Freud Through Ayn Rand Colored Glasses

According to [Freud’s] theory, the prime mover in human nature is an unperceivable entity with a will and purpose of its own, the unconscious—which is basically an “id,” i.e., a contradictory, amoral “it” seething with innate, bestial, primevally inherited, imperiously insistent cravings or “instincts.” In deadly combat with this element is man’s conscience or “superego,” which consists essentially, not of reasoned moral convictions, but of primitive, illogical, largely unconscious taboos or categorical imperatives, representing the mores of the child’s parents (and ultimately of society), whose random injunctions every individual unquestioningly “introjects” and cowers before. Caught in the middle between these forces—between a psychopathic hippie screaming: satisfaction now! and a jungle chieftain intoning: tribal obedience!—sentenced by nature to ineradicable conflict, guilt, anxiety, and neurosis is man, i.e., man’s mind, his reason or “ego,” the faculty which is able to grasp reality, and which exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche’s two irrational masters.

As this theory makes eloquently clear, Freud’s view of reason is fundamentally Kantian. Both men hold that human thought is ultimately governed, not by a man’s awareness of external fact, but by inner mental elements independent of such fact. Both see the basic task of the mind not as perception, but as creation, the creation of a subjective world in compliance with the requirements of innate (or “introjected”) mental structures. . . .

The real root of the outrage his own doctrines provoked, Freud says with a certain pride, is their assault on “the self-love of humanity.” Whatever the “wounds” that men have suffered from earlier scientific theories, he explains, the “blow” of psychoanalysis “is probably the most wounding.” The blow, he states, is the idea that man is not “supreme in his own soul,” “that the ego is not master in its own house.” ...

Freud offers to the world not man the dutiful, decorous nonperceiver (as in Kant); not man the defeated plaything of grand-scale forces, such as a malevolent reality or God or society or a “tragic flaw” (as in the works of countless traditional cynics and pessimists); but man the defeated plaything of the gutter; man the smutty pawn shaped by sexual aberrations and toilet training, itching to rape his mother, castrate his father, hoard his excrement; man the sordid cheat who pursues science because he is a frustrated voyeur, practices surgery because he is a sublimating sadist, and creates the David because he craves, secretly, to mold his own feces.

Man as a loathsomely small, ordure-strewn pervert: such is the sort of “wound” that Freud inflicted on the being who had once been defined, in a radiantly different age, as the “rational animal.”

Leonard Peikoff

writing in “The Ominous Parallels”

quoted in “The Ayn Rand Lexicon”

Will Freud Finally Slip?

Pushed to the fringes of academia,
psychoanalysts are concerned their practice is dying

Joseph Brean
National Post


Saturday, April 21, 2007

It would have been disappointing to leave the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, Division 39 (Psychoanalysis), in Toronto this week without hearing a Freudian slip.

Luckily, in a panel on the sorry state of psychoanalytic research in universities, Joel Weinberger, a professor at Adelphi University on Long Island, N.Y., observed that, by failing to adequately mentor the students who will take their place, "we are shooting ourselves in the groin."

It was rich, because psychoanalysis is indeed gravely wounded, unable to attract new talent because of its financial impotence, and dying a slow death on the margins of academia, where it is maligned by mainstream psychologists as unscientific, sex-obsessed, postmodern witchcraft. So where else would the mortal blow be struck against this century- old talk therapy? Achilles had his heel. Freudians have their groins.

"I'm pretty sure that psychoanalysis will survive," said Nancy McWilliams, president of Division 39, in a keynote lecture on Thursday evening. "At least in intellectual circles and among those who can afford intensive and long-term treatments ... Whether we will survive in psychology is another matter."

Dr. McWilliams, who is in private practice in New Jersey and a professor at Rutgers University, spoke of the "increasing estrangement between academia and psychoanalysis," and complained that psychologists in other fields repackage their ideas as new discoveries that fit the modern scientific fashion, with its emphasis on genetics and drugs.

She said the upshot is that today there are fewer arrogant psychoanalysts, who were attracted to the field because of its popularity in the mid-20th century. Nowadays, the hot-heads go into genetics or pharmacology.

"They hurt a lot of feelings," she said of her predecessors. "They insulted a lot of academics. We can't afford to talk like that anymore."

Joel Paris, chairman of the department of psychiatry at McGill University, said the continuing decline of psychoanalysis in Canada and the United States is partly due to the decline in religion, because church "was the place in the community where suffering was explained." But it also reflects a mood shift among potential patients. "The same people who would have come in to me and said, 'Can you get me into therapy?' are now asking, 'Can you get me a better anti-depressant?' " Dr. Paris said in a phone interview.

Dr. McWilliams said recent psychology graduates, pressured by their employers to produce research and grant money, do not have the time to get crucial experience in private clinical practice, and even those who are intellectually sympathetic to Freud's legacy eventually lose touch with what it means to be a therapist. For older, psychoanalytically minded university psychologists, there is a temptation to migrate to the philosophy, sociology, or English departments, just to be able to speak in metaphor with their colleagues.

Her address was not entirely negative. She did, for example, suggest that, over time, an analyst could have helped Cho Seung-hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, "to make sense of his suffering." But overall, the entire conference, which continues this weekend at the Royal York Hotel, was steeped in pessimism. Stories abounded of students who lack the philosophical background to properly discuss 19th-century Viennese thought, and of analysts forced to hide their psychoanalytical background on grant applications, or are treated like "dinosaurs" and "twoheaded freaks" in their faculty lounges.

"They're giving us a taste of our own medicine that we gave them 20 years ago, with our arrogance and dismissiveness in terms of their methodologies," said Michael Nash, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee.

"We deal in meaning, and that's not the currency right now," he said.

In university psychology departments, the dominant field is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which aims to influence emotions by getting patients to modify thoughts and behaviours. It is more closely allied with the fields of pharmacology and genetics, and as a result, it receives most of the research money, which in turn determines what sort of young professor a department is inclined to hire.

Psychoanalysis aims to do the opposite of CBT, to influence thoughts and behaviours by targeting the emotional roots of the problem. To do so, it relies

on exhaustive discussion in often arcane and abstract terms, with outcomes that have proved nearly impossible to measure. And so compared to CBT's short-term, targeted interventions, the multi-year process of psychoanalysis can make it seem as Dr. Paris described it: "marginal ... more an exploration of self than a medical treatment."

Even in the wider culture, mental illness has come to be seen as more physiological than intellectual, and more genetic than environmental, which makes people more inclined to take pills than to probe their psyches. In the age of the "chemical imbalance," when cigars are just cigars, and Ativan and Prozac hold more promise than Oedipal complexes and penis envy, the couch is looking increasingly like a horse and buggy.

Pop culture is where psychoanalysis gets its easiest ride, although usually with mock deference. The famous psychoanalytic technique of free association, in which a patient is asked to blurt out whatever is in their mind to help give voice to their inner conflicts, has been mocked almost to death, and the image of the analyst's couch continues to thrive in New Yorker cartoons, such as the one of the analyst asking the empty couch how long it has had these hallucinations, or the one who exclaims, "Wow! You need professional help."

But generally, the image of the greybearded, pipe-smelling man named Dr. Von Stumpf, or the feline woman with Oriental tastes named Tziporah, talking some anguished soul through their memories of toilet training, can seem at best

quaint, if not a bit nutty and sex-obsessed.

At its worst, it can look like a vastly expensive, risky and potentially pointless exercise in validating the anxieties of neurotic, middle-aged, urban wine-alcoholics with corporate health insurance, liberal arts educations and frustrated libidos. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but psychoanalysis is not the mental health breakthrough it was once hyped as, and it remains deeply resistant to objective, scientific study. Among the problems is that psychoanalysis takes upwards of three years, and you cannot have long-term control groups of mentally ill patients receiving no treatment. Another question is how do you measure peace of mind, or an epiphany?

The difficulty for modern analysts is in coming to terms with this frustration.

At one point, in the 1950s and '60s, when analysis was new and cost a princely $25 an hour, there was no problem. The future was Freudian. By the 1970s, just about every Canadian had experienced at least a taste of it in the Jungian imagery of Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, and by the end of that decade, Woody Allen had started to mine the field for comedy.

In recent years, psychoanalysts have had a tendency to clutch at the discoveries of neuroscience, which show processes of the brain that are not present to consciousness, and to hold them up as objective proof of their theories. But it is a huge leap to do as the analysts do, and describe these processes as equivalent to Freud's unconscious. This problem of semantics hangs over the entire emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis.

On television, it is a different story. Since it started in 1999, The Sopranos, in which an emotionally conflicted mobster and his female analyst exhibit textbook desires of transference and countertransference, has eased the pain immensely, by almost single-handedly resurrecting psychoanalysis as a topic of current discussion. But despite the ringing endorsements of people in the field grateful for the publicity, Tony's sessions with Dr. Melfiare about as accurate a depiction of the profession as CSI and Law & Order are of forensic scientists, police and criminal lawyers, which is to say accurate enough for a television drama.

In his 2006 book The Fall of an Icon, Dr. Paris writes that "the most serious problem for analysis has been its failure to keep its promises ... Once seen as a uniquely powerful method of treating the mentally ill, analysis has not been proved effective for severely disturbed patients."

The less it is studied, the more difficult it is to convince research funding bodies and health care providers that it should be funded at all. And so, in flirting with expulsion from the academy, modern psychoanalysis risks ending up like sailing or wine collecting, a hobby for the rich. Scott Bishop, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and an analyst in private practice, calls Dr. Paris "completely incorrect."

"We've proven that most of what happens in the brain is unconscious. That's one of Freud's central tenets," he said. "A lot of critics of psychoanalysis are actually criticizing Freud, as if psychoanalysis hasn't evolved since Freud."

Shortly after the Second World War, about five years after Freud's death, Viktor E. Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, gave a lecture to a club of Viennese intellectuals. He said psychoanalysis, in its initial incarnation, "not only adopted objectivity --it succumbed to it ... psychoanalysis made the human person into an object, the human being in a thing," and the whole enterprise is hindered by its "technically minded, mechanistic view" of the self.

In a way, the achievements of psychoanalysis since Frankl's criticism can be seen as a resolution of this problem, of ironing out the rough theoretical edges. Now it is pharmacology and CBT that are "technically minded and mechanistic," and exaggerating their potential, according to the analysts.

Freud might be famously dead, but as they search for new ways to prove their worth, Freudians still have a chance. As Dr. Weinberger, the Freudian slipper, said on Thursday, "We can despair and go home, or we can come up with some sort of compromise solution, which is what I thought psychoanalysis was all about."

© National Post 2007

Freud And Cake

... [T]he unconscious, as the name suggests, is precisely that region of mental life to which consciousness has no ready access. As such, it is inaccessible to positive description. Freud’s statement that its processes ‘show characteristics which are not met with again in the system immediately above it’ might be restated thus: unconscious processes cannot be captured in the language of conscious ones.

... Take the first ‘special characteristic’ of the unconscious Freud identifies: ‘it consists of drive-representatives [Triebrepräsentanzen] which seek to discharge their cathexes; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses’. In less technical terms: the unconscious is the domain of the unrestricted pleasure principle, an underground cavern of drives demanding perpetual satisfaction, drives so imperious they are oblivious to one another’s presence: ‘Drive impulses ... exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction’. The dry, quasi-scientific vocabulary can’t conceal—indeed only accentuates—the disturbing indeterminacy of the object it describes. Freud employs the authoritative tone of the man of science to delineate an entity beyond the reach of direct classification and observation.

How, then, are we to understand a force that violates (common) sense? A proverbial illustration may be helpful: I can of course desire both to have my cake and to eat it. But to be conscious is to know that discharging one of these desires cancels out the other. The unconscious does not know this: its desires both to possess and to consume the cake can exist side by side, blissfully impervious to their basic incompatibility. In the unconscious, I eat my cake and continue to demand I have it—not however, another cake, but precisely that cake, the one I’ve eaten.

Columbine

The Ax Ismail/Holden Caulfield Connection

Amid all the speculation about the meaning of the Virginia Tech killer’s phrase, Ax Ismail, I’m surprised folks are overlooking the obvious connection to “The Catcher In The Rye.”

Remember the scene just before Holden shoots up his dormitory?

Doesn't Holden have sex in his empty English class with the school receptionist, a girl Salinger inexplicably named "Ishmael?" Then, after their intimacy, doesn't the receptionist named Ishmael break the glass of a fire hose cabinet, take out the fire ax and chop off the head of the school’s principal?

I’m surprised the media isn’t running with this. It’s a good catch. Of course, it’s been a while since I’ve read through “The Catcher In The Rye,” so I might be mis-remembering one or two details . . .

The Videogame Contradiction

That was quick: Seems that video games are already being blamed for the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Yesterday, anti-video game activist Jack Thompson was expressing this opinion before anybody knew who the shooter was. Thompson says that the killer likely trained or rehearsed his actions in games like "Grand Theft Auto" or "Doom."

Last night, Dr. Phil took the same line on CNN's "Larry King Live," as pointed out in the site GamePolitics.com

"Common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high."

[Va. Tech: Dr. Phil & Jack Thompson Blame Video Games]

The underlying concept in the many anti-videogame tirades the media has featured over the last three days seems to be that violent videogames have so shaped the minds of America’s youth that the mis-shaped minds are now releasing their violence on society at large in the form of school shootings and other violent events.

But one thing almost all the school shootings have in common is that the majority of the victims are young, often the same age as the shooter, and the victims almost never fight back. Indeed, only a few victims even seem to make an effort to run away.

If so many young people have had their thinking shaped by violent videogames, why don’t more of the young victims resort to violence themselves? Why don’t they run en mass? Why don’t they attack en mass? Why don’t even one or two attack?

I believe the answer is that videogames, even the so-called ‘violent’ videogames, do not encourage violence in people at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The process of sitting down in front of a screen is inherently passive.

I suspect the popularity of videogames among young people is more directly related to why so few young people fight back rather than why a tiny number of young people freak out and engage in mass killing.

The issue of video and its effect on the human mind was covered in extraordinary detail in a classic book called “Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television,” by ex-advertising man Jerry Mander. I suspect that issues of both aggression and passivity explored in this book apply even more in the modern world where young people spend uncounted hours every day staring at television screens and computer screens.

The Copycat Effect

[This is Monday’s entry from Loren Coleman’s blog:]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, April 16, 2007

VA Tech Shooting

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing has a good overview of the Virginia Tech shooting today. It appears 33 dead are confirmed, including the shooter (described in some reports as an Asian male with a black hood).

Sadly, I saw this coming.

In an article based on an email I sent to a Canadian TV reporter Bridget Brown on September 18th and her followup interview, CTV noted that Expert predicted 'cluster' of school shootings, on October 3rd, 2006.

In that article, I was quoted as noting the psychological process that these shooters appear to be "competing for the highest body count." Sadly, we've seen that come true today.

Also, the news item from last fall noted: "He says that while the Pennsylvania shootings may not be the last in this cluster, the copycat crimes will likely slow down as we near winter. He says spring, and the anniversary of Columbine, could be enough to spark another cycle of tragedy." Again, my prediction of a reigniting of the school shooting wildfire during this very week was revealed today.

Interestingly, I am been interviewed by Canadian media today, and will be on the CBC tomorrow. The media north of the border seem less threatened by what I've said in The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines. I was interviewed after the Dawson College schooling last fall frequently by Canadian television and radio stations, less by American programs.

Xeni Jardin wonders how I would feel about what I am hearing on the American cable news networks. To listen to CNN and MSNBC is to watch the news people stumble through this story.

These cable news people certainly should be aware that there is a copycat effect going on here. They have been reporting on this for ten years now, and can't see the legacy between wall-to-wall coverage and what happens when you elevate Columbine the way the media has.

Specfically today, there is something over-the-top being heard in some of the reports that this shooting today is the "deadliest" in American history. Also, incorrect information is being shared. These newspeople are misreporting on the profiles and the changes in it. Cable news earlier this afternoon misrepresented that this is an American-only problem. During the early evening, I just watched a report on CNN saying that the few historical non-American school shootings have been done by adult non-students.

Of course, this is simplistic. The American cable networks are ignoring Taber, Alberta (1999) to Erfurt, Germany (2002), and several in-between international events where the shooters have been relatively young people. The US media outlets are also forgetting that most of the fall 2006 American school shooting incidents involved outsiders, non-students and adults.

Last fall, as I told all that would listen, there was a shift in the overall North American shooter profile. It moved from one of mostly Caucasian males who were members of the student body to "outsiders." It began in earnest with the the youthful South Asian immigrant who became happier as a member of the cult of Columbine before his attack at Dawson College, and the two adult alleged sexual molesters who victimized young females in Bailey, Colorado and at the Amish school in Pennsylvania.

Will more of these happen? Probably.

There was a Columbine copycat shooting last week (April 11) in Oregon (with no deaths) in which the shooter said he got the idea after watching National Geographic's April 7th showing of "The Final Report: Columbine."

This VA Tech shooting comes days before the Columbine anniversary on Friday, April 20th.

I would definitely say we are going to be entering a period for the next month of many threats, many plots, and a few shootings.

Don't let your guard down. Awareness is key, communication is important, and quick response is a must.

posted by Loren Coleman at 4:22 PM

Romance, Terror And The Word ‘Piss’

A few years back I worked for a company in a building just a few blocks south of the Water Tower shopping center on Chicago’s near north side. One morning a bunch of us were avoiding work by standing around talking about how our expectations for romance had become more realistic as we’d gotten older.

“Realistic, heck,” I said, “at this point if I could meet a woman who could get through one date without saying the word ‘piss’ I’d marry her.”

One of the women there gave me a sharp look. Linda said she didn’t use that word under any circumstances. I said every woman I knew used the word all the time. She said, again, that she never used the word. We talked a bit more and made a date to go to lunch that afternoon. (This is a different Linda than the Linda’s I’ve written about earlier. In my life I’ve known a strange surplus of women named Linda and women named Joanne.)

That afternoon we walked west and did some window shopping along the cool shops between Michigan Avenue and State Street. We had lunch at a small cafe. We had a good time, nobody used any unpleasant words and after lunch we walked slowly back to work.

As we approached Michigan Avenue, I began to search for the words I’d use to congratulate Linda on being a person true to her word. At Michigan Avenue we stopped at a construction site an entire block wide. A new skyscraper was going up and the entire block was fenced off with a high wooden wall. Linda pointed south and started to walked around the block, but I stopped her.

“Look,” I said, “we can see Michigan Avenue through the doors in the wall. I bet we can cut right though the construction site.”

“We’re dressed in business clothes,” Linda said. “We’ll stand out. We’ll get caught. We’ll get in trouble.”

Just that second, as if on cue, a team of five or six businessmen and women walked past us and entered the construction site. They must have been architects or inspectors or something. At any rate, we were dressed just like them. When they walked past us, I grabbed Linda’s hand and pulled her after me and we followed the well-dressed people into the construction site.

“Look official,” I said to Linda.

We walked along a narrow pathway made by wood boards lined up in the mud and gravel. The iron girders of the new skyscraper towered above us ten or twelve stories. All sorts of machinery roared around us. Concrete mixers spun around. Torches blasted blue and orange flame. Cranes somewhere overhead dropped empty pallets on one side of the pathway while other cranes lifted pallets full of construction supplies. The noise was so loud we couldn’t hear our footsteps. The boards under our feet were constantly shaking from the huge equipment all around us engaged in putting up the new building.

About halfway through the site the team of well dressed people turned off the main path and entered a shadowed area directly under the metal skeleton of the new building. Linda and I continued walking straight. I put my hand on Linda’s shoulder and gestured as if I were showing her something. I was trying to look official. We continued walking through the site and exited onto Michigan Avenue.

I clapped my hands and laughed, turning to look back the way we’d come. I pointed. “That was cool!” I said. “Did you see all that stuff? We should do that again. That was fun!”

I looked at Linda. Her eyes, now, were strangely narrowed and she was looking up and down Michigan Avenue in such an odd fashion I got the idea she wanted to kneel down and kiss the sidewalk. Then she looked at me. It wasn’t a happy look. Her eyes became even more narrow. She slapped me across the stomach with the back of her hand. “That’s wasn’t cool!” she said. “That wasn’t fun! That was terrifying! That scared the piss out of me!”

My eyes went wide. I pointed at her. I said, “Ah-ha!”

Linda rolled her eyes and made an exasperated sound. She turned away and started across Michigan Avenue without waiting for me.

Peter Gave Himself Up For Lost

Peter was most dreadfully frightened; he rushed all over the garden, for he had forgotten the way back to the gate.

He lost one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe amongst the potatoes.

After losing them, he ran on four legs and went faster, so that I think he might have got away altogether if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net, and got caught by the large buttons on his jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.

Peter gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears; but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows, who flew to him in great excitement, and implored him to exert himself.

Mr. McGregor came up with a sieve, which he intended to pop upon the top of Peter; but Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket behind him.

Peter Rabbit Wiki Page

God In “A New Kind Of Science”

In physicist Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science,” the index entries for ‘God’ occur between the index entry for ‘Goats, fortune-telling from’ and the index entries for ‘Gödel, Kurt F.’

These are the index entries for ‘God.’ (The book “A New Kind Of Science” is online, but I cannot link directly into it because sometimes the site makes you register and sometimes it does not. Registration is free, however, so you get a lot for taking the time to fill in the slots!)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

God

      and character of space, p. 1028

      and complexity, p. 861

      and free will, p. 1135

      identified with universe, p. 1196

      and objects in nature, p. 828

      and origin of complexity, p. 3

      and phenomena in astronomy, p. 834

      and physics as intelligence, p. 1191

      and purpose for universe, p. 1185

      as source of complexity in biology, p. 1001

      and ultimate theory of physics, p. 1025

      and universe as intelligent, p. 1196


      see also Religion
      see also Theology

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A New Kind Of Science Website

Stephen Wolfram’s Website

Stephen Wolfram’s Wiki Page

Underwater This Is The Cathedral Sea

Underwater

Underwater, this is the cathedral
sea. Diving, our bubbles rise
as prayers are said to do, and burst
into our natural atmosphere—
occupying, from this perspective,
the position of a heaven.

The ceiling is silver, and the air
deep green translucency. The worshippers
pray quietly, wave their fins.
You can see the color of their prayer
deep within their throats: scarlet, some,
and some, fine scaled vermilion; others

pass tight-lipped with moustaches
trailing and long paunches, though
they are almost wafer-thin seen sideways,
or unseen except for whiskers.
Further down, timorous sea-spiders slam
their doors, shy fish disappear

into their tenement of holes, and eels
warn that they have serpent tails.
Deep is wild, with beasts one meets
usually in dreams. Here the giant octopus
drags in its arms. We meet it.
We are hungry in the upper air, and you

have the sea-spear that shoots deep;
you fire accurately, raising a conflagration
of black ink. The animal grabs stone
in slow motion, pulls far under a ledge
and piles the loose rock there as if
to hide might be enough. It holds tight,

builds sanctuary, and I think cries
“sanctuary!”—it dies at your second shot.
We come aboveboard then, with our eight-armed
dinner and no hunger left, pursued by the bland
eyes of fish who couldn’t care, by black
water and the death we made there.

Michael Schmidt
“Sound And Sense,” Fourth Edition

A Mainstream Sports Reporter Meets Evangelical Beliefs

... Still, I ultimately resisted taking the easy, sensational way out. ... I suggested that the three players had collectively succumbed to the stress of playing in a strange exotic environment under the extremely competitive conditions that typified the minor leagues of tennis. Without the tennis ministry there to provide a safety net, they began to make it up as they went along, feeding off one another’s spiritual hunger and anxieties in an unhealthy way.

... The column generated a surprising amount of mail, ranging from nutty denunciations of Christianity to letters that were uncritical and almost pathetically thankful for the simple fact that something—anything—about Christianity had made it between the covers of Tennis magazine. But one letter made me angry at first, then it got me thinking. ... The striking thing about this was the accusation that I didn’t “understand” Christianity. How could someone raised as a Christian and educated at a Catholic university not understand? Well, I eventually came to understand that the answer to that one was, “Pretty easily.”

... Some elements of Christian doctrine need to be spelled out because typical secular individuals, including highly educated ones, often don’t understand them. They see Christianity as a bewildering jungle of arbitrary, antiprogressive doctrines (doctrines that some, particularly fundamentalists, take literally). This attitude is shared by nominal Christians who basically think that believing is a good “idea” for its social and moral value, but find fundamentalism scary and arrogant. These prejudices prevent lively and productive debate, and they make it difficult to grasp the problems with which believers grapple. So let’s take a quick look at some of the most troublesome claims of Christianity and the defense that believers make for them.

CLAIM: Christianity is not a way but the way to spiritual salvation.

DEFENSE: Despite the existence of other great, lasting religions and personages, including Muhammad and Buddha, only Jesus Christ made the explicit claim to be the Son of God. Of course, a lot of other people have also subsequently claimed to be the Son of God, but they did not become what Christ did—an important, if not the most important, and well-known figure in world history, an achievement nearly as mind-boggling as Christ’s claim.

This puts Christ in a very different league from other religious figures. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, this claim made Christ one of three things: a good, albeit deeply deluded man; a manipulative crackpot; or, well, the Son of God. Anybody who would take religions seriously must choose one of those three descriptions and figure out the consequences.


CLAIM: The Bible contains literal truth.

DEFENSE: If Christ was just another teacher and moralist, the Bible is just another old book full of symbolism, poetry, and moral guidelines set down at a time when different problems, values, and needs obtained. But if Christ was indeed the Son of God, the Bible is by far the most extraordinary document ever written. Instead of interpreting the Bible by the standards of our time, our time must be judged by the standards of the Bible.


CLAIM: Homosexuality (substitute abortion, infidelity, and so forth) is wrong.

DEFENSE: The Bible is a book full of restrictions and prescriptions, but the Christian God is not only all-knowing but all-loving and all-forgiving. That’s why, unlike some other tyrant, he really does have the authority to tell you how to live. And that’s what makes him God, instead of just another three thousand-year-old dog who speaks to you through the medium of some guy working out of a mall in Santa Monica. The essence of Christianity is love and forgiveness, so its mandate to believers is to “hate sin, love the sinner.” And even those who most flagrantly violate biblical mandates can be saved through belief.


CLAIM: An individual’s way of life and actions have less to do with his or her salvation than whether or not the person believes.

DEFENSE: Accepting this has something to do with Christian humility, in that it implies that even the most murderous serial killer, may ultimately end up saved. This may not seem fair, but fairness itself is a temporal notion based on the very shaky premise that you and I can be the ultimate judges of our brethren. The preeminence of believing also ensures that nobody can buy his way into heaven. Anybody who has ever wondered why Donald Trump or Aristotle Onassis seemed to have all the luck will appreciate this. The paramount importance of belief offers universal access to salvation, and the fact that so many people still choose not to believe is a confirmation of the flawed, stricken condition of human nature.


CLAIM: It is possible to have a personal relationship with God.

DEFENSE: This is the bonus baby that bothers so many people. God is like Michael Jackson. Some people know him, others don’t. Some will, some won’t. Some want to, some don’t. The key difference, however, is that a lot of people who want to know Michael Jackson never will, but anybody who wants to can know God. Thus, Christianity is not only remarkably exclusive but breathtakingly inclusionary. It is open to every person who fulfills its single, overwhelming demand to believe.


And, finally, knowing God doesn’t give you a leg up on anyone else. And it isn’t any easier getting along with him than with Michael Jackson, your wife, or your boss. In fact, if you don’t have problems with God, you don’t have any more of a relationship with him than you do with your wife or boss.

Peter Bodo
“The Courts Of Babylon”

My Little Cthulhu

My Little Cthulhu to Arrive in 2007

Production on My Little Cthulhu will start in December 2006 and the toys should arrive at the distributor by April of 2007. For wholesale inquiries please contact DKE Toys or look for a solicitation through Diamond Comics/Alliance Distribution.

My Little Cthulhu is an 8"vinyl figure and has a suggested retail price of $29.99. There will also be set of six Little Victims & Little Minions ™ that will retail for $14.99.

Oh, and stay tuned for details on an exclusive limited edition My Little Cthulhu.

Dreamland Toyworks Homepage

Cthulhu Wiki Page

Enchantment And Notan

... The search for Notan should force us into a more creative observation of our surroundings and revive in us a sense of the wonder of life.

Much of this discovery will involve the recovery of something that we all once had in childhood. When we were very young, we were all artists. We all came into this world with the doors of perception wide open. Everything was a delightful surprise. Everything, at first, required the slow, loving touch of our tongues and our hands. Long before we could speak we knew the comfort of our mother’s warm body, the delightful feel of a furry toy. Smooth and rough surfaces, things cold and hot surprised and enchanted us. Touch by touch we built up our store of tactile impressions, keenly sensed in minute detail.

Later on, this tactile sensing was transferred to our eyes, and we were able to “feel” through the sense of vision things beyond the grasp of our hands. This kind of seeing was not the rapid sophisticated eye sweep of the well-informed. This kind of seeing was a slow, uncritical examination in depth. The more we looked, the more lovely, surprising things appeared, until we were pervaded by that wordless thrill which is the sense of wonder.

None of us have lost our store of tactile memories. Nor have we lost our sense of wonder. All that has happened is that we have substituted identifying and labeling, which can be done very rapidly for the tactile sort of feel-seeing which requires much more time and concentration. For example, if you were asked to look at the edge of your desk and estimate its length, it would take you only a few seconds to flick your eyes back and forth and say it is so many inches long. But suppose you were asked to run the tip of your finger along the edge of the desk and count every tiny nick? You would press your finger along the edge and move it very, very slowly, and your eye would move no faster than your finger. This slow, concentrated way of feeling and seeing is the first step towards regaining our sense of wonder.

There was a time when man moved no faster than his feet or the feet of some animal that could carry him. During that period the artistic or creative spirit seemed to have free expression. Today, in order to be creative and yet move smoothly and efficiently through our fast-paced world, we must be able to function on two different speed levels. The mistake we have made, often with tragic results, is to try to do all our living at the speed our machines have imposed upon us.

In order to live at this speed we must scan the surface of things, pick out salient aspects, disregard secondary features; and there is certainly nothing wrong in this if we are driving on a busy freeway. But when we allow this pressure to invade every aspect of our life, we begin to “lose touch,” to have a feeling that we are missing something, and we are hungry for we don’t know what. When that happens, we have begun to suffer from aesthetic malnutrition. Fortunately, the cure for this condition is very pleasant, and although it takes a little self-discipline at the beginning, the results are worth the effort.

By the time we finished the third Notan problem we should have noticed how Notan operates in the allied arts. In architecture we are suddenly aware of the spaces between the windows, at the ballet we notice how the spaces between the dancers open and close, and in music we realize that rhythm is made by the shapes of silence between the notes.

Everywhere we look we see the principles of Notan in action. Trees are not silhouetted against blank air, but hold blue spangles between their leaves while branches frame living shapes of sky. Space seems to be pulled between the leaves of a fern. We delight in the openings between the petals of a flower or the spokes of a wheel. This endless exchange between form and space excites us. Once more we feel in touch with our world; our aesthetic sense is being fed and we are comforted.

...Since we are no longer children, this innocence of vision is not based on ignorance, but rather on the ability to discard incidental bits of information until we lay bare the basic generating principle. And this is where self-discipline is necessary. We may have been taught that butterflies are lovely and toads are ugly, so we admire the butterfly and shrink away from the toad without really examining it to find out if what we have been taught is true. Or we are taught that flowers are good and weeds are bad, so we pull up the latter without a glance.

To the artist’s eye there is no good or bad. There is just the inappropriate. In the garden weeds are not appropriate, but in the vacant lot they offer a world of enchantment. And after we have learned to see the beauty in weeds, even though we have to pull them out of the garden, we can first admire their design.

When no preconceived ideas keep us from looking and we take all the time we need to really “feel” what we see—when we are able to do that—that universe opens up and we catch our breath in awe at the incredible complexity of design in the humblest things. It is only when this happens that we regain our sense of wonder.

Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield
“Notan: The Dark-Light Principle Of Design”

Distortion And Notan

Most of us resist any distortion of a recognizable image. Yet the artist must distort or modify form, not only in order to express his ideas, but to preserve the unity of the picture plane. All spaces must be designed so as to maintain an exchange of importance with one another. When the design is successful, nothing can be added, nothing taken away. All relationships must be established and united through this exchange of equality.

The privilege and necessity of design to distort for the sake of unity has always been an instinctive device in the arts of primitive cultures. ...

... Distortion for distortion’s sake would be just that. But distortion in order to let “no-thing,” the background, have reality, “thing-ness,” produces harmony and an exchange between the forms.

When we begin to work in art, we find that we do not mind distorting some kinds of things that can actually grow in deformed ways—trees, for instance. But what about a chair or a chimney? Man-made structures or functional objects are the most difficult for us to distort. Here our resistance is greatest, for objects designed for a utilitarian purpose must maintain their shapes and proportions in order to serve their functions.

Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield
“Notan: The Dark-Light Principle Of Design”

The Solid And The Fluid In Notan

...Notan came into being when both the positive and negative areas began to exist as realities in balance. When the black weights or holes on a static surface became rocks and water seen as equal entities, then Notan was achieved. Notan was found when the spaces between the forms became one unified form flowing like a mountain stream around and between the rocks or positive shapes, sealing the whole design into an organic whole.

This experience is at the basis of the culture of the Japanese bonseki garden, such as the Ryoanji in Kyoto, where the sand is raked and appears to flow like water around the rocks. In our problem we have given these black forms the idea of weight, considering them as pebbles. By giving them the sensation of weight, we also gave them stability; and when this happens, the negative space is released to flow in a pattern between the rocks and holds the entire composition together in dynamic balance. The rocks are held in a fluid pattern which they themselves create! After we observe how the space between the forms seems to move, we notice that the forms themselves seem to shift very slightly, and suddenly the format becomes the only fixed frame of reference. Again the Japanese bonseki gardens achieve exactly such an interchange of elements and utilize these wonderful principles of the interplay between the solid and the fluid. The solid and the fluid are universal polarities, and there will always be enjoyment for man in their interchange.

Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield
“Notan: The Dark-Light Principle Of Design”

Notan

Notan is a Japanese word meaning dark-light. The word, however, means more than that. The principle of Notan as used here must be further defined as the interaction between positive (light) and negative (dark) space.

The idea of this interaction in Notan is embodied in the ancient Eastern symbol of the Yang and the Yin, which consists of mirror images, one white and one black, revolving around a point of equilibrium. Here the positive and negative areas together make a whole created through a unity of opposites that have equal and inseparable reality. In the Yang and the Yin symbol, as in Notan, opposites complement, they do not conflict. Neither seeks to negate or dominate the other, only to relate in harmony. It is the interaction of the light and the dark, therefore, that is most essential.

Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield
“Notan: The Dark-Light Principle Of Design”

2007 1st Quarter Index

March Archive


Friday, March 30, 2007 -- Ode To An American Zombie

Thursday, March 29, 2007 -- My Favorite Cannibalism Song

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 -- The Basic Zombie Plot

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 -- My Favorite Zombie Movie

Monday, March 26, 2007 -- Rave To The Grave: Return Of The Living Dead #5


Friday, March 23, 2007 -- Tiny Purple Fishes Swim Laughing

Thursday, March 22, 2007 -- Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #4

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 -- Triss

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 -- Gloomy Bear

Monday, March 19, 2007 -- RIP Brad Delp (June 12, 1951 – March 9, 2007)


Friday, March 16, 2007 -- Surfacing Like Well The Loch Ness Monster

Thursday, March 15, 2007 -- “A Most Excellent Philosophy”

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 -- AquaBabies

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 -- Real Life Shapeshifting

Monday, March 12, 2007 -- “Will Slime Molds Take Over Our Moon, Now?”


Friday, March 09, 2007 -- Jack Chick

Thursday, March 08, 2007 -- Captain America Has Been Cut Down By A Sniper

Wednesday, March 07, 2007 -- Is Paris Hilton A Superhero?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007 -- Is Paris Hilton A Supervillain?

Monday, March 05, 2007 -- Seven Characteristics Of A Supervillain


Friday, March 02, 2007 -- Happy Birthday Theodor Geisel!

Thursday, March 01, 2007 -- Mandelbrot Flirt



February Arhcive


Wednesday, February 28, 2007 -- Anna Nicole Smith’s Dead Body, Jokes 1, 2 and 3

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 -- A Mischa Barton Loose End

Monday, February 26, 2007 -- In The Realms Of The Unreal Right Here


Friday, February 23, 2007 -- No Zen Here

Thursday, February 22, 2007 -- Why I Almost Never Use Rhyme

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 -- Winona Ryder Redux

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 -- My Britney Shaves Her Head Theory

Monday, February 19, 2007 -- Why Catching A Cold Makes Some People Cuter


Friday, February 16, 2007 -- Mycelium And Aurora Borealis

Thursday, February 15, 2007 -- Crannogs

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 -- Toadspawn Is Quite Unlike Frogspawn

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 -- A Woodland Path Encircles The Loch

Monday, February 12, 2007 -- There Is Only One Lake In Scotland


Friday, February 09, 2007 -- Jeanne Hébuterne — Art As A Grail

Thursday, February 08, 2007 -- Rocks In His Head

Wednesday, February 07, 2007 -- The Goblin Universe Sexuality Gedankenexperiment

Tuesday, February 06, 2007 -- The Other Reason To Burn Witches

Monday, February 05, 2007 -- Talking To People Who Can’t Talk To You


Friday, February 02, 2007 -- Micro Freudian Imperatives

Thursday, February 01, 2007 -- De Humani Corporis Fabrica



January Archive


Wednesday, January 31, 2007 -- meeting archy and mehitabel

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 -- Keys With Their Baffling Variety Of Curves

Monday, January 29, 2007 -- A Play Within Limitations


Friday, January 26, 2007 -- Natural History

Thursday, January 25, 2007 -- Night Buggin’

Wednesday, January 24, 2007 -- Spiders And Snakes

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 -- Actias Luna

Monday, January 22, 2007 -- Spiders


Friday, January 19, 2007 -- Daddy Needs A New Pair Of Shoes

Thursday, January 18, 2007 -- Melanie Daniels In Paris

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 -- Britney Spears And The Southern Polar Opening

Tuesday, January 16, 2007 -- The Mind’s Ocean

Monday, January 15, 2007 -- Middle Earth


Friday, January 12, 2007 -- Cryptobiosis

Thursday, January 11, 2007 -- Real Mainstream Professional Publishing #3

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 -- Real Mainstream Professional Publishing #2

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 -- Real Mainstream Professional Publishing #1

Monday, January 08, 2007 -- Have You Seen The Stars Tonight?


Friday, January 05, 2007 -- Saturn and Titan, And The Pleiades

Thursday, January 04, 2007 -- Asymmetry In Its Simplest State

Wednesday, January 03, 2007 -- Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum

Tuesday, January 02, 2007 -- The Full Moon Never Eclipses The Sun

Ode To An American Zombie

You ravished child of God, true, ugly

No lips to mourn Arcadia lost

No skin that won’t curl and fall like leaves

Forever cold, forever man-shaped

Forever gone from human passion

A landscape, empty, a sky, empty

A waste, a constant woe, could you speak

Would you just curse, or curse and say, too

Life is corruption, corruption life

That’s all till God’s fire eats corruption

My Favorite Cannibalism Song

Throw down all your silver spoons
Eat all the raw meat
With your hands

Pick it up piece by piece . . .
Pick it up piece by piece . . .

Where are the bodies for dinner?
I want my food!

What if you were starving to death
And the only food you had was me
What would you say to the cannibal question?
Would your answer be perfectly free?

Your mother told you never to eat your friends
With your fingers and hands
I say you ought to
Eat what you will
Shove it in your mouth any way that you can

You think that I will come to your mouth
Looking for a home
But I get stuck sideways in your throat
Like a Godot chicken bone

Where are the bodies for dinner?
I want my food!

Stay out the kitchen children
The cook is cleaning his rod
He just got back from the open market
Shooting his food on the run

Your mother told you never to eat your friends
With your fingers and hands
I say you ought to
Eat what you will
Shove it in your mouth any way that you can

Sharpen your teeth for the family feast
Let all the hungry drool roll down your chin
Hide the human and bring out the beast
Let all the animal games begin!

Where are the bodies for dinner?
I want my food!

You could learn to dine on your friends
Pour their bones into a cannibal soup
Muscles like steak blood like wine
Save the brains to be in the stew

Your mother told you never to eat your friends
With your fingers and hands
I say you ought to
Eat what you will
Shove it in your mouth any way that you can

Scarlet juices oozing slow
Boiling in the human steam
Is it human dinner we’re talking about?
Then slice me tender arm meat

Where are the bodies for dinner?
I want my food!

Oily fingers can hardly wait
Bodies are slumped facing the plate
Wake up the drunks the coffee’s on
Fourteenth courses have come and gone

So long
All day sucker
Your candy has come and gone
Happy to love you with your mouth wide open

Just keep coming
Cannibals all

Cannibals all!

Grace Slick
“Silver Spoon”

The Basic Zombie Plot

The basic zombie plot is very different from the basic plot of most horror films, and most films in general.

At their most basic, almost all plots are mysteries that people solve. Something happens. The hero or heroine attempts to figure out what happened and who is behind it. Then the hero or heroine attempts to figure out how to put things right. Personality and character are tested and revealed by how the hero or heroine figures out what’s going on and how he or she makes things right.

Zombie films are wildly different. Zombie films begin with the hero or heroine in a bad situation. Then the situation gets worse. Then the situation becomes still more horrible. Finally the situation becomes grotesquely unbearable. Personality and character are tested and revealed not by how the hero or heroine figures out things and solves things, but rather by how he or she reacts when confronted with the escalating chaos and hopelessness engulfing their world.

These are, at their root, philosophical differences and those philosophical roots are growing deep within religious soil.

Even though the basic elements of plots are seldom discussed by consumers of films, or even critics in the modern world, everyone still reacts at one level or another to the philosophy and religion implicit and unspoken within entertainment. And I think that’s why zombie films generate such passionate revulsion from some movie goers and such passionate engagement from fans.

In normal entertainment, normal plots, the basic unspoken philosophical assumptions are that we can know what is going on. We can figure out what is going on. There are individuals we can isolate as the cause of our problems. We can take meaningful action to make our problems go away. We can fix things and make the world right.

These beliefs are not axiomatically true beliefs. They are beliefs people choose to believe. They are philosophical beliefs that grow, flower, from various religious assumptions about the world around us.

These are expressions of the basic schism in the Christian world about the City of God. Is it Man’s job to create the City of God here on Earth and then Jesus will return and rule from that City? Or is it Man’s job to keep himself right with God until Jesus returns bringing with Him the City of God that He will then open to us?

Do the answers to our questions, the solutions to our problems, lie here, within and around us, or do the answers to our questions, the solutions to our problems, lie out there with God?

For the first two or three hundred years of Christianity, Christians looked to God. Then, for the next few hundred years Man turned his attention away from God and to this world and to men and women. Then the Reformation fractured the Christian world and nothing has been sorted out since.

Today Dominion Theology in its “official,” codified framework and throughout the secular and ‘mainstream’ religious Establishments still looks away from God and toward man, still works directly to build the City of God for Jesus. Other Evangelicals (without any official label but often identified as Premillennialists in general) acknowledge that Man cannot Save himself or this world and rather must always look to God, and it is God who will cleanse this world and deliver His City to men.

This conflict—unstated, unspoken, unlabeled—defines almost all art and entertainment. Sometimes it’s almost invisible even if you look for it. Sometimes it’s bluntly obvious.

The basic zombie plot makes things pretty plain. And the intense, emotional responses zombie films inspire—for better and worse—testify to the deep-seated place the conflict holds in all of us.

Premillennialism Wiki Page

Dominion Theology Wiki Page

My Favorite Zombie Movie

“Return Of The Living Dead #3” isn’t just my favorite zombie movie, it is also one of my favorite films of all time.

This film was directed by Brian Yuzna and written by John Penney. The heroine is played by Melinda Clarke and the hero is J. Trevor Edmond. (Melinda Clarke, of course, later portrayed Lady Heather on “CSI.”)

George Romero’s genre-defining zombie films all have had a political subtext. Most clearly, “Dawn Of The Dead” was set in a shopping mall and we see repeated images of the zombies continuing to stagger through the motions of consumer life. “Day Of The Dead” presents military men at odds with scientists while ‘regular’ people just try to make it through the day. Direct-to-video, low-budget zombie films usually follow Romero’s example and at least pay lip service to using the genre to make some statement about zombies as externalizations of the political corruption defining society at large.

“Return Of The Living Dead #3” comes out of the blue and pushes aside genre conventions by delivering a coming of age, Romeo-and-Juliet story! All the typical elements of a zombie film are in place but the entire focus of the story is on a young man and young woman trying to find their places in life, making choices and dealing with the consequences of their choices.

It’s a classic tragedy, told within the trappings of government, business and social corruption and, of course, cannibalism.

It’s a great film that does all those things avant garde cinema is supposed to do. There are things to think about. There is counter-point imagery challenging any thought process at all. There’s emotional content that is sometimes underscored and sometimes undercut. There is tension and resolution without fakery, tragedy without pathos, a challenging viewing experience that repays the effort by delivering a unique assemblage of—to use words of the zombie lexicon—chills and thrills.

And the ending makes me cry every time I see it.

My favorite zombie movie: “Return Of The Living Dead #3”

“Return Of The Living Dead #3” Wiki Page

Rave To The Grave: Return Of The Living Dead #5

I’m talking about this movie today just because I watched it over the weekend and it was not nearly as bad as I anticipated.

“Necropolis: Return Of The Living Dead #4” was not just a bad movie—it was so bad it wasn’t even fun, totally without value. Apparently “Rave To The Grave” was made at the same time as “Necropolis” by the same director with much of the same cast but only recently released. That’s a bad sign.

However, “Rave To The Grave” is reasonably fun. It’s a bad movie, don’t get me wrong, but at least it’s a fun bad movie.

The heroine, Aimee-Lynn Chadwick, has a Tara Reid-like kind of pretty, inoffensive charm.

The DVD cover art is pretty cool. The Kari Byron-looking girl in the cover art, sadly, never appears in the movie. Too bad, because Kari Byron as an almost naked zombie would have made the film even more fun . . .

The special effects are generally adequate. There are a couple of terrible effects. Unlike many zombie films, however, “Rave To The Grave” builds to a large, outdoor conclusion, so at least there aren’t endless scenes of zombies staggering through corridors.

If you’re a fan of zombie films and if you enjoy fun bad films, “Rave To The Grave” takes this franchise back to the energy and fun of “Return Of The Living Dead #1.”



Tomorrow: My Favorite Zombie Film

Tiny Purple Fishes Swim Laughing

You thought the leaden winter
Would bring you down forever
So you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun . . .

The colors of the sea
Blind your eyes like trembling mermaids
You touch those distant beaches
With their tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By Sirens sweetly singing
Now sparkling waves are calling you
To kiss their white-laced lips . . .

You see a girl’s brown body
Dancing through the turquoise
Her footsteps make you follow
Where the sky loves the sea
When your fingers find her
She drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples
In the tissues of your mind . . .

Tiny purple fishes
Swim laughing through your fingers
She wants to take you with her
To the heartland of the winter . . .

Her name is Aphrodite
She rides a crimson shell
You fear you cannot leave her
For you touched those distant sands
With their tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By Sirens sweetly singing . . .

Tiny purple fishes
Swim laughing through your fingers
She wants to take you with her
To the heartland of the winter . . .

Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #4

Anime Girl

Oh, Sasquatch, a construction manager at the new Virgin suborbital tourist spaceport says that soon I must get used to hearing only wind in these trees, because his work crews will round up all the wildlife and relocate it to a nature preserve!

Sasquatch

Breath deeply and be at peace, Anime Girl! If any men or women in jumpsuits try to round up me and take me away from you their manager will need an orbital spaceship to collect the pieces of them that I don’t bother to eat.

Anime Girl

Oh, Sasquatch, your jaws can rip through flesh and bone like a person bites through toast, but when I touch your cheek you shiver like a kitten purring. I love you, Sasquatch.

Sasquatch

And I love you, Anime Girl. I love you.

Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #1

Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #2

Sasquatch And Anime Girl, #3

Triss

Enslaved by the evil ferret King Agarnu and his daughter Princess Kurda—slavers of shackled hundreds—the brave squirrelmaid Triss, along with Shogg the otter and Welfo the hedgehog, plans a daring escape by sea.

At the same time, far away in Salamandastron, three young companions, Scarum the hare, Sagax the badger and Kroova the otter, are driven to sail away from their mountain home, too, but for a different reason: they are seeking the adventures of their lives! Something far from family and home.

And in Mossflower Woods, a pair of wandering Dibbuns accidentally discovers the long-lost entrance to Brockhall, the most ancient hall of the Badger Lords.

The journeyers could not seem more remote from one another in pursuit or kind. Yet fate relentlessly draws them together when, in her flight from Kurda, Triss happens upon Redwall, and the abbey creatures discover a new hero in her. Someone brave enough to carry the sword of Martin and face the evil that threatens them.

Jacket copy from “Triss”
by Brian Jacques

I haven’t read all the Redwall novels. I read the first one, and one or two others. This is the fifteenth [!] book in the series.

The Redwall novels always make me think of the Tolkien novels and the American novel “Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH.” (“Mrs. Frisby And The Rats of NIMH” isn’t just my favorite talking animal novel, it’s one of my favorite books of all time.) But Brian Jacques writes without the heavy, portentous seriousness of those books. The Redwall novels are fun adventures. Bad things happen, but there seldom is the shadow of an all-encompassing doom looming over the story. I don’t like to compare books and films, but in this case I think the tone of the Redwall books can best be compared to the original release of the first ‘Star Wars’ film, before that saga got all complicated and dark with the ‘I am your father’ crap.

I’m reading “Triss” just because I liked the sound of, ‘the brave squirrelmaid Triss.’

I like brave squirrelmaids. But I haven’t met a brave squirrelmaid for a long time. Until a brave squirrelmaid comes my way again, this novel will have to do.

Redwall Wiki Page

Redwall Official Site

Redwall Wikia

Gloomy Bear

I understand that you began designing Gloomy Bear on postcards. Where did Gloomy Bear come from?

When I was a retained illustrator for a recruitment magazine, I was asked to draw a little girl holding a cute bear. I did it because it was my job, but I was thinking, “Bears aren’t really cute and cuddly...” and I doodled a small picture of a bear attacking a boy on the side. This eventually became Gloomy.


What is the story of Gloomy Bear? What is the message of this character?

If anyone really ran into a bear, they’d be terrified, right? If a real bear wandered into town, it would probably be shot. But in stuffed animal form, bears somehow become cute and cuddly. The same bear that we’d usually fear and kill. I convey the humor in this contradiction. There’s also the unfortunate fact that animals age faster than humans. I’ve always had pet dogs and cats, but they’ve all died. When the boy Pity finds Gloomy, he was still a baby bear. Another message I want to convey is that abusing animals is just as bad as abusing children who are unable to defend themselves. There are many messages within the Gloomy story and I can’t name them all, but each reader will probably understand it in his own way, which is the best way.

Mori Chack
quoted in “I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion”


Mori Chack’s Wiki Page

Gloomy Bear Net

RIP Brad Delp (June 12, 1951 – March 9, 2007)

I woke up this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away ...

It's more than a feeling (More than a feeling)
When I hear that old song
    they used to play (More than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (More than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walking away

So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet I still recall as I wander on
As clear as the sun in the summer sky ...

It's more than a feeling (More than a feeling)
When I hear that old song
    they used to play (More than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (More than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walking away ...

When I'm tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
I closed my eyes
And she slipped away ... (She slipped away)

It's more than a feeling (More than a feeling)
When I hear that old song
    they used to play (More than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (More than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walking away ...

Brad Delp's Wiki Page

Tom Scholz Remembers Brad Delp

Brad Delp’s suicide note: I am a lonely soul



Tom Scholz Wiki Page

BOSTON Wiki Page

Surfacing Like Well The Loch Ness Monster

For the last few days thoughts of the Loch Ness monster

have been surfacing like well the Loch Ness monster

surfacing making an appearance then going

leaving nothing but the memory of a sighting

going without context and without evidence

except for this imperative to write these words

but it’s a deep imperative itself rising

from depths within me even deeper than Loch Ness

and were this imperative a Scottish monster

it would surface and it would look south toward Ireland

and it would say, “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, Brenda!”

“A Most Excellent Philosophy”

There was a crash of splintering wood as the prow of the enemy rammed the Gregory galley amidships. Already listing crazily, she careened to the impact; and as the water poured over her port gunwale, she began to sink, leaving her passengers floundering in the river and her slaves screaming in their chains; then the other galleys moved in to pick up the survivors.

D’Arnot and Helen were dragged into the galley farthest up stream, which immediately set out for Ashair. The other members of the party had drifted down stream before they were finally picked up by a second galley. Tarzan had swum beside Magra, encouraging and supporting her, while Gregory, Lavac, and Ogabi remained nearby. Night was falling, and it would soon be dark in the narrow gorge. When they were in the craft, they saw that Thetan was already there, having been picked up before they were; but Helen and d’Arnot were not there; and the boat in which they were prisoners was out of sight around a bend in the river.

“Did you see anything of Helen?” asked Gregory, but no one had.

“I could almost wish that she drowned,” he added. “God! Why did I ever undertake this stupid venture?”

“It would have been better had we all drowned,” said Thetan. “There is no hope for those who fall into the hands of the Asharians.”

“All that has happened to us so far,” said Tarzan, “is that we have gotten wet. Wait until something really bad happens before you give up hope.”

“But look at what lies ahead of us!” exclaimed Lavac.

“I do not know what lies ahead of us, and neither do you,” the ape-man reminded him; “therefore we might as well anticipate the best as the worst.”

“A most excellent philosophy,” commented Gregory, “but a strain on one’s credulity.”

“I think it is good,” said Magra.

AquaBabies

I’m not a pet person (except for Sea Monkeys, as in “Science” and “Cryptobiosis”). But if I were to attempt to keep pets, I’d try an AquaBabies container.

Unlike a full aquarium, an AquaBabies container is small and requires no air pump to be plugged in and chugging away constantly. Although the container is small, it attempts to create a reasonably complete eco-system inside. There is active gravel, with microbes breaking down waste products. There is a plant adding some oxygen to the water. There is a snail eating away at some of the growth that will form on the inside walls. And, of course, there are a couple of little fish.

There is no filter to maintain. In fact, the only maintenance is to feed the fish every couple of days, change a portion of the water now and then, and once or twice a year clean the inside walls.

The only thing that troubles me is that it is a very small container. Even though the fish are small, too, I wonder what kind of life the fish experience never being able to cut loose and swim a long distance or swim very fast.

I’m giving AquaBabies some thought. If I take the plunge and invest in an AquaBabies container and pets, I’ll post further. I’m thinking of getting an AquaBabies container with a couple of Cherry Barbs or White Clouds.* If I do, they could become this blog’s mascots . . .

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* As I said, I’m not a pet person. When I was in high school, I had a five or ten gallon aquarium with neon tetras and angel fish. One morning getting ready for school I accidentally bumped against the little heater that kept the water warm. (This was in Chicago. Even indoors gets cold in the winter.) So I went off to school without realizing the heater was cranked up and later I got a call to report to the dean’s office. My mom was calling from home. She told me she had to unplug the heater because the aquarium was actually boiling and all the fish were dead. It was a pretty horrible scene when I got home, all those poor fish. (At least with an AquaBabies container if I screw up I won’t be committing mass murder . . .)