Stormfield Manor

Autobiography 2

2012-01-19T20:26:00.001-08:00

It was at the age of 1 that I discovered the Philosopher's Stone. The key was the realization that there was no difference between the Final Transmutation and the Elixir of Life--if a substance were so awesome as to turn base metal into gold, the Universe seems to have reasoned, it might as well grant unending life.

That was the realization, but I have forgotten the Secret, and without the Secret, the Stone won't run. It just sits belching smoke and steam for a while, then asks in a sort of wheedling voice, "Can I go home now?" And, because you don't know what else to do with it, you let it.

In a way, all my life since that year has been a quest to recover the lost secret of the Philosopher's Stone.

Autobiography

2012-01-19T20:18:00.001-08:00

I was born, as nearly as I can remember, in April. There was a soft rain falling and the ground had not yet given up its snow, as if the snow and the earth were the sort of boyfriend and girlfriend who cannot bear to cease clinging to one another, lest the other disappear. Then the snow did disappear, materializing the earth's greatest fears, and in bitterness the earth gave us an extremely hot summer.

Of course, the summer of '89 was a hot one in Wisconsin for different reasons. That was the summer that Overlord Zarnoff attempted a hostile takeover of the state government. I clearly remember my mother pushing my perambulator at the outskirts of one of the protests. A certain young man, brown-haired with long-lashed eyes, saw my glowing face and was inspired to create the legislation that in the end defeated the Evil Overlord, which was fortunate for him because I have been in the ventilator ducts of the capitol and they are not the sort of space a young man with good prospects wants to crawl through.

I don't like to brag, but the young man did give me a gold-plated trophy resembling a mass of tentacles being dragged into the Universal Void, a commemoration of the Overlord's final moments. This was just before, having turned down the post of Universal King of Wisconsin, he became the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

2011: A Year In Books

2012-01-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

Ironically, I started the year reading a steampunk anthology, and ended the year reading a steampunk anthology. Also, wow, the second book on my list is "Reading Lolita in Tehran," and one of the last books is "Lolita." In between, I managed to cover a lot of territory: theology, communication studies, philosophy, history, YA science fiction, alchemy, classical Greece--and those are only the ones I read for FUN.

Last January, I remember feeling kind of weird starting the list, because I had no idea where I'd be at the end of the year--graduation was looming, grad school applications were pending, but nothing solid was even on the immediate horizon--which somehow made me disinclined to even start the list. However, on reflection this seemed silly.

Last year's number of books read--68--was highly depressing. I had extenuating circumstances, mainly consisting of being in a lot of upper-div classes that were not reading- (or at least book-) heavy. This year, I was helped by being in a LOT of classes that were book-heavy, but I also think I had more enthusiasm for reading this year.

Here then, is my year in books. As I have done the last couple years, I'll write as concise a review as possible for each book or few books. Those who are not foolish or masochistic enough to read the whole thing can skip to the end, where I'll give my top twelve picks for the year.

1. Steampunk II (Anthology), edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer [Steampunk 1]
While it is a sequel, published by popular demand, to the Vandermeer's anthology "Steampunk," Steampunk II would actually serve as a good introduction to the subgenre. A great collection of short stories, some such as Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" epoch-making in their own right, as well as some essays about the movement itself, where it came from, and what it might mean. Other than that, it's a great grab-bag of steam-powered stories of all kinds, from the strictly almost-scientific to the entirely whimsical.

2. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Read for my class in Non-Western Lit. Fascinating account of the oppression of women, literature, and just general freedom under the fundamentalist Iranian government. Well worth reading on that account, and even more rewarding for the literature nerd.

3. Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande
Decent book of advice for up-and-coming writers. Written in the 1920s; mostly still relevant. Quick read, too, and introduces an interesting writing method that I have yet to try.

4. Human Narration as Communication, by Walter Fisher
Part of my research for my Senior English Thesis. Fisher uses rhetorical theory to argue that all forms of communication--from the novel to the scientific treatise--are forms of story, in that they are recountings of things happening in sequence. Really good book if you are nerdy enough that the foregoing piques your interest.

5. The Story of the Irish Race, by Seamus MacManus
Incredibly fascinating history of Ireland from its mythic ancient past up through the early 20th Century. MacManus' methodology is occasionally questionable, but he tells the history of Ireland mixed with myth, poetry, song and story, a method and structure I find entirely appropriate to the subject matter.

6. Everyman's McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji & Jacob Albert [Media Ecology 1]
I took a class in Media Ecology, and it subsequently INVADED MY LIFE. ME is basically the idea that media interacts ecologically with other media and the culture around it; that is, the effect of a new pervasive form of media is similar to putting a drop of red dye into a glass of water. You don't have the old glass plus red dye; you have a glass permeated with red dye. So with media. McLuhan, who wrote in an aphoristic, consciously anti-academic (though by no means un-academic) style, founded this form of study. McLuhan is one of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the last 500 years. He frustrates people, he is easily misunderstood, and I love him. He has been the biggest influence on my thought, writing, and life since Mark Twain.

"Everyman's McLuhan" is an excellent introduction--in the pictographic-mixed-with-text style that McLuhan himself favored later in life--to the man's thought, work, and life.

7. Mr. Mani, by A.B. Yehoshua
My favorite book from Non-Western Lit (which did have a lot of dismal books). The story of a Jewish family, the Manis, by means of five conversations. The first conversation takes place in the 1980s, and the subsequent ones move back in time, the final one taking place in 1848. The historical research in this book is incredible, impeccable. In one section, this Israeli writer gets into the mind of a Nazi better than I have seen almost any writer do, anywhere.

8. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Ugh. Boring, hackneyed, and badly-written. No wonder it became a best-seller.

9. Blood Wedding, by Federico Garcia Lorca
I played the father. Being in a play, besides the initial read-through, I always feel like I have studied the text, or at least parts of the text (even besides my own parts) in great depth, simply due to the amount of exposure to everyone else's scenes, due to the listening to various scenes over and over while waiting for my own cues, etc. Blood Wedding is a great play, an incredibly poetic tragedy that belongs on the shelf next to Hamlet.

10. Nectar in a Sieve, by Kamala Markandaya
One of those novels that so accurately portrays its subject--dreariness, poverty, and hard work--that the experience of reading it becomes similar to the subject matter. Ugh. (This and Kite Runner, in case there was any doubt, were also for Non-Western.)

11. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
I was not impressed. This is possibly due to Retro Prejudice--that is, the feeling that one has heard this story told a thousand ways, because one HAS, but THIS story that one is therefore bored by WAS THE FIRST. Still, as a white man, I felt less indicted than sleepy.

12. 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, ed. by Kathleen Hoaglund
Wonderful anthology with a slightly misleading title: it covers at least 3000 years of Irish poetry, starting with the mysterious Druidic Song of Amergin and moving through the ancient bardic poets, the early Christian prayers and poems, and up through the middle ages and modern era. My favorite poem was one attributed to St. Brigid, in which she wishes for "a great lake of beer to give to the King of Kings," so that she and the holy family might sit by its side and drink for eternity. Yay Ireland.

13. Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan [ME 2]
McLuhan's seminal work. Short chapters poke and prod at various forms of media, starting with the spoken word but focusing largely on electric technology, which McLuhan thought was the greatest technological revolution since writing. McLuhan is writing a history of the effects of this media. If he has a thesis statement, it might be his famous phrase, "the medium is the message," an argument that the very FORM of any medium, quite apart from its content, has a message attached to it.

14. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, by Marjorie Taylor
15. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, by Jerome Bruner
Two more books, both psychology-related, for my Senior Thesis. Both are about world-building (the subject of my paper): imaginary friends are a child's attempt to build his or her own world, and Bruner expands the idea of constructed worlds to comprehend all human thought.

16. The Court of the Air, by Stephen Hunt [SP 2]
A steampunk romp that takes the aesthetic and builds its own world (as opposed to a lot of steampunk, which riffs off of the "real" world). A fun book, a good adventure.

17. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
John Green has this tendency to write teen novels that are hilarious, and real, and by the end feel like a punch in the stomach. Looking for Alaska won lots of awards, and with good reason; Green has a spiritual depth to his writing for teens that a lot of authors lack. He also has a really good handle on what being a teenager feels like. Really, he's sort of incredibly brilliant.

18. Saint, by Ted Dekker
The second of the "Showdown" books, and just as enjoyable as the first. I usually avoid fiction writers marketed specifically as "Christian," but Dekker crosses boundaries, and with good reason--his stories are as good as any modern author of "junk food" fiction.

19. Larklight, by Philip Reeve [SP 3]
Wonderful YA steampunk novel, somewhat satirical, about a house floating in the middle of a solar system as colonized by the Victorian-Era British Empire. Space pirates, giant spiders, frilly dresses. That's all I have to say.

20. Going Bovine, by Libba Bray [Partial]
Got a hundred pages in before I got bored. It was reading like an attempt to write American Gods as a teen novel without being Neil Gaiman. Ugh.

21. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
My Non-Western class voted this book out because it had one sex scene. In defiance, I read the rest of it, because it was actually one of the best books (as far as prose, storytelling, and serious treatment of theme goes) in our Non-Western pile. A South African author, and a purely South African tragedy. It leaves a twist in the stomach that may just make the reader a better person.

22. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
Vintage Gaiman and McKean; not really explicable. It's much more about the human condition, about childhood and the loss of innocence, than about Mr. Punch, but like Mr. Punch it will do its best to fool you.

23. Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah
Somewhat fascinating, somewhat boring YA-level memoir of growing up during the cultural revolution in China.

24. Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman [ME 3]
Postman takes McLuhan's idea, "the medium is the message," and thoroughly examines what message the medium of television sends. In a word: television turns everything into entertainment. A fascinating indictment of a culture obsessed with triviality. Postman's specific application to TV might seem a little dated, but we can quite easily examine his arguments in light of modern entertainment media: computers, iPads, etc.

25. The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
26. The Phoenix Transcendent, by John C. Wright
The first two books of a trilogy, for which I still need/want to read the third. Wright is brilliant; he takes a far-future science fiction story and imbues it with a strong patina of Greek tragedy, taking what could be a very technical world and making it seem universal.

27. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green
The previously-mentioned Green. This novel is about a young man who is a math prodigy and who, at 18, has been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine. A brilliant novel, probably my favorite by Green.

28. House, by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti [Partial]
Simply was not impressed. 50 pages was enough to make me bored. I'm not sure why, either--Peretti and Dekker both know how to tell a story (though I have a lot more respect for Dekker). But, meh. After 50 pages I just couldn't bring myself to care.

29. The Devil Knows Latin, by E. Christian Kopff
Brilliant book loaned to me by Bruce Gee; an indictment of a country (ours) that is largely out of touch with its philosophical and artistic roots, and a plea for classical education in all walks of life.

30. Alchemy: Its Science and Romance, by the Right Rev. J. E. Mercer, D.D. (Sometime Bishop of Tasmania)
A fascinating little history of alchemy, written in 1921 (thus the awesome quaintness of the author credit, which I copied straight from the title page). Good overview of the basics of alchemy and good thumbnail biographies of a few alchemists.

31. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
Classic SF that EVERYONE has been telling me to read for YEARS, and they were RIGHT.

32. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
This was perhaps the third time I have read this book. It is my opinion that every teenager should be made to read this book and, once they have done so, should be hit over the head, told, "YOU DIDN'T GET IT," and then made to read it again. It would solve a lot of angst and various other pretentious teenager problems, I think.

33. The Sorceror's House, by Gene Wolfe
Managed to be simultaneously not one of Wolfe's best and better than most fantasy being written today. Appreciable for its trickiness; Wolfe loves the unreliable narrator, and in this story told through correspondence, unreliable narrators abound. Worth reading if just for the brain activity it takes to try to figure out what's REALLY happened/happening.

34. Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, tr. George Thomson
Honestly, I wasn't sure what was going on in this play for about the first quarter, then it all hit me like a load of bricks. A better tragedy, by my lights, than Oedipus.

35. Going Out, Getting Dumped, and Playing Mini-Golf on the First Date, by Rev. Tim Pauls
Excellent book of advice for Lutherans (or any Christians) on dating. Written for a high school audience, but valuable for anyone, really. It steers away from the mistake of most "Christian" dating books by not trying to control specific behaviors; rather, it lays out guidelines and helpful things to remember. (The latter being things like, Yeah, maybe your boyfriend dumped you. Are you therefore worthless? Well, did Christ still die for you?)

36. The Greeks: Cosmology and Cosmogony, ed. by W.H. Auden
Compilation of texts from people like Plato, Aristotle, Hesiod, Homer and various other Greek authors (some of them unknown/anonymous), which paint an interesting picture of the worldview of the ancient Greeks--i.e., the guys who laid the philosophical foundation of our entire civilization.

37. Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
Sanderson has always been good at storytelling and worldbuilding, and Mistborn is sheer storytelling and worldbuilding. Lots of fun, and a lovely big story, and quite refreshing in that the epic fantasy here was also a heist story. Still need to read the other two of this trilogy.

38. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!, by Edmund Carpenter [ME 4]
Another Media Ecology classic, this also marks the first of several that I read NOT for class, but on my own, initiating my descent into the Truly Nerdy (had I not been there already). A book full of short, pithy mini-essays about the effect of media on our senses--namely, that any form of media which extends our senses also alienates us from being truly human.

39. Audrey, Wait!, by Robin Benway
Fair-to-middling teen fiction fare. Unexpected fame and its consequences on suburban teenage exes, handled more gracefully than I would tend to expect from the genre.

40. Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
Discworld, an actually flat earth which flies through space on the back of four elephants which stand on a giant turtle, is a place that is wonderful both for an escape and for a challenge of the Way Things Are in the "real" world. Feet of Clay, perhaps the twelfth (or something, I don't even know) book in the series, breaks the genre of Police Procedural.

41. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
Anyone who says they know Oscar Wilde's thought and has not read De Profundis is a liar; and if they have not read the unexpurgated version, they might be a liar still. Wilde's letter from prison reveals him to be a changed man, and (puns aside) is one of the most profound things I have ever read. Worth reading for those interested in prison literature, Wilde's life, or, you know, human nature.

42. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of those books every literary person has to read sometime. Unlike many lit students (see: Ethan's opinion of Tristram Shandy), I LOVED this book, in all its bizarre magic realist glory. Many of the images--the old man haunting his workshop, the sons with Ash Wednesday crosses burned permanently into their foreheads--have stayed with me to this day.

43. Cairo: a Graphic Novel, by G. Willow Wilson
A truly fascinating graphic novel. The title is the setting, modern-day Cairo, and the story revolves around a magic lamp and the Djinn found within it. In the meantime it becomes a meditation on the Islamic world and its relation to the West. I'm tempted to think--though I realize it's highly unlikely--that if more people were to read this there would be less conflict between Muslims and everyone else. Certainly it courageously says some things that need to be said. And, being Dark Horse, there are of course some big firearms as well.

44. Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, by Brian Talbot
This graphic novel is almost indescribable, and is further indescribably brilliant. Ostensibly a local history of the Sunderland region of England, it reaches across time, space, genre and form to encompass Shakespeare, the beginning of the universe, sculpture, art in general, theater, and numerous other topics, including lots and LOTS of Alice in Wonderland. A brilliant book, and truly like falling down the rabbit's hole in the best possible way.

45. Popgun: a Graphic Mix Tape, Volume One, edited by Mark Andrew Smith and Joe Keatinge
Really pretty much what the title says. The comic equivalent of a short story anthology, including the various advantages and drawbacks of an anthology. Particularly educational for me, not knowing THAT much about graphic novels, in that it shows off some of the many different forms and styles that graphic storytelling can take, as well as the many different types of stories that can be told. I grew bored and skipped some of the entries; I read some of them multiple times.

46. The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
47. The Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness
50. Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness
Collectively known as the Chaos Walking trilogy, probably the best Young Adult SF of the last 10 years. Maggie R. gets major props for recommending them. The set-up takes a cue from Firefly, in that we're on a planet that humans settled after using up earth, and after the ship landed had pretty much a Wild West level and style of technology to do the settling (though Firefly is far from the first SF story to use that idea). This planet has a disease, or a curse, or SOMETHING, which makes all the animals speak and which makes all the men broadcast their thoughts to everyone. That's right, everything the guys think is on public display. *shudder* Brilliant and gripping story, with main characters it's hard not to care for. One does kind of need a massage afterward.

48. Paper Towns, by John Green
John Green's cheapest novel, in that he essentially rewrote Looking for Alaska with somewhat different characters and a couple different themes and it STILL WORKS, and is STILL GRIPPING. Bastard.

49. Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto [ME 5]
I count this as Media Ecology, even though I don't think it intentionally is, because what Gatto does in this book is to look at the medium of the public school system, in order to try to determine what message it sends. That message is, according to Gatto, essentially postmodern despair. Public schools teach the disconnection of everything, and they teach reliance on outside "experts" who supposedly know us better than we know ourselves. An excellent book to read for anyone considering homeschooling, but more important, I think, for anyone who has or is considering sending their kids to public school--it serves as a warning about what they'll get out of it.

51. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies: Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Amy Schlitz
While it can stand on its own, this book is meant to be a play for grade/middle school aged children; it consists of a series of monologues by various characters from a typical medieval European village, ranging from the Lord's daughter to the son of the miller and the daughter of the sniggler. Rather brilliantly written, and enormous fun to assistant direct, but with content making it possibly not for every small child.

52. Stories, by Oscar Wilde
53. A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde
54. Lady Windermere's Fan, by Oscar Wilde
55. A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde
It is a very dangerous thing to let someone like me find the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde for very cheap. Honestly, out of these few, I recommend A House of Pomegranates, Wilde's book of fairy tales for children, the most highly, because I think it has the greatest literary quality and probably the greatest lasting importance.

56. The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshall McLuhan (ME 6)
A sort of "prequel" to Understanding Media (written beforehand), Gutenberg Galaxy is all about the effects--psychologically, philosophically, and in all other ways--of the dominance of the printed word, as it held sway essentially from the invention of the printing press through the invention of the telegraph, and held on to its prominence for a while after that.

57. Serenity: Those Left Behind, by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews
58. Serenity: Better Days, by Joss Whedon
Graphic novels that bridge the gap between the TV series Firefly and the movie Serenity. Filled with just as many fanboy moments of "Hey, remember when..." as the movie was.

59. Digital McLuhan: a Guide to Understanding the Information Millenium, by Paul Levinson [ME 7]
Levinson takes McLuhan and "updates" him for the digital age. While I appreciated a lot of Levinson's work, he doesn't particularly hold McLuhan's worldview to heart, but rather injects his own to a degree that I found annoying (possibly because I am much more inclined to agree with McLuhan's detached worldview than Levinson's evolutionarily progressive one). Further, I'm not sure it was necessary--McLuhan speaks for himself about the digital age, if one is listening at all.

60. Behemoth, by Scott Westerfeld [SP 4]
Sequel to Leviathan, and book 2 of Westerfeld's YA steampunk trilogy. A pleasing romp through Westerfeld's steampunk'd WWI era, with lots of mechanical marvels and airship action.

61. The Empire of Ice Cream, by Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford is one of those writers that all the other SF/Fantasy writers and nerds love, and very few other people seem to have heard of. This book of stupendously weird, though occasionally a touch too meta, novellas and short stories serves as evidence as to why. Good stuff.

62. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
The first of a series of books set in a very alternate 1985 (the Crimean War is still happening, dodos and other prehistoric beasts have been brought back through cloning, etc.). As all the others will be, this one is very literary; the plot centers around the attempted kidnapping of Jane Eyre from the pages of her book, with main character Thursday Next charged with rescuing her.

63. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, by Steven Millhauser
The title, as listed above, was the first thing that caught my eye, then the preface, which began, "I have read them all, those smug adult prefaces..." convinced me to read the thing. In case it wasn't clear, the conceit is that this is a biography of one of the great American writers--Edwin Mullhouse, who died at age 11--by his friend, who is 12 at the time of writing. If that interests you, then by all means read it.

64. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
My third Austen, and I was not sorry to have read it.

65. Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, by M.T. Anderson
I was thrilled to find that Anderson had added a couple titles to his Pals in Peril series, which reads like a mash-up of EVERY FORMULA GRADE-SCHOOL SERIES EVER. In this book we're much more on the Tom Swift, Jumanji, Indiana-Jones end of things, with our heroes heading off to the exotic realm of Delaware (full of jungles, hidden temples, and exotic monks) to stop a plot involving a cursed artifact.

66. National Monuments: Poems, by Heid Erdrich
68. The Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, by Eric Gansworth
74. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
76. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
The three collections of poems read for my Contemporary Native American Poetry class. Further, these three along with Susan Power are the authors on this list I have talked to personally (because my prof is well-connected).
Erdrich's poems, like her sister Louise's fiction, have this way of being very analytical and deeply emotionally resonant at the same time. Gansworth, meanwhile, has this way of stringing a sentence over several pages with a brilliant, punchy image in almost every line. Henry was probably my favorite; I did in fact read his book twice, and I still feel as though I missed a lot of stuff.
All three of these poets are very Native American, addressing concerns facing the tribes today and using images often drawn from reservation settings; but they are also very contemporary, stubbornly refusing to fit into any compartmentalized notion of what a Native American writer should be.

67. Dangerous Laughter, by Steven Millhauser
A collection of short stories. In his elegiac styles, his middle-class American settings, and his big conceptual ideas, Millhauser actually reminds me a lot of Jeffrey Ford. That, and they're both obsessed with Edison-like characters.

69. Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
A story about two young British boys who, at the time of the British government's switching from the pound to the euro, intercept a bag of pounds that is meant for the incinerator. Another YA book, but probably one of the more skillfully-written stories on this list.

70. Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Fascinating Victorian sensationalist fiction (along the lines of "It was a dark and stormy night"--and actually, Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote that line, was one of Braddon's mentors). Lady Audley, the darling pretty new wife of an old manorial lord, is not who she appears to be. Mwa. Ha. Ha.

71. Carmilla, by Joseph Le Fanu
A vampire novella, one of the inspirations for Stoker's Dracula. Carmilla is a female vampiress, insanely seductive, and the end of the book, while appearing to have done with her, leaves to my mind an open question as to whether Carmilla won.

72. The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan et al. [ME 8]
A small book, inventorying some effects of the causes outlined in Understanding Media. This one would actually, I think, serve as a good introduction to McLuhan's ideas, and would also engage the visually-oriented reader since it is chock full of images that interact with the text.

73. Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick
The new book by the author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret (on which the recent movie "Hugo" is based). It's in the same style as Hugo, in that it has text and charcoal drawings which together tell the story--basically, it's just on the novel's side of the prose/graphic novel divide. I truly appreciated this book, because it has to do with one of my favorite things: wonder cabinets. Also with museums, and the wonder cabinet's inspiration for museums. (The book's size is deceptive: it's about as thick as a brick, but due to all the pictures I read it in a couple hours without having to leave Barnes & Noble.)

75. Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
Epistolary fantasy novel that is mostly a piece of historical fiction, but not entirely. Set in England in 1849, the year after the Year of Revolutions. The characters tend to know what they are talking about better than the reader does, but everything becomes clear in time. Meanwhile, the characters themselves are fun, the plot is exciting, and the intrigue is fascinating.

77. King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
This was the second or third time I read this, and it didn't get any better. This time, though, I got to discuss it with all the other lit nerds in my Brit Lit class, and also do a bunch of research on it, and the research itself was actually quite fascinating. (Btw, you know The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Sean Connery's character, Allan Quartermain, is the main character of this book.)

78. Fugitive Anne, by Rosa Praed
Sort of like Mines, if one took out all the misogyny and made the main character a female rather than three males. She escapes into the Australian outback and, of course, finds the somewhat decadent descendants of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

79. The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch
80. The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power
Two of the books read for Contemporary Native American Fiction. Charging Elk is based on a true story, about a young Sioux man who travels to France in 1879 with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, is injured there, and thus gets left behind. He spends the next fifteen years making his way in France. It's a fascinating historical novel.
The Grass Dancer, meanwhile, is a brilliant magic realist novel set around a Sioux reservation, starting in the early 80's but traveling backward and forward through more than a hundred years of family history. It's a brilliant novel about brokenness and healing, actually one of my favorite books that I read all year.

81. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest [SP 5]
A fun steampunk ride through an alternate Seattle in an alternate 1879, it manages to include dirigibles, zombies, poison gas, gas masks, advanced weaponry, and a giant drill that can collapse buildings. Not the best-written piece of work, but it's printed in brown ink so that's forgivable.

82. The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford
I had read part of this for my Brit Lit class before the prof announced that class was cancelled that week and we didn't have to read it, but there was no way I was NOT finishing it. Hard to explain this book; it's somewhat like The Great Gatsby, but with better characters, a more complex plot, and deeper themes.

83. Underground Christmas, by John Hassler
Decent novella from a best-selling author. It had too much of the moralistic for my taste.

84. The Painted Drum, by Louise Erdrich
Out of books that have a non-human main character, this is probably one of the best. It's the story of an Ojibwe sacred drum, its theft and return to its rightful place. The human characters are drawn with great depth and skill, and the story is almost painfully subtle. But in a good way.

85. Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
I truly believe that this book literally made my writing better. It's the story of the two men who surveyed the Mason-Dixon line in pre-Revolutionary America. But it's so much more than that. Written in the style of an 18th-century novel, it features a hyper-intelligent mechanical duck, a talking dog, all the legends and conspiracy theories early European America has to offer, and I'm sure all kinds of subtext that I missed. The prose, meanwhile, roars along in a hilarious, brilliant, endearingly odd and incredibly eloquent manner. For a while after reading it, I was having a hard time NOT writing in that style. What I recommend: read the first sentence. If that makes you want to read the rest of the book, do so. If not, you have no soul.

86. The Early Church, by Henry Chadwick
A fascinating history of the church from Paul through John of Damascus. Gave me a much firmer grasp and wider framework for what I already knew of the early fathers, the early heresies, and the early tension between the church in the east and the west.

87. Steampunk!, ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant [SP 6]
The second steampunk anthology I read this year, this one aimed at the YA market. There was some brilliance here, and some boredom, though these stories hold up against almost any of the "adult" steampunk being released. Cory Doctorow's "Clockwork Fagin" is almost worth the price of admission alone (and, I have just discovered, is available for free on Amazon), while Kelly Link's "The Summer People" and MT Anderson's "The Oracle Engine" are both at least as good. Also includes two graphic stories, both very good.

88. The Sandman Papers, ed. by Joe Sanders
This book combines nerdiness with nerdiness to get SUPER-NERDINESS. It's a collection of academic papers written about Gaiman's Sandman series of graphic novels. For a fan of the series who is also interested in literary analysis (namely, me), this is enormous fun. The analyses run from the fascinating (such as the analysis of Orientalism in an episode of Sandman that takes place in old Baghdad) to the annoyingly unfair (the stilted, academically dishonest feminist take on "The Kindly Ones), but mostly consists of the former.

89. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller
By the end of this graphic novel, I could see why it shook the entire world of comics back when it was released. This very mature take on Batman--who up until this point had been little better than a kid's comic--set the stage for literary graphic works like Sandman, Watchmen, and so forth. But its importance aside, this book is brilliant just for being an amazingly-told story.

90. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
The second Thursday Next book, which is more complex and pleasing (especially for book nerds), but will also leave the reader frustratedly wanting the third.

91. Not Less Than Gods, by Kage Baker [SP 7]
An excellent novel for fans of Baker's Company series. It can stand alone, but knowledge of the universe in which it's placed gives it a lot more complexity. Sort of a steampunk romp, though Baker's world here is much bigger than that of just a Victorian secret society. Her series is set across all of history, and while this book does stay in the 1800s, echoes of that resonate through it.

92. Laws of Media, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan [ME 9]
The book Marshall McLuhan was working on when he died, taken up and finished by his son, Eric. The McLuhans' endeavor was to find what universal laws applied to all forms of media--that is, all forms of human endeavor. They found that there are four of them: each form of media expands some function of humans, obsolesces some previous function of other media, retrieves something that was previously obsolesced, and when pushed to the limits of its potential flips into something unexpected and opposite.

93. Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis
A brilliant comic (as in funny, not picture-riddled) novel by the author of True Grit. It starts in France in 1917, when a tramp gives a young American man stationed there a manuscript that supposedly holds the lost secrets of Atlantis. Take that set-up, and imagine Mark Twain writing it, to get a decent picture of what this novel is like.

94. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Interesting book, though one I'm not sure remains particularly contemporary. Either way, it tells a good story, though also the sort of story that features rape on page 1.

95. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov
The most brilliant book I will probably never recommend to anyone. A great indictment, not of a sexually exploitative society, but of the vampirism that allows such a society to operate.

96. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, by Stephen Millhauser
The extremely well-researched story of a young man who purportedly builds hotels, but in reality is building dreams. At some point his dreams get away from him. Yet another Victorian story, and a good one at that.

97. Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan
The first in a series of graphic novels about a young man who becomes the last man on earth. Literally. A virus kills off all the men in the world, except young Yorick and his male monkey. A fun opening, at least, without a ton of depth.

98. The Justification Reader, by Thomas Oden
Oden's thesis is that, far from the commonly-promoted idea that nobody between Paul and Luther properly understood salvation by grace alone through faith alone, there is a large consensus between the early church fathers and the justification teachings of the Reformation (Oden says, too, that a large amount of this overlaps with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox teachings, but he is much more familiar with the Protestants).

99. Extraordinary Engines, ed. by Nick Gevers
The THIRD steampunk anthology of the year. Once again a mixed bag, with some stories I couldn't bring myself to care about. The YA stories, at least, focused as YA tends to do on characters; the risk in "adult" SF in general is always that it will get too conceptual--doing interesting things with a world and people that no one cares about. The last four stories--Reed, Vandermeer, Lake and Jeffrey Ford--are probably the best.

100. Commentary on Galations, by Martin Luther
Not nearly finished with this one, but I thought I'd mention it. Luther is wonderful; we Lutherans should read him in primary sources far more than we do.

I thought about compiling several lists like I did the last couple years, but this year I am lazy. Thus I am picking the twelve books out of this list that I would recommend to pretty much anyone, of any age, ever, except that some of them have content probably best kept from children--so any adult, of any age, ever. Counting down in the style of a cheap late-night show:

Ethan's Top Twelve Books of 2011
12. Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
11. Steampunk!, ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant
10. The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power
9. Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
8. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
7. The Justification Reader, by Thomas Oden
6. Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
5. The Chaos Walking Trilogy, by Patrick Ness (see 46, 47 and 50)
4. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
3. Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan
2. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
1. Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Book List 2012

2012-01-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

Yep.

1. The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde
2. Ill-Met in Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber
3. Weep Not, Child, by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
4. The Collector of Treasures, by Bessie Head
5. Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid
6. Thackeray T. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities, ed. by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

What I Will Tell My Kids About Sex. Maybe.

2011-12-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

[Whether I will actually give my kids a long speech using words like "aggrandizement" and "compartmentalization" remains to be seen. Though it's likely. At any rate, it's an interesting thought experiment. Content warning, I guess, though the title is probably a tip-off.]

Kids, Western culture's tendency over the last few hundred years has been to attempt to subordinate all ways of being and becoming, all methods of understanding, and all wisdom under the rather limited worldview fostered by one of the several branches of knowledge--namely, science. While science has led to many great things, its aggrandizement above other ways of viewing the world leads inevitably to a magnification of its flaws, as well as its fine points.

One manifestation of a common scientific worldview is our tendency toward division, categorization, and compartmentalization. You will see this whenever you walk into a bookstore (if indeed there are bookstores by the time you're alive, theoretical kids): bookstores inherently ask the question, what category are you looking for? Children's? Adult? Teen? Science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy? Teen paranormal romance? Erotic science fiction poetry? Here at the end of 2011, I think some of this strict categorization is starting to break down: I am seeing the same book shelved in teen sections AND adult sections, and "Young Adult" books shelved in "Adult" categories. Writers, as they ought to do, are breaking free from the compartmentalizations imposed upon them.

If bookstores were run by people with an artistic sensibility, the books might be arranged intuitively, or all grouped together in a single running mass. The fact that these ideas seem hopelessly whimsical simply shows how tenacious the grip of a scientific worldview really is.

In light of this, it might seem dangerous, even blasphemous, to say: babies--people--do not come from DNA. Yes, I'm familiar with genetic research, and the fact that we have supposedly broken people down into the constituent categories that add up to all their traits and tendencies. But people are greater and more mysterious than any combination of genes could ever describe.

In fact, people come from mystery. People come from sex. That is, people come from the mysterious absolute union of a man with a woman. This is just as true of babies formed in a test tube as it is of babies formed the old-fashioned way. People are a mystery that will not be solved by categorization; sex is a mystery which cannot even begin to be clarified by compartmentalization.

Our culture has an extremely clever way of covering up this fact: by making it ubiquitous. Sex and physical beauty are everywhere; therefore they come to seem like not a big deal. Here's a fun game: every time you hear a euphemism for sex--sleep with, screw, fuck, bang, do, etc.--replace it with the grammatically appropriate version of "the mystical joining of one body to another." See what happens. Maybe nothing; maybe you'll want to cry.

Just because a mystery can be cheapened does not make it less a mystery. Just because people treat sex sort of like a handshake does not mean that it has any less significance. Just because people categorize sexual acts into "more serious" and "less serious" does not mean that they are not all united.

Kids, sex is a lot easier to get into than to get out of. We are physical people; once we begin to rely on something that is physical, we get very upset when it goes away. There is nothing necessarily wrong with holding hands, kissing, "making out." But always remember that it's foreplay; and always remember that if you start getting to know someone physically and ultimately are not with them, the pain is just as great as if it is only your heart that desires them. And if your heart desires them too, then the pain is doubled.

If you are sixteen and never been kissed, don't worry about it. If you are twenty-one and have never even held hands with anyone, don't worry about it. If you are thirty, or forty, and still a virgin, good for you. Any friends--of whatever kind--that are upset with you for this are not your friends.

That said, don't get hung up on purity either. Purity is certainly a wonderful thing; it is, of course, the absolute safest way. But we are human. We are weak. It takes an endless string of victories of self-control to maintain "purity," but it only takes one defeat to lose it. I'm not recommending you go out and have sex; if you've been paying attention, most of what I've said has been dead set against it until the exact right time. However, if you end up doing so--or if you decide not to kiss anyone until your wedding day, and end up accidentally kissing on the first date--or whatever--it in no way decreases your value as a person. Christ still died for you. I still love you. You could get an STD--four of them--and these things would not stop being true.

We can get to the mechanics in a minute; any questions on this, the important part?

Men and Women and Being Friends

2011-12-24T02:06:00.000-08:00

Apparently the "Christian Blogosphere," something with which I am only ever scare-quotably "current" by random chance, has been debating lately the topic of whether men and women can ever be "just friends." Here is one of the more balanced posts I've seen on the topic, which contains a link to another longer one by the same author.

Personally, I find it presumptuous and pretentious at best to even call this a debate. Why? Because in order to render this debate completely pointless, all that is needed is one single instance of a man and a woman being "just friends" and nothing more. If there is one single instance of this, anywhere, ever, then no matter how well-reasoned or smugly self-anecdotal an argument against the idea of men and women being "just friends," that argument has been disproven.

To be smugly self-anecdotal myself, I actually have rather a lot of experience here: I have more truly close friends who are women--that is, there are more women with whom I would entrust my life or my deepest secret--than men.

I would not want to belittle the complexity involved here; male-female "just friendships" tend to be more complicated than same-sex friendships (though I even have personal experience to contradict that generalization). Basically, in such a friendship, the possibility of romance has to be dealt with in one way or another. Sometimes one or the other or both friends have to go through a "crush" phase; sometimes re-evaluations need to be made--in some cases, frequently. Or, sometimes, both sides are uninterested in being anything more than friends from the beginning.

Whatever. The whole "debate" leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it's the kind of either-or thinking that a culture obsessed with polemics likes to jam down everyone's throats. It's the kind of binary thinking that makes for smug, self-assured, simplistic pronouncements whose effects are ultimately negative, in that they limit the range of options available in an already rather sticky territory. Sometimes when things are complicated, "either" and "or" are equally bad, and the best option lies somewhere not in the middle, but off to one side, above or below the stated options.

(By the way, as the post I linked above points out, this sort of "either/or" thinking is what's known as a False Dichotomy Fallacy--an argument that presents two options as if they are the only ones, when there are actually several more available.)

Ultimately, I think, it comes down to what world a person is willing to build. If a person decides to build a world where men and women have to be either More Than Friends or else ignore one another, then that is the world they are going to inhabit. However, if a person is willing to live in a world where it is perfectly possible to be friends with a member of the opposite sex, they will find that that world exists as well.

Escape

2011-12-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

The boy stood on the balcony of his parents’ high-rise apartment, looking down at the city glimmering, swimming below, a stew of golden light and red and green and blue neon, with occasional glimmers from afar of the torches of the revolutionaries, occasional gunshots as the revolution made its slow progress, not affecting the boy and his family and those like them, the rich, the privileged.

As the boy stood there on the balcony, he knew. The knowledge came with his parents’ voices swirling and boiling out from the apartment, with the rising cacophony as they shouted at each other, screamed at each other, accused each other as the world burned around them.

The boy spread his wings and jumped. He flapped his wings and he flew. His stomach churning, he flew out over the sea of the city, out past the gleaming spires pricking the sky like silver pins, then out over the seas of rolling wheat, dull gold under the white of the moon. He came to a barn, and he flew into it and sat alone, and suddenly he knew that he was all alone. But it was better than hearing his parents scream.

The Happiness Fiasco

2011-12-12T08:19:00.001-08:00

1. Skeletons

When [insert Idol here] happens, I will be happy.

As long as [insert Idol here] happens/fails to happen/continues to happen, I will be happy.

2. Some Possible Flesh

When I graduate, I will be happy.

When I get my bachelor's/masters/PhD, I will be happy.

When I get married, I will be happy.

If I can date [name], I will be happy.

As long as I marry [name], I will be happy.

If I always have friends around, I will be happy.

If I am always friends with [name(s)], I will be happy.

As long as I have a job that pays at a certain level, I will be happy.

When I am making enough to afford a certain level of luxury, I will be happy.

As long as I have a roof over my head and enough food to eat, I will be happy.

3. The Walking Dead

This is the kind of crap our culture foists on us. We are led, raised, and preached into the belief that there are certain things we must attain in order to attain happiness. This is preached at us by our books, our movies, our other entertainment, our pastors (even the good ones, sometimes), our presidents, our leaders, our role models. It is unavoidable. The pursuit of happy-ness is the medium in which our culture grows, and therefore it is inevitably the message of that culture.

4. The Problem Is

The problem is:

It's not true. None of it is true. If I cannot be happy with the sum total of all the gifts I have been given, then the sum total of all the gifts I have been given plus this one thing that I really really want is not going to give me happiness. Or, if it does, then it will be happiness founded on the most shifting of shifting sands.

5. The Religious Part

Up to now, what I've been saying is pretty ecumenical, I think. That is, it can be agreed with or disputed without getting into the thorny subject of religion. The rest of the parts are religious. So if that flips your lid, go away. OR, better yet, stick around and see how another side thinks.

Once I asked my brother if it ever seemed to him that if we could think the right thought, glean the right insight, we could see the bones of the world. Not really responding to that, he said the right insight is this:

Christus resurgens ex morituis iam non moritur mors illi ultra non dominabitur.

Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and dies no more; death shall have no more dominion over Him.

Everything else, from the clothes on our backs on up, is gravy.

6. The Valley

This kind of fiasco happens in a Christian setting, too, and sometimes it is all the more nefarious by being clothed in Christian language, as if not only is this the only way to attain happiness, it is the only way to attain salvation, or at least the only proper way to respond to salvation.

One that I see a lot due to my time of life is, “Once you are married you will attain happiness and be living a proper Christian life.” I have never had this preached at me; I have only had it assumed at me. Which, actually, is worse.

Others include:

Once you have joined a good Bible study, you will attain happiness and be living a proper Christian life.

Once you regularly tithe ten percent, you will be living a proper Christian life and attain happiness.

Once your church/youth group/Bible study swells in numbers, you have attained a sure sign of God's favor, and of course happiness. (An inexcusable personal aside: nothing will make me run from a church so quickly as when it is clear that its members and leaders are happy to see me not because I am a person, but because I am a number.)

Once you devote as many of your waking hours as you possibly can to things that are labeled “charities,” you will attain happiness and be walking correctly with Christ.

...all of the actions implied are perfectly honorable, and all are symptoms of a healthy faith. However, none of them, that is none of them, are requisite; none of them are required for salvation. The statements as they are written above are lies.

Look at “The Problem is.” I would be willing to bet every Christian knows someone, if only second or third hand, who has left the faith because something happened to them that they were somehow convinced a loving God would not let them go through. Often they lost the only person in the world who could make them happy. Is our faith as shallow as that?

7. Shall These Bones Live?

Our faith is ancient. We have roots that transcend this time, this culture, and the prejudices and blindness that come from any pervasive medium, any culture.

And what do we do with those roots? Our tendency is to ignore them, or to be embarrassed by them, apologize for them, and try to mold them to fit in with the message of our culture. Why? Every culture has its prejudices; every attempt at freedom is oppressive.

Our faith is an escape route. Embrace the ancient. The more it seems to offend our cultural sensibilities—whether that involves secular culture or church culture—the more likely it is giving us something that we need.

If Christ did not rise, I am of all men most miserable. You know the rest.

1,000,000

2011-11-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

Recently I calculated that since the age of sixteen I have written approximately 800,000 words of fiction. And this is just what, given access to both the internet and my personal desktop computer, I could come up with in under five minutes. It's a conservative estimate, too--pieces that were 21k and change I rounded down to 20k, etc. Also, this does not include whatever poetry, scriptwriting, blogging, or assigned school writing (except assignments for creative writing classes, which make up a miniscule percentage of that 800k) I have done in that time, all of which I have done a decent amount, nor does it include redraftings; that's 800,000 words of first draft alone.

Ray Bradbury, an author I tend to trust on the subject, says that an author has to write 1,000,000 words of fiction in order to know what he or she is doing. Various other writers I tend to trust have said similar things, or directly backed up Bradbury's statement. It's one of several reasons I try to write more or less constantly.

But, the closer I get to a million words, the less I feel I know what I'm doing. The closer I approach to that threshold, the more aware I am of my own shortcomings, the more I realize how pathetic my knowledge of techniques and of other authors is, the more I feel like I should stop writing before I get to a million words and know nothing.

Harmony

2011-11-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

It is always fascinating to realize that one has written in harmony, thematically or stylistically or both, with another author, especially when one was barely aware of that author's existence when one has done so. If this seems like a very specific generalization, that's because it is.

In 2009 I took Playwriting, a class I was let into by the grace of its teacher in spite of not having the prerequisite courses for it. It is still one of the classes in which I learned the most about writing in general.

As a final project for that class, we were required to write a 1-act play. My play was described as "very Ethan-ish," which I suppose is a compliment. It was about a mother and daughter, and the person who killed the mother when the daughter was an infant. At the height of the play, the daughter reads the one letter she got from her mother, a letter written by her mother while the daughter was an infant:

“My darling child,

"I write this as I watch you sleep peacefully, your little eyes closed, your little fists relaxed (for once). I am thinking of all the things I want for you, of all the things you will accomplish, and of how proud I will be of you no matter who you turn out to be. But, and maybe this is just the natural worry of a mother, most of my thoughts turn towards things I have experienced or seen or heard that I never wish you to experience. Things I hope I will be able to protect you from. Things I know I will not be able to protect you from—your first love, your first broken heart, your first betrayal.

“My mother, in her semi-mystical way, always used to say this to me: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ The dragons in life, I have found, are never what we expect them to be. They are never what we are prepared for. We must face them on the strength of our weakness, that weakness which is turned into perfect strength by our God.”

For one of my graduate classes I just finished reading The Painted Drum, a novel by Native American author Louise Erdrich. This is a novel that is about, among other things, mothers and daughters, and the love that is between them. It was published in 2005, four years before I wrote my play, but as implied, I had not heard of it, much less read it, until this year. A couple pages from the end of that novel we have this:

"There are other things that [my mother] could say to me, things I will never hear. I doubt that many mothers say these things to their daughters... They try to protect us, even when we're middle-aged. So I must supply the words for myself:

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could." (Erdrich, The Painted Drum, 274)

Obviously there are differences--her writing is good, mine is not; my writing has overtly religious content, hers does not; etc.--but they are similar enough to give me a slightly eerie feeling. I suppose some burgeoning writers like me would be annoyed, perhaps thinking that such similarity implied in them a lack of originality. However, I tend to view the finding of such things oddly flattering. I take it, perhaps incorrectly, to imply that I have hit on something universal, or at least somewhat universal. At the very least I find encouragement in the fact that my wild guess at what a universal theme might be in such a case is so similar to someone else's--someone with a LOT of credo, no less.

August Night

2011-11-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

If you wanted the gleaming golden leaves on the trees
to be your harlequin, your palanquin,
you needed only to have told me.
I would have sprung, on Mercury's slippers,
into the tops of the trees
where the real leaves lie, with their real slippers,
with their buds of exchange
and their slippers like old theaters
breathing the dust of soliloquies
past, breathing the dust of two
children who thought they were adults
and were performing for each other
in that old theater on an august night
and the soft melting of whose lips
illustrated, unconsciously, the soft melting
of the snow in April, illustrated
the way all things fade away in the end.

Sanderson

2011-11-13T21:10:00.001-08:00

Sigh. I like Brandon Sanderson. I do. I seriously intend to read the last two Mistborn books, AND the new Mistborn books, and the rest of the Alcatraz books, and probably his other books at some point too. But this...

...it has problems. In it, Sanderson talks about postmodernism in fantasy, declaring himself to be a postmodern fantasist and trying to define ways in which fantasy has been, and is, postmodern.

I only have the time and energy to point out a few of the problems at the moment. I guess my first major beef is that after stating, correctly, that fantasy was very quickly ready for a postmodern era, since it was subverting its own genre tropes almost from the beginning, Sanderson says this (in the context of his idea for Mistborn):

The thing that made me want to write it, originally, was the thought, “What if Rand lost the Last Battle? What if Frodo had failed to destroy the ring? What if the Dark Lord won?”

See. Frodo DID fail to destroy the Ring. Why is it that nobody, especially those writing criticism of Tolkien, seems to remember this? Frodo failed. The evil, the corruption, overcame him, and it is only through the influence of Gollum's greed that the ring is destroyed.

What I'm saying is, if this sort of thinking makes fantasy postmodern, then fantasy has been postmodern from its very beginning. Which essentially renders the appellation meaningless. (Actually, this sort of thing goes back farther than Tolkien. Lord Dunsany was subverting the tropes of fairy stories, and James Branch Cabell subverting the tropes of basically everything, decades before Tolkien published Lord of the Rings.)

Here's a post from Jeff VanderMeer where he says a lot of the things I thought about this post, and has much more credibility to do so. Vandermeer is one of a slew of fantasy writers I can think of off the top of my head who are actually postmodern; others include Michael Moorcock (Elric, among others); Neil Gaiman (though he claims, rather charmingly, not to know what it means to be a postmodern writer, his short stories and most of his novels are filled with postmodern tropes and techniques); China Mieville; Steven Erickson; R. Scott Bakker; Kelly Link; Jeffrey Ford; Jasper Fforde; and even George R.R. Martin. Not all of these people are writers of epic fantasy, though a lot of them are, but all of them are more postmodern than Sanderson probably ever will be. (And I do realize the ridiculousness of the phrase 'more postmodern,' since as VanderMeer points out, postmodernism is not a monolithic concept of the type that lends itself well to a scale or even a continuum.)

Of course, that leaves off the writer who might be the king of postmodern fantasy (a title I am guessing he would hate): M. John Harrison. By the end of his Viriconium books, Harrison has deconstructed his fantasy world right out of existence. That, ladies and gentlemen, is postmodernism (granted, one of many possible incarnations of postmodernism); that is deconstruction. Setting a world a thousand years after the hero failed is a neat concept, a springboard for a good story, but it does not make a book 'postmodern fantasy.' (Or if it does, then the appellation would have to be defined so generically as to be useless.)

But my major problem is the point Sanderson seems to be making about Mistborn. He seems to think that the series' success came from the fact that it was a supposed postmodern fantasy; that it was the specifically postmodern things he was doing with the book that made it good. Now, there's a certain truth to this, if we go with Sanderson's definitions of postmodernism: most of the people I know who fell in love with those books seem to have done so because the story was something they had not seen before, the world-building and concepts very new, very fresh. If Sanderson got there by consciously taking epic fantasy tropes and twisting them, then more power to him. But again, he's just following in a long line stretching from the people subverting William Morris in the late 19th Century up through the reactions to Tolkien up through now. If that technique is postmodern, once again, all of fantasy is postmodern, and it's not even worth having this discussion.

The thing is, people don't fall in love with a technique, or with a form, or with a movement, when they fall in love with a book. People want good writing, good characters, and a world that they can either get lost in or through which they can gain new insight into the world, or both. Mistborn has enough of those things that it sold well, and that people fell for it.

If you want real postmodern fantasy (which, sometimes, I do), read M. John Harrison. If you want a good story with solid characters and an intriguing world, read Brandon Sanderson. Don't worry about the deconstruction, unless that sort of thing floats your boat, in which case, let's have coffee.

broken places

2011-11-11T23:05:00.000-08:00

the clouds were split like the scar of a claw
raked by the moon’s silver venom.
you called me and said you wanted to walk
said you were depressed
and that you wanted to attack the night and talk
about anything that wasn’t being depressed.
since I was the one who had said you weren’t allowed
to walk alone at night you said I was the one
who had to walk alone with you.

that was years ago. the moon has waxed and waned,
becoming a great accusing face,
a silver spoon made to overflow with its own mercury,
melted down in the crucible of our hearts.

we walked a crooked shining silver sidewalk
past a slow stream that wound under a bridge
of bright yellow with streamers flying,
and both of us thought of being kids,
when bridges were castles in the sky
floating high above a night land whose green
and twinkling flow like a river
the color of a peacock’s tail
spelled redemption from all the bloody scrapes
and the throat-tearing shouting matches
that filled our days like the hot sun.

i told you a line i took from hemingway:
that the world breaks everybody
but afterward many are strong in the broken places.

i used to like that sort of thing,
big sweeping cynical speeches
from novelists who knew everything.
now they hurt too much, and the breath
to make the speech comes from a place in my heart
that is too broken for words.

we are broken places, you and I,
and how can we be strong
when we don’t believe in strength?

moonbeams shoot out the ends of your hair
and i hold the sun in the palm of my hands
but all i can remember are three red-gold leaves
that floated to the sidewalk that night,
the silent wind of whose passing
through the river of the moon’s face
silenced us as if forever.

The Weaver at the Loom

2011-11-07T16:58:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the Weaver at the Loom--a group I found by accident on Grooveshark--while not really paying attention to the lyrics, until the song "Without Fear of Their Return" kind of grabbed me by the lapels. Like any really great song, it's incomplete without the lyrics, but like any great lyrics, it can stand as a poem on its own:

A golden moment's come to pass,
And it made a swift goodbye.
Waved its hand from left to right,
Saying bye, farewell, goodnight.
But it left me brave and bold,
Like the knights of ages past,
Leaving courage,
Like the dawn leaves dew upon the grass.

As morning glories bloom,
So do some things in life this way:
Rising early but well past noon,
They weaken die and fade.
But there's many perspective buds
Still clinging to the vine,
Waiting in patience
To show their glory at later times.

Oh I got what I wanted.
And I'll be afraid no more,
And face all these toxic things,

Because I have finally found my bravery.

Also, their EP, "I Was Seeking and I Found," contains five songs: "Buck Up, They're Coming.", "You Can't Escape Them;", "You Can't Evade Them.", "But You Can Enjoy Life Before And After,", and "Without Fear of their Return."

Graceland--Excerpt 4

2011-11-03T14:23:00.001-07:00

Larry

She led us to the edge of a giant bowl in the woodlands, a sudden valley that dips away and down. The trees grew at angles that made some of them look like awnings, like giant fans, like someone had chucked a giant toothpick into the side of the hill.

“I used to come out here when I was a lot younger, when my parents and Cassie were shouting at each other,” Grace said. “It was the only really rebellious thing I did until… well, until everything I did was rebellious.”

There was a tree that was growing at an angle that was nearly horizontal. Into the trunk, in a rough sort of block letter carving, was the word GRACELAND. Grace pointed to it and grinned at us. “My mark,” she said.

She led us farther down the slope, all three of us leaning back to counter balance as we scuffed our shoes in the dirt side of the valley, until we got to a tree that had fallen. Judging from the size of the thing and the rot at the base of the trunk, it may have simply died of old age. Grace hopped up on the trunk and balanced her way out onto it. Mark stopped and watched her go; I hopped up after her and followed behind, ready to grab her if she fell. She turned and gave me a bit of a quizzical look and then yelled at Mark.

“You have to come up here, too.”

Mark sighed and hauled himself up onto the log, and came and stood by the two of us, a little close, as though he were trying to stand next to Grace through me. Grace pointed and we turned and looked off the broad side of the log down at the valley as the sun was striking it.

“I have this timed down to the second,” Grace said. I was about to mention how the valley did look really beautiful when the sun was at this exact angle, filtering through the trees and making the valley glow green and shining red off of some metal that must have been buried in the dirt, and white off a hundred sprays of mushrooms I suddenly realized were scattered throughout the valley floor. But the breath to form the words caught suddenly in my throat. The view wasn’t what she was talking about at all. The sunlight shone another scene, as if the light itself was creating a view, or projecting it. Suddenly the valley floor became mapped with roads of gleaming gold and the trees transmuted into houses, but houses like I had never seen before, great hills black as pitch with gold windows from which white light shone, and one great house like a miniature mountain which rose over all of them. There were people dressed in robes almost like kimonos, adorned with stars, robes of gold and white and red, and in the center of the town a great fountain sprayed water into the sky, and above the fountain rose a globe that pulsed with color, more color than I could comprehend, color that seemed to encompass all hues at once and leave me with the feeling that I was seeing more than I could possibly comprehend. I stared at the scene for what could not have been a minute but felt like hours, not sure where to look, wanting to see all of it and barely able to comprehend or contain any of it. Then, the sun passed behind a cloud, and it was gone.

Graceland--Excerpt 3

2011-11-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

[This one posted mainly because of its homage to 'Stina's NaNo. It follows immediately after the previous one.]

Mark

There's not a whole lot for Larry and me to report about that year either, and unlike certain people, I won't take 1200 words to say how little there is to talk about. Larry and I pretty much went on the way we always did. We would have known who Grace was, if you asked us, and we knew when she went off to boarding school because that's the kind of thing that home schoolers will talk about, but she was nobody special to us at that point.

That was the year we both got jobs; I started working the cash register at a gas station and Larry started working desk and shelving at the local library. He would show up to the gas station and sit on a stool behind the counter with me and grab cigarettes for people if I was too slow to find the pack they asked for. I would show up at the library and follow him around while he shelved and sometimes unshelve things just to make him mad, which didn't work because he said it just killed part of his shift while not really making things more complicated for him, shelving wise.

We went through several phases, that year: an alchemy phase, a time travel phase, an Atlantis phase, and several minor history phases (the Napoleonic Wars, the Hundred Years' War, the Great Depression, British Colonialism). We did some writing, too, mostly to entertain ourselves and each other. One series we wrote while some of our phases overlapped was about time traveling alchemists who sometimes lived in Ancient Atlantis. That was fun. Larry's library job allowed him to check out materials without getting overdue fines, which allowed us to keep books for the months on end that we required when obsessed with a particular subject.

One book Larry checked out, on supposed (or suspected) Atlantean architecture, showed a picture of a pyramid sunk under the ocean in the Bahamas, on the stone side of which was carved a circle with spiky points, that could have been a stylized sun, or moon, or star. I remember Larry staring at it for a while.

“I recognize that design,” he said.

I glanced at the picture. “Says it doesn't resemble any known design.”

“I can see that. But I still recognize it.”

“Did you dream it? Maybe the Atlanteans are trying to communicate with you.”

“Maybe,” said Larry, but he was still focused on the book.

Graceland--Excerpt 2

2011-11-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Grace

It's not really worth going over that next year in detail. The stuff from the mango incident to the conversation I just talked about took place between something like August and May. I had to wait until the following August to go off to boarding school. I would be sixteen in October. They enrolled me as a Sophomore. Over the summer they pretty much let me do whatever I want, as long as I didn't do it in front of them. I calmed down somewhat. I stopped smoking pot, and I never drank that much at a party (or anywhere else, for that matter) ever again. I did have a few drunken make out sessions, and the little bit of a romantic who survives somewhere inside me is kind of sad that I don't specifically remember my first kiss, and that even if I did it would be a memory of two drunk people sort of slobbering on each other.

The boarding school (I prefer not to remember its name) wasn't awful in the way that you hear about British boarding schools being awful. There was never any rape, as far as I know, and there was no physical abuse or anything like that. There was a lot of scheduling, though. That was one of the two things that put me on the phone with my parents one evening in April, just barely too dignified to be begging them to take me back.

Just to show you what I mean: we would get up to one of the Mentors banging on our dorm room door or ringing a bell down the hall at seven. We would have fifteen minutes, during which we must brush our teeth, wash our face, and get into our school uniforms. We would file down to the cafeteria, have half an hour precisely to eat breakfast, then go to school. And the end of four very precisely measured fifty five minute periods, with five minute breaks, we had precisely half an hour for lunch. Three more class periods later, we would go outside for some kind of physical activity; tennis, soccer, distance running, sprinting, and so forth. We would then have a forty five minute supper period, after which we had two hours of free time, followed by an hour of study hall, after which we had an hour to prepare for bed before lights out at eleven thirty.

I learned a lot, sure. But this was not the freedom I was looking for.

There was a group of us who got into the habit of skipping study hall and going out into the woods down by the pond and drinking Boone's Farm or smoking. I didn't like them, really, and I didn't (and don't) like Boone's Farm and I never could stand the taste or smell of cigarettes. But they were the only people who made any effort to be free, and at that point I only really had the ability to do what other people were doing.

One night we were there and the Dean of the school and a bunch of Mentors came and told us we were surrounded and shouldn't run. I didn't run, but I hid, under the trunk of a fallen, rotting tree. At least two mentors and the Dean (I recognized him by his black wing tips) walked right past me.

After that I was sort of a hero to the “rebellious” kids. I remembered how to flirt, suddenly, and on top of my cache as hero I used my flirting to make a few of the boys fall in love with me. That really wasn't nice, but I was so not used to being thought of as anything like hot that it went to my head.

Well, one of the boys tried to kill himself. I don't know if he had other problems (you don't really get to know people when you're flirting with them), but his roommate said it was my name all over his notebook before he passed on from falling off the chair. His roommate, who was not in love with me, hid the notebook before the authorities searched the room for evidence, and the kid who tried it, Blake, never mentioned my name at all.

Writing this brings back an urge I've had several times over the past three years: to track Blake down and apologize to him, unconditionally, to tell him I'm sorry and ask for his forgiveness, knowing I don't deserve it. Sometimes that urge is overpowering, but I can't get to the point of actually doing anything about it. I'm a coward.

Anyway, after that I got away from the rebellious kids, even though they kept wanting me to hang out with them. I started going to church a lot. But church was a prison too.

Let me put it this way: what I learned at church was, You need to be converted, say the Sinner's Prayer. Okay, you've said that? Good. Now you're saved. Now, if you pray hard enough, and believe hard enough, and have enough faith, then God will give you everything you ask for, and will make you into a wonderful person. Oh, you're not a wonderful person? You're not getting all the things you ask for? You haven't prayed hard enough, or believed hard enough. You don't have enough faith. Better recommit yourself, pray the Sinner's Prayer again, make sure you actually believe it and actually mean it. Now, pray for all that stuff again. Oh, it's still not working? You obviously don't have enough faith. Better recommit...

I'm a broken person, I wanted to cry. I can't bring myself to think about the things I want to do, the things I should do, let alone to do them. Please God (I would think), can't I just crawl into your lap and cry for a while?

I finally didn't want to deal with it any more, any of it. If I couldn't crawl into God's lap I would crawl into my basement room and cry there for three years or so. I called my parents and I cried, and I gave them apologies I'm still not sure I believed, and I asked them to take me back, to let me come home. They sounded like they truly wanted to; my mom cried too. I had a flash of insight, then. I told them I'd follow their rules, but I would need some freedom, I would need them to trust me somewhat and let me out of their sight and out of the house, sometimes on the spur of the moment, sometimes until late at night. There was a long pause, to the point that I was afraid they had hung up or the connection had gone dead, then Dad said, All right. I hung up with them and suddenly I was really happy. Maybe it wasn't a perfect place, maybe it wasn't a castle in the sky, but I was going Home.

Graceland--Excerpt 1

2011-11-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

[Nano writing at its best--unedited, just as it came out of the scary reaches of my skull. Enjoy.]

Grace

I first became interested in the two young men who will tell a lot of this story when I first saw them. Don't tell them that, though, it would go straight to their heads.

I was fourteen, I suppose, which seems like a really long time ago though it was only four years. Four years can change a person a lot, and it certainly changed me. Let's set the scene for my fourteen year self:

A tall girl, gangly, with long self conscious brown or strawberry blonde or dishwater blonde hair (nobody could ever agree on the color, and when they talked about it I always wished they would just shut up and leave me alone and let me read). I wore a floral print dress that hit me at mid calf, and looked just awkward but it was modest and that was the point of clothes, to be modest. My arms felt long and thin and naked, sticking out from the short sleeves of my dress, so I crossed them in front of my chest.

Imagine this person standing in the middle of a crowd of similarly clad people, home schoolers all of us except the Catholic priest who didn't have kids, on the sidewalk right next to the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood. We were staging a prayer vigil protest, where we showed up and stood just off the Planned Parenthood property lines and held signs silently and prayed in silence. In sharp contrast to this were the people who drove by on the busy street behind us. Some of them honked and some of them screamed things at us (this was the first time I realized what the word was that people meant when they talked about the “f” word). I, the shy little home schooled girl, was far too freaked out to even think of words to pray. I stood, arms crossed, mouth probably a little open, eyes probably a little bugged out, a hot chill of mortification shooting through me every time a car went past and honked or yelled or anyone looked at us or I thought anyone was looking at us or I even thought about anyone looking at us, at me.

We were a big crowd, and being from a smallish town in the upper midwest, we were mostly white. I say this so that when I mention that there was one black boy in the crowd, hopefully it will seem less... I don't know, racist or whatever. I don't mean to be; it's just that, in a place like that, he was noticeable. His parents were the O'Connors, who couldn't have kids so they adopted five of them. The other four were Russian or Ukrainian; Larry was from Uganda. He didn't seem that different, other than his skin, and no one really cared. He was just Larry.

I didn't know him very well. He went to one of the other Baptist churches in town, and at home schooler events he would hang out with the kids from that church, who seemed a lot more socially well adjusted than the kids from my church, but that was only because they dressed in contemporary clothes and went to the mall and played video games and things like that. We might have been less entertaining, but we were more spiritually mature than they were. At least, that was the only way I knew how to think.

Larry's friend Mark came up the sidewalk, carrying his backpack. Larry was wearing a yellow button-up shirt, untucked, and blue jeans, with a pair of white sneakers. He had a backpack at his feet, though (as I would come to know later) it was unlike any backpack that someone going to a public school would carry: the only book in it was something he was reading for fun.

From the other side of Planned Parenthood came Larry's friend Mark, who seemed in sharp contrast to the adults and kids in the crowd here. We were a lot of studious faces, hands lifted, lips moving silently or half vocally, eyes closed or cast skyward in presumed prayer or contemplation. The Catholic family all had rosaries out, and were praying through their beads. I didn't understand it, but watching them filled me with a sort of awe.

Mark, meanwhile, was loping along, one arm swinging wide, the other occupied eating a mango like it was an apple. He wore a big grin, which got bigger when Larry waved at him. Mark was wearing a white button-up shirt, black jeans, a red tie and a black vest, and if it hadn't been for the vest and the cheap costume shop bowler hat (and also the wide grin on his face), he might have looked like a junior version of our pastor. He walked up to Larry, and the two clapped each other on the back and Larry said something that made Mark guffaw rather more loudly than I thought appropriate. Then I heard Mark ask:

“Do you have any floss on you? Mangoes are delicious but they get stuck in your teeth something awful.”

“They do, man, it's true,” Larry said. I turned and watched as he rummaged in his backpack, wondering how Mark could have the audacity to assume Larry had something as random as floss on him.

“Here you go,” Larry said, handing Mark a dentist's waiting room sort of floss container. “You'll have to take off the needle first. Careful.”

Mark took the needle and thread, handed his half eaten mango to Larry, unthreaded the needle from the floss, and proceeded to floss his teeth. I turned away in disgust, thinking a lot of uncharitable things about the two boys and their appropriateness, propriety, and... stuff like that. I overheard Mrs. O'Connor berate Mark for dropping floss on the ground. Mark made Larry guffaw at something and while Larry was laughing a woman came out of the Planned Parenthood. Her face was red and she looked across the parking lot at us and she marched over and stood about twenty feet in front of us. I had never seen someone look so mad before, never seen a brow so furrowed or a glare so fierce.

“You people can just go home!” she yelled, her voice high and shrill like when my younger brother dragged his fork across the chalkboard just to watch us girls cringe a lot. “Get out of here! What women do with their own bodies is their own business! What do you care? You all can just go to hell!”

Nobody responded to her. We had been told what to do if something like this happened. It was, basically, not to respond. The woman stood there another minute and her eyes got even darker and her forehead developed even more wrinkles, something I would have thought was impossible. She screamed at us even more loudly.

“Guess what? I'm about to have an abortion! I'm about to go in there, and set up an appointment to commit murder, according to you people! How do you like that? I'm going to have an abortion and there's nothing you can do about it, you bunch of meddling, pious, self-righteous, idiotic, control freaks!”

During this tirade I heard Larry mutter, “Dude, give me your knife.” Larry pushed past me and I saw that he had cut a couple slices of mango in his hand. He went to the front of the crowd and crossed the gulf toward the lady while she was still screaming. He stood at arm's length from her and held out a slice of mango. She glared at him and finally asked, “What the hell is this?”

“It's a mango,” Larry said.

“Is this supposed to be symbolic?” the lady asked, uncertainty making the stridency of her voice decrease.

“No,” said Larry. “It's supposed to be a mango. You looked like you might be hungry. Have you ever had one? You should try it, they're delicious.”

The lady stared at him another moment, completely at a loss. Larry continued to hold out the mango, arm extended, smiling at her. Finally she took the mango from him, took the other piece he offered her, turned around, and marched back into the clinic, a shard of sunlight making me wince as the glass door swung shut behind her. Larry turned back around and resumed his place by Mark's side. From the way he walked, he might have thought that what had just occurred was the most normal thing in the world.

Some people looked around at him (including me, though I did it surreptitiously), but he seemed to only be responding to Mark and all Mark did was give him a look.

“What?” Larry said defensively. “She looked hungry.”

Real Life

2011-10-25T15:30:00.001-07:00

Recently I asked myself, Self, why do we so often put quotation marks around the phrase "real life"? And my Self returned an interesting answer.

When we, who have grown up in this country, in this culture, use the phrase "real life," we are actually talking about a fiction.

When we use the phrase "real life," we mean a world in which everything makes sense. A world in which people are consistent. A world in which people act predictably, and in which thoughts and feelings can be understood and figured out logically.

We we say "real life" we mean a world in which everyone's goal is to get as much education as they can handle, get a job that pays as much as possible, or is as prestigious as possible, or preferably both, find a significant other, and settle down to a life of consuming as many of the pleasurable things produced by multinational corporations as our consumer culture can shovel into us.

When we say "real life" we mean a world in which science can explain everything. A world in which God doesn't make sense, but faith in Him is permissible as one of the beautiful, and one of the few acceptable, leaps of non-reason.

When we say "real life" we mean a world in which spiritual reality is no more than a personal construction, a fiction we can take or leave.

When we say "real life" we mean a world in which miracles do not occur.

When we say "real life" we mean a world in which true love does not exist.

When we say "real life" we mean a world without wonder, or mystery, or grace, except what we can create for ourselves.

In the end, anyone living in a world where any of these things are true is living in a world that is just as much a fiction as any Narnia, Naboo or Middle-Earth that ever graced the screen or page.

Truth

2011-10-02T20:53:00.000-07:00

Respectfully dedicated to Marshall McLuhan and Pontius Pilate

In the end, the world is not a book.
The stars cast their finite light
but they refuse to tell me answers.
The truth is an obsidian statue
with a hooked nose
and a large frown,
staring hawklike at a world
that refuses to acknowledge it.

Look, books are old news,
which is sad news
to those of us born from them.
But because God gives his message
in a book, should we snap up
a book's prejudices?
No.

The truth is not a black-and-white
film, it is not either-or,
it is not a boundary line.
If truth is that, it is worthless.

Truth is an obsidian statue with many sides,
all of them absolute.

Truth is an awning,
a shelter into which the smell of the hot dog cart
wafts, off of which acid rain
cascades, leaving us unharmed.

Truth is a flashlight,
so why do we shine it in our own eyes?
Thus we are only blinded,

and our either-oring
makes us into prostitutes
who can see only original sin,
not salvation.

Truth is not a page in a book,
but the light that comes from reading
shines within us
(not by our doing)
shines through us
to illuminate the dark.

Truth is not the arbitrary lines
we draw in the sand
because we think we have the basis
to follow a page of print
containing it to the only possible conclusion.
With rare exception,
those who reach the only possible conclusion
are to be feared.

Truth is not the pages of the book
we have written about the world.

Truth is the sun, and its illumination
of the hills and vales, its light and its dark.
Truth is the noise a sunbeam makes as it falls to earth.

Thought of the Day

2011-09-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

Evangelicals and others can get excited over their "Yes, Lord" and "This is the air I breathe." It's a free country. But personally, having been through much of that sort of thing, I don't think it was until I was singing "Chief of Sinners Though I Be" and unexpectedly found tears rolling down my cheeks, or until I found myself walking back from Communion suddenly struck by the knowledge that, no matter how I felt, the eight or so sins that had been deeply bothering me were wiped clean away, that I experienced anything like true emotion in worship.

Poetry Blog

2011-09-10T17:22:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, I thought, "I should write a poem every day this month."

A few seconds after that, I thought, "Nah."

However, as it happens, I have written a poem every day since then. So apparently it's been three days. At any rate, if I keep this up, I will have 23 poems by the end of the month. And I would want somewhere to go with them besides DA. However, while I occasionally post poetry on this blog, and while it seems to be EVERY OTHER POST these days, I feel as though those who originally signed up for this blog did not sign up for a poetry blog, and whether there's any truth to that or not it's MY BLOG and I'll POST WHATEVER I DARNED WELL PLEASE and, furthermore, I DO NOT DARNED WELL PLEASE to post poems EVERY SINGLE DAY for most of a month.

So in short, I have done something I probably should have done a long time ago, and created a separate poetry blog, on which I shall dump all of my poems. It is here:

www.themuseandfriends.blogspot.com

I will link it to facebook, so those of you who generally read me there will probably not notice much of a difference.

Drought

2011-09-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

This has been a pathetic year for blogging. Looking at my numbers, my previous low for posts was 23, way back in the ancient days of 2007; this year I am at 16 (17 with this post), 3/4ths of the way through the year, and I'm fairly sure a deplorable amount of those have been poetry (which somehow I count less even though I probably write more of it these days than of anything really blog-gish).

That's all. Just wanted to say something about it, even while I continue the trend.

Ah, E-Readers

2011-09-05T21:46:00.000-07:00

Here we have yet another perspective on the e-reader. This one comes from one of my favorite theoretical perspectives, that of Media Ecology. The thing I love about these guys is that they tend to be able to look at technology with a cool head, noting that any given technology is not necessarily good or evil (or if it is, it is not so for the simple-minded moralistic reasons that fundamentalists of various stripes would have us believe), but it will change things. Because of Media Ecology, now every time I hear someone praising some new form of technology and all the wonders it will bring, I can hear almost as audibly the shadow side of any given list of praises: the trade-offs, the obsolescence, which any widespread change in technology inevitably brings.

Now, every time an article like this appears, there are those--some of whom are indeed media ecologists--who in their technophility will in shrill tones denounce the complainer, and will wonder to the stars why people are so ignorant that they can't just GET ON THE BLOODY BANDWAGON and see, finally see, that we don't lose anything in the switch to digital, or anything we do lose can be made up for by a simple software upgrade, and even if we DO lose some things it's a necessary trade-off in the inevitable march of Progress, and those who wail and gnash their teeth will be seen by history as minor, unimportant breakwaters in the inevitable tide of Evolution. Thus, Mr. Grossman entirely misses the point that it is incredibly easy to do a word-search on a reading tablet, that we can (or will be able to) use all kinds of electronic bookmarks, and that anything we lose from the book can be replicated just as handily on a compact, eco-friendly screen.

For me, until the day when I can leave a tablet behind on a train (or, you know, some form of transportation that won't soon be as obsolete as books) and replace it for a fiftieth or less of what I make in a week; until the day when I trust electronic media enough to believe that things I have paid for won't evaporate at the whim of some corporate bureaucrat, and believe that somebody's idea of political correctness or making me a good citizen will not arbitrarily change certain words or phrases or entire books in my electronic library; until I see it proven that a power outage will not evaporate my entire electronic library; until I decide that it will be healthy for my ENTIRE life to consist of interfacing with screens (as opposed to just the majority of it)--for all this read: never--books will continue to be my friend and boon companion, and I will continue to sound my halcyon cries in their defense by use of this most electric form of media.

I shall diminish, and fade into the West...

Holy Crap Holy Crap Holy Crap

2011-08-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a college course for the first time ever 2 hours from now.

Holy crap.

That is all.

The Caravan of Those Who Have Turned Their Face to the Sun

2011-07-19T16:47:00.001-07:00

I walk in the shadows, dear,
and I wear the mask we all wear:
a mask made of shadow and of starlight
a mask that hides my face
by showing it

covered in colors,
gold and red and black,
showing a mask
that transmutes the things of this world
into something we can comprehend,
and comprehending,
something we can despise.
And if we have faces, dear, they are faces so colorful,

with hues of the soul's spring and the spirit's fall,
that only a monster with teeth of crystal rose,
only a professor with terrible tweed skin,

only a warrior with sand for soul
could ever hope
to know us,

could ever hope to comprehend the weakness
that keeps us from turning our faces to the sun.

We walk in shadows, dear,
and when we look each other in the face

we cringe and turn away,

hoping to preserve some part of that old world,
the one where the sun through crystal leaves transmuted everything into sea foam, a green
and waving sea that we swam
one night
when your shining body fell into my embrace

one night when above us whispered the white wings
of one whose whispers saved us.

Take my hand, dear, and we'll
walk together in the shadows and we'll look
each other, blindly,
in the eye, until one day we do not sleep but are all changed,
until we
can look each other
in the eyes,
and join the caravan of those who have turned their faces to the sun.

On Politics

2011-07-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Christian Conservatives: Trying to legislate things like a specific stance on marriage, homosexuality, or indeed sexuality in general is like throwing sharp darts at a child with acne in the hope that his zits will pop. It might be effective, but you won't like the peripheral effects. There are many other ways to fight this battle, and I would be willing to bet you a million literal dollars that all of them are more effective than cramming one more piece of legislation or one more sophistic legal definition down everyone's throats.

More political thoughts are fomenting, but I will only write them down if, as the narrator says in Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, "My ideas either clarify or depart altogether."

4 Free Verse Riffs From a Sleepless Night in July

2011-07-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Riff 1-- 1:00 AM

How far away is Heaven
and what flowers will bloom there?
As you sit upon your chair
and blink stars pinwheel overheard
spinning dancing raven's claws
staring like eyes of the dead

as you sit upon your chair

what eyes, what circles

what starlight what gaslight

will we breathe there,

will the flickering flame

the candle's wick

become one flickering flame all across the sky?

Will the sun, no bigger than a basketball,

sputter and flutter in your hand, as the eyes of the dead stars look on,

jealous,

singing in their fear,

until one day, bathed in snow,

they blink and awaken,

wrapped in golden wings

with lips turned black as pitch

and burning with a coal,

staring, swaring, swaying,

round the blazing trees

as the midnight smell was

in our hair and the midnight

taste upon our skin?

Riff 2--1:35 AM

I take my baptisms when I can:

the cool of a morning shower

washing away all the sins of the night

(the minotaur with three rose

of crystal teeth

devouring the wheat I planted

while, tied to a stake,

I could do nothing),

the soft sister's tears of a spring rain,

washing March's dirty snows

and crying down the whiskered

face of the hare, my friend,

who twitches and sniffs

and pushes away the earth

seeking cover while I lay down

in the grass, spread my arms,

and the rain covers me with her tears

the grass rising up, a

straining stretch staring wide-eyed

tower of Babel, embracing me,

and

the place where the earth

rests her head on her arm,

the scrying pool

where her tears form a well

looking out at the future

(I dislike what I see),

taking my baptism

in the warm inviting pleasance

of a friend's smile,

a promise of springs swelling

from the earth, a swelling I fear

irrationally

will dry up,

as I take my baptism

in the aching beauty of the night air,

in the dreaming embrace of night wind,

the wings of the night

teasing me,promising me

far things--

bedouin fires

czars' spires

golden sails

ruby lips

a thousand roses,

all aflame--

but always I timble from

the silver shimmer of a flying carpet

onto the back of my bed,

a hundred-headed glass-toothed minotaur

looking at me with judgement,

until I flick my wryst

and he is gone.

Riff 3--2:33 AM

A late december night

snow sprinkling

dandruff from God's tonails

and it should cry out as it hits the ground

and I should smile

but neither of us do.

How can snow

make a song

in the night air?

How can I smile

when my dreams don't care?

I made a snow-angel today--

see?

There's a man with wings

pressed into the lawn

and on his wings

smeared dirt and blood

a thousand things

pressed

into the green slime

of my

brain

your smile white-toothed

your flickering

eyelashes

like angel's wings--

see?

Riff 4--2:40 AM

Grass scratches at my calves

tall, itching, as gnats

fly into my eyes,

my mouth,

droplets squishing full of life

snuffed out

in the ocean at the back of my throat

cicadas shreik in fear

I am

the sheikh,

the shreik,

in your eye, your head

and did you know your cat

clawed me? Here, on my hand, and if you'd

kiss it,

but you're off, grass crunching beneath your feet,

skirt flying up around your pale knees,

grinning at me,

laughing,

rolling your eyes because

my face has gone dark and solemn,

like the thunderhead charging behind you across the sea of the sky.

Overheard Tonight

2011-06-02T22:14:00.001-07:00

At the West Side Target store, a manager talking on the phone:

"What's that, sir? You're caught... you're stuck... you've got your head caught in a vacuum cleaner? What, it's not your head, it's technically your turban? And why are you calling Target about this? Sir, shouldn't you be calling 911? No, sir, I realize you called Target. But what I'm saying is, if you've got your head stuck in a vacuum cleaner, shouldn't you call 911? What? You're stuck in your dirty American hotel? What hotel are you staying in, sir? A Super 8? No, sir, I'm fairly sure even a Super 8 would have vacuum cleaners... Sir, I'm having a hard time believing your story...

Best Man Speech

2011-06-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

[What follows is a transcript of the speech I gave on May 28, 2011, at the wedding reception of Aaron and Heidi Nemoyer. It is a transcript because, while I have a first draft of it typed out somewhere, I edited that first draft in my head over the couple weeks between writing it and giving the speech, and the version that I gave was a generally better one but one which exists nowhere but in the unit of time, now past, during which I gave it. Thus, this is written from memory, and while it may have different wording than the speech I actually gave, the spirit and the idea of it are the same. Also, at one point I (completely inadvertently, I swear) started to call Aaron the bride, but I can't remember where that was.]

ETHAN: To give you all a taste of my history with weddings, when I was six and my brother was three or so--my brother is over there, the taller, skinnier, uglier version of me--we were at the wedding of some old friends of our parents. Both our parents were in the wedding, so we were in the charge of some friends of theirs. Just as they got to the exchange of vows, I turned to my brother and said very loudly, "This is the part I hate." My brother loudly agreed, and we made it onto the wedding tape. I feel I have matured since then.

As best man, I am here to support the groom. And as such, I am supposed to say things like, that Aaron is the handsomest groom I ever saw, and I am terribly happy for him, and I hope his marriage is long and joyful and happy.

Well, I'm afraid I can't. The reason I can't is that I have been Aaron's roommate for the last three years, and as such, have been keeping a list of his faults. Here is an abridged list of Aaron's faults:

He snores.
That is, when he sleeps at all, which is seldom.
When he does sleep, he will carry on conversations with you as if he were awake.
He also hogged all the covers, which was quite a feat since we slept in bunk beds in separate bunks.
He killed my pen. I had named my pen Boswell, and Aaron killed him, and then drew a sarcastic grave marker for him on a cardboard box.
Aaron then took a bite out of the cardboard box.
I once saw Aaron eat a leaf.
Also, he ate all the muffins.

Now, can we allow someone like this to get away with marrying someone as lovely and wonderful as Heidi? I think not. What I'm saying is this: Heidi, run away with me. It's not too late. There's a taxi waiting outside, I've booked a flight to the Bahamas, we can go into witness protection. This can work.

KAREN: I object!

ETHAN: Oh dear, my girlfriend objects. We'll have to deal with that later.

Before Heidi and I get out of here, you all may want to hear a real best man speech. Like I said, I can't give one, but if I did, it would sound something like this.

In one of my favorite short stories, "Babette's Feast," a character makes the sort of speech I think is appropriate at almost any time, and especially so at a wedding. He starts off quoting the Psalms.

Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.

Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace plays no favorites and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.

Aaron and Heidi, if there is one thing I have learned in my admittedly young life, it is that there is grace in everything, whether you know it or feel it or not. Throughout your marriage, God will pour out his grace on you, whether you think he is or not.

[PAUSE]

It's a pity I can't make that speech, really.

FIN.

Things To Do

2011-04-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

...If You're in a Celtic Song

1. DO NOT let your lover get anywhere near the ocean.
2. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, go anywhere or do anything on All Hallow's Eve.
3. If you are in love, do not get anywhere near weapons, wars, or wild animals.
4. If it speaks English, run away.
5. If you have done anything like plighted your troth with your true love, it's probably best to hide under a rock or in a cave for at least 7 years.
6. Ships. Just burn 'em all.
7. If you are in love with someone, but there's some sort of cultural
taboo or political reason why it might not be wise for the two of you
to be together... go spend some time with them anyway; one of you is
about to die, regardless.
8. If funny things are happening at your expense, for the love of
everything, stay sober. Drinking will only make things more hilarious.
9. If children are involved in any way, you're going to need some kleenex.
10. If you're a lass and have overly protective male family members, have your ticket, yourself, and your love on board a something headed for somewhere else far, far, away before you let the relatives know about your relationship. Best to send the announcement by a letter without return address after the nuptials and the first few children, if at all.
11. If it's named Charlie and wears blue, invite it, feed it, and fight for it, and (lasses) marry no man who won't.
12. If you're a lady, remember that the lads are more fragile than they will be in a few hundred years. If you refuse them, they'll simply lay down and die.
13. Be sad, be very, very sad.... Then either die dramatically or make the best of it and move on.
14. If you've got to kill, it's got to be complicated and unexpected. The details of the dispatching must take up at least a whole verse.
15. Be beautiful - all the ladies who make it into the songs are. Probably that forced anorexia; appreciate the hunger.
16. Don't use metaphors involving wilds horses. They always come back to bite you. (The metaphors, that is, not the horses.)
17. If you have anything to live for AT ALL, do not get involved in revolutions. Conversely, if you have nothing left to live for, revolutions should probably be your first destination.
18. If you're a woman, always be prepared to waste away in the woods. All the best tragic heroines do it.
19. If you're a man, DO NOT get into a fight with ANYTHING EVER, no matter how sure you are that you can win.
20. If there's only one way in which you can die, DON'T make it mad.

[Credits: 7-9, Nat; 10-15, TruthQuestioner; 20, Mental Llama; the rest, me. This list is under construction; additions are welcome.]

Eschatology III

2011-03-12T22:10:00.000-08:00

While these posts are sort of drifting from actually having anything to do with the study of the end times--the original only sort of had to do with it anyway--they are a progression of thought and as such it seems only fair to continue the progression of name.

The poem contained in the last post was not called "Eschatology II." It was called "For A Friend," as it was a vent to feelings inspired both by my own personal troubled thoughts and those of a good friend. The reason I chose that post title is that the thought inspiring the conclusion that poem reached was directly related to the thoughts in the post titled "Eschatology."

Now, I do not want to assign a direct meaning to my own work, or imply that this is the only thing that poem is about. It is about a lot of things, and if I expounded on all of them this post would become massive.

The original thought was, Why do poetic sentiments about the end of all things, and the fulfillment of all hope, and the healing of all hurt, and the wiping away of every tear, only seem to ache, to instill almost a hurt, and to make one (make me, at least) want to cry? Why does such comfort, even when believed with a whole heart, with an unshakable faith, make one feel like weeping all the harder? The simple answer is that we live in a fallen world, a world where all such hope reaches for a better world, a world we can only dream of, can only imagine in our highest thoughts and most mystical fairy tales. But something more occurred to me, one morning while getting ready for class.

It struck me that the reason people cry is not that they are in despair. When one despairs, tears dry up, for things are not even worth crying over anymore. Tears of sadness are the product of dashed hopes. They are the dust of dead dreams, or the funeral libation for dying ones. We cry when someone close to us dies, not because they are gone, but because somewhere deep inside we wish they could be with us again, and in wishing, we hope. We cry when love hurts not because we are mourning the end of something or the impossibility of something, but because we are hoping for happiness, hoping for a love that will not break our hearts, but dismiss our fears. The sadness we feel in these situations is fully real, but we would not bother to feel sadness if there were not happiness to be hoped for. Even sadness, perhaps, is a form of hope.

What is Revelation 21 talking about, if not the ultimate fulfillment of faith? He will wipe every tear from their eye, because hope is no longer needed, for it has been fulfilled.

And so, with this on my mind, a somewhat traumatic day passed--filled with those little traumas that are really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but which hurt no less for that--and I felt I needed to sing, a song of light in the darkness. Very nearly four years ago now, I wrote a snippet of prose which never actually found its way into a story, perhaps because, despite appearances, it is complete by itself. I think of it, periodically, and now it seems to me that perhaps the thoughts contained in these three "Eschatology" posts are not that new after all, but are things I've thought before and temporarily forgotten.

"We are children of light," said the old man. "And as such, the darkness clusters all around us. We speak of high-minded things, of good versus evil, of slaying dragons within and without. But we forget, sometimes, that our doppelgangers do exist; we forget that there is truly evil in the world. And when it comes roaring out of the shadows, fangs bared, and tears us and scars us with unspeakable horror, sometimes we lose sight of the good that, in the end, is really the victor.

"And sometimes, lost in Misery, in the dark wood of Despair, there is nothing to do but sing, a song of light in the darkness, and wait for others to answer our call. And soon that song will be ended, and its yearning will be fulfilled."

Eschatology II

2011-02-15T00:15:00.000-08:00

For now you are sad,
My dear one, my friend,
For all the ruins we traipsed through,
All the daylight of my nighttime beauties,
All the larklight of your laughter
And the hedonism
Of our carefree days, our sad days,
Our days when the smell of spring grass
Could take us away to far-off kingdoms,
Our days when the inviting finger of the sun
Invited us in our infancy,
Our dependency,
Our total annihilation of ourselves,
To take the road to the highlands
Where glowed the green gloaming of Ireland,
Where her fair face on the faery mound
Was but the dust of our dreams, our uncertainties,
Our groaning.

And now, when the deep reaches of our souls are silenced,
Now, when the green waves of the sea
Wash away the arbor of ourselves,
Now we wish we had that and yet we do not
Yet we do not.
We have each other,
But maybe that is not enough for either of us;
For we dream of something more,
A dream of seabirds flying across the far reaches
Of the ocean's kingdom
Flying
On unbroken wings,
Wings we can no longer imagine
And can only occasionally feel,
Wings that stretch behind us
Like the seabird's briny feet,
Wings that take us deep into the ocean of ourselves
Where we lose us,
Lose each other,
Lose all the things we once held dear:
All the things we see,
An ocean's worth of grace, it seems,
Disappearing into the brine, into the foam,
Into a wine-dark sea that no Aeneas could ever sail,
All of our days running in the woods
Where the green leaf-dapple
Made our skins into something other,
Made us into dragons and fae-folk,
Made us monsters in the form of ourselves;
All our days of breathing fire
And thinking the end would never come
And that we were free
Free forever
All of those days would end.

And now we feel that it is that sea,
That rock,
Scylla's bite and the whirling of Charybdis
That eats up our souls
And spits us out in a mature and pastoral form
That we hate,
That we run from,
That we swim away from
Over that same wine-dark sea
Where the gulls cry but where their white feathers
Turn to ice,
Black ice,
Ice laced with feathers turned black from the white-hot core
Of an earth that was never our mother,
Or if it was, then one that spat us out of the womb
And never looked to us again.

And so we cry.

So we cry.

So.

It is not for the beauties
And the tragedies
Of the sentiments we feel
Nor for the far shores
(The Grey Havens)
The rest we hope for and look for at the end of all things;
For my dead grandfather—
What will he profit from my tears?
Will the salt-water I spill on his grave
Form again a wine-dark sea
That he may swim through,
Laughing after seabirds and seachildren,
Fae folk flying on their ice-laden
Unbroken wings?

No.

It is for me that I cry,
For myself and the journey I have yet to take.
It is for the loneliness and the loss
The sense that all those I love will find love
Apart from me,
The sense that all my love will be for nothing.
It is for the loss of all I hold close,
For the slow death that is any one life,
For the festive mural
Of seabirds and faechildren and the albatross
The mural all black like my bedroom at night and gray like old snow
And blue like the eyes of a girl I once loved
And purple like the night sky when the stars have just come out
And like the wine-dark sea,
The sea of my childhood that I cannot seem to leave.

And yet there is hope;
Hope in our tears,
Hope in the smirk of the seabird that flies on unbroken wings
Higher than any hope I could muster,
Up to a star whose light will still shine when I am dust,
And whose light will wink out but will still go on forever.
There is hope in our very tears,
For tears will only dry,
Sorrow will only heal,
The wine-dark of the sea will deepen until all things
Are contained within it,
And despair will never reach us, for it cannot.

For how can we despair when we have understood,
Understood what the intellect cannot understand:
That tears are not an end in themselves,
But only a form of hope.

Life

2011-02-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

It is one of the Great Mysteries to come upon something one has written, and think to oneself, "I meant something by that once. I wonder what it was." Then, to stare at it for a few moments, shake one's head, and admit--even if only in private--that one has no idea what it was.

Eschatology

2011-01-27T21:55:00.000-08:00

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." -Revelation 21:4 (ESV)

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
-Mumford and Sons, "After the Storm"

We are not alone
We feel an unseen love
We are sons and heirs of grace
We are children of
A light that never dims,
A love that never dies
Keep your chin up child
And wipe the tears from your eyes.
-Thrice, "Music Box"

Why is it that verses like Revelation 21:4 and songs and passages that reflect that idea so often just make me have the feeling of tears, make me want to do the very thing whose cure they speak of? Is it that I want to open a wound so that it might be healed? Or--what I think more likely--is it that on this side of such a promise, all we really have to do is cry and cling to our faith, cling to that hope?

Daily Quote

2011-01-25T23:21:00.000-08:00

The more I think about this quote, from Thomas Moore's Soulmates, the more I completely agree with what Moore says, about the true way to help people:

We may think that "it's only right and proper" that a person change her ways and that her soul be something other than what it is, but this kind of thinking moves us away from the person's own nature. Sometimes it appears that there is more moralism in the field of psychology than there is in religion.

Don't Read This One, It's Really Long

2011-01-22T00:38:00.000-08:00

On the Transfiguration of Grape Juice

I.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.

II.

And you sat there, holding my hand,
And worlds and worlds were at your command.

III.

If you want to become human,
A stor mo chridhe,
You may have to die to yourself in order to rise again.

IV.

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.

A stor mo chridhe,
I told you,
Though maybe I failed to love you or know you,
And all the things I showed you,
Glittering fireworks on eagles' wings,
Scamping hedgehogs fighting over gems of emerald green,
A bounding doe,
Suspending in the snowy air,
Brown-on-white,
Eyes wide and dark like pits of chocolate.
All of this was a glittering monstrosity,
Like 80's New York as envisioned by the 50's.

And the same with you, a stor:
For you we must live in order to live,
Must change before we can change,
Change before we can change
Before we can...

If you want to become human, love,
You may have to die in order to rise again.

Shall these bones live?

O believer, I was told,
God died for you,
So that you could live for Him.
O the glory of your obedience when
In the waters of baptism
You come to Him,
In obedience,
In submission.

I was told, O
Believer,
You must do
You must do this and that and these,
You must live in order to live,
You must become a true son
Of the living God.
You must believe, and do,
and serve.

When you throw off the artifice
Of symbol that has polluted your life,
And decide to decide,
When you learn to live in order to live,
Then your real life begins.

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.

See this grape juice?

It is a symbol.

See this bread?

It, too, is symbol.

Have you made your decision?

Then you may partake.

There's a boy in an old chapel,
In an old chapel where the stained glass
Was entertainment, all entertainment, all you!

O Believer!

Leap to leap and live to live!
Come and obey!
Drown yourself in God's water!

Ceilidh framed in painted glass,
Changing colors with the shadows that pass.

O shadows, please pass,
Please stop smiling upon me,
Please stop showing me the chinks in the armor
Of the world.
And yet, if you do,
I fear I will waste away.

And the boy, sitting in his pew,
Picks up a rock, and shatters the glass.

V.

And there you sit, there in my memory,
Holding my hand;
And worlds and worlds
Are at your command.

And in my memory, I throw
Down your hand, I run for the door
Throw myself into the sea,
The water washing over me,
But it is cruel, it is stinging,
The brine of the salt is in my mouth,
My nostrils,
Tearing at my skin,
But not making me new.

I had to find a loving God.

I climb from the sea and a man
Drapes a towel over me
And offers me a snack;
He calls it a snack.

I had to find a loving God.

O man, I said,
Your grape juice is an illusion,
And your bread is a conjurer's trick.

If your grape juice is but a symbol,
If your bread is not a body
If the body of Christ is not a body
But wax paper merely,
Why bother?
For the sake of obedience?

I had to find a loving God.

The works were too much,
And the weight of doing tore me down.
Shall these bones live?
I could not leap in order to leap
I could not leap
I could not
And I was not obedient
Never obedient
Shall these bones live?
For all my efforts, all my fights,
All my storm-winged glittering jeweled flights,
Under the halo of the stars
My tending of others' scars,
I was not good enough, I was not strong enough.
Shall these bones live?

And you, a stor, there in my memory
Still hold my hand,
And still you have worlds
At your command.

VI.

I had a pyramid once,
A grounding-place between skull and earth,
Death and birth,
A great thing made all
Of stone, and dirt, and dead men's bones,
New flowers and old skulls,
The smell of Orion,
The dust of Demetrius.

The Trinity was there too,
Three points uniting all,
Inevitable.

A bird perched upon my pyramid,
White as a lily,
A desert flake of snow,
Small head darting about in quick-step with itself,
It chirruped and tweeted,
Then cackled,
A deep throaty rumble emerging
From its tiny neck;

And upon my pyramid, the dirt trembled.

And deep inside my pyramid
An evergreen started to grow,
Branches spreading, budding,
Splitting the earth and the dust and the bone and the dirt
Inside my pyramid.
A trickle of rocks and dirt skittered down
My pyramid's side,
Then with an explosion of salty mist
The evergreen burst forth
Flinging dirt and rock and skulls,
Orion's belt and Demetrius' dust,
Lily-blossoms and orange petals,
Out across the land.

VII.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.

I love you,
But maybe that's not enough.
Maybe you have to love me too.
And if you do,
If you do,
Maybe we have to leap.
Do we have to leap before we can leap?
Do we have to leap before we can even get there?

That's it. I refuse.
This labyrinth, self-created, where
All the Minotaurs are sleeping,
Where Perseus' shining thread
Is but the dust of dreams and uncertainties,
The thread ferrying our fallacies,
This labyrinth is not worth the sacrifice of navigation.
Sometimes the soul lives in sacrifice,
But sometimes sacrifice must cease to live to save the soul.

When paradox saved my life,
Chaos ensued, and peace.
Then it was that I saw,
Saw the deep love and grace at the bottom of the universe,
Saw the transfiguration of grape juice,
And, thank God,
It did not depend upon me.
The symbol was the thing,
The water was the blood,
The body and blood
Were the bread and wine, not
A symbol, not a snack,
Did not depend upon my belief,
And, thank God,
They did not depend upon my obedience.
Light will issue from the sun,
The stars will pinprick and then go supernova,
The lilies of the field will be clothed,
And deep grace will reverberate
Throughout the universe,

Without relying on me,

Thank God.

Ethan's Literary Year in Review

2011-01-05T23:52:00.000-08:00

As happened last year, herein shall follow the list of books I read this year, with commentary.

I racked up 101 books last year; this year I only did 68. However, as I said at the beginning of the year, I purposely read longer and harder books this year than last year.

One of my projects this year was to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I did not fulfill this. I read all of his novels except his last, unfinished one; it still remains for me to read The Last Tycoon and all of Fitzgerald's short stories and miscellany. There was some purpose in not finishing Scott in a hurry, as the year closed: I was still a little sick of him. As much as I love the man, three of his novels in a year is actually quite enough.

Without further ado: the List of 2010.

1. Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough [Half-read]
I intended to come back and finish this later, but have not yet done so. The half I did read was utterly fascinating. Burrough does as thorough a research and reporting job as it is possible to do, uncovering the story of the 1932-33 crime wave and breathing life into such figures as John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and their many peers. At the same time, Burrough keeps from romanticizing them at all. For example, he calls Bonnie and Clyde a couple of vicious backwater criminals, killers utterly undeserving of the romance that sprang up around them. I thought the movie taken from this book to be fairly good, but this book is about a hundred times bigger, more detailed, and probably a thousand times more fascinating.

2. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
A science fiction classic, of course. There were a lot of things in it I liked, and it was a classic example of golden age SF's focus on the human side of its technology-laden stories. I got bored about 2/3rds of the way through, but I still recommend it.

3. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain
Twain thought this was his greatest work; I would be perfectly comfortable putting it on the same level as Huck Finn. Not funny, and therefore out of character for Twain, but what Twain lacks in humor here he makes up for in passion and in detail, and in his drawing-out of the drama of Joan's story. Twain is at his best when he assumes another's voice, and here he writes as the man who became Joan's personal secretary.

4. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Probably the 7th or 8th time in my life I've read this book. The beginning never gets less disorienting, and the ending never ceases to make reading the whole book worthwhile.

5. Gorgias, by Plato
6. Phaedrus, by Plato
Plato doing what he does best: taking aim at our brains and blasting them into little pieces, thereby creating scholarly controversy for literally millenia to come. Both of these are worth reading; MAYBE they're worth reading the nine or so times it would take to fully understand them.

7. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
I am looking forward to this coming semester, as it appears that I will not have to read Oedipus Rex, even once.

8. Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud
An enormously fun book, mainly for the character of Bartimaeus, an ancient Djinn conjured by a young sorcerer in a sort of alternate London run by magicians. Also, footnotes.

9. The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My least favorite of Fitzgerald's novels, so far. The story of a torrid unhealthy love affair between a young couple in the early part of the Roaring Twenties. Fascinating in places, highly skillful in many places, but ultimately just sort of miserable to read.

10. Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood
A classic Hindu scripture, translated by two men enamoured of its importance. An extremely interesting read, especially for those interested in Eastern religions. I thought I found a lot of inconsistencies (I'd have to read through it again to give specifics), but I don't know if they're inconsistencies due to difficulty of translation, or simply because I lack context. Anyway, lots of heresy for the Christian, but worth reading perhaps for that very reason.

11. MacBeth, by Shakespeare
Still an overrated play. Still a lot of build-up for not really anything. Still a rushed ending. Shakespeare was still trying too hard. Actually, exact same thing could be said of the performance I subsequently saw at the Guthrie in Minneapolis.

12. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
I can see why so many people love it. I can. If I had been allowed to take my red pen and cut out the 60% or so of the text that could be cut without damaging the story at all, maybe I would have liked it more.

13. The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht is an interesting fellow. His play here is rather blatant in the point it attempts to drive home, but rarely for an author like that, he did it with enough art that I didn't hold it against him.

14. Fences, by August Wilson
This is sort of very much a "Death of a Salesman" set in the African-American community in the 60s, but is a very good play for all that--I like it much better than "Salesman."

15. The Atlantis Enigma, by Herbie Brennan
Brennan is trying to make the case that Atlantis not only existed, but ran on crystal technology, and its remnant may be responsible for our world today. He does all this on the flimsiest of evidence, but boy, is it a fun read!

16. Joan of Arc: In her Own Words, edited by Willard Trask
I am NOT obsessed. Okay, maybe I have a crush on her. Maybe. Anyway, this book is REALLY eerie; her words are elegant, and calm, and even in an English translation a thousand years later, one can almost sense the real person here. Sends chills down one's spine.

17. Son of the Mob, by Gordon Korman
This book was fun, except I got bored about 2/3rds of the way through. An amusing one on which to waste an afternoon.

18. The Judging Eye, by R. Scott Bakker
Bakker is STILL one of the best fantasists writing today. This first part of what I believe will be a trilogy is fascinating, and by the time you get to the last third where a lot of it is basically a retread of the mines of Moria, there's so much else going on that you don't mind this.

19. The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
Wolfe is a better fantasist even than Bakker. His story of Faerie is somewhat maddening, but also fascinating, and Wolfe has this incredible penchant for taking things that shouldn't really be that emotional and making them somehow gut-wrenching.

20. Alan Mendelssohn, the Boy From Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater
21. Slaves of Spiegel, by Daniel Pinkwater
Pinkwater sells himself on being a subversive children's writer, on being someone too risque for the big publishers to touch. I was not impressed by him.

22. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This was a fascinating novel, miles better than either "The Great Gatsby" or "The Beautiful and Damned." It may not have had the structural perfection of Gatsby, but the characters were more developed, more sympathetic, the prose was better, the story was more elegant and richer. This became my second-favorite Fitzgerald, after "This Side of Paradise."

23. Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch
SUCH A FUN BOOK. The second in the "Gentlemen Bastards" sequence, which effectively combines the Con Man and Epic Fantasy genres (read: two of Ethan's favorite things), and halfway through this book becomes a pirate story (read: now THREE of Ethan's favorite things).

24. How to be Alone: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen has some fascinating stuff to say; his essays get a little whiny, a little self-righteous, and a little pretentious now and then, but at least he often KNOWS he is being this way and points it out himself.

25. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
26. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
27. Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
I cannot say enough good things about the Ghormenghast trilogy, so I won't try. Many, many modern fantasy writers will claim that it was Tolkien and Mervyn Peake who inspired them to write fantasy, and having read these three books, that makes perfect sense. If you have ever wanted to read a Gothic novel that was also good literature, these are the books for you.

28. First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings, by Edward Sorel and Nancy Caldwell Sorel
29. Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech
30. Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, by Lynne Jonell
31. Victory, by Susan Cooper
About none of these do I have anything in particular to say. The last three are part of the slew of YA books I read toward the end of the summer. They are all fun, in their own way.

32. The End of the Beginning, by Avi
33. A Beginning, a Muddle and an End, by Avi
These two books, which take maybe half an hour apiece to read, are both the type of book only someone who has been writing for many years could come up with and execute. They glory in paradox, and because of that I gloried in them.

34. The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo
35. Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
Having already read DiCamillo's second two novels, and having loved both of them, I decided to read her first two. Neither of them quite made the all-time favorites list, but they are both really beautiful little books, and both eminently worth reading, for anybody.

36. Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow
Anyone who likes reading about old movies, Orson Welles, the Depression, the Theater, or a young man's coming-of-age should read this book. For me, who likes reading about all of those, it was perfect.

37. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, by Neil Gaiman
38. Sandman: The Doll's House, by Neil Gaiman
39. Sandman: Dream Country, by Neil Gaiman
40. Sandman: Season of Mists, by Neil Gaiman
41. Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman
42. Sandman: Fables and Reflections, by Neil Gaiman
43. Sandman: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman
44. Sandman: World's End, by Neil Gaiman
45. Sandman: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman
46. Sandman: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman
For years, everyone said, "Read the Sandman books." For years, I was like, "Yeah, yeah." WOW. Sandman fans may get annoying, and it may seem like these books are overrated, but they're NOT. They're brilliant; if Allan Moore made the graphic novel literature, Neil Gaiman may be the one to make it great literature. Gaiman and his artists effectively tell a story that takes place pretty much literally everywhere, and everywhen, and sometimes nowhere and never.

47. Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman
48. Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman
The first, an illustrated Sandman short novel; the second, an anthology of stories about Dream and his siblings, written ten or so years after the last main sequence Sandman came out. Both well worth reading for those who liked the series.

49. The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, by Bruce McAllister
I found McAllister's story "The Courtship of the Queen" on Tor.com, and thought it was one of the most beautiful, touching fictions I had read in a long time. I wrote him an email telling him so, and he wrote me back and was very kind and gracious. Almost all of the stories in this book are remarkable in one way or another; some of them are truly great.

50. Theater/Theory/Theater, ed. Robert Gerould
58. Dramatic Theory and Criticism, ed. Bernard F. Dukore
I love theater theory in general; I hated most of its practitioners. Ho-hum.

51. Ironheart, by Victoria Tecken
68. Ink on Their Fingers, by Victoria Tecken and Benjamin Tecken
Two books by friends of mine. The first was probably the weirdest reading experience I've ever had: I was the narrator for the full-cast recorded book, and therefore I read it in bits and pieces and chunks, completely out of order, reading some sections many times, and some sections barely at all. The second book is short stories and poetry, ranging from decent to very very good. I recommend the first book to those who like YA fantasy; the second, to anyone who likes to read.

52. Miss Julie, by August Strindberg
53. Two Rooms, by Lee Blessing
More plays, more plays. Will I ever escape? "Two Rooms" is one of the saddest plays I've ever read. I did a monologue from it, which was great fun.

54. Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics, Various Authors
Very effective noir comics; those who write and draw graphic novels seem to really grasp the genre. Not for the faint of heart.

55. The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo
DiCamillo seems to have mastered the creation of beauty, and of a well-told story. Again, recommend for anyone who likes stories.

56. The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart
Clever and fun, the book gets a little too far-fetched in places for my taste, but it's a good solid pleasure read.

57. Broadway Bound, by Neil Simon
Fairly typical Neil Simon. Semi-autobiographical, about two brothers in 1949 New York breaking into comedy writing.

59. Holding Onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium, by Albert Borgman
I read this for a class. It's a brilliant history of information, charting it through its three phases of growth. Borgmann tries to calm some of the "internet hysteria," and to present a cogent argument for a balance of technology.

60. How to Conduct Organizational Surveys, by Jack Edwards et al.
Bore bore boring bored.

61. Selections from "Against Verres," by Cicero
Read in and translated from the Latin. Worth reading, in Latin or English, as examples of great oration, and as also just as history.

62. Following the Equator, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
Twain's travels, mainly in Germany, in the 1880s. Vintage Twain. There are several chapters--notably, "The Great French Duel" and "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn"--that get reprinted solo in short story collections and the like. These DO tend to be the highlights, but if one needs a Twain fix, pretty much any chapter in here will do.

63. Showdown, by Ted Dekker
Dekker definitely knows how to tell a story, and the fact that his story involved more than a little magic, mystery, and bizarre fantasy suited me just fine.

64. Panzer Commander, by Hans von Luck
More of a personal memoir than a military history, though with plenty of the latter, von Luck's story of commanding Nazi tanks in WWII is fascinating and well worth reading.

65. Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks
Banks was a female journalist beginning in the 1890s. She went to England, and employed a lot of gimmicks in writing interest pieces for London papers. She posed as a crossing-sweep, a laundry girl and a housemaid, among others, and wrote articles concerning her experiences. They are great fun to read, and anybody interested in the Victorian Era will probably find them fascinating.

66. Post-Scarcity Anarchism, by Murray Bookchin
My reaction to anarchist writers tends to be equally split between vehement agreement and wanting to punch them in the face. Bookchin caused much more of the former in me, which is not to say the latter was not present. This book was published in 1971, but the vast majority of it seems incredibly relevant.

67. The Mabinogion, by Anonymous Welsh Poet(s), translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones
Folk-stories and myths are interesting on many levels: there's the level of pure story, which is one major reason they should be preserved in the first place; there's the things they tell us about the culture of a time; there's the dissection and analysis of what they mean, where they came from, and how they were transmitted and changed; and there are sociological, psychological, archetypal, and anthropological options. Occasionally, the Maginogion was not interesting to me on any of these levels. Most of the time, it was interesting on all of them.

So. In Summary.

Books everyone should read
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
The End of the Beginning, by Avi
A Beginning, a Muddle and an End, by Avi
The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo
Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo
Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow

I'm not going to bother posting other categories this time; I think my comments should be a good guide if anything on the list looks interesting, and there's too much crossover and difficulty of categorization to attempt it.

Book List 2011

2011-01-05T23:48:00.000-08:00

When I was in grade school, my mom cut out a big felt capital "E" and hung it on the bulletin board in the living room. (She cut out a similar Z for my brother.) Every time I read a book, I got to put a star on that E, and every time I had a certain number of stars I got a prize from the school Treasure Chest. However, after a while it was no longer about the prizes: it was about putting up one more star on that E, making the aggregation of stars more and more impressive. Sometimes, when I keep my annual book list, I feel as though it's only a leftover psychological manifestation of the giant E, as though all I am doing every time I finish a book is putting another star on that thing. Oh well. It's still a satisfying feeling.

This list to be updated throughout the year. Everybody be excited.

Book List 2011
1. Steampunk II (Anthology), edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer [Steampunk 1]
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
3. Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande
4. Human Narration as Communication, by Walter Fisher
5. The Story of the Irish Race, by Seamus MacManus
6. Everyman's McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji & Jacob Albert [Media Ecology 1]
7. Mr. Mani, by A.B. Yehoshua
8. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
9. Blood Wedding, by Federico Garcia Lorca
10. Nectar in a Sieve, by Kamala Markandaya
11. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
12. 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, ed. by Kathleen Hoaglund
13. Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan [ME 2]
14. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, by Marjorie Taylor
15. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, by Jerome Bruner
16. The Court of the Air, by Stephen Hunt [SP 2]
17. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
18. Saint, by Ted Dekker
19. Larklight, by Philip Reeve [SP 3]
20. Going Bovine, by Libba Bray [Partial]
21. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
22. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
23. Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman [ME 3]
25. The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
26. The Phoenix Transcendent, by John C. Wright
27. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green
28. House, by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti [Partial]
29. The Devil Knows Latin, by E. Christian Kopff [Classics 1]
30. Alchemy: Its Science and Romance, by the Right Rev. J. E. Mercer, D.D. (Sometime Bishop of Tasmania) [Alchemy 1]
31. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
32. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
33. The Sorceror's House, by Gene Wolfe
34. Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, tr. George Thomson [Classics 2]
35. Going Out, Getting Dumped, and Playing Mini-Golf on the First Date, by Rev. Tim Pauls
36. The Greeks: Cosmology and Cosmogony, ed. by W.H. Auden
37. Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
38. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!, by Edmund Carpenter [ME 4]
39. Audrey, Wait!, by Robin Benway
40. Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
41. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. Cairo: a Graphic Novel, by G. Willow Wilson
44. Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, by Brian Talbot
45. Popgun: a Graphic Mix Tape, Volume One, edited by Mark Andrew Smith and Joe Keatinge
46. The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
47. The Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness
48. Paper Towns, by John Green
49. Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto [ME 5]
50. Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness
51. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies: Voices from a Medieval Village
52. Stories, by Oscar Wilde
53. A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde
54. Lady Windermere's Fan, by Oscar Wilde
55. A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde
56. The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshall McLuhan (ME 6)
57. Serenity: Those Left Behind, by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews
58. Serenity: Better Days, by Joss Whedon
59. Digital McLuhan: a Guide to Understanding the Information Millenium, by Paul Levinson [ME 7]
60. Behemoth, by Scott Westerfeld [SP 4]
61. The Empire of Ice Cream, by Jeffrey Ford
62. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
63. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, by Steven Millhauser
64. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
65. Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, by M.T. Anderson
66. National Monuments: Poems, by Heid Erdrich
67. Dangerous Laughter, by Steven Millhauser
68. The Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, by Eric Gansworth
69. Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
70. Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
71. Carmilla, by Joseph Le Fanu
72. The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan et al. [ME 8]
73. Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick
74. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
75. Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
76. The Failure of Certain Charms: and Other Disparate Signs of Life, by Gordon Henry, Jr.
77. King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
78. Fugitive Anne, by Rosa Praed
79. The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch
80. The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power
81. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest [SP 5]
82. The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford
83. Underground Christmas, by John Hassler
84. The Painted Drum, by Louise Erdrich
85. Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
86. The Early Church, by Henry Chadwick
87. Steampunk!, ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant [SP 6]
88. The Sandman Papers, ed. by Joe Sanders
89. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller
90. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
91. Not Less Than Gods, by Kage Baker [SP 7]
92. Laws of Media, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan [ME 9]
93. Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis
94. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
95. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov
96. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, by Stephen Millhauser
97. Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan
98. The Justification Reader, by Thomas Oden
99. Extraordinary Engines, ed. by Nick Gevers

Another Year

2010-12-30T22:48:00.001-08:00

Another year is almost out. Do I have any summarizing words for 2010? Yes: Meh. That's about how I feel about this past year. A lot of time was spent bothering with things that weren't worth bothering; a lot of time was spent doing things that weren't worth remembering. There were some good times, of course, and some great ones: there always are, if you know where to look.

I'm sorry if this isn't the kind of year-ending ra-ra-ra you were looking for. I'm feeling rather Ecclesiastical tonight.

One thing that seems to be eternal is books. It looks like I'll be short last year's count by about 35, but I think I've read more longer tomes this year than last year, and not being on a 100-book challenge I have not bothered to read everything to completion, and I only put books I read completely, or almost completely, on the list. A decent list, though, if I do say so: soon after the 1st I shall republish it with added commentary.

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, along with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

Editing

2010-12-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

Editing NaNo is usually a terrible thing; one is always much less brilliant than one thinks, even when one KNOWS one is writing crap. However, occasionally there is a moment that is worth it, a paragraph that makes one almost understand why one subjected oneself to this month of Hell. I don't know that it's brilliant, but I rather liked this paragraph.

There followed several more meetings: Owen’s reunion with his younger sister Julia, who could see the truth in the things people said, and his reunion with his twin sister Minerva, and with his brother Patreus, and Eleanor’s introduction to all of these people. They sat down to supper then, and in the evening Artemis’ sister Tatiana and her husband James joined them, and they commenced an evening of storytelling, which was an old tradition in the Avalon household. James was a professional fiction writer, but it was the story Patreus told—a story of a time in the far future when all the world had lost its color, had become black and white, in which two lovers saw in each other all the colors of the rainbow—that was unanimously voted the best.

Thinking Aloud, In Metaphor (AKA: Poetry)

2010-12-05T14:41:00.001-08:00

In the Window

Two-headed man, in the window
Smiling-frowning on my rambunction
As you stare down the barrels
Of my silver-handled shotgun,
You frighten me.
It is not the way your eyes move,
Blazing straining blaring blinking staring,
Struggling to track my rambunction
As you stand straight, stare straight,
In the window.
It is not the way your hands reach,
Gripping convulsively and fighting
Each other off,
Scoring themselves and scarring themselves
Training themselves for a day
When unity would be most important
And when,
At a crucial moment,
They would come up empty.
It is not the way your heads loll,
Rolling like moon-calves and rambling on
About nuclear physics and Pindar's odes
And the beauty of Nefertiti and Locke's
Psychology of the Self.
No.
It is none of these things.
It is, two-headed man, the way
You think you own me.
The way you feel that because
Of your lolling heads, your moon-calf eyes,
Your lascivious officious gendarme sighs,
Because your brains form a negative
Image of mine, because you have read
All of the ancients who also thought they knew
The perfect code of morals that man should follow,
You think you know all things.
Two-headed man, you are wrong.
And so as you stand in the window,
Staring down the barrel of my
Silver-handled shotgun,
I pull the triggers. I destroy you.
I close the blinds.
I have no regret.

It's Kind of a Funny Story

2010-11-27T23:49:00.000-08:00

So tonight my family and I saw this film. It's about a teenage boy who checks himself into a mental hospital. And, for anyone who has ever felt like doing this (read: probably everyone who has been in high school or college in the past ten years), I think it might be very cathartic. It's the kind of film that makes one laugh as much with joy as with humor; and the kind of film where bits of it run through one's mind for hours, maybe days afterwards. This is the kind of film that has the potential to change one's life. It's the kind of film that makes life seem far more liveable, and survivable. The kind of film that makes living and surviving seem worth it. If you get the chance, see it.

Winning

2010-11-27T14:55:00.001-08:00

This year I wasn't even sure I should do National Novel Writing Month. And, what with being a senior, having four organizations to run or help run, a show to rehearse, grad schools to apply for, and umpteen other activities and commitments, I was not at all sure I would be able to finish my 50,000 words.

However, stubbornness will always triumph over common sense. Last night I passed the finish line plus twenty-five words. Usually in the past my November novels have ended at a little over 50k, which was helpful, or at a little under, which was not and required me to B.S. a prologue and/or an epilogue. However, this year's novel is looking to be about 75,000 words long, at least. It has three parts, and I have written part 1 and most of part 2. I shall attempt to at least finish the second part in the couple days of November remaining. I intend to finish the third part, as soon as possible, still writing NaNo-style (that is, as fast as possible and not worrying overmuch if at all about quality). I need to get this story out of my head. It will bother me until I do.

What with the various school projects coming due, followed closely by finals, and all the responsibilities I've been putting off until December (the bulk of those pesky grad school apps, for example), I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish that third part. Hopefully over Christmas break, if nothing else.

At least a couple people have already made me promise to send them the novel. Those of you who want to see it should let me know, one way or another, and also tell me if you want to immediately see the 2/3rds that are written, or wait until the whole thing is done and get it all at once. (That last is a very respectable choice; however, be advised that there's a very distinct possibility that waiting for me to finish the book MAY mean waiting LITERALLY FOREVER.)

On Snow

2010-11-13T08:02:00.000-08:00

It snowed last night. A group of friends and I went out and had a snowball fight. This morning I woke and it was still snowing. Rarely for me, I woke before 1 PM on a Saturday, because I had to return three DVDs to the library before the library opened in order to avoid fines. (They were due on Friday, but if one returns things before the library opens, those things are checked in as if it were the day before.) The saving of $3 was enough to make the Scotsman in me wake up; the rest of me was then grateful to that old stingy Calvinist because, to his defeat, I found myself walking through the most beautiful metaphor for baptism I can think of.

What better way of picturing baptism than to go to bed while the world is drab and dreary, dark and depressing, only to wake up to a world washed in purest white? I don't think I will ever be able to use new snow as a symbol for anything negative. Today I saw some possible consequences of so much snow so suddenly: a squirrel struggling to survive, the bowing down of trees, cars sliding around or stuck, the breaking of branches and their blockade of walkways and the obstacles they offered to the walker. Still, snow makes me think only of hope, and purity, and love; of benediction and renewal and grace. A sudden snow is an invasion of beauty from beyond the fields we know. Looking up at the arch of trees as they bow before the onslaught of white dust, seeing the flakes trickle from the sky, shimmering and glistening and soft, I can think only of heaven, of beauties beyond our ability to comprehend.

I will never understand the beauty of black and white images so well as when I look up into the snow-tossed air and see, against a sky of grey and a fluttering snow carpet of pure white, the stark black forms of a horde of crows flying out against the sky, crying in protest against this sudden change in their world.

I walked down to the river, which was not yet frozen, and I stared out across the heaving water and the snow coming down, stared in each direction as far as I could see. It was not far; the river seemed to have no beginning, no ending. And no matter how far we can see, I thought, still the world has no beginning and no ending, none that we can know. Could we know everything from the moment of creation to the end of the world, still all we would be able to see is a segment of river, disjointed and almost nonsensical, and all that would be left for us to do would be to trust the One who made it.

Walking back, I discovered that there are few feelings more integral than coming upon people in distress and helping them. I helped push and dig at least two or three cars out of predicaments, stuck at intersections or in driveways.

The Mumford and Sons song "After the Storm" was stuck in my head already, but today it seemed very appropriate:

I will die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
Because death is just so full and mine so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

I was reminded, further, of the TSO song "The Wisdom of Snow," which is an instrumental piece but whose title carries with it all the meaning of a full song. And, in the narration associated with the song:

So on this night of Christmas eve
As once again the spirits weave
Its snowswept dreams and colored lights
With bits of magic into each life

And as the snow comes gently down
Its sole intent to reach the ground
To cover scars the world still feels
Perhaps to give them time to heal

For as men invest in money
And professors in what they know
God invests in mercy
Like winter invests in snow

I thought, finally, of a verse from another TSO song, "What Child is This?", a verse I always think of at least once during Christmas, and at least once during Easter:

Tell me how many times can this story be told
After all of these years it should all sound so old
Yet it somehow rings true in the back of my mind
As I search for a dream that words can no longer define

Introversion

2010-11-04T23:24:00.001-07:00

Every time I am with a group of people for a while, even--especially--if it's a group of people I like, there comes a point when everybody is gone and I realize that I'm alone and just HOW alone we all are. The fact that I can't shake existential crap like this is probably why I'm an introvert. While I object to Eastern religions and Transcendentalism for their views of ultimate reality, and while I reject Thoreau because he was an idiot, all of those folks do have a worthwhile point when they talk about self-knowledge. We are the only mortals we can be certain will be around for our entire lives, so it were possibly best to get comfortable with ourselves as much and as soon as possible.

Sufjan Stevens on the Eucharist

2010-10-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

Music website "The Quietus" recently posted an interview with Sufjan Stevens, in conjunction with the release of Stevens' first album in a few years, "The Age of Adz." Once the subject of religion comes up, or rather, is sort of forced uncomfortably into the room by the interviewer, said interviewer proves himself to be--how shall I put this nicely?--sort of an idiot. He appears to be trying to get Stevens to say something headline- and controversy-making. Stevens sidesteps the potential traps rather beautifully, and manages to say some very gracious and graceful things into the bargain.

One of the most interesting comments, for my money, was something whose controversial and revolution-stirring potential the interviewer was probably too ignorant to realize. The interviewer makes a disparaging comment about the idea of the church as a building, and Sufjan responds:

SS: I mean it’s weird. What’s the basis of Christianity? It’s really a meal, it’s communion right? It’s the Eucharist. That’s it, it’s the sharing a meal with your neighbours and what is that meal? It’s the body and blood of Christ. Basically God offering himself up to you as nutrition. Haha, that’s pretty weird. It’s pretty weird if you think about that, that’s the basis of your faith. You know, God is supplying a kind of refreshment and food for a meal. Everything else is just accessories and it’s vital of course, baptism and marriage, and there’s always the sacraments and praying and the Holy Spirit and all this stuff but really fundamentally it’s just about a meal.

His further comments strike me as VERY SUSPICIOUS from the perspective of most of the prevalent Christian views. Mwaha. Haha. Ha.

Rest of interview here.

Cheering Up

2010-10-26T15:51:00.001-07:00

My roommate asked me the other day to read from a book that was cheerful. I looked at my bookshelf, and the first several titles I saw were: "Winter's Tale," "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "Post-Scarcity Anarchism," "Tales of the Dying Earth," "The Last Tycoon," and "The Great Gatsby."

Really, he should have known better.

History Fest

2010-10-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

So as previously noted, the main reason I did not end up doing the reading marathon is that I went to History Fest (link to their website in previous post; it gives a pretty good idea of what the thing was like). The farm on which it takes place is owned by a very charming older fellow of Irish descent, who does sleight-of-hand tricks and speaks with the closest thing to an Irish brogue one can get while still actually being American.

After five of us directed parking for a couple of hours, we were released to wander about at will because traffic was arriving at a rate of maybe one car every ten minutes, something that would maybe take one of us to direct but would not take five.

So I found the guy playing Abraham Lincoln, and we discussed states' rights and whether he had strengthened or weakened the federal government and state governments during his presidency; then I noticed his campaign button (which he was rather impressed with--it comes from having an antique dealer for a mother) and was told all about it, which because I have an antique dealer for a mother I was rather interested in.

After that, wandered through the Wild West part of things, past a rather skilled cowboy yodeler, walked on stilts for a bit, tried on medieval plate armor, and wandered into the encampment labeled "Scotland, 17th Century." Now, because the Risings did not occur until the 18th Century, and because there were lots of Scottish mercenaries in the Thirty Years War, I had already guessed that TYW was what these Scotsmen would be. I was totally right.

Talked to the head of the mercenary encampment for quite a while, at first about Thirty Years War stuff and things that were actually on-topic, but then digressing into things that were not quite so on-topic (but were equally rare for two people in the same place to both know about--for example, see Will Kemp). I concluded by telling the guy about the time Zeke and I did such convincing Scottish accents that we made a British lady think we were Scottish.

THEN went over to the fighting ring, to see the medieval reenactors (from the Society for Creative Anachronism) fight each other, medieval-style. They made their weapons to have the weight and heft and as much of the look of actual medieval weapons as possible, while trying to limit the actual death that occurred during their re-enactment. After the battle I talked to the guy who I believe is the head of the local chapter. I was invited to join them for medieval combat, which they apparently engage in once a week in town here.

Then we met up with the others of our group, who had not had the chance to wander around, and Tarja and I wandered and, among other things, goaded each other into walking on stilts and crawling through the troll tunnel, the latter of which was a more claustrophobic experience than I usually engage in but wasn't bad. Then it was time to go, and I felt properly nerdy for a day's work.

Right II

2010-10-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

So the this that I signed up for is not happening, as I am volunteering at History Fest for the first part of the day tomorrow, and may go to a state park for the second. History Fest, as far as I can tell, is predicated on taking all of the COOLEST STUFF from history, and putting it all together. It does look pretty cool.

On My Grandfather

2010-10-07T00:09:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about my Grandpa Mobley--my mother's father--lately. I'm not sure why. Part of it might be that, for various reasons, I have been noticing a lot of the things that both Zeke and I get from our grandfather. Little things, mostly, like quirks of phrasing, expressions, attitudes, dispositions toward certain topics, things like that. But those trivial things are just the outward evidence of what is actually a much deeper influence.

In fact, it has occurred to me that in order to fully understand me, and Zeke too, one would probably have to meet our grandfather. I'm fairly certain that a psychologist who was able to fully understand my grandfather would find it rather simple to pick apart my brother and me. However, that's assuming any psychologist could survive analyzing my grandfather without tearing out his or her hair. I find this an unlikely prospect, since I believe that what Freud said about the Irish is perfectly applicable to my grandfather: they are impossible to psychoanalyze.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, while I know I am in many ways very like my grandfather, and while I know that he is one of the people I look up to, respect, admire and wish to emulate the most in this entire world, I find it hard to pin down exactly what significant things I get from him. Perhaps it's like I say about certain authors who have come to influence my writing greatly: perhaps he has simply entered my heart and therefore my bloodstream and my very being at a microscopic level, so that he is simply a part of what I am, a part of the fabric of my very being. If there is any human goodness in me, it comes from my other grandfather, one of my grandmothers, my mom, my dad, or from him, from Grandpa Mobley.

The other day in Acting class, we were told as part of an exercise to walk like one of our grandparents--not like they actually walk, but as their personality would walk. I looked at my brother and knew he had also chosen to try to walk like Grandpa Mobley, whose personality is probably the hardest of any of our grandparents' to convey. For how do you express or embody someone who is a combination of George S. Patton, John Wayne, and the most dignified of Cherokee chiefs, someone who has utter confidence in himself, having done everything he ever set out to do, being completely satisfied with the life he has led, knowing how to be confident, comfortable, and at peace in almost any situation?

My grandfather flew airplanes in Europe during WWII; he spotted for artillery, doing a job that these days is done by satellites. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He flew General Patton repeatedly, was present for at least one incident that often makes it into the history books; he flew others, the likes of Churchill and possibly De Gaulle, and his dog used to play with Patton's dog. He met Ronald Reagan; he was an extra in the movies; he danced with Ingrid Bergman. He looks like John Wayne, too, and the feeling I get being in his presence is only replicated when I watch a John Wayne movie. But, did I have the chance to meet John Wayne, and General Patton, and Churchill and De Gaulle and dance with Ingrid Bergman, I'd trade it all for one evening with my grandfather.

Right

2010-10-04T21:59:00.000-07:00

So I signed up for this. I don't know if I'll have time, or if I'll want to come Saturday, since Saturday is the only day I can usually manage to have mostly free, BUT with the amount of people I've generally felt like seeing lately (that being MOSTLY NONE) it actually sounds rather inviting at this point.

On Two Types Of People

2010-09-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

It has struck me lately, from several quarters, that there are in at least one way two types of people in the world. In my head they have come to be called "be-ers" and "becomers," "fixers" and "sympathizers," and "idealists" and "realists."

My Anthropology class is taught by one of my favorite professors, a WELS Lutheran Pastor who grew up on an Apache Indian reservation. One day in class he said that Apaches were into "being," as opposed to modern mainstream Americans, who are into "becoming." That is, a typical American is always becoming the next thing in his life: a student becoming a teacher or an expert or whatever, a single person becoming married, etc. Apaches, on the other hand, are content with what life offers them at the present moment, and are less worried about tomorrow. Thus it becomes hard, for example, to approach an Apache about becoming a pastor, since that takes planning (one must account for college and four years of seminary), and planning of a type that Apaches are not familiar with.

In the book Soulmates, Thomas Moore writes a very philosophical, literary sort of advice pamphlet on the subject of love in the modern world. In the introduction Moore claims that he will not offer any answers, setting his book apart from pretty much every other book on the subject currently in print, and providing a refreshing change even from the better of Christian books on the subject, like Wild at Heart. Moore claims instead that he will offer alternative ways of looking at matters of the heart, ways which will hopefully shed new and helpful light on the subject. I have only managed to read two chapters, because I am busy and it is heady stuff which requires digestion, but my mind already feels like it has been twisted in knots--or turned loose from some.

In Moore's book, he talks about the legend of Daphne and Apollo. To grossly oversimplify and somewhat bastardize what Moore says: the legend goes that Daphne fled from Apollo into the forest, and Apollo pursued her. Finally, he caught her, but Artemis, the goddess of whom Daphne was an aspect, took pity on Daphne, and Daphne was turned into a tree by the side of a river, and Apollo could never reach her. Moore says that Daphne represents the "spirit," the part of us that wants to dream, to fly free, to be a world traveler, to be independent. Apollo represents the "soul," the part of us that longs for connection, that longs for companionship. The soul, according to Moore, is the valleys to the spirit's mountains; the soul is about the nitty-gritty, the stuff of real life.

Everyone apparently has some of both Daphne and Apollo in them. There is a part of all of us which wants to be free, which balks (for example) at the idea of being tied to another person. And there is another part in all of us whose greatest desire is that other person, is to be together with someone else, forever.

As will come as no surprise to those who know me, I tend to fall heavily in with the Daphne. While I love my friends, and miss them when I'm apart from them, it does not take a whole lot--very little, by some peoples' standards--for me to have a surfeit of them, and to need or at least to want to get away, to be by myself. I have too much Daphne in me to want a relationship, for its own sake; it takes a special person to make me even consider wanting to date, to court, or whatever. ('Special' doesn't always mean 'good,' but that's another topic.) Maybe I have too much of the Daphne side to be able to have a successful relationship, at least at the moment. Whatever. Not really the current point.

All this is basically prelude. The thing that has occurred to me recently to throw this into focus is a distinction that echoes or harmonizes with the above, or possibly it does both. The topic is friends, which topic tends to be at the forefront of every college student's mind (schoolwork generally running a distant second). What has occurred to me is this: there are friends who are content with you as you are, and there are friends who want to change you. (Note: I don't like the rhetorical second person accusatory, but it feels most natural here; if one didn't like it, one could change the you's to one's, and make it third person.)

I am not offering judgment here, saying that one type is better than another. I'm just observing. There are certain friends who will take you, bad habits, foot odor, nerdy references and all; and there are certain friends who, if they are good friends, will love you and be good friends but will try to get you to stop smoking and wash your feet better and not discuss the Aeneid with 8-year-olds.

Another way of stating it, one that I dislike because of the judgment implied but one which shows the distinction clearly, is this: Some people love you for who you are; some people love you for who you could be. A third category, now that I think about it, is that some people love you for who they THINK you are. This last is the genesis of many a misguided crush; in the fog of infatuation, the real shape of a person can become obscured, sometimes on purpose, and can be imagined to be whatever one wants it to be. Actually, it strikes me that this third is just a subset of the second category. But again I digress.

One of the two sides is not necessarily better than the other; mostly it's a matter of personal preference. I come down strongly on the side of be-ers, on the side of accepting people as they are, faults and flaws intact, and being accepted similarly. And while idealism is not necessarily a bad thing, and self-improvement certainly something to be sought, ultimately a good friend is going to have to do some amount of being, of accepting that we are all flawed and that some of that is not going to get better, no matter how much it should, no matter how much we might want it to. Moore says this:

We may think that "it's only right and proper" that a person change her ways and that her soul be something other than what it is, but this kind of thinking moves us away from the person's own nature. Sometimes it appears that there is more moralism in the field of psychology than there is in religion.

I find that people who have experienced depravity in one way or another--seen what great depths of sin either they or someone they love dearly can fall into--have an easier time accepting people as they are; it often takes a less experienced person to maintain high expectations of others. (This is, again, not a dig at idealists: an idealist who has been through such fire and come out still idealistic is often quite a remarkable person.)

In the end, of course, we each have our own trials. Idealists must struggle to accept sinners, and not to judge; the rest of us must struggle not to lose our values in knowing we cannot live up to them.

How Theatrical Productions Go (At Least For Me)

2010-09-22T21:35:00.001-07:00

It varies, depending on the type of show, sometimes on the size of my role, and on the length of rehearsal, but this still tends to be pretty universal.

Pre-rehearsal. I got into the show! Yes! This is gonna rock!

Early rehearsals. This is gonna be so cool. We're, like, doing stuff, and it's cool stuff, and it'll be so great.

Middle Rehearsals. Okay. Maybe it won't be as cool as I thought. But it'll still be fun.

Week before Tech Week. Can this just be done with already?

Tech Week. UUUUUUUUUGH JUST SHOOT ME NOW.

Opening night, before show. I'M GOING TO MESS UP AND DIE.

Opening night, after show. THAT WAS SO COOL. I love this show and I love everybody at all associated with it and I love all the people who think it was cool and and and...

Closing night. This show is so great and I could perform it forever and... wait, it's over? Crap!

Week after. Emotional let-down; depression; often, getting sick.

After that. Awesome memory. Any bad parts edited out.

Storytime

2010-09-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

[Our assignment for Acting today was to write a story based on two words we were given. My words were "road" and "bruise." I don't particularly like this story, but for the Gentle Reader it may entertainingly waste a few minutes.]

When the girl lay down on the road, all she could see were the stars. She could not see the burned, charred, black road around her, the piles of bodies, the skeletons of cars and trucks, the hulks of tanks. She could not see the road winding on and on, bleakly across a bleak world, starting nowhere and ending nowhere. Looking at the stars she could imagine she was dead, that she had finally come to peace, that she lay in a box in the earth and that the stars were her only friends. We are all made of stardust, she had been told, and she had laughed.

She had been brilliant, once. The smartest ten-year-old on the face of the earth; possibly the smartest ten-year-old who ever lived. They sent her up in the rocket ship, the one that would reach Mars, the one that would guarantee humanity’s survival when the destruction unleashed by the last war was complete. Her words, beamed from the spaceship to the ears of all humanity, just as the ship broke earth’s orbit, had become famous. People loved them and quoted them. She always thought that they did this because they made her sound like a little girl, because they made her sound human, rather than like the divine being most people imagined her to be.

“It looks… like a bruise. We’ve made the world look like a giant bruise. This was never what man was supposed to be.”

And in the six years it took them to establish the Martian colony, in the years it took her to turn from a warm, brilliant, adorable little girl to a cold, manipulative, power-hungry woman, her words had apparently touched off a war, one even worse than the previous war, one in which humanity unleashed its most horrible weapons and, finally, destroyed itself.

The Martian crew managed to find the survivors, the last several hundred humans locked deep underground. They were taken onboard the spaceship; they told the story of earth’s final six years. They blamed the girl, and rightly so. It did not take long to make the decision; and the decision was unanimous. They exiled her. They set her on the ring, the highway that man had built to encircle the earth, the scene of the worst and most brutal battles of man’s final war. They ordered her to walk it until the end of her days, to walk it until she, the last remaining human, was gone. The captain delivered the sentence; the captain knew she would never have the strength to take her own life.

Staring up at the stars, the girl heard a noise behind her. She jerked upright. The noises couldn’t be coincidence; they had been following her all day. Either someone was out there, stalking her, or she was going insane. Either way, perhaps her death would come soon.

A figure moved in the darkness. Her instincts, unwanted, flared up; she leapt and grabbed the figure and brought it down, smashing its face into the road, her hands flying and pummeling by instinct and nothing else. When the figure stopped moving, she rolled it over, perched above on the edge of the road. The sea below heaved incontinently. Her stalker was a boy, of about her own age. The boy was breathing raggedly.

“Who are you?” the girl hissed.

“You’ve… you’ve killed me…”

“Who are you?”

“I… fought against… your exile. When you left… I followed you. I lost you for a while… but now I’ve found you again.”

“Why? Why do you care? I’ve destroyed all of humanity. Everyone knows it.”

“And yet… I love you…”

“Love me? You don’t know me.”

“I grew up with you. I… always saw your face on TV.” The boy was growing more animated, starting to recover himself. He was bleeding from several places, but he ignored this. “No one ever loved you. They admired you, they feared you. But I loved…” he stopped, and began to cough. The fit prolonged itself, and he turned his head aside and spat blood. He groaned and lay his head back down with a clunk on the road.

The girl thought she had cried all of her tears away, but now she began to weep. She bent down and kissed the boy firmly on the mouth. He kissed her back. His arms closed around her and with the last of his strength he used his body to toss her, backward, over the edge of the road. He rolled over and watched her plunge toward the sea. Then he lunged after her.

For a moment the two bodies hung in midair, becoming smaller and smaller until they were specks indistinguishable from the whitecaps of the roiling sea below. Then they were swallowed up. The sea roared on, like a great bruise blotting the face of the earth.

Current Thoughts

2010-09-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

There are certain songs, and even certain verses of certain songs, that have entered my being at a microscopic level. That is, I don't necessarily quote them or even think of them often any more--though usually I did both, once--but they are in there, in my mind and heart, as a concrete symbol of what and who I am, or at least what and who I want to be. One such verse is from "Jericho," by Wolfstone:

Don't run from the bad and the beautiful
Or all the hurting they provide
Don't hide from the sad and the cynical
Look for the diamonds inside

I've tried, Wolfstone. I've tried.

YA Authors and their Wisdom

2010-08-16T00:48:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a slew of YA books recently, because I felt like it. And while I may have said disparaging things about YA authors in previous posts, I sometimes find them extremely wise. I think there is a certain wisdom gained by authors in any genre, who are privileged to spend a large part of their adult lives as authors; this may be particularly true of YA authors, at least of good ones, for they are writing at a level of childhood, a level where first and often lasting and affecting impressions are formed--they are writing to the people who will influence the people of tomorrow, who will become those people. Witness Susan Cooper, reflecting on her privilege in the afterword to her book Victory:

Sam Robbins's encounters with Admiral Nelson are not historical; they came out of my imagination, and I loved writing them. Perhaps I wrote this whole book only for a chance of meeting one of my greatest heroes, just as I was lucky enough to meet Shakespeare in a book called King of Shadows and Merlin, long ago, in a sequence called The Dark is Rising. Writers are fortunate people.

Another thing I notice in Cooper here is her humility. The Dark is Rising is perhaps one of the most famous of YA book series to come out in the last forty or so years, and Cooper would be justified in assuming that the type of people reading her Author's Note would be familiar with it. However, it is not famous enough to warrant the assumption of universal familiarity and her reference to "a sequence called The Dark is Rising" therefore does not come across as condescending.

Also, while I have read and loved The Dark is Rising, that note made me rather want to read King of Shadows.

Another author in whom I have noticed the latter-day presence of both wisdom and humility is Avi. This fellow has written a veritable slew of "YA" and "Teen" books over the past three or so decades. Some I have found worth my time; others I have thrown, justly or unjustly, by the wayside. But always he seems to be writing what he wants to write, and not what others want him to write, and for this I respect him.

Recently I read his The End of the Beginning and A Beginning, a Muddle and an End (2004 and 2008, respectively), which are both about a snail and an ant who have philosophical and epistemological discussions, often to arrive at counterintuitive conclusions. The books are somewhat in the tradition of Winnie the Pooh, and I found them great fun. A note at the beginning of the second book goes like this:

Some time ago one of my young readers wrote to me about writing. Among the many wise things he said was that a good story consists of "a beginning, a muddle, and an end." It was the smartest description of a story I've ever read. I wish I knew his name. Perhaps he'll read this book. If so, I thank him for giving me a title.

Besides the fact that Avi is right, this is quite a remarkable little note in a few ways. Notice the experienced writer deferring to the child who wrote to him; notice him calling the child "wise." I can think of no other living writer who would be likely to do this. Neil Gaiman, maybe. Maybe. Of fully "adult" fiction writers that I know anything about, I can picture none saying something like this. Could it be that our childrens' writers know something the rest of us are missing?

Finally we come to Kate DiCamillo. I read her books The Tale of Desperaux and The Remarkable Journey of Edward Tulane a while ago, both of which became favorites in their own way. It was not until recently that I got to reading her first couple books, Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tiger Rising. I don't know that either will become out-and-out favorites the way Desperaux and Edward did; but both are masterfully crafted, grace-filled stories.

In The Tiger Rising, a withdrawn young boy meets an angry young girl, and against all apparent odds the two become friends. There is a lot of grace in the book, especially in their burgeoning relationship. One of my favorite passages was this:

"Oh," said Sistine. And Rob realized then why he liked Sistine so much. He liked her because when she saw something beautiful, the sound of her voice changed. All the words she uttered had an oof sound to them, as if she was getting punched in the stomach... Her words sounded... as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so that he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it.

Honestly, I don't know if this is wisdom, or folly, or simple conceit. But I love this passage. I love it because this is how I feel when I encounter overwhelming beauty. I feel as if I've been punched in the stomach; when I'm talking about it, sometimes I feel exactly as if my words have that oof sound. I don't know if this is noticeable to anybody else.

The whole of Winn-Dixie, which somewhat incredibly is the author's first novel, is littered with wisdom. It is harder to pin down than the works quoted above. One bit of wisdom is made concrete here:

"Come here, child," Gloria Dump said. She reached for me and pulled me close to her and whispered in my ear, "There ain't no way you can hold on to something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it."

Recently on facebook I saw a friend of a friend of a friend (I saw this because I find facebook-stalking a good way to kill boredom) comment on someone's status. The status was of the genre of status in which the poster wishes to 'be a kid again' in one way or another; the response was something along the lines of "Childhood should be remembered well, but maturity and growing up valued more highly." This sounded like a certain genre of post comment I have encountered, that of the Thinking Christian, and the implication of every comment in this genre is that every Thinking Christian should agree. And I sort of did at the time, though something rankled me about it. And then I realized that at least one of the reasons for this rankling lay in Matthew 18; and while this as a response to the post I am referring to may be out-of-context and therefore not be fair, this all works as an illustration summing up what (if anything) I had to say in this post:

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.

An Open Letter to Barnes and Noble

2010-07-31T00:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Sirs:

You have disgraced yourselves. I am sorry to have to be the one to inform you of this; I, who have spent many happy hours perusing the shelves of your bookstore, who was weaned, as it were, on the smell of the new books emanating from your bookshelves.

Are you catching my drift yet, noble sirs? Why would I put book in my opening paragraph so many times?

I will cease the semantics, sever the cleverness.

I am talking about this abomination you call the Nook.

Perhaps there is a place for e-readers: perhaps. I am thoroughly unconvinced on the subject, but we will grant it for the sake of argument. But if there is a place for them, and if they must be sold, this is not the way to go about it.

Placing a large, rather sleekly garish desk directly in front of the entrances to all of your stores, with sleekly cool-looking men or sexlessly attractive women with grins on their faces and a general attitude as if they are Jehovah's Witnesses here to convert all of the sheeple to their new faith is both blatant and blatantly wrongheaded. We are the descendants of people who formed a new country because the old one was forcing unwanted tea upon us: what else can you, using the abovementioned tactics, expect from these people but outright rebellion? And while rebellion is a heady topic for literature, it is not conducive to the selling of electronics.

Which brings up another point: the fact that this product is, essentially, a more useless iPod. Why are you selling such a thing in your store? The obtusely illustrative stack of books with prices comparing their print versions to their e-versions is potent advertising, it is true. But the fact remains that this product costs $149, plus the cost of whatever books one wants. The latter cost, while more affordable than new hard copies, is not much (if at all) less than one could pay for an actual book at almost any used bookstore.

This is where you are particularly wrong, I daresay even disgraceful, my good sirs. For books are, have long been, and ought always to be something for the masses. They ought to be something that not only the well-dressed businessman or working parent with more disposable income than ideas of how to spend it can afford. Their very appeal lies in the fact that they are affordable to the poor college student, the vagrant off the street, the child with his or her allowance money or hard-earned yard-raking or lawn-mowing or grifting money. There is much appeal to the fact that one can come in with a ten-dollar bill and leave with a brain-stimulating classic or a soul-satisfying romance. There is, furthermore, the fact that one can leave a seven-dollar paperback behind on a bus, or have it rained upon, and treat the matter with a shrug and conceivably buy a new copy the next day. Now, if a $149 e-reader gets left behind on a bus, or rained upon and ruined, even the increasingly small percentage of your clientèle who can afford said bauble will probably treat its demise with more agitation than that.

Speaking of agitation, I have one (or possibly two) more complaints before I post* this. What is greatly agitating is the amount of advertising for the e-reader that occurs in your store. I am often looking, in an access of perfect happiness, at a literature or a science fiction section full of good old (well, new) books, only to have thrust into my sight a sign advertising SAVE MONEY WITH THE NOOK, or similar Advertising Department drivel. The amount of signage and other advertisement begins to make your store take on the aspect of a desperate high school nerd begging a girl who is, as they say, way out of his league, to go to prom with him: PLEASE LOVE ME, the Nook ads seem to say; OR PLEASE NOTICE ME, AT LEAST! AT LEAST CONSIDER NOTICING ME! PLEASE?

Finally, there are the rumors that go around concerning the Nook. I am sure you are aware of them, and I myself am certainly aware of how outlandish are the claims they make. Still, the sheer amount and the terrier-like persistence of said rumors does make one wonder. You know the ones: The Nook eats babies, The Nook is a tool of the Devil, The Nook eats the soul of its owners. Things like that. Clearly unfounded speculation.

Sirs, I have stated my opinion. It was probably a useless thing to do, but at least it made me feel better. It is my hope that you take these things into consideration, and do not end up like the nerdy kid, sitting at home on prom night, weeping because the girl he loves went to the dance with the big dumb football player who reads actual books. But you won't let that be you. Right?

Yours Truly,
Captain Stormfield

P.S. I have a solution: Take all the money you are pouring into Nook advertisements, and invest it in installing special B&N bars next to your cafes. Think about the sheer amount of writers who have been alcoholics; probably a greater number than ever frequented coffee houses. Think of the mural! Twain and Hemingway, over their respective Scotch and Absinthe, laughing over a fallen Scott Fitzgerald, his jug of moonshine clutched to him the way he once held Zelda... Plus, if your store had a bar it would scare away those people who come to your store only to flirt because your store doesn't have a bar. All I ask is that you think about it.

*Note that "post" here can refer to the posting of mail, i.e., the traditional way to send a letter, even an open one.

Uh Fought

2010-07-26T22:05:00.001-07:00

Good friends are like bad drugs. While they're around, in your system, it's wonderful, but when they go away the withdrawal can be a terrible thing; and the only relief for the symptoms of withdrawal is more of the drug. The only relief for the loneliness caused by the absence of friends often seems to be more friends. Often, when particular friends are missed, the only relief seems to be a return to those particular friends whether literally or somehow by proxy.

Because of friendship and the pain it causes sometimes I wish my heart was truly cold, was closed away in some sort of room where love and its contingent heartbreak was a distant reality, something that happened to other people but never came near. But always when I have these thoughts I find myself returning to the words of CS Lewis, in The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Adequate Sleep

2010-07-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

Good grades, adequate sleep, a social life: pick two. Welcome to college.
-Overused but true adage

I have noticed a few times in the past several weeks that I have awakened in the morning to the sound of my alarm clock and have hit the snooze button not because all of my limbs felt bone-tired and my body seemed to be craving extra sleep, but because sleep simply felt nice and I wanted a bit more of it. On getting up, I then noticed that it did not feel like a war to simply stay standing up and get myself ready for the day. Midway through the day I did not feel the need to have a shot of caffeine in order to get through the rest of the day. Every time I sat down I noticed a distinct lack of attempt on my body's part to crash and go to sleep.

This "getting enough sleep" thing is certainly a new and novel experience. I can't decide if I like it or not.

On B&N

2010-07-11T17:47:00.001-07:00

I am informed, by my mother, that Barnes and Noble is a "meat market." Apparently people go there to flirt if they don't like bars. Now, I enjoy flirting as much as the next guy--depending on who the next guy is, I very well might enjoy flirting somewhat more than he does--but if someone tries to flirt with me at the bookstore it will be a problem. See, as much as I like flirting, I like books a manifold amount more. It's not even a contest. It's like if I was a die-hard Star Trek fan, and flirting was watching Star Trek while books were meeting Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and Gene Rodenberry all at the same time. It's not even that I wouldn't necessarily flirt back in a bookstore, though it's eminently possible that even a very cute girl flirting with me while I was looking at books would be very annoying. What is most occurring to me is that if someone tried to flirt with me while I was looking at books, I might not even notice. I'm really curious whether this has happened, actually.

Maybe I'll be more aware next time I go to a bookstore. But probably not. One new Gene Wolfe novel, and I'm lost to the world.

Pirates and Stuff

2010-06-30T11:17:00.001-07:00

Lately I have found myself somewhat surrounded by pirates. This is not necessarily by design, though it may be a result of predeliction.

Bought The Gigantic Book of Pirate Stories, which I named (accurately, I think) Possibly the Coolest Book in the Entire Universe. It has stories, histories, ballads, poems, and other random stuff like ships' charters and a section on the last words of famous pirates. Plus I traded a bunch of stuff in to the used bookstore where I got it, so I didn't spend any money and got rid of a bunch of no-longer-wanted books in exchange for it.

Then I was reading Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second book of the Gentleman Bastards sequence, which is cool simply for combining the epic fantasy and con artist genres--really effectively--and halfway through that book turns into a sort of pirate story.

Yesterday I read the beginnings of a few different YA novels, and was reflecting on how dismal the Young Adult genre can be. Then I picked up Victory, by Susan Cooper, which Yes! is largely about sailing ships (though being much about Admiral Nelson the ships are of a less illegal variety). I read the first couple pages and sighed in relief; Cooper's writing was like diving into a swimming pool after a long time toiling in the hot sun. There's something about a good writer who has been writing for years, a writer whose sentences and paragraphs and rhythm are so self-assured that there can be no question she knows what she is doing, that is completely different from any other reading experience in the world. The sense of this crosses genres; one can get it as easily from a book intended for small children, young adults, or anyone else.

All these nautical encounters will, sooner or later, lead to a re-watching of Pirates of the Caribbean--either all three or the first one multiple times. Maybe both. I can feel it. I was thinking earlier that one of the best parts in the first one is the bit just before the Black Pearl and Barbossa's ship have at each other--when the two ships are pulling alongside each other, all stops pulled, battle about to be joined, and the crews yelling and screaming wordless hostility. It creates a moment of almost unendurable tension before that tension explodes along with the charges in the cannons.

Product of Boredom

2010-06-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

A rose bloomed in my window
Outlined in the falling snow.
The world turned white under an old,
Cold, worn blanket that covered
The land and bent it to its own will.
A petal fell from pane to sill
And stained my white world crimson;
Crimson drops seeped across
The white wood of my floor.
I lay down in them and would weep
But the depths of sleep took me instead.
I slept and I dreamt that I saw
That the world was a great white maw
Into which the Creator wept
Tears of crimson from a great red rose
(That was Himself) and as I close
I awake, somehow, with a great thirst slaked.

Complete Works

2010-06-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

A while ago in a class about British literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras, my prof (a nationally-known Dickens scholar and one of my favorite teachers of all time) was talking about authors whose complete works he had read. He had done all 14 1/2 of Dickens' novels, all 7 of Austen's, most of Thomas Hardy's, among others. Currently he was (probably still is) working on Anthony Trollope, of whom there are only 47 novels to get through. This digression had the effect of making me think of which authors' complete works I wanted to read through.

Of course, saying one has read an author's "complete works" can be a bit of a tricky thing. Does this mean all novels? Novels and short stories? What if the author also wrote essays, plays, songs, screenplays? What if the author's writing in one of these genres, well, sucked? What about things that went unpublished during an author's lifetime, or manuscripts that have been completely lost?

Being a nerd, I have spent some time pondering these questions. My basic conclusion is that it's plenty impressive to have read an author's published work (meaning published in their lifetime, or generally included in the canon of critically considered work by an author), or sometimes to have read an author's major works (Thomas Hardy, for example, has several novels that are almost universally considered lesser works, and nine or so that are considered his major ones). The caveat to this is that there is the possibility of cheating: one can say "I have read all of William Golding's major works" when what one actually means is "I have read Lord of the Flies."

At any rate, the only author whose every work I intend to read (or as close as possible) is, of course, Mark Twain. I have read all of his at-all-major works except two of his later travel books; I also have a couple volumes of his more obscure newspaper columns and letters. When I have read those two travel books I can say with a clean conscience that I have read every at-all-major work by Mark Twain; after those two more obscure volumes I will have to begin digging to make sure there's nothing even more obscure I have missed.

I have also read the complete works of Laurence Sterne, which is less impressive when you realize they consist of two books: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Spain. However, the first of these is one that English professors slog through in grad school, if they finish it at all, and that I read and loved as a senior in high school.

One of my goals this year is to get through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's major works; this consists of 4 1/2 novels and about an equal amount of short stories, 4 or 5 volumes' worth. Once I finish Tender is the Night I will only have his half-finished final novel and all his short stories left.

I have apparently read through most of Stephen Crane (author of The Red Badge of Courage), but that was mostly by accident and occurred in late middle and early high school.

According to Wikipedia, I have read about half of Ernest Hemingway, but that seems like quite enough. I have covered most or all of his major novels, some of the minor ones, and enough short stories to last me... forever. The only work of his I still consciously intend to read is A Moveable Feast, simply because of its profound influence on so many authors.

By the same reliable source, I have read 10 of 19 of Joseph Conrad's novels, and (debateably) 9 of his 12 or so at-all-major ones. Conrad is someone else I intend to read all or most of. He is another one people in college and grad school slog through; most--pretty much all--of what I have read so far I did in high school.

Other authors I want to read in some sort of full measure, just off the top of my head:

Oscar Wilde (about 1/2 read)
Jane Austen (2/7 read)
P.G. Wodehouse (just for kicks--he has 150 or so novels and story collections)
G.K. Chesterton (have read deplorably little of him so far--maybe 3 volumes)
Lord Dunsany (must research his bibliography a bit more)
Edgar Allen Poe (and I have a convenient 1-volume complete works)
Neil Gaiman (have read all of his prose, except a couple YA type books)
E.R. Eddison (1 volume out of 3 1/2)
Gene Wolfe
James Joyce (2 out of 7 or so--and the real monsters yet to be conquered)
Shakespeare

...and this list will continue to increase. Of course, there are some notable absences: Tolkien, CS Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula Le Guin, Connie Willis, Ray Bradbury, and Terry Pratchett are examples of authors I adore but whose utterly complete works I for various reasons do not intend to go about reading.

I bought some powdered water, but I don't know what to add to it.

2010-05-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Since it's been literally two years or so, I decided to do an "Update on life in general and random thoughts, you can read and care if you want to" type of post. In my head I also call this an "Anan-style" blog post, though instead of a song lyric I started with a Steven Wright joke.

Can't say I'm sorry school is over. That is, I already miss some people, and will miss some more as the summer progresses, but currently I'm enjoying not having any deadlines hanging over my head, and having only one young person who is likely to burst into my room at any given moment and try to drag me off on some inane-but-fun adventure. Also the food is better here.

Now, what would make my mostly-contentment just about perfect would be if I could find a regular job. My dad has a 9-4 job weekdays for an indefinite period of time, which limits my options to getting a job in town or getting evenings, weekends, and/or overnights. I think I'd rather like an overnight job--10 PM to 6 AM seem to be my most natural hours to be awake anyway. Otherwise a job in town would be nice, something I could walk to. I've applied at most of the at-all-likely places in town already this past week, and will hit a few more on Monday. I also plan to make up a poster advertising my willingness to do... pretty much anything that will make me money, in the style of an old broadsheet: "Children cared for WITH THE UTMOST TENDERNESS! Yard work done... WITH ALMOST MAGICAL RESULTS! Subjects tutored by one of the most learned minds OF THE ENTIRE MIDWEST!" Something like this.

Over the past few days I watched the entire long version (only 312 minutes) of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Bergman is someone that people like my mom suffer through in film school, and people like me grin and enjoy every minute of. (Usually in film school one watches his The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, neither of which I have seen.) At any rate, this was a momentously incredible movie, of the kind that is not really describable but which leaves one with the general summary impression of: "Wow. Woooooow." One thing I appreciated was that it was about a family of theatre people (granted, set in 1907 Sweden, but theatre people apparently don't change that much). Another thing I appreciated was how bloody bizarre it got. Also, over the course of 312 minutes, the only time I ever got close to being impatient or bored with a scene was right at the end of the whole thing, which is pretty remarkable. (Granted I did not watch the whole thing in one sitting, but it wasn't necessarily meant to be watched that way.)

Thanks to Mr. Gee, I've started listening to Tom Waits, who you really just have to experience to understand.

My reading lately has consisted of Son of the Mob; a book of all the recorded words and dications of Joan of Arc; a book arguing seriously that Atlantis existed (which was greatly entertaining); The Thackery T. Lambshead Book of Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (in which a bunch of fantasy writers play around with disease, also hugely entertaining); and the latest book by R. Scott Bakker, one of the most bizarre modern writers of epic fantasy.

The short summary of my last three paragraphs is that my cultural diet lately has consisted largely of the arcane, outlandish, fantastic, weird, and bizarre. Needless to say, it makes me happy.

Fiction as Remembrance

2010-03-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Often when I go back and read through my stories, it's like reading old journal entries. It's not as though I write autobiographical or even semi-autobiographical fiction, usually (though often mine is partially autobiographical); it's more that whatever I am thinking of or going through at a given time makes it into my stories at a sideways sort of angle, so that reading back through them is like a keyword outline of the thoughts behind it. Like a code only I can understand, and only I know exists.

As a more direct example than usually occurs, in the story "In Which Several Odd Things Happen" from the Ritual cycle, there is a character who contains my grandfather as I remember him from the few years before he died. He was in a nursing home in Mt. Horeb, and we would periodically go see him. He had lost his legs to diabetes, and had a stroke, both when I was fairly young; most of my memories of him are from after this time. In all of my memories he is a gruff, rough-hewn sort of man, and in all of my memories these things provide a thin veneer of causticity over the love and affection he contained for his family, especially his grandchildren. This is him:

Vic opened the door. The room smelled less of chemicals than the hallways did. Several plants lined the windowsill. An old man lay in bed, an old man who stopped just above the knees.

“So, you son of a bitch!” he said jovially. “Actually showed up for once?”

“Shut up,” Vic said. “Where's your damn wheelchair?”

“In the damn closet in a damn mess, like you left it last time,” said the old man.

“Ah,” Vic scoffed as he pulled the wheelchair from the closet. “This is a lot neater than I left it. You've been out since, you guilt-tripping old coot.”

The man shrugged. “Just get me out of this damn room. Who's your friend?”

“Joseph, meet Mr. Wilson. Wilson, this is Joseph.”

The man insisted on shaking Joseph's hand while Vic helped him into the wheelchair.

“You associate with this bastard?” Wilson said.

“Yep,” said Joseph, barely hiding his grin.

“Well, then, you deserve to.”

Or, rather, this is NOT my grandfather. Grandpa didn't swear that much, at least around me, and he was almost never this abrasive. But in the minimal description, in the preparations to go for a walk/ride, in the very speech patterns Wilson uses--in all of these things I find echoes of my grandfather, and I can use them like a rope to find my way back to the real man.

They wheeled him outside and the air was still both refreshing and damp. They took him down the nursing home's walk past some old-timers sitting on the benches lying about their youths and onto the neighborhood sidewalks where Vic had to steer around icy patches and wet patches and where the naked trees bowed over their paths and middle-aged men and women looked out of windows to see them and reflected, uncomfortably, on their own mortality. Wilson grinned. He looked at the trees and grinned to see them bow and he looked at the air and he grinned to see it wet and he looked at the boys and he grinned to see them young and he looked at the blue of the sky and he grinned to see it old far older than he was.

This IS my grandfather. Even in a wheelchair he had a sense of energy and a projection of personality that made anyone who looked at him realize he was alive, was animated, and I think that sense made them reflect on their own mortality, the fact that they would age and die, and perhaps wonder if they would be that alive when they were that old. And when we took him on walks, Grandpa would grin, seemingly at the whole world and everything in it. There was a sense of the foolishness of life, the pervasiveness of vanity, in that grin.

“Fog's comin' in," Wilson said. "You boys make sure you go out and enjoy it, hear?”

“What now?” said Vic.

“I said go out and enjoy the damn fog! Listen, ain't you ever...? Well, listen. Once I was out in fog that was so thick you couldn't see a damn half inch in front of your damn face. Listen. I saw a girl, prettier'n all hell. She had dark chestnut hair all curled an' bobbed, and red lips like a cupid's bow, and white teeth and a gorgeous smile. She wore a red dress and she cut through that fog better'n a spotlight. And she set me all... Well, I followed her, but she looked back and she laughed and she lost me in the fog. Wasn't hard to do, like I said. Well, they said she was Iris Jensen's visiting cousin but there was no way someone ugly as Iris had a cousin that pretty. I knew. I knew she was a Faerie, and she come out because fog's damn magical.”

This, again, is NOT my grandpa; and I have a fear that it is not Wilson either, but that's a topic for another day. It does have my grandpa's speech patterns again, the trailing off, the digressing, though again it is slightly more profane than he was wont to be. It is my grandfather if he had read Lord Dunsany, perhaps. But somehow it is this monologue as much as any other part of the story that connects me to him. I can hear him saying this, can almost feel his presence when I read it, especially aloud. But that is metaphysics. I understand almost as little of what I do when writing this stuff as anyone else; but somewhere in here there is magic, and somehow I do not think it is mine.

3 Poems

2010-03-05T18:27:00.000-08:00

Apathy: A Sonnet

As floodlights flare through foggy dew
Glim'ring yellow and then vanishing,
So do I e'er feel for you,
No matter that you're fair and ravishing.
And when you, darling, descend the stair,
Fair of countenance, lithe of frame,
All I can say is "I don't care,"
Thou all your friends will call me lame.
And at the end of time I'll be,
Perhaps, a sad lonely little man;
But better that than to end up with thee--
At least my own company I can stand.
As long as good fish can dive into the sea,
I'll rest, comfortable, in my apathy.

Maturity: A Love Sonnet

O you are so darling and so dear,
Beautiful in form, academically wise;
Men exotic and men near
Find Faerie flick'ring in your eyes.
And one like me, in lowly place,
Can but stand back and admire
Your clear complexion and your grace,
Your brightly flaring Creator's fire.
And should this grace with which you're gifted
Make you graceful in your turn?
No. You wish your curse was lifted;
And so you all of beauty burn.
I hope for you sake that you do
Grow up and get over you-know-who.

Antipathy: A Sonnet of Romance

Once I had ideals of romance:
Knights and ladies, forms and old conceit.
My ideals never stood a chance
Before your wanton cherubim deceit.
Warmth in your smile lighting up your eyes,
In sympathy you light up lucky lives.
Easy 't were to call it lighted lies,
But real steel lights up real knives.
Out of my benighted scars,
And out of my naive romantic dreams,
You conquered love like the god of Mars
Polluted blue skies and poisoned fragrant streams.
But, love, despite your blackest arts,
You're not an end but merely a new start.

This has been another edition of "Ethan is Amused to an Unwarranted Degree by his Own Work." Tune in next week for our new episode, "Ethan Laughs At His Own Jokes About the Coming Robot Revolution."

Thoughts in the Snow

2010-02-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

The other night there was a heat wave and the temperature got up around freezing, prompting me to take a walk. The snow was falling and as the streetlights shone through it the flakes seemed to regiment themselves into glittering, sparkling armies or armadas of alien ships coming to earth. When I looked at the ground it glimmered too and it looked for all the world like an early computer-generated special effect, as from a bad '80s movie.

As I went I thought of a walk I took early in the fall, in the company of one with whom I was foolishly infatuated. We found a park off the main drag that I was sure had never existed before and that I am sure has never existed since. Certainly I have never found it again. In the foolish daylight hours I attribute this merely to my lack of navigational skills.

We lay down on a flat star-shaped slab, a dried-up fountain, and we looked at the stars and the encroaching clouds and found symbolism in the environment all around us. There were stars in our eyes, glimmering and false. After a while we got cold and went home.

Overall, we acted foolishly and later we would suffer the consequences.

And as I walked the other night I thought that if the Faerie Park reappeared I would go back to that star, that dry fountain, alone, and think about all I had lost. But I can never seem to sustain such cynicism these days. What did I actually lose? I thought. A foolish, flaring feeling, as much akin to sickness as to joy; a thing comparable to real love only as the wailing of the wind is comparable to human song.

Recently a dear friend told me that during that time she felt as though I were being taken away from her. I don't know how much hyperbole was in this statement (she is given, a bit, to hyperbole), but no matter how hyperbolic it was it still left me feeling tearful, a bit, and wanting to tell her that there was no way, ever, I would be taken away; at least not like that. But I couldn't. For how am I to know the future? How can I say what will end up happening? All I could honestly have said was that I never want that to happen; and that seemed like cold comfort.

But in a way, I suppose, I could have said that it would never happen. For the heart is not rational, and it is not a moralistic thing; neither is it physical or limited by distance. If it were any of those, beauty could never exist and love could never occur. Perhaps if I marry my heart will all be kept in one place; but for now it is fragmented. It is with my family, it is with those friends who have become like family. And oh, how it hurts sometimes; and oh, how I would have it no other way.

Reading Goals

2010-02-04T13:59:00.001-08:00

Because yes, on top of being a college student I need to set other goals for myself for things like casual reading, something for which everyone knows college students NEVER EVER HAVE TIME.

I'm not doing the 100-book challenge again, because as I have alluded to before while it was great fun it did push me toward reading shorter books. But Mr. Gee gave me a different almost-challenge which I have decided to accept: to read no books this year under 500 pages long. Except there are a few exceptions to my acceptance.

1. School books, of course. Many of my classes this semester have disappointingly small textbooks.

2. I do intend to read through Scott Fitzgerald's major works this year. That seems like a fine goal in and of itself.

3. I reserve the right to read short works when I feel like it. One needs a short book after a certain number of large tomes.

4. Also, there are a few series that I want to read/finish, not all of which contain 500-page volumes. However, they all have a combined length of 500 pages, so I will read them together and count them as one.

The end.

Computer Science and College

2010-01-22T15:21:00.001-08:00

Computer Science

A Certain College

I saw the second article first, and thought that MSU's decision to cut computer science was extremely ridiculous before even reading the first article. Could there be a correlation here? Ie, are more colleges cutting computer science programs? Or is MSU just coincidentally stupid?

A Year of Books

2010-01-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

This is the part of the blog where Ethan comes out and makes comments about all of the books he read last year. If you are feeling very nerdy, bored, or masochistic you may want to read all of his comments. If you want to skip that crap and get to the point you may go to the end where Ethan will list his "must-reads" and "must-avoids."

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
2. Salome, by Oscar Wilde
3. The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
4. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde

Being a Wilde-lover, I can hardly be expected to make objective unbiased comments on his works. However, it is my opinion that every literary person should read these four. Picture, of course, is a classic; and a better and more tragic rendering of original sin I have never encountered.
De Profundis was written while Wilde was in prison, and we see a much humbler and in many ways much more profound Wilde than previously. He says some of the most beautiful, profound things about Christ I have seen in a while.
Importance is, of course, the classic of stage wit; Salome contains some wonderful prose poetry (also a play, I don't know how speakable it is, but it's a great read).

5. Poems, Poems in Prose, and a Fairy Tale, by Oscar Wilde
6. Anecdotes and Sayings of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde et al.
7. The Critic as Artist, by Oscar Wilde
Also brilliant stuff, of course, though less essential. Critic is esoteric almost, though not quite, to the point of unintelligebility. I loved it.

8. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Massive, surreal, brilliant novel from one of the world's best living authors.

9. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
The type of book I read for a somewhat guilty pleasure, about rich kids at a private school. Suprprisingly intelligent for its genre.

10. This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The second out of a projected many times I read this. The novel that proved to me that college students haven't changed in 90 years.

11. The Roots of African-American Drama
For American lit class. It covered the early period, back before African-American writing was filled with self-important pretentious whining.

12. The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Also for class. Approximately the seventy-nine millionth reading for me. Still wonderful.

13. Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose [Reading for Class]
Was only assigned the first few chapters; I've been meaning to go back and read the rest. Very interesting book which shows one how to do exactly what the title implies.

14. The Writer's Book of Days, by Judy Reeves
15. Creating The Accomplished Image [Partly read, for class]
16. The People's Bible Commentary: Romans
17. Wheelock's Latin
18. God's No and God's Yes, by CFW Walther [half-read, for
class]
More books for various classes. All hold some merit in their specific field; nothing incredibly remarkable.

19. The Urth of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The one-volume sequel to the four-volume Book of the New Sun, it's utterly brilliant, though you have to read the first four books first.

20. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken
I heard this described somewhere as "whimsical without being sentimental." Somewhat along the lines of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," but better.

21. The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
One of those books where Lewis takes 100 pages and changes your entire life.

22. Manalive, by G.K. Chesterton
See 21, with Chesterton's name instead of Lewis's. Brilliant little novel.

23. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
Lost some of its punch for having seen most of this done in novels like 1984. Some brilliant passages, and Burgess is a very good and interesting writer.

24. Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
One of my favorite collections of short stories ever. Magic realism with a vengeance. The title story alone is worth the price of admission.

25. The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany
Replaced "The King of Elfland's Daughter" as my favorite Dunsany. If you like lyrical prose and faerie-tale-esque fantasy, read this book. (If you can find it.)

26. One More For The Road, by Ray Bradbury
A not particularly impressive collection of Bradbury shorts, though it has a few gems of brilliance.

27. Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg
Another old favorite. Silverberg is at his best writing novellas, and these five are some of his best novellas.

28. The Halfling and Other Stories, by Leigh Brackett
An interesting, often superbly done, collection of short stories by the writer of "The Empire Strikes Back."

29. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
I rather liked this play, against all expectation.

30. Figures of Earth, by James Branch Cabell
Wonderful satire of Arthurian type heroism, by another master of prose.

31. The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
32. The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
Of these two plays, the first one is rather funny and I was proud of myself for catching most of the 30s cultural references, and the second one, while powerful, was rather a failure.

33. The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch
Somewhat like a cross between "Ocean's 11" and a standard urban adventure fantasy, but freshly written and with good characters and story. A literary Big Mac with fries.

34. Coffee at Luke's, edited by Jennifer Cruisie
People writing intellectually about the series "Gilmore Girls," which, yes, I watch. The writing on that show is brilliant. Shut up.

35. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
I hated it for the first half, then fell more and more in love through the second. When I reread it I expect to love the whole thing.

36. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
Better than Salesman.

37. The Fabulous Tom Mix, by Olive Stokes Mix [half-read, research purposes]
An excellent book for information on the very beginning of the silent film era, and one of the first ever movie stars.

38. Nightside the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
50. Lake of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
51. Calde of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
52. Exodus From the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The Book of the Long Sun is not quite as satisfying as New Sun books, but being Gene Wolfe is still fairly brilliant.

39. Who is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain
A new collection of unfinished and unpublished Twain. There's some pretty funny stuff here.

40. The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
Fairly typical Gaiman, but there are a lot of cool and subtle things to it that one might miss if one was not careful. It grows on one after one has read it, too.

41. Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger
Brilliant. Became my favorite Salinger until I read "Franny and Zooey."

42. Dutchman, Amiri Baraka
That whiny pretentious boring African-American drama I was talking about? A pretty good example of such.

43. Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller
A wonderful collection of essays on Christianity in the postmodern world. Miller isn't Lutheran, but he has some excellent thoughts.

44. Smoke, by Ivan Turgenev
45. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
46. First Love, by Ivan Turgenev
If anything, I liked "Smoke" much more than "Fathers and Sons," though the latter is a much more famous novel. Didn't really like Turgenev in general, though.

47. The Name Above the Title, by Frank Capra
Capra, who made (often wrote or co-wrote and directed) films like "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Lost Horizon," and "It's a Wonderful Life," writes a brilliant biography. It's worth reading for anyone interested in movies or writing, or just looking for a big, entertaining book.

48. The Story of Film, by Mark Cousins
For nerds only, but for nerds it's heaven. All of the film history you'll need in one place.

49. A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne
Not as utterly brilliant as Tristram Shandy, but worth reading--and at 150 pages, about 1/8th of the length of TS.

53. Heroes of the Valley, by Jonathan Stroud
54. The Last Siege, by Jonathan Stroud
The first book is invented-world fantasy, the second a real-world story about British school kids with no particular fantasy element (though set in an old castle). Both were well-written and solid stories; I was impressed with Stroud by the time I was done.

55. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Wonderfully funny time-travel novel. The action takes place largely in the Victorian era. If those two categories sound at all attractive, it is recommended.

56. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
A book about why, when we know so much about things like atoms and what stars are made of and everything else there is to know, humans know so very little about ourselves.

57. Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today, by John Kleinig [Partly read; book klub]
A decently readable book of Lutheran theology for the layman.

58. Storeys from the Old Hotel, by Gene Wolfe
59. The Wolfe Archipelago, by Gene Wolfe
I don't think Wolfe is as comfortable in the short form as he is writing multi-volume novels, but there is good stuff here, especially in the Archipelago.

60. Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer
What happens when an atheist sci-fi writer attempts to posit God. Besides a couple of utterly ridiculously drawn Southern Baptist wacko characters, Sawyer makes an even-handed attempt, but he ultimately fails at writing either good theoretical theology or an entertaining novel.

61. Rude Mechanicals, by Kage Baker
62. Black Projects, White Knights, by Kage Baker
63. Gods and Pawns, by Kage Baker
64. Dark Mondays, by Kage Baker
Of these three story collections, the first two are worth reading if you've read the rest of Bakers Company novels; the final one is non-Company, and has some pretty good stuff.

65. Questions of Truth, by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
Two Anglican scientists argue that the theory of evolution is in no way incompatible with religion. After reading, I am inclined to agree on this broad point, even if I disagree on a lot of their sub-points.

66. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, by Garrison Keillor
Good, fun book, if dirty in places.

67. Carry On Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse
It's Jeeves. What more can I say?

68. Either You're In Or You're In The Way, by Noah and Logan Miller
Utterly cool non-fiction book about two brothers who started with literally no money and no experience, and made an award-winning movie.

69. A City in Winter, by Mark Helprin
70. The Veil of Snows, by Mark Helprin
71. Swan Lake, by Mark Helprin
This trilogy of dreamlike fantasy has unexpected teeth. Its elegance provides a welcome break from the hectic nature of real life.

72. Believer Beware, edited by Jeff Sharlet et. al.
A collection of essays "from the edge of religion." Worth reading for anyone interested in the postmodern religious scene.

73. The Merchant of Venice, by Shakespeare
75. Richard III, by Shakespeare
76. Othello, by Shakespeare
80. The Tempest, by Shakespeare
82. King Lear, by Shakespeare
84. Sonnets, by William Shakespeare
90. The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare
95. Much Ado About Nothing, by Shakespeare
The stuff we read for Shakespeare class. For wonderful examples of how to run a play and how to write in English and insights into human nature, I recommend any of them. For good entertainment, I reccomend Merchant, RIII, Tempest, Lear, Sonnets, Taming, and the scenes in Much Ado with Benedick and Beatrice.

74. Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
Being forced to read the whole thing for class, I discovered that after the first 50 pages (as far as I'd gotten on previous attempts) it gets much better.

77. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
Eh.

78. The Laramie Project, by Moises Kaufman et al
79. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
81. Proof, by David Auburn
83. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The four plays we read for Playwriting class, except Oedipus was for Lit Crit. Godot was amazing, if you like surrealism. Laramie Project, about the brutal murder of a gay man in Wyoming, I found interesting stylistically and very moving emotionally.

85. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, the Restoration through 1800
Eh.

86. Winter's Tales, by Isak Dinesen
Dinesen, the author of the short story "Babbette's Feast," is wonderful. That's all I will be able to say without going on for pages.

87. Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger
This became my favorite Salinger. Everything else he wrote is now officially better than "Catcher in the Rye."

88. The Controversy Between the Puritans and the Stage, by Elbert Thompson
Very interesting book, read for research-paper purposes.

89. Lost Worlds, by Clark Ashton Smith
A 30s pulp writer along the lines of RE Howard (Conan), Smith's quality wildly varies. He's worth reading just for the bizzare stuff he comes up with.

91. The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, various authors
Oh my head hurts.

92. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
A fictional correspondence between a London author and inhabitants of the only English territory occupied during World War II, taking place just after the war, the characters are so honest, charming, and witty that it made me want to be there or at least be English.

93. Peace, by Gene Wolfe
Again, it's Wolfe, and again his utter brilliance shines through. Many people think this is his best novel.

94. Great Joy, by Kate DiCamillo
Okay, so it's a picture book. But the illustrations are beautiful and because it's DiCamillo writing the text said text is touching and beautiful in its own right.

96. Waverely, by Sir Walter Scott
Ugh. Scott stretches two hundred pages' worth of story, prose skill, and cleverness over about six hundred pages.

97. Reading the OED, by Ammon Shea
Awesome book about a guy who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary over the course of a year. He pulls out the best forgotten words. "Onmotomania" is my favorite.

98. Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
Fun YA alternate history steampunk.

99. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer
100. The Fabulous Riverboat, by Philip Jose Farmer
The first half of the SF classic Riverworld series. Good fun, especially if you like history.

101. How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff
Sort of post-apocalyptic YA novel. I liked it.

102. Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
The follow-up to Harrison's "Light," which I read last year, could have been shorter but its surreal glory is not lessened for that.

103. Anecdotes of Destiny, by Isak Dinesen
This collection contains "Babette's Feast," and while none of the other stories match it, they are all very good as well.

104. The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis
See "Abolition of Man."

105. The Owl Service, by Alan Garner
Interesting forgotten YA fantasy. The writing style is nearly perfect, very subtle, and the Celtic roots are used brilliantly.

106. Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock
Probably the hundred and sixth or so time I've read this one. Moorcock still continues to anger and intrigue me in equal amounts.

So. Now for categories.

Books Everyone Should Read to be Human:
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
Salome, by Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
The Urth of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe (After reading the first 4 New Sun books)
The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
Manalive, by G.K. Chesterton
The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
Anecdotes of Destiny, by Isak Dinesen (even if it's only "Babette's Feast.")
The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis

Books Everyone should Read Who Wants to be Literate:
The Critic as Artist, by Oscar Wilde
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger
Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
All the Shakespeare, of course
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger
Peace, by Gene Wolfe
Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock

Books Not Part of the Previous Two Categories but Still Worth Reading:
Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg
The Halfling and Other Stories, by Leigh Brackett
Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
Figures of Earth, by James Branch Cabell
The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
Nightside the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
Lake of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
Calde of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
Exodus From the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
The Name Above the Title, by Frank Capra
A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
A City in Winter, by Mark Helprin
The Veil of Snows, by Mark Helprin
Swan Lake, by Mark Helprin
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer
The Fabulous Riverboat, by Philip Jose Farmer
The Owl Service, by Alan Garner

Books to Avoid:
Dutchman, Amiri Baraka
Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer

And yet... I feel like I've barely put a dent in my "To Be Read" list.

Book list 2010

2010-01-04T11:34:00.001-08:00

I read 101 full books last year, thereby fulfilling the challenge upon which I embarked. I won't be trying it again this year, because while it was fun, I found it nudged me toward a proclivity to reading short books, in order to make sure I could have higher numbers. So this year I'm just going to keep track of the books I read without a specific goal in mind. This is especially helpful because most of the books that are getting to the top of my miles-long "to be read" list are long-ish.

Books Read, 2010
1. Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough [Half-read on break, will hopefully finish later]
2. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
3. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain
4. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
5. Gorgias, by Plato
6. Phaedrus, by Plato
7. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
8. Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud
9. The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood
11. MacBeth, by Shakespeare
12. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
13. The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht
14. Fences, by August Wilson
15. The Atlantis Enigma, by Herbie Brennan
16. Joan of Arc: In her Own Words, edited by Willard Trask
17. Son of the Mob, by Gordon Korman
18. The Judging Eye, by R. Scott Bakker
19. The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
20. Alan Mendelssohn, the Boy From Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater
21. Slaves of Spiegel, by Daniel Pinkwater
22. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch
24. How to be Alone: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen
25. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
26. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
27. Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
28. First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings, by Edward Sorel and Nancy Caldwell Sorel
29. Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech
30. Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, by Lynne Jonell
31. Victory, by Susan Cooper
32. The End of the Beginning, by Avi
33. A Beginning, a Muddle and an End, by Avi
34. The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo
35. Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
36. Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow
37. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, by Neil Gaiman
38. Sandman: The Doll's House, by Neil Gaiman
39. Sandman: Dream Country, by Neil Gaiman
40. Sandman: Season of Mists, by Neil Gaiman
41. Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman
42. Sandman: Fables and Reflections, by Neil Gaiman
43. Sandman: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman
44. Sandman: World's End, by Neil Gaiman
45. Sandman: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman
46. Sandman: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman
47. Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman
48. Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman
49. The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, by Bruce McAllister
50. Theater/Theory/Theater, ed. Robert Gerould
51. Ironheart, by Victoria Tecken
52. Miss Julie, by August Strindberg
53. Two Rooms, by Lee Blessing
54. Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics, Various Authors
55. The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo
56. The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart
57. Broadway Bound, by Neil Simon
58. Dramatic Theory and Criticism, ed. Bernard F. Dukore
59. Holding Onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium, by Albert Borgman
60. How to Conduct Organizational Surveys, by Jack Edwards et al.
61. Selections from "Against Verres," by Cicero
62. Following the Equator, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
63. Showdown, by Ted Dekker
64. Panzer Commander, by Hans von Luck
65. Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks
66. Post-Scarcity Anarchism, by Murray Bookchin
67. The Mabinogion, by Anonymous Welsh Poet(s), translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones
68. Ink on Their Fingers, by Victoria Kasten and Benjamin Tecken

Year-Ending Blurp

2009-12-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

I have at least three topics on which to blog, potentially, though I find myself periodically forgetting either what they were or what in particular I had to say about them. I will likely either not mention them again or do several posts in one day to make up for months of silence.

The Owl Service became the 100th full book I read this year. After New Year's I will post a full review of my book list, for all the people who will be soooo interested (read: no one). In the meantime, I have mapped a play that I'm not sure I like, and have read an average of about 3/4s of a book per day since semester ended. Three cheers for vacation.

Party in the USA

2009-11-14T12:38:00.000-08:00

The young man walked into his wing’s bathroom, toothbrush inserted into his mouth, scrubbing vigorously. The radio on the sink counter—a dilapidated thing older than many of the inhabitants of this wing of the dorm—was blaring the vehement inanity that was the pop station. Four songs a day, repeated ad nauseam. Currently playing for the umpteen millionth time was Miley Cyrus and her “Party in the U.S.A.” It was a song the indignity of which the young man had been bearing repeatedly for well over three months now; it was a song he had taken an immediate dislike to, for its synthetic trickery, its obvious lack of authenticity, its complete disregard of good taste and of musical complexity and tradition.

But, standing above the sink scrubbing his teeth and too lazy to expend the effort needed to reach out and turn the dial to a bearable station, the young man found himself for the first time ever listening to the lyrics. And, despite himself, he found that he was sympathetic. Maybe it really was just a song about a girl coming to a new place, lost and lonely and scared, for whom the musical tradition of her childhood provided a link to her past and her tradition…

The young man stopped and stared at himself in the mirror, frozen mid scrub. His eyes widened and he looked at himself as though he were an alien, a sub human, someone who had escaped from the circus. Miley Cyrus? A lost little girl? Jay-Z and Britney Spears her musical forebears, a legitimate part of her tradition? What was pop music doing to him?

He spat in disgust into the sink, rinsed his mouth, rinsed his toothbrush and stomped out of the bathroom with a thunder cloud above his head. A few minutes later he returned bearing a small screw driver. He turned the dial on the clock radio to another station, then bent down and did some close work with the screw driver. The plate on the side of the radio came off, and a few sparks leapt from the old man’s interior. The young man walked away, a smile on his face, followed by his own personal ray of sunlight.

The radio, meanwhile, was wafting classical music. Its dial appeared to have been removed, so that never again could it be changed to Pop Nausea. The young man slept well that night.