Lately I've been in quite a conundrum, career-wise. Those of you who know me are aware that I am struggling with the overwhelming parfum de politique wafting down from the top of the ivory tower that is academia. While I am fully capable of playing the game that the Academy demands, I an unwilling to do so. Much like a bored kid in the back of the room in high school, I find much of what I'm presented with uninteresting and am interested deeply in things that never get covered in class, and so I content myself with drawing little pictures of skulls in the margins of my notebooks and on handouts I receive during lecture. I'm actually getting somewhat good at it.
On the other hand, I'm so close to Thirty I can smell what it had for breakfast on its breath, not to mention that I'm up to my eyeballs in debt from my "education." Thus, having a quarter-life crisis and quitting my university job to go to technical college and become a diesel truck mechanic is less than a good idea. For one, it costs more money, and secondly, I still have to pay off those student loans from "real college" whether I'm a professor or a grease monkey or a shirt folder or whatever. My ill-fated attempt to join the Navy was intended to be a workaround for this, as I would have been an airframe mechanic with her student loans paid off. Unfortunately, that idea died in the birthing, and I ended up back in school because I wasn't sure what else to do -- plus I like badass books and I love learning new things about them. Who doesn't? That clearly means that I should be an English major, right? And because I really like them, then I should major in English at graduate school.
Right?
Unfortunately, now that I'm more than halfway done, I can't say that I know the answer to the question. A deeply rooted part of my animal soul keeps telling me to cash out and walk away, that it's not worth playing the game anymore. The slightly more intellectual side of me suggests that if we're not going to go all the way to a PhD, can we please just finish the MA so all that money wasn't totally wasted? That's about where I've fallen out. Finish and be done. But what then? Those bills will still come in, and I will still have to pay them. The best way to do so is to use the degree that I'm earning, at least when you go by the numbers.
But the numbers can be idealists or dirty liars or both, because there's a catch to any salary I can get with an MA in Rhetoric. It will involve The Game, which, near as I can tell, is an epic and perpetual session of Ass-Kiss. This is fine if you're a politician by nature, but those who know me will understand why I balk. I'm about the least political being you've ever met. I say exactly what I think, I don't care if you like it or not, and I will do what I believe is right regardless of popular opinion. If I were president, I would kick off my doubtless first, last, and only term by blasting several small and obnoxious countries into powder. I would command everyone, by executive order, to take off their damn diapers and grow the hell up. I would also do many other things that would get me in trouble with every political party to ever exist, to include holding Very Important Meetings in an old metal band shirt and a leather jacket and punching all of congress in the mouth. With shot-lined gloves. Repeatedly.
So politics are bad news for me, to say the least.
So what to do? I love learning, and I get a kick out of helping other people learn, too . . . but I can't stand the ridiculous nature of the way education, whether secondary or higher, is conducted. If I teach secondary school, my personal life gets probed worse than an Earthman's butt on a Martian spaceship, and not many fugitive and cloistered suburban housewives would joy to discover that their Little Darlings were being taught Beowulf and Layamon and Chaucer by a woman with a substantial tattoo collection and a love of heavy metal. Not to mention that they would not joy to discover how little bullshit I am inclined to swallow at parent-teacher conferences.
On the collegiate level, barring perhaps online, vocational, and community colleges, I would be required to publish research on current trends, many of which seem useless and uninteresting to me. I would also be expected to conform, on many levels, to the overwhelmingly liberal orientation of the field, not to mention the variety of popular positions out there concerning what a shameful thing it is to be a Caucasian living in the United States. Granted, not every professor attends to these trends, but I find the fact that I have to justify my position or even my existence at all to be repugnant enough that I am rather disinclined to subject myself to it for the length of a career.
Hence my growing frustration at my situation. So much so, in fact, that I was wound up enough all last week to invoke migraines and ridiculously high blood pressure and gastro-intestinal woes. Not that you likely desire to know the details, but all of this has a purpose. I promise.
You see, all this crazy coupled with my handling papers at school this week seems to have exposed me to some flavor of Viral Nasty, and so my present to myself this weekend has been a head cold.
Today, I lay down to take a nap in the afternoon with the intention of avoiding a good deal of the fever and discomfort while also giving my body a chance to heal itself. They say you dream about whatever is on your mind at the instant before you drop off to sleep. If that's the case, then I must have been thinking about a lot of crazy things, because the dream I had seems to be a combination of allegory, heavy metal overload, NyQuil, and the fog I had to drive through this morning.
The dream began in an old single-wide mobile home. My mom's sister and her family lived in a similar model when I was a kid, and so I immediately recognized it. This one, however, had been stripped of most of its walls and redone as some kind of crazy occult temple. There were idols all around, with sigils smeared on the floor, and so forth. An unseen companion behind me pointed out that the place actually contained great sealed power, and to unleash it I needed to remove a small cast plaster icon of an angel from the wall. I did so, and the entire single-wide exploded away into a mass of wind and fire around me.
When the chaos cleared away, I was standing in a deep valley swaddled in thick, roiling fog. It was impossible to see any way out of the valley, and as it was currently night, there was no constant source of light above. Lightning seemed to flash in the distance, but it was obscured by the fog. My interests turned rather immediately to finding a way out of the valley.
As I wandered, I eventually came upon what I thought at first were stone columns reaching up into the fog and the sky beyond. As I got closer, though, I saw that they were actually carved stone spiral staircases. Each staircase had a posted set of rules as to who could ascend it. Some limited gender, some race. Some had absurd requirements that made no sense whatsoever, and all were guarded by a robed, hooded gatekeeper of sorts. Though they all seemed to go up, I was not interested in following the gatekeepers' rules, and so I kept on searching.
Finally, I exclaimed my frustration, and before me manifested a strange sight. A ladder made of giant broadswords materialized before me, along with its gatekeeper. She was not robed and hooded like the others, but was a tall, lithe black woman dressed in the attire of a dominatrix. She introduced herself as Mistress J, and asked if I wanted to climb the ladder. Not one to jump in quickly, I asked what her rules were.
"No rules here," she said. "Except that you have to climb by yourself. And few people are brave enough to try it or strong enough to succeed."
I could clearly see why: the swords that made up the ladder were real swords. In order to climb them, they would have to be grasped by the blade.
As I peered up the ladder, Mistress J continued.
"I'll tell you a secret, though," she said. "None of those stairways over there go to anything. They all get to the top and -- nothing. Just empty air. Only this one will take you where you want to go -- if you can handle it."
While it all may just be the effects of too much NyQuil and metal music, I have a sense that my subconscious is talking here. Unfortunately, I'm unsure as to what it means, and so I'm uncertain as to how to proceed. However, one thing seems clear: playing the game will lead me nowhere.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Find Your World: The Value of Escapism
I've heard that old gripe time and again that commercial fiction, genre fiction, fiction-as-entertainment, or whatever you please -- that all of that is "worthless schlock and mindless drivel," as a professor of mine once put it. Self-important scribblers of fiction-as-art so often condemn the pulpy volumes that populate the shelves of the bookstore in the mall and cling like geriatric bats to the racks at the used paperback shop, making the rounds again and again until they decay into powder and memories. But there has to be a reason that these things hang on while the ultra-limited chapbooks and one-shot acid-induced exercises in irony that tend to emerge from the deformed chrysalis of the average MFA program are soon forgotten and chipped up for toilet paper. Simply put, I believe, we are in love with the ideas that escapist fiction offers -- but why?
I think the answer can be pegged pretty easily if we look at the fiction itself. At the moment, two things rule my life outside of school: Sword and Planet fiction and the video games I play. Sword and Planet, for those unfamiliar, is a subgenre of fantastic fiction that's two parts fantasy and one part science fiction. It operates in terms of pacing and tone much like historical adventure (Sword and Sandal -- think Ben Hur) and weird fantasy (Sword and Sorcery -- think Conan), with the single exception that it takes place on another planet -- hence the name -- to which the protagonist, typically an average Earthman, has been transported.
Usually, the hero is either an anachronism or a nobody on Earth (sometimes he's both), and his life holds no prospect for happiness there. However, on being transported to the new planet, he becomes a great hero. He may have special physical abilities, or his outmoded, romantic, and combat-inclined world view turns out for once to be an asset, enabling him to beat the bad guys and get the girl over the course of his stint on the other world. At the end of the story, he is often forcibly compelled home to Earth, much to his agony, and the story leaves off as the hero struggles vainly to return to his adopted homeworld. Provided any sequels, we can be sure that he will find his way and will yield as many follow-up stories as the readers will consume.
For most people, this sounds pretty kitschy. Me, too. I think it's terribly ridiculous, and that's why I love it. I think the reason that Sword and Planet draws so much derision from "serious" writers is the exact same reason that it is so cultishly popular with us unwashed plebes. To get it, though, you have to go way back with me in time. In my case, we're going back to the early Reagan Administration, but your temporal mileage may vary.
Whatever your destination, think back on your childhood. There was probably a time when you imagined going Someplace Awesome, a pretty much nonexistent but still awesome location where everything you wanted to exist and/or happen would take on an uncompromisingly verifiable physicality. Dragons? Check. Unicorns? Not for me, but if you like them, then check. Badass swords? Yup. Powers? If you dig them. Bad guys to fight? Check. A world where you and you alone are the coolest of the cool, the baddest of the badass? Doubleplus check.
Maybe you never had daydreams like that, but something similar probably crawled through your brain once or twice, and even if you never did want a mishmash of album covers, the toybox, and your own imagination to spring to life, you did want something you couldn't have, wanted to be somewhere, someone that would never be. Even if it was just that you wished you were the prettiest girl in the 8th grade or the toughest guy in the school but you knew that was never going to happen, then you've tasted this wine of which I speak.
We still do this kind of stuff. Who hasn't slid into a daydream at work, on the road, or even just out in town? Even the cranky stuff counts. For instance, I imagined terrorizing the cashier at the Wal-Mart the other day and considered possibly attempting to save the world from the roving pack of children in the parking lot, but I'd rather not be magically transported to jail, so I didn't do it. On a moderately less misanthropic note, I often just want to ride off into the sunset on my way to Adventure (which I believe may be in Alaska) and get away from the unending annoyance and complication of daily life.
Of course, the time machine and matter transporters aren't quite ready yet, so I still have to contend with bills, grocery shopping, and whiny students who email me at three in the morning wanting special treatment after a bout of negligent behavior. Thus, I have to find my escape elsewhere, and that usually means fiction. However, when I'm writhing in a vat of my own cranky disillusionment with the world, the last thing I want is to be reminded by some "literary artist" that life is an unmitigated, inescapable, roiling sea of Suck. I already received that memo, thanks. I don't desire in my free time to be reminded of it and compelled to consider taking a flying leap or smashing my car into a derelict retaining wall somewhere. Maybe that's ironic and artistic and gets you posthumous Real Live Writer Cred or something, but I'll pass.
No, I'd rather jam my head into the sands of another world and indulge myself for a bit before diving back in to the unpleasant struggles of this one. After all, for the moments during which I'm engaged in the struggles of that fictional hero, I get to come along for the ride. I indulge that escapist impulse that civilization has buried deep, deep inside the soft yellow stockpiles of pizza and Chinese food that will carry me through any possible oncoming ice age. For a brief, fleeting instant, I, too, can find myself on another world where my ill-matched philosophies and inclinations are an asset instead of a burden. I can put on my space sandals and believe, if only for an instant, that there's something more epic out there for me than a flavorless destiny that includes paying bills, doing the laundry, and struggling to be allowed to do my job in spite of the "support" structures supplied by the establishment.
That chance to momentarily step out of the constraints of one's fate is powerfully compelling. During some of the most stressful times in my life, I did my strongest indulging in such fiction. As a result, stories like A Princess of Mars are potent medicine for me even if I've read them ten or fifteen times. That's what they're made for.
I'm reminded of a short story I read a week or so ago while immersing myself in the subgenre for the sake of my own work. "Kaldar, World of Antares" by Edmond Hamilton is nothing special. If anything, it's downright ordinary. Published in the Ace Books anthology Swordsmen in the Sky in 1964, it's the story of Stuart Merrick, a poor, unattached young man who answers an ad in a newspaper for a lucrative employment opportunity. As it turns out, Merrick's would-be bosses want to teleport him to a planet in the Antares star system to see if there is any life there. Merrick would be stuck there for a number of days, and would then be automatically returned. He might find himself on an airless world or a volcanic world, so there is a great risk of death even if there are no hostile natives. Merrick has nothing to lose, though, so he takes the job.
Upon his arrival, he is promptly made the Chan, or ruler, of the human population of Kaldar. There ensues a quick-paced adventure in which he fights spider people, hunts down traitors, and eventually saves the girl. But then Merrick is transported back to Earth as was the original plan. He rails at his employers demanding they send him back. They agree to do so after he's told them what he has seen, but they want to know: what could he have found there that is so compelling?
His answer is short and pointed: "I found -- my world!"
Merrick's answer is the key to our mystery as well. Earth was never Merrick's world, just as it was not John Carter's world or Carson Napier's world. It did not contain the things that would enable any of these heroes of other planets to live a powerful, fulfilling life that was characterized by a great destiny and a complete fulfillment of their ideals about society. Most Sword and Planet heroes are indigents, misfits, or living anachronisms. They are their universe's respective Last Romantics, caught in the flow of time and stranded on a shore where none of the rules they believe in apply. But then -- there they are, on a new world, and all that starts to change.
I've seen this in other kinds of media, too. There's an entire subset of Japanese animation and comic books that focuses on young, overstressed teenage girls being transported into another world or being shown that beneath the humdrum overlay of their own world, there is actually a secret struggle going on, and they are a necessary part of it. We see that in the myth of comic book superheroes, too, although the tendency in anime and manga more than in Western comics is to make the protagonist at least superficially similar to the audience.
And then there's video games. I won't touch on MMORPGs like World of Warcraft here because I don't know much about them. On the other hand, I do indulge in finite, story driven games. Most recently my husband prevailed upon me to bless the purchase of Brutal Legend, which is a game for the XBox 360. At first I wasn't sure about it, but as I had heard that its exclusively heavy metal soundtrack involved Manowar (the best band in the mutliverse, if you don't know), I figured it was worth a shot.
Essentially, the story of Brutal Legend revolves around a roadie named Eddie Riggs who finds himself transported to another world. Here on Earth, Riggs is trapped by his profession, working for hypocritical musicians who claim to be heavy metal performers, but who actually contain a higher percentage of poseur in their bloodstream than the entirety of the Glam scene in the 80s put together. The band members treat Riggs poorly, willfully breaking his equipment and telling him to "join the modern world" and create sets that "speak more to our tween demographic," implying that he is an anarchonism. However, Riggs can do nothing about these abuses if he wants to keep his job. He is, in fact, so dedicated to that job that he risks his life to save the band members that so despise him.
While watching his ridiculous charges perform, Riggs asks another roadie, "Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time? Like you should have been born earlier, when the music was real?" Shortly thereafter, a chain of events unfolds that leads to Riggs lying in a pool of blood after a stage accident. Some of that blood drips onto his monstrous belt buckle, and the item, which is revealed to be some kind of artifact, summons up a colossal beast made of metal and fire that facilitates the transportation of Riggs to another world.
Once he arrives in the other world, Riggs finds that everything he knows -- his music, his knack for construction, and his love of hot rod cars, among other things -- places him in a unique position of power. The human inhabitants of this world are suffering under the abuses of a demonic overlord, and Riggs brings them the power and the knowledge they need to fight back and free themselves from the clutches of their oppressors. Here, suddenly, Riggs is not an anachronism. He is not an outmoded leftover of a bygone age. In fact, as the game's narrator notes, he and he alone can do what must be done to save the world.
It should be no surprise, then, that I have enjoyed Brutal Legend a great deal. I have my own feelings of temporal misplacement, having received an infusion of Awesome and Badass from older relatives when I was a kid. My music tastes are stuck in the 80s, and I love fiction styles that quit being popular about five years after I was born. Much of the modern trends in both areas turn my stomach, and my personal philosophy is certainly not in line with the weak, submissive, ankle-grasping culture of the modern world. I've sat on my steps many a night, puffing my way toward an inevitable date with lung cancer, wishing there were some hidden place somewhere to which I could go.
To paraphrase Merrick, I want to find my world.
Alas, the line between fiction and life is, quite often, the bottom line. There isn't some Magical World of Badass where all our petty struggles can be exchanged for epic conflict. If there were such a thing, we'd all move there, and this world would be a pretty empty place. Bottom line is that I have to pay my rent and the crush of student loan bills that I've taken on in order to "educate" myself. Bottom line is that I have to behave on a certain level or I don't make the money I need to pay those bills. Bottom line is that half the things I want to do will send me straight to prison, and that's not the kind of world change I want.
Perhaps that's why I write -- and why I write what I write. I can't do certain things, but my protagonists can. I can't get out from under a ridiculous press of ivory tower nonsense and gilded unicorn crap, but my heroes have a way of extricating themselves from such things. I'm subject to my own body, traitor that it is. My protagonists never are. They may struggle briefly, but they always win. They may take some licks, but they stand supreme when the sun goes down. No struggle or sacrifice is ever in vain. Victory always comes, and bravery is always rewarded. Clearly life in this world isn't like that, and until I finish my time machine, we've got no chance of reprogramming the old girl. So what do you do when that fact presses too hard?
Throw that self-important chapbook in the garbage and go find your world.
I think the answer can be pegged pretty easily if we look at the fiction itself. At the moment, two things rule my life outside of school: Sword and Planet fiction and the video games I play. Sword and Planet, for those unfamiliar, is a subgenre of fantastic fiction that's two parts fantasy and one part science fiction. It operates in terms of pacing and tone much like historical adventure (Sword and Sandal -- think Ben Hur) and weird fantasy (Sword and Sorcery -- think Conan), with the single exception that it takes place on another planet -- hence the name -- to which the protagonist, typically an average Earthman, has been transported.
Usually, the hero is either an anachronism or a nobody on Earth (sometimes he's both), and his life holds no prospect for happiness there. However, on being transported to the new planet, he becomes a great hero. He may have special physical abilities, or his outmoded, romantic, and combat-inclined world view turns out for once to be an asset, enabling him to beat the bad guys and get the girl over the course of his stint on the other world. At the end of the story, he is often forcibly compelled home to Earth, much to his agony, and the story leaves off as the hero struggles vainly to return to his adopted homeworld. Provided any sequels, we can be sure that he will find his way and will yield as many follow-up stories as the readers will consume.
For most people, this sounds pretty kitschy. Me, too. I think it's terribly ridiculous, and that's why I love it. I think the reason that Sword and Planet draws so much derision from "serious" writers is the exact same reason that it is so cultishly popular with us unwashed plebes. To get it, though, you have to go way back with me in time. In my case, we're going back to the early Reagan Administration, but your temporal mileage may vary.
Whatever your destination, think back on your childhood. There was probably a time when you imagined going Someplace Awesome, a pretty much nonexistent but still awesome location where everything you wanted to exist and/or happen would take on an uncompromisingly verifiable physicality. Dragons? Check. Unicorns? Not for me, but if you like them, then check. Badass swords? Yup. Powers? If you dig them. Bad guys to fight? Check. A world where you and you alone are the coolest of the cool, the baddest of the badass? Doubleplus check.
Maybe you never had daydreams like that, but something similar probably crawled through your brain once or twice, and even if you never did want a mishmash of album covers, the toybox, and your own imagination to spring to life, you did want something you couldn't have, wanted to be somewhere, someone that would never be. Even if it was just that you wished you were the prettiest girl in the 8th grade or the toughest guy in the school but you knew that was never going to happen, then you've tasted this wine of which I speak.
We still do this kind of stuff. Who hasn't slid into a daydream at work, on the road, or even just out in town? Even the cranky stuff counts. For instance, I imagined terrorizing the cashier at the Wal-Mart the other day and considered possibly attempting to save the world from the roving pack of children in the parking lot, but I'd rather not be magically transported to jail, so I didn't do it. On a moderately less misanthropic note, I often just want to ride off into the sunset on my way to Adventure (which I believe may be in Alaska) and get away from the unending annoyance and complication of daily life.
Of course, the time machine and matter transporters aren't quite ready yet, so I still have to contend with bills, grocery shopping, and whiny students who email me at three in the morning wanting special treatment after a bout of negligent behavior. Thus, I have to find my escape elsewhere, and that usually means fiction. However, when I'm writhing in a vat of my own cranky disillusionment with the world, the last thing I want is to be reminded by some "literary artist" that life is an unmitigated, inescapable, roiling sea of Suck. I already received that memo, thanks. I don't desire in my free time to be reminded of it and compelled to consider taking a flying leap or smashing my car into a derelict retaining wall somewhere. Maybe that's ironic and artistic and gets you posthumous Real Live Writer Cred or something, but I'll pass.
No, I'd rather jam my head into the sands of another world and indulge myself for a bit before diving back in to the unpleasant struggles of this one. After all, for the moments during which I'm engaged in the struggles of that fictional hero, I get to come along for the ride. I indulge that escapist impulse that civilization has buried deep, deep inside the soft yellow stockpiles of pizza and Chinese food that will carry me through any possible oncoming ice age. For a brief, fleeting instant, I, too, can find myself on another world where my ill-matched philosophies and inclinations are an asset instead of a burden. I can put on my space sandals and believe, if only for an instant, that there's something more epic out there for me than a flavorless destiny that includes paying bills, doing the laundry, and struggling to be allowed to do my job in spite of the "support" structures supplied by the establishment.
That chance to momentarily step out of the constraints of one's fate is powerfully compelling. During some of the most stressful times in my life, I did my strongest indulging in such fiction. As a result, stories like A Princess of Mars are potent medicine for me even if I've read them ten or fifteen times. That's what they're made for.
I'm reminded of a short story I read a week or so ago while immersing myself in the subgenre for the sake of my own work. "Kaldar, World of Antares" by Edmond Hamilton is nothing special. If anything, it's downright ordinary. Published in the Ace Books anthology Swordsmen in the Sky in 1964, it's the story of Stuart Merrick, a poor, unattached young man who answers an ad in a newspaper for a lucrative employment opportunity. As it turns out, Merrick's would-be bosses want to teleport him to a planet in the Antares star system to see if there is any life there. Merrick would be stuck there for a number of days, and would then be automatically returned. He might find himself on an airless world or a volcanic world, so there is a great risk of death even if there are no hostile natives. Merrick has nothing to lose, though, so he takes the job.
Upon his arrival, he is promptly made the Chan, or ruler, of the human population of Kaldar. There ensues a quick-paced adventure in which he fights spider people, hunts down traitors, and eventually saves the girl. But then Merrick is transported back to Earth as was the original plan. He rails at his employers demanding they send him back. They agree to do so after he's told them what he has seen, but they want to know: what could he have found there that is so compelling?
His answer is short and pointed: "I found -- my world!"
Merrick's answer is the key to our mystery as well. Earth was never Merrick's world, just as it was not John Carter's world or Carson Napier's world. It did not contain the things that would enable any of these heroes of other planets to live a powerful, fulfilling life that was characterized by a great destiny and a complete fulfillment of their ideals about society. Most Sword and Planet heroes are indigents, misfits, or living anachronisms. They are their universe's respective Last Romantics, caught in the flow of time and stranded on a shore where none of the rules they believe in apply. But then -- there they are, on a new world, and all that starts to change.
I've seen this in other kinds of media, too. There's an entire subset of Japanese animation and comic books that focuses on young, overstressed teenage girls being transported into another world or being shown that beneath the humdrum overlay of their own world, there is actually a secret struggle going on, and they are a necessary part of it. We see that in the myth of comic book superheroes, too, although the tendency in anime and manga more than in Western comics is to make the protagonist at least superficially similar to the audience.
And then there's video games. I won't touch on MMORPGs like World of Warcraft here because I don't know much about them. On the other hand, I do indulge in finite, story driven games. Most recently my husband prevailed upon me to bless the purchase of Brutal Legend, which is a game for the XBox 360. At first I wasn't sure about it, but as I had heard that its exclusively heavy metal soundtrack involved Manowar (the best band in the mutliverse, if you don't know), I figured it was worth a shot.
Essentially, the story of Brutal Legend revolves around a roadie named Eddie Riggs who finds himself transported to another world. Here on Earth, Riggs is trapped by his profession, working for hypocritical musicians who claim to be heavy metal performers, but who actually contain a higher percentage of poseur in their bloodstream than the entirety of the Glam scene in the 80s put together. The band members treat Riggs poorly, willfully breaking his equipment and telling him to "join the modern world" and create sets that "speak more to our tween demographic," implying that he is an anarchonism. However, Riggs can do nothing about these abuses if he wants to keep his job. He is, in fact, so dedicated to that job that he risks his life to save the band members that so despise him.
While watching his ridiculous charges perform, Riggs asks another roadie, "Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time? Like you should have been born earlier, when the music was real?" Shortly thereafter, a chain of events unfolds that leads to Riggs lying in a pool of blood after a stage accident. Some of that blood drips onto his monstrous belt buckle, and the item, which is revealed to be some kind of artifact, summons up a colossal beast made of metal and fire that facilitates the transportation of Riggs to another world.
Once he arrives in the other world, Riggs finds that everything he knows -- his music, his knack for construction, and his love of hot rod cars, among other things -- places him in a unique position of power. The human inhabitants of this world are suffering under the abuses of a demonic overlord, and Riggs brings them the power and the knowledge they need to fight back and free themselves from the clutches of their oppressors. Here, suddenly, Riggs is not an anachronism. He is not an outmoded leftover of a bygone age. In fact, as the game's narrator notes, he and he alone can do what must be done to save the world.
It should be no surprise, then, that I have enjoyed Brutal Legend a great deal. I have my own feelings of temporal misplacement, having received an infusion of Awesome and Badass from older relatives when I was a kid. My music tastes are stuck in the 80s, and I love fiction styles that quit being popular about five years after I was born. Much of the modern trends in both areas turn my stomach, and my personal philosophy is certainly not in line with the weak, submissive, ankle-grasping culture of the modern world. I've sat on my steps many a night, puffing my way toward an inevitable date with lung cancer, wishing there were some hidden place somewhere to which I could go.
To paraphrase Merrick, I want to find my world.
Alas, the line between fiction and life is, quite often, the bottom line. There isn't some Magical World of Badass where all our petty struggles can be exchanged for epic conflict. If there were such a thing, we'd all move there, and this world would be a pretty empty place. Bottom line is that I have to pay my rent and the crush of student loan bills that I've taken on in order to "educate" myself. Bottom line is that I have to behave on a certain level or I don't make the money I need to pay those bills. Bottom line is that half the things I want to do will send me straight to prison, and that's not the kind of world change I want.
Perhaps that's why I write -- and why I write what I write. I can't do certain things, but my protagonists can. I can't get out from under a ridiculous press of ivory tower nonsense and gilded unicorn crap, but my heroes have a way of extricating themselves from such things. I'm subject to my own body, traitor that it is. My protagonists never are. They may struggle briefly, but they always win. They may take some licks, but they stand supreme when the sun goes down. No struggle or sacrifice is ever in vain. Victory always comes, and bravery is always rewarded. Clearly life in this world isn't like that, and until I finish my time machine, we've got no chance of reprogramming the old girl. So what do you do when that fact presses too hard?
Throw that self-important chapbook in the garbage and go find your world.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Teaching and Technology: A Rant
This isn't my work. It was written by a college professor after observing the behavior of some students in his undergraduate lecture class. He has given his full permission to post this on the internet, so I am sharing it here in the hopes that it does some good:
On Wednesday and Friday there were people visiting our class to observe my teaching as part of their training to be teachers. Among the things they noticed while sitting in the back of the room was that several of you were texting throughout class, not even bothering to bring the textbook or take notes. I really appreciate your commitment to the class and your education. Such activity is also remarkably rude to me and your classmates.
Students often wonder why some teachers become cynical and institute harsh rules. This is a good example of behaviors that test the resolve of even the most dedicated teachers. I teach because I know it is important for students to think about more than their careers or their alcohol limits, because I know there is a lot of pressure on students NOT to think very deeply but just spend money and get fat consuming everything they see. I've been teaching for twenty years, and will not let the apathy of certain students turn me into an apathetic teacher. I fight back.
Text abusers, Ipod fiends, Blackberry junkies: How about you pull the gadget needle out of your arm and try to interact with the real world for fifty minutes? Or, if you have no interest in the material, stay home where you can't bother others who are trying to learn something, and text until your fingers fall off. I have no doubt those of you texting in class, after you do poorly on exams, will come to my office and attest that you "attended" every class meeting. Physical presence, however, is not mental engagement.
From now on, electronic devices are not welcome in my classroom, and [the Teaching Assistant] has my permission to confiscate them should he see you using them in class. Some of you may think you have the right to text (or whatever) in class, but it is disruptive -- as the reports of the observers prove. I have the right to end disruptive behavior in my course.
Enough already. Monkeys can text. This is a university. Act like scholars.
On Wednesday and Friday there were people visiting our class to observe my teaching as part of their training to be teachers. Among the things they noticed while sitting in the back of the room was that several of you were texting throughout class, not even bothering to bring the textbook or take notes. I really appreciate your commitment to the class and your education. Such activity is also remarkably rude to me and your classmates.
Students often wonder why some teachers become cynical and institute harsh rules. This is a good example of behaviors that test the resolve of even the most dedicated teachers. I teach because I know it is important for students to think about more than their careers or their alcohol limits, because I know there is a lot of pressure on students NOT to think very deeply but just spend money and get fat consuming everything they see. I've been teaching for twenty years, and will not let the apathy of certain students turn me into an apathetic teacher. I fight back.
Text abusers, Ipod fiends, Blackberry junkies: How about you pull the gadget needle out of your arm and try to interact with the real world for fifty minutes? Or, if you have no interest in the material, stay home where you can't bother others who are trying to learn something, and text until your fingers fall off. I have no doubt those of you texting in class, after you do poorly on exams, will come to my office and attest that you "attended" every class meeting. Physical presence, however, is not mental engagement.
From now on, electronic devices are not welcome in my classroom, and [the Teaching Assistant] has my permission to confiscate them should he see you using them in class. Some of you may think you have the right to text (or whatever) in class, but it is disruptive -- as the reports of the observers prove. I have the right to end disruptive behavior in my course.
Enough already. Monkeys can text. This is a university. Act like scholars.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Barbarian Scholar Goes Primal
This evening I have made the decision to embark upon a rather different turn in my life. After years of struggling with my weight and relative levels of fitness, I stumbled onto the blog Mark's Daily Apple, wherein the eponymous Mark advocates the so-called Primal lifestyle. This is something that, in a less detailed form, had occurred to me back in 2002 and 2003 during a couple of physical anthropology classes at UT Austin, but I could never quite crack the code, so to speak.
In essence, Primal living advocates adopting a lifestyle that mirrors as closely as possible the eating and activity patterns of paleolithic humans -- that is to say, human beings of the Old Stone Age, before the dawn of agriculture and city-based civilization. Shortly put, this means that if it wasn't available to eat in 8000 BC, you shouldn't put it in your face. This includes grains, sugars, and most refined and processed foods in general. Activity-wise, you should walk lots and pick up and carry heavy things, since this is the kind of behavior stone-age man engaged in. Cavemen didn't jazzercise, and, according to Primal, neither should we. There's other stuff, but that's the Cliffs Notes version.
In some ways this is similar to Atkins, which I tried back in 2003, and which produced moderate weight-loss success in my case. However, unlike Atkins, Primal restricts processed foods and artificial sweeteners. I turned up some data the other day that noted an obscene increase in the odds of being morbidly obese for each can of diet soda drunk. Yes, each can. Considering my typical Diet Mountain Dew intake, that could explain a few things. Apparently it plays merry Hell with the insulin production cycle even if it's fake sugar.
Currently I'm easing my way into the idea of no grains and no processed foods and no sugars. Kicking the diet soda habit is proving to be the most obnoxiously difficult of the three. I've gone breadless, riceless, and sugarless before, but I've been a diet soda crackhead since about 2000 or so, when I finally kicked regular sodas after a lifetime of guzzling them a liter or more at a time. For the past few days I've been like a junkie going through detox. Headaches, the shakes, irritability, general malaise -- and it ain't from caffeine, either. I've been drinking coffee regularly, so I know that this must be nothing less than a reaction to the absence of artificial sweetener in my body chemistry. Creepy when you think about it. Sensible, too.
So the game plan is to ease off the bad stuff. We currently have a good bit of it in the fridge and the pantry, and considering our budget around here, there's no reason to waste it by chucking it in the garbage. However, the prohibited items, once used up, will not be replaced.
As for working out, we've got a pair of kettlebells here at the house that I've been neglecting, and it's time I got around to using them with a seriousness. The gym at school is becoming a chore, too. I have to peel out of bed at an unnatural hour to just get up there and get parking, but the majority of the equipment there tends to be of little use or interest to me. Kettlebells can produce effects similar to those of freeweight barbells and dumbbells, and at my level of muscular development (which is to say zero development), I can do a lot with a hundred pounds of iron in my living room. I can also do it whenever I please, without worrying that I won't find parking or will have to contend with skinny girls hefting pink Barbie weights or mindless roid-junkies with shrinking testes and burgeoning man-mary glands.
So does this mean no more bread and rice and junk food ever? I can't legitimately say that I'll never put a chip or a sandwich into my face again, no. And I can't say I won't occasionally spring for that sushi or a bowl of curry with rice. But those times will be very few and far between. I'm going to give this Primal thing the best shot I can, and as time passes I will track any progress that results. Hopefully it will bring good things.
In essence, Primal living advocates adopting a lifestyle that mirrors as closely as possible the eating and activity patterns of paleolithic humans -- that is to say, human beings of the Old Stone Age, before the dawn of agriculture and city-based civilization. Shortly put, this means that if it wasn't available to eat in 8000 BC, you shouldn't put it in your face. This includes grains, sugars, and most refined and processed foods in general. Activity-wise, you should walk lots and pick up and carry heavy things, since this is the kind of behavior stone-age man engaged in. Cavemen didn't jazzercise, and, according to Primal, neither should we. There's other stuff, but that's the Cliffs Notes version.
In some ways this is similar to Atkins, which I tried back in 2003, and which produced moderate weight-loss success in my case. However, unlike Atkins, Primal restricts processed foods and artificial sweeteners. I turned up some data the other day that noted an obscene increase in the odds of being morbidly obese for each can of diet soda drunk. Yes, each can. Considering my typical Diet Mountain Dew intake, that could explain a few things. Apparently it plays merry Hell with the insulin production cycle even if it's fake sugar.
Currently I'm easing my way into the idea of no grains and no processed foods and no sugars. Kicking the diet soda habit is proving to be the most obnoxiously difficult of the three. I've gone breadless, riceless, and sugarless before, but I've been a diet soda crackhead since about 2000 or so, when I finally kicked regular sodas after a lifetime of guzzling them a liter or more at a time. For the past few days I've been like a junkie going through detox. Headaches, the shakes, irritability, general malaise -- and it ain't from caffeine, either. I've been drinking coffee regularly, so I know that this must be nothing less than a reaction to the absence of artificial sweetener in my body chemistry. Creepy when you think about it. Sensible, too.
So the game plan is to ease off the bad stuff. We currently have a good bit of it in the fridge and the pantry, and considering our budget around here, there's no reason to waste it by chucking it in the garbage. However, the prohibited items, once used up, will not be replaced.
As for working out, we've got a pair of kettlebells here at the house that I've been neglecting, and it's time I got around to using them with a seriousness. The gym at school is becoming a chore, too. I have to peel out of bed at an unnatural hour to just get up there and get parking, but the majority of the equipment there tends to be of little use or interest to me. Kettlebells can produce effects similar to those of freeweight barbells and dumbbells, and at my level of muscular development (which is to say zero development), I can do a lot with a hundred pounds of iron in my living room. I can also do it whenever I please, without worrying that I won't find parking or will have to contend with skinny girls hefting pink Barbie weights or mindless roid-junkies with shrinking testes and burgeoning man-mary glands.
So does this mean no more bread and rice and junk food ever? I can't legitimately say that I'll never put a chip or a sandwich into my face again, no. And I can't say I won't occasionally spring for that sushi or a bowl of curry with rice. But those times will be very few and far between. I'm going to give this Primal thing the best shot I can, and as time passes I will track any progress that results. Hopefully it will bring good things.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
New Book About Bushido
I would like to direct my readers' attention to the website of Tomoshige Tatsutora's new book, Living Bushido: A Guide to the Modern-Day Way of the Samurai.
Living Bushido is not a scholarly book. Tatsutora doesn't wow you with his credentials (he doesn't even list them) or toss around his academic knowledge. He does give you a short reading list at the end with which you can begin to further your studies, but don't expect some dry, boring doctoral dissertation work here. All in all, it's a very soundly thought out presentation of what it takes to live by the code of Bushido in today's world.
If living a warrior's life interests you even a little bit, you should check it out.
Living Bushido is not a scholarly book. Tatsutora doesn't wow you with his credentials (he doesn't even list them) or toss around his academic knowledge. He does give you a short reading list at the end with which you can begin to further your studies, but don't expect some dry, boring doctoral dissertation work here. All in all, it's a very soundly thought out presentation of what it takes to live by the code of Bushido in today's world.
If living a warrior's life interests you even a little bit, you should check it out.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Mishima and Powdered Tea
My mind is on Yukio Mishima this evening. He's yet another one of those writers who would never have liked me or enjoyed my presence -- and yet I remain in utter awe of him for a variety of reasons. While considering the frothing patterns of a fresh batch of matcha tonight, the following leapt to mind:
Honest Tea
Midnight under moonlight
Thin February crescent, like
A blade of well-honed steel
Or a god's narrowed eye.
Seated on wind-rent cliffs
That plunge, howling,
Into star-spattered ocean eddies,
I see Mishima, shade within shade.
He sets the scene: utensils
Chosen with care, ancient, simple.
A bowl, a whisk, a foot of steel:
There is no flower-arranging here.
Smiling, he revels in the Stygian cold;
Crescent under crescent in a flash,
Then the fury of motion, purpose.
Red rises to white froth in the bowl.
Night winds embrace rising steam
Like the smoke of fine incense,
And waft the sick-sweet perfume of
Sincerity across the gulf of decades.
He drinks deeply from the cup himself
And does not offer it to me. It is sufficient
To have seen, and to know:
Such a brew is always best
When we make it ourselves.
Honest Tea
Midnight under moonlight
Thin February crescent, like
A blade of well-honed steel
Or a god's narrowed eye.
Seated on wind-rent cliffs
That plunge, howling,
Into star-spattered ocean eddies,
I see Mishima, shade within shade.
He sets the scene: utensils
Chosen with care, ancient, simple.
A bowl, a whisk, a foot of steel:
There is no flower-arranging here.
Smiling, he revels in the Stygian cold;
Crescent under crescent in a flash,
Then the fury of motion, purpose.
Red rises to white froth in the bowl.
Night winds embrace rising steam
Like the smoke of fine incense,
And waft the sick-sweet perfume of
Sincerity across the gulf of decades.
He drinks deeply from the cup himself
And does not offer it to me. It is sufficient
To have seen, and to know:
Such a brew is always best
When we make it ourselves.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Robert E. Howard's Serpent God
Tonight, because I'm a nerd and these sorts of things are fun for me, I'm going to bore you with drivel about mythology, more specifically that of Set, Robert E. Howard's serpent god of Stygia, a kingdom in the Hyborian World of Conan the Barbarian.
Somebody else has probably discussed this topic in the past with much greater skill than I. However, I don't remember, and it's something I can yank out of my posterior with a real quickness, as Egyptian mythology is an interest of mine.
Set, as you may be aware, is the chief god of Howard's pseudo-Egyptian kingdom of Stygia. He is typically depicted as a colossal snake, and is generally viewed as a chaotic, monolithically evil deity. To a certain degree, Howard's Set is rooted in the Set of Egyptian mythology, especially as it was understood in Howard's day.
However, Set in the Hyborian world actually more resembles the demon-snake Apophis, the enemy of the gods, which attempts on a nightly basis to devour the sun god Ra and which is defeated in combat by the actual Egyptian deity Set, who is a more positive figure.
Set as the Egyptians understood him was the deity of chaos, storms, the ocean, the desert, foreign countries, combat, and physical strength. He was the embodiment of The Other and of conflict, as well as of the powerful forces of change that, for better or worse, often wrought their will on the Nile Valley. Set was the brother of the gods Osiris and Horus the Elder and the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. As the well-known myth goes, he slew his brother Osiris and causes Isis and her son, Horus the Younger, lots of grief. But Set has other, more positive roles in the myths, and primary among these is the defender of Ra.
In this role, Set stood at the helm of the sun-boat on which Ra traversed the heavens. On his journey, Ra faced many foes, especially when he descended into the Duat, or underworld, to light the land of the dead while the mortal realm experienced night. Several gods traveled with Ra to protect and assist him, but Set was chief among the defenders because only he could stand against the worst of Ra's enemies, the giant demon-serpent Apophis.
Apophis is described as a giant snake, 16 yards long and covered in scales of flint. He supposedly arose from a poorly aimed drop of spittle that was expelled by the goddess Neith at the dawn of time. This goddess subsequently forgot to assign the mispurposed loogey a role in the universe, and it became Apophis, the Uncreated, a direct antithesis to all of established creation.
In this regard as a godlike, supernatural snake with an apocalyptic agenda, it seems Apophis more resembles Howard's Set than Set himself does. Indeed, the two appear in places in Howard's stories to be completely conflated. While it would be unrealistic to assume Howard attempted to maintain every historical precedent he encountered, he did rely heavily on history to flavor his tales, and the material available to him did, in fact, tend toward a conflationist view of Set and Apophis.
This is largely attributable to occurrences in Egyptian history and Greek accounts of Egyptian myth, which were the bulk of what was popularly available until recent decades. Set enjoyed only periodic popularity throughout Egyptian history. When his supporters controlled the country, he was held in high esteem and his cult flourished. During periods when his popularity waned, he was demonized and his role as the slayer of Osiris was magnified.
Toward the end of Egyptian history, Set had become so reviled that he actually began to take on the evil qualities previously attributed to Apophis. Furthermore, when the Greeks began recording Egyptian history and myth, they interpreted Set as the serpent-beast Typhon, furthering the "evil snake" association.
Howard would have had access to Greek versions of Egyptian myths primarily, and because of this his interpretation of Set takes on many of the qualities of the Set-Apophis-Typhon hybrid.
In what I consider a twist of irony, though, we find our hero Conan quite frequently in conflict with the servants of Howard's Set, and the image of Conan battling a giant serpent has become something of an archetypal image -- if not a Freudian field day, but I digress...
Often Conan, as I recall, is the only one capable of slaying the Set-spawn he encounters. He is additionally a creature of rugged, harsh foreign places, and he is known for his physical strength.
I am not suggesting that Howard somehow secretly knew the older myths and snuck them into his yarns. The man-snake struggle is a pretty universal type, and Howard was an avid fan of types and patterns if he was anything.
However, I do enjoy a delicious sense of ironic truth when I reread those stories that pit Conan against the forces of Set, or if I (gasp) look over my old comics or (double-gasp) sit down to watch Ahnuld chop his way across Hyboria-wood, taking down James Earl Jones' pretty little Set-pets the whole way.
Of course, I have a personal sense of investment in enjoying such connections, as ephemeral as they may be. I'm a big fan of Egyptian myths, as I said, and I am a particularly big fan of Set. The Apophis myth being the story that makes him into the biggest rockstar, it is one of my favorites. If you've seen the tattoo sleeve on my left arm, it depicts the battle between the storm god and the demon snake.
For what it's worth, I hope this contributes a tiny bit to your understanding or enjoyment of the stories. If not, feel free to line the hamster cage with it.
Somebody else has probably discussed this topic in the past with much greater skill than I. However, I don't remember, and it's something I can yank out of my posterior with a real quickness, as Egyptian mythology is an interest of mine.
Set, as you may be aware, is the chief god of Howard's pseudo-Egyptian kingdom of Stygia. He is typically depicted as a colossal snake, and is generally viewed as a chaotic, monolithically evil deity. To a certain degree, Howard's Set is rooted in the Set of Egyptian mythology, especially as it was understood in Howard's day.
However, Set in the Hyborian world actually more resembles the demon-snake Apophis, the enemy of the gods, which attempts on a nightly basis to devour the sun god Ra and which is defeated in combat by the actual Egyptian deity Set, who is a more positive figure.
Set as the Egyptians understood him was the deity of chaos, storms, the ocean, the desert, foreign countries, combat, and physical strength. He was the embodiment of The Other and of conflict, as well as of the powerful forces of change that, for better or worse, often wrought their will on the Nile Valley. Set was the brother of the gods Osiris and Horus the Elder and the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. As the well-known myth goes, he slew his brother Osiris and causes Isis and her son, Horus the Younger, lots of grief. But Set has other, more positive roles in the myths, and primary among these is the defender of Ra.
In this role, Set stood at the helm of the sun-boat on which Ra traversed the heavens. On his journey, Ra faced many foes, especially when he descended into the Duat, or underworld, to light the land of the dead while the mortal realm experienced night. Several gods traveled with Ra to protect and assist him, but Set was chief among the defenders because only he could stand against the worst of Ra's enemies, the giant demon-serpent Apophis.
Apophis is described as a giant snake, 16 yards long and covered in scales of flint. He supposedly arose from a poorly aimed drop of spittle that was expelled by the goddess Neith at the dawn of time. This goddess subsequently forgot to assign the mispurposed loogey a role in the universe, and it became Apophis, the Uncreated, a direct antithesis to all of established creation.
In this regard as a godlike, supernatural snake with an apocalyptic agenda, it seems Apophis more resembles Howard's Set than Set himself does. Indeed, the two appear in places in Howard's stories to be completely conflated. While it would be unrealistic to assume Howard attempted to maintain every historical precedent he encountered, he did rely heavily on history to flavor his tales, and the material available to him did, in fact, tend toward a conflationist view of Set and Apophis.
This is largely attributable to occurrences in Egyptian history and Greek accounts of Egyptian myth, which were the bulk of what was popularly available until recent decades. Set enjoyed only periodic popularity throughout Egyptian history. When his supporters controlled the country, he was held in high esteem and his cult flourished. During periods when his popularity waned, he was demonized and his role as the slayer of Osiris was magnified.
Toward the end of Egyptian history, Set had become so reviled that he actually began to take on the evil qualities previously attributed to Apophis. Furthermore, when the Greeks began recording Egyptian history and myth, they interpreted Set as the serpent-beast Typhon, furthering the "evil snake" association.
Howard would have had access to Greek versions of Egyptian myths primarily, and because of this his interpretation of Set takes on many of the qualities of the Set-Apophis-Typhon hybrid.
In what I consider a twist of irony, though, we find our hero Conan quite frequently in conflict with the servants of Howard's Set, and the image of Conan battling a giant serpent has become something of an archetypal image -- if not a Freudian field day, but I digress...
Often Conan, as I recall, is the only one capable of slaying the Set-spawn he encounters. He is additionally a creature of rugged, harsh foreign places, and he is known for his physical strength.
I am not suggesting that Howard somehow secretly knew the older myths and snuck them into his yarns. The man-snake struggle is a pretty universal type, and Howard was an avid fan of types and patterns if he was anything.
However, I do enjoy a delicious sense of ironic truth when I reread those stories that pit Conan against the forces of Set, or if I (gasp) look over my old comics or (double-gasp) sit down to watch Ahnuld chop his way across Hyboria-wood, taking down James Earl Jones' pretty little Set-pets the whole way.
Of course, I have a personal sense of investment in enjoying such connections, as ephemeral as they may be. I'm a big fan of Egyptian myths, as I said, and I am a particularly big fan of Set. The Apophis myth being the story that makes him into the biggest rockstar, it is one of my favorites. If you've seen the tattoo sleeve on my left arm, it depicts the battle between the storm god and the demon snake.
For what it's worth, I hope this contributes a tiny bit to your understanding or enjoyment of the stories. If not, feel free to line the hamster cage with it.
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