Humans and their Symbols

~ 500 words

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acerbic - adj - of sour or astringent taste/severe temper.

vivisect - v - to dissect the living body of an animal.

codicil - n - an addition, appendix, post script, or afterthought.

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Carl Gustav Jung, an influential early 20th century psychologist, came up with a number of interesting theories, some of which have been misinterpreted and misrepresented over the years. I find it informative in such instances to go back to the source (as my regular readers are no doubt aware).

To set the tone for this post, I'd like to share a quote from Jung's 1948 essay "On Psychic Energy"

"We must always bear in mind that despite the most beautiful agreement between the facts and our ideas, explanatory principals are only points of view, that is, manifestations of the psychological attitude and of the a priori conditions under which all thinking takes place"

Man and His Symbols (aka Mankind, aka Humankind) serves as a magnificent compendium of his life's work, though he didn't live long enough to see the volume compiled.  The book is comprised of five sections, the first written by Jung, and the remaining four written by his closest colleagues (those he trusted to accurately relate his theory of psychology). These topics range through discussions of the nature of the unconscious mind, the importance of myth and symbol, the process of achieving psychological maturity, symbolism in the visual arts, and a case study.

Despite being written by five people, the book is unified by the importance of symbology.  There is an enormous gulf between the subconscious of Freud and the unconscious of Jung.  To quote Jung,

"The ideas of Sigmund Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche.  Before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected; it has now become a dump for moral refuse.

This modern standpoint is surely one-sided and unjust.  It does not even accord with the known facts.  Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral.  It contains all the aspects of human nature--light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.  The study of individual, as well as of collective, symbolism is an enormous task, and one that has not yet been mastered.  But a beginning has been made at last.  The early results are encouraging, and they seem to indicate an answer to many so far unanswered questions of present-day mankind."

It's the sort of book that, once you start quoting, it's hard to cut him off.  That by the way is the last bit of Jung's own section.  

Anyway, very interesting read.  Very accessible, too, which is not commonly said of books of psychological theory.  Worth a look for anyone interested in myth, symbolism, dream interpretation, or theories of mental functionality.

You can expect more posts on Jung.  I know I've said that before, but this time I mean it. 

Today's mildly disturbing graphic is the middle of "The Spirit of Geometry" by René Magritte (1937).  Surrealists like Magritte are lauded in Man and his Symbols for their unparalleled combination of realism and dream-like symbology.  

Also, just as a side note, I have decided to stop contributing to Blogcritics for a couple of reasons:

1. They have "rules"

2. Their interface is a pain in the ass.

3. Their site is chock full of trolls and it's even more of a pain in the ass to get them to remove trollish comments.

4. I published an apparently decent article on The Brothers Karamazov with them and it has redirected all my traffic for that post away from my actual site.  They said posting with them would increase my site traffic, but they lied.  Not that I'm making any money off of you (I do this purely to slake my colossal ego), but I like my site better.  You get the pictures, you get my interesting words and quotations, and most of all you don't have to put up with me trying to sell you anything!  We can talk about books without commercial pressure and I rather like that (exceedingly uncommon these days).  Also, I like to see my counter go up.  Thanks guys!!!

4. I'm not sure I even like the idea of being a member of a sinister cabal of (self-evaluated) superior writers. 

Warning! Spin-off Blog Approaches!

Good day virtual virtuosos. I just wanted to drop a line to my faithful readers that I've started a brand new blog about my collection of vinyl records. It will resemble this blog in layout and format (I happen to like my setup here so why not reproduce it?), so I'll be writing short pieces on the 45 and 33 1/3 rpm disks in my collection. I might also post on issues relating to establishing, maintaining and enjoying vinyl collections, but mostly I'll be talking about the music. I promise I'll have something interesting posted sometime this weekend, so swing on by sometime!

My new site is Vivacious Vintage Vinyl, which I've also linked to on my blogroll over there -->

Skål!

An Elegy to the Elegies of Theognis

~ 700 words

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obsequious - adj - servilely compliant or deferential.

paroxysm - n - any sudden, violent outburst, as of action or emotion.

dissonance - n - an inharmonious or harsh sound; discord.

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I recently polished off a book that has been on my "to read" shelf for some years now, the 1973 translation of Hesiod's "Theogeny", "Works and Days", and Theognis' "Elegies," translated by Dorothea Wender and published by Penguin Classics. It's a tidy little volume at just under 150 pages of unrhymed iambic pentameter. I'd like to talk about Theognis presently (I will probably deal with Hesiod in some later post).

Now. I don't like to give bad reviews, to a certain extent because I don't like to read bad books. Every once in a while, though, one sneaks through, as is the case with this particular translation of this particular poet.

Theognis, so far as we know, was a ancient Greek poet, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of 550 BC, around 200 years after Homer. He was a well educated aristocrat who lived in a city named Megara, (of which there were evidently several), and at some point lost his money and was exiled.

Now, I've read some poetry in my time, and this translation of the Elegies of Theognis is at best dull, repetitive, and inherently self-contradictory. The elegies produce the impression of an arrogant, whiny, self-indulgent man in the grip of whatever passed for a mid-life crisis in the iron age. One moment he's saying that all rich men have unjust hearts, and the next he's lamenting how poor he is and how he wishes he still had his riches. One moment he says that an honest friend is worth their weight in silver and gold, the next he advises to always be duplicitous, and never tell even your friends the whole truth. The one thing he universally agrees on, though, is that youth is wonderful and being old is worse than being dead. In fact, one gets the distinct impression in a couple places that Theognis is a pedophile. I know I can't make a claim like that without some proof, so here you go:

1335-1336: "Happy the lover who exercises, then / Goes home to sleep all day with a handsome boy."

1341-1342: "I love a smooth skinned boy, who shows me off / Against my will, to all his friends."

1345-1346: "The love of boys is sweet. Even the king / Of the gods, the son of Kronos [that is, Zeus], loved a boy / Ganymede, and he took him to his home / Olympus, and he gave divinity / To him, because he had the lovely bloom / Of youth. Don't be surprised, Simonides, / To see me love and serve a handsome boy."

Now, I know it's not entirely fair to brand these ancient poets with our modern moral sense, (I'm sure there was no legal age of consent in ancient Greece), but that doesn't make it any more palatable to our modern tastes.

The translation isn't terribly good either. I can not read Greek, I have never read the Elegies of Theognis before. However, the translator makes the mistake of including prose translations of certain verses in her translation notes when she is particularly liberal with her interpretation. She should have left it in prose!

I am currently reading Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin (you may have noticed the quote at the top of the screen). It's translator, Vladmir Nabokov, says some things I agree with. (He penned a literal, unmetered, unrhymed translation of Eugene Onegin.) He puts it bluntly, "can a rhymed poem [...] be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes? the answer, of course, is no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible." He gets quite angry towards the end of that paragraph. When I read Homer, it is Homer that I want to read. When I read Dostoevsky, I do not want to read the translator's interpretation of Dostoevsky. I want to read Dostoevsky.

Eugene Onegin, by the way, I recommend to anybody currently alive. I would only recommend Theognis to a person who loves classical Greek poetry, who doesn't mind loose translations, and who has read every other poet of the era, and then I would recommend it only for the sake of completion.

Many thanks to ~plastic11 of Deviant Art, who shared with the interweb this striking picture of an ancient Greek amphitheatre, where poets would have their works performed... with varying degrees of success...

Article first published as Poetry Review: "Elegies" by Theognis, translated by Dorothea Wender on Blogcritics.

Ender's Series: is Midquel even a word?

~ 800 words

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perspicuous - adj - clear in expression or statement, lucid.

perspicacious - adj - of ready intelligence, esp. discerning or insightful.

perfidy - n - a deliberate breach of faith or trust, faithlessness; treachery.

scrofulous - adj - of the nature of, resembling, or affected with scrofula, a form of tuberculosis (swelling of the lymph glands, especially in the neck).

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A year and a bit ago I received a book from an esteemed colleague, Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card. I had, at the time, just polished off the original Ender quartet, and as I am physiologically incapable of reading a book without raving about it, this esteemed colleague was well aware of my favourable opinion of the series.

If the reader has not encountered Ender’s Game in their journeys, it comes highly recommended, even if the reader doesn't like science fiction, heck, even if the reader doesn't like books generally. It is highly and thoroughly entertaining, but not the subject of this article.

Suffice to say the subsequent entries in the original Ender series diverge significantly from the first book (emotionally, chronologically, spatially, thematically), to the extent that people who enjoyed Ender's Game are unlikely to enjoy Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, or Children of the Mind for the same reasons. Ender in Exile is a supposed direct sequel to Ender's Game, but that is only approximately correct. The story inserts itself between the penultimate and final chapters of Ender's Game, so not an easy book to write, considering there is the potential to conflict the existing story twice a paragraph. Quite personally, being used to stories that exist in multiple sometimes conflicting renditions (see the Volsunga Saga, the Epic of Gilgamesh) this is not terribly concerning. However, particularly in science fiction it seems you also get the type of reader that will write to you to point out all the mistakes you made while writing the book, so you can't just attempt a project like this willy-nilly. So yes, written to be a direct sequel toEnder's Game, implicit in that the assumption that it will be a nail-biter just like the original? The argument could be made. Do not read this book expecting it to be Ender's Game.

Over the course of the original series a number of developing themes can be noted, for instance, an increasing volume of dialogue. Every book of course achieves its own equilibrium between dialogue and description (compare The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. Dostoevsky will inundate you with a paragraph of dialogue that lasts eleven or twelve pages, and in this early book by LeGuin, she doesn't feel any pressing need to have two characters together in a chapter unless necessary.) While Ender's Game was more balanced volumetrically in this respect, Ender in Exile follows the trend of the original ender series. This has the effect of greatly enhancing the emotional content of the story, if perhaps sacrificing some of the physical description that science fiction is (in)famous for.

One trend that is not continued in Ender in Exile from the original series is an increasing tendency towards metaphysical-physical crossover. One has the impression of Xenocide as a sort of philosophical pet-project, what with the discovery of the soul particle and the exploration of the consequences thereof. At some point during my reading (impossible to say where precisely) I stopped thinking of the story in terms of science fiction and entered the previously undiscovered country of science fantasy. The idea, I would say, is the fusion of the physical (rational, natural) with the metaphysical (romantic, super-natural) into an enlightened median. The problem being, of course, that you anger the rationalists and disappoint the romantics.

Speaking of romantics, that is a rather large component of the book as well. It's a book about the colonization of the planets won in the war against these aliens ender slaughtered. Nothing is sexier than some sultry space god/goddess sidling up to you and whispering in your ear, "hey there, how about we populate a planet?"; So I was bamboozled into reading a rather unsavoury and disappointing love story. It was unsavoury because it over-rationalised romance. For Pete's sake, at one point a female tells a male that she wants to bear his child because she deems him as having the best genetic material in the colony. The love story is disappointing because the fated couple does not end up together at the end. Disappointing, even though the possibility of a happy ending here is impossible due to the series chronology.

Anyways, if you've not liked a book in the rest of the series you may not like this one. But if you liked the all rest of the books in the series (like I did) then you'll probably like this one. Just bear in mind that it isn't as far deviated from Children of the Mind as the publisher would have you believe.

Many thanks to ~LuoLanJP of Deviant Art for this today's rather majestic artwork, the planets really do look habitable!

Article first published as Book Review: Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card on Blogcritics.

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

~ 900 words

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efface - verb - to wipe out; destroy; do away with.

timourous - adj - full of fear, fearful.

multifarious - adjective - having many different parts, elements, or forms. Numerous and varied, manifold.

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My subject for today's blog post is The Brother's Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The book is generally considered among the best books ever written by mere mortals, and in my opinion it is well deserved of the distinction. Being unacquainted with Russian (and perhaps Russia generally), and with an author as idiomatic as Dostoevsky I can't overstress the importance of a decent translation. Mine is the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which in fact won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club translation prize in 1991. Dostoevsky generally, having read a couple books by him before, can be idiomatic, colloquial, and perhaps even redundant in places. Take for example this line from the author's introduction to the Brother's Karamazov:


Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.

Certain translators will cringe at that sort of thing, feeling it their duty to make Dostoevsky more palatable to our modern sense of grammar by busting out the thesaurus and shaving off seemingly redundant clauses. The problem with this, however, is that there is a sort of gait of thought that Dostoevsky had well developed by this, the last book of his career. The spacing of the active elements of the thought are given almost a rhythm, I find. As a poet uses syllables, so does Dostoevsky use thought. And all that elegance can be cut to ribbons by translators who feel it their duty to protect the reader from how the book was actually written. This is a problem that Pevear and Volokhonsky are thankfully not afflicted with. These two also provide a highly informative introduction and footnotes that provide much more fluid descriptions than this blog post, not only of the contents of the book but the context of Dostoevsky's life.

At any rate, The Brothers Karamazov is a book that is almost too big to describe, but the story is largely about (unsurprisingly) the brothers Karamazov. I shirk from describing any of them with mere adjectives because of the sheer depth of the characters, it would be about as insulting as if one starting running around applying epithets to ones friends and neighbors.

Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, the eldest and half-brother to the other two, is accused of killing his father. He is sensitive and impulsive, very much in love for most of the book, a downright scoundrel at times but has the noblest sentiments of any character in the book.

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, the middle child, is an atheist who struggles with his disbelief. He is the most intelligent and educated of the brothers, and he is the cause of two of the more interesting digressions, which are worth reading even if you don't read the rest of the book.

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, the youngest in his early twenties, is a novice at the local monastery, and perhaps the most ambiguous of the brothers. He is faithful, but is not immune to crises of faith. He is the point of view character in most the scenes he appears in.

Alexei (Alyosha, Yoshka, or similar diminutives) is more often than not a conduit for the thoughts of other people, rather than a source of thought himself. Through most of the book he channels the wisdom of his Elder at the monastery, who dies fairly early on (relatively speaking), but this is also true symbolically, because he spends most of the book delivering messages to people. That being said, at the end of the book he recognizes the need for himself personally, and really shows his power of thought, of understanding, of empathy on the second last page. I really don't want to spoil the ending because it is worth reading the 800 tome just to get to the last page.

Alexei is also a point of stability in the lives of most of the important characters regardless of allegiance. He represents an ideal to most of the characters, of faith, hope and love, though he is far from perfect in these areas. It is the needs of others that pull him more into this role as things go on. On the elder's deathbed he tells Alyosha to go out and live among the people, rather than sequestering himself in the monastery, because of the real psychological need for him, almost as an extension of religion generally. In the introduction to Notes From Underground (introduction by and translated by Pevear & Volokhonsky) Dostoevsky says that the Russian sensors allowed him to abuse the entirety of Russian society, but when he tried to explain the need of religion in the human soul they cut it out. To me it seems that Alyosha is the embodiment of this principal he was not allowed to explicitly state. Perhaps that people need something to look up to. They need a carved snake on a pole to look for when live ones bite. Speculation.

It's also the sort of novel that doesn't dissect well. In order to convey the correct sense or feeling or reason for an action or statement, I would pretty much have to drag you back to chapter one and work my way up. I will revise that to say that it doesn't vivisect well, because The Brother's Karamazov is as close to a living inanimate object as I have ever seen.

Today's art is an onion. If this piques your curiosity, please look up "Dostoevky's parable of the onion." Many thanks to Scipio21 of www.deviantart.com for so delightful a photo of so un-delightful a vegetable.

Article first published as Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky on Blogcritics.

So yeah, I'm now a contributor on BlogCritics. Pretty cool, pretty sweet gig. we'll see how it goes.

Tolkien's Proving Ground

~ 1100 words

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phalanstery-noun - (Fourierism) the building occupied by a phalanx, the community itself, or otherwise a small self sufficient socialist society.

provendor- noun - food or provisions, especially for livestock.

seminarian- noun - a student of theology.

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I've been reading The Brothers Karamazov for some months now (fantastic book, highly recommended, several posts to follow), but I took a break between parts 3 and 4 to read something else because you can't eat expensive cheese every day. The Silmarillion had been sitting on my shelf for some time (I vaguely recall having mentioned it in this very blog), and I decided that enough was enough. So I read the darned thing.

I can understand why some people wouldn't like it. In the first place the thing is a turbulent gyre of invented nouns that Tolkien does indeed expect you to remember, though his son was kind enough to include fifty blinking bloody pages of index at the back. The book has enormous mythic passages where there is no plot, and mind-grinding tradegy where there is plot.

If found the style reminiscent of the first book in the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, which is to say, hyper-condensed. Both are the sort of book you have to pay attention to. This is more common in the opening chapters of the "Quenta Silmarillion" (the silmarillion proper, as it were), and I will here give a passage to illustrate:

"As the ages passed the Vanyar grew to love the land of the Valar and the full light of the Trees, and they forsook the city of Tirion upon Túna, and dwelt thereafter upon the mountain of Manwë, or about the plains and woods of Valinor and became sundered from the Noldor. "

The theological structure he sets up is sort of curious as well, a sort of polythesism within monotheism. In essence you have Illuvatar, the supreme being and creator of everything, and then you have the Valar, who represent different areas of his mind. He then creates middle earth with them and sits back to let them run things. It is from these that you get Melkor or Morgoth or the First Dark Lord or Sauron's big brother who, being the most powerful of all the Valar, decided that everything should belong to him, hatred, rage, hell metaphors et cetera. The thing has Paradise Lost (by Milton) strewn about in large semi-digestible chunks throughout the entire novel. I say this having only a cursory knowledge of Paradise Lost, but perhaps I may be permitted to say that thematically this is the case, what with the whole fallen angel thing, and the "we will make our great enterprise, to conquer the world God has made for mankind (elfkind, dwarfkind, hobbitkind, entkind and eaglekind), and in the process corrupt as many as we can from the path of righteousness.

Speaking of righteousness, Tolkien uses a large number of very obvious metaphors for the nobility/righteousness of various characters all through the book. If people are tall that means they are of noble bearing, so consider the implications for hobbits and that lone ranger named "strider." People who live for a long time are wise, though this only really applies to humans, because they were gifted with death for mysterious reasons by Illuvatar himself. It's the same sort of "my ways are not your ways" argument invoked frequently by Christians when accosted by the problem of the existence of evil. If someone is wearing black armour it's not because they like the colour, children are bound to the nature of their parents, and paradise is destroyed by allowing evil to enter into it and corrupt the hearts of it's occupants with lies that appeal to pride and vanity.

So elves then. According to Tolkien they are the physical manifestation of art, and (here's the kicker) therefore necessarily of science. Similarily Tolkien classifies machines and magic as arising from essentially the same source and both almost uniformly the devices of the Enemy. So where does this leave Gandalf? If you notice, Gandalf does not actually use magic all that often, his purpose as a character is more that of the advisor, wise-man, rallying the troops, warning people of various disasters, and the occasional duel with Darth Vader...

While we're on the subject, the rings given to the elves... Galadriel obviously has one, as it's mentioned in the extended cut of the first movie. Elrond is too important not to have one. Number three? Originally belonged to the shipbuilder who builds the ships that take elves to Valinor, but he gave the ring of fire to none other than Gandalf himself, who is, by the way, of the divine race of the Maia, who are below the Valar but above the Elves and do not leave Valinor except in very special circumstances (and that is why all the elves love him).

Anyways, I wanted to say something about the children of hurin, which is summarized somewhere in the middle. It seems to me as if Tolkien was attempting to create the most tragic tragedy in existence. He's right when he says there is great beauty in tragedy, but there is also such a thing as pushing your luck. I don't even really want to summarize, just suffice to say that the manor of the dragon slaying is almost precisely the way Sigurd the Volsung slays the dragon Fafnir in Norse Mythology (which was an extremely popular saga at the time, carvings of this slaying are widespread through northern europe). That is, you hide in a hole or trench, wait for the dragon to pass over you, and then stab your sword into the dragon's soft exposed underbelly. Take that chivalry, sneaky tactics are permited if your opponent is an enormous insidious reptile. It is worth mentioning, I think, that Sigurd dug his own hole to hide in, whereas the son of Hurin had to rely on a very conveniently placed trench/small canyon.

Ultimately, my impression from the Silmarillion was that Tolkien was human after all, and not some sort of demi-god, a rank to which he is frequently lifted in modern popular and unpopular culture. His influence is undeniable, and I would almost say that he set the standard for "good" fantasy novels unbearably high, where authors are now measured by how tolkien-like they are. I'm not even sure I approve of the word "world-building", let alone the concept.

Many thanks to ~Azremodehar of deviantart for his enchanting redition of Feanor's handiwork, the only artist brave enough to put the light of Valinor into a Silmaril for us. Thank you for your noble efforts good sir.

The tide, the tempest and the apocalypse

~ 1500 words

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lede - noun - the opening paragraphs of a print article

litany - n - a ceremonial or liturgical form of prayer consisting of a series of invocations or supplications with responses that are the same for a number of successions.

exchequer - noun - the treasury of a state or nation

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In the vein of my previous post on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and in an effort to reverse this blog's transformation into a shrine to Fyodor Dostoevski, I would like to ramble at length on a subject I find interesting. In particular, I will be comparing Sumerian, Semitic and Roman accounts of one particular event in very early human history that nearly snuffed civilization out in its infancy. I am speaking of course about the great flood. I`ll be comparing and contrasting the the accounts in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and Ovid`s Metamorphoses.

While we are trying to make up our minds as to whether the great flood really happened or not, the fact that the theme occurs from italy to india suggests that it was based on actual events. Some theorize that a tsunami could have provided the ancients sufficient material to write about, or perhaps a flooding river, but by far the most interesting theory is the so-called Ryan-Pitman theory, which explains how, around 5600BC, the Black Sea had it`s coastline expanded enormously in a very short time. The theory goes as follows: Before the flood, the Black Sea is a freshwater sea that flows into the mediterranean. When the glaciers retreated at the end of the last iceage, all the feeder rivers for the Black Sea dried up, and at the same time ocean levels rose. Thus, the flow reverses, and dumps water into the black sea at a rate of 20 times that of niagra falls. If you`d like to see more about this please check out this article. Archeological evidence suggests that early human settlements were displaced (read anihilated) by this great flood, and it is not inconcievable that some of the survivors may have settled in Sumeria a couple of thousand years later.

I will tackle these in reverse chronological order.

The Roman flood started as an enormous rain concocted by Jupiter (aka Jove) that does little more than cause some agricultural discomfort. Jove then entices Neptune to aid with all the water in the oceans and you get the following passage:

"Delivered from their courses,/ the rivers rush across the open fields/ and bear away not only figs and flocks/ but folks who tend them, with their dwelling places;/ the also sink the shrines of the household gods!/ If any roof has managed to resist,/ untoppled, this unnatural disaster, / the waves embrace above it nonetheless;/ its highest turrets lie beneath the flood. "

This would seem to suggest rivers in flood, rather than a sea expanding, and the description is mild (relatively speaking). This passage goes on to describe how there was so much sea that there was no longer land, and that two people survive on a mountain top. These two having invoked an oracle that somehow survived the flood, the Gods create the human race by animating stones, which is the story about how human beings came into their enormous capacity for hard labour (which is, all things being equal, a very Roman thing to say).

Of the three this is more likely the story that you've heard. Noah builds a gigantic ark to carry past the cataclysm the seed of the new world. God lets loose the heavens and drowns the corrupt and sinful men. I'd just like to quote here because the style of the story is half the point (NRSV).

"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights [...] and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters. The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits [approximately 7.5 metres] deep. [...] everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died."

Whereas the best Ovid could manage was "it washed away houses... then covered them!" and people survive on a mountain, in the biblical account we have references to the waters of the abyss (one of the mythological bases of Sumerian myth, see: Gilgamesh. A very interesting topic on its own that I will not enter into here), forty days and nights of rain that floods the earth, and the mountains were covered "up to fifteen cubits deep". It might also be worth mentioning that the Romans have far less affection in their account for fuzzy forest creatures (who not being saved presumably all perish).

So now to Gilgamesh, and by far the most violent depiction I have seen. It's my interpretation that it attempts to induce fear. And I quote:

"For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts. When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea gre calm, the flood was stilled"

And of the gods gathering the storm:

'With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon; it thundered within where Adad, lord of the storm was riding. In front over the hill and plain Shullat and Hanish, heralds of the storm, led onThen gods of the abyss rose up; Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether waters, Ninurta the war-lord threw down the dykes , and the seven judges of hell, the Annunaki, raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven whent the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup. One whole day the tempest raged, gathering fury as it went, it poured over the people like the tides of battle; a man could not see his brother nor the people be seen from heaven. Even the gods were terrified at the flood, they fled to the highest heaven the firmament of Anu; they crouched against the walls, cowering like curs. Then Ishtar the sweet-voiced Queen of Heaven cried out like a woman in travail [which I assume to mean labour]; "Alas the days of old are turned to dust beacause I commanded evil; why did I command this evil in the council of all the gods? I commanded wars to destroy the people, but are they not my people, for I brought them forth? Now like the spawn of fish they float in the ocean." '

I apologize for quoting nearly an entire page, but I thought the whole thing rather poigniant. Please note the frequent comparisons to war and bloodshed, at the time probably the pinnacle of the human experience of chaos. We have another reference to the waters of the abyss, this time called the nether waters. This account literally pulls out all the stops, invoking pretty dang close to the full force of the underworld. The world is also consumed in flame (which seems a bit out of place and reminds me inexhorably of Ragnarok), and the gods themselves are forced to retreat from the forces they have unleashed. That right there is the detail that distinguishes the sumerian account. Zeusjove (Jupizeus?) casts his thunderbolts from olympus with impunity. God holds a similar position, never once being threatened by the flood (and how could He be? He is the one true God after all). The sumerian pantheon retreats by necessity to their final fortress, the firmament, or ether, or the medium in which the stars are hung.

Anyways, long blog post, but I had lots to say.


Today's image is courtesy of Jean-Genie of the ever popular www.deviantart.com. An excellent composition in every respect.

Gilgamesh: the roots civillization?

~ 700 words

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crofter - n - British, a person who rents and works a very small farm

prolepsis - n - 1. the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance. 2. the assigning of a person, event, etc. to a period earlier than the actual one: prochronism.

vesper - n - 1. the evening star (Venus) 2. evening bells, songs, or religious services. 3. (Archaic) evening.

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As most of you have probably not noticed, I have not posted for a while. I was online recently and noticed that despite this fact the site had still drawn a considerable amount of traffic, and in fact continues to on an ongoing basis. I found this at once curious and heartening, so much so that I've decided not to play as many video games and take back the mantle of blogging. I have read a few books in my absence, so I have plenty to write about, including another by Dostoevki. It seems that my articles on Dostoevski have been the main draw for people, so I will without a doubt mention the book I've read at some point.

But today I would like to talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I must do by first introducing Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is one of the most ancient cultures ever to have existed on this planet, though in this case I'm speaking mostly about Sumeria, a particular subset of Mesopotamia generally. The geography of the region (where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf) provided the ancient sumerians extremely fertile land for agriculture, which may have led to the first real accumulation of population, which would have led to culture blossoming in the heart of the ancient world. We're talking before Greece, before Egypt, before Israel, Even before Babylon (same spot, different civilization). please see map.


The epic of Gilgamesh, like so many of the world's oldest stories, started off in an oral culture, and was subsequently transcribed, in this case onto clay tablets in cuniform language, a written language made by pressing a triangular stylus into wet clay to form characters.

The first half of the epic details Gilgamesh's friendship and adventures with Enkidu, a man born from the wilderness and a metaphor for "wild man." This book is so old that one of the great acts of the hero is capturing the wild man and civillizing him. It is interesting to think about this, because the implication is that the creators of the epic had some difficultly trying to transition people from being cave-people to a civillized, agricultural society. Granted this is probably a distant memory for the city of Uruk (Gilgamesh's city), but a temptingly rational outlook, even if the story is mythical. This interesting theme has a number of uncomfortable parrallels in recent history as well, and I'm thinking about Rudyard Kipling when I say that.

At any rate, Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh sets out on a fantastical journey to find the herb of life that grants immortality. He encounters many gods and beasts, such as the scorpion-man pictured above, two such beasts guard a tunnel into the mountain where the sun rises. In order to gain the knowledge of where the plant grows he has to cross a very large body of water (which is most likely the Indian ocean) to the island belonging to Utnapishtim, the only king ever to be made a god. He tells the story of the flood, which is fascinating in it's parallel to the story of Noah's Ark. That, my friends, is for another post, because I could go on about that for several hundred words at least.

At any rate, he manages to obtain the herb, but it is then eaten by a serpent, which gains the ability of self-renewal, which is why snakes shed their skins. Gilgamesh bemoans this loss, because he was bringing it back to Uruk to share with his people, rather than immediately scarfing it down. He subsequently dies, and we get something that looks like his funeral rights as the last tablet in the epic. Speaking of which, and in case any of you were wondering how easy this story was to translate, the clay tablets look like this:



This is the tablet containing the story of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. You may notice that bits are missing. Fortunately there remain more than one copy of most of these tablets (in various languages) so archeologists can cross reference the tablets and produce a more or less complete story.


Today's image credit goes to MythAdvocate of DeviantArt. Not terribly many people concern themselves with ancient mesopotamian myth and their visual interpretations, so thanks!

The Valkyrie Tragedies

~ 800 words

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indigent - adj - lacking the neccessities of life because of poverty; needy; poor; impoverished

interlocutor - noun - a person who takes part in conversation or dialog

duplicity - noun - decietfulness in speech or conduct; double dealing.

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So I finished the Poetic Edda over the weekend. I must say, it is an excellent book in all respects. I'm on to Pride and Prejudice now. Never thought I'd see the day when Austen made it to the top of my list, but a friend of mine was rather insistent. I'd like to take a few moments and mention a couple of the really interesting characters that dwell in the Poetic Edda.

The heroic tragedies are divided into two discrete units. First you have Helgi Hundingsbani, who is likely the older archetype on which other variants were based. The second is the Volsung saga, which follows several characters, all related to each other somehow.

Helgi Hundingsbani is a hero, whose auspicious birth was overseen by the Norns (female spirits connected with fate) and who was ready for battle at the age of one day (similar to the god Hod, born to avenge the death of his brother Baldr). It depends on which version you adhere to, as a couple versions of each story are contained in the book, but Helgi falls in love with a valkyrie named Sigrun. Valkyries are interesting, and there is a great deal of modern adaptation of the term to things that have little to do with the actual function of a valkyrie. Valkyries were semi-divine women who determine who falls in battle and serve mead in Valhall, Odin's hall where the spirits of great warriors gather for the final fight of Ragnarok. These are often human women who forgo mundane life for the life of a valkyrie. Helgi falls for Sigrun, but he must first thwart her suitors. Being hand forged from pure awesome, he wins handily, but is subsequently surprise-attacked by Sigrun's brother to avenge their father whom Helgi apparently killed at some point.

More interesting to me are the Volsungs. These more or less start with Sigurd, purportedly the most heroic hero ever to rescue damsels. He is the only hero in the entire book to slay a dragon. The dragon's name is Fafnir, he slays him to reclaim the rightful inheritance of the dragon's brother (who is a dwarf by the way). He finds the dragon's drinking pond, digs a hole over the dragon's tracks, and scores a direct hit when the dragon comes to have a drink.

The sword he uses, which the dwarf brother forged for him, is so sharp, if you dip the tip into a stream and allow unspun wool to float across it, it will part the wool as if it were water.

At any rate, he subsequently saves the valkyrie Brynhild from Odin's wrath (she allowed the incorrect combatant to win in battle), and promises himself to her (for keeps). He subsequently (and conveniently) drinks the ale of forgetfulness, forgetting that he promised to marry Brinhild, and marries another swingin' gal (and valkyrie) Gudrun. Brynhild persuades Gudrun's siblings to kill Sigurd, which they do, and Gudrun is out a husband. She is then fed the ale of forgetfulness and married to Brynhild's brother, none other than Attila the Hun. Brynhild sort of says "Oh, he's dead now isn't he..." and kills herself and a dozen servants.

Attila is beset by Gudrun's brothers, whom he summoned to his court. He intends to steal Fafnir's treasure, which passed to Gudrun's brothers after the death of Sigurd. He murders them mercilessly, cutting the heart out of one and throwing the other in a snake pit. Gudrun is at this point rather peeved with Attila, so she murders their children and feeds them to Attila and his men. She then kills him and burns down his hall and everyone in it.

Gudrun then throws herself into the sea, trying to drown herself, but ends up with still another king. She has two sons who own magic armour, and who set out across the land to avenge the death Svanhild, Gudrun's daughter by Sigurd. They go, knowing it's their doom. They meet their half brother on the road, who is full of wisdom, but also rather annoying. They kill him a few stanzas after meeting him and proceed to the enemy's hall. Though hopelessly outnumbered, their magic armour serves them well. They cut off the king's arms and legs, but the king tells his warriors to use stones to kill the two of them. Apparently the magic only deflected iron, so they say to themselves, "Oops, I guess we shouldn't have killed whats-his-face thirty stanzas ago.

You heard it here first. A brief summary of Old Norse tragedy complete with dragon fighting and child cannibalism.

Reflections on Crime and Punishment

~ 1300 words !!!Major Spoilers!!!

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bravura - n - a display of daring, a brilliant performance

sacrosanct - adj - sacred or inviolable

conspectus - n - a general or comprehensive view, survey

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I finished Crime and Punishment this week, and I have to say it is definitely one of (if not the) best book(s) I have read.

In the first place the ending was fantastic. This man, crippled by ambition, intelligence and circumstance, finds redemption. If you've read the book this comes as no surprise, and you might even have thought it a bit corny. Love saves him in the end. Well, I'd just like to point out that love is not what saves him. At the end of the book (after going to prison), Raskolnikov falls ill, a sort of lack of will or purpose in life. Psychosomatic illness occurs frequently throughout the book. He misses his visit from Sonya (who followed him all the way to Siberia) because she is ill (notable because it is one of only two occurrences of illness caused externally in the book. The other is Katerina Ivanova's tuberculosis). She has a cold. At this point he realizes how much he relies on her for emotional support, he had been snubbing her up to that point, more or less. Of course, realizing his love for her is only the first step. On her next visit, when none of the guards are looking, he throws himself on her feet. In the end, he overcomes his pride, which up to that point had prevented him from making public (or any) displays of emotion. I thought that was a very good ending. Raskolnikov learns that just because you have an idea, that doesn't make it a good idea, even if you can rationalize it. It takes him the murder of two innocents, incarceration in Siberia, and him causing the death of his mother for him to realize this. Lots of people, young people in particular, could benefit from this wisdom I think.

I would also like to share with you a paragraph that appeared near the end. It really stuck in my mind for some reason.

He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness, he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish except for a certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgements, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, and could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part--but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were the pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.

The first time I read this I thought, this is Dostoevsky's vision of a world consumed by the philosophical forces he sought to counter. As I read this again, however, I'm not so sure. Certain elements certainly have an anti-rational lean (such as the epidemic having the ability to reason), but in general it's almost like the tower of babel all over again. For those in my listening audience unfamiliar with the story of the tower of babel, it occurs in the Bible after Noah's flood. Essentially, a bunch of people band together after Noah's flood to design and build a gigantic tower that would protect them from another great flood. In punishment for their insolence, God makes it so that no person can be understood by any other. To a person "love" may mean "hate", and "war" may mean "peace". Stymied by their inability to communicate with each other, they all sort of meander off and went back where they came from, and that explains why all sorts of different languages exist in the world.

Among Biblical stories, this one (in my humble estimation) is extremely influential. Off the top of my head, "babble", our word for incoherent nonsense, bears striking resemblance to "Babel". The organism that slips into your ear and translates for you in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the Babel Fish. In Final Fantasy II, one of the core environments is the tower of Babel, which supposedly reaches all the way to the moon. It's an interesting game, what with the whole walking on the moon thing, but final fantasy almost doesn't count in this regard. It seems to me as if the people who make those games actively pursue world mythology to integrate into their content, no matter how obscure the source. Granted the old testament isn't exactly obscure, but I've seen references to Homer's Odyssey (in the form of Scylla).

Here is a picture:

Not exactly congruous with the description in the Odyssey (something about seven heads), but undeniably final fantasy material.

Oh, and while I have you here, I'd just like to mention that my good friend Jeff Chapman (his blog) has a short story in an anthology up for preorder! The anthology is The Midnight Diner Volume 3 and the story is "The Princess and the Vampire", which I believe I mentioned actually. Jeff has a sample of his story up on his blog, so check it out if you have a taste for astounding tales!

Also, he has had another short story accepted, "The Master and the Miller's Daughter". I haven't read it myself, yet, but Jeff given the quality of Jeff's fiction (and the fact that it was accepted after all), I have reason to believe that it is very good. Check it out if you get the chance!

The image today came from a pop art blog if you can believe it. It's unfortunately been derelict for more than a year, but still has an interesting archive of pop art. I don't know if it's really art, I'm not exactly an expert, but here's the link anyways.

Necrology 2

~ 700 words

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New Interesting Words!

salutary - adj - favourable to or promoting health.

solecism - n - a breach, error, impropriety or inconsistency, esp. in grammar or etiquette.

inimical - adj - unfriendly, hostile, adverse in tendency, harmful.

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This post, as one might gather from its title, is the second in my Necrology series, based on a series of essays contained in "Death and Dying: Challenge and Change", edited by R. Fulton, E. Markusen, G. Owen, and J. L. Scheiber. Today's blog post is based on the essay "Life and Death in the USA" by Melvin Maddocks.

Let me preface by saying that I am not American in the traditional sense. That is to say, I'm Canadian. Thus, some of the more regional themes were not readily apparent to me as I read this essay, but thankfully the majority of the article is not of regional interest.

Maddocks' purpose for this article is mainly taxonomic, as he is almost exclusively interested in segregating people into groups based on their views and beliefs about death. While such systems beg for exceptions, it is interesting to note the author's perception of general trends in society. This article was originally published in 1974, so one might argue that the 70s were an entirely different time and place. I would stipulate that the 70s were the last social revolution I'm personally privy to, and much of what was decided forty years ago is still relevant in today's society (not only because people who lived through the seventies now run things. Scary thought?). We still make references to hippies, though they have long been extinct, or at least, the only surviving specimens are kept in captivity.

He groups people into three categories.

1) The Pragmatist.
These are people who act to thwart death wherever it occurs. Immortality is possible if you try hard enough, or at least, death can be managed out of existence. Hence you get a plethora of how-to books, guides, handbooks, pamphlets etc. all espousing their particular theory on death and the grieving process (which you pay for of course, they are pragmatists after all). Maddocks calls this politicizing. Here's one of those how-to books for free.

manuscript: How to Die for the Incurable Imbecile

-Step 1-

Stop breathing.

end manuscript


2) The Optimist
These are interesting folk who hold that death "could be the best thing that ever happened to you". Death is not a disease, it is the natural course of life. You are going to die anyway, you might as well embrace it. Life's end can be a beautiful experience, as beautiful as life's beginning. These are the sorts of people who tend to pull the plug on people on respirators. Why would you suffer, they might say, when you could simply die and end your sufferings. It is from this mode of thought that power of attorney came into being. You should make your wishes known. You should have the right to choose the manner of your death.

3) The Existentialist
This group, comprised primarily of young 'uns (according to Maddocks) are melancholics. Suffering is to be honoured, case by case, and death gives meaning to life. Death, therefore, is authentic, and kids these days crave validation. Hence, Maddocks neatly explains his theory of teen suicide. I think kids still crave validation, correct me if I'm wrong. I die, therefore I am. To these sorts of people, if they are authentically depressive by nature and not simply lured in by the lethargy of melancholy, the possibility of living forever would be philosophically castrating.

The extrapolation of this, as seen by Maddocks, is that you get one of two futures. You either get a society advanced enough (remember, this was in the seventies, when resources were limitless and science would advance indefinitely) to create the "Anti-Death Machine", or you get a society sensitive enough to extract death's sting, the "Age of Compassion".

Anti-Death Machine? Unlikely. We are no closer to immortality now than we were forty years ago when the article was written. It all seems a bit like science fiction to me.

Age of Compassion? More likely. At the very least there's much less overhead. It could arise as a natural consequence of religious (specifically Christian) beliefs. Compassion is undeniably espoused in the Bible, and Maddocks says that "imitation of Christ [is a habit] that post-Christians have inherited in spite of themselves."

I would like to close with a little verse that closed Maddocks' article.

Xerxes the great did die,
And so must you and I.

Youth forward slips,
Death soonest nips.

Raskolnikov's Napoleon Complex

~ 800 words -- !Minor Spoilers!

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New Interesting Words!

philander -v- to make love without serious intention, to carry on flirtations.

reticent - adj - disposed to be silent, reserved.

samovar - noun - A metal urn, used for heating tea in Russia.

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10th post! Someone bake a cake!

This illustration, which I found on www.deviantart.com, is a rather artistic depiction of the crime in Crime and Punishment. For those of you who have not read the book (or have not read it in some time), Raskolnikov's first victim, that little old lady, was in fact brained by the blunt end of the handle, not the blade itself. So no, he is not holding the axe the wrong way in this illustration.

I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of Crime and Punishment, while at the same time presenting some context to these ideas, as I'm sure was Dostoevski's intent when he wrote the novel.

Raskolnikov (our central character) is the quintessential melancholic. That is, melancholy as defined by humourism, an ancient mode of medicine that (on the grand scale of things) has only recently fallen into disrepute. Humourism divides a person's physical and mental health (concepts more closely correlated a hundred and fifty years ago) into four humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. The theory is very old (think ancient Greece), but later evidence arose to support it. Apparently, if you let blood sit for a while, it separates itself into four distinct layers, which resemble the four humours. Each humour is associated with specific personality traits, and many diseases were at one point diagnosed and treated as imbalances in the humours. Hence, you get practices like bloodletting. I digress. A person with too much black bile, under humourism, is irritable, depressive, independent, and takes his philosophy personally. This describes Raskolnikov's personality quite thoroughly. He often has half-mad depressions which cause him to lay on his couch fretting. He is frequently rude to nearly every important character. His most ardent desire is just to be left alone.

And he takes philosophy very seriously. In order to really understand any book written in the 19th century, you have to know who the author was arguing against. While I'm not educated enough to know who specifically he was fighting (though I'm sure the translators of my edition are), I'm familiar with the concept he makes his case against. The name of the game is rationalism, and if you don't believe me, check some of the quotes I've posted on my "Interesting Quotations" page penned by our friend Fyodor.

The murder, as an act, is perfectly rational and completely justified by some of the larger principles that were (and still are) natural consequences of rationalism. Alyona Ivanovna, the unfortunate axe-ee, is an old crone, a moneylender and pawnbroker, who jealously hordes several thousand roubles (currency, ten roubles will by you a thrifty but serviceable wardrobe including boots, one hundred kopecks to the rouble). Raskolnikov is troubled by the human suffering that he encounters in his daily life. At one point he comes into thirty five roubles (an advance on his mother's pension) and twenty five of it goes to the widow of a man run over in the streets by a carriage.

So he asks himself this question. If several thousand roubles could do so much good in the world, why is it allowed to stagnate in some old crone's stash where it does no good to anyone? If these funds were distributed among the poor, and their lives improved, would that not be worth the life of some bitter old hag? Can we equate the life of a human being, even one so stale and abusive of the poor, with the well being of dozens of families?

Combine this with Raskolnikov's Napoleon complex and you have murder and robbery. Silly guy doesn't even rob her properly though, stealing only pawned trinkets that he subsequently hides under a rock.

Raskolnikov writes an article, before the book's timeline begins, theorizing that the world is divided into two groups of people. First, you have ordinary people, for whom crime can not be justified. Second, you have extraordinary people, for whom crime can be justified. If one of these extraordinary people, by the performance of a crime, can remove a barrier to the betterment of mankind, then he has the right to do so. That is, not a legal right, but the right to a clean conscience. If by killing ten people an extraordinary person could improve the lives of one hundred thousand, Raskolnikov believes this would be justified.

Raskolnikov views himself as one of these extraordinary people, commits murder for the benefit of mankind, and spends 5/6s of the book being punished (and punishing himself) for it. Dostoevski is illustrating that there are more considerations than simply the faculty of reason, and that there are forces internal to the human mind that can rip a person apart if offended.

I haven't quite finished the book, so you can expect one more post from me on the subject.


Image credit to ~PoohateQ of www.deviantart.com, who posted this rather dramatic scene. It is apparently an image from the movie "Crime and Punishment" by Peter Dumala.

SF&F -- Distinction Through Modes of Plausibility

~800 words

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New Interesting Words!

mien - noun - air, bearing or aspect indicative of character.

bedizen - verb - to dress or adorn in a showy, gaudy or vulgar manner.

catechism - noun - A statement of beliefs or principals, or a particular book, a summary of Christian beliefs and values in the form of questions and answers.

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Let me start by saying that I originally conceived this article as bridging the great gap between these genres, but that quickly stepped in far out of my depth (literary criticism is a really deep well). Instead of doing something crazy (and dare I say academic), I will talk about things I have read and things I would like to read.

I was researching this article (surprised?) looking up science fantasy authors I seemed to recall, when I happened upon a pair of articles on the Internet that lend some insight on this topic. The author was Ursula K. LeGuin, whom you might know from the Earthsea novels, or The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards. She has written quite a lot of prize winning science fiction and fantasy since the mid sixties, and has a very good website.

I had been researching her because I remembered her name appearing on a list of science fantasy authors. A couple of sources cite her as being mildly unconcerned with genre boundaries, but neither did I find a billboard declaring this or that novel to be science fantasy.

I probably should mention, stories that deliberately contain science fiction and fantasy elements have their own sub-genre called science fantasy. My excellent friend Jeff Chapman recently wrote an article clarifying the somewhat misty boundaries between sci fi and fantasy, which inspired this article, and I am here to expand somewhat on his classification. I tend to think of science fantasy as having two approaches, over-explaining fantasy or under-explaining science fiction.

There is one book that I will tentatively place in this category. It is a book I have been meaning to read for some time now, and have read a fair bit about. The book is The Iron Dragon's Daughter, by Michael Swanwick, and it says right in the first line of the wikipedia article that it "combines fantasy and science fiction."

So there you go.

Michael Swanwick was an author I first read in Best SF 14, an anthology of science fiction short fiction (with occasional novellas). The story was called "The Scarecrow's Boy", and it was about a world in which robots have more common decency than humans do.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter focuses on the misadventures of Jane, a young female changeling who is a slave in a dragon factory. She meets an rusty old dragon and they escape, and I believe she goes to school afterwards. The book is more or less a criticism of the rash of recent fantasy authors who prey on the success of J.R.R. Tolkien. That is to say, he takes all the tropes and archetypes of the elf-man-dwarf-dragon stories and turns them on their head. I believe there's also some social satire mixed in there as well, but as I've said I haven't read it. Yet.

So yes, when we find a book (or set of books) that doesn't quite fit in our set of pigeon holes, we create a brand new hole for it. The interesting thing to me is whether science fantasy gets listed as a sub-genre of fantasy or science fiction. Wikipedia's index of genres has a special category for "cross-genre".

One other note: more than once, when reviewing story markets on Duotropes, I have noticed that publishers will say something to the effect of "Cross-genre is more than fine" or similar. I could be mistaken, but it looks to me as if publishers want that sort of thing.

BUT I DIGRESS

In her articles on plausibility in Fantasy and Science Fiction, LeGuin draws a clear line between the two by demonstrating the different methods by which they become plausible to the reader.

Fantasy, according to LeGuin, is made plausible through detail. Vivid, realistic description, reference to events in the past or the future, and above all coherence and stability in whatever rules govern the world are the staples of a plausible fantasy novel. She also says that ulterior motives completely spoil the mood. If the writer is a victim of wishful thinking, political intent or didactic purpose, fantasy stories are hobbled by their intent. In order to be a free expression of imagination, it has to truly be free from these harmful psychological influences.

Of science fiction, she says that it is very similar to realism. Science fiction relies on "accurate, honest observation and intuition of reality". Science fiction often avoids comparison with the present time, because contradicting the reader's experience of modern life seriously compromises the plausibility of the story. The most important question, when testing the plausibility of a science fiction story, is whether this might have happened, might be happening, or might yet happen, so the science fiction story must subjugate reality, but also keep its distance from it.

They are very good articles, I would encourage all my readers to take a look at her website, as well as her books.


Image credit to ~Rawbot of www.deviantart.com, who likes to draw ROBOTS (and is also pretty good at it).

Odin's Quest

~800 words

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New Interesting Words!

signet - noun - a small official seal, as on a ring, sometimes used to mark wax seals.

spermaceti - noun - a waxy solid drived from the cranial cavity of sperm whales. Used as an emolient in 19th century cosmetics.

didactic - adj - intended to instruct or tutor.

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Just one small administrative note. Some of the more observant of my loyal listeners may have noticed that a quote from the poetic edda has adorned my header for some weeks now. Well, I've decided to change it, so I've filed the old one away in a brand new page you are welcome to visit whenever you like. Clicking "interesting quotes" at the top of the page will bring this up. Similar to the interesting words, these will occur on an "as they appear" basis, and if it hasn't changed in a couple of weeks I'll pull some wisdom from the poetic edda.

Speaking of me being back from vacation...

It wasn't bad. Not bad at all. I had a little more time to sit around and read than I thought I would (plus!) so I actually managed to digest a sizable chunk of the poetic edda (now @ 119/263). You know, that book I've been raving about for weeks now. I've moved from myths to legends (the hero stories) which mostly involve evil kings, righteous warriors and valkyrie brides.

The Poetic Edda (or the Elder Edda) is translated from a very ancient manuscript called the Codex Regius. The codex was written in 1270 by an unknown icelandic author on fifty three pages of vellum, and the majority of poems contained therein appear no where else in the world. The book was written, and subsequently disappeared into history, re-emerging nearly four hundred years later as a gift to the king of Denmark in 1643, having lost eight pages. It was preserved exceedingly well until the nineteen seventies, when it was transported back to iceland to take it's place in the Árni Magnússon Institute.

It is interesting to note that the Prose Edda (or Younger Edda), another mythological text written by Snorri Sturlston in the 1220s, is likely to have predated the Elder Edda's actual transcription by about fifty years. So despite one being called "Elder" and the other "Younger", they were actually transcribed in the reverse of that order.

So, Norse mythology. The poems themselves are surprisingly coherant, and having recently dealt with terrible translations, I attribute this to Carolyne Larrington, who translated my Oxford World Classics edition.

The first four poems are wisdom poems, essentially listing out large swathes of information. The Seeress's Prophecy, for example, is a timeline of the major events in the history of the world, from creation to post-Ragnarok. In Norse myth, the world was created from the body of Ymir, the primordial being, the first humans were created of driftwood, and the varying realms of the world are connected by a gigantic ash tree named Yggdrasil. Ragnarok is concerned mainly with the slaying of various gods by various beasts/demons. Surt, a flame monster of the underworld, ravages the realms with fire in the final days. Fenrir, an inteligent and deadly wolf, does battle with Odin and defeats him, though Odin's son Vidar avenges his father. Thor is fated to fight the Midgard Serpent (or Iormungand), and they will kill each other. Midgard being the realm of men, Iormungand was a serpent that completely encircled Midgard, swimming in endless circles around the surrounding oceans. Another important beast/demon is Nidhogg, one of only two dragons I've encountered thus far (the other is Fafnir, who is slain by the hero Sigurd I believe), whose primary function is to gnaw on the roots of Yggdrasil and to suck on the souls of the dead. He is the only beast in the Seeress's Prophesy that survives Ragnarok, and that depends somewhat on your interpretation.

Odin is the primary figure in all four of thesee wisdom poems. He is roughly equivalent to Zeus in his role as leader of the gods, though in this case he indeed fathered most of the gods (except the Vanir). He is a source of great wisdom, and he is characterized by his endless quest for knowledge, particularily concerning Ragnarok. In Vafthrudnir's Sayings, he challenges a giant (Vafthrudnir) to a contest of wisdom in the giant's own hall. He wins of course.

I should mention two things. First, the giants are the rival race of the gods, they are comparable in both strength and wisdom, and it is from the giants that the gods are descended. Second, there are two main families of gods. The Aesir live in Asgard and include Odin, Thor, their wives, children etc. The Vanir are the rival house, living elsewhere, and include Freyr and Freyia who appear to be male and female fertility deities. Prior to reading this book I was under the impression that there were three important gods: Odin, Thor and Frey. As it turns out, "Frey" is actually two separate deities of opposite gender.

It is an interesting read, definitely worth the time. I can already begin to see ways in which this stuff influenced Tolkien, but I'll save that for another post.


Image credit to Luis S. Ramos of www.deviantart.com, your Odin pleases me!

Administrative

Good Morrow Blogosphere!

Just two quick notes.

First, my good friend Jeff Chapman has sold his short story "The Princess and the Vampire" to Coach's Midnight Diner, a print anthology. Having looked the story over prior to his submission, I was certain it would do well. It's an interesting perspective on the recent teenage vampire craze, a cautionary tale, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone considering a love affair with a demon or demoness. Jeff's blog, as well as the full account of his victory, may be found here.

Congratulations Jeff, keep up the excellent work!

Second, I'm afraid I'm going to be off-world next week for a little respite from the daily trials and tribulations of the modern aspiring author. I'll try to get another post written, maybe post-publish it in the middle of the week. At any rate, I'll be taking the Poetic Edda with me, so I should have plenty to talk about upon my return.

Callisto is simply marvelous this time of century, that was my choice, but everyone else wanted to stay by the sulphur beaches of Io, and in the end I acquiesced.

Second Foundation - Physics versus Psychics

~1100 words

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New Interesting Words!

Licentious - adj - Unconcerned with law or moral standards, especially a lack of sexual restraint

Crinoline - noun - a type of petticoat resembling a hoop skirt (19th century fasion)

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For the past few years I have made it my business to familiarize myself with the important authors of science fiction. I have read selections from the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Orson Scott Card, and I am currently puttering my way through Issac Asimov's Foundation series.

In case you are not familiar with Asimov, he wrote a number of influential works, including the foundation series (naturally), the "greater" foundation series, which includes the foundation, robot and galactic empire series, and some of his works were made into fairly famous movies. You might remember "I, Robot" starring Will Smith, and "Bicentennial Man" starring Robin Williams. He established his reputation in the pulp science fiction magazines writing short stories, and by the age of 21 he wrote 'Nightfall', a work of social science fiction that brought him to the forefront of science fiction.

Some weeks ago now I finished Second Foundation, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The thing that amused me was not so much his wry wit (which was also very funny) as his deft and shameless plot contortions.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the the series, the Foundation, after which the series of books is named, is a scientific society dedicated to the physical sciences, planted at the end of the galaxy. The Galactic Empire, which has held for thousands of years, is crumbling, and this one beacon of enlightenment will shorten the thirty thousand years of barbarism after the fall of the empire to a mere millennium. All of this is based in a predictive, statistical science called "psychohistory", which can predict social trends for large groups thousands of years into the future. Somewhere in the middle of the second book (Second Foundation is the third ironically enough), a mutant, unpredictable by statistical methods, conquers the Foundation. That being done, the only thing left to do is to chase the rumor of a second foundation, which was concealed upon its inception. It's almost an underworld of intergalactic politics, a concealed organization dedicated to the preservation of "mental science", which includes psychohistory.

They communicate with their minds, inferring entire sentences from small facial gestures. At least that's the first theory. Later on Asimov seems almost to change his mind, relying the a latent psychic ability of the human animal.

The first Foundation is dedicated to the physical sciences. Anti-gravity ships, hand held nuclear devices, ray guns, that sort of standard sci-fi fare. These are all natural extensions of the sorts of things we have today. In these instances I always find it more interesting what a sci-fi author doesn't predict, as opposed to what he does.

For example, the Foundation universe is analog. People still use paper, data is stored strictly in read/write devices, and people do their math by hand. This is the future before the pocket calculator. Somewhere near the end he goes on for a whole paragraph about this device he has that is so much better than it's primitive ancient-earth version. The device? the logarithmic slide rule.


Completely analog. Also fantastic. The slide rule (in the right hands) can calculate multiplication, division, trigonometric ratios, square roots, logarithms, and more, depending on the model. They used these all the time in the days before the scientific calculator. Reading about slide rules sixty gazillion years in the future made me giggle like a little girl.

The physicists are pitted against the psychics, who are guardians of the "Seldon Plan", a map through history of the Foundation's sociopolitical status. The idea is that today's encephalographic analysis plus the then burgeoning science of psychology yields scientific control over the mind. Once the first foundation re-establishes centralized galactic government, the second foundation will swoop in and become the ultra-intelligent ruling class that, by virtue of their powers over the minds of their proletariat, will rule indefinitely. Most of these mind games, interestingly enough, concern not blatant thought control, idea implanting or mind reading, but emotional control. That is, control over a subject's emotional state. Best way to stop rebellion? Give your troops an artificial loyalty to the cause. Best way to conceal your existence? Make everyone in the vicinity completely unconcerned with you.

Mind powers, unfortunately, have fallen into disfavour (even ill repute) in most science fiction these days. Having read this book, I can hypothesize a few theories which my commenters are more than welcome to prove false if they so desire. First, psychic powers are not scientific enough for science fiction. The whole "latent ability" argument doesn't really hold water because if it were true we would never have invented manual communication. Dolphins are a possibility though. Second, it is more difficult for a reader to sympathize with a character that is fundamentally distinct from normal human experience. You can't just say, "your brain is not capable of understanding this exchange", and expect the reader to say "wow! that's pretty awesome". They are more likely to say "wow! Now I don't know what to think." Third, the science of biochemistry and molecular biology has more or less demystified many of the gray areas authors of all sorts liked to play in. I would love to digress into how neurology has killed the ghost in the machine, but I'll save that for another post..

The Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Definitely worth the read.

PS: I noticed as I was writing this, the words "physics" and "Psychics" are almost anagrams of one another. All "physics" needs is another 'c'.

Administrative

Sorry everyone, this isn't a real post. I need to publish a verification code for Technorati before I can be added to their indexes.

A shameless ploy to increase readership.

Here's the code:

AP5NQV9QD3C9

I expect I'll have another post ready for my loyal blogonauts by monday or so.