is too much with
us and nothing but light reading
will do. The comedies of P.G.
Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer’s
Regency romances and Golden
Age whodunits provide much-
needed respite from stressful re-
ality. So do fantasies and weird
tales, such as those by two writers
you may have never heard of.
Snuggly Books has recently pub-
lished “The Complete Shorter
Fiction” of the remarkable Eng-
lish polymath Edward Heron-
Allen, while Wakefield Press has
issued “Whiskey Tales” and
“Cruise of Shadows” by Jean Ray,
founder of the “Belgian School of
the Strange.”
Among much else, Heron-
Allen (1861-1943) was an authori-
ty on violin-making and palmist-
ry, a noted translator of Persian
poetry, an expert on barnacles
and, notoriously, the author of
the controversial and extremely
scarce novella, “The Cheetah-
Girl.” More about it in a moment.
In the foreword to Heron-
Allen’s principal collection, “The
Strange Papers of Dr. Blayre,” we
learn that Christopher Blayre,
the University of Cosmopoli’s
registrar, has over the years been
the recipient of various manu-
scripts, “which, by reason of their
intimate personal n ature... were
confided to me as records of
events which appeared at the
time to be of too fantastic and
inexplicable a nature to be pub-
lished by their Recorders.”
Thus “The Purple Sapphire” —
deposited by the Smithsonian
professor of mineralogy — de-
scribes the malefic influence of
an accursed gem, while “The
House on the Way to Hell” re-
veals, through a utomatic writing,
that the university’s recently de-
ceased librarian now oversees
the infernal region’s books and
manuscripts. In the science-
fictional “A alila,” Cosmopoli’s ob-
sessed astronomer constructs a
device based on “photo-
telephony,” which permits him to
communicate with, and eventu-
ally do more than just communi-
cate with, a female being from
the planet Venus.
At times Heron-Allen’s story-
telling approaches the charm
and outrageousness of the many
travel tales of Lord Dunsany’s
bibulous clubman Joseph
Jorkens (who claimed to have
once married a mermaid). Still,
Cosmopoli’s f aculty members fre-
quently come to unhappy ends. A
complementary collection titled
“Some Women of the University”opens with the account of a
young woman torn between a
female and male lover and closes
with a terrifying encounter at a
sinister Austrian inn. It is an
unnerving tale mixing erotic en-
thrallment with pathos and hor-
ror.
Even more disturbing, “The
Cheetah-Girl” violates multiple
sexual taboos. We are hooked
with the first paragraph:
“I have spent a long and very
tiring day in London, and I have
come home, worn out physically
and mentally. But I have settled
my worldly affairs, and am, I
think, prepared for any eventual-
ity. I am now ready therefore to
kill my wife on the first opportu-
nity that offers.”
Cosmopoli’s professor of phys-
iology then adds that, despite his
murderous resolution, he re-
mains madly in love with the
oddly named Uniqua. He remi-
nisces that on the day they first
met, “I crushed her body to meand our lips joined. I thought
until t hen that I knew what it was
to be kissed. I did not.”
Originally published in 1923,
“The Cheetah-Girl” touches on
prostitution, homosexuality, mis-
cegenation, orgies, pedophilia,
artificial insemination, bestiality,
abortion and extraordinary amo-
rous ecstasy. Little wonder that
the story proved too shocking for
commercial circulation and was
only printed in an author’s edi-
tion of 20 copies. In fact, it’s far
more poignant than titillating
and, at heart, an indictment of
the coldly scientific mind-set.
While Edward Heron-Allen is
an appealing writer of weird
fiction, Jean Ray (1887-1964) is a
great one. Over the years Ray
produced every kind of uncanny
tale and more than a hundred
adventures of Harry Dickson,
“the American Sherlock Holmes,”
as well as one novel, “Malper-
tuis,” a masterpiece of European
fantastika (superbly translated
by Iain White for Atlas Press).
Till recently, however, this Bel-
gian author’s many “strange sto-
ries”— written in French — have
been hard to come by in English.
Happily, Wakefield Press has in-
augurated a program to publish,
in chronological order, Scott Ni-
colay’s fresh translations of Ray’s
dozen or so collections. Last fall’s“Whiskey Ta les” offered relative-
ly simple shockers — the stuff of
“Tales from the Crypt” comics —
such as “One Night in Camber-
well” (struggle with an invisible
intruder), “Josuah Gullick, Pawn-
broker” (a macabre variant of the
biter bit) and “The Cemetery
Guard” (the hideous truth be-
hind a dream job). This spring,
however, brings us “Cruise of
Shadows,” which contains noth-
ing but masterpieces, notably
“The Gloomy Alley” and “The
Mainz Psalter.”
In general, Ray’s stories are
characterized by short punchy
paragraphs, the use of docu-
ments and newspaper reports,
sudden shifts of narrative per-
spective, and a pervasive atmo-
sphere of menace and approach-
ing doom. The meanings of his
mature stories, though, are sel-
dom made explicit. In “The
Mainz Psalter” a ship, hired by a
supposed schoolmaster, sails
from this world into another
dimension or plane of being,
where its crew confronts squid-
like Lovecraftian entities and
horrific elements adapted from
William Hope Hodgson’s compa-
rably unsettling short novel, “ The
Ghost Pirates.”
Despite the bland title, “The
Gloomy Alley” quickly grows Es-
cher-like in its vertiginous twistsand turns. In the first section, the
residents of a Hamburg house-
hold suddenly feel “fear” in cer-
tain rooms, then either disappear
or turn up savagely murdered. In
its second section, an impover-
ished teacher discovers a narrow
street that only he can see or
enter. Inside he finds doors to
three houses, from which he
purloins various artifacts for
which a local pawnbroker will
pay almost any price. Eventually,
these two seemingly unrelated
narratives merge, though their
full meaning is revealed only in a
coda.
Even though Jean R ay g rounds
his mature fiction in the ordinary
here-and-now of waterfront bars
and cheap rooming houses, it
periodically hints at or crosses
over into what he called “interca-
lary worlds,” other dimensions or
realities. Maurice Renard, author
of the much-filmed horror clas-
sic, “The Hands of Orlac,” fa-
mously called Ray the Belgian
Poe, though at times he seems
more the Belgian Lovecraft. Nei-
ther comparison seems exagger-
ated, given the poetry and imagi-
native power of his haunting,
mind-boggling stories.
[email protected]michael dirda reviews books each
thursday in Style.BooK World
A perfect time to get lost in the weird tales of Edward Heron-Allen and Jean Ray