The Battle Hymn of the Republic

The Battle Hymn of the Republic has been in my cold black heart since Independence Day.

A song with such rich lyrics sometimes requires a little explanation.

Here's a wonderful version (by LiliAna) wherein the lyrics can be plainly heard:



And a poorer sound quality, but nonetheless unforgettable performance on our nation's most recent day of prayer, fasting and remembrance:

I, For One, Welcome Our New Web Content

Trolls are incredibly difficult to own. We are messy, we are loud, we are fiercely religious and we occasionally eat our masters.

But The Guild owns me. For now. I'm sure they are going to regret it once I drain Vork's supply of orange drink and release Clara's shoats into the wild, where they'll be better cared for by the snakes and coyotes.

But this extended interview by Zadi Diaz with show creator Felicia Day from the blog of Epic Fu does a great job of getting to the heart of at least one key facet of the art of start-up media: the origin of creation.

Rejection is Good

I rarely repeat myself, but I'm going to here:

I don't look at the fiction submission process as an interview where I am the candidate. I think of it as an editor search. An agent/editor is a book's first consumer. Write the right book and find the right first consumer and they'll be best positioned to match the book with a like-minded audience. A query letter isn't a "please love me" note - it is a ruthless way of culling out all the wrong people who aren't a good match for your stuff.

So, getting a lot of rejections doesn't mean you are a lousy writer, it means you are cutthroat and specific. You know what you are looking for, and you have the pile of rejected editors and agents to show for it.

Quick "no's" are critical. It's what the potential readers do all the time.

Agents/editors aren't evaluating you, you are evaluating them. You've got to rip through as many of them as you can in order to unearth the right one. Rejections are good.

Quick rejections are better.

FourFour Makes Friends While Not Here to Make Friends

I would embed it, but FourFour deserves a little recognition for his deep philosophical examination of the zeitgeist of the "bad guy" subculture of reality television. I hope he gets some friends out of this.

Excellence is Not a Democracy

When I wonder why what is great is not revered, why a person's best efforts are often overlooked, while mediocrity holds court, I must remember: excellence is a virtue, not a reward. Excellence makes enemies. Excellence, while benefiting others, is an unwanted goad to others. Excellence won't win you love or universal praise. It may not even sell your books.

Melville excelled in Moby Dick, but his earlier works, esp. Typee sold better in his day. Excellence is no guarantee of reward. There are shorter roads to reward, democratic ones, even.

The most excellent way has no correlation to personal gain or even enrichment. But it is at the heart of life, and those who go there would not trade the world for its adventure.

Liberty in America

Thank the Maker for our founders and our freedoms.

At the Mountains of Madness in Del Toro's Hands

There's a script review of Guillermo Del Toro's production of one of H.P. Lovecraft's greatest stories At the Mountains of Madness. I find the secular author's approach to the atheism of Lovecraft and the Christian elements included by Del Toro to be fascinating, for obvious reasons.

The tension between Lovecraft's* beautifully misanthropic thesis (that beauty, science, art and man are useless) and his efforts (namely: the studied portrayal of beauty, science art and man) is a wonder to behold, even seventy years after first publication. I can only imagine what Del Toro is going to go through to try realize this on film. Even a failure could be a wonderful one.

Some great insights and excellent questions are raised by Big Ross at CC2K.

Spoilers, obviously.

As if Lovecraft's words are mortal enough to be spoiled...

*Even old Howard's surname betrays him: Love. (Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ) Craft. (Creation testifies to its own Maker.) Can something be simultaneously delicious and painful? Certainly. A diet of ice cream, after all, likely contributed to the great man's untimely demise.

Ass* Kicking Book Cover of the Day

The Personifid Invasion is set to release in October. I've never read R.E. Bartlett before, but I'm going to give this author a shot.

Yes, based on my judgment of a book's cover. Best one I've seen so far this year.

+

*Balaam's ass, of course. What were you thinking?

Euhemerus Amok: Thanking Jesus for Odin

Snorri Sturluson, one of my favorite humans, is the medieval Christian and an antiquarian most responsible for preserving our (still limited) knowledge of the old Norse myths and epics. Although we can glean some detail from Saxo Grammaticus, Saxo's nine books on the Norse myths serve much better as a critique of the old Norse religion than as a faithful preservation of its stories.

In any case, contributions like Sturluson's, and, to a degree, Saxo's, are often overlooked by the critic of Christ-following. Not only do the contributions of antiquarians provide a sober understanding of our place in history, but they provide much of the historic basis for the renewal of religions that would have otherwise become dead arts.

I wonder how often the neo-Odinist thanks the Christian for carrying enough of his spiritual ancestry forward so that he may approach life in adherence to his ancestral nine truths? I don't advance this to pick on anyone, more to point out that all off us have a lot of valuable things in our life because Christians in our past performed epic service to their fellow man.

I find that the critic of Christ is quick to bring up the crusades, the inquisition and witch trials. But if the critic has never heard of Snorri Sturluson, he's chosen a bad axe to grind.

It won't hold up in battle.

Clinically Lycanthropic Cultural Policy

Back in the 1980s, several clinicians revived the concept of perceived lycanthropy: the belief that one has memories of transforming into another animal, or the delusion that one has, in fact, transformed into an animal (not necessarily a wolf).

Lycanthropy has been a known rare but problematic mental and emotional disorder for milennia. Even the great tyrant Nebuchadnezzer "transformed" into a beast (in his mind) for seven years, bringing the government to a halt.

If clinical lycanthropy, the delusion that one is no different from an animal, is considered to be a mental illness, why then does it so acceptably drive social policy?

Oh well, gives me an excuse to link to apes. I love apes. You know, in a totally species-appropriate way.

Keeping Harmless Flirting Harmless

I'll admit something here that I wouldn't anywhere else. I have a bad crush.

The woman is rich. She's beautiful. And she doesn't know I exist.

I want to keep it that way. I certainly think that if I asked her out, the fantasy would be ruined. Besides, there's a big part of me that knows I'm not worthy.

She's one of those supermodel types that no one ever seems to have the courage to approach.

Her name is Wisdom, and she's so lonely I've heard the woman calling out from the roof of her nearby house to see if anyone might notice her.

Please don't tell her I'm interested. After all, the reality could never live up to the dream, right?

Inside the Mind of a Troll (an inevitably short trip)

So, to the one cricket chirping in the dark corner, here's your customized glimpse inside my mind:

In the process of ignoring an unformed notion regarding Strato of Lampsacus I started to think more about the peripatetic school of philosophy, so I began to walk about without making the conscious recognition that my body was playing out the very definition of peripatetic in an attempt to puzzle out the thing I didn't know I wasn't thinking about.

I decided right there that my walking should have a purpose, so as not to appear mad or distracted, I went to get some crackers, because if I know one thing it is this: food has purpose. One cannot be mad in its quest. The only crackers I could find were Frito-Lay's "Cheetos" brand, the kind with "golden toast" flavor crackers and a pseudocheese colloid wedged between the sections.

Although instead of reading "golden toast" on the package, I thought it said "golden toads" and I thought how much more interested I would have been in an animated version of the Henry Fonda/Katherine Hepburn film "On Golden Pond," which, of course, would have been named "On Golden Toads."

Therefore I was thinking about movies and Cheetos and I thought of galactically famous movie star/internet mogul Felicia Day* who combined my favorite contributions to human culture of the last fifty years: television commercials and artificial food packaging in one masterful stroke in, of all things, a Cheetos advertisement.

In attacking hunger I thought more deeply about hunger, and that sensation's dependence on the hypothalamus to alert the body of its cravings, and how hypothalamus basically means, in Greek, "below the chamber;" the chamber, of course, being the "thalamus" of the brain, and how the folks who invented the Greek language had a descendent named Strato whose, ahem, pedestrian, if not downright non-existent contribution to the philosophy of virtue, was responsible for this entire vapor trail of thought.

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle. Which reminds me...



*Felicia Day is once removed (i.e. 2 degrees) from Kevin Bacon, by Ingrid Oliu - i.e. the original Officer Montoya in the animated Batman series. The Montoya character has eventually become a latter-day incarnation of The Question, a character who first appeared in Blue Beetle #1 and was the inspiration for the Watchmen character Rorschach, whose viscous mask resembles a "living" Rorschach test. I believe Hermann Rorschach studied under Carl Jung, who is responsible for the development of the modern concept of psychological archetypes. According to Jung, the hero archetype was nearly universal in all societies, and depicted a person who defeats evil, suffers punishment for the sake of others and rescues the vanquished. Which basically describes Codex in The Guild, a character played by -- of course -- Felicia Day.

Fear of Girls 3 Wall Poster

Game on.

Okay, not so much a wall poster, and somewhat closer to a .jpg, but still. I haven't felt this way since I caught first glimpse in '77 of a bare-chested Luke and red carpet-ready Leia prepared for battle.*

Fear of Girls 3 is going to take the world by storm. It is the story of America. Told with dice. Through a retainer.

*and two fairly confused droids in the background.

Higgins Stands Where She Should, Not Where I Stood

Missy Higgins really gets a lot of photobooth photos for $4. And a great song.



Where I Stood.

F is for Fire that Burns Down the Whole Town*

I climbed a high tower, looked over the land, and saw water where there should be no water, fire where there should be no fire, and a moon turned to blood.

Somehow, St. John on Patmos doesn't seem so delirious to me.

I'm going to admit something: I get a kick out of the apocalypse. Pure entertainment. That's not to say that I don't take the writings of John seriously. I do.

But man oh man does the book of Revelation inspire some cool stuff: big godzilla monsters coming out of oceans to join forces with, then fight and torture a beast-riding queen of religion and whoring, hailstorms of superbug disease cupcakes, trumpets rolling out the best of Count Basie in a syncopated rythym to beat the devil.

I'm translating loosely, but still. Hellhorses, 200 million man armies at war, blood to the bridles, falling stars, thirsty dragons.

Yum. But you've got to remember that I'm the sort of troll who gets a kick out of cleaning out hog lots and dining on chilli dog spaghetti burittos.

I'm thick in the skull, so I can only afford to spend most of my time just bowing my neck and pushing forward in the Word, and trying hard not to fight against the scarylove Ru'ach of Jesus. I've got to leave the real End of Days to brighter minds than mine.

But I do have fun looking in on the apocalyptic expressions of others:

Apocalypse Soon
Berean Call
The always hilarious* Rapture Ready (I hope those manuals never come in handy for me.)
The God Still Loves Us forums... where being crazy and wrong never felt so good and friendly.

Oh, there are a jillion of them out there. There is plenty of pop-apocalypse, both Christian and non, that borders on (or even bathes in) the asinine. For example, I'm pretty certain that, despite the contemporary protests to the contrary, neither Ronald Wilson Reagan (good ol' 666) nor Barack Hussein Obama fit the profile of the Antichrist as described in the bible.

But the links above are reasoned and worked at. Even if they don't get everything right (because, after all, who does?) they do a good job of citing actual sources and doing their level best to comprehend something as wild and incomprehensible as the End of Days.

*Thanks, Plankton. I feel tingly inside too.

**to those, like me, who find Johnny Cash/Shel Silverstein meditations on death to be a hoot.