Undone Again

Oh, these humans! Such delicate things! As for me, I'm fat and muscle and dirt and rolling concrete.

Or, perhaps, like Karloff the Uncanny in the Invisible Ray, I poison all that I touch. That would explain why the check engine light is on in both of our cars.

God, grant me the grace to be strong AND gentle. Remember the gentle. Remember the gentle.

And meditate on Isaiah 6, the first part:

In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said,“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts,The whole earth is full of His glory.”

And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.

Then I said,“Woe is me, for I am ruined!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I live among a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.”

Demon: A Memoir (Reviewed by Me, Read by You)

As you know, I don't rank works of literature, however, I can name only about a score of major modern* works that really matter: Beowulf, Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet and Henry V, Canterbury Tales if you must. In the 20th Century, I've read a few great tales - The Wasteland, the Lord of the Rings, Perelandra, The Great Divorce, The Violent Bear it Away, Ficciones, the Name of the Rose, and The Secret History.

So, there you have it. This reader's noted great works first saw print, with the exception of Tart and Eco, well before my birth. Because it has been 15 years or so since the last straggler (Donna Tart's The Secret History) made it through the arch, I had lulled myself into thinking that my personal canon of great works was closed.

I am an idiot.

One of the greatest perils of postmodern thought is postmodern ideology, which carries an inherent risk: the risk that qualities such as good and bad, important and irrelevant, will be drained of meaning. Eventually, only the "personal" matters, and, eventually, not even that. I must have fallen in line with this quiet assumption at some point, because otherwise I cannot explain the shock I experienced when Demon: A Memoir appeared in my mailbox through what I can only describe as a series of unusual circumstances.

Let me get to the point: Tosca Lee's Demon: A Memoir is great literature, and being such, will very likely be misunderstood (at best) or overlooked (at worst) for another 30 years or so.

Me and the followers of the only way worship the Word, so it has always baffled me as to why we are, generally, so incapable of writing well. Eliot, L'Engle, O'Connor and Lewis are, of course, among many examples to the contrary, but there is a lot of Christian literature that can't even get the prose right, much less the theme. Demon: A Memoir is a new exception to that general tendency.

The plot structure is that of an architect's, the characters are vivid, the writing expresses clarity, wit, realism and logophilia. The book has three extraordinary characters that I'll be able to name on my deathbed. The climax is taut and spectacular. If Tosca Lee ripped out her own heart, I think words would come pouring from the wound.

This is a brave book - one that very humbly ventures into darkness with a candle.

Let me bypass a synopsis in favor of persuasion. I'll give you three reasons to pick this book up through a scene, an artifice, and an element of pathos:

A scene: The recently divorced protagonist, Clayton, is approached by, and drawn to, a beautiful woman in a bookstore. Lee masterfully negotiates a vulnerable man's complex lusts without ever once relying on cultural myths of manhood. Clay's emotions towards her come from a good place, a desire for the comforts and companionship of a wife, and quickly distort into more complex, and less pure desires.

An artifice: I love mis en abyme, when done well. The play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the book-within-a-book in The Name of the Rose, the poet-within-a-poem of Eliot, are all flawlessly executed. I'm a sucker for them, but I also know that they can be a trap, tempting the author to pull the trick once too often (a fate that befell the great artiste of our generation, Michael Jackson, when he turned the spectacular Thriller into a movie within a dream, or vice versa, or something.) The 70s film They Might Be Giants was brilliant mis en a byme, but had to bail on the ending to avoid the myriad traps that the story-within-a-story structure. Demon: A Memoir, shamelessly goes for mis en abyme, and delivers. In spades.

Demon not only is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, but it is also a Truth-Within-the-Lie-Within-the-Truth story. Not only that, but it makes subtle reference to the conceit with overt references to John Gardner's Grendel and even, of all things, Sesame Street's infamous "Monster at the End of This Book."

The pathos: I know demons. I've seen their handiwork (so have you). Even as a weak and vain bridge-troll, I know my charge: to wrestle against principalities and powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, and the rulers of darkness. Somehow, like the unconsolable wailing of Esau over the unfairness of the loss of his birthright to his deceptive younger brother Jacob, the demon Lucian, with craft, earnestness and emotion, quickly earns my sympathy with his account of the Cosmic Disaster, even though I know that he too abandoned his own birthright for even less than a trifle.

Lee must be crazy or brilliant to try to pull this off. Just because it works flawlessly doesn't mean she isn't crazy. Van Gogh cut his own ear off, you know.

Are you getting the impression that I liked the book yet? Go buy it, already, for God's sake. And yours, too.

Post Scriptum - I have noticed two somewhat prevalent comparisons among commentators that don't quite jive with me.

There are a few references in other places to the work as being derivative of Anne Rice's Interview with A Vampire, but this is error. Lee's novel displays an episodic structure that has greater kinship with Stoker's Dracula, and though the villain is certainly sympathetic, he is no less a villain. Why do people think Demon is like Interview? Uhm, I guess because it has an interview in it, I don't really know. Trust me, Demon has a far greater sense of creeping dread, malevolence and power than Rice's Lestat-as-Superman saga (Don't get me wrong, IwaV is a good book, but isn't similar to Demon in any important or thematic way). I guess by this logic, Les Miserables is derivative of The Music Man, because, uh, they're both plays.

Also, Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis' demonic parody is delightful and full of insight and encouragement. Demon: A Memoir aims at a much different target. Lucian has much more in common with one of my favorite figures in literature, Lewis's Professor Weston in Perelandra, than he does with the master's more famous work about the corporate inner workings of hell.

A better book to compare Demon: A Memoir to is Stoker's Dracula. The full story emerges through obfuscation and deceptive trails, through a variety of voices and media (where Stoker utilized telegrams and letters, Lee takes advantage of text messages, calendar reminders, e-mail, cell phones) and centers around an evil that takes most of the book to fully appear. Although Lee is a better writer than Stoker, both Demon and Dracula share the same attention to layering.

Post Post Scriptum - If none of this has encouraged you to pick up Demon: A Memoir, here's one last-ditch effort: if you liked Lois Lowry's The Giver, Rice's The Vampire Lestat, the aforementioned The Great Divorce or Perelandra, King's The Eyes of the Dragon (or, for different reasons, The Shining), Borges' The Library of Babel, Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Inferno or Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, you are probably going to enjoy Tosca Lee's debut novel.

*You do recall my somewhat broad definition of "modern" don't you? Everything following 601 and the baptism of King Aethelbert. The brief thousand-year-or-so period before that is the Classical, and before that, the Ancient. Suck it up if you don't like it. Keep things simple, I say.

Precious Death of Saints

I trust that I'm in the palm of God's hand. I just worry that He may start clapping.

Fantasy Killed the Atheist Star

Paul (the liar in 6 Degrees of Separation, not Paul, the Saint) said it very well:

"Why has imagination become a synonym for style?"

(scroll down in link for full quote. It's worth a look and listen.)

"Imagination as style" is the last refuge of the atheist author of fantasy. The late, great H.P. Lovecraft was a devout atheist, and to prove his worldview to himself, wrote of fantastical cosmic horrors that he openly admitted were fabrications, great eldritch and indescribable creatures signifying both nothing and nothingness. He wrote these wonderful stories, these brilliant illustrations of vivid loneliness, as something of an escape from what he "knew" to be true.

The fascinating thing is that he must, as all atheists admitedly must do, co-opt the symbology of faith in order to express a faithless worldview.

To the religious, otherworldly beings are no stylish, "imaginative" conceit expressing a separate, but deeper materialistic reality. Christians, in particular, believe in the historicity of angels, of miracles, of a Creator who makes himself plainly and tangibly known to his creation. Elves, or space monkeys, or even the mocking "Flying Spaghetti Monster" of the Pastafarian can be natural extensions of our Creator-given imaginations. They can express spiritual truths in new ways.

The spiritual truth of the atheist is that there is no spirt and no truth but proxy truth. How can one express that fantastically? How can one express the joy of living the zero-sum life without resorting to (or simply parodying) spiritual symbols?

The best bet of the atheist writer is to work at building a great artificial proxy, of course. Lovecraft does it best. His stories simply take for granted that cosmic and plasmic beings from "way out there" and "eternity past" occasionally intersect with the insignificant mud puddle we call earth, and upon which we, like ants, crawl out a meaningless existence. Humans go mad when they encounter the atheistic "truth": that an alien cosmos is vast and destructive, and doesn't notice us in the least.

A great proxy, to be sure, but upon what does it rest? Trust me, it isn't floating in ether, but it tries. Lovecraft's created world exists in one in which the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not exist. I wish I could have asked Lovecraft one question during his lifetime:

If we came from a sort of magic soup and Cthulhu came from a sort of cosmic soup, then what made the soup? And what made the what?

In any case, the only reason I bring this up is because there is some hubbub about the forthcoming The Golden Compass movie. Apparently, it is based on a series of atheistic children's books, wherein the heroic protagonists kill God.

For the sake of the quality of the literature, Lovecraft carefully buried his theological chinks under complex and wondrous prose. His story, ultimately, is more important than advancing an agenda. But The Golden Compass sounds like its own arc is doomed to collapse.

What sort of atheist sets out to kill God? Doesn't the author know that God isn't a real thing? What do the little murderers target next, Santa Claus?

See, I've got a heart for this sort of pretzel logic. I was a devout atheist, and I dedicated myself to struggling with God. Does that make any sense, logically? I couldn't see it at the time, but it certainly made sense to me at the spiritual level, a level whose existence that I would have denied at the time!

"There's no God, but if there is, I'm going to sock him in the jaw," was sort of my motto. I know now that it makes about as much sense as me saying now, "There's a God, but if there isn't, I'm going to sock an atheist in the jaw." My first error seems to be the one that the author of The Golden Compass is repeating.

Ultimately, atheist writers who attempt to express their worldview through fiction, especially fantastic fiction, end up sounding like quasi-religious fence sitters.

Creating a monster that you don't think your readers should believe in isn't a simple self-defeating purpose.

It's a rout.

It's Not a Movie

"Show, Don't Tell" is a horrible maxim for experienced writers.

We are storytellers, not storyshow-ers.

My tales are not movies. Even if they were, they darn well better "tell" you a story, not show you one.

I believe/hope it was Boris Karloff who eschewed the term "Horror Movie" when referring to his many chilling films, and much preferred the more accurate "Tale of Terror." Even in acting on edited film, Karloff viewed his portrayals as tales first.

I'm not exactly sure why, if a master of English language cinema thought chiefly of his work as tale-telling, we writers should be so obsessed with "showing."

Tell me a good story, and I'll show you a good time.

Oh, THAT crack.

I find myself on the opposite end of everybody in the order, with an uncrossable chasm between us. I've watched some folks tumble down into the everlasting abyss between us, and a few clinging to my side, trying to decide between the struggle of pulling to the level and the ease of letting go.

I didn't make this crack, and I didn't choose this side. How often, on those rare, rare days when I do see the Mighty Hand of God tracing great lines in the dirt, do I, instead of falling prone in worship, say "Hey, yeah, uh, Jesus, thanks for the, uh, canyon, but wow, we were kind of hoping to have a potluck supper instead."

Very, very often.

Ha.

I live.

Two More Great Songs For Me to Ruin

Sleep - zero, Caffeine - 1. I am more of a monster than usual. How many more things that I love can I wreck today?

At least two:

Brandi Carlile's video for The Story doesn't complement the aching beauty of her song. Its shot in such soft, angelic light, and her face is so conventionally pretty that its impossible not to lose sight of the "lines across" her face.

Every time Amy Winehouse's tough guy boyfriend in I'm No Good tears "a man down like Roger Moore" I can't help but picture Bob's Suntory Whiskey ad from Lost In Translation. Thank you Sofia Coppola.

Nits, thou art picked!

The Gentle Ballad of Toht's Melting Head

Colbie Cailat's lyrics to the very cute Bubbly cause me to suspect that she's really singing about that one time King Arthur met Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark right before the Nazi's head melted.

I've been awake for a while now

You make me feel like a child now'

Cause every time I see your bubbly face

I get the tinglies in a silly place

After all, Camelot is a silly place. My face may be grotesque, but bubbly? Eesh.

No wonder Colbie (as Arthur) "crinkles her nose."

Sincerely,

X. D., Song Ruiner At Large

Drawing Near or Pointy Sticks?

Jesus brought the Kingdom of Heaven when his heel first touched Earth (the same heel that'll split a mountain when He comes again.)

We built a tower to reach higher than Him when we all spoke the same language. I wonder if the last Unified Word we spoke before God confounded our language was a great, unanimous "D'oh!"

And I wonder how God looks on our modern (i.e. last millenia and a half or so) worship structures - St. Paul's Cathedral, the Dome of the Rock, Borobudur, for example. Does he see our flawed, struggling efforts to engage him, or are they the equivalent of man's best efforts at heaving pointy sticks his way?

Oh, great. I just started another fistfight with myself. Ow.

One Wish

If I had one wish, it would be that Weston, Ransom and the Queen of Perelandra were characters so rooted in the social psyche that their names would be shorthand for the essence of things.

It has been two years since I last read Perelandra, and I only need to recall the issue of Weston for the hair to stand up on my arms.

If I had two wishes, I'd wish for three more wishes with my second wish. Then I'd wish for a really good friend whose main attribute is that he can grant wishes upon request (yes, that's only one wish.) Then I'd wish for the Iowa State Cyclones to win the rest of their games this season. Then I'd wish for fifteen back-up wishes in case my new friend and I have a falling out.

I am a very inefficient wisher.

Ink isn't Pixel

I write very brief notes to myself everywhere. They are symbolic stand-ins for massive, complex structures I can only hope to comprehend someday.

The weird thing is that these notes MUST be in flowing ink, from a real pen, and have to be written on notebook paper or on spiral bound note cards.

If I typed the exact same notes on a keyboard (whether computer or hack-slam Underwood), they would lose all meaning.

Not to bust all Hummel figurine-like on you, but when it is assumed that sorceror's spells are literary constructs disconnected from what is Real, my first instinct is to wave a magic Pilot G-2 07 and cast Take Note - Recall Galaxy.

Scott Jorgenson Dominates Planet (Mine)

Scott Jorgenson has achieved world domination.

First, the guy co-stars in the 2nd* greatest short film in world history: "Fear of Girls"

In FoG, he played Raymond Ractburger, a lovelorn hardcore gamer. FoG also features my favorite representation of Christians on film. I know I'm supposed to be offended by their awkward, judgmental portrayal, but the fact is that if it wasn't for awkward, judgmental Christians who cared enough about the weird little atheist that I was to share the gospel with me, God knows where I might be today. No, literally, God knows, and I'm pretty sure He's wiping his brow in relief over the few who took his message seriously enough to try to beat me over the head with it.

Anyhow, back to the issue of infinitely greater import than my salvation: Scott Jorgenson's film career.

This guy has already achieved greatness. Raymond Ractburger, pining for his unwitting Leia...his Arwen...his Shakura!...Ractburger is an American everyman, iconic, the Tom Joad of the X Generation, if you will.

But yesterday...I witnessed the great Jorgenson achieving new heights. You probably don't know this (okay, yes you do, because you are "me") but I work in the telecommunications industry. One of my all-time favorite novels is Harry Newton's 973-page Telecom Dictionary. (Bonus: My favorite entry is the hotly debated "octathorpe" AKA octothorpe, octotherp, octothorp.)

I don't work for Qwest by any stretch of the imagination, but I love to see my industry strive for greatness, even it it is in the form of a competitor. Qwest did such a thing.

For their latest ad, they hired Jorgenson. He's hilarious in a silent role.

Good show, Qwest. Good show.

Now learn how to spell. Your company name reads like a breakfast cereal.

*The #1 Slot going, of course, to Tater, Tomater.

"Winning is Cheaper" - quote by Tom Wilson

Wow, this is fun. I won a secret contest at http://toscamoon.blogspot.com/ from the author herself. Tosca Lee is someone I heard about through Jeff Gerke's absolutely amazing site "Where the Map Ends." http://www.wherethemapends.com/main.htm

My prize? Tosca Moon Lee's Demon: A Memoir.

Gerke's interview with Lee was old school nerd*, hearkening to a time before faux-geek got tres-chic. Really funny, too. Anyway, from Jeff's site, I tracked down Lee's writer site (http://www.toscalee.com/ ) and then her above-mentioned blog. I was the first person to guess that she used to work at Smart Computing, so that means I haven't felt this cool since I won a purple ribbon at the 4-H fair for my text-adventure program for the Apple IIe which roleplayed the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter from the Hobbit. I was the only entrant in the computer programming category.

At the same fair, my duroc hog won reserve champion gilt (what she lost on the hoof, she gained on the hook) so I'm pretty certain I'm eligible for the Socially Undesirable Hall of Fame.

Anyhow, when I finish the book, I'll let you know. "You" being "me," of course, as I am the only you who reads this blog. So, yeah. I'll let me know.

*I'm pretty certain that Christian is the new old school nerd, since computers are so unstrange now. I hope Christians never become cool. I think every Bible should be sold with a pair of high-water pants, just to be certain...

Oh, sorry for the gunky linkages (i.e. Name - then link.) I'm rushing. As usual.

I write curiosities.

My only published works of fiction are of 100 words or less.

Evidently, that is the threshold of a mortal's ability to sustain an unblinking stare. For now, at least. Actually my longer works (epics of, say 150, perhaps 200 words*) simply take longer in the blast furnace.

That's where they are right now, burning. The alien technology that should emerge if I play my words right should be a lot of fun.

Until then, my collected published works can be found...here:

Dot, Dot, Dot: http://www.webdelsol.com/DIAGRAM/2_4/eness.html
Transient Eschemic Attack: http://thediagram.com/2_3/eness.html
The Legend of Elizabot Battery**: http://www.ideomancer.com/fl/Eness-Elizabot/Eness-Elizabot.htm

*Actual works in progress may be longer than they appear.
**This was the first time I teamed up with Rudyard Kipling. Okay, well not "teamed up" as much as "appeared in the same magazine as."