Dedalus Enterprises

Sagely Advice

2010-10-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

In thinking about human affairs, always call common sense into question. It is the most creative part of philosophy. Take ideas which are commonly accepted and which seem to be incontrovertible and question them. Turn them inside out and see what would happen if they were thought about in another way.

This from our friend Alan Watts. If Dedalus Enterprises has a motto, it very well could be that. And it applies to everything from metaphysics to politics to Star Wars.

Rely not on the teacher, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but experience. Do not believe in anything because you have heard of it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

This from the Buddha himself, right out of the Kalama Sutra. Honestly, is this not remarkably sane? If someone had inserted just such a paragraph anywhere into the texts of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, one stands in awe how much trouble could have perhaps been avoided.

And incidentally, if you're looking for another blog full of philososphical mischief and cosmic wonder, might I suggest Hardcore Zen? I am almost finished with Brad Warner's new book, Sex, Sin, and Zen, and it is fantastic. Be sure to pick up yours at Borders today!

The Whos Down in Whoville

2010-05-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

It is almost impossible not to experience a delicious thrill of delight rolling down your spine when the Doctor introduces his new, awestruck companion to the interior of the TARDIS, and proceeds to offer her the journey of a lifetime. One that can encompass "Everywhere and anywhere. All of time and space. Everything that ever has happened or ever will. Every star that ever was ... where do you want to start?"

Pure storytelling magic. But that's Doctor Who for you. After the first ten minutes of the new series, we're all wide-eyed children again.

Sure, so many of us were skeptical after David Tennant finished up his triumphant reign as the Tenth Doctor. Arguably, he was more popular in the role than anyone but perhaps Tom Baker and his scarf back in the seventies. No one had any idea who this Matt Smith guy was. His hair was weird, he was too young for the part, and most troubling of all, he wanted to wear a bow-tie!

Well, I am relieved to announce that somehow, someway, Matt has pulled it off, bow-tie and all. Actually, I want a bow-tie now. The tweed jacket is really working for him too. Impossibly, he has made the transition as painless as possible, so much so that after the opening scene, he seems a perfectly natural successor.

After seeing the first few episodes, I am already very attached to the Eleventh Doctor, not to mention his companion, Amy Pond. With Stephen Moffat at the helm, the writing has been superb, perfectly capturing the fairy tale feel they wanted to weave through this series.

We've already had giant eyeball spaceships, ominous cracks in the walls of the universe, futuristic Britains floating in orbit, gun-totting amnesiac queens, benevolent star whales, Daleks fetching tea for Winston Churchill, World War II dogfights in outer space, and now the return of the much loved (and much feared) Weeping Angels! And did I mention we're just four episodes in?

The stories have been fascinating and multi-layered, with enough imagination to fill at least two or three television shows. As always, it has generous doses of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, drama, tragedy, humor, and maybe even a hint of romance.

And yeah, that new steampunk TARDIS is about the coolest thing I have ever seen!

Quite frankly, Doctor Who is about the best thing to be geeking out about right now. If you are not a part of this, well, you're seriously missing out. Next to it, American television continues to be a joke. If I honestly had to sit down and watch American networks every night, I would take a baseball bat to my own skull without a moment's hesitation or regret. FOX, from hell's heart, I continue to stab at thee.

All I can say is, now that the transition is over, I cannot wait to see how it all turns out on the other side of the pond. Tune in on BBC America and help make those record-breaking numbers a little more spectacular (though they do truncate episodes to an alarming degree!).

Not that Doctor Who fans wouldn't watch it on TV and have bootlegs or anything ... nope ... never ... why are you looking at me like that?

Series Five Trailer

Reclaiming Pandora

2010-04-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

“Learn well, Jakesully. We will see if your insanity can be cured.”

Kaltxi one and all.

This is my long awaited philosophical exploration of Avatar, the James Cameron film that has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Months before the film's release, most of us had heard the story behind the story. We knew Cameron had conceived Avatar well over a decade ago. We knew he had to wait years for technology to catch up with the visions conjured by his imagination. We'd heard again and again how this promised to be a lavish, epic 3-D experience, a panoramic digital painting of an alien world with a level of detail previously unheard of.

As the hype began to build, trailers surfaced online, and hushed presentations premiered on the convention circuits. We soon learned that the film centered around a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully, and took place a hundred and fifty years into a grim future. With the Earth's resources almost exhausted, a mega-corporation known as the RDA had found a new world to plunder, though it was light years away.

Calling upon Jake to take his late twin brother's place, the RDA brought him into their Avatar program. On a beautiful, rich moon named Pandora, he became an avatar of the native humanoids who lived there. Known as the Na'vi, these exotic, ten-foot tall blue aboriginals reluctantly agreed to train Jake in their ways. Though originally sent to infiltrate the peaceful tribe, he soon falls for a striking Na'vi called Neytiri, experiences a profound connection with the wondrous forests of Pandora, and predictably questions his own loyalties.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Though the most expensive movie ever made, Avatar eventually spun box office gold. It is now the most successful movie of all time, earning over two billion dollars worldwide, and even eclipsing Titanic at the box office. It was nominated for a handful of Academy Awards, and won three of them. It was also a significant critical success, though some have argued its story is somewhat clichéd and its themes are one-dimensional.

I had hotly anticipated the film's release, poring over the trailers and even buying the art book and the soundtrack ahead of time. Still, after that first midnight showing, I'd felt like some of the critics. The visuals were undeniably spectacular, the music was stunning, and the direction was exciting and imaginative. Nonetheless, the story and the script had seemed very one-note to me, not really providing the depth my analytical mind enjoys feasting on. What was worse, at times the film felt more like a static political allegory, and less like the grand, multi-layered myth I'd been expecting.

To be sure, Avatar has generated a fair amount of political controversy. While the left has not been without criticism, the right has been particularly adamant about chastising the film. Rightly or wrongly, they have seen it as attacking capitalism, criticizing the war on terror, and clobbering unwitting audiences with an aggressive environmental message.

For me, the film unarguably contained two or three lines of overt political dialogue, and they hindered my enjoyment during that initial showing. While my concerns are most certainly with humanity as well as with our planet, I cannot help but shrink away from the political side of things. Not only do I personally find politics divisive, unintelligent, and consistently playing to the lowest common denominator, more often than not, it seems real issues are hijacked and become little more than fodder for campaign platforms.

Whether I personally agree or disagree with Cameron's political sympathies is beside the point, because as far as I'm concerned, politics themselves are beside the point. The sometimes smug, usually fevered politicizing of environmental issues is something of a minor tragedy. After all, even though the right and left wings live in different worlds, they do share the same planet. Unfortunately all both sides do now is engage in territorial threat displays, flashing their colored crests at each other like massive Pandoran Hammerhead Titanotheres. And in the process kick up so much dust no one can see a thing.

As the poet William Blake said, politics seemed to him to be "something other than human life," and human life is what this blog is exploring. Particularly how we experience that life, and how that experience informs our relationship with everything else.

That sort of thing really appeals to me, though I didn't see much of it in Avatar the first time. But I was still interested, and so I sat back and watched as the film grew into an unstoppable phenomenon. Clearly, it was resonating with audiences, and with some of them on that deep, mythic level I'd expected and wanted. So much so that many even felt empty and depressed when they had to walk out of the theaters and into our own troubled world.

Fortunately, someone convinced me to go see it again, and I enjoyed it considerably more the second time around. Things started clicking for me, as if the story had been waiting to gel. Then I finally dropped my preconceptions altogether, and went to see it a third time alone. I was transported even more this time, and it became a magical movie-going experience. Now I own the Blu-Ray, and the visual quality remains utterly stunning.

After immersing myself in it, I can honestly there is much to love in Avatar. I love the story, the characters, and even much of the dialogue. I love the creatures, the fauna, and the entire moon of Pandora. Most of all, I love the Na'vi culture, especially the Omaticaya tribe we as the audience are initiated into. In the end, they taught me about as much as they did Jake Sully, at least as far as appreciating the film goes.

Undeniably, Avatar provides a very visceral experience for film-goers. The 3-D practically envelops the theater on a good day, and one can almost swim in the spectacle of the bioluminescent forests at night. Connection is a big theme in the film, and it is easy to connect with the action here. Alongside Jake Sully's avatar, audiences can thunder about on mighty, six-legged direhorses, skate over the uppermost branches of the primordial trees, and soar through the air on enormous, four-winged mountain banshees.

Not to mention simply sit back and savor the majesty of the floating Hallelujah Mountains.

But what struck me most of all, what freed the film from any and all political commentary and opened it up to considerable philosophical interpretation, was one simple line. When it was being decided whether Jake would be taught the ways of the Omaticaya tribe, Neytiri's mother Mo'at was interested in one thing, and one thing only.

Mo'at wanted to know if Jake Sully's "insanity can be cured." And by extension, the insanity afflicting the whole of humanity. Now this was something I could philosophically sink my teeth into.

For some time, it has seemed a distinct possibility to me that modern human beings feel, interpret, and experience reality - and really our very existence - in an utterly dissociative, almost schizophrenic way. The reasons for this are complicated, but much of it boils down to the nature of our self-conscious minds. With the ability to endlessly intellectualize, to conjure up concepts and ideas about life, we have lost much of our basic connection to life. We are trained to live in a commentary on reality, rather than in reality itself. This handicap is in no small measure the reason for both our estrangement from nature, as well as our often destructive technological relationship to it.

In his wonderful book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig looks back over the history of the Western World and comes to the same basic conclusion. Investigating the underpinnings of modern civilization, the narrator even remarks -

And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained the power to understand and rule the world in dialectical truths had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

And indeed, Avatar was saying much the same thing. No cinematic creation in recent memory is more a part of their world than the Na’vi, and they even reflected on the impossibility of teaching someone who’s "cup is already full.”

This is of course evocative of a modern mind filled to the brim with so many ideas and preconceptions it can no longer process anything else, much in the same way that an RDA executive is so convinced the real wealth of Pandora is in the market value of Unobtanium rather than in the spiritual wonder of the moon itself.

It is a mentality that has no problem crashing through grove after grove of sacred trees with massive construction vehicles just for another wad of money, an artificial symbol of wealth. It is a mentality that likewise kills Jake's brother, a living, breathing human being, for nothing but "the paper in his wallet." The Na'vi princess Neytiri provides a stunning counterpoint to this when she mourns and prays over the pack of viper-wolves she had to kill in order to save Jake, addressing them as brothers and sisters.

The point of this essay is that scenes like this have absolutely nothing to do with politics, nor can they simply be chalked up to unrestrained corporate greed. They have to do with the institutionalized cultural insanity that has nurtured and developed such a mentality both in the fictional arena of the film, as well as in our own reality. What we are dealing with is a psychological fracture in the way human consciousness has evolved, a neurological divide between the holistic right side of the brain and the hopelessly analytical left, and the way that schism dictates how we view the world. No matter how many plastic bags we recycle or how eco-friendly our corporations become, it is very likely no fundamental change can occur until things are dealt with on some existential level.

As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it, and there is no indication whatsoever that politics are capable of or even interested in exploring deeper issues. On the contrary, a political mind is one of the fullest cups on the planet, and if human beings are ever to "see" life the way the Na'vi do, politics is probably the first thing that needs to be jettisoned.

This may be borderline heresy for some people, but the story is largely told from this point of view. When Neytiri takes Jake under her wing, and teaches him how to tease out the faintest "scents and sounds" of the forest, how to feel the "network of energy" that flows through all living things, and shows him to respect the "spirits of animals," she is not making political statements. This cannot be stressed enough.

The statement she is making has to do with a complete psychological orientation that values the unity of life over the isolation of the self-conscious ego. She brings him into full participation with the one life that the Na'vi see in all things, and she does so by hunting and swimming, chanting and flying, diving from tree branch to tree branch, and precariously using large leaves to slide down enormous heights. As Jake muses, with Neytiri, he has to "trust his body to know what to do," and that it's either "learn fast or die." She certainly doesn't break out pie charts and lecture him on the injustices of deforestation.

The Na'vi are able to live as they do because that is the way they interpret and mythologize their existence. They let nature speak for herself, specifically through the planetary neural consciousness they personify as the living goddess Eywa. One of the most fascinating things about their culture is that the spiritual has no identity separate from the material, and even their deity only serves the greater "balance of life."

Indeed, their religion consecrates everything they touch, so much so that the corporate executive Parker Selfridge complains that you can't drop a stick on the moon without "hitting some sacred fern." It is a spirituality that is about moving in harmony with nature, rather than perceiving it as something fallen or sinful, something that needs to be conquered and corrected.

But keep in mind, the Na'vi do not live this way to hammer home a political ideology, much less because they're environmentalists. It seems highly likely they would simply see environmentalism as another aspect of our insanity that needs to be cured, if for no other reason than a true Na'vi would never conceive of themselves as something separate from the environment to begin with!

Their entire existence speaks of connection, from the way they all form a network around someone who has been "reborn" into the Omaticaya tribe, the way their braided qeues allow them to essentially download their consciousness into that of other creatures, the way they mate for life under the trees of voices, and even the way in which they are cradled in cocoon-like beds by their beloved Hometree every night.

If the Na'vi are telling us anything, it is that we're going to have to come back to our senses. But if we're going to do that, we're first going to have to go out of our minds - or at least out of the endless narration going on in them that serves to cut us off from life's ebb and flow. Much like Jake Sully, humanity is going to have to learn to sink into the rhythms of nature again, to move with them as easily as branches seeking sunlight, and to foster a deep love and respect for them. In other words, we are all going to have to abandon our old wheelchairs and our old habits and our old mindsets, and learn to walk all over again.

It may be remarkably easy to forget in a world of traffic jams and skyscrapers, but human beings bloomed out of the rich fabric of nature as surely as any tree or flower. There is no fence with humanity on one side and nature on the other, no matter what our social systems or religions or philosophies or sciences may have sometimes argued. The reason Avatar resonates so deeply is because this primal connection with the entirety of nature, what the Na'vi call shahaylu, was also experienced by modern homo sapiens for the better part of the last 100,000 years. It's just the last few thousand that have been so rough.

Yet this natural bond is still direct and immediate, and can be experienced in the biological legacy of our own bodies. After all, our physical organisms are ecosystems of marvelous intricacy and intelligence in their own right, with river systems of veins and arteries and vast root networks of neurons and dendrites. The deep organic wisdom that the Na'vi revere as Eywa is surely the same as the natural patterns that grow our bones, color our hair, animate our limbs, and beat our hearts. We continually miss it because we regard intelligence as something that exists almost solely behind the eyes and between the ears, as if we get in our bodies and drive them around, not unlike the mercenary Colonel Quaritch in his mechanized AMP suit.

Keep in mind this identity with all of life is not, as Dr. Grace Augustine pointed out in the film, "some pagan voodoo." That we are intimately connected to everything around us is evident in the genetic history of every cell in our bodies, starting with the lineage of our parents, then our extended family, then our ancestors, and then into the animal kingdom, and finally into the entire planetary whole, including earth and air, sky and water. Our senses and nervous systems imbue our reality with light, smell, taste, sound, temperature, weight, and color, our bodies unconsciously playing the continuum of nature as a master pianist plays a piano.

But again, all of this has to do with states of consciousness and awareness, not red states versus blue ones. The Na'vi are raised to perceive life as an organic whole, whereas socialized human beings are largely hypnotized into seeing it as an assembled machine that can only be grasped through elaborate signs and symbols.

While it is true that such an orientation enables the humans in the world of Avatar to do amazing things like launch the enormous spaceship Venture Star and travel five light years to the Alpha Centauri system, it also inhibits them from understanding what Pandora truly is when they get there. As Pirsig pointed out, in this bargain we have lost what it means to be a part of the world in exchange for our ability to rule it through language, science, mathematics, and technology.

The late great mythologist Joseph Campbell said it best -

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

The trick is simply feeling this to be so, to bring it into our awareness, even when everything around us is screaming the opposite.

In closing, this sort of orientation cannot really grow in an atmosphere of divisive politics, ecological sermonizing, or doom-laden warnings concerning climate change. Quite frankly, the average individual really has no control over such things anyway, aside from the usual self-congratulatory feelings that one might derive from pointing accusatory fingers at the other side.

One has the choice of growing depressed over this, or simply embracing the one thing they do have control over, namely their own awareness of the world around them. There is nothing whatsoever that prevents any of us from teasing out our own connections to life, and to seeing nature, our relationships, our bodies, and ourselves as something sacred.

We can take to heart the words of our own William Blake when he suggested, "Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy."

In the end, we know what saved Jake Sully. In his own words, he simply "fell in love." Even moreso than his apotheosis under the Tree of Souls, that was his redemption, the maturing of his own hero's journey. And it seems fair to speculate that he fell in love not only with the Omaticaya People, and the forests of Pandora, and of course Neytiri, but with life itself. His world wasn't saved through fear, guilt, or angry protests, but rather through love. Love was what taught him to truly "see," to open his heart to a much broader and richer life experience, and to be able to take a deep breath and simply sink into the sheer wonder and beauty that is existence.

No doubt love can do the same for us and, if it does, then we can rest assured this wonderful planet we all call home is more than capable of taking care of itself.

So Kiyevame, and may the All-Mother smile on your path.

* Happy day. My article has been officially posted at naviblue.com in the editorial section as well as the forums, though that version does contain a few typos I failed to catch before submitting.

The Wascally Wisdom of Watts

2010-03-23T00:10:00.001-07:00

While searching for Alan Watts stuff on iTunes, I happened across several wonderful lectures and tributes I had never heard before.

This is pretty incredible, when you realize what kind of an impact Watts has had on me. I like to think I am pretty well versed on the guy. I've read at least twenty books of his, not to mention endless collections of essays. I've also listened to dozens of audio lectures and countless podcasts. So when I find something new, that is quite an event.

Or at least enough of an event to warrant a blog post.

So if any Watts lovers are out there, you might want to check out what I managed to dig up on a groovy podcast known as The Psychedelic Salon.

While I am not, nor have I ever been, nor do I expect to be in the future, a far-out, consciousness-cooking kinda guy, I do find the early experiments with psychedelic drugs in the sixties rather fascinating. Particularly when the type of people taking those first timid steps into altered levels of awareness were people like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. In other words, those with a philosophical background that could enable them to understand, interpret, and eloquently express the inexpressible states of consciousness such medicines often produced.

With that in mind, I highly recommend that any wisdom seekers out there take in at least a few shows that our good host Lorenzo has managed to put together for us.

Posted back on August 15th, show number 193 is an absolute gem. As far as I'm concerned, it's the crown jewel of them all. If you haven't heard about the legendary "Houseboat Summit" back in 1967, well, this is it. It features not only Watts, but also Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary.

Show number 207 is also about as rare a podcast as I've heard. Posted back in December, it's truly a Christmas gift. It's called a "Tribute to Alan Watts," and features an entire crew of like-minded seekers and philosophers recalling their experiences with Alan months after he had died. Watts' daughter Anne is featured for a brief segment, and Aldous Huxley's wife is also on there.

Speaking of Aldous Huxley, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up show 209 from the beginning of January. "An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley" is fabulous. It is a collection of clips from interviews and things that Huxley did back in the fifties and sixties. This is the only time I've ever heard him speak, and his accent is fabulous.

And last but not least, show 213 belongs to Watts. It is called "The Alchemy of LSD," and offers not only Watts feeling on the possibilities of the drug, but also an eloquent summary of his own philosophy. I highly recommend that, no pun intended.

In short, any time you have an opportunity to listen to Alan Watts, take it. As brilliant as he was on paper, the rhythms of his voice and the cadence of his laughter really captures him as much as anything can. I always come away smiling and a little bit more enlightened than I had been beforehand.

All the shows are available here, and if you have any interests in such things at all, you won't be disappointed.

In closing, I would also like to remind everyone that Mark Watts does an excellent job hosting the official Alan Watts podcast every week, which is available for download here.

Not in Kansas Anymore

2009-12-14T21:27:00.001-08:00

December 18, 2009

12:01 AM

Discover Mills AMC

Theater 7

AVATAR in 3-D

Well, this is it kids. Some fourteen years and $300 million in the making. The controversial trailers, the comic-con footage, James Cameron's return to movie making after TITANIC. Rapturous applause. Almost diabolically stupid internet comments.

It all erupts Thursday night. Or Friday morning. Take your pick.

The critics have spoken. 45 reviews. 92% at Rotten Tomatoes. Most love it. Some call it groundbreaking. A few call it cliched. All say it is unlike anything ever seen by human eyeballs. Roger Ebert said sitting down to watch AVATAR was like sitting down to watch STAR WARS in 1977. One thing is for sure - movie making is going to change forever after this weekend.

And as IGN pointed out, ten minutes in and this baby pretty much silences whatever little critic you have camping out behind your eyes and between your ears. This is as close to visiting another planet as most of us will get. No doubt many will want to purchase tickets to Pandora the minute they get out of the theater.

This is mythic.

As IGN also pointed out, the odd thing is - less than a week to go, and the general public seems to have little to no idea what this movie is going to do for cinema, or what it's even about.

Too high concept for general audiences, perhaps?

I guess we'll see.

P.S. No, it wasn't. 3-D Movie. 1-D script. Yep, I called this one wrong kids. Oops.

P.P.S. Actually, it was pretty awesome the second time. Who knew?

In a Grain of Sand

2009-10-27T00:13:00.000-07:00

Well, gentle readers, here we are. Yet another blog post that isn't really a blog post. No amusing anecdotes from the book-selling trade or embarrassing reminiscences of personal experiences. It's ironic that I feel as if a good deal of my writing life is spent resisting the Siren Call of this Blog, yet here it is. If I'm not doing something constructive as far as novels and such go, I just feel bad tinkering on here. Yet here I tinker. Sort of.

One more YA novel down. Of course, when I say down, I mean I have to finish out the reworking of my back story in fine detail (it's already 25 pages long), and then I have to actually put together a final, final edit. But first comes a query letter and a synopsis, and the thought of writing those is enough to put me in a corner where I may or may not eat my fingers. Who knows, maybe that's why I'm on here? But I digress.

William Blake is essential to this whole series I'm doing, providing a very firm set of shoulders for me to wobble precariously on (even I wouldn't attempt to actually "stand" on them). And wow, is he quotable. So why don't we take a minute to stop and savor some words of wisdom from the sage who jump-started that whole Romanticism business?

- To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

- The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

- Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.

- I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath die end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.

- God appears, and God is Light, To those poor souls who dwell in Night; But does a Human Form display To those who dwell in realms of Day.

- Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.

- But to go to school in a summer morn, Oh, it drives all joy away! Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day-- In sighing and dismay.

- Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

- A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

- He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise.

- God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration! (amen)

- A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.

- The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

- If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

- Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is Holy.

- I must create a system or be enslav'd by another man's. I will not reason or compare: my business is to create.

- I rest not from my great task! | To open the Eternal Worlds, | to open the immortal Eyes of Man | Inwards into the Worlds of Thought; | Into eternity, ever expanding | In the Bosom of God, | The Human Imagination. (amen to that too)

A Bit of Inglorious Fun

2009-10-04T22:42:00.000-07:00

ONCE UPON A TIME IN POST APOCALYPTIC LOS ANGELES ...

EXT. The night sky over L.A. is blackened by nuclear fall-out. Ghostly buildings stand half-demolished; the charred, devastated streets empty except for burned-out human skulls.

And a group of eight young men dressed in torn, ragged uniforms. Plasma rifles are slung over their backs, and the red band of the RESISTANCE decorates their arms.

A solitary figure steps from the shadows. The sound of his boots echoes across the cracked pavement.

EXT. When he steps into the light, we see he is another battle-hardened soldier. He is older than the rest, boasting a thin mustache, and a nasty scar across the throat. He also speaks with a distinctive southern drawl.

ALDO RAINE
My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight resistance fighters. Eight metal hatin’ tunnel rats.

EXT. All eight men snap to attention.

ALDO RAINE
Now y’all might have heard rumors of John Connor’s big push coming up here soon. Well, we’ll be pushin’ a little earlier than he will. We’re gonna be dropped into what’s left o’ downtown L.A. dressed as work camp refugees. And once we’re in Skynet territory, as a rubble-crawlin’, shadow-huggin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doin’ one thing, and one thing only … destroyin’ terminators.

ALDO RAINE
(now pacing)
The machines of the Skynet Defense Network have conquered half the world through nuclear warfare, terror, torture, and termination, and I’m here to tell you that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know about y’all. But I sure as Judgment Day didn’t come down from the radiation fields of Tennessee, cross two thousand, five hunnerd miles of skull-littered de-bris, fight my way outta Century City work camp, and then parachute from a fuckin’ reprogrammed HK to teach the machines lessons in humanity.

EXT. One of the resistance fighters nods in agreement.

ALDO RAINE
(continues)
Machines ain’t got no humanity. They’re the mindless metal mechanisms of a soul hatin’ overgrown chess computer that got too big for its britches, and they need to be destroyed. That’s why every robotic sum’ bitch we find wearin’ synthetic human skin, they’re gonna wish they never rolled off the assembly line.

EXT. ALDO stares down the eight veterans in front of him, really getting into his speech now.

ALDO RAINE
We will be cruel to the cyborg, and through our cruelty, their neural data banks will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the deactivated, disassembled, and demolished endoskeletons of the terminators we leave behind us. And Skynet will not be able to help itself from replaying on its surveillance feeds over and over the cruelties its metal minions endured from the blasts of our electro-magnet’ pulses, and the discharges of our plasma rifles.

EXT. Sky. Overhead, a metallic HK begins circling the area, scanning for human survivors. All the men ignore it, including ALDO RAINE.

ALDO RAINE
And the terminators will be short-circuited by us. And the terminators will transmit fearfully about us. And the terminators will go offline rather than face us. And when those terminators shut off their optical receptors and power down for the night, and their memory banks torture them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with.

EXT. ALDO walks over to a dufflebag on the cracked pavement, reaches in, and pulls out a severed terminator head. Its eyes have grown dark, the red circuitry behind them having long since melted. ALDO holds the skull up to the men.

ALDO RAINE
But I got a word o’ warning for all would be resistance fighters. When you join my command, you take on a debit. A debit you owe me personally. Every red-banded warrior under my command owes me one hunnerd terminator CPUs … and I WANT my CPUs.

EXT. With that, the lieutenant theatrically drop-kicks the terminator head, which sails over into the skeletal remains of a car.

ALDO RAINE
And all y’all will git me one hunnerd terminator CPUs, taken from under the scalps of one hunnerd T-101 infiltrators, or you will die tryin’.

EXT. ALDO RAINE faces the men, and bellows a final question.

ALDO RAINE
Sound good?

All eight resistance fighters take a single, decisive step forward.

THE END

* Photos belong respectively to Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures, and special thanks to James Cameron, Josh Friedman, and Quentin Tarantino for making this spoof possible.

I Sing the Universe Electric

2009-09-02T22:00:00.001-07:00

"Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?"

He laughing answer'd me: "I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you feed me on love thoughts, and give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies, so when I am tipsie,
I'll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy."

- William Blake

INTRODUCTION

For awhile now, I have had a series of seven axioms fluttering around in my head, with this theme flapping about here, and this idea settling down there. It has been very enticing to break down my own philosophy of life and the universe, especially after years of feeling and thinking and writing about such things. So contained within the seven precepts I am about to list are the seeds of everything that has moved and animated my inner life for as long as I can remember.

At some point, I will indulge in a few pages of commentary on each of them, but alas, I haven't the time now. Still, I feel compelled to at least list them, to give some kind of shape and context to my vision of the cosmos. Various poetic and philosophical voices across the ages could back up many of these sentiments, though for now I'm going to be the quintessential lone voice in the wilderness. That might be just as well, because I'm essentially chronicling what I personally feel when I go out into an empty field at night and stare up into the Milky Way.

Just keep in mind, patient reader, that this is the philosophical set-up that frames all my literary work in some form or fashion. It is the intellectual scaffolding, if you will, that makes all the creative constructs to come possible. Of course, it very neatly forms the spine of the two young adult novels I have already completed. These themes have and will continue to find form and expression in varying degrees across the entire spectrum of my writing. They are the water my work swims in, the wind on which it soars.

Whatever misgivings I have over what man has made of man, I can honestly say I have rarely if ever felt alienated from the rhythms of nature and the universe. On the contrary, the larger the cosmos gets, the more my chest gleefully expands to breathe it all in. I may have been at war with the grinding, twisting gears of the monolithic system for some time, but my quarrel does not extend to the stars and moons and planets, much less to the mountains and rivers and flowers.

Of course, one could argue these precepts are mere projection, but as a writer, making the stardust dance and painting the beauty of the nebula clouds is after all my vocation. And so be it. All is projection at the end of the day, be it religion or politics or even science, and sometimes I feel the real problem is not that our projections of the cosmos are too imaginative, but rather not imaginative enough.

And with that in mind, let us begin, and hopefully find our way home in the process ...

THE SEVEN JOYOUS PRECEPTS

1) "Our boundless, immeasurable universe is not a reality of dead matter and blind mechanism, but rather an organic field of living intelligence increasingly fascinated by the patterns of growth within it."

2) "Humanity is the complex ripening of the stars into acute awareness, the ultimate creative result of the cosmos fertilizing itself."

3) "The wondrous spectrum of consciousness crystallizes in the evolution of the human mind and breathes life into imagination, a remarkable faculty through which the teeming galaxies find expression."

4) "The universal experience of God is humanity spontaneously realizing its profound identity with the whole of creation, not unlike a solitary note suddenly aware of its place in an infinitely vast symphony."

5) "True religion is not a dogma but an art form, a singular talent which enables human beings to tease a harmony out of the heavens, and later clothe this spontaneous rhythm in story and symbol."

6) "The oldest and noblest symbol woven into the fabric of myth is the female form divine, a beatific image which sanctifies the cosmos and imbues every particle of matter with holiness."

7) “Life stands open and ready for us, existence little more than a blank canvas trembling with anticipation for whatever colors and light and textures we see fit to splash upon it, equally receptive to both our lowest, darkest hells, as well as our most achingly beautiful heavens.”

Why Stephenie Meyer is the World's Greatest Literary Phenomenon

2009-08-05T15:24:00.001-07:00

"I don't think of myself as a writer ... the words aren't always perfect."

So says Stephenie Meyer, the unsurpassed voice of the young thanks to her Twilight series. Piffle, Stephenie. You're here to stay. I admit it. Not only has Twilight defined a generation, it will probably define the next few generations. Maybe the rest of them. Forever.

Oh, these bookstore-strained eyes have seen. They've seen so much. They've seen the acolytes of Team Edward mount up to physically destroy Team Jacob. They've seen a thirteen year old girl having a temper tantrum because her mother would only buy her a Twilight bookbag, action figure, poster, calendar, and candy but not a Twilight movie book. They've seen comically overweight women bully their way past women of nimbler girth to get in front of the line for the Twilight DVD release. They've seen Twilight books that will help you score higher on the SAT and ACT. They've seen forty something year old teachers come up and proclaim that reading Twilight has changed their lives. They've seen fourteen year old girls marching around the story, loudly arguing that Harry Potter is in the toilet now that Stephenie Meyer has put pen to paper.

So in short, you win Stephenie. You win. You are the Greatest Writing Machine the world has ever seen, and I've assembled a list of facts to help prove it. Even the wonderfully witty people at Twilight Sucks have been forced to agree.

To paraphrase the song at the tournament at the end of the Karate Kid, Stephenie Meyer, you're simply the best around. Nothing's going to ever keep you down. Uh-huh. You eighties people know the tune I'm talking about.

Stephenie Meyer is the World's Greatest Literary Phenomenon, and here are a few reasons why ...

- It is estimated that there are more Stephenie Meyer fans attending Twilight conventions than there are people currently alive on the planet.

- In May of 2008, Stephenie Meyer jotted down a grocery list on a scrap of paper. By June of that same year, four top New York literary agencies were fighting to represent it.

- Stephenie Meyer stayed overnight at a friend's home. When the sun rose, she had to enlist a small army of U-haul trucks to carry off everything she had written the night before. By the end of the week, she had three new books to publish.

- Bram Stoker was actually a figment of Stephenie Meyer's imagination.

- Stephenie Meyer once had writer's block. According to experts, it lasted approximately .00001% of a second. To make up for lost time, she wrote a new bestseller that afternoon.

- Stephenie Meyer mentioned in an interview that she never watched R-rated movies. Later that month, every major Hollywood studio stopped making them.

- After going to see the Twilight film, Emily Bronte went home and started writing Wuthering Heights. Though not well-known in literary circles, Bronte always envisioned Robert Pattinson in the role of Heathcliffe.

- Stephenie Meyer's literary output is so prolific it actually results in the shifting of tectonic plates under the earth's surface.

- For a short time in the early twenty-first century, books written by "other" authors had to be put on the Stephenie Meyer Best-Sellers List.

- In her latest book, Stephenie Meyer created characters so real they had to be assigned social security numbers. One even received a summons for jury duty courtesy of the local judicial system.

- While on a vacation in the Bahamas, Stephenie Meyer glared at a blank notebook for five long minutes. Later that day, it was mysteriously filled with words.

- Sources insist that JK Rowling frequently phones Stephenie Meyer at all hours of the night to ask what her next book series should be about.

- Thanks to Stephenie Meyer, Mormonism has now replaced Islam as the world's fastest growing religion.

- Stephenie Meyer invented the entire English language simply because she thought no existing one would do the Twilight saga justice.

- The very popular Hooked on Phonics book series is set to be replaced some time next year by Hooked on Stephenie Meyer.

- Literary critic Harold Bloom once claimed that Shakespeare had invented the human. Then he read Stephenie Meyer and realized his mistake.

- The Nine Muses frequently audition for Stephenie Meyer's attention, but the fact is she doesn't need them. Every morning before she writes, Stephenie Meyer looks into the mirror and inspires herself.

- Stephenie Meyer's annual literary income exceeds the net worth of several countries in the Far East, including Taiwan.

- God's only regret is that He didn't let Stephenie Meyer write the Bible.

- Stephenie Meyer's fictional worlds are so real and three-dimensional that a fourteen year old girl in Portland, Oregon actually fell head-first into one of them. Sadly, she was never heard from again.

- For millennia, the author of the first story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, has been listed as simply being "anonymous." Why? Because Stephenie Meyer doesn't like to brag.

- The only reason Edward settled for Bella in the books is because he couldn't have Stephenie Meyer.

- For every hour that Stephenie Meyer spends writing, literacy rates in the continental United States increase by ten percent.

- According to certain prominent journalists, at least thirty two old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest have been decimated to provide paper for Stephenie Meyer's unstoppable pen.

- Stephenie Meyer is indirectly responsible for the discovery of time travel. On April 12, 2009, a small group of fanatical Edward fans broke the laws of the space-time continuum and engineered a machine to carry them into the future. Why? So they could see the New Moon film before anyone else.

- Stephenie Meyer's advice to aspiring writers is very simple. Give up. She has already written everything that will ever be published ever again.

- Stephenie Meyer once claimed that abstainance was sexier than sex. Everyone believed her.

- Lord Byron finally came forward and admitted that he stole the archetype of the dark, handsome, mysterious byronic hero from Stephenie Meyer. It's not the other way around.

- It is predicted that by the fall semester of 2013, the Twilight books will constitute their own English 101 curriculum in every college around the country. So long Chaucer, Milton, and Keats. Hello Meyer, Meyer, and Meyer.

- The United Nations was forced to table Middle East peace talks so that its members could attend the midnight release party for Breaking Dawn at the local bookstore.

- In the world of the ancient Greeks, Stephenie Meyer's pen name was "Homer."

- Stephenie Meyer is so talented that she often writes and rewrites her books from the perspective of multiple characters. And she doesn't simply do this for the major characters, but for all of them. Even the minor ones with no names or relevance to the plot. It has been estimated online that the first Twilight book has been rewritten at least fifty-seven times, from fifty-seven perspectives. Stephenie Meyer is just that detailed in her work.

- Ernest Hemmingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961. Why? Because he knew he couldn't compete with the literary prowess of Stephenie Meyer.

- J.D. Salinger became a recluse and stopped publishing for the same reason.

- Stephenie Meyer invented vampires. Period.

- Someone once asked for Cliff Notes to Stephenie Meyer books because they were so long and rambling. Little did they know, the books were the Cliff Notes.

- Contrary to certain complaints, the first editions of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn were not littered with typos. Stephenie Meyer was simply inventing new words to keep the Oxford English Dictionary people on their toes.

- The lines for Stephenie Meyer's book signings are so long they often constitute their own equatorial plane.

- Every time Stephenie Meyer finishes a complete paragrah, she saves a major bookstore chain from bankruptcy.

- Stephenie Meyer doesn't have to follow the basic rules of grammar. The basic rules of grammar follow Stephenie Meyer.

- War and Peace was cribbed from notes off an early draft whipped up one rainy afternoon by Stephenie Meyer. She was bored.

- Stephenie Meyer once wrote so much in a single week that the weight of her compositions actually unbalanced the Western hemisphere, and came dangerously close to tilting the earth off its axis.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed he could never finish his masterful poem "Kubla Khan" because he was interrupted by a mysterious man from Porlock knocking at his door. Stephenie Meyer was interrupted by the same man from Porlock, but she finished her poem that afternoon. And she rewrote Eclipse from Jacob's point of view. Stephenie Meyer doesn't make excuses.

- Stephenie Meyer once told a group of lustful teenage fans that they should abstain from sex until they were at least forty-eight. Every single one of them did.

- After Stephenie Meyer was given the Nobel Prize for Literature, they simply stopped awarding it. The committee agreed it would all be downhill after that anyway.

- The line to see Stephenie Meyer at a local book fair was so long the fans at the end of it were actually three zip codes away. They didn't even care.

- Due to intense reader demand, Stephenie Meyer announced this week she was going to rewrite Twilight one last time. As a treat to the fans, this time the epic love story would be told entirely from the point of view of inanimate objects.

- It has been proven that an endorsement by Stephenie Meyer on the cover of a book is worth more than ten such nominations by the Oprah Book Club.

Part 2

- Stephenie Meyer is so talented and prolific her next book is already finished before she's even been inspired to write it.

- After Stephenie Meyer finished writing Twilight, she didn't even have to submit a query letter. The literary agents lined up on her door step of their own accord.

- Rumor has it that Stephenie Meyer has crafted an entirely new alphabet for her next series.

- With the Bella and Edward and Jacob plotline, Stephenie Meyer single-handedly invented something she likes to call the "love triangle."

- Stephenie Meyer wrote Eclipse and The Host simultaneously. Literally. She had a pen in each hand. She's that good.

- When other writers have "new" ideas, they're actually old ones that Stephenie Meyer has already had and discarded.

- If Stephenie Meyer could somehow transform her literary powers into fossil fuel, she could generate enough energy to power an entire metropolis for ten years.

- Once a major studio tried to option one of Stephenie Meyer's dreams for a movie before she'd even woken up.

- Strunk and White's The Elements of Style has now been revised to accommodate Stephenie Meyer's use of dangling modifiers.

- Stephenie Meyer's next book will be a tale of forbidden hand-holding. The unreleasable, built-up sexual tension between the two main characters will be so intense the pages will catch fire right in your hands. The inside book flap will actually include flame retardant gel.

- When aliens landed at a writer's conference in rural Nebraska, they demanded that the attendees take them to their leader. An hour later, they were being introduced to Stephenie Meyer.

- Stephenie Meyer made adverbs cool again.

- By the year 3010, Stephenie Meyer's fiction will have inspired not only peace, harmony, and love, but global ritualistic square dancing.

- Some writers sweat blood. Stephenie Meyer sweats ink.

- When Stephenie Meyer was finishing Breaking Dawn, she didn't need to eat or sleep for three straight weeks. The story alone was her sustenance.

- Some people ingest large amounts of chemical substances to be able to write like Stephenie Meyer does.

- Conspiracy theorists have discovered that if you read The Host backwards, Stephenie Meyer has predicted the exact hour that Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs, will descend on the Empire State Building in 2012.

- The planets now properly align only when Edward and Bella are blissfully in love.

- The original title of Midnight Sun, or Twilight from Edward's point of view, was originally going to be titled The Eighty Year Old Virgin.

- Stephenie Meyer personally hand-sculpts every Twilight action figure.

- When they make the inevitable disco version of Twilight, Stephenie Meyer will be unanimously awarded the role of Bella.

- Stephenie Meyer's imagination is so huge that if it ever manifested physically, it would take the entire continent of Australia to contain it.

- During the Writer's Strike in Hollywood, Stephenie Meyer took up the slack and wrote enough for everyone.

- Stephenie Meyer's imaginary friends are so real and vivid they sometimes have trouble getting through airport security.

- There are over 100 translations of Twilight in print. Stephenie Meyer learned every language and translated them personally to make sure the job was done right. Even Aramaic.

- Military radar picked up an inexplicable power surge in the western U.S. They went to investigate only to discover that it was just Stephenie Meyer thinking up a plot twist.

- Once Stephenie Meyer was typing so fast at a keyboard her computer exploded and the rest of the neighborhood lost internet connection for a whole week.

- For most authors, five hundred pages constitutes an entire book. For Stephenie Meyer, five hundred pages barely constitutes a prologue.

- The only reason Stephenie Meyer wasn't awarded her very own national holiday is because congress realized at the last second that the day was already President's Day. Eventually they voted to move President's Day.

- By the end of the twenty-second century, Stephenie Meyer's face will be on the national currency of at least four South American countries.

- Once there was an alternate dimension where Stephenie Meyer had never existed. Children who lived there often asked why they should bother learning to read. Their parents had no answers for them.

- Meteorologists detected ominous weather patterns building over central Kansas. Little did they know, it was just Stephenie Meyer brainstorming while on a book tour.

- Some literary critics argue that if John Keats hadn't died so tragically young, he may have been the greatest writer in English literature. Now that Stephenie Meyer has been published, though, they all agree it doesn't really matter either way.

- God is now jealous of Stephenie Meyer because Twilight is outselling the Bible.

- Buried a quarter of a mile under Switzerland is a secret vault containing Stephenie Meyer's greatest story ideas. It is guarded by a highly trained sect of Ninjas so dedicated to their mission they no longer remember their own names.

- There are only five wonders of the world now because Stephenie Meyer has only published five books.

- Every time Stephenie Meyer creates a character that refuses to have premarital sex including but not limited to storylines about the end of the world, an angel is awarded their wings.

- There will come a point in American politics when congress will no longer be fought over by Democrats or Republicans, but rather the even more bipartisan Team Edward and Team Jacob.

- While you've been reading this, Stephenie Meyer has already written a prequel about the Cullen family, a sequel about Jacob, and an entirely new work concerning the sasquatch and forbidden love in the Rocky Mountains.

Harry Potter and the Plotless Prince

2009-07-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

In a word - don't believe the hype.

You know, I'm usually the most lenient of our crew when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations. Especially where "Harry Potter" is concerned. After all, the page and the screen are two totally different mediums. The virtues of one are often the vices of the other. Inevitably, favorite scenes and characters are going to be cut, plot points will be lost, and details sacrificed.

However, from pretty much the first scene forward, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" teased out the nitpicker in me. The book wasn't just surgically cut in many ways ... it was essentially amputated. Monumental elements were left out and pointless ones were added in. Yes, it may be winning very positive reviews, but if you read carefully, the critics are more often than not damning it with faint praise. Put simply, the end product constitutes less of an actual movie, and more of a loose assembly of scenes patched and edited together.

And HBP, as I will now call it, is Warner Brothers' tent-pole summer movie. The flagship. It was pushed back almost six months for just that reason. Lest we forget, this turkey cost around two hundred and fifty million to make. Sigh. You know what, maybe it's time to curtail these ridiculously massive movie budgets. Like Alan Moore said, use the money to feed a third world country for a month or two instead.

Anyway, if you love or respect the original material (and this is my second favorite book of the series) and have any powers of discernment or cognition, it seems impossible that this film will please you. I'd heard fairly troublesome rumors about this one from the beginning, but was willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. Shaky camera aside, I didn't really mind David Yates' direction of the last one, and hey, Steve Kloves even came back to once again start penning the adaptions. He did a solid job on the first four, but I don't know what happened here.

So without further ado, let's start slicing this big fat turkey up. Spoilers follow, but honestly, HBP has been out for how long?

- After a semi-cool opening with the Death Eaters wreaking havoc on hapless Muggles, the film finds our hero Harry Potter not at the Dursleys ... but at a subway cafe trying to pick up a twenty-something waitress. The first real WTF moment of the film.

- Harry soon after informs Dumbledore that he's been "riding around on trains" all summer. WTF again? He should have been in hiding at the Dursleys, seeking the safety of the family blood protection thanks to his mother's sacrifice. No mention of this, or of the excellent scene where Dumbledore collects him from his vapid relatives. Not to mention assaults them with a couch. The key point is, though, Harry can't just wander around freely. Voldemort is back, and now everyone knows it. Hello? Harry is under maximum security courtesy of the Ministry of Magic, and basically has to be shuffled about in armored cars, not joy riding alone on the subway.

- There's no mention of Rufus Scrimgeour, the new and rather important Minister of Magic.

- Even crazier, there's barely any mention of Sirius Black, Harry's beloved godfather who was killed just months ago. Dumbledore doesn't even mention him, but I suppose that's predictable, because the old wizard has none of the paternal warmth towards Harry that he has demonstrated again and again in the books. Really, who cares when he's killed at the end, because the films have already engaged in character assassination.

- When Harry gets to the Burrow, he's already making googly eyes at Ginny. No, he doesn't have any feelings for her at that point in the story, aside from the brotherly kind. It was supposed to be a slow, gradual realization over the course of the year. And frankly, why even include this in the film if you're going to cut everything else? The relationship was given no time to breathe as it was, and was kinda pointless.

- WTF is Fenrir Greyback doing at Borgin and Burkers with Draco Malfoy? The whole point of Malfoy's mission is that he has to do it alone, because Voldemort wants him to fail. Also, no mention of the possibility of the Dark Mark on Malfoy's arm, which is the basis for all of Harry's suspicions.

- After Harry is left bloodied and paralyzed on the Hogwarts Express, Luna Lovegood finds him. I love Luna, but honestly, if you're going to put Tonks in the movie at all, at least give her something to do and let her be the one to find him. Even worse is the fact that Luna discovers him because he's surrounded by "wrackspurts"?! WTF? Like half the creatures Luna believes in, they don't exist. Newsflash, it was a joke.

- When Harry gets to Hogwarts, no indication whatsoever is given that Dumbledore has any special plans for him his sixth year, which is a rather crucial point in the book. Instead, he randomly invites him up to his office, and shows him a memory or two, but offers no special advice or reason for doing so.

- Dumbledore actually asks Harry is he's dating Hermione Granger. WTF? Not only is Dumbledore brilliant, but he's highly intuitive. He knows of the trio's special bond, and probably understands it better than they do. And um, shouldn't he be more focused on, oh, maybe defeating Voldemort?

- Hogwarts is barely a school now. Aside from the newby Slughorn's potions class, no one really has lessons anymore. There is no mention of the ever-important O.W.L.'s of the year before, or anything about learning apparition. A huge deal is made of this in the book, especially considering how important it is that no one can apparate or disapparate on school grounds. Kinda the whole point with Malfoy attempting to smuggle Death Eaters into the school through the vanishing cabinet rather than through the usual magical means.

- While we're on the subject, even Dumbledore CANNOT apparate while in Hogwarts, at least until the last act of the film when he winks and mumbles something about how "being me has its privileges." WTF?! This is inviolable magic here.

- Snape finally securing control of the Defense Against the Dark Arts post is a HUGE DEAL in the book. It all ties in with whether or not Dumbledore trusts people too much. In the movie, no one cares, nor do they even attend his class anyway.

- On the romance front, the whole reason Ron starts locking lips with Lavender Brown is because Ginny basically goads him into it. He obviously likes Hermione, and is happy when he finds out she was going to invite him to Slughorn's party. Here the whole thing is arbitrary and his actions aren't that understandable.

- Why is it Luna who spots Harry allegedly slipping the Felix Felicis into Ron's drink instead of Hermione? And while we're on Luna, why was she wearing the Gryffindor Lion hat in this movie and not in the last one? And why didn't it roar? And most importantly, why didn't Luna do her priceless Quidditch commentary?

- Where is all the big mystery about Malfoy and the Room of Requirement? And WTF is all that business about half-eaten apples and dead birds in the vanishing cabinet? Does it already work? And if so, why not bring in the Death Eaters already?

- In the book, we had no idea Katie Bell's cursed necklace was intended for Dumbledore, unlike the clear understanding we got in the film.

- One of the biggest mysteries in the book was the identity of the Half Blood Prince, the brilliant student who'd once owned Harry's potions text. Was it a he or a she? Were they good or evil? Had it possibly even belonged to Harry's father? In the movie, no one seemed to really care.

- Okay, so in the books, Snape will assign Harry detention for the least little infraction. Yet in the movie, Harry nearly kills the student he's sworn to protect with his own deadly sectum sempra spell, and Snape just lets him walk off without saying a word? WTF?! Here, we're not adapting the book so much as rewriting it backwards.

- Ginny then takes Harry to the Room of Requirement to ditch the potions book, and he just agrees to this with a simple nod? In what alternate universe was Harry ever going to relinquish that book that had become almost a friend to him? And then Ginny uses this time to kiss him? What?

- There is absolutely no mention of the fact that Harry learns that it was Snape who gave the location of James and Lily Potter to Voldemort before his conversion. A rather important piece of information, don't you think?

- While we're on the subject, a crucial point in HBP is, yes, INFORMATION. The book is practically a character study of what made the darkest wizard of all time tick. We learn Dumbledore has spent years tracking Voldemort, ferreting out every single piece of his dark past in the hope that it will someday lead to his future defeat. Memories about his parents, his family, his time before, during, and after Hogwarts, the people who had known him, everything was examined, and nothing was left to chance. In the movie, we get two and a half blurry memories. In other words, the audience learns a big fat NOTHING about Tom Riddle and his alter ego Voldemort, which was of course the entire point of the book. Again,WTF?

- Um, and why exactly did we see that memory in the Pensieve of Riddle's orphanage-bound childhood anyway? Yes, I know I just said there wasn't enough backstory, but what was there was NEVER explained. Riddle's sense of his own importance, his tendency to scavenge and collect "trophies," the reference to the cave he once scared his fellow orphans at, and everything else was never referenced in the film. Where were all of Dumbledore's fascinating commentaries piecing together Voldemort's fractured psyche? Where were his insights to Harry that would hopefully allow him to triumph over the Dark Lord? Again, that was the entire point of the book.

- The CRUCIAL discovery of Voldemort's use of the Horcruxes was rendered almost moot in the film. Dumbledore said that practically any object can be used to conceal part of a person's soul, and actually left it at that! WTF!? No word was given in the movie at all about Voldemort's imbuing Hogwarts items with significance, or that Nagini the snake was probably one, or anything of the sort.

- This brings me to my next point. What exactly is Harry going to do in the next two films since HBP was supposed to prepare him for his epic quest and did nothing of the sort? With absolutely no wisdom or guidance to go on, is he simply going to stroll around and randomly turn over stumps in the hopes of accidentally uncovering a Horcrux? Is that why the next movie was broken into two parts? This is perhaps the single greatest WTF of the movie, and it actually prompted me to inwardly chuckle when Dumbledore toppled off the tower, realizing he had left his scarred protege so ludicrously unprepared for the trials ahead.

- Sadly, even the discovery of the single fake Horcrux in this film made little sense. How did Dumbledore know about the cave? Why did he and Harry apparate directly onto a jagged rock jutting out in a storm-tossed sea? Why not just land at the entrance of the cave? How did he know about the boat? How did he instantly and inexplicably understand that he was to drink the liquid in the basin? Why was there no talk of the Inferi or what they were?

- When Dumbledore and Harry apparate to the astronomy tower (which is impossible), how is Dumbledore still standing? The potion in the book nearly killed him. Where is the scene where Harry is paralyzed once more and hidden under his invisibility cloak? Why doesn't he just disarm Malfoy since he's still mobile?

- And on the subject of Malfoy, WTF has he exactly been doing all year? Why are the Death Eaters brought into the castle through the vanishing cabinet at all? Bellatrix kicks a glass or two over and then knocks out some windows, but aside from this pointless, half-handed vandalism, why were they there, period? After all that screen time we get with Malfoy trying to sneak them in, the Death Eaters come in, watch Snape kill Dumbledore, shrug, and then leave the grounds with no explanation whatsoever.

- And another thing. At the Burrow, Mr. Weasley basically tells Harry he suspects what Malfoy is up to. Unlike in the book, I might add. But anyway, um, Arthur is a ministry official, as well as a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Shouldn't he, um, I don't know, DO SOMETHING?!

- And where the HELL was the awesome, all-out wizards duel between the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix in the middle of Hogwarts? Why would anyone in their right mind cut that special-effects heavy action set piece, and then add a needless attack on the Burrow with people running around lost out in the wetlands?

- So at the climax of the film, yes Snape does succeed in killing Dumbledore. The funny thing is, he just calmly walks away, then tells Harry he's the Half Blood Prince, and then shrugs and leaves. No explanation for WHY he told him. No explanation for WHY he ever called himself that to begin with. You know, I'm not even starting on this one. Sigh.

- And in case you missed it, was it just me, or was there a radical new character death after Dumbledore? See, the big, dumb half-giant Hagrid was passed out drunk in his cabin. In the movie, an hour or so passes, and the filmmakers actually have Bellatrix then walk by and casually blow up his house. Hagrid is dead, people. Can't say I'm really gonna mourn that one, but certainly a minor deviation from the book, no?

- And then we get a scene with all the Hogwarts students standing around Dumbledore's broken body and holding up their lit wands in what was beautifully described by my nitpicking partner Patti as a "We Are the World" moment. I was wondering if they were going to start offering each other Coca-Colas, and then burst into song about teaching the world some harmony. Um, did anyone think about including the actual freakin' funeral, or at least Fawkes the phoenix's song?!

- At the end, Harry never breaks up with Ginny for her own protection, but I guess it doesn't matter, because in the movie I don't remember her ever even breaking up with Dean Thomas to begin with. Then you realize Dumbledore never told Harry to confide only in Ron and Hermione, so for all we know, Harry will be working with the Ministry in the next one. Dumbledore certainly never tried to convey the importance of love, and how Harry's ability to love is what truly separates him from Voldemort, and that in the end, love is the only thing that can defeat You Know Who. Actually, Dumbledore never gave him any actual instructions or anything, so I'm left wondering why Harry is determined to hunt down the Horcruxes after all.

So, big summer bust at the movies. I'll stick with "Star Trek" and "Terminator Salvation." As for movie Harry, well, have fun with your mission next time around. I can only doff my hat to you, and wish you the best of luck. Hogwarts knows you're gonna need it.

Oh, well. At least Dumbledore still enjoys Muggle knitting patterns.

Cool Cosmic Coincidence

2009-06-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Einstein once famously remarked that "God doesn't play dice." In other words, this is not a universe that is organized in a haphazard way, and events do not occur randomly. Obviously, Einstein never worked at Borders.

So Patti and I are on our way to the Snellville store. I had just finished up a delightful school day with Michael. We have only three classes left, so I figured why not go out with a bang? Since we had studied Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson earlier, I had dusted off the old "Dead Poet's Society" DVD.

You probably know the scene. Robin Williams lures a shy young Ethan Hawke up to recite a poem in front of the class. He hasn't prepared one, so Williams makes him look at a picture of Walt Whitman up over the chalkboard and spontaneously spout off some verse. Stream of consciousness style. Unfortunately, we didn't have a picture of Walt Whitman in the living room, though we did have a Paul McCartney poster, so that was our stand in.

Much like in the movie, I circled Michael in a very Robin Williamsesque fashion, forcing him to spew out mad, incoherent gibberish, in the hopes that it would spontaneously produce a poem. I went faster and faster until I grew dizzy, but it was most effective. Before long, Michael started talking about how Paul McCartney sings "truth" and then something about the guitar strings. It all bottomed out when I suggested the guitar strings were what David Carradine of "Kill Bill" and "Kung Fu" fame had used to hang himself in a Bangkok hotel room earlier that day.

Class over.

So Patti and I had to take him to Borders to meet his friend David. All well and good. So I'm standing around the cafe, and Jessica walks by me and asks, "So, are you here for the book signing?" Being a Borders employee, I of course had no idea we were having a book signing. "Who is here?" "Oh, it's Stephen Hawking's daughter. They wrote a kid's book together."

Do huh?

Yes, Stephen Hawking's daughter Lucy is coming to Snellville Borders to do a reading and a book signing. Sure. Why wouldn't the daughter of the most eminent physicist of the century come to the town where "Everybody is Somebody?" Makes sense to me. So I'm like, "Hell's yeah I'm here for the book signing."

Actually, I was even enlisted to do a series of announcements regarding her arrival. I had a little event sheet to go off of but I was mostly winging it. You know, I thought my highest honor regarding announcements had come four or five years ago when I was issued a certificate at a staff meeting that christened me "King of the Closing Announcements." How wrong I was!

As it turns out, Lucy Hawking greatly enjoyed my announcements. She referred to them as "theatrical," and said she would have liked to record them and just carry them around with her, presumably from bookstore to bookstore. And this from a lady with a great Cambridge accent.

I should point out that it was rather remarkable that it went well, and hopefully it established something of a new precedent for me. As any of you who have gone to Dragoncon with me knows, there is a fairly predictable range of outcomes when I am in the vicinity of celebrity. Usually either I humiliate myself, as in the case of Julie Benz, or they humiliate me (sometimes in front of a room full of people), as in the case of Anthony Daniels. So this was definitely a step up.

Lucy Hawking spoke for about an hour, and it was fascinating. She started by drawing up an Old World map that included where Europeans had once believed the world ended, and likened that to prevalent attitudes regarding space exploration. She even had a brilliant caricature of her dad up in the right hand corner. I would like to point out that the drawing has been appropriated and will soon be hanging in the employee lounge upstairs.

At any rate, the talk included a brief slide show on her laptop. We saw everything from rare family photographs of Stephen Hawking before he was diagnosed with ALS, to him on the set of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," to super novas, to what aliens may or may not look like. Here I should point out that I was able to help out with that last bit, as I just happened to be wearing a Chewbacca t-shirt at the time. Fate, thy are a strange mistress. We also watched a video that chronicled, among other things, the effects of trying to gargle in zero-g gravity.

I acquitted myself fairly well, asking some questions about the multi-verse as well as the possibility of interstellar travel. I (happily) knew that the closest star was Alpha Centauri, but as she pointed out, even travelling at the top possible speed, it would still take over fifty thousand years to get there with existing technology. She did say using the energy released from matter/anti-matter engines Star Trek-style may be a possibility for flinging ships from star to star, but that's not going to be for awhile yet. After it was over, I did get to seed the idea that, since we are just taking our first timid steps off our planet, it is entirely likely that there is some future means of space travel that we can't conceive of anymore than our neanderthal ancestors could have conceived of airplanes that could break the sound barrier. She whole-heartedly agreed.

On a philosophical note, I did get to briefly discuss with her what I still find to be the most amazing, paradigm-shifting discovery of modern astronomy, namely that we are stardust. Once scientists learned how all the heavier elements in existence were cooked up in the heart of a star that eventually went supernova, our indelible connection with the universe was sealed. I brought up the fact that when we start talking about "the universe," people inevitably start looking up. But not only is the universe around us, it's in us as well. Right down to the iron in our blood. Her favorite star fact was that it produced the very calcium in our bones and teeth. That was the real mind-spinner. We both hope the reality of that will eventually seep into and inform our collective common sense before too long.

The only bad part about the whole thing was that barely anyone showed up. Granted, it was a rainy night, but not counting Bel, Patti, and myself, I doubt more than half a dozen people showed up. And again, it was purely serendipitous that we were even there to begin with. It was a real shame, because I would have promoted this thing for all it was worth. I mean, it was Stephen Hawking's Daughter, for heaven's sake! Just as Patti told her, she would have packed the place with homeschoolers if only we'd had any head's up whatsoever. They no doubt would have enjoyed the pronouncement by the public school system that Lucy offered up. Her father wasn't a good student in primary and secondary school and his teachers hilariously wrote home saying, "He'll never amount to anything."

But we didn't have a heads up. I guess that's Borders for you. So what if the daughter of one of the most brilliant minds on the planet is coming to promote her IR book and answer questions about the mysteries of the universe? Who cares? How many Borders Rewards transactions have you scored today?

Sigh.

So anyway, the first book the mother and father team extraordinaire wrote was called "George's Secret Key to the Universe." The second is "George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt," which basically features a young boy who's led across the universe by scavenger-hunt loving aliens. A super computer named "Cosmos" helps him out, and he learns a lot about physics on the way. Super-cool.

Check out - www.secretkeytotheuniverse.com

P.S. Excellent photo courtesy of Patti Ward and her excellent cell phone.

P.P.S. And a little late, but as for FOX cancelling the Sarah Connor Chronicles, FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. Assholes.

No Fate But What We Make

2009-04-13T16:54:00.000-07:00

My Soon to be Sent Letter to FOX -

To Whom It May Concern,

First off, let me congratulate you on another excellent season of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." I think you know by now that it is one of the best written, acted, and directed shows on television. It is genuinely without parallel, and I am happy to see it has been nominated for some major Saturn Awards. Season two has consistently offered up an incredible mix of action and mystery and drama, and the season finale was most certainly one of the best hours to grace network television in years.

But more to the point, the finale was a mind-blowing cliffhanger which I and countless other fans do not want to be the final exclamation point for the series. That would be a tragedy not only to the people who make the show and have poured everything they have into it, but for those of us who love it as well. I know there has been a lot of talk of cancellation due to the low ratings that seem inevitable when a show moves to Friday night, but this program is simply too good to lose. And the fans who are scrambling to make online petitions and video polls and firing emails your way by the thousands obviously feel the same way.

It is somewhat ironic that the show features an underground resistance movement in the future that is vastly outnumbered and outgunned by an army of relentless machines determined to snuff the burning flame of what's left of humanity out of existence when we fans of "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" feel much the same way. Only in this real life scenario, we are worried that our favorite show is going to be snuffed out simply because not enough people are watching it, regardless of the seamless quality and incredible story-telling it offers up week after week. From such a vantage point, I suppose it was inevitable that we would have to form our own resistance to keep it on the air.

Of course, we are doing more than resisting the cancellation of our favorite television show. We're simultaneously resisting a corporate agenda that dictates mindless reality shows are easier and less expensive to produce and shove on the air waves, so that's just what we're going to have to watch. We're resisting a network mindset that is largely dominated by outdated Nielsen ratings and the like. And first and foremost, we are resisting a machine mentality that insists on boiling everything down to numbers and decimal points and quantity.

The relentless march of a world ruled by numbers is really what is at stake here, not to mention a life that is perpetually threatening to become nothing but one long, never-ending assembly line. If we as television viewers and you as television producers refuse to at least consider the quality of a show regardless of the quantity of eyeballs watching said show, then the machines have already won. There's no need for Judgment Day and exploding bombs, because the machine mentality has already subverted much of what it means to be human. For to be human means to recognize a kind of ineffable, incalculable creativity at the very heart of things, a sort of poetry that refuses to be pinned down and quantified.

Joseph Campbell found much of this poetry in the world of myth. He realized that myths were the stories told since the dawn of time and that, far from being simply outdated scientific theories about the world and the universe, they contained within them the inner drama of the human race. Myths explore the questions too deep to explore through other mediums, questions about life and death, birth and time, dreams and reality. In short, the very themes that are the main ingredients behind the saga that is "The Sarah Connor Chronicles."

In the opinion of the resistance, this is one of the few programs to deal with such things in a properly mythic context. Despite the technological wonders of time travel and sentient robots, "Sarah Connor" is a tale as old as civilization. It is the tale of the hero's journey, a journey we all make, only it is powerfully dressed in the postmodern metaphors that best reflect our dreams and nightmares about the world we now inhabit. Trips to the underworld may have been replaced by odysseys into the dark future, and tricksters of old may have been replaced by shape-shifting liquid metal robots, but at its ancient root it is the story of a family with an epic, world-shattering destiny.

It is also a multi-dimensional love story that bridges the past, the present, and the future. It echoes across a war-torn timeline, exploring the love between a parent for a child, between brothers, between man and woman, and even, perhaps, between man and machine. Despite the perils and pitfalls lurking in a mercurial future that constantly shifts like the sands, it cites love in all its myriad forms as the redeeming, regenerative energy that makes humanity something worth saving.

And love is not only the powerful force inside the context of the series, it is also the basis for the art that has created the series itself.

Yes, we do consider "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" to not only be an art, but a remarkable blending of multiple art forms. Look no further than the fabulous musical montages in episodes like "What He Beheld," "Samson and Delilah," and "Adam Raised a Cain." It is here where choreography, cinematography, sound, editing, and directing come together with all the force of something one would expect to see in a movie theater.

Of course, the writing on the show is some of the smartest out there, a remarkable balancing act of just the right amount of personal drama and epic excitement. It is very literary, with even the names of episode titles ranging from Robert Graves to Virginia Woolf to the book of "Genesis." Just top notch storytelling that leaves so much to the imagination and so much good food for the intellect to graze on. This show weaves a fabulous tapestry of philosophy and art and religious symbolism, when it could have just been robots exploding every week.

All of this is brought to life through the incredible talents of a cast without peer. We honestly haven't seen an ensemble this gifted on network television in ages. There really is too much to be said about all of them.

Lena Headey owns the role of Sarah Connor, evoking not only the mother goddess of old who gives birth to the world savior but blends that perfectly with the strong, independent modern woman. She is a character capable of surviving anything yet still desperate to maintain her own innate humanity. Thomas Dekker likewise brings such weight and gravitas to the role of John Connor it is astounding, particularly in a performer so young. His performance is so measured and thoughtful, balancing both the teenager he is now with the man he is going to ultimately become. And Summer Glau as Cameron, the terminator send back in time to protect him, has been simply superb in every single scene since the pilot. The role of Cameron is by definition a terribly difficult one to play, as it is shrouded in mystery and an almost alien agenda that we don't really understand. Through a careful mix of quirky mannerisms and comments, Glau has succeeding in making her character one of the most intriguing of any that has ever appeared on television. The camera simply adores her, and she alone is reason enough to tune in every week.

Yet because of the unique nature of this series, Summer Glau has also played more than one character. By some counts, she plays as many as four different versions of herself in the phenomenal "Allison from Palmdale," an episode which should have earned her an Emmy. And the surprise stand-out since season one has also been Brian Austin Green, who plays Derek Reese, a rough and tumble war veteran from the future. Again, his performance in the equally powerful "Goodbye to All That" was equally deserving of an Emmy. Richard T. Jones has been solid from the pilot episode, emanating pure magnetism in every scene he's in. And this may have been Shirley Manson's first real acting job, but her role as an ambiguous T-1000 has been consistently creepy and fascinating. Not to mention Garrett Dillahunt, who began as the murderous terminator Cromartie and evolved into the innocent, childlike John Henry who spends most of his time playing with "Bionicles." He's also become a fan favorite.

Quite frankly, once you start complimenting all the cast and crew of this show, it is very difficult to stop. And I would like to give one final shout-out to Josh Friedman, who has done a great job creating and producing a show that is so rich and fertile and has so much to say about the human condition. Probably in the hands of just about anyone else, season two would have devolved into one long chase scene with killer robots hounding our protagonists at every turn, but I am very glad to say it evolved into something so much more layered than that.

I truly hope Josh gets all the accolades he deserves for this one day.

So obviously, we absolutely love and adore this show, and we believe it deserves a place on airwaves that are becoming increasingly cluttered with the flotsam of silly sitcoms and rancid reality programming. Otherwise, there is simply going to be no reason for people who enjoy complicated characters and engaging storylines to ever turn on a television program at all. Countless people purchase this program on iTunes, watch it online, and are planning on re-buying it when it comes out on DVD, yours truly included.

And might I also add that most of them do not have Nielsen boxes plugged up to their television sets, also yours truly included.

But speaking of the frustration over the ratings, we of the resistance are mostly unsympathetic to such things. It doesn't matter in the slightest that the next crop of super popular reality shows will probably be stuff like "Who Wants to Survive on an Island With Schizophrenic Stars from the Seventies" or "Marry a Millionaire Amputee Bachelorette for a Day." Nor will it matter that they are easy to produce, cheap to make, and score huge in the ratings. While they may have their place, they speak to nothing deep and lasting inside us.

Shows such as "Dancing with the Stars" or the imminent "Pole Vaulting across Alligator-Filled Lagoons With the Stars" may score twenty million viewers a week while "Sarah Connor" only gets three and a half million or so, but that's neither here nor there. We don't care if the probably soon-to-be-produced "Eating Salad with the Stars" wins thirty million viewers a week, or fifty million a week, or even a hundred million viewers a week, it still is not saying anything to the human condition. It simply cannot compare with the kind of mythic, archetypal stories like those on "Sarah Connor," stories that make you feel and think and wonder at the possibilities of the human imagination.

And on a side note, isn't three and a half million viewers a LOT of people? Honestly, how many viewers do you need? Simply congratulate yourselves for having three and a half million of the most intelligent, dedicated viewers in the country, and leave it at that.

In closing, we can only stand and respectfully ask for a third season of "The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Josh Friedman only has two more seasons planned out anyway, and so many really and truly want to see his vision fulfilled. So we very much implore you not to let this show die, to let quality win out over quantity just this once. If not, well, thank you for two excellent seasons, and keep in mind that many people liked the first few episodes of this show only to stop watching because they feared they would get too attached to it and then it would be canceled anyway. Pity, but perhaps they were right.

Until then, though, we will keep fighting and, in the eloquent words of Dylan Thomas, "Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light." Or in the words of Sarah Connor herself in the pilot episode, until then "It's gonna be one helluva dogfight."

Thank you so much for your time,

Paul F. McDonald

A "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" Fan

So yes, if anyone has read this far, let's please, please get a season three for "The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Buy the show on iTunes, download episodes on FOX, and pre-order those DVDs. A decision will not be made until May 18th regarding the fall line-up, but we do not want to lose this one the way we lost "Dark Angel" and "Firefly." And besides, whatever they replace it with they'll just cancel anyway, so why not leave it on?

Please write letters and sign petitions and do everything you can. Tell them how you feel. Let them know you love the show. Feel free to even print off my letter and send it in with my name attached, or better yet write your own. Just make it from the heart. Here are some addresses -

FOX Broadcasting
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

WB
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
4000 Warner Blvd
Burbank CA 91522

Or email them at: askfox@fox.com c/o Fox President Kevin Reilly
Scott.Rowe@Warnerbros.com

You can also keep up with all "Sarah Connor" news at the awesome official blog-

www.fox.com/blogs/terminator

Also, don't forget to listen to the best "Sarah Connor" podcast around with the ever-great Steve and Derek, Skynext -

www.skynextpodcast.com

There is even a video petition that you can burn and send it copies to FOX on YouTube. This is awesome.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjOODNKGyc

And last but not least, "Sarah" is in the lead at this EOnline poll, but it couldn't hurt to run over and vote one or two or six times -

"http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/watch_with_kristin/b107874_save_one_show_help_your_fave_see.html"

And just to remind you of why this show is so awesome, here's that wonderful four minute trailer for the last half of season two that was shown at Wondercon -

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid14602162001?bclid=14539929001&bctid=14624346001

Remember, there is No Fate But What We Make.

Many Humble Apologies

2009-04-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

First off, let me just extend my heartfelt apologies to the entire blogging community. This must be one of the least updated blogs of all time. But I have been SO busy with other writing duties that simply must take precedence. What can I say? I've only got SIX chapters to go on my new book with twenty in the can, and there's no backing down now.

Second off, major sorrows go to the friends and family of Andy Hallet, who played the lovable green nightclub owner on "Angel." Sure, he was a demon, but he wasn't such a bad guy. I met Andy a couple of times at Dragoncon, and he was a nice, funny, thoughtful fellow. He just passed away at the tender age of thirty-three due to heart disease. He will be missed, and suddenly my heart arrhythmia problems of a year or so ago don't seem so bad.

Third off, no, I'm not actually going to provide you with any original content now. My muses carried me through half a chapter today, and they've decided to go bowling or some such this evening. They deserve the night off. Not that it really matters, cuz who reads this thing anymore, anyhow? However, I do want to fire off a poem deep into cyberspace, just because I can. I've always loved it, and its time to serve it up on a silver platter, Dedalus Enterprises-style.

Strangely enough, it ties in to my new YA series as well.

So without further ado, I offer the floor to the inestimable Arthur O'Shaughnessy -

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Let It Snow!

2009-03-01T20:24:00.001-08:00

What enchanted photo is this? A magic lamp post that grew out of a far away country? A look at the Lantern Waste, right on the edges of Narnia itself?

Nope, it's from none other than Highpoint Road. Snow, kids, snow!

I know this may not be blog worthy, but as a person who's spent their entire life in the Deep South, just the sight of big soft flakes drifting out of a gray slate of sky is enough to fill my heart with joy. And today, we got absolutely drenched with the stuff, our world magically transformed under a beautiful blanket of cold whiteness.

Like so much in nature, snow absolutely entrances me. I spent the morning eating cereal, listening to Alan Watts on Zencast, and just lazily gazing out the window as the soft ballet of snowflakes whirled around our fair city. I could have done it forever. I find that if we still our minds, let our infatuation with labelling the world fade, this whole snow thing is all the more amazing.

Right now, I'm fighting the urge to go out and walk through it. Still, it seems almost a sacrilege to trudge through all that fine powdery goodness and pollute it with graceless tennis shoe tracks. So maybe not. Still, there is so much to soak in just by looking and smelling and listening.

I am really noticing how snow not only beautifies the world, but also covers it with a peculiar quietness that is getting rarer by the day. It is nature's way of saying "shut up!" So just stay in, get a fire going, drink some hot chocolate, pull out the wool socks, luxuriate in silence, and enjoy!

As for a more substantial post, well, the Narnia Paradox is coming, but in the meantime, check out the archives. There are months and months of cosmic wonder and philosophical mischief to be had. I personally am putting my cut schedule at Borders to use by making enormous progress on book one of my new YA series.

Over and out. Or as Aslan would say, further up and further in.

DISCLAIMER - Okay, so I made a grievous error. Not as in General Grievous, though. This isn't about a four armed Jedi Killer. This is because I didn't give photographer credit. This stunning winter photograph was taken by Patti Ward. I just assumed everyone would know I didn't take it because 1) I don't have a camera and 2) I have no photographic skill whatsoever. If I had tried to take a picture of a lamp post and made it appear is if it was in a snowy wood, I probably would have wound up snapping a shot of my shoe laces or something. Cause when it comes to photography, that's the way I roll.

Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Program ...

2009-02-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe not.

What can I say, kids? I have been insanely busy lately. There was the big 35th birthday extravaganza, there was Valentines, there was homeschooling at the Dedalus Academy of Philosophical Excellence, there was an insane amount of book writing from which blogging can only distract me ...

I am happy to announce I am halfway through with my latest book, and when I say through, I mean through. Well, there's the inevitable Patti-edit, but other than that, I think it's in good shape. More rewriting than I thought, but what can you do? I only have five or six chapters at the end that haven't been worked on at all, except in outline form, but I think by the end of May or early June it should be done.

I will say that I am putting together an enormous blog involving Aslan, the big, furry, maned god of Narnia. After doing extensive research on the Chronicles courtesy of not only the books themselves, but other works such as The Magician's Book and Borders' very own book of essays called Through the Wardrobe, I have a great number of ideas running through my brain. It is going to make for a doozy of a blog/research paper. Just let me say I am seriously loving on some Chronicles of Narnia. I haven't been into the series this much since I was a kid, and I am trying to read it as objectively as possible. Needless to say, I'm taking it in quite a few directions in my mind.

And may I just say, kudos to FOX for picking up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to be released as a major motion picture? Especially after Disney so unceremoniously dropped it from their schedules. Anyway, can't wait to see Caspian and Reepicheep and Eustace and the gang sail to the end of the world.

On the other hand, FOX made a nasty miscalculation when it put the best written, acted, and directed show on television, aka Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles into the death slot on Friday nights. In case you hadn't heard, yes it is on at eight o'clock on Fridays now. And given ratings, apparently you haven't heard. We can't let this one die, faithful readers. We can't. We won't.

A grass roots resistance worthy of toppling Skynet itself is being mobilized, and you can read about it here - No Fate But What We Make. So get watching, write an email, buy on iTunes, whatever.

Speaking of grass roots resistance, you should also check out this nonsense - The New Book Banning. Sheesh.

Anyway, I'd like to float a bit of philosophical mischief in the form of a poem that a friend recommended. It's by Stevie Smith, and it kinda ties into the Aslan thing. Very moving. It's called "Our Bog is Dood," and think of a lot of little kids talking.

Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood
My darling little child?

We know because we wish it so
That is enough, they cried,
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride,
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.

Then tell me, darling little ones,
What's dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.

But when they raised them up again
They had forgotten me
Each one upon each other glared
In pride and misery
For what was dood, and what their Bog
They never could agree.

Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that soon should drown them all,
That never yet drowned me.

Are You Watching This Yet?

2009-01-07T19:32:00.000-08:00

Victoriously Vanquishing Virgil

2008-12-30T19:32:00.000-08:00

First off, I have a new and improved online bookshelf courtesy of shelfari.com. It is a big improvement over goodreads.com, as it automatically updates directly from the site itself. This allows all of you to read what I read, so you can become as cool as I am. Or not. Still, it's pretty nifty.

*Scratch that. Shelfari doesn't work worth a damn. It's back to good reads for me. Still, it applies just the same.

Second off, for those of you who have been keeping up with my reading lists, you know that Robert Fagles' translation of The Aeneid has been haunting my digital shelf for quite some time now. Well, at least for a few months. However, everyone will be happy to know that I finally did finish it, line for line, verse for verse. All twelve books.

For the most part, it did live up to the hype. I must say, this was one classic epic I was totally unfamiliar with. I have read a prose translation of The Odyssey, and in general, know more about the Greeks than I do about the Romans. The odyssey of Odysseus I had read, but the aeneid of Aeneas I was considerably shakier on.

So I have to admit, when I finish a big work like this, there is a bit of pride that wells up in me. The last really huge verse epic I read was John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was supplemented by great paintings by Gustave Dore. I highly recommend checking it out if you like that sort of thing. I personally can't wait for the movie, complete with THX sound and lots of digital effects. The war in heaven would be awesome.

The Aeneid was well worth the challenge, though. The translation itself was impeccable, and I already have Fagles' translation of The Odyssey which I plan to tackle when I have sufficient intellectual fortitude once again. His choice of words is superb, his imagery so rich you can almost taste it. He really does make the old live again in a sometimes mesmerizing linguistic cadence.

The Aeneid is first and foremost the tale of the founding of Rome. Just as Odysseus had to travel far and wide to find his home again after the long Trojan War, so does Aeneas. This is basically the Trojan War from the Trojans' point of view, and I must say, it is nice to see them get to lay seige to a city before it's all over. Poetic justice, quite literally. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, the death throes of Troy were also the birth pangs of Rome.

We have epic battles, gods and goddesses, the personal struggle between destiny and desire, and of course, the requisite trip to the underworld. We also have a very big shield that essentially has the entire history of Rome carved into it, names and all. Not sure how that works. And when all is said and done, that is the only thing that made this work difficult to read at times. It seems as if every single character in it is named, even if all they do is pop up and get killed (for the record, I'm really glad they don't do this on Grand Theft Auto 4). It got to be a lot to slog through, though the battle scenes during the last few books between the Trojans and the Latvians were pretty awesome.

And did I mention gory? A couple of times, I almost thought I was watching a Quentin Tarantino film, what with all the beheadings and spurting blood. Still, the book worked its way up to quite a crescendo at the the end, not unlike a summer blockbuster. You really, really wanted Aeneas and his own personal Darth Turnus to throw down. I could practically hear John Williams' "Duel of the Fates" blaring in the background.

When all is said and done, Homer and Virgil did pretty much comprise the classical world's very own George Lucas. What with recurring characters, storylines, and even themes, The Illiad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid form a single trilogy, and as far as I'm concerned, the Robert Fagles translation should be sold as a boxed set.

In short, if you're looking for an ancient trilogy on the level of Star Wars, these are pretty much it. Sure there may not have been any action figure tie-ins and they probably won't be doing a special edition anytime soon with a digitally inserted Boba Fett, but still ...

The Lion, the Psychoanalyst, and Why It's All Relative

2008-12-15T21:33:00.000-08:00

This particular blog was inspired by a particularly bad book that I recently picked up and read. Well, actually, I didn't read the whole thing. I'm not in the habit of tossing books aside unfinished, but in this case, it couldn't be avoided. I did slog through most of it and, quite frankly, I was growing so exasperated with the low quality of discussion that I just couldn't continue.

And yet at the same time, I was unable to simply walk away from it, because it did push me down some reasonably interesting avenues of thought. That explains why I'm here answering the siren call of the blogosphere, as opposed to actually writing something important. Like a book.

(Or at least finally finishing Robert Fagles' translation of The Aeneid)

Well, that's not really fair. This is important, otherwise I wouldn't be writing it, and hopefully you wouldn't be here reading it.

So the book is called The Question of God. The basic premise is simply that if Sigmund Freud, a militant atheist dedicated to the scientific materialist point of view, and C.S. Lewis, a devout believer advocating the religious spiritual point of view, had actually sat down and had a debate, what would it have been like? It sounds interesting, which is why I picked it up to begin with.

About halfway through, however, I was quite certain that neither side had the slightest idea of what they were talking about, and the narrator least of all. If there actually had been a debate and I'd had the bad fortune to actually attend, I wouldn't have hesitated to call a time out and tell them exactly that. At least I think I would have, if I’d been able to muster up enough spunk.

Still, the book reduced me to laughter at several points. And that's just wrong. I mean, these are arguably the two most well known, respected, and argued philosophers for their particular point of view that the twentieth century had to offer. Okay, maybe that's precisely what was wrong with the twentieth century, but I walked out of that debate feeling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually insulted.

Let's start with Freud since I admittedly know the least about him. True, he is the father of psychoanalysis. True, many of his points on the human mind and memory and transference and familial relations and so on were quite acute. No arguments there. I took some psychology in college and it has always been a subject of interest for me, though I have concentrated more on Freud's disciple, Carl Jung, than the master himself. This is probably because the late great mythologist Joseph Campbell always said that the older you got, the more Jung had to offer, and the less Freud did.

Campbell was right there, only I would argue that Freud has very little to say to begin with. Ids and egos aside, he took a wholly negative view of religion and mythology. All of it was infantile wish fulfillment, and any kind of mystical experience was reduced to libido or misplaced sexuality.

Actually, pretty much everything for Freud was misplaced sexuality.

The problem was when he tried to tackle the big problems of the universe from such a vantage point. The whole thing turns to rubbish, and Freud himself couldn't adequately come to terms with it. He suffered from depression most of his life apparently, and this came into play with his take on existence as a whole. Since a loving, intelligent energy guiding everything was no longer scientific and the cosmos itself was a clock without a clockmaker, Freud apparently felt that everything in nature was basically held together by a combination of brute force and blind stupidity.

And that included human beings.

This doesn't make for a particularly solid base on which to found a cosmology, but that was what he attempted to do. And, no surprise, he didn't do so successfully. As he himself put it, "I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution." This made me laugh out loud. Quite frankly, it's not even scientific or the objectivity that science is allegedly founded on, but hey, at least it's wholly negative, so that's better than all this silly wishful thinking that religion offers up.

And this brings us to C.S. Lewis. In the interests of honesty, I will say my relationship with Lewis is considerably more complicated. For one thing, we have the Narnia paradox. Now, that's a subject for another essay altogether, and I would love to compose one with nothing holding up the spine of the whole thing but Aslan, the furry-footed, golden-maned God-in-disguise of that series.

Maybe I will and maybe I won't, but let's just admit for now that I love Narnia, that I grew up peering in closets hoping to find a way in, and that it was a profound landmark in the geography of my childhood imagination.

While I do find Lewis a very capable storyteller, that's not to say I'm entirely down with every message that is woven into the fabric of his imaginary countries. For the purposes of this essay, though, I think he is much more talented as a painter of mythic images in the heads of young children than he is as a theologian. But given the theology he was working inside of, perhaps that's not too surprising.

Lewis is a very interesting case in that he fell out of his faith very early, only to return to it later in life. He didn't undergo his own personal conversion until the ripe old age of thirty-one, and that irrevocably changed his life forever. Given his soft-spot for ancient mythology and medieval literature, this makes a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, it is ironic that after being exposed to so many pagan myths with symbolism almost identical to the New Testament, he suddenly was persuaded into believing that the church of his native country was the real truth behind all of them. Maybe a bit too convenient, even with J.R.R. Tolkien twisting his arm? I get the feeling that a single conversation with Joseph Campbell would have made him an infinitely better thinker, but that's just me.

Nonetheless, there is something fundamentally off-putting about Lewis' inability to conceive of the divine as anything but a monarchichal father in heaven. His entire theology basically boils down to an is-or-isn't dichotomy, where not only is something true or false, but that people are either saved or damned, and it's his way or the highway.

Some of this is avoided in Narnia, but it shows itself all too plainly when Lewis argues that when Christ claimed to be God, he was either crazy, or lying, or telling the truth. Really? Because I can think of a lot of other explanations.

Maybe Christ was trapped in a Hebrew culture and tied to a language system that couldn't adequately express what he wanted to say. Maybe he simply meant it as an expression of oneness with not just a monarchichally-conceived God as described in the limited imagination of the Old Testament, but with the mystery underlying the billions of galaxies. Or maybe he was simply expressing what many, many sages, neither crazy or lying, have said throughout the cultures of Egypt and India and China and Japan.

Anyway, the main problem with Lewis actually stems from the way The Question of God frames his life after his conversion. Okay, well Lewis' weak theological arguments don't exactly help, but the author very much gives the impression that from his religious salvation onward, he really didn't have a significant problem for the rest of his life. It was all sunshine and roses, the universe dripping with meaning, and life itself filled to the brim with purpose. It is so one-sided as to be almost laughable.

And again, keep in mind every other philosophy and religion and cosmology is never even mentioned or discussed in any way. So much is left unsaid it's truly staggering, and if you want to know what, it would be easier to just check out the book than me trying to recount everything here. The main premise of the book is flat-out admitted by the narrator at the end when he simply states, "Whether we realize it or not, we all embrace some form of either the materialist worldview advocated by Freud or the spiritual worldview advocated by Lewis."

Right.

There you have it, people. The tragedy of postmodern civilization, all laid out for you in one little book. You can either believe in a giant invisible father figure who has a home waiting for you in the sky, or a dumb, mindless universe tottering precariously on predetermined laws. Never mind that we've already been to the sky in those wacky things called airplanes and there's nothing there, and never mind that a cosmos is operating under laws even though there is no such thing as a lawmaker.

So we have Freud crying sour grapes, and Lewis crying for the moon, and we all have to pick one or else.

Sigh.

As I've said many times, the problem with heaven and hell alike is that - between the two - there's simply nothing to choose. Or at least that's what so many people want you to think. I guess I'm here to deflate the whole thing and laugh as I do so.

This entire dilemma has been solved a dozen times over in the writings of Alan Watts, and nothing would give me more pleasure than to see him gingerly inserted into this mock argument between Freud and Lewis. His cheerful laughter would have poked a hole in all the solemn proceedings and brought them both back to something at least resembling reality. He may not be as well-known, but Watts was arguably the most important philosopher the twentieth century produced, the kind of sage that is perfectly capable of fashioning a middle bridge over the twin abysses of heaven and hell.

In point of fact, I've grabbed a quote from his cleverly titled autobiography In My Own Way which does the impossible task of nailing his entire philosophy in a paragraph -

"It is simply that I think people would be much happier and more at home in the world if they felt as I do, that I have no other self than this whole universe. I am not controlling it volitionally any more than I am controlling my autonomic nervous system, and at the same time it is not befalling or happening to any separate me as its observant victim. There is simply the whole process happening of itself, spontaneously, and with every pair of eyes it takes a fresh look at itself. This happening is what I call God, and what it is essentially is beyond all possible conception. I feel it most intently in a stillness of mind where words and ideas are not running around in my brain."

Really, folks, it's not that complicated. Poets and mystics have been saying the same thing for ages, though granted, always within the confines of their own cultures and belief systems. It's just that the pearls need dusting off and re-examining every now and again.

The important thing to understand is that this timeless, unavoidable conflict between such confused abstractions as "scientific materialism" and "spiritual truth" is neither timeless nor unavoidable. The chasm that separates science from religion and Freud from Lewis is, ironically, totally arbitrary. It isn't a law of the universe so much as an accident of history and a mystification of terms.

Perhaps one of the most important science books of the early twenty-first century, The View from the Center of the Universe tackles this very problem. It traces it back to the point in history when the world of science and the world of religion shook hands and decided to go their separate ways.

In the seventeenth century, Galileo virtually proved that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun as dictated by natural law, as opposed to the earth-centered view as espoused by the Bible. After his arrest and trial, other scientists like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes decided to take a much safer "hands-off" approach when it came to the Church, as well as spiritual matters in general.

"As the Church and scientists both went on to develop rationales for their respective realms of authority, a kind of social schizophrenia entered the culture," Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams state in The View, adding, "The physical world and the world of values and meaning were for the first time in history seen as two separate realities." In other words, science was not going to say anything about spirituality, and spirituality was not going to say anything about science.

Enter Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.

This is a sad state of affairs, and perhaps the central irony of the whole thing is that science has actually succeeded in providing a universe a million times larger, grander, and more spectacular than anything religion has had to offer. As William Blake said, "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise," and science has done exactly that. The minute Edwin Hubble discovered the Milky Way galaxy had at least a hundred billion stars in it and that it's just one of at least a hundred billion galaxies, all bets were off.

Of course, initially this led to just more cosmic angst. As the egg-headed mathematician-monk Blaise Pascal whined in a post-earth-centric cosmos, "I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing and which know nothing of me. I am terrified." Really, Blaise? Because it makes me happy. Not only happy, but relaxed. What can I say - I like my elbow room. And it's worth pointing out that Joel and Nancy argue in The View that such an emo-like stance isn't even science ... it's just bad French philosophy masquerading as science.

However displaced the human race once felt by science, the field itself has progressed far beyond Newtonian mechanics where everything is reduced to cold mathematical precision and Cartesian dualism where mind and matter are irrevocably divorced. Actually, the central, central irony of all this is that science has again provided a perfect, legitimate foundation for the most important aspect of religion, something that Western religion in particular has had problems with, namely the religious experience itself.

As Karen Armstrong points out in her great little book, A Short History of Myth, "Some of the very earliest myths, probably dating back to the Paleolithic period, were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky - infinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny lives - people had a religious experience." So the stars have always been a source of mystic delight. Astronomy wasn't the end of religion, it actually just harkened back to the beginning of it. As Armstrong notes, the night sky was by itself "numinous," or capable of providing people with a transcendent experience independent of dogma or scripture.

And that was thirty thousand years before all those vast spinning galaxies and achingly beautiful nebula clouds were captured by the Hubble space telescope!

It seems to me that the religious experience itself has always been about connection, about coming into direct contact with something infinitely larger than one's self, and in the realization that every thing is somehow inexplicably one thing. Poets and sages have been intuitively stumbling over this fact for centuries. And as amazing as it sounds, science has finally caught up with them.

For instance, Walt Whitman once proclaimed that "A leaf of grass is nothing less than the journeywork of the stars." This could so easily be dismissed as poetic sentimentality, an overblown romanticism without regard for the basic division between subject and object. After all, what could a leaf of grass possibly have to do with the work of the stars?

Of course, a century and a half later, Neil DeGrasse Tyson basically said the said thing. One of the top astrophysicists in the world, Tyson argued in one of his essays found in Death By Black Hole that if a person was asked where they were from, they could simply respond by stating what town or city they were born in. Of course, an "astrochemically richer answer might be, 'I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago'."

And indeed, astronomers have realized that all the heavier elements that exist in the universe were produced by the nuclear fusion process that churns right in the heart of the largest stars. The stars then go supernova, and scatter those elements across the galaxy, basically seeding it with potential life. As the poets and scientists alike will tell you, we’re all stardust. Everything from the chair you're sitting in, the clothes you're wearing, the calcium in your bones, and the iron in your blood. It all connects you in a shattering intimacy with every star in the sky.

So not only did science not bury the idea that the kingdom of heaven is within you, it rather handily proved it. And even better, this is a cosmic heritage that operates regardless of race or religion, libido or creedo. It is the birthright of everyone on this planet, even Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis!

While it may be bad form and subjective for a scientist to form a personal opinion about the universe being something that we not only stare up into, but something that is also embedded right under our very skin, Neil DeGrasse Tyson still admitted on an episode of The Universe that he's personally inspired by the idea. Staring at the camera, he said straight up that the fact that not only are we in the universe but that the universe is in us "makes me smile."

My own particular sensibilities do fall right in line with this worldview. When I personally find religion, I find it in strange places. This includes the theory of evolution, something that has been at war with fundamentalist religion for the better part of a century.

Most of us have heard the theory before. It cites an unbroken chain of life that has evolved on this planet from a single-celled organism, and that this is more likely than not where we come from. Honestly, I find nothing even remotely distasteful about this idea. It even makes me smile a little.

Evolution is not to be understood as all "bloody tooth and claw," where everything simply goes around killing everything else. This is popular though stupid misconception that colors so many people's idea of what evolution is. Put simply, if every big animal just went around randomly killing every small animal, then pretty obviously, everything would be dead.

The dreaded phrase "survival of the fittest" has never meant nature inherently favors the strong over the weak. From a certain point of view, it simply points to the notion that the organisms that are fittest are those that can not only form harmonious, symbiotic relationships with their environment, but also those that can cooperate. Evolution hardly favors parasites over cooperation because, after all, when a parasite successfully kills its host, both of them die. This is hardly "fit."

While sitting in a botany class in college, what really struck me about evolution was that ultimately - ultimately - it pointed to a holistic view of life and the physical world where everything was again profoundly connected. The large depended on the small, and the strong depended on the weak, and basically every multi-cellular organism can trace its ancestry back to a common cell. What's even remotely alienating or depressing about that?

Even when some hard-nosed scientist comes around and says that that means we basically evolved out of strains of bacteria and owe our existence not to an all-perfect heavenly father but to the oozing slime of the earth, that still doesn't phase me. Instead of constantly seeing that as some sort of a de-motion of the human race, why can't we flip it around and just as accurately see that it's a pro-motion of bacteria?

After all, if all it takes is about four billion years for the first prokaryotic cell to produce an Albert Einstein, shouldn't that drastically heighten our respect for so-called oozing slime? And when all is said and done, is this process really that radically different than the one that takes place between sperms and fertilized eggs in the female body all the time? Is the level of miraculous transformation really that different?

What sets me apart is that all of this strangely strikes me as a much sturdier base for religion or theology than much of what's being shouted down from the pulpits. For the longest time, I hesitated to admit such ideas, because they are really the exact opposite of what everyone else feels. Or so I thought.

A magazine known as The Skeptic featured an issue celebrating the works of Carl Sagan, the legendary astronomer. One of the writers interviewed Anne Druyan, who was Sagan's wife as well as a scientist in her own right. When pressed about the creation versus evolution controversy, she answered that all in all, she found the story science told to be much more convincing.

Well, this isn't that surprising. But what is surprising is that she thought the theory of evolution, including its insight into the deep and powerful biological connections that hold the whole tapestry of life together, was much more "spiritually satisfying" than anything mentioned in Genesis. On the contrary, our God-given role as basically "middle management" and "lords of the field" served to remove us from our real heritage and dissociated us from the world of nature. In short, it wasn't a more spiritual view of the universe, but a significantly less one.

To so many people, this would be going too far. Or maybe it wouldn't. This is simply a side of science that hasn't been told. There is still a very legitimate fear that to give too much validity to our feelings rather than our observations might upset the entire boat that science has been successfully sailing around in for the past four hundred years. And yet as it now stands, it offers up a very incomplete view of humanity and the cosmos. Human beings are not intellects alone - we feel our way through as much as anything, and that's important.

In some ways, there are certain intellectual elements in the current scientific cosmology that really don't make sense. Even scientifically. For instance, our theory of consciousness hits nothing short of a brick wall when spied through the lens of our current biological paradigm. Yet the scientific community for the most part clings to a rather silly theory of "emergence," wherein the entire cosmos is unintelligent matter, and only by some crazy evolutionary fluke did consciousness somehow magically "spring" out of our brains when they got complicated enough.

It was fairly recently that I came across a school of thought known as "panpsychism," which is roughly translated as "all mind." It basically cites that physical "matter" and spiritual "mind" are twin aspects of the exact same thing, like two sides of a coin. While it hasn't been embraced by science at large, it does provide a much more satisfying way of explaining how exactly something as ethereal as consciousness managed to evolve out of something as material as the brain.

This isn't to imply that everything "thinks," but it does imply that everything is in some sense alive. Everything from subatomic particles to molecules to DNA strands to planets to stars to galaxies. It's all conscious, though obviously not self-conscious to the degree that we are. A tree can't think about thinking, though their basic structure and design can be seen as intelligence in and of itself.

Human brains are unique, but as the most complex forms of matter in the universe, it only stands to reason that they would produce the most complex forms of consciousness.

Now every Romantic poet who ever wandered as lonely as a cloud or swooned over an old abbey knew that nature was in some sense animate or alive. They knew it intuitively. As the literary critic Meyer Abrams once cited in his work, The Mirror and the Lamp, basically every theory of poetry to come out of Romanticism also involved in some way an organic conception of the universe. This was in strict revolt against the Cartesian Bargain of the Enlightenment, which had science positing the cosmos as "celestius machina," or as a celestial machine.

This is one of the many ways in which religion and science have tended to hamstring each other. Science was adamant about getting rid of the watchmaker who made the universe, but at the same time, they ironically kept the notion that the universe was a watch. This makes no sense, and creation scientists have been having a field day with it for the last century.

So much confusion would have been spared had science somehow managed to blend some romanticism in with its worldview. Impossible, maybe, but one of my fundamental philosophies is that the cosmos as conceived as a machine has been disastrous on both sides. After all, machines have to be built by an energy and intelligence outside themselves, whereas self-regulating organisms are grown by an energy and intelligence from within.

Though he may be loathe to admit it, Freud's conception of the universe as blind, stupid libido grew directly out of Genesis. In the second story of creation, God has to formally come in and "breathe" life into the clay figure of Adam, thus separating life from the clay itself. This, coupled with the firm and fast though completely fictitious dualism of the Greeks, set us on a road whereby any view of the universe as intelligent or alive was swept under the rug and completely dismissed.

Still, the poets have always known better, though Lewis himself was slightly queasy about saying so. William Wordsworth, on the other hand, spoke of how our "meddling intellects/ Misshape the beauteous forms of things." His close connection with nature was overwhelming, no matter what the current religious or scientific trends of the day may have been. In his first edition of The Prelude, he said it as simply and eloquently as he could - "In all things, I saw one life,/ And felt that it was joy."

This may strike some readers as completely ludicrous, this proposition that everything is fundamentally joy. But not me. On the contrary, if the universe is not fundamentally made of joy, even with all its death and decay and destruction, what exactly is the point of a universe at all? Surely it would have found a way to commit suicide by now if it really was, as Freud suggested, a "regrettable institution."

As Alan Watts pointed out, it only stands to reason that we come at the universe with an optimal theory. And there's no better proof for the basic existential bliss of existence than the fact that anything exists at all. Because really, it's a lot of trouble for something to exist, and if it's not really worth it, than why bother? He was adamant that existence was all a dance, a play, a drama, or at least a game. And that game had to be great from the outset, regardless of how badly we human beings played it.

This may not be scientific, but on the other hand, why isn't it? We may be pole-vaulting to conclusions here, but that's just it. We, as human beings, are here. Objectivism aside, at some point in time, we have to be taken into account as being part of the equation. So maybe subjectivity isn't a bad thing after all.

As Watts would say, at least in this galaxy, in this particular solar system, on this particular planet, the universe is evolving people. And after all, we call a tree an apple tree because it produces apples, so why in the world can't we see the cosmos as a human cosmos? Right here and now, the universe is producing human beings, as surely as an apple tree apples. To deny that would be to deny the empirical evidence.

Watts gave the best definition of humanity I've ever heard. He said that we were the entire universe looking at itself from six billion different points of view. And why? Because it's so wildly entertaining, so endlessly fascinating, that the universe had to devise a way to develop eyes and ears and noses and bodies sensitive enough to absorb the whole show. So here we are.

Well, this has gone on for considerably longer than I ever intended, but let's wrap things up with a little help from none other than Albert Einstein himself.

A few months ago, I purchased a book titled Einstein in His Own Words. As you might imagine, it's about Einstein, and it's in his own words. Though he was the scientist par excellence of the twentieth century what with that whole theory of relativity thing, he had a lot to say about religion. Maybe, just maybe, we can use him to nudge the parallel tracks of Lewis and Freud a little closer together.

Generally speaking, Einstein was critical of organized religion. Apparently, he often bemoaned the fact that humanity as a whole couldn't conceive of a "more sublime means" through which to envision the divine except through a personal god. A god who took excessive interest in the comings and goings of human beings and even handed out rewards and punishments based on their behavior was ludicrous to Einstein. He had no use whatsoever for personal immortality, and thought those who sought it were "feeble souls."

Interestingly, though, he had what he called a very profound and well-developed "cosmic religious sense." It didn't revolve around an anthropomorphic God, but nonetheless was a kind of undeniable rapture at the order and harmony of the universe. And while he said that the "concept of a soul without a body seems to [him] to be empty and devoid of meaning," he wasn't opposed to the idea of a soul altogether.

He rather perfectly described himself as being a "devoutly religious non-believer," and yeah, I know just how he feels.

In point of fact, Einstein lightly played about with "pantheism," which is the notion that the physical universe and all of nature was a manifestation of God. He especially liked the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, remarking that he was critical to modern thought because "he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things."

While never making concrete religious statements, Einstein still celebrated the "beautiful and deepest experience a man can have," namely a sense of the mysterious. And then he went on to say that that sense is the domain of religion and science alike.

Personally, I ache with that "cosmic religious sense" that he spoke of. Sometimes it infuses me until it threatens to lift me right off the ground. But at the same time, it grounds me, and lets me feel perfectly at home in the universe. No matter how ill at ease I have been with the institutions and nation-states and belief systems of humanity, I have never had a quarrel with existence itself. Whether among trees and mountains and streams and fields, or just gazing up into the infinity of a star-embroidered night, it is impossible for me to feel the slightest pang of despair or alienation.

Existence as a whole delights me and teases me and fascinates me and charms me, and that is something that neither Lewis nor Freud ever took into account. It was a possibility they simply never entertained it.

Back in the early days of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge jotted down a few very telling lines. With his imagination burning inside him, he conceived of the universe as nothing less than a great Eolian harp, played by an ineffable transcendence - “And what if all of animated nature/ Be but organic harps diversly fram’d/ That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps/ Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”

Sound overblown, no pun intended? Or at least irreconcilable with science? Obviously, you haven’t heard of string theory, an idea formulated by theoretical physicists. It is the mathematical equivalent of Coleridge’s poem, citing the possibility that at its deepest level, physical reality is looped, vibrating strings of matter. So perhaps it is all a musical phenomenon after all.

And if that’s what the universe really is, then it’s no wonder we can’t understand it through any amount of talk. The only way of truly understanding the universe is simply by stepping off the sidelines, letting the rhythm overtake you, and joining in the dance. The beat carries on through, from the thumping of our hearts to the twinkling of the stars.

For the record, I’ve never heard of Sigmund Freud or C.S. Lewis ever once hitting the dance floor and cutting up the rug, and I guess that's the most telling thing of all.

On the Lighter Side

The Thundering Art Revisited

2008-12-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

"Human intellect is incurably abstract."

So wrote the scholar and theologian C.S. Lewis. This is the "great divorce," the defining irony of human existence. We can think, we can use signs and symbols to illustrate the thoughts, and we can often do so to great effect. The only problem is, the more we do this, the further away we get from the very reality we're trying to describe.

In other words, we have the actual experience on one side, and the abstracting language and thought that attempts to capture said experience on the other. No one wants to stroll into a restaurant and eat a menu, and yet menus themselves can be extremely helpful if used properly.

The same could be said about books written concerning the art of whipcraft. First and foremost, everyone wants the tangible experience of cracking a bullwhip up close and personal. They want to feel the braided plaits in their hands, smell the aroma of the leather, and finally hear a crack break the sound barrier and erupt across the landscape. Nothing abstract there.

But with an art as demanding, precise, and potentially dangerous as whipcraft, sometimes an expertly written guide is necessary. Happily, Robert Dante is there to fill such a void. As a three time World Record breaker as well as professional performer, he is in an excellent position to write one of the first bullwhip bibles, and that's precisely what he did.

Let's Get Cracking: The How-To Book of Bullwhip Skills is an excellent treatise that offers something to beginner and expert alike, covers practically every aspect of whipcraft and, best of all, provides something of a philosophical backdrop to support the whole thing.

There are so many fascinating little tidbits to know and learn about whip-cracking. For instance, the fact that a popper really is going over nine hundred miles an hour with a strong crack is certainly of interest to just about everyone. Dante has many bits of information like that, and he cheerfully shares them all. In point of fact, we even get a short dissertation on Newtonian physics before all is said and done.

Not even including the cracks themselves, Dante likewise provides a wealth of information on all the basics of the art. This includes great tips on how to select and work with a whip maker, not to mention how to maintain the integrity of your whip once you have one. He also takes readers by the hand and explains the sometimes confusing lexicon of whipcraft, specifically regarding how different cracks are known by different names in different countries. The anatomy of a well-braided whip is beautifully laid out for us, as well as safety tips that should guide us successfully from out first attempt at whip cracking to our last.

This book reminds us that life is a show, and that the bullwhip artist can be one of the leading magicians. That is the basic "feel" of the book, a sense of the residual magic of the stage sprinkled across all the pages. It guides us through various simple tricks all the way up to the more complex routines or "flashes." If anyone has ever been interested in whipcraft as a performance art, this book explores all of it, from target-cutting to self-wraps to what basically amounts to a kind of bullwhip-ballet.

From start to finish, Let's Get Cracking is imbued with a sense of what Dante calls "Dancing on the Edge." It is what he and his daring partner Tina do for a living, and its practically palpable in the prose. And in the pictures too, which are every bit as good. Whipcraft photography could probably merit its own book, actually.

As for me personally, it has inspired me to save up for something better than my usual latigo leather bullwhips. Techniques Dante offers up like "pausing the crack" and "squeezing the trigger" do make a difference, even with a swivel handle whip. Dante does criticize this type, and though I had a good time running about pretending to be Indiana Jones as a kid with one in hand, I agree that they definitely do have their shortcomings.

And I certainly want to eventually try out his technique for making my own poppers.

Still, I personally am a writer, not a bullwhip artist, so my internal editor is always flipped in the "on" position. The only thing keeping this review from being five out of five stars is the simple fact that an extra proofreading or two would have greatly benefited the whole book. Okay, maybe living with a grammarian influenced my reading, but the book is scattered with typos and comma splices and probably other things most people wouldn't notice. While I know corrections are being made for hopefully the next edition, having an editor pick through it probably wouldn't have been a bad idea.

And also, there is a quote about how can we tell the dancer from the dance that is contributed to T.S. Eliot which actually belongs to William Butler Yeats. Yes, maybe I'm just trying to get some actual use out of my English degree, but I caught it right out.

On the other, considerably more important hand, the quote so perfectly captures the beautiful unity of it all, who can hold that slip against anyone? Indeed, who can tell the whip artisan from the whip? And therein lies the true appeal of the book, that thing that makes it unique, as well as why it warrants (and apparently has received) a warm reception in the enthusiast community.

Honestly, how many authors writing about bullwhips are going to be quoting Eliot or Yeats anyway? It delighted me to learn that Dante is a poet himself, and apparently knew Allen Ginsberg. It delighted me, but it didn't exactly surprise me. While my knowledge and skill in the bullwhipping arts are still practically non-existent, I recognized the poetry in it immediately.

At least when I got back into it about a year ago, anyway.

One of the great things about any kind of bullwhip performance is the rhythm of it. In the hands of a master, the beat and cadence is unmistakable, like an ode being written in the air. A genuinely talented individual can conduct a symphony orchestra with a whip, and that's almost what Dante is doing on the cover of the book.

But best of all, Let's Get Cracking explores not only how to get into whipcraft, but also why people do so. Yes, this is also a book of philosophy. It contains quaint little colloquialisms like how important it is to "ride the horse in the direction it's going." True enough, but it also equates whip cracking with life itself, recognizing the need to sometimes just allow something to happen, as opposed to simply bullying it into happening.

Dante advises us, "It's a matter of form, not force. You don't make the whip crack, you let it crack." There is no real need for muscle or effort - in point of fact, those things cause us to trip over our own feet more often than not. Or at least to stress ourselves as well as our whips. All that's needed is to be able to set the ego aside and then allow the universe to do its thing. This is as true in whipcraft as it is in Tai Chi or Yoga, which is also mentioned in the book.

And perhaps what's even more important is that - in practice - whip cracking does begin to bring us back to concrete reality, back to a world we can see and smell and taste and touch. And that's so simple its alarmingly difficult nowadays. Furthermore, there's nothing on earth or heaven above that's quite so truthful as a speeding bullwhip.

As Dante says, "trust the whip. It does not lie. It can't." In other words, whip popping is direct, immediate, and is about as non-conceptual as it gets. It may be philosophical, but not the kind of philosophy that leads you into a world of words and ideas with no solidity to them. Like the slap in the face the Zen master sometimes gives, it's all about snapping you back into the moment, into the now.

And if you aren't totally there in your practice, you're probably going to be sporting a nasty red welt the next day.

This is what Dante calls "bullwhip truth," and intriguingly, this is why he recommends cracking with the hand that you don't usually use. And he recommends it very well -

"Intellectualizing can get in your way ... when you use your recessive hand, you will be more likely to not think, since you will focus on how it actually feels. You are more in reality, less likely to compare what's happening with how you think it 'ought' to be. You get into the moment, into the body. You become a dancer, a child - in short, you become teachable."

Admittedly, the literary itch to spin off a zinger about Zen and the art of the whip is intense right about now. But the thing is, Dante really gets it. As warm, witty, and western as Let's Get Cracking is, it also very much has the flavor, the mysterious taste, of the Far East.

Not long ago, I delved into another book called The Unfettered Mind. Written by Takuan Soho, it is a collection of advice from a Zen master to a sword one. While it may not have anything overtly to do with whipcraft, on the flip side, it has everything to do with it. Its wisdom is at once simple and profound, vague and precise, otherworldly yet perfectly natural. Like Dante's work, it seeks to cultivate the spontaneous perfection of the body, while simultaneously breeding the soothing calmness of the mind. Or better yet, wu-shin, the no-mind.

Different time, different art, different cultures, but the same philosophy. A finely crafted bullwhip has as much personality as an expertly made sword, and there's simply nothing to do about it. They each create their own music, and effortlessly weave together the spiritual and the physical. The spirit of the whip braider lives on in the whip every bit as much as the spirit of the swordsmith lives on in the sword, and I'm sure if you put someone like Takuan Soho in the same room with someone like Robert Dante, they could certainly speak on equal terms.

In short, whipcraft deserves to become a highly refined, widely practiced, and well-respected art form, and this book very much points the way.
As Dante himself eloquently puts it -

"Throwing a whip gracefully, powerfully and efficiently is not merely a mechanical activity. Throwing a whip correctly requires clarity, clear purpose.

"The trajectory of the whip is truth. It is as precise as a knife blade, as exact as a scalpel, narrow as a tightrope, even as you hold one end in the air yourself. A whip is a ribbon of road into the universe.

"It is lightning brought to earth, it is divine fire placed in the hands of men. It is the speed of thought, the reach of possibility, the danger of dancing along death's icy brink. The area which lies within the arc of a whip is sacred space. What moves within is real; what lies without is a dream, a shimmering surface reflection.

"Each crack is a jewel, a nova glint of star flash, that flare in the eye of one who loves profoundly the gleam of the knife point flying toward the breathless magician's assistant waiting against the bullseye of the target."

Words like that may not be able to literally bridge the gap between the abstract and the concrete, but on the other hand, they get so close you can't really hold it against them. Of course, that's what poetry is really all about.

And with that, I respectfully bow to the master, and leave with a cracking salute.

Hooked on Crack

2008-11-10T22:40:00.001-08:00

Some time ago, I sent out best wishes to Robert Dante, whip artisan and expert. He was having some rough medical issues with Type 2 Diabetes. Happily, his symptoms aren't slowing him down any. As a matter of fact, he recently won his third Guinness World Record for "Most Whip Cracks in a Minute." That's right. The previous record of 253 cracks in sixty seconds set by Adam Winrich has now fallen. Dante won it by a single crack with a six-foot bullwhip.

He was also kind enough to fire an email in my direction. He has a new book coming out, and he has very graciously offered to send me an autographed copy to review on my blog here. How cool is that? This is going to be a whip cracking "bible" of sorts, and since Dante started out in life as a poet, it should make for lyrical, instructive reading. I've always insisted there was something inherently poetic about the art of the bullwhip, and he's totally proven me right.

Major congratulations to him on the record and the new book. If any other whip artisan hopefuls are reading this - and I know a couple who are - check out "Let's Get Cracking" right here:

http://www.bullwhip.biz/

I would also like to remind everyone that there is apparently going to be a program on the bullwhip courtesy of the Discovery Channel, and Adam Winrich will be on it. It should air on November 12th at 8:30 pm. Hopefully it will be a good show.

On a side note, my blogging may very well get trimmed down a bit. It has become a kind of siren call for writers, and as many have noted, yeah, it can actually distract one from the business of "real writing." I have to say, I have been writing up a storm lately with my Imagina Chronicles, and in case I didn't mention it, the first novel in my Rhythms in Stardust trilogy has been submitted to Stephenie Meyer's agent at Writer's House. How's that for ego?

In closing, this photo was taken by Lars Larsen, and is the copyright of Wired News.

Apparently he won first prize because of it. It's called "Flaming Bullwhip."

Awesome much?

Blogaversary

2008-09-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

Well, September 23rd marked the five year mark for Patti and I.

We began the relationship with seeing Underworld, and continued it Tuesday night with Burn After Reading. At the same theater at the Mall of Georgia. I think both of us were swimming in a sea of memories, all of them life altering in almost every way imaginable.

Quite frankly, this is the second year I've had to face down a blank card or piece of paper. Anytime I reflect back on everything this relationship has meant to me and try to somehow articulate it, I find myself at the place where words just fall away. The whole world freezes and language pretty much collapses in on itself. Even for me, even as a writer. There are no words to say what needs to be said, and all I can really do is just reiterate that fact over and over again.

So thank you so much, Patti. It has been, hands down, the most wonderful five years of my life. I cannot express how happy you and yours have made me. In so many ways, I feel like I've been born again. I was always incomplete in the life before ours, and you have become the person that I love to be with more than anyone else in the world. I've never had that before, or anything even approaching that.

It is so wonderful to be able to look back at all those initial uncertainties and concerns after having found them hollow and bankrupt. We could never work on paper, but we prove every day how well we work everywhere else. And I can still look at you and think about you and grow so joyful I could almost burst, a happiness my nervous system simply can't contain flowing through me.

So here's to another five years, and many more after that.

Why Dragoncon Matters

2008-09-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

(I show a Dalek my Dalek t-shirt)

Well kids, another Dragoncon has come and gone.

What can I say? We journeyed down on Thursday afternoon and didn't come back till Tuesday morning, and all in all, had an utterly fantastic time. Sure, I missed at least half of the things and stars I wanted to see, but that's always the way. Still, we were all of sensory-overload as it was.

After we had successfully checked into the Hyatt, the busiest of the four DC hotels, we very prudently got in line for registration. After all, obtaining your badge is pretty much the most important thing you can do. Your badge is your key to all the fun and merriment that DC has to offer. Lose it, and you get to spend the rest of the weekend sitting in your hotel room, staring at four walls.

Actually, this is probably a good time to bring up Dragoncon TV. This special brand of entertainment basically revolves around a series of original programs, sketches, satires, and blurbs that are all about either the con itself, or just the things that make fanboy hearts go pitter-patter. They are hilarious, and run not only in the grand ballrooms while you wait for panels to start, but also on the television in the hotel rooms. So quite frankly, it wouldn't be entirely bad to be stuck in your room the whole time.

Not to mention, if you had a balcony, you could lean out it on Saturday morning and watch stormtroopers and wizards and elves and robots marching past in the totally happenin' parade. Still, that's about all you can do without a badge, so you need to get one.

And so that's what we did, first thing.

Registration wasn't supposed to start until four o'clock, but because there was already a line winding almost all the way around the Hyatt two hours ahead of time, they happily opened the doors at three. It was a pretty intense wait, I'm not gonna lie, but it was just great to get back in that atmosphere again. There weren't any costumes yet, but just checking out everyone's t-shirts is entertaining in and of itself. When I finally did acquire my badge, it belonged to someone else, and I had to actually go back and nab the proper one, but no big.

Afterwards, we just had a lot of time to kill. Bands come in and play on Thursday night, but the official con doesn't start until Friday. Still, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to do. We ate dinner in the food court that connects the Hyatt and the Marriott, and then we got our bearings again, checking out all the conference rooms and stuff our carefully constructed schedules had on them. The high point of the night came when we found a completely deserted Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame is the place in the Marriott where all the stars come and sign autographs and have their pictures taken. It was pretty cool, because they had all the signs and stuff out, but no one was actually there. I have to say, it is loads of fun stalking James Marsters and Edward James Olmos and the like before they actually arrive. We had lots of fun with the name plates. I even got to pose as Virgil.

I turned in pretty early because I was still recovering from my flu, but I passed the night away by listening to Steve Glosson's excellent podcast, Geek Out Loud. He's one of the co-hosts of Skynext, of course, but does a great job on his own cast. Appropriately, it was about Star Wars, which really got me pumped for all things Geek. I happily slept really well the whole time I was down there. Two earplugs and a pillow over the head will do wonders, even with four people in the room.

Soon, Friday was upon me. Michael and I started the con by going to see Matthew Lewis, who plays Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies. He was really cool and funny and had some interesting pictures to show the audience on his phone. And yeah, he was as bummed as everyone that the Half-Blood Prince movie has been moved back till the summer. Most surprising, he's actually not quite as ... well, round as he is in the films. In reality, he wears a fat suit. So that was neat to learn. As well as the fact that he likes "kegging." You kinda had to be there. Come to think of it, he said he'd actually lost his car keys in the airport back in jolly ol' England. I really hope that worked out well for him ...

Anyway, the next order of business was to see Nathan Fillion, star of Firefly and most recently, the fabulous Dr. Horrible video blog. Unfortunately, when we got to the room he was scheduled in, we found that he had been re-assigned to one of the Centennial ballrooms in the Hyatt. Actually, he was on an entire Firefly panel now, and when we made our way down there, we found out that people had been standing in line since apparently eight o'clock that morning. Insane. Especially when you consider most of the Firefly cast - Nathan, Alan Tudyck, Morena Baccarin, and Jewel Staite - had already been there a few times.

But whatever. Michael and Patti and her writing friend Alex went on anyway, while I decided to go to the newly remodeled Marriott. I got in line early for the Battlestar Galactica panel. I mean, not crazy Firefly fan early, but an hour or so. And it was worth it. Edward James Olmos, Michael Hogan, Tahmoha Penikett, Aaron Douglas, and James Callis were all there, plus a few technical advisors on the show. It was so great. Eddie got a standing ovation at the beginning. The high point was a Colonel Tigh imposter, complete with eye patch and gruff voice inflection, calling out Michael Hogan. It doesn't get any better than that.

Afterwards, I got some food, and then I couldn't take it any longer. I hit the dealers' rooms. A ferocious amount of anticipation had been building in my chest. The dealers' rooms are some of the best things about DC, and there were three of them located in the Marriott. Floor to ceiling everything you could ever want. Videos, bootlegs, toys, action figures, comics, costumes, games, t-shirts, even sharp-edged weapons, they've got it all. I personally made off with Doctor Who stuff to the tune of three t-shirts, five action figures, and a boatload of bootlegs. Stuff you can't even get in the States, and reasonably priced too.

I should also mention how awesome the closing announcements were every day in the rooms. Not only did they tell you what time they were closing and all that, but they also threatened you with death rays and stuff if you didn't get out. I really think we should incorporate such things at Borders. I'll have to work on that.

Next up, I hit the Space track at the Marriott. I've never done that, but it's a really cool idea, and they even have live astronomy at night. I listened to several lectures about extraterrestrials and big bangs and all that good stuff, and went back on Saturday night. I also made off with a lot of cool pictures of stars and planets and nebula. Oh, and a NASA sticker.

We ended Friday night with the ever-popular Star Wars Fan Films, which mainly consisted of the Pink Five series. Incidentally, if you guys haven't seen it, it's about a Valley girl named Stacey who blunders her way through the original Star Wars trilogy. It's knee-slapping entertainment. Especially when Yoda starts picking up her Californian phrases, and goes around saying things like "To the hand you must talk."

Saturday boasted the parade, a Narnia panel, a Doctor Who one, and lots of astronomy. In retrospect, this was the day there were five hundred bazillion things to do, and I somehow managed to miss most of them, including the showing of the first episode of the Clone Wars cartoon, courtesy of Steve Sansweet. For Patti and me, the highlight was definitely going to the Skynet panel, the very first of its kind devoted to the excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles. Best of all, we got to briefly met Steve and Derek of Skynext podcast fame. I loved it when someone gave Steve a book inspired by the infamous Robot Lovin' Act of 2027. If you listen to the cast, you'll know what I mean. And if you don't, well get on it!

Sunday was much more eventful. Though I missed the discussion of Joss Whedon's new show, Dollhouse, I did start my day by attending the Indiana Jones panel. Unusual for me, but I was contributing so much to the discussion, I was actually invited to sit in on the panel! There was a guy there who had a perfect representation of Henry Jones' grail diary that he got online. It was really sweet. And also on the Indy front, there was a person there in costume who had a five hundred dollar Joe Strain bullwhip on his hip. Beauty doesn't begin to describe this thing. The whip, I mean. Not the hip. Anyway, if anyone reading this has the funds, I highly suggest picking one up.

Next up, I went to Wibbley-Wobbley, Timey-Whimey, a discussion of the new Doctor Who series at the Sheraton. Incidentally, I thought the addition of events at the Sheraton was going to suck. It's the only hotel that you actually have to walk a block or so to, but man, did it make a difference with crowd control. Anyway, this was just a panel I was going to, one with no guests or stars or anything. And there was a line down the hall. No kidding. We packed everyone into the conference room as well as we could, but unfortunately, it wasn't a TARDIS where it was bigger on the inside. The Brit track eventually had to put us in a ball room about the size of a football field, and it was STILL standing room only.

I think it's safe to say Doctor Who has gotten reasonably popular at DC. After that, I sat in on a couple of more Doctor Who discussions, which were awesome. Full of ideas and thoughts and words and sentences. And Keith DeCandido. A good time was had by all.

After making another trip to the dealers' room and no doubt eating a couple of times, it was Sunday night. Happily, I hooked back up with Patti and company, We all went to dinner, including Alex, who she met in a writer's conference last time around. After some heated debate on the quality of Star Wars, we eventually settled into a most enlightening philosophical conversation. I enjoyed it greatly, even as we stood in line for another high-light of the con, the Dr. Horrible sing-a-long. Live and unplugged.

The event itself was so popular they had to run the musical twice, and it was indeed fantastic to sit in a room with hundreds of other Joss Whedon fans, screaming out the words to the songs, and occasionally adding special effects like bubbles for the laundry scenes and of course, a little plastic toy to simulate Bad Horse. They even had people acting out the scenes in front of the screen and in the aisles, which really added a lot to it.

When that was over, we retired to a cool new loft in the Marriott, where you could just go and sit and people watch. And oh, the people there were to watch. The costumes are truly amazing as always. They simply have to be seen to be believed. Star Wars ruled as always, as did Star Trek, Doctor Who, GI Joe, super heroes, and predictably, lots of Jokers. Our DC convert Todd was up there with us, so that was cool. At some point, Jewel Staite, star of Firefly and Serenity and now Stargate Atlantis, came up there. And yes, she went over and sat down next to Todd. In the Toddverse, that's just the way it happens. Unfortunately, people started crowding around her, and she left pretty quickly.

Quite frankly, the best thing about Monday was NOT having to leave. Well, we also attended a great play that fused James Bond and Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who - "From TARDIS With Love." Unfortunately, it marked the final performance of the Atlanta Radio Theater Company at DC. That was highly entertaining, as was the last Skynet/Terminator panel we attended.

Stiil, it was so great to know that my uncle was coming to pick us up on Tuesday, and that the money we had saved on parking we got to sink into the room another night. I never will forget trying to get out of the Hyatt on one Labor Day, and having to wait over three hours for a bellboy. The elevators were a nightmare. As a matter of fact, I even had to take a picture of an empty elevator on Tuesday morning just to assure myself that such things actually existed.

Oh my god, I almost forgot that Patti and I got stuck in an elevator at the Hyatt, I think on Saturday night. Well, look, it was going to happen eventually. An elevator can only support the weight of so many wookies and cylons. Fortunately, it was one of the glass ones, and we got someone's attention pretty quickly. Also fortunately, it was on the lobby level, so when we saw that the controls weren't responding, we were left to basically sink to just one last floor. We were stuck about ten minutes, and much joking was made about running out of air and stuff like that. We were jammed in like sardines. It was all fun and games until a girl really had a mild panic attack, but they freed us a few moments later.

After spending much of Monday evening chatting up DC staff, we finally went back to our room and tried to figure out how to assimilate so-called "normal life" again. If you haven't attended a con for a weekend at least, you can't really understand just how disorienting it is to come back home and not see any stormtroopers walking around. For quite some time now, I have been advocating the construction of some kind of decompression chamber, but instead of for submarines, it would be for con-attendees. The last panel, the last guest star, or the last trip to the dealer room is always achingly bittersweet.

In closing, I just have to say that an experience like Dragoncon really does demonstrate how truly sterile, colorless, and unimaginative the rest of society really is. For four or five days, you're not only surrounded by fans, but also people who are almost all artists or writers or musicians or what have you, and it's just a great outlet for creative energies. I don't want to overstate my case, but the quality of the thirty or forty thousand people who attend these things is always pretty impressive. Fellowship is key to the whole thing, because you can pretty much walk up to anyone there and strike up a two hour conversation. The "real world" just doesn't produce people that interesting, sorry to say.

But Dragoncon does, and it's great to be able to just completely immerse yourself in an experience that I can only describe as being mythic. Of course, you also catch the Dragoncon flu, but that's another story. Basically, I went sick, and I came back sick, but in the interim, I wasn't, and that's the important thing, isn't it?

Ode to the Universe

2008-08-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

For all you Whovians out there, this is a great little short that was shown at Albert Hall in London. Our favorite Time Lord comes across a portal that connects him to that very symphony hall, and he proceeds to conduct a piece via his sonic screwdriver. Oh, and a mad little alien is running around too. Some lovely stuff, albeit random.

Gentle readers, I give you "Music of the Spheres" -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8E-JxIkntw&feature=related

Beautiful, no? Courtesy of Joseph Campbell, I've always been entranced with this notion of the "music of the spheres." And to think that the TARDIS can actually translate it!

It also reminds me of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about the Eolian harp, that seminal visual metaphor of Romantic inspiration:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all!

And then you start thinking about "string theory" in modern physics, which echoes perfectly what Coleridge wrote. This is an idea I really want people to start thinking about. I don't mean it's a notion that I want to convert people to or anything like that, but I just want them to let it tickle their brains a little. Just think about what sort of life potentialities it could open up for us.

Our prime metaphor for life right now is that it is a journey, with a clear cut beginning, middle, and end. And the most important part, of course, is the end. What if we replaced that central metaphor with one of dance? What if that's what everything is doing, from the smallest subatomic particles up through the planets and stars right on through to the largest galaxies? It isn't going anywhere. There's no specific end its moving toward. It just dances.

Why? Because it likes to.

I now hereby license each and every one of you to spend a day relating to your life not as a series of chores to wade through, but as a ballet, a waltz. Imagine the universe as dance, and yourself as an individual note in a cosmic opera that's been going on for some fourteen billion years. Rhythms in stardust, all.

What an idea.

Just like the Doctor said, you're all musicians, each and every one of you. And here's a short clip of the Ninth Doctor remembering it too -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3REt-MDaa4&feature=related

Dragoncon, Thy Is a Cruel Mistress

2008-08-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Or so it seems to me.

That's right kids, the biggest sci-fi and fantasy convention in the Southeast is about to hit downtown Atlanta, and I've been dead sick all week.

Actually, it trails in from last week, when I started feeling just really, really tired. Fatigue has been my major adversary with this one. A little bit of a sore throat and runny nose, but basically just physically exhausted.

Perhaps my big mistake was actually working this weekend. Well, my big mistake was not only working, but working really hard. Mainly because of the book drive. I just got it in my head that I not only had to do well, but that I had to beat every other employee. Well, in particular one very annoying employee who usually wins these things and who will remain nameless. As it stood Saturday night, I have a 181 donations overall, and I have secured an 85 book lead on said employee. But it not only has to hold this week, but into Labor Day as well.

Obviously, I'm not going to be at Borders. No, I'm going to be at Dragoncon, though I swear, Sunday and Monday it was touch and go there. It was terrible. I was in bed twelve hours Friday night, and I slept at least ten of them, but I still woke up exhausted. And I had to go to work because I had to maintain my book drive lead.

So the pressure was extraordinarily intense. Not only do I have to get to 100% by Thursday morning, I have to get to a 150% by Thursday morning, because that's when we're leaving for the greatest weekend extravaganza of all time. And Sunday and Monday, all I did was lay around the house. Actually, just in bed. Obviously, I'm doing better because at least I'm sitting here blogging, but it really worried me.

For those of you in our studio audience, Dragoncon exhausts you. You don't want to go to Dragoncon exhausted. It will chew you up and spit you out. Registration starts at 4 pm on Thursday, and beginning Friday at 1pm till Monday at 5pm, it's a non-stop panel watching, author meeting, autograph getting, dealers' room shopping, lightsaber competitioning, costuming, gaming, fanfilm watching, sing-a-long blogging, hanging outing, star gazing, ball and party attending extravaganza the likes of which the world has never seen.

So it's good to be at your best.

Accordingly, I plan on spending the rest of the day more or less in bed, gathering my strength for the onslaught of relentless four-day, four-hotel funtastic fun that it sure to erupt in downtown Atlanta this weekend. Tomorrow will be spent packing, making last minute travel details, and watching Galaxy Quest in anticipation of the event itself. I have already spent two hours plotting out a plan based on the Dragoncon schedule, and our annual trip to the Waffle House for a last minute planning session will take place tomorrow night at 7pm.

I figure if we can stay from Thursday night to Tuesday morning, leave no time for eating or sleeping, and split ourselves into no less than three people, we should have no problem getting to see and do everything we want to.

P.S. Blast! We still wouldn't have enough time to shop down in the massive dealers' rooms! Foiled again.

Fading Into the Twilight

2008-08-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

(Or Why I have a problem with Stephenie Meyer)

Yes, I have already posted a long review of Breaking Dawn, but this is a much revised piece that I'm probably going to make available at your friendly neighborhood Borders. Also, Amazon is now refusing to post one star reviews of BD, so this is your only chance to read it -

In so many ways, the gauntlet has been thrown down.

Or at least that’s the way it feels to me.

f you’re reading this, then chances are you know the Twilight series is the hottest selling thing this side of that scarred wizard with the glasses. You also know that its author, Stephenie Meyer, has been effectively crowned queen of the young adult genre. And you may even know that the final book debuted at midnight at your local bookstore a couple of weeks ago.

But what you probably don’t know is that I’ve been playing around in the young adult field myself for awhile. After reading in it pretty extensively, I’ve started writing in it as well. It suits my own sensibilities perfectly, and while I do have a trilogy on the backburner that has evoked some interest from literary agencies, I’m currently working on another story that’s grabbed hold of my attention and simply refused to let go.

All I can say is, if you want a mythic young adult love story, I’m going to give you a mythic young adult love story. Yes, it’s written in first person. Yes, it features a mythic being of otherworldly beauty. And yes, it takes place over several books. Five, in point of fact. But no, I’m not going to pull a Meyer and write one book of the series and then have no idea what to do with the rest of it. In point of fact, most of the last chapter of the final book has already been written.

Keep in mind I’m not saying I’ll ever write them all if I can’t find an agent, but if I do, at least I’ll be ready with a capital “R.”

Also keep in mind that Phillip Pullman largely wrote the His Dark Materials series as a response to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, which he holds in considerable disdain. I personally love Pullman and Lewis, but who I don’t love is Meyer. And when push comes to shove, you could probably chalk up my new series as a Pullmanesque response to hers.

And what a response it’s going to be. When all is said and done, realize I say that as a rather bashful, self-deprecatory writer who hastily covers up whatever he’s writing whenever anyone else enters the room. Or at least I did until wading through thousands of pages in Meyer-land. Incidentally, I also work at my local Borders, and I was there at Ground Zero when Breaking Dawn debuted at midnight. Irony of ironies, I even played out the role of master of ceremonies.

Yes it was fun, but I also have to say that, in retrospect, it was also a rather dubious honor. Considering the quality of the series and the messages and themes buried within, I'm not so sure I would have taken the job had I known where it was all going.

Still, there I was precariously perched between two venomous packs of teenage girls that Friday night, one for Team Edward, and one for Team Jacob. Sure, the former was far larger than the latter, but they were both every bit as vocal, anxious to insure that the world knew very well their stance on who Bella Swan, the befuddled narrator of the series, should spend the rest of her life with. And possibly her death, too, considering Edward is a vampire.

But let's get one thing straight.

Twilight is no Harry Potter, and Stephenie Meyer is no JK Rowling. Sure, they're both bestselling authors. Sure, Meyer was a bored Mormon housewife who had a dream about a sparkly vampire, while JK was a welfare mother who was trapped aboard a stalled train when the Boy Who Lived popped into her imagination. But JK Rowling went on to meticulously plan every single last detail of her beloved series, while Meyer seems to have relied on nothing but that seminal dream of inspiration to carry her books through.

Carried them through to what, you ask? Well, lets start at the beginning.

Twilight was a very, very good debut novel. While the narrative did move pretty slowly, the world did feel totally lived in, and the characters did seem very real. Or as real as they could be, anyway, considering the fantastic nature of the premise. You know the one. Girl meets boy. Girl falls in love with boy. Girl finds out boy is a vampire. Girl wants to be boy’s eternal honey-bunny.

The second book, New Moon, was actually considerably longer than the first, and even less happened this time around. Girl wants to neck with vampire boy, vampire boy is scared he will kill her by mistake, vampire boy leaves town, and girl is forced to hang out with best friend who naturally turns out to be a werewolf. Wereboy predictably develops crush on girl, and then vampire boy comes back. It's a tale as old as time. The break-up is suitably tragic, as is the ensuing grief, but still, Meyer could have easily edited out two hundred pages in the middle.

The third book, Eclipse, is where the real stink begins to set in. Girl is caught between the flea-bitten and bat-bitten affections of her best friend and her boyfriend respectively, both of whom grow considerably annoying as the book goes on. And just plain creepy. Girl finally realizes that she loves both of them, and thus begins what I consider the worst love triangle in the history of Western literature, if not the world.

It's bad enough Bella has been helplessly co-dependent on the love of her life, Edward, without making her now hopelessly fickle, and unable to decide who she really loves the most. Even though we all know who she's going to choose from the beginning, thus making the whole affair pointless. And again, the book is even longer than the first two, even though less happens.

Frankly, if the Twilight series was a car, the first book would be a nice little sports car, new and fast and fun to take for a spin. However, the second would be when that car develops an oil leak and gets a nail stuck in one of the tires. The third would be when the engine starts smoking, the car stalls out, and has to be pushed into a nearby garage. And yes, the fourth is when the car throws a rod and burns down the garage and possibly kills one of the mechanics.

One after another, confused parents have been filing into Borders for weeks on end now and requesting that a copy of Breaking Down be put on hold for their young daughters. Okay, so the fourth book is really called Breaking Dawn, but given the tepid reception it's gotten, Breaking Down really is far more appropriate. Not to mention funnier.

To put it simply, Breaking Down is one of two books I absolutely could not get through, and keep in mind I'm the guy who read Whistling in the Wind from cover to cover, a book many people consider the worst thing ever written.

This isn't to imply that I finish every book I pick up, because that's certainly not the case. Sometimes I will read them straight out, sometimes I will go read something else and then come back to them, and sometimes I may not come back at all. You know, so much to read, so little time. But I got a hundred and forty pages into Meyer’s grand finale, and just hurled the book across the room.

Okay, not literally. Seeing as how I did bring it back to Borders the next day, certainly not literally. But quite frankly, I'm not the first one to make this choice. I never bring books back unless they're damaged or missing pages or something. But with this one, apparently I'm not alone. There was a bit on Borders Live Journal about whether or not we should return read books just because they're really badly written, so it's been something of an issue. I wouldn't have returned mine had I made it all the way through, but it's like with a meal. If I take a few cautious bites and the food is bad, I'm certainly going to send it back.

And at this point, I certainly considering Breaking Down (as I continue to insist on calling it) the literary equivalent of food poisoning.

I remember one of my friends saying that he heard Stephenie Meyer give an interview on NPR about the time that The Host came out, during which she was dreamily commenting about how she just "heard voices in her head" and that she just "wrote down what they had to say." Well, in retrospect, I'm glad those voices didn't tell her to kill someone or something, but I think we can all agree that just writing every single thing down that comes into your head is not a formula for literary quality. It may serve you well once or twice, particularly if you're writing in first person, but there is a little thing I like that’s called “editing.” Perhaps some of you have heard of it.

I have a feeling Meyer hasn't, which is why her books are five, six, seven hundred plus pages long - and nothing really happens during the course of them. Eclipse is probably the worst example of this. It was the most rushed manuscript I've ever seen, and others have said the same thing. Just on the simplest grammatical level, it contained dozens of typos and misspellings of every description. And this from one of the biggest publications of the year.

I'm not trying to imply that Meyer is just out to make a quick buck. She obviously feels deeply about her characters. This whole mess was her story from beginning to end. But at some point, someone really should have taken out some scissors and mercifully cut the whole thing in half. Okay, you may feel the same about this review, but this is just for fun.

The actual book I'm working on now is going to come in hopefully at a lean and mean three hundred and sixty pages or so, and believe you me, it would have been so much easier on me as a writer to make it six or seven hundred pages long. But I don't belong to the Stephenie Meyer school of writing, where you just type up every little idea that your mind burps up, nor do I have so much clout off my first book that no one dares to edit them out. Happily.

Well, Breaking Down is currently sitting on top of over five hundred one star reviews at Amazon.com. Of course, there are also seven hundred five star reviews, but those are usually simple, one sentence declarations like "it was everything I wanted it to be" and "everything I wanted to happen happened." Do you girls want to know why it was everything you wanted it to be? Because anyone one of you could have written it, that's why.

As Joss Whedon, who can saturate a forty-five minute musical blog done by a super villain with more genuine emotion and wit than Stephenie can in two thousand pages, aka the web-sensation Dr. Horrible, once said, "I don't give people what they want, I give them what they need."

Big, big difference there.

But when all's said and done, I don't think anyone really wanted Breaking Down. Not really. All Miss Meyer did was catch lightning in a bottle with one book, and that's only because she made use of the classic Byronic hero which women have been helplessly swooning over since 1816 (incidentally, it has been speculated that Lord Byron himself was a vampire). And really, it was a formula only a complete, incompetent moron could have screwed up, and yet she did.

Still, maybe that's not all that surprising. Let's take a quick look at Bella Swan, her heroine and the narrator of the Twilight series.

With the publication of the last book, there are exactly two characteristics that Bella possessed. One, she loves Edward. Two, she's clumsy. And have I mentioned she loves Edward? And really, that's it. Some two thousand and four hundred pages since Bella first turned up in Forks, and she has two characteristics. TWO.

Some of my female associates were subtly and not-so-subtly implying that I simply couldn't understand or relate to Bella because I wasn't, nor would I ever be, a teenage girl. I can only gently reply that I can't understand or relate to Bella because she's a vacuum, a blankness, a vacuous black hole where a character should be. I mean, despite all the protestations that Meyer makes about Bella's heart pounding and jumping and racing and doing somersaults and catapulting over the moon and conducting ten piece symphony orchestras and all that whenever Edward is around, that's not telling me anything about her as a person. Except that maybe she really, really needs to see a cardiologist.

To put it simply, there's nothing to understand or relate to. Bella has no interests outside of the men in her life. She is completely and utterly defined by them. She has no mind of her own, no hobbies, no interests, nothing. In Twilight, at least she's portrayed as an "old soul," who doesn't relate to people her own age and is so different she even gets the mysterious Edward's attention.

But after that, she just turns into an increasingly whiny, helpless teenage girl. In most books, the characters learn and grow with every new story, but with Bella, there is only regression. One day she can't live without Edward, the next day she loves Jacob too. One day she wants to be made a vampire as soon as possible, the next day she wants to hold off on it. One day she loathes the very idea of marriage, the next day she's happily married.

Many critics have noted that it's quite possible the Twilight series has set feminism back about a hundred years, and this was before Breaking Down debuted. Now I have to say that I agree with them.

I have no idea what Meyer is thinking at this point, but I can only assume that deep down she believes the fairer sex shouldn't think at all. They should just find a big strong vampire man to take care of them so they won't have to worry about anything. If I had to pick a theme that runs throughout this series, a carefully crafted message that underlines the whole thing, I would have to say “marry rich” pretty much sums it up.

That's right, young ladies. You don't need hopes and dreams, interests and passions. You certainly don't need an education. You just need to have two men battling over you, neither of which you can live without. Oh, and you also need to abstain from sex, but that's okay, because you'll be married and pregnant by the ripe old age of eighteen. I know what you're thinking - I may not want to be married and pregnant when I'm eighteen. To which I can only reply, Bella thought the same thing too. She just thought domestic bliss wasn't for her, but that was before she walked down the aisle. Then everything worked out swimmingly well, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Or they were turned into a vampire, but same thing.

It didn't really hit me until I was reading through The Myth of the Goddess, which incidentally is an amazing book and should appeal to anyone interesting in mythology or religion or matriarchal history, but Meyer constantly and consistently casts Bella in the depreciatory role of Eve.

Throughout the series, it's Bella that's begging for sex, not Edward. Edward may be a vampire, but he abstains from the flesh - except when he's biting it. He's as chaste as a priest the rest of the time, at least until the honeymoon. And then he's ripping apart pillows with his teeth in an effort not to kill Bella, as we see in a later scene. It does get laugh-out-loud hilarious, but his rock hard vampire body also leaves her covered in bruises the next morning, which is less funny.

And even then, it's Bella that has to tempt and seduce her husband over and over, otherwise, he wouldn't touch her again.

Even from a cursory glance, it seems like Stephenie Meyer has lots and lots of issues with sex, probably enough to keep an entire team of therapists in Vienna busy for at least a decade or so. I mean, how ironic is it that she creates the ultimate sex symbol of the young adult world, aka Edward, and then makes him a virgin? And not just a virgin, but one who's been around longer than the grandparents of most of the girls reading these books? The movie version of Twilight should perhaps be more aptly titled The Eighty-Year Old Virgin, but I doubt they're going that route.

And seriously, what is it with Edward anyway? We have to shove our way through pages and pages of purple prose with Meyer constantly likening him to a statue and granite and marble and the like. Okay, I suppose from a certain standpoint, I get the hardness metaphor, but honestly, who wants to kiss cold marble? From all those descriptions of him, we just get the idea that sleeping with him would be like sleeping with an ice cold rock. Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get the appeal.

But again, for an epic romance, this series has very little in the way of sex and passion. Based on the Cullens’ constant battle against the temptation of sinking their teeth into human flesh, coupled with the series’ stance on more explicit forms of sexuality, I get the feeling Meyer is very big on repression. Of course, in this post Freudian world, most would argue that the repression and vilification of perfectly natural instincts is unhealthy and only turns them into something monstrous enough to be truly worthy of vilification. But in the Meyer-world, repression is a perfectly respectable thing, even honorable. Puts hairs on your chest, and so on and so forth.

If that’s true, then Edward should have a chest as hairy as Jacob’s, even if he’s in wereboy form. Edward’s entire existence is little more than one big ball of repression, the star around which his whole life revolves. Word has it that Meyer is going to write the first book from his point of view, and if that’s true, then I’m sure we’re going to be treated to entire chapters with him categorizing and filing and alphabetizing all the things he has to repress.

But make no mistake, sex is still the one great evil, vampire metaphors or no. At one point in Eclipse, Edward even muses that though he’s killed people, at least he’s never had sex, and that should help balance the cosmic scorecard in his favor. Personally, I feel equating premarital sex with murder is more than a little disturbing, but maybe that’s just me.

Actually, Twilight has been called the love story that makes abstinence sexy. Right. Incidentally, you know what I'm going to make sexy in my series? Sex. Revolutionary, I know, but there you have it. True, it won't be for the first thousand pages or so, but it's gotta happen sometime. And it's going to be sacred when it does, demanding a deep and profound cosmic understanding from both sides involved. It’s not going to be all guilt-drenched and repressed and Meyer-like, an attitude which conversely only increases the likelihood of meaningless teenage sex because it’s so convincingly cast in the tantalizing light of forbidden fruit.

Not to mention that it also brings about the confusing character of someone like Jacob, the horn dog who stands in such sharp contrast to Edward. He would be all too willing to go horizontal with Bella. And this is where things get really warped.

According to Stephenie, Jacob’s the best friend a girl could ever have. I can't really see it. Not after the part in Eclipse when he threatens to kill himself unless Bella makes out with him. No, I'm not making that up. I really hope I couldn't. And even if I could, none of the girls in my books would put up with it for a second.

But back to Twilight.

Then there's another scene where Jacob grabs Bella, pins her arms behind her, and starts putting his tongue down her throat. Keep in mind Bella is saying "no" and keeps trying to squirm away, but Stephenie writes this not as sexual assault, but a love scene. Many reviewers have wondered just how high she was when she did so. And let's not even get to the point where Jacob bursts in on Bella's wedding, grabs her again, physically hurts her, and then Bella spends the next hour frantically worrying that she's done something to upset him.

And just to prove how completely and utterly out of touch Meyer is, she takes Jacob, the most hated character in the series, the very character that I wanted to see decapitated by Edward by the end of Eclipse (an idea, incidentally, that evoked thunderous applause from the audience when I suggested it as master of ceremonies), and lets him narrate one-third of the final book! That is the exact point at which I non-literally threw the book down.

I have never been a fan of backseat writing, but I as a writer know that she as an author has absolutely no idea what she's doing. And as a result, we're going to have an entire generation of helplessly codependent, hopelessly fickle young women whose fondest romantic fantasy will be to make love to a statue. Way to go, Steph.

Still, I don't know why I take such offense to all this.

True, I’m certainly an advocate of the sacred feminine. Like Alan Watts, I feel that “he” is an absolutely absurd pronoun to assign to the divine, but at the same time, I'm also not really down with the whole I-am-woman-hear-me-roar reactionary leftists. I mean, I want the patriarchy gone as much as the next friend of the goddess, but so often, feminism does little else but imitate the worst habits of the male of the species, whether it is in war or politics or corporate life.

Honestly, I think it could be a lot more than that. At its best, surely feminism should be a complete re-evaluation of everything, from art to religion to sex to nature. It should be aiming toward balancing out a civilization that has been out of balance for a ridiculously long time, as opposed to simply miming systems and institutions that never should have existed to begin with.

And as far as I’m concerned, modern myths and stories are simply the best way of doing this, though this was an opportunity hopelessly lost in the backward, bewildering worlds of Stephenie Meyer.

I’m sure it’s also because I personally really, really love women, the more empowered the better. I cut my own creative teeth on characters like Princess Leia, Marion Ravenwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the currently re-invented for television Sarah Connor. Mothers, warriors, leaders, and lovers, they had it all.

And let’s have a hand for Hermione Granger, too. I know at the beginning of the Harry Potter series, some women had a problem with her being bossy and a know-it-all, but come on! By the time we get to the Deathly Hallows, the girl is holding up under torture, and she's still managing to outsmart everyone in the room. Give me a bossy, know-it-all any day over the simpering, wishy-washy Bella Swan.

And maybe, just maybe I’m so offended by this simply because I consider young adult my genre, and I feel like it’s being sold so short. Everyone deserves much better than this. And indeed, I hope I can give it to them. Quite frankly, I think what irks me the most is the thought of any of my female characters being handed over to the likes of Stephenie Meyer. The very idea appalls me.

Still, I have to applaud her for finally kicking me out of my own somewhat nervous, reluctant stance as a writer. Okay, I always knew I was good, but I have to say, deep anxiety does blossom in me whenever I let someone new read my books. Not anymore. If Stephenie Meyer can re-write the young adult genre with this sludge, then it’s not like the bar is set particularly high.

The two lead characters in my new series are going to be facing an impossible love too, but when all is said and done, they’re also going to be the only thing standing between us and the systematic unraveling of the universe. And they’re going to be discussing some things that are very important, both to themselves and civilization at large, not just engaging in endless conversations about their love lives like Bella and Edward and Jacob do. They’re also going to grow and change and empower each other, and have a few transreality adventures in the meantime. And who knows, they might even help rewrite human consciousness before it’s all over.

I suppose what really kills me are the people who insist that stories are just stories and that I should just let it go. Whenever anything has captured the collective attention of an entire popular culture, like Twilight has, it becomes considerably more than that. It becomes something approaching myth, and as so many have competently demonstrated, myth is vitally important to the evolution of this species. Stories have informed us since the very beginning, and judging by the current state of the socio-economic-political-religious infrastructure, they’re pretty much all we have going for us right about now.

In my opinion, the last thing we need now are archaic worldviews defined by rigid, petrified thinking. We need new stories and new symbols and new ideas, which is exactly what the Twilight series failed to do. We got the mormon-ification of the young adult genre at a time when it could have greatly benefited from something akin to the goddess-ification of it. Though I’ll never have Stephenie Meyer’s readership or success, I suppose that’s up to me now.

And when all is said and done, hopefully I’ll produce something actually worth reading.

Judgment Day

2008-08-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've never been that big a fan of the Terminator movies. Can I say that out loud? The first was very low budget, and the second featured a very dramatically unsatisfying villian. I say that because there's not much drama fighting a virtually indestructable machine that just keeps coming no matter what. To be honest, the third was probably my favorite, and I know I shouldn't admit to that out loud.

Still, the moment I got a bootleg of the unaired pilot of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that debuted on FOX during the Writer's Strike, I knew it was going to be something special. And indeed, it has been. Though only nine episodes have aired, it reimagined the series after Terminator 2, and has been firing on all cylinders ever since. The action and special effects are great, but more importantly, the TV budget forces the show to deal with the drama and ideas of the Terminator franchise, and they are explored to wonderful effect.

The cast is probably one of the best of any series. We of course have Summer Glau of Serenity and Firefly fame as a new advanced terminator model, and she steals the show. But we also have a new John Connor who I like more than all the other ones that came before, namely Thomas Decker, who defected from Heroes. And no disrespect to Linda Hamilton, but when it comes to Sarah Connor, Lena Headey is our girl, hands down.

Happily, there's now an awesome preview for season two -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCB56IBXm5Q&feature=related

This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with me?

I'm so glad you asked, because it gives me a chance to tell you about Skynext, the podcast that is dedicated to TSCC. I found it by chance on iTunes, and it is without a doubt the best podcast I've ever listened to. I've listened to all the chronicles at least twice, and the two hosts, Steve and Derek, are hilarious. If you enjoy great commentary on a great show, you should check them out right here -

http://www.skynextpodcast.com/

You should also check out Chronicle 10, because yes, I wrote in an email, and yes, they discussed it at length during the email segment of the show. That was so cool. I actually emailed them back, and they might read that one on air as well.

But anyway, big thumbs up to Steve and Derek. Incidentally, I plan on meeting up with them at Dragoncon, and if you haven't signed up yet for that, what are you waiting for? It's less than three weeks away, and the guest list is amazing. Patti and Michael and I are going to be staying down there for five days this time, and it is going to be awesome. Labor Day Weekend can't come fast enough. Check it out -

http://www.dragoncon.org/

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down

2008-08-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

Or at least that's the way it feels. To me anyway.

(Actually, to find out why, check the post made on August 26th. It is a much revised and much improved version. Cheers)

A Lot of Disparate Stuff ...

2008-06-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Have I been insanely busy? You betcha. As you may have guessed, that's precisely why there has been such a complete and utter lack of blogging as of late. That and the fact that I had to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull multiple times. I just got word that it finally crossed the $300 million line this weekend, so congratulations to Steve and Harrison and Uncle George.

But as you may have also guessed from the poster hanging proud and tall up there, I've also had the opportunity to see some other movies. Sure, we checked out Wanted yesterday, and while it was adolescent male wish fulfillment at its best, I just have to mention another little film that came to me highly recommended.

(Thanks, Todd - a great movie, and not a single bald woman from the future in sight)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow may be old, it may not have gotten the reception at the box office it deserved, but it's one of the best movies these old eyes have seen in many a moon. Imagine Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Buck Rogers, Lost in Space, Flash Gordon, and pretty much every single pulp comic of the thirties and forties all rolled up into one two hour piece of glorious celluloid, and you pretty much have Sky Captain. If you can handle an alternate 1930's where ray guns are plentiful, planes can fly underwater, people sport around on jet packs, and giant robots menace entire cities, let me just say this is the film for you.

If not, then it's best to stay home and watch Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire Amputee Bachelor for a Day? on FOX. But who am I kidding? No one reading this would have a problem with any of those things anyway, so nevermind.

This is a film made by people who love films, for people who love films. You need more than two hands to count all the bits of meta-narration running through this thing. It covers all the bases from George Lucas to Wizard of Oz. It looks and feels totally unique, but at the same time, it looks and feels totally familiar. So I don't care if you have to knock over a video store and steal the DVD, just snatch yourself a copy and feast thine eyes on its computer generated hills. I'm right there with Ebert when his jaw literally dropped when his co-host gave it a thumbs down, but you're either going to get it, or you're not, and that's that.

But enough on films. Book One of my very own Imagina Chronicles is coming along swimmingly. We're twenty chapters in to a twenty-six chapter book, and while I have been averaging at least a chapter a week, I'm feeling the need right about now to go back and work through some background as well as redo the first few chapters. But oh is it cool. I haven't been on such a creative tear in forever, and it has been very gratifying. The Muses kindly took my hand in theirs, in more ways than one.

But enough about me. I'd also like to give a shout-out to the late great George Carlin, the world's crankiest comic. This word-obsessed funny-man was not only one of the true misanthropes, but also the most truly out-of-the-box person this country has seen in a long time. He oscillated proudly between the profound and the profane, but he did it so well you can't hold it against him.
So RIP, and let's remember him at his best. No one could have ever summed up my own feeling about politics better than this riff -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF05oDvHPq8&feature=related

And the same goes for the current faddish hysteria over global warming -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljNDbKpusT0

P.S. And for those of you who watched the Battlestar Galactica mid-season finale, I think I speak for everyone here when I say - WTF?!?!

Indiana Jones 4 Revisited

2008-05-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm stupid. If you want to learn why, continue reading this spoiler-filled edition of my film review.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull simply rocks the house.

True, there's still not enough whip-play. Okay, so there's about as much as what's in Last Crusade, but during that movie, it was spread out over a span of two hours. Here, we get past the first fifteen minutes, and Indy's whip is back in it's holster where it pretty much stays. Well, he takes it out when he's fighting the skull-faced cemetery warriors, so I guess points for that.

But yes, there's more to the story than that. And I simply have to give a shout-out to James Rollins here, the author of the sublime KOTCS novelization. If you come out of the theater whip-starved, all you have to do is pick up the book. From cover to cover, Indy uses his whip to grand effect no less than nine times. He disarms people, he wraps Russian rifles and causes them to shoot other Russians, he lashes around a native's neck just seconds before he would have killed Marion. Hell, Rollins even ends a chapter with Indy pulling his bullwhip out of the closet right before the adventure and the last word is simply KUH-RACK!!!!

That's what I'm talking about.

But anyway, the film itself works fine, and while it's still probably a solid number four in my list of favorites, there isn't a serious thing wrong with it.

See, I'm just better equipped to judge now. I must admit, a few hours before the midnight showing on Wednesday night, my uncle's death was really hitting me hard. In point of fact, I was crying and could have stayed home when all was said and done. Not exactly an optimum time for viewing a new Indy film.

Not to mention, Patti and I went to see it again Sunday afternoon. I really enjoyed it, much moreso than the first time. Still, the middle seemed to drag a little, but all in all, it was great. Like the first time, I loved the opening sequence. So much so that when we exited the theater and I saw KOTCS had just started playing on another screen, I insisted we sneak in and at least watch the opening.

About fifteen minutes in, I leaned over and asked Patti if she wanted to leave. She was like, "no." You have to love her. Even though it was way crowded with a good audience, we had found nice seats up front. Needless to say, we wound up emerging from the darkened theater two hours later, and I for one was hopelessly in love with the latest edition.

While we did end up depriving the film of a little box office money, everything finally clicked for me. The middle didn't drag at all. In point of fact, the third time in, the film seemed to last about fifteen minutes. I had no problem with the plot, and it was all good.

The opening with the American Graffiti hotrod racing the army trucks to the tune of Elvis was sublime. Indy's silhouette alone was worth the price of admission. Dovchenko, the big Russian antagonist, was a very nice follow up to Pat Roach, the guy Indy continuously fought in the first two movies. The John Williams' music when they entered the warehouse was awesome, so hauntingly evocative of the Ark. And of course, when we first see the Ark, who's not loving that?

I love the entrance of Spalko, she was such a great villain. She really does work not only the wig, but also the accent. The way Indy used the gunpowder to find the magnetized contents of the secret crate was particularly effective. And when we learn what's inside, we realize pretty clearly that this whole Hangar 51 simply hasn't been expanded into Area 51 yet. Totally cool. Indy's first bit of whip-work was terrific. We've never seen him use the whip to not only disarm someone, but to re-arm someone else. Mac's betrayal was much more poignant this time around.

And from the minute Indy drops the gun and gets away from the Russians, it's one of the most Indy-like scenes in Indy 4. Particularly the use of the exact same music cue that John Williams used when our hero was first escaping the Hovitos in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The whip swing and the miss was a terrific play off any number of films of derring do, and when Indy plays chicken with the other truck it's just masterful. Particularly Mac's "You don't know him, you don't know him!"

After Indy snags the lamp and scurries up, I love how he's running around up in the rafters and being shot at. Maybe a small moment, but nothing screams INDIANA JONES to me like Harrison Ford running around on catwalks being shot at by the baddies. Just vintage Indy. The first fight with the Russian is masterful, as is the ride out of the base on the rocket sled. The lack of expression on the prairie dogs' faces as it shoots by is probably one of my favorite film moments ever.

And then Indy gets to Doom Town, and it just keeps getting better and better. I loved the scenes where Indy was being interrogated and we got to hear about his war record. And the bits with McCarthyism and the Red Scare were quite effective too, particularly in our own charged political climate. On the lighter side, you can't beat a car full of KGB agents being hit over the head with "Better dead than Red" signs.

The important thing is, we really feel for Indy at the beginning. Particularly in the shot when he's just absentmindedly staring down at the pictures on his desk. This is a man who's lost everything. His father. His mentor. His job. As the new dean tells him, "we're at the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away."

But that's the point. By the end of the film, Indy has found himself again. And his son. And his wife. And even the mumbling John Hurt. And it's really good stuff. The scene with the hat blowing into the chapel and Mutt nearly putting it on his head before it's snatched away by Indy is just ... wow.

Okay, I realize if I keep narrating like this I'm going to be writing forever. I might do some more later, but I just had to redeem my first lackluster review.

Apologies to Lucas and Spielberg and Ford and everyone involved. I plan on spending a lot of time in the movie theater this summer because of you guys. Now it's time to go practice some of my own whipcraft.

KUH-RACK!!!!

Indiana Jones and the Crazy Fans of Doom

2008-05-22T10:17:00.001-07:00

This is going to be a non-spoilery review, but I am going to start off with something mildly spoilery, but not really.

The complete and utter lack of whip use in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is absolutely absurd. It is a crime against God, Nature, the Universe, and everyone who's ever dreamed of owning a David Morgan or Terry Jacka bullwhip. That colored my own experience of the film to no small degree, because Indy uses it more in the first fifty pages of the novel than in the entire movie. Criminal.

Okay, the first bit of whip usage in the warehouse was very good, but basically, if you've seen the trailers, you've seen how often he's going to pull out his trusty leather. I found a scene in the making of book that involved more whipcraft, but it was mercilessly cut from the final film. Why in the world you would have Harrison Ford training with Anthony De Longis of all people and then not use any of it is beyond me.

So anyway, the film was pretty good. Maybe.

Harrison Ford was actually very good, and indeed, he looked younger as the film went on as many have pointed out. Karen Allen was there, and the first scene between them was good, but their relationship never had time to develop. Shia whatever his name was wasn't bad at all, though at one point he did seem to be stealing some action from Indy. Ray Winston was fine, though he did switch sides faster than a truck driver switches gears while barreling down a mountain. Kate Blanchett was a very effective villain I thought, though a little ill-defined. John Hurt mumbled a lot.

There were a lot of players, and overall, that hurt things a bit. No one had as much play as they should have. It was just wildly alternating from one to the next. Indy wasn't as central a character as he should have been.

Well, he was at the beginning. I loved the first thirty minutes of the movie. The dissolve of the paramount logo was probably the best ever, an enormous wink from Lucas and Spielberg. The warehouse scene was great, as was the action. Indy's intro was great. All the nods to American Graffiti was just vintage Lucas. I even liked the scene that involved the nuclear blast and the refrigerator and the prairie dogs. The prairie dogs kicked ass, no doubt about it.

And while we're on the subject of critters, KOTCS probably had the best batch since the snakes in Raiders. They made for a real threat, and no, I'm not talking about the prairie dogs. So kudos there. And the whole thing with the Crystal Skulls themselves I felt was very effective, and very creepy, and like the critters, they represented a very real threat. Plus I like how instead of trying to find some priceless artifact, Indy had to put one back.

The action was good, and the fist fights had a brutality sorely lacking in Crusade. The scenes in the middle did seem to drag, though. There was a lot of exposition, and due to the late hour, I didn't entirely follow the plot. It was the most aggressively archaeological of all the films, which was groovy. They had some very good set pieces and some very imaginative, memorable gags, but all in all, the action was just nothing compared to Raiders and Temple of Doom.

And I have to agree with Shannon's assessment of the first trailer - they needed loads more location work. I mean, really. I don't have a problem with sets, but after awhile, all the sets in this one started to kinda blend together. "Oh look, it's another tomb. And hey, check out the cobwebs." It did look low budget, but more importantly, the sets simply weren't distinctive enough in my opinion. Okay, the one with the Crystal Skulls and the you-know-whats were very cool, but nothing compared to the stuff in the first three films.

Overall, though, it was an enjoyable experience. We arrived before anyone else did, and basically wound up getting great seats in the spill-over theater before there was any spill-over. And there was whip-play in the theater, actually much moreso than in the actual movie. One of the theater guys was highly inquisitive about my whip, so much so that he asked me to do a crack in the lobby. I got off a very nice coachman's.

This was all well and good until he informed Michael and me a few minutes later that the theater owner considered whips weapons and we would have to put them in the car. Not to fret, though, because we were cracking out in the AMC parking lot at 2:30 in the morning. I actually drew a crowd that demanded a little demo, and scored a little applause at the end.

Maybe they were just whip-starved from the movie.

So thank everyone for coming and making it a fun experience. Shout-outs to Patti, Michael, Mary, Heather, Steve, Shannon, DJ, Todd, Jeff, Josh, Melissa, Ryan, and Jess. That was just great, as was the round of Indiana Jones Mad-Libs before the movie started.

The movie gets a half-hearted thumbs up from me, and no, is not even close to the originals.

Having said that, I want to point out that the critics LOVE it. 81% at Rotten Tomatoes, with well over a 160 reviews. So the critics are loving it more than the fans. Especially the online ones.

Yes, I expected the outcry over the lack of whip use at Club Obi-Wan, but the situation at TheRaider.net and a few other places has gotten completely out of hand. Allow me to illustrate.

The arguments on the forums are reading something like this -

"I went in with an open mind and I still couldn't like it!"

"Oh yeah? Well I went in with an opener mind than you and I liked it!"

"Your open mind doesn't count because you'll just like anything with Indy in the title! That's too open!"

"My mind is so open I had to pick it up off the theater floor where it fell out of my head!"

"You need to open your mind to the fact that you can't open your mind and open your mind to the movie as it is, as opposed to the movie your closed mind wrote before you ever went to see it!"

"No one objective could have liked this movie."

"But if you're so objective, that just means you object to everything! I was so objective that I objectively loved it!"

"My objectivity is more profound because I objectively thought it sucked!"

"Oh yeah? Well, I'll take your objective dislike of the film, raise it to my objective like of it, and then that will be more objective than just one opinion, and maybe then we can figure out whether or not the film is objectively good or bad."

"My negative objectivity can beat up your positive objectivity any day!"

"My child is an objective student at Hently Elementary School!"

"I'm a truer fan than you because I hated it!"

"I'm a truer fan than you because I loved it!"

"I can be a better fan than you with two arms tied behind my back!"

"Before I saw the film, I lowered my expectations. I knew it couldn't live up to them. Then the reviews came in, and I lowered them even more. Then it screened at Cannes and I raised them. Then it got a thumbs up and I raised them even more. By the time I got in the theater, I had raised and lowered my expectations so many times, I have no idea whether I liked the movie or not. Did I have too high expectations, or too low? Please help. I'm completely confused."

Can I just say one thing?

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My god, this is worse than the internet post-Phantom Menace. This is complete dementia. Just shut up, please. I think giving everyone a voice in cyberspace is slowly driving the entire American movie going population stark raving mad. No, seriously. No one should be exposed to that much opinion.

So I'm signing off, and I'm going to shave the stubble I let grow on my face, and then I'm getting on with my life.

The Countdown has Begun

2008-05-20T21:03:00.000-07:00

With less than twenty-four hours to go till Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I felt compelled to put up something a little special.

While tis true we'll inevitably see better whip action in the first ten minutes of the film than the entirety of this video, I just wanted to get a sense of what I looked like while popping and cracking.

Patti did a fine job with the video camera, capturing me as I go through a few basic moves here. Hopefully everyone will enjoy.

P.S. I tried to upload the video, but that would have taken far too long. Just follow the happy link to YouTube instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4gKkLPJ4K8

The Other Eulogy

2008-05-11T12:40:00.001-07:00

In many ways, the eulogy that we have to endure at our death is the final indignity that is forced upon us.

Most of the time, it is presided over by faceless pastors or preachers who know little to nothing about us, and serves only to fill the most superficial needs of those left behind. All too often, it conjures up images of us that reflect merely what those lingering souls in the chapel wanted us to be, as opposed to what we truly were. As a result, the profundities of our lives and our personalities are given little more than a peripheral glance, while the trivial and the cliched are elevated and exalted beyond all measure.

So this is where I come in. As is so often the case, it falls to me to say everything that can't and won't be said anywhere else, to give voice to that which, while skipped over and marginalized, are the most important facets of our lives. This, more than anything else, has given me my desire to write. And the fact that I feel as if I knew him quite well, not to mention the fact that my middle name was taken from his, compels me to write this in particular.

There are many places to start, but I suppose the most fitting would be to simply say that my uncle, Floyd Dyer, won't be attending the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He died yesterday afternoon, less than two weeks away from the first Indiana Jones film to grace movie screens in some nineteen years. It is poignant when you realize that, even though he wasn't fond of crowds, my aunt just had talked him into going opening night a few days ago.

Perhaps some would think this an irreverent thing to mention in a eulogy, but that's precisely why this is the "other" eulogy, as opposed to the formal one. It is entirely fitting in the sense that one of my fondest memories is the time he came over to visit me, and brought a couple of unexpected gifts with him. I was probably nine or ten years old.

Anyway, my uncle walked in the door bigger than life, and presented me with my very first real fedora, not to mention my very first bullwhip. I'm not sure if the fedora was officially Indiana Jones', but it was close enough, and the whip was a wonderful, six-foot latigo leather affair, complete with a swivel handle. Last week I saw it in a drawer, or should I say what was left of it. It was missing the popper and the fall, and was little more than a glorified rag of tattered leather. To say I enjoyed it extensively would be the understatement of the millennium.

Still, this might seem slightly out of place. After all, Indiana Jones fans are a dime a dozen. But you see, it wasn't just that he took me to the FOX theater in downtown Atlanta to see Raiders of the Lost Ark once upon a time, or even that he entered a contest in the local paper and won us two free tickets to an early screening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, though he did do both of these things.

It was that, in the halcyon days of my youth - or at least the days that were approaching halcyon - he was the closest thing I could get to a living, breathing Indiana Jones.

In so many ways, he was a better father to me than my own father has been. I have been very, very fortunate when it comes to uncles. My father figures have more than made up for all the inadequacies of my real one.

In point of fact, my absolute fondest memory of my Uncle Floyd, or as I always called him, Uncle Sonny, was when he took me into the woods for the weekend when I had been supposed to spend it with my father. For whatever reason, I absolutely, positively had not wanted to go, and when my father arrived to pick me up, I just took off running in the opposite direction.

Uncle Sonny called not long after he had left, and had stated in a very decisive manner that I needed a weekend in the great outdoors, and to get my stuff ready. That was exactly what I needed, and when I got in his truck, he was very adamant that we didn't even have to talk about why I hadn't wanted to go with my father. That was very nice. It's very rare to meet someone these days who is comfortable with silence.

Although by the same token, he was a man filled with stories, a person bursting to the brim with colorful tales anxious to be told. In our days together, we spent hours and hours in conversation about everything imaginable. He had a wealth of knowledge when it came to the natural world he loved so well, whether it be animals or birds or rocks or trees or just about anything.

But even though he was a natural conversationalist, those memorable afternoons often revolved around some story from his past, some adventure from long ago. I spent countless hours listening to him weave the fabric of his life into a story, and it was something I never grew tired of.

He told me about growing up in Avondale in the fifties and sixties, calling up old friends and old hangouts and old loves in his imagination. My favorite was probably when he got lost in the swamps of south Georgia as a young boy, and had to spent the entire night alone in a tree, with only a dead turkey he'd shot for company. But there were plenty of others that ranged far and wide.

He effortlessly spun tales of his time spent in the Marine Corps, particularly his tenure at boot camp on Parris Island, SC, as well as his time stationed in Okinawa. He was a Marine through and through, and I don't believe Semper Fi was ever that far from his heart (incidentally, to this very day, whenever I do push-ups, I always do one for the Corps, just as he taught me). I also vividly recall his many stories of his old fraternity back at the University of Georgia, and what campus life was like so many decades ago.

But this isn't to say it was all sitting and shooting the breeze. There were adventures to be had, and have them we did. His love of the land sprung naturally from a well deep inside him, and either it was in me too, or else it was just highly infectious. Put simply, Uncle Sonny was a man who was most alive in the middle of nowhere, who loved the open air and wind on his face, who loved more than anything else to be perched up on a deer-stand in freezing temperatures long before even the sun had bothered to come up, with an arrow nocked in his compound bow and the promise of a trophy buck beating in his heart.

While I never was much of a hunter, he did take me along for the ride on quite a few of his outings.

Our first camping trip was quite an adventure. We rented a U-haul camper, hooked it on the back of his pick-up truck, and proceeded to trek up into the North Georgia wilderness.

And this is as good a time as any to point out that when I say we went camping, we went camping. It was usually on some land that he had a hunting membership to, way up in Jasper County. There was an old house there that the hunting parties sometime slept in, but other than that, it was miles from anything even remotely resembling civilization. This wasn't some deal where we went to Stone Mountain Park and there were campers every ten feet, and we called it camping. This was the real thing.

My uncle always swore I must have popped and snapped my whip nine hundred times. It was great to be out in the open like that, with nothing but pine trees and hills and fields and the blue sky to keep us company. It was not unlike coming home, and I know he always felt the same way. Both of us may have felt ill at east among the world that humanity has made, but neither of us felt anything but release and renewal when it came to the natural one.

And this held true even when a freak snowstorm unleashed itself on our last night out there. We wound up frozen in, and not only that, the heat in our camper had gone out. And since we had to have some ventilation, we had opened a vent the night before only to have snow filter down into our boots. Needless to say, we finally got out of there, but not before getting the camper free and then navigating down some icy back roads without even a hint of pavement.

And that was just the start of our adventures.

The time after that an unexpected tornado erupted and tore through the mountains and we had to drive our way out through that. Then one time his Ford truck got stuck in the mud and we had to wait for a jeep to come by and pull us out. Another time we had to walk into town because his battery had died, and we even had to crack our whips a few times to draw off a few wild dogs that were following us. Once we had to track a deer that one of his friends had shot during hunting season, navigating the deep woods under not the blaring sun but rather the watchful eyes of the stars. On a trip up around the Appalachians, we even ran into a wandering minstrel who took pictures of and wrote poems about the mountains and streams and wildlife around the area, selling them as bookmarks.

But it wasn't all just hiking and camping. There was a little treasure hunting every now and again, a search for that ever tantalizing bit of "fortune and glory." There are still photographs lingering in the bottom of a drawer somewhere that depict me doing all sorts of things. Some show me walking along freshly plowed fields looking for arrowheads, others show me crawling over ancient boulders that indians once used to grind corn, still others show me discovering the skull of a long dead animal.

While more a geologist than an archaeologist, Uncle Sonny did enjoy poking around old, deserted houses with a metal detector, hunting for any bits of precious metal that someone might have buried during the Great Depression or something. And though we never did find any Sankara Stones, we did discover a piece of a meteorite once that was polished black from its descent through the atmosphere. We did unearth some very interesting trinkets every now again, many of which I still have.

And even though he was something of an Indy, perhaps the most peculiar thing about Uncle Sonny was that he in fact loved snakes. Far from having an aversion to them, he'd caught them ever since he was a boy, navigating the back woods and creeks around his home. Then he learned everything he could about them through nature magazines and books and journals. He held a lifelong affinity for them, and while I don't think he was ever bitten by a poisonous one, he did receive his fair share of hits.

Long before the antics of the Crocodile Hunter, we were hunting snakes with a flashlight along the river banks inside of Stone Mountain Park, and I can recall him very clearly grabbing them at the base of the neck so they couldn't get their fangs into him. More often than not we'd let them go, of course, but it was quite exciting nonetheless.

Of course, all things change, and the two of us eventually drifted a little bit apart. Life has a tendency to do that, and it was no different for us. In the end, he didn't really travel into the woods that much, and was content to just play the lottery as opposed to actually going to dig up treasure. And when all was said and done, he spent a lot of time looking after my grandmother before she passed away a few years ago.

Unfortunately, this was also the time that his lifelong foe choose to make a reappearance, this substance that you drank and that altered your personality and experience, not to mention your most fundamental self. No, not the blood of the Kali that Indy was forced to drink, but rather alcohol. In my mind, though, the two are very similar, and very creepy.

While he had been sober for the better part of ten years, he eventually succumbed to its insidious flavors again. It was a battle he'd been fighting on and off again for the last few years, and yesterday afternoon, he suffered heart failure and lost.

And he was only three years older than Harrison Ford.

After the medical examiner was finished and the funeral home had taken him away, all I could do was give a little salute and mutter "semper fi." Well, a little later on I broke out my newest whip and gave him a twenty-one crack salute. It was the best I could manage at the time, and I'm sure he would have appreciated it.

Frankly, it was too much to remain in the house and listen to the endless conversations about going to a "better place" and all that kind of thing. Uncle Sonny didn't really need a better place, because he knew more than most that this good earth, under this good sky, was the better place. He was a nature man, a person, as Joseph Campbell would say, "from the suburbs of Eden."

And while I'll leave the travels of his soul to the tender mercies of the theologians, I will say that every atom and particle and so on that made up his physicality are right now happily breaking up and finding a new home among the good green fields, around the mist-covered mountains, in the afternoon light playing across spiderwebs, in the dance of raindrops, and everything inbetween. As the Roman poet Ovid so eloquently put it, "Be sure nothing perishes in the whole universe - it does but vary and change form," and Uncle Sonny wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Semper Fi, my friend. Thanks for spending so much time with that weird, gawky kid you had for a nephew. He really appreciates it.

I want to close with a bit from Adonais, which Shelley wrote in memory of John Keats when he died of consumption almost two centuries ago. While I could have gone out on something Indy related, this seems most appropriate as well.

He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world's slow stain

He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;

Nor, when the spirit's self has ceas'd to burn,

With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

XLI

He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;

Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,

Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee

The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!

Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,

Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown

O'er the abandon'd Earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

XLII

He is made one with Nature: there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

Spreading itself where'er that Power may move

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never-wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

XLIII

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear;

Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;

And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

Tonight, on a Very Special Episode of Dedalus Enterprises ...

2008-03-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

So there Patti and I were, driving down 124 South toward Snellville. We had just finished a relaxing meal at IHOP, and were looking forward to a relaxing evening, perhaps watching her Stargate SG-1 DVDs. Alas, it was not to be.

We were sitting at a red light in front of Lowes, completely minding our own business. I can't stress that enough. Anyway, the red light turns green, and I gently press on the gas. I glance up to notice a pair of headlights coming toward us in the rear view mirror. And this is when any chance of a relaxing evening is pretty much shot.

I have one second to calmly think to myself, Hmm, ya know, there's really no way that car is going to be able to stop in time.

I was dead on the money, and then I wasn't calm anymore.

I watched the headlights veer under my rear view mirror, and then experienced a slight tingling sensation as the other car gently tapped my rear bumper. Okay, did I say gently? Oh, my bad. It actually barreled into us at top speed. The police report notes there were no skid marks on 124, which is true. As Patti very observantly pointed out to me later, we never heard tires squeal.

Why, you might reasonably ask? Because the other driver never even so much as bothered to hit the brakes. Fortunately, I was there to help with that.

So we're knocked from the right hand land into the left one, all in the span of half a second. Happily, no one was over there. We were both knocked forward with extreme force, and the police said it was really surprising that our air bags didn't deploy. The assailant's bags did, but she hit us dead on.

So I'm sitting there in a complete daze. I don't know if it was excess adrenaline or what, but I was shaking and/or shivering in a major way. Incidentally, I shook for quite some time afterwards. I also hit my head on the visor, and my back was quite sore. Patti was already on the phone calling 911 at this point, before I even know what was going on. She's very good in a crisis, you have to hand it to her. Of course, she's also got some major neck and back pain.

I finally manage to get the car backed up onto a little patch of pavement on the side of the road, and the other car pulls up behind us. Although honestly, she nearly hits us again while backing up. That would have been a comedy of errors. Anyway, a passing by EMT worker stops and checks us out, and this is humorous given the amount of EMT workers Patti has blown up on Grand Theft Auto. Happily life does not reflect video games.

So the cops finally arrive, and Patti is hauled off in an ambulance to EastSide medical. Stretcher and neck brace and all, but mainly as a precaution. This is bad, because I'm just left sitting in my car, shaking like a leaf, and basically unable to do anything. Well, I did joke with the cops that I had just filled my car up with gas, not to mention taken it through the car wash, not three hours previous. Which was absolutely true.

Well I wasn't injured - except for a nick on my forehead - it had absolutely knocked me for a loop. Again, we were given no warning whatsoever. So Patti is gone, and I'm left to fend for myself. I comically couldn't find my insurance card. I've had insurance with Jim Anderson for probably a decade, but I couldn't find my card to save my life.

I have my license and registration, but the insurance is no go. I swore the insurance card was in my glove box, along with about ten thousand Borders pay stubs, but it wasn't. I didn't find it until about midnight, when I was safely home and it suddenly dawned on me, Hello, you idiot, your insurance card is in your wallet. So this resulted in them writing down the wrong insurance for me on the police report, but happily I wasn't cited, and I did have Snellville's finest make a copy of my insurance card to go with the report the next day.

And the hits just keep on coming. It took me a good long second to remember what lane I had actually started off in. The police were obviously really interested in knowing. I remember that I ended up in the left one, but that was about it. I mean honestly, when you've driven down a road nine thousand times, do you really consciously pay attention to what lane you're in? But we finally got it together.

Except for the part where I lose my keys. I haven't even gotten out of the car yet, and I can't find my keys. Of course, the officer informs me the car is not driveable, so a wrecker comes to tow it. I finally, finally found my keys after much searching. I had been sitting on them.

And then when I finally got out of my car, the cop pulls out a little plastic bag full of suspicious-looking tablet/pills from the side of my door. I hastened to assure him it was just Tums. I would have hated to have been pulled in for possession of a dime bag of Tums.

So our vehicles are pulled away, and I'm waiting on the side of the road for the cop to take me to EastSide. It's freezing. Tuesday night will probably be the last really cold night of the season, lucky us. And yes, I was still shaking. I take the time to call my uncle and ask him to meet us up at the hospital, which he very gratefully does.

The cool part of the evening was the ride in the back of the police car. If you ever have to ride in the back of a police car, it's probably best to do it in those circumstances. It was really fun, and wow, those cars ride well. And he had all this computer equipment and stuff up front, and it was neat. We even had to stop on the back road behind Best Buy while he checked out some suspicious activity.

So we get to the hospital, and I have to reach around outside to let myself out of the back of the police car. After thanking him for the ride, I go into the emergency. Eventually, my uncle arrives, and then I get to go see Patti. She had a sprained neck and they gave her two prescriptions, which we went by Walgreens to pick up. It was funny, but when we left the hospital, the nurse was like "See you later," and we were both like "We hope not."

All in all, it could have been worse. We visited my car yesterday at the wrecker place, and I had to crawl through the backseat to get stuff out of my trunk. The back of the car looks like it was hit by a torpedo. The girl said she didn't see us because she was changing lanes, but funny enough, she crashed into us dead center. And after driving down 124 south yesterday, I must say, her visibility was pretty clear for at least a quarter of a mile. I have no idea what she was doing to result in her being so oblivious. Fortunately she has good insurance, so I really, really want a new car out of this. No blue book value for me.

But no word on my beloved Grand Prix. If she bent the frame, the car is done for. We'll see. I think the relative insurance companies are investigating today.

The funny thing is, my agent said that she told her agent yesterday that she now remembers I was driving without my lights on. It's funny because I was driving a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix, and if you know that model, you know the lights are on ALL THE TIME. It's physically impossible to turn them off. So there.

Tattler.

Best Wishes to Robert Dante

2008-03-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

Robert Dante is one of the best whip masters in the world.

In 2003 and 2005, he set and reset the Guinness World Record for most bullwhip cracks in a minute. He managed 203 the first time and 214 the second. He does all sorts of circus and cabaret acts, and even began a bullwhip academy in Minneapolis. He hopes to orchestrate an actual symphony at some point in his life, with whips cracking through the notes. He's also working on a definitive book on whipcraft, what he calls the "bible."

Unfortunately, a month or so ago he was diagnosed with Type Two diabetes. He lost his sight for a short time, and had to spend four days in the hospital. While his health is improving, he has to take two types of insulin every day and is now on a strict diet.

But Dante is not only a whip artisan, he is a poet as well. I know I mentioned in my last post that a dancing whip is analogous to composing poetry, but this guy has actually done both in his life. I had no idea. Oh, the ironies. This does strengthen my conviction that whipcraft is a truly profound art, and Dante feels exactly the same way.

(Plus, Robert Dante is the coolest name ever)

Anyway, we here at Dedalus Enterprises want to send Mr. Dante our best wishes for a speedy recovery. Hopefully he'll be cracking us all up again in no time.

http://bullwhip.net/

The Thundering Art

2008-03-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

- A Life in Whipcraft -

When most people today see someone standing out in their backyard cutting through the air with a leather whip and producing loud cracks that echo throughout the neighborhood, they are curiously unmoved.

Well, perhaps not completely unmoved. They may be moved enough to stare and scratch their heads in bewilderment. They may even be moved enough to call the authorities and complain about some nut disturbing the peace.

But they are not truly moved. Not deeply. Not profoundly. And certainly not philosophically. And few think they should be.

At best, some among us may be able to conjure up a certain amount of cinematic nostalgia for the craft, especially when we recall the whip-wielding heroics of icons like Indiana Jones and Zorro. At worst, some of the more fundamentalist among us will blush and assume that nowadays whips are used for purposes best left to scandalous imaginations rightly operating behind closed doors.

In reality, though, whipcraft is one of the noblest arts.

And quite frankly, it has been for me ever since childhood. If I may be allowed an indulgent stroll down whip-cracking memory lane, I think my first whip was actually a belt, because it was the only thing around the house that even remotely resembled Indiana Jones’ legendary weapon.

Yes, like so many enthusiasts, amateur and master alike, my earliest infatuation with whips was born from countless hours watching Raiders of the Lost Art.

But I progressed to longer and slightly better whips.

A fair portion of my childhood was spent running about, happily popping the first few cheap whips that I got from fairs and game ranches, beating them on trees and driveways and pretty much everything in-between. I even broke one attempting to swing on it.

But again, I progressed to longer and better ones.

My first real leather whip was a six-foot, swivel-handle affair that my uncle presented me with. I was probably around twelve. For a few years, the whip was my constant companion on any camping or hiking trips I went on. I whittled away untold hours learning basic moves like the front crack, otherwise known as the cattleman's crack. But I didn't know what it was called at the time. All I knew was that it was cool, and furthermore, it was something I had a bit of a natural affinity for.

At some point in my teen years, I eventually inherited my uncle's eight-foot bull whip. I found it much better for target practice and just cracking in general.

Predictably, the summer that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out was a big one for my whip skills. I had just finished my freshman year in high school, and I did impress more than one friend with my whip handling. Of course, they hadn't evolved much beyond your basic overhead cracks and things like that, but I took great pleasure in it just the same.

Yet throughout all those years, I only hit myself twice. And even then, that was usually when the cracker on the end of the whip just got a little too close and popped me slightly. Both times got my attention, but they were a small price to pay for so many days, weeks, months, and years of enjoyment.

Still, after Indy was over, I didn't really delve into the world of whips except on occasion. Every now and again, I would break out my eight-footer and amaze myself that I could still hit soda cans across the yard again and again without missing. It was a good thing to do, but I didn't think too much about it after that. At that point in my life, I had become much more interested in writing and philosophy and the scholarly side of things.

And I should point out, it wasn't like whipcraft was encouraged in any way, shape, or form. There were no whipcraft clubs or societies when I came of age, that was for certain. Sure, sports were the rage, and that's as true now as it was then.

To my mind, there are very few athletic beauties humankind has produced that can even begin to rival the sublime ballet of a finely-braided bull whip dancing through the air, yet it's not exactly the sort of thing they usually broadcast on ESPN.

Of course, you may very well be asking what exactly is the point of taking a piece of leather or cowhide originally designed to move cattle from one part of a ranch to another and learning all sorts of elaborate cracks and performing routines with it.

But as for me, I would turn that right around and ask what exactly is the point of grown men swatting at balls with sticks and other grown men chasing oblong balls made of pigskin around on mud-caked fields?

Well, there really isn't any.

The only difference is, sports are accepted, even adored. No one raises an eyebrow when they pass a group of kids shooting hoops, but if those same kids were all brandishing stock whips and target cutting, there might be a problem.

Perhaps this isn't so unexpected. After all, we live in a society that is almost aggressively un-artistic, and I will once again argue that whipcraft is most definitely an art.

Predictably, some might argue that sports qualify as art as well, but in my mind, the two things are rather diametrically opposed. In sports, the goal is to master others. In art, the goal is to master one's self. At the end of the day, the former needs roaring crowds shouting their approval, whereas the latter doesn't.

The whip master stands alone, self-possessed and self-created, with no clear line where he or she ends and the whip begins. Watching a whip master like Alex Green or Adam Winrich in action, one would almost be tempted to invoke William Butler Yeats - "How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

But I should point out that the dance of whipcraft isn’t necessarily devalued the world over.

For instance, in Australia, whip cracking is tantamount to a national pastime. This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, their kangaroo-hide whips are some of the most sought after - not to mention most expensive - whips on the planet. And all one has to do is flip through any catalogue that features whips crafted by Aussies like Terry Jacka to see how seriously they take this sort of thing Down Under. His braided affairs are truly exquisite.

Of course, the whips hand-crafted for the Indiana Jones films by David Morgan aren't too shabby either, but alas, I'd have to actually sell a book trilogy or two to score one of those.

Still, I have recently attained a brand new latigo leather eight-footer in the mail, and I just finished spending a few days breaking it in, trying to master more complicated moves like "The Queensland Flash" and "The Tasmanian Cutback” and “The Snake-Killer.” I’ve got the last one down, but that’s about all I can brag about for now.

But at the same time, there’s really nothing to brag about, because rather unexpectedly, the adept holding the whip isn’t actually doing that much. This statement may strike beginners as odd, because it’s generally assumed that the more power and force generating the crack, the louder the crack will be. Not so. Actually, adding more muscle to a technique results in nothing but sore arms and whips with stressed plaiting.

As a fan of philosophy and the Far East, I couldn’t help but be impressed by a mantra that came not from the Yogis in India or the Zen teachers in Japan, but rather from the whip masters of the Outback –

“Let the whip crack itself.”

Such a simple statement, but certainly a profound one. And like all the best wisdom, it can be applied to not only whipcraft, but everything else too.

So yes, gentle reader, this is where we get philosophical.

Throughout my years with a whip at my side, I’ve instructed friends and family alike from time to time. Invariably, people will often take hold of the handle, lash out blindly with it, the fall or the cracker flies back up at them, and then they get flustered and just start beating the whip against the ground, harder and harder.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with producing the clean, spontaneous snap we all so long to hear.

Surprisingly, the question whipcraft instructors ask most is not whether you can add more power to your technique, but rather if you can take more power away from it.

Much like in martial arts, the aim is to use as little of your own energy as possible. When judo experts are tossing their opponents left and right across the mat, it’s not as if they’re using force and muscles to do so. They’re simply redirecting the energy their opponent is attacking them with, and trusting gravity to take care of the rest.

It is the same with the whip. It has its own energy, its own arc, its own trajectory, and rather than try to dictate where it’s heading, one should merely find its rhythm and then step smoothly into the dance.

Whipcraft at its best is a kind of meditation, albeit one in the middle of a spinning hurricane. After all, with a simple snap of the wrist, a cracking whip is actually breaking the sound barrier. The end of the whip quite literally erupts in a minor sonic boom, and at that point is traveling in excess of nine hundred miles an hour.

To be of calm, relaxed mind in the center of that is to indeed be at what T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”

The aim of whip mastery is therefore being able to summon up a substantial crack as easily and as naturally as you breathe in and out, and a settled mind is much more important than mere force.

For the longest time, I didn’t really understand that. I didn’t understand it in terms of whip cracking, nor did I understand it when it came to target practice.

Like all whip enthusiasts, I’ve always enjoyed setting up soda cans and plastic bottles to pop around the yard, but it took me awhile to realize it wasn’t even remotely impressive to just brutally slap said cans and bottles into oblivion. Not to mention it was a pain to go and set them up after knocking them into the neighbor’s yard over and over again.

After a largely unsuccessful practice session, I eventually realized that I was missing all my targets not because of insufficient force, but because my mind was stressed and unfocused. It slowly dawned on me that my use of the whip was almost incidental. I wasn’t even aiming at the bottles with my whip, I was aiming at them with my fumbling agitated mind, as if I could knock them over with nothing but stress and frustration and force.

So I took a deep breath or two, and then proceeded to knock one bottle after another over in effortless succession.

Delicacy and precision are all that matter when it comes to target cutting. As far as I'm concerned, the goal is not to clumsily slap the can or bottle as far away as you can, but rather to flick it so subtly and so gracefully that the object barely knows that it’s even been hit.

In point of fact, I think of it now in terms of a kiss rather than a hit, a kiss so light and so delicate the bottle isn’t even knocked off the side immediately, but rather has to spin around in confusion a second or two before submitting to the inevitable fall into failure. In such an ideal performance, the whip is doing very little, the whipper even less, and the object is defeated mostly by nothing but its own weight and a healthy dose of gravity.

Again, this is simply a case of easily slipping out of the way, and letting the target fall of its own volition.

It is very similar to the experience of Eugen Herrigel, a German professor who studied archery in Tokyo for five years. During that time, his master told him he should learn to release his bowstring as naturally and spontaneously as a ripe fruit falls from the tree. That is to say, he needed to fire his arrow with no intent and no ego, almost as if he wasn’t aiming at all.

In the end, Herrigel produced a short classic called Zen in the Art of Archery, which I would suggest to everyone interested in whipcraft. As the master tells his students, let the arrow find the target. Once there is no separation between the archer and the arrow, there is nothing else in the entire universe the arrow wants to do more than bury itself in the bull’s-eye. It properly becomes what he referred to as an “artless art.”

Conversely, once there is no artificial separation between the master and the whip, there is nothing else in the universe the whip wants to do more than let loose a loud, satisfying pop. Like archery or tea ceremonies or flower arrangement, whipcraft opens the possibility of inspiration totally usurping the fruitless striving of the ego, and consequently transforming the duality of whipper and whip into one beautiful, seamless whole.

Again, it all simply comes down to letting the whip crack itself. This is an echo of Aldous Huxley, another writer with a penchant for the Far East, who once remarked that every kind of instruction is merely getting someone “out of their own light.”

On some level, I think most artists would intuitively know that a master recognizes no clear line between the whip and the hand which guides it, and that that’s the way it should be. This is the secret that all artists have realized, the very thing that separates them from everyone else. And this is what makes art “artless,” as opposed to painfully “artful.”

For example, one cannot “force” a whip to crack anymore than a dancer can “force” herself to dance, or a painter can “force” himself to paint. When this happens, everything becomes terribly artificial, which is to say it reeks of artfulness. A sweeping, fluid performance becomes a mechanical, paint-by-the-numbers drill, one hard to watch and harder to wade through.

Just let the whip crack itself. And if you think on it hard enough, you’ll realize the same can be said for life in general, and that’s when you’ll truly understand the art of whipcraft.

In closing, I’m sure that to some, the whip aficionado is still just a person who makes noise.

But as far as I’m concerned, the whip aficionado is nothing less than a poet. Standing alone in the sun, he weaves and writes shadows and stanzas of hypnotic beauty. His only pen is the whip in his hand, his only page the blue sky itself. As he etches odes into the wind and sonnets into the passing breeze, his whip punctuates every rhyme with thunder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNKPIOelTgA

My Ongoing Herculean Struggle to Find Quiet Dining

2008-02-25T09:52:00.000-08:00

This is a letter I sent to Firehouse Subs that, quite frankly, has been a long time in coming -

I dine quite frequently at the Firehouse Subs on Scenic Highway here in Snellville, GA. Good subs, friendly workers, all that stuff.

But quite frankly, I am really tired of the excess noise that erupts around me every time I try to dine in. Not from the other customers or employees, but the television sets that are blaring out nonsense from every conceivable angle. I can't help but notice this is a disturbing trend here in America over the past year or so.

Every place you go to eat, radios blare, televisions broadcast, and for anyone trying to get a quiet meal, it's quite simply noise pollution. And true, you might suggest I just go somewhere else for a sub, but it's the same at Subway. The music in there is so loud I can feel it practically drilling out my fillings.

On a philosophical note, it is somewhat distressing that costumers have grown so fundamentally terrified of silence. What happens to a society that has to be artificially distracted every single second of its existence?

On a more pragmatic one, Saturday night was the last straw. I went to Firehouse on break from my job, really wanting a nice, quiet meal. What I got was the vacuous Entertainment Tonight sonically attacking me from both sides of the room. There was this grown girl on there who was completely emaciated. She made the Olsen Twins look healthy. I'm guessing she weighed probably forty pounds, and all she could do was whine about how fat and stupid she was.

And do I need to point our how utterly unappetizing it is to look at a self-inflicted Holocaust victim while trying to digest a hook and ladder sub? Then of course, they had to bring in Dr. Phil, and he starts spouting his people-stamped, Oprah-approved opinion. "What this girl needs - is a wake-up call."

And what I needed was ear-plugs. I was sitting there trying to read, but it was impossible. I read the same paragraph three times before finally giving up. I eventually admitted defeat and had to drive back to work to eat in peace.

What does this mean to Firehouse? Probably nothing. But it's been an ongoing problem, and it does get old walking in every time and asking someone to turn the television down. In this age of portable DVD players and video iPods, if people are that desperate for entertainment, I say let them bring their own. And let the rest of us take Louisville sluggers to the idiot box, especially the idiot boxes in public places.

And lest I've given the impression of being a cranky, disagreeable ninety-two year old who angrily waves his cane at every teenager he sees, I'm thirty-four years old.

But still, excellent food, and the employees do promptly and politely greet all the customers who come in.

P.S. On a side note, what's up with having one full size table per store? If I order a sandwich, I don't want half a sandwich. If I order a drink, I don't expect half a drink. So why in the world would I want half a table?

My Long Awaited Review of Whistling in the Wind

2008-02-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

Well, it's over and done with. I've finally taken a deep breath, and plunged into the murkiest literary waters of all time. I've reviewed Whistling in the Wind, a book that proves Carl Jung's theory of entiodromia. This self-published tome is so bad it has actually morphed into its opposite, and I gave it a five star rating at Amazon.com. I was holding off, I really was. My hopes were high that another one would be published, and my and mine could once again feast on the unintentionally hilarious prose. But the gloves are off, and the first one star review has been launched. The true battle has begun.

The Greatest Worst Book of All Time
By: Paul F. McDonald

Every now and again, a work of literature comes along that allows you to re-imagine your life, that challenges your ideas and beliefs, that proves that words and language can change the world, and that demonstrates once and for all what the English language is capable of.

Whistling in the Wind is NOT such a work.

Camey Brooks' literary debut is nothing short of a published abomination, a literary train wreck from the first page to the last. You read one sentence, and then another, and you promise yourself that the next one can't be as bad as the last, but it invariably is. I have read the text from cover to cover. I doubt too many reviewers can claim that. I doubt even the editor can. I emailed him a two page summary of everything that was wrong with this mess, and he has yet to get back to me. And did I mention it's been months and months?

It has taken me so long to summon up the will to even attempt crafting a review of WIIW, because it's like the dark side. Once you start down it, forever will it dominate your destiny. I could easily dedicate the rest of my feeble existence to pulling this thing apart, sentence fragment by sentence fragment, misplaced modifier by misplaced modifier, comma splice by comma splice, and more likely than not I wouldn't even scratch the surface.

Even now, I'm getting sweaty palms because I don't know where to begin. Okay, I'm taking a deep breath. Here we go. But I'm warning you, I can't linger too long. Reading Camey Brooks reminds me of what Nietzsche said about looking into the abyss. You know, that as long as you look into it, it's also looking into you. And right now, her ill-fated verbs and bewildering adjectives are staring right down into my soul, burrowing their way into it like an out-of-control sewer rat.

Okay faithful readers, here we go. Our tale basically revolves around two clueless goofballs named Devin and Jarvis. They're living the middle class dream, just a couple of good guys who have their faces happily and obliviously buried in their particular slice of the American pie. Then, tragedy strikes. They lose their jobs! Still, they keep their heads up, and with the help of each other and God, they manage to succeed. Sort of.

And that's pretty much it. Of course, from the way Brooks couches it, you would think our two protagonists basically endure the trials and tribulations of Job. You would think no one suffers like they have suffer. You would think them superheroes for surmounting the gargantuan obstacles laid out before them. But I'm not seeing it. They're unemployed something like six months, but are they homeless? Are they destitute? Are they forced to sell their bodies and souls for a weekly meal of stale bread and cornflakes?

No, gentle reader, they aren't. Actually, we spend the most amount of time with Devin, and he consequently spends his time laying around on the sofa, eating pizza, watching ball games on his big screen TV, and hanging out with Jarvis at the International House of Pancakes. Not exactly the same as becoming a leper and having your friends and family being smited off the face of the Earth in a complex theological bid for your soul is it?

Or maybe it is. I mean, obviously we're meant to think it is. But quite frankly, the worst thing that ever happens to these fun-seekers is that Devin's leg falls asleep in church while, strangely enough, Jarvis can't get to sleep so he spends an entire night tossing and turning in bed. And counting sheep backwards. And thinking about doughnuts, for some strange reason.

And yes folks, that's an ENTIRE CHAPTER. You're treated to an entire chapter of some yo-yo counting sheep in reverse. And keep in mind that the synopsis on the back of the book earnestly invites you as the reader to "join in this page-flippin' suspense as this saga unfolds." I don't know what's funnier, describing this as suspenseful or mislabeling it a saga.

In the first place, why even try to bill this as a "roller coaster ride?" It makes no sense. This story is a quiet, leisurely paced drama about two guys struggling with unemployment, and that's not only the best that can be said for it, that's all it attempts to be. Ever. This is simply false advertising. To call it a roller coaster ride would be tantamount to calling Indiana Jones the most boring movie series ever!

In the second place, why call it a saga? True, it's long. We have to wade through well over three hundred pages of wacky Jarvis and Devin antics. But the very term "saga" implies that some sort of epic, larger-than-life struggle is unfolding before us.

For instance, I just finished reading Paradise Lost in its entirety. For those of you in our studio audience who don't know, Paradise Lost is John Milton's twelve book poem that seeks to "justify the ways of God to men." And look at what it deals with. Wars in heaven. Rebellions in hell. The creation of the universe. The fall of man. When someone uses the term "saga," that's the kind of thing I think of. I want scope, and lots of it.

By contrast, in Whistling in the Wind I don't think we ever even leave the suburbs.

So what kind of antics go on with our two luckless protagonists?

Well, let's take a look at Devin. He has a dog unfortunately named Jordache, who subsequently gets loose and Devin has to chase him around the neighborhood. A little later, a sprinkler system goes off unexpectedly thus soaking Devin. Hilarity ensues. Then there's his unintentionally hysterical (and erotic) encounter with a pizza boy.

And don't even get me started on his love life. He meets a girl, and she has a twin. And then she has a twin. And then the same thing happens to Jarvis. Pretty soon, they walk into a convenient store and are surrounded by identical cloned copies of their girlfriends, bringing to mind Neo's epic battle with the never-ending army of Agent Smiths in the Matrix films. The girlfriends are twins, then triplets, then quadruplets, and they just keep inexplicably multiplying throughout the book.

The most amazing thing about these totally un-amazing events is the way in which both Devin and Jarvis react to them. I can't even begin to describe how completely incongruous their reactions are to what's actually happening in the story.

Quite frankly, graduate students studying this text centuries from now will probably launch a thesis or two exploring the possibility that our two heroes are in fact extraterrestrial life forms. Honestly, it's like Devin and Jarvis have never been on Earth before, and are just amazed by everything they see or hear.

Every time a phone rings, their hearts start racing. Every time someone knocks on the door, their pulses start pounding. Someone tells the stupidest, corniest joke of all time, and they fall on the floor, clutching their sides in laughter. They go to pick someone up for a date, the door opens, and they start "gawking uncontrollably." Honestly, play it cool guys. I mean, there's literally uncontrollable gawking going on. It's like they've never seen a member of the opposite sex before. They meet every situation with complete and utter incredulity.

In retrospect, it's amazing they held on to their jobs as long as they did.

And on the phone ringing thing, I should just point out that during the course of the story, phones often ring "urgently." Devin and Jarvis apparently have some completely unexplained ability to tell whether or not the call is going to be important - before they even pick up the phone! While that does lend some credence to the extraterrestrial - not to mention extrasensory perception - theory, it just doesn't make sense. Someone should take the time to explain to the author that a phone in and of itself can't ring "urgently." It just rings. It's a phone. An inanimate communication device with no mind of its own.

Maybe it's different on the planet that Devin and Jarvis are beamed in from, but not so here on good old terra firma Earth.

Of course, there is one shining point to all this. At least there is for Devin and Jarvis. If you've muddled your way through the clumsy, run-on synopsis on the back cover of the book, you know their lives are inexorably altered by a little girl. A little girl named Joy. And guess what she brings? Yep. Joy. It's Pilgrim's Progress time, gentle readers. Okay, so a friend of theirs has a sweet little daughter with a penchant for obvious platitudes. Big deal. She's not even in the bloody book that much, and yet she's mentioned in the summary.

Much like the losing the job thing, her importance to the story is so bloated it's not even funny. She's supposed to be this little fountain of wisdom, I suppose to draw a biblical allusion to the "out of the mouths of babes" idea. But only Devin and Jarvis could be inspired by her, and her cookie-cutter, jack-in-the-box wisdom. From the way the two of them react, you would think she was Yoda and Dumbledore rolled into one.

But keep in mind, that's not saying much. I mean, if Devin and Jarvis so much as walk outside and see a tree, they pretty much stand there gawking in utter amazement. So needless to say, when she advises them to do stuff like believe in themselves and follow their dreams, they're completely flabbergasted by her intelligence, almost deliriously ecstatic that they've met someone as divinely inspired as she is at this point in their lives.

Of course, they meet other people who are instrumental in bringing them closer to ... well, the end of the book, I suppose. For instance, in the big lay-off back in the opening chapters, their friend Michael is fired as well. But unlike Devin and Jarvis, there's no IHOP for him. No, he loses his house, his family, everything. By the time they link back up with him, he's living on the streets. In retrospect, maybe that would have been the interesting story to tell. You know, one with a character who actually has some drama going on, but whatever.

The only role Michael serves is that of making Devin and Jarvis feel bad for feeling sorry for themselves. And to serve as more unintentionally hilarious comic relief.

For instance, he tells his friends that he's currently living under a bridge, but "the bills just keep on coming." And this is when any sane reader asks themselves, HOW?! The man now lives under a bridge, for crying out loud. Does he have a mailbox there? Do angry creditors just drive by and throw bills off the overpass at him? And quite frankly, what is the deal with these creditors anyway? They still hound their clients, even when they're homeless? Personally, I would think if a man was living under a bridge, there's going to be little to no chance he's going to pay his VISA bills on time, but that's just me.

And while we're on the subject, what do Dumb and Dumber do when they talk to Michael about his troubles? Do they offer to take him to the IHOP to get a sandwich? Does Devin offer him a place to stay, considering he lives alone in a nice house? No. They invite him to church, and then they drive off. Church is on Sunday, and they're content to leave their homeless friend camped out under a bridge, probably fighting off creditors with cardboard boxes and burning rats to stay warm, while they go eat pancakes.

Great Christian message there.

And I suppose I should point out there's some subplot about a singing career, but who really cares at this point? This is going to be the really difficult part of the review, because ... well, basically because I can't take out the entire text and dissect it line for line. Well, I could, but that would just take too long. Nonetheless, that's what I want to do, and that very unreasonable urge has prevented me from writing a review until now. Still, before this draws to a close, I'm going to have to attempt to say something about the actual writing.

See, I understand that most writers write and rewrite and read and reread their opening pages until their eyes are bleeding from exhaustion and they've alienated all but the most devoted friends and family. Heck, some writers even carry that level of meticulous analysis throughout the entire book. But we aren't dealing with them. From the way Whistling in the Wind is written, I don't think anyone ever actually read the thing. Ever. That includes the author. There are simply too many slapping-you-right-in-the-face mistakes that no human being is capable of missing, even if they're only giving the text a cursory glance.

To be fair, some things are inevitably going to slip through the cracks, even with a top paid group of editors and proofreaders from major New York publishing houses going over your work. I realize for many authors, especially with the advent of vanity presses and self-publishing, this is simply impossible. However, the second line of Whistling reads as such - "Apparently my verbiage had been placed under a microscopic."

Go back, read it again.

Done? Good job. Not "microscope," as I assume the author intended, but "microscopic." And then on page two, there's the priceless "our chitchat was sautéed with flavor and roasting." This has been tickling my brain for over a year now. What in the world is being said here? I get the metaphor. Devin and Jarvis are having a conversation, and it's going well. I wouldn't normally associate chit-chatting with sautéing something, but how exactly do you sauté something with flavor, much less roasting? What? Then on page three, she goes off on "chu-chu trains." Not only does she use the baby name for a friggin' train, but she even misspells it!

And so it goes. You can't really even comprehend it until you've tightened your rope and just plunged down into the neverending caves of Camey Brooks' prose. For instance, when Devin's dog gets loose, he's described as running "in stride with gravity." What does that mean? Not exactly the time to bring up Newton's Laws of Planetary Motion, but I assume everyone on the planet is in stride with gravity. That's what gravity is.

And it goes on and on and on. Every page, every paragraph, almost every sentence. It carries from the acknowledgments all the way to the about the author page. I mean, according to the little bio, Camey Brooks was a former residence of Arizona. She was a what? A house? And I have to stop now, otherwise I'm going to quote the entire book.

If you've read this far, I'm sure you're asking yourself why I've given this book a five-star review. Quite frankly, I couldn't give it anything else. In its own way, it's one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Not to mention it's provided more hours of laugh-out-loud entertainment than anything in recent memory has. I wish I had the book in front of me right now, but alas, the significant other gave it to a writing instructor who's currently using it as an example of how not to write books, or sentences, or anything.

In closing, I will say that the English language has never produced anything like this before, and I doubt it ever can again. Do yourself a favor. Buy this book. Read it aloud with friends. It's a masterpiece of fiction. As a fan of the book so eloquently put it in her own Amazon review, "I didn't hear no grammar comments come out of they're mouths and they would be the very ones to mention (I would think) of any bad grammar or taste in a novel."

Indeed. Camey Brooks couldn't have said it any better herself.

An Unprecedented Announcement!

2007-12-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

Yes, the rumors are true.

No doubt, you've heard whispers of them out on the street. You're seen new Yahoo groups springing up to debate their validity. You've gotten strange, knowing looks from your friends whenever you mention them.

So let's just get this out of the way.

While I have in no way, shape, or form totally abandoned the Rhythms in Stardust trilogy, I have been working on something else. True, I've only written half of a first draft of book two in the Astrophel saga, but what can I say? The new ideas grabbed hold of me while I wasn't looking, dragged me into a back alley, pummeled me senseless, and demanded to be written down. I was quite helpless in the matter.

I will say, though, that I do have two Astrophel-based queries/submissions wasting away at a couple of literary agencies, but for the moment, they refuse to say yes or no, so here we are.

But enough about that. What can I tell you about the new series that I'm sure everyone's salivating to hear about? Ha. Well, I could tell you a lot. But naturally, I'm not going to. I find it almost impossible to talk about something while I'm in the throes of composition, but these are a few juicy tidbits that you won't see on Ain't It Cool News.

The new series is in the Young Adult genre. Big surprise there. It will be more fantasy related than science-fiction (this isn't to imply there won't be spaceships, because I luves me some spaceships, but if I say how, I'll give the whole thing away). The series will be five books long, and each book will probably run a smidgen over three hundred pages. I already pretty much know how every one of them is going to turn out, and even though I promised myself I wouldn't get buried in notes again, I'm currently three or four notebooks into building this particular mythology.

As for the new book one, I can say that it's going to be twenty-two chapters, and I assure you I've already written about nine. So yes, the first book is almost halfway done already. It writes fast, and I hope it will read fast. It may even sell faster than the Rhythms in Stardust trilogy, who knows? Speed is the name of the game, even in an industry that's quickest pace could only be described as "glacial."

What else can I tell you about the new book one? Well, it's written in first person. Not my original choice, but it simply wouldn't work any other way. Also, it has a lot of stuff in it. Knights? Check. Aliens? Check. Dinosaurs? Check. Yes, dinosaurs! Because if there was one thing my first series lacked, it was dinosaurs. It's just no fun without 'em.

And remember the unprecedented announcement this blog promised?

Well, here it is.

The title, that's right, THE TITLE, of my new series.

Drum roll, please.

Thanks.

THE IMAGINA CHRONICLES

Hopefully coming soon to a bookstore near you

Darth Vader Hates Atheism That's Promoted to Kids!

2007-12-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

One day aboard the Death Star, Darth Vader is relaxing in his private chambers. It's been a hard day for the dark lord of the Sith, a day spent interrogating rebels and trying to seek out the location of their hidden rebel base. He's looking forward to a nice, quiet evening flipping through the Imperial Gazette and reading the funnies.

But Philip Pullman has a nasty surprise for him.

Easing back in his hover chair, Vader puts on his slippers and gets his smoking pipe ready. That's when a protocol droid wanders in with his paper. And that's when his nice, quiet evening is ruined.

In disbelief, Vader snatches the Gazette away from the robot, his mechanical eyes fixed on the headline. It very clearly reads -

"New Golden Compass Movie Sparks Controversy Across the Galaxy."

The subtitle also vividly states -

"Philip Pullman's Book Sells Atheism to Kids!"

Vader reads the article, and then puts the paper down. Then he picks it back up, and scans the article again. Then he puts it back down. And then he picks it back up again.

A dark side fury building within him, he Force-hurls the Gazette away from him, stands up, and screams a scream so horrible it awakens three Imperial legions two floors down.

"NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

How to be a Romantic Poet

2007-11-12T15:40:00.001-08:00

Well, I haven't seen this bit for a very long time. I remember one of my English professors at Kennesaw State printed it up for a class and gave it to us. And since Romanticism was basically serving as my surrogate religion back in the day, it was always back there, tingling the fringes of my consciousness. And here it is again, for your reading pleasure.

How to be a Romantic Poet

O reader! Does a drowsy numbness pain your sense? Does the sight of a ruined abbey send you into dizzy raptures? If so, you may be ready to take your place among the immortal poets of the Romantic era. Just follow these simple instructions, and become a permanent fixture on the English 101 syllabus.

1. Mien and Demeanor

First, look the part. One thing the Romantics had in common was hair, and lots of it -- masses of glossy curls, preferably raven-hued. Wear an open-necked shirt in all weather; this will both expose your shapely throat and help you to catch a wasting ailment (see Step 4). If you have a tendency toward fat, emulate Lord Byron: When he found himself exceeding the limits of poetic girth, he played cricket wearing seven waistcoats and a greatcoat until he was once again suitably ethereal.

Get an early start. As a teenager, Shelley was already sleeping with pistol and poison under his pillow, and writing poems about nuns with "half-eaten eyeballs." Suicide must always be an option. " I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out," reflected Byron, "but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law."

2. Dissipation and Love

Youthful exploits can fall into two categories: athletics or expulsions. Either swim or walk a notable distance (Byron, Keats) or get kicked out of school for a scurrilous publication (Shelley for The Necessity of Atheism; Southey for The Flagellant, a protest against flogging). Later, ingest large quantities of controlled substances. Coleridge chose opium; Byron preferred to quaff claret from the skull of a medieval monk.

In matters of the heart, you must be either a conspicuous failure or a conspicuous success. Keats was too short (barely five feet) to find love, which induced professionally useful melancholy. Byron's amours, on the other hand, ran the gamut from his Calvinist Bible teacher to an Italian countess to a Cambridge choirboy to his own half-sister. He left broken hearts and illegitimate children in his wake, which scandalized England and boosted sales.

3. You and Your Muse

Before sitting down to write, get in the proper mood. When Byron composed Childe Harold, he was " half mad . . . between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies." Imitate the masters: The best line in all Romantic poetry is Shelley's "Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night!" He socks you right in the gut with an Unexpected Initial Adverb, then wins points for Use of the Word O'er, Reference to the West, Maritime Synecdoche, Direct Address of a Spirit, and Gratuitous Capitalization. In just nine words, Percy earns a perfect score.

4. Expiration

A Romantic poet doesn't die, he Expires. This involves ceasing to breathe amid suitable theatrics. One popular escape route is a wasting illness like Keats' consumption, which will give you plenty of time to travel to Italy, compose your epitaph, savor the guilt of the women who've spurned you, watch your cheek grow wan, and so on. For a quicker departure, drown in the Gulf of Spezia, as Shelley did, or perish for the cause of Greek liberty, as Byron did. Thomas Love Peacock distinguished himself by dying after a house fire, when he stood among his beloved books shouting, "By the immortal gods, I will not move!" That was a grand exit.

WARNING

Model yourself on Keats, Byron, Coleridge -- but never Wordsworth. The poor guy made a promising start, but before long he'd moved in with his sister, gone bald, become a Tory, acquired a Scottish terrier, and begun writing sonnets in praise of capital punishment. He died full of honors, at a ripe old age -- of a common cold. O sorry fate!

-- Adam Goodheart

A Rewarding Problem

2007-10-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

How is it, in a galaxy rich and varied with the spectacular phenomenon of shining stars, spinning planets, luminous moons, and beauteous nebula clouds, on a planet positively bursting with stunning, sumptuous forms such as towering, snow-capped mountains, bottomless emerald seas, majestic clouds that float across clear blue skies, dancing flowers, and timeless trees so tall they reach toward heaven, within a species so marvelous and talented that they have been known to compose achingly beautiful symphonies, craft poetry that reflects the rhythms of life itself, and art so powerful it rivals reality, that something like the Borders Rewards program ever managed to come along?

These are the questions that keep me up at night. Unfortunately, I get the sense that I'm the only one. This essay is very much about changing that. It will not only challenge many basic assumptions about life, the world, and of course, Rewards programs, but will also suggest hopefully fertile solutions for the problems at hand.

As everyone who has made it through freshman biology knows, human life evolved on the planet Earth over an enormous span of time. It was a sometimes invigorating, sometimes tortuous, but always winding course stemming up from the most basic atomic structures, on through new molecular possibilities, finally breaking into singular and then multicellular organisms. These organisms made the development of the aquatic, and then the reptilian, and finally the mammalian species possible. And out of this came the stunning creature known as the human being.

This being had an extremely complex neurological system, a marvelous "enchanted loom" by which to think, reason, and create, a rich and infinitely varied nervous system that made it possible to feel and develop a sensuous relationship with the world, an immeasurably priceless system of digits or fingers, not to mention the ever-important opposable thumb. This was all capped off by the rich sensory jewels of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Somehow or another, this process also culminated in the Borders Rewards program, a tedious system that enables modern consumers to gather intangible rewards points on an ugly slab of non-degradable red plastic.

And I for one just have to ask - was three and a half billion years of evolution worth this? We may have many regrets in this sometimes troublesome life, but is anyone really going to be lying on their deathbed secretly chastising themselves, wishing they had put just a little more effort into signing customers up and taking down email addresses?

Of course, I am not being very fair toward the religious part of my audience, but the situation doesn't get any simpler with this paradigm either. Suppose you were indeed created by a kind, loving Father who presides over the most distant reaches of time and space. You are given a lush green world on which to live, as well as a brain with which to reason, and even a will free enough to choose your own divine destiny. And furthermore, there is a point and a purpose to every breath you take, not to mention some, as Tennyson put it, "far-off divine event toward which all creation moves."

I ask you, is there anyone among us who thinks this "divine event" is the Borders Rewards Program? Did God fashion us in His own image, or in the image of a red slab of gaudy plastic? Who believes that when we die, we'll journey up to the heavenly gates, only to be confronted by an immovable Saint Peter, who remains unimpressed even as we talk about a life lived by the Christian love of agape, and our firm commitment to all things divine. Why? Because God feels that we could have done a better job promoting the Rewards program.

At this point, no doubt some readers are already throwing up their hands in frustration, pleading with me to stop or simply begging what one thing has to do with the other. But if there is one thing that the study of many Eastern philosophies has taught me, it is that there is no separation, absolutely none, between the profound and the simple, the sacred and the profane, and the everyday and the eternal. One reflects the other as surely as muddy rain puddles reflect the transcendent beauty of the moon.

To be sure, this is an anxious time for our species. And not just because of the somewhat new threats posed by terrorism, global warming, over-population, teenage gangs, and basically "man's inhumanity to man." These are overt and obvious to everyone, but the things that inform them, the mentality that makes them possible in the first place, is what is of interest to me. After having lived on this planet for over thirty years, I would say the most pressing problem is not that - for the first time in recorded history - all of humanity is more or less adrift, cut loose in an infinitely vast universe it can't understand and has no interest in coming to terms with (be those terms mythic or scientific), but rather, the things that it uses to distract itself from that problem.

It is astonishingly clear to me that the Borders Rewards Program is one in this seemingly endless chain of existential distractions, designed first and foremost to fill a void it is grotesquely incapable of filling. Think I'm reading too much into things?

Frankly, it would be one thing if said Rewards Program existed to simply give customers a discount, as it is reputed to do. Actually, it still doesn't need to exist. Believe it or not, there was a time when retailers didn't have to resort to filling the wallets of their customers with "loyalty cards." They just offered competitive prices, and that was that. This Rewards industry is something new altogether. But from what I've seen, the Rewards program basically serves as a kind of surrogate spirituality in the only church left with significant power - the corporation.

So it isn't just functioning as a Rewards program. Indeed, the employees who are able to conjure up within themselves a bizarre, misplaced missionary zeal for the cards are not confined to psychiatric study, as I would have it, but instead, just serve to ruin the bell curve for the rest of us who are living more or less fulfilled lives.

As with any ecclesiastical rote, the Rewards program is immune from any and all criticism or analysis. Any critical comments are regarded as heresy, even when one is only pointing out that said program has nearly bankrupted the company. Right alongside this is a complete inability to admit that their way may not be the only way. Better to destroy the world first, or in this case, run the company into the ground.

Instead of high priests and inquisitors, we have supervisors and service managers who ferret out employees that don't have the requisite number of Rewards transactions and deal with them accordingly. The only good thing about it is that the rack has at least been replaced with write-ups and disciplinary meetings, though thanks to highlighted print-outs for everyone to see, the "saved" and the "damned" are clearly delineated in the offices upstairs.

We might best ask ourselves how in the world things have come to this. We might ask ourselves how sincere, educated adults can be expected to make sure every single customer has a Rewards card happily shining in their pocket. We might ask ourselves why we so unimaginatively decorate our stores, for when the program first started, there was barely a flat surface, horizontal or vertical, that wasn't smeared with aesthetically displeasing Rewards logos. In my own store, there were twenty-two advertisements for Rewards cards visible when the Program debuted. Twenty-two. And then you have to ask yourself - why stop there? Why not fifty-two? Why not a hundred and two? Why not a thousand?

This type of advertising vigor can only be chalked up to a religious zeal that isn't even evident in most religions anymore! There are many employees who firmly believe in a literal hell, but don't put half the enthusiasm toward saving souls as they do toward evangelizing the Rewards program. Am I the only one who finds this odd? I mean, eternal damnation versus accumulating rewards points - which is more important? But then again, these are the perpetual mistakers of shadow for substance, or as the semanticist Alfred Korzybski would say, the "map for the territory."

Aldous Huxley wisely predicted that this might happen. After all, with religions admittedly growing antiquated and exhausted, other philosophies have to take their place. It happened with nationalism in Europe in the twentieth century, and we had two world wars to thank for it. No God has ever been worshiped with more fervor than the twentieth century State, and now, corporations are there to fill the void.

The Rewards Program is so transparently symptomatic of a species that's lost its place in the universe. Only a civilization that's recently - comparatively speaking - discovered they do not exist at the center of the universe could possibly come up with it. But cosmic understanding is unfortunately not the pitch. Better something to replace cosmic understanding, or distract you from the fact that you don't have it. And what better way to do that than with a Rewards program that registers you, and tells you you're a good consumer, and entices you with your personal Borders bucks, and, in some small way, proves that you exist? Borders Rewards members are nothing if not a people aching for cosmic validation.

Pardon me for saying so, but I just don't think Borders Rewards is a good way of handling this. As religious experiences go, it's pretty much all retch and no vomit. Bertrand Russell made the point that only philosophy makes us "citizens of the universe," and that is indeed a beautiful thing. Conversely, when I glance down at my bright little Rewards card, all I see is blind, existential panic.And I must also ask - by the time we have Rewards cards lining the pockets of every living consumer from Madras to Madrid, from Singapore to Sydney, when Rewards scores are universally at one hundred percent, what then? Is anything going to be different? How has the world been approved in any way, shape or form?

Of course, this whole thing would be somewhat humorous if everyone didn't take it so damn seriously. Indeed, when the program first debuted, it was so confusing even the employees didn't understand it. If you spent something like fifty dollars during a two month period when the moon was full, you might qualify for a personal shopping day, but there was only a fifty percent chance of that. Later, we had our howling, unintentionally hilarious initials for Personal Shopping Days and Holiday Savings Rewards, and so we went around talking about PSDs and HSRs and any number of things that sounded like venereal diseases. It was just far too easy imagining someone walking into a doctor's office and demanding a whole host of antibiotics because some Borders employee had told them they had the PSDs.

The problem with all this is what John Taylor Gatto cited as the principal trouble with all networks and systems and the people who worked for them, whether they be schools or corporations:

"Networks, however, don't require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If, on the other hand, you function in a network, it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network interest part - a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil's bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one's present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains, you will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them."

I'm fairly certain anyone who has had to stand at a register for any amount of time and promote the Rewards program has felt this way. It is emblematic of our entire way of life in post-modern America. I once read a training program known as "The Loop," and it was so ill-conceived to this very day I find it difficult to believe it was written by something other than a machine. It actually went through these conversely hysterical and depression-inducing instructions on how to greet a customer, part your mouth and smile at them, ask them about the weather to induce a feeling of friendship, and mechanically extend your arm up in the air and motion back and forth when they exited the store.

This has got to stop. This is precisely what psychiatrist Gregory Bateson defined as the "double-bind," a self-contradictory situation whereby the subjects are eventually driven into schizophrenic and destructive behavior. You cannot program spontaneity, anymore than you can force camaraderie between an employee and a customer. And even if you could, why would you want to? Does anyone really and truly want someone to smile at them because a corporation is paying them to?

If so, count me out. Yes, I could just look for another job. But what is that going to solve? Frankly, these problems are afflicting the whole of Western civilization, so there's really nowhere to go. Some people experience a deep-rooted disappointment in their children, but as for me, I personally experience it in terms of my entire civilization. We can do better than this, but first life is going to have to be cleared out of all of its distractions and self-contradictory game rules.

And this goes for both sides of the counter. Isn't there something inherently dishonest about providing a customer with Anne Coulter's newest book of bile, handing them a tabloid outlining the latest in celebrity gossip, filling their Rewards card full of loyalty points, and then unceremoniously shoving them out the door? As the indomitable Bertha Mahony Miller once stated, "The bookstore's stock trade is ... explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

You see, my brothers and sisters? There is life beyond Rewards cards for those of us in the book-selling trade. Here's the craziest thought I can conjure up at the moment - how about we get those bean-counting, book-selling CEOs in a room and ask them to change the focus of Borders? What if the focus is no longer on frantically gathering up email addresses with all the desperation of a psychotic running down the street with his hair on fire, but rather on books and ideas and philosophies that are "capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly?" Now THAT would be a job worth clocking in for.

Just think of the possibilities. We could actually challenge customers ... and I mean challenge them beyond making them dig through the other eight-hundred rewards cards they've got glued to their key-chains. I mean challenge them in a deep and meaningful way. Provide them with material that might actually make them call into question the middle-class death sentences they're so thoroughly hypnotized by.

It's simply a matter of first things first, at least as I see it. The late great sage J. Krishnamurti so eloquently noted that trying to deal with day-to-day, social, political, and even economic dilemmas without having first come to terms with life, death, God, the Universe, and all the Big Questions, is like furiously and fastidiously cleaning one's fingernails in the middle of a house that's burning down. That pretty much sums up the human race right about now, doesn't it?

So first things first, brothers and sisters.

As it is, we live in a society that is terrified of silence, that cringes in the very depths of its soul when someone talks about "knowing thyself," and exists mainly in a ceaselessly symphony of ever crescendoing distraction. So Borders goes along with it, and batters their customers senseless with sales, promotions, pointless events, ridiculous book drives, and shiny red cards.

What would happen if we didn't? What if we were able to dim the interminable siren call of "quantity" that holds so many of us enthralled, and replace it with a little something called "quality?" Imagine, a corporation that puts the intellectual well-being of its customers above its vanishing profit margins. This would be more publicity than a thousand Rewards programs could buy, but first, changes must be made. These are my humble suggestions.

First off, the Rewards program is out the window. Obviously.

Second off, the info desks are also history. They will be replaced, but our new definition of "customer service" is allowing customers enough good, old-fashioned Emersonian self-reliance to find their own books. Walking in a bookstore, picking out a book, buying it, and then leaving is, after all, a pretty simple task.

Third off, all the display and shelf-space that is currently being wasted is going to be opened up and hollowed out. All those end-caps that are stuffed with useless, flavor-of-the-week books that are here today and gone tomorrow are outta here.

Yes, we all know what that means. No more catering to Oprah zombies, readers seeking out Kevin Trudeau's non-existent miracle cures, believers who want to spend ninety-minutes in heaven, and those seeking drivel from any political party, regardless of whether or not their fear-factor platform is terrorism or global warming.

Fourth off, the registers as you now know them are a distant memory. Why someone hasn't done this before is beyond me, considering the profound loathing that the registers generate. The entire check-out procedure is going to be automated, and best of all, the company should find some way to take Buckminster Fuller's advice and financially compensate their cashiers for the work now done on their behalf by machines. Plus, there should be some kind of shameful, red-faced public apology for the Rewards fiasco.

Last but not least, we should bid a fond farewell to special orders. They take up far too much time, effort, and space, especially considering that probably 60-70 percent of them are never picked up. Same thing with three day holds and reserve requests. Either it's there in the store and they buy it immediately, or they should look it up on the internet, which is, after all, faster and cheaper. As for not allowing holds, this will teach them the Ram Dassian lesson of being right here, right now.

And naturally, our store is going to be streamlined. We're going to pour all the money we're now futilely bleeding into customer service, cashiers, and special orders into selecting elite committees in every district. In fact, even before burning their Rewards cards in effigy, the very first thing we should do is conduct an extensive, nationwide search for a new kind of employee.

This search should center around sniffing out the best and brightest Borders employees ever. And by the best and brightest, I of course mean those who have an inherent pull toward the philosophical and the metaphysical, who realize that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. Right beside the standard, run-of-the-mill GM meetings, Borders will start hosting philosophical conferences.

A couple of critical things will be decided at these summits. The first will be what kind of books will now be populating our shelves. These will be limited to much the same in fiction, but a complete overhaul as far as non-fiction goes is screamingly necessary. Only the best in art, religion, literature, psychology, mythology, and philosophy will survive the cut. Furthermore, they will not be relegated to an obscure back wall, but instead will be prominently displayed up front.

This will be remarkably easy once all the copies of Confessions of a Video Vixen, He's Just Not that Into You, and Godless have been shoved out of the way and sent back to the distributors from whence they've come. How refreshing would it be to walk in a neighborhood Borders and see nothing but Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell books filling an entire front display?

And while we're on the front of the stores, magazines will have to be reworked as well. All car magazines will be the first casualty. As far as cars go, you just get in them, turn the key, point them in a direction, and they go. You don't need five hundred magazines to tell you this. Actually, an assortment of intellectually stimulating magazines along one wall is more than sufficient.

Anyway, once our key committees are in place, they will make it their business to go out into local communities and find their most learned members. In every store nationwide, we will bulldoze over the pointless and tacky (and pointlessly tacky) Paperchase sections, and in their place we will provide a kind of community learning center.

In these centers, the selection committee will invite local philosophers, theologians, professors, psychologists, poets, artists, rishis, Zen masters, and even yogis to come and lecture and maybe even host seminars. I see this cultural centers becoming the centerpiece of this entire grand experiment. No book-seller has ever offered such a rich and vibrant environment in which to explore the deepest complexities of humankind. Obviously this will be free, but if anyone would like to make a donation in the provided box, more power to them.

If we could put up a few strategically placed fountains throughout the store, that would be great. We could perhaps couple these with soothing rock and sand gardens, and maybe even decorate the floors with the occasional Jung-inspired mandala. The music will no longer be limited to the pop hit of the week, but rather melodies that relax both mind and body.

All of this will informally drift over into the cafe. All ties with the corporate driven Seattle's Best will need to be severed, and uniforms will be discarded. However, perhaps we could liven things up a bit with a Japanese theme or something. As long as the suits are footing the bill, how about we adorn our employees in sarongs and kimonos and beautifully embroidered robes? It would be delightful to even get a few cafe workers to learn the noble art of cha-no-yu, otherwise known as the tea ceremony.

The tables and chairs in the cafe will likewise be replaced with cushions and mats, so our customers can be comfortable while they debate and discuss the most pressing existential questions of our time. Instead of employees squandering their hours helping customers find books they could easily find on their own, we could participate or even lead these sessions. Maybe certain Borders stores could even set aside evenings for tai chi lessons, zazen or sitting meditation, or perhaps just silent, contemplative prayer.

Employees will also have to challenge customer assumptions. For instance, if someone approaches a member of our staff and requests a copy of You: The Owners Manual, we could reply in the style of Bodhidharma, demanding of the customer, "Who is this 'you' you're looking for? Bring him out before me!" Or if a customer wants to know where Younger Next Year is, we could engage them in a philosophical debate regarding why they want to be younger. Or even better, we could point out that they are stardust and already billions of years old, and then put a copy of The View from the Center of the Universe in their hands.

The possibilities are endless, provided we have enough imagination. We could make a real difference in this world. But we're going to have to rethink some things, and replace mere "information desks" with "wisdom" ones. We're going to have to grow up and take some responsibility for the world, rather than spending all our time drifting through a conceptual fantasy world of profit margins and making plans and CSI scores.

Borders - a bookstore that only sells books that are worth reading.

P.S. I'll even make a deal with the bean-counters. After we've solved all the complex, metaphysical dilemmas that have plagued us for centuries, and once our species can look up at the infinite reaches of space and laugh with enlightened laughter rather than shake with existential anxiety, you can have your Rewards program back. You can even have more than one. When all is said and done, you can have all the Rewards programs you want. Start them by the millions. But first things first.

An Ideal University

2007-10-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday, The Dedalus Academy of Philosophical Excellence is now in session. Our two to three year course will hopefully balance the thing that most school systems are hopelessly divorced from - namely, a sense of context. And what better context could there be, what finer spine for a comprehensive course, than the near-infinite universe itself?

Indeed, the first lessons will revolve around the cosmos in all its glory, including the big bang of creation, the origins of the stars, the wonders of the planets, the dynamic dance of the galaxies, the mind-boggling timescales, the possibilities of a multiverse, and all the other elements of astronomy. After a short pit stop in the jungles of grammar and the basics of the five paragraph essay, we will no doubt be planning a trip to the Fernbank planetarium to explore the cosmos up close and personal.

The aims of this course will extend beyond this, much in the same way as a tree branches out to explore other things while retaining its basic roots. It will also cover the various ways in which different human beings and cultures have attempted to experience the universe. This includes world religions, mythologies, branches of science, and of course Eastern and Western philosophy. Mathematics may be given a cursory nod, but given my algebra-haunted background, that's about it.

The course will focus on the many things that - at least in this particular solar system, on this particular planet - the universe does. This includes the literature, films, and plays through which the cosmos expresses itself. We are nebula clouds doing grammar, and stardust practicing penmanship, all without the odious ringing of perpetual school bells and the harsh regimentation of incoherent class schedules.

And really, what could be better than that?

Alan Watts' Autobiography is Back in Print

2007-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

From In My Own Way -

"It was in the autumn of 1932 - windy, with fallen leaves skittering along roads and fields - and I was trying desperately to work out this problem. What is the EXPERIENCE which these Oriental masters are talking about? The different ideas of it which I had in mind seemed to be approaching me like little dogs wanting to be petted, and suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be meant by my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. All hang-ups disappeared. I walked on air."

And a legend was born. Do yourself a favor and go to your local bookstore and pick out a copy of this now.