Activity

the wolf in this story is a liminal figure, an embodiment of some occult state in which binary conditions are impossibly, gruesomely conflated.

his arch locution is a latter-day fillip

Other animals don’t require a whole cavalcade of concepts to warn them away from creatures that want to eat them

Intercepting the girl, the wolf engages, charms, inveigles

[...] the people who invented the story didn’t have modernity. They didn’t have ruffled caps or gingham aprons or a notion of quaintness to which these garments belonged. And they presumably did not have a concept of the wilderness, not the way we do. We think of the wilderness as bounded and finit…