Readercon

I am off to Boston tomorrow to hang with the sf literati at Readercon. If you're there, please come by and say hi! Here's where you can find me:

SF As The Literature Of Things.

Friday, 11 am

Clute, Bobet, Di Filippo, Nakashima-Brown, Weinstein

It's commonly agreed that stories set in the future can "really" be about the future or the present. But in novels like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, and Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist and Zenith Angle, we are for the first time seeing stories set in the present which seem to be about the future. These fictions seem to argue that the future will be built bottom-up rather than top-down; that progress does not derive from the implementation of ideas but rather from the accumulation of quotidian technological change. Character in these works is not so much a matter of nature or nurture, but a product of our interaction with things, things produced as fast as we can (because we can) and without any deep consideration for their consequences. Is this "SF as a Literature of Things" ultimately just an interesting sub-genre, or might (or should) the field itself be morphing in its direction? There are more and more slipstream stories that start with an architectural setting or an object or some arcane text; do these reflect the same movement?

Reading – Chris Nakashima-Brown
Friday, 7:30 pm

I Spy, I Fear, I Wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic.

D'Ammassa, Finlay, Macdonald, Nakashima-Brown, Shirley

Saturday, 2-3 pm

In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because "all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation") while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their "obsessive collection of secret information"). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the "uncontrollable universe" in horror fiction "verges on the overwhelming," while spy fiction "allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over" it. This is only one example of the confluence of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic; the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers' Declare, William Gibson's Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We'll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationship?

Treasures of the Spiderhole

A couple of weeks ago I read a comic book in which an aged version of Wolverine is carried, assumed dead, into a dystopian White House occupied by the Red Skull. The Red Skull is wearing the bloodied uniform of Captain America, his staff unable to extract him from the trophy room he has installed with mementos of all the superheroes he killed. The idea of the trophy room persists in comic books, as depicted in a thousand cross-sections of their secret hideouts. The Fortress of Solitude, the Batcave, the Baxter Building. Not unlike the imagined Al Qaeda mountain fortress depicted by some comics-weaned newspaper graphic artist at the onset of the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, which had basically every super-lair sweet playset option *except* for the trophy room.


[Pic: The above cross-section actually appeared in leading newspapers before the Tora Bora push in November 2001.

So, perhaps sensing that I needed some reminder that the Team America reality is just as authentic as consensus reality, today's NY Times ran an amazing report about W (The Ex-President), now retired to Dallas.

He has a trophy room. Kind of like Batman or the Justice League of America, only W's is real. And the centerpiece of the George W. Bush trophy room is Saddam's Glock:

The gun, a 9 millimeter Glock 18C, was found in the spider hole where the Iraqi leader was captured in December 2003 by Delta Force soldiers, four of whom later presented the pistol to Mr. Bush. Among the thousands of gifts Mr. Bush received as president, the gun became a favorite, a reminder of the pinnacle moment of the Iraq war, according to friends and long-time associates.

Before Mr. Bush left the White House in January, he made arrangements for the gun to be shipped to a national archives warehouse just 18 miles north of his new home in Dallas. His foundation said a final decision had not been made on including the gun in the presidential library. But his associates and visitors to the White House said Mr. Bush had told them of his intention to display it there.

For nearly five years, Mr. Bush kept the mounted, glass-encased pistol in the Oval Office or a study, showing it with pride, especially to military officials, they said. He also let visitors in on a secret: when the pistol was recovered, it was unloaded.

“We were getting ready to leave the Oval Office, and he told us, ‘Wait a minute, guys, I want to show you something,’ ” recalled Pete Hegseth, the chairman of Vets for Freedom, who described a July 2007 visit. “The president moved back into his private study and he came out with the gun, inside this glass case. He said, ‘The Delta guys pulled it off Saddam.’ He was very proud of it.”

I once imagined a Presidential trophy room, and featured it in a work of political satire that was published in Eileen Gunn's The Infinite Matrix the week Saddam was found in his spiderhole. The story, "Script-Doctoring the Apocalypse," imagined psychological warfare operators commissioning a special work from the dictator's Frazetta dealer. With any luck the W Library will also include some of the Rowena-knockoff chainmail bikini art discovered in Saddam's bachelor pads, or perhaps even this work that apparently never made it:

In the game room of level B-3 of the apocalypse-proofed sub-basement at Camp David, the Vice President sat in the warmth of the fire with a tumbler of Glenlivet rocks and admired the newest addition to the trophies hanging on the wall. Between T.R.'s bison head, a D K E fraternity paddle, and a carefully embalmed extraterrestrial biological entity, stretched eight feet of canvas featuring a scene from a geopolitical fever dream.

"Scooter, you've got to come in here and check this out," hollered the Veep to his chief staffer.

Envision this: The Giant White King, an albino sword and sorcery simulacrum of the American President, lies recumbent on the pillowed daybed throne of his private sanctum, framed by a Tolkienesque map of his new empire of the imagination. His imperial pets surround him on the marbled floor, a menagerie of Moreauvian anthromorphs with facial features redolent of barely-remembered newspaper photographs of minor autocrats. Spotted little cat-men, a talking pig, a litter of mangy dog-men, all effusing well-fed supplication.

And stretched across the King's lap is the Leader, re-imagined as a freshly shampooed leonine bodybuilder, bushy tail curled up between his legs, eyes half-closed, whiskers signaling a submissive smile of pleasure. The King strokes the lion-man's belly with one hand; the other holds a leash of silver chain. The King's armory of magical blades is arrayed nearby, ready for use as needed.

"Remember Womack?" asked the Vice President.

"Isn't he the special ops wacko who started jamming Orrin Hatch gospel videos over Saudi national television?"

"Among other bad career moves."

"I thought he got reassigned."

"Yeah, but he's still on the team. Need to keep a fruitcake like that around for the oddjobs that require that rare postmodern sensibility they don't teach at West Point. Like this."

"Kind of weird stuff, if you ask me," said Scooter.

"I know. But it grows on you. It's supposed to be en route to the Leader's weekend retreat, but I thought the Boss might benefit from having it around for a while. Let the idea sink in a bit, if you know what I mean."

Scooter mixed himself a Tanqueray and tonic, leaned up against the billiard table, and took in the work. In the background, one of Nixon's old Martin Denny records played on the hi-fi at low volume.

"I mean, I'm not much for the science fiction thing," said Scooter, "but he does have a nice brush stroke. And you know, that looks just like…"

"Bingo. You're a little slow today. Take a closer look at the other faces."

Scooter walked up, squinted, and then stepped back.

"I'll be damned," he said. "How about that. Looks like last year's Arab League meeting."

"Yeah. You should have seen it before. The original version was a little too anatomically correct, and we had to have it touched up a bit. Never know when the Attorney General might drop in."

"No kidding. Got a title?"

"Tyrant Odalisque."

"Which one's the tyrant?" asked Scooter.

"Very funny."

"Speaking of tyrants, I'm going to head back up to the War Room and see what's happening," said Scooter.

"Screw that," said the Veep. "Rack 'em up and tap the keg. I can hear Marine One chopping in now. It's party time."

As his cyborg heart thumped in mellow sync with the distant helicopter blades, the Vice President sat back, admired Endora's work, and got to thinking it would look very nice on the wall of his favorite undisclosed secure location.


[Pic: A copy of this Rowena painting was found on the wall of one of Saddam's love shacks during the 2003 invasion.]

Our real-world Atrocity Exhibition

At Balladrian, "Michael Jackson's facelift," after Princess Margaret's.



“The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

-- JGB

See also Michael Jackson's science fiction paperback selection.

It's that time again.

Those yahoos (in the Swiftian sense) at San Jose State have posted the results of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, so I have to continue my (likely Quixotic) effort to defend the man. The following is the appendix to my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana:

In his lifetime Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Knebworth (1803-1873) was a popular, prolific, and influential writer. But thanks to the vagaries of time and changing literary tastes Bulwer-Lytton’s name has become synonymous with bad writing, to the point that the English department of San Jose State University has, since 1982, held the "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" for the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels." The decline in Bulwer-Lytton’s reputation is at least somewhat understandable, as many aspects of his style have not aged well. Bulwer-Lytton’s work can be stiff, wooden, and melodramatic. He often unsuccessfully strains for affect. He had a fatal weakness for prolixity, fustian, and bombast. He is little-read today.

But Bulwer-Lytton deserves better. Never mind that he wrote in the style of his era, and that to single him out for writing like his contemporaries is unjust. Never mind that other writers who are his stylistic inferiors are not targeted so; no sober critic would read Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, and then read Bulwer-Lytton, and declare that Bulwer-Lytton is more deserving of derision. Never mind that, as Jaime Weinman says, "It was a dark and stormy night" isn’t really that bad. (I can find several opening lines in Dickens that are worse).

Bulwer-Lytton deserves praise and admiration. Few writers, of any time or of any country, were as influential during their lifetimes. Few writers possessed his commercial instincts or had as great an insight into the tastes of the reading audience. And few writers were as consistently experimental over as long a period of time. The following is a summary of his accomplishments:

• Pelham (1828) was the most popular and influential of the Silver Fork genre of novels. The Silver Fork (or "fashionable novel") genre described the improper behavior of the aristocratic set, as told to the public by (supposedly) one of the aristocrats themselves. The Silver Fork novel was popular from the 1820s until the 1840s and was the transitional genre between the novel of the upper classes and the domestic realism of the Victorian novel proper. Pelham made the fortune of the publishing firm of Colburn and Co. and may have been the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Pelham also set the style, still the standard today, for men wearing black evening dress rather than blue.

• Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) were the first two major Newgate novels and essentially established the genre. Neither novel was quite as popular as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, but both novels were successful (and scandalous), and Rookwood and the succeeding Newgate novels would not have been written without Bulwer-Lytton’s precedent.

• The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was not Bulwer-Lytton’s first historical novel (the undistinguished Devereux (1829) was), but it was his first success in the genre. It is the best historical novel of the 1830s and was seen by critics as having topped the work of Sir Walter Scott. Bulwer-Lytton followed Pompeii with Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). Scott deserves credit for the creation of the modern historical novel, but Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels were among the most popular in the genre in the 1830s and 1840s, and The Last Days of Pompeii created the subgenre of historical novels set in Rome, a group which would later include Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885) and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880). Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels set the standard for applying scholarship and research to the writing of historical romances, and The Last of the Barons and Harold were among the first historical novels to apply contemporary social political issues to the past: in Barons, the negative effect of the Industrial Revolution on England; in Harold, the question of what it is to be "English" and a celebration of the romantic Toryism of the Young England movement of the early 1840s.

• England and the English (1834) was an important criticism of English culture which was politically radical in its call for education and child labor reform.

• Athens: Its Rise and Fall (1837) is one of the best and most readable Victorian histories of ancient Greece.

• Ernest Maltravers (1837) is the novel in which the influence of the Germans on Bulwer-Lytton is the most pronounced. Bulwer-Lytton was greatly influenced by the German thinkers and writers, Goethe and Schiller especially, and he translated Schiller’s lyrical poetry and wrote essays on Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Bulwer-Lytton admired and liked the Germans and helped spread an appreciation for German thought among the English, and in Ernest Maltravers Bulwer-Lytton did a passable attempt at emulating Goethe.

• Night and Morning (1841), another of Bulwer-Lytton’s Proto-Mysteries, was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in the same issue of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in which appeared Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe’s first C. Auguste Dupin story. Though not wholly complimentary of Bulwer-Lytton, Poe nonetheless praises Night and Morning’s plot construction. Poe probably did not read Night and Morning before he composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but it is likely that the complicated plot of Night and Morning had some effect on Poe’s composition of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Moreover, Night and Morning’s detective Monsieur Favart, though an imitation of Eugène François Vidocq, is an early example in crime fiction of the police detective character. Both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins knew of Night and Morning, and it is arguable that Favart was an influence on Dickens’ creation of Inspector Bucket (in Bleak House) and on Collins’ creation of Sergeant Cuff (in The Moonstone). The mystery genre would be different without the example of the Newgate novels to draw upon. The mystery genre would not exist without the work of Poe, Dickens, and Collins, all three of whom were influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.

• Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861-1862) created the occult fantasy genre. Bulwer-Lytton had predecessors, including William Beckford (in Vathek), but it was Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni and A Strange Story which were influential on and imitated by later writers of occult fantasy.

• The Caxtons (1849) was not the first major domestic novel–-Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) has that honor–-but Bulwer-Lytton’s prestige (by the mid-point of the century Bulwer-Lytton was seen as England’s leading novelist) gave significant impetus to domestic fiction and helped make it fashionable.

• The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) was the first modern haunted house story. It is set in the London of the day and uses psychic phenomena rather than the rationalized supernatural of the Gothics. The Haunted and the Haunters has been imitated dozens of times and is one of the two or three most influential haunted house stories ever written.

• The Coming Race (1871) was multiply influential. It is a significant early work of science fiction and uses concepts which would become standards in science fiction, including a version of atomic energy in the vril force. The Coming Race is the best-written of the 19th century Hollow Earth novels and was influential on later utopian novels, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). And the mystical vocabulary and ideology of The Coming Race were adopted by Helena Blavatsky and incorporated into the philosophy of Theosophy.

The preceding list does not include Bulwer-Lytton’s work (1831-1833) as an editor on the New Monthly Review, one of the most popular of the monthly fictional magazines; his political career as a Member of Parliament (1831-1841, 1852-1866) and as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1858-1859); his satires, including The New Timon (1846), with its then-shocking attack on Tennyson, and Money (1840), which like England and the English retains its bite today; his great influence on modern occultism, including the Order of the Golden Dawn; his influence on other writers, particularly Dickens; his efforts on behalf of other writers, both toward creating effective copyright laws and, through the Guild of Literature and Art, to support struggling writers and artists; his extensive critical work on the theory of fiction; and his attempts to experiment with narrative structure and to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction, especially in My Life (1853), in which the narrative is interrupted by criticisms from the characters.

The callow call Bulwer-Lytton "Barely Literate," and the annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" invites similarly shallow jibes, but Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton is as deserving of respect and appreciation as any other writer of his age.

Life as performance art.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us mourn the passing of America’s finest performance artist, the man who so loved a literary genre that he used his whole life to emulate it.

The Gothics were, of course, the literature of terror and horror of the late 18th and 19th century. The Gothics began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and ended around 1830. The most common male character in the Gothic is the Hero-Villain. The roots of the Hero-Villain lie in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan’s combination of admirable and objectionable qualities–his dignity, evil, and defiance against a power he knows he cannot beat–have led many critics to see him as the hero of the poem. Milton’s Satan was influential on the Romantics, and through them the Gothics, as was Sensibility, the privileging of emotions over rational self-control and the indulgence of what Goethe called the dämonisch, or “daemonic” impulse, the unquestioning trust in the correctness of one’s instincts and emotions, regardless of the laws of morality and society.

The Gothic writers used the model of Milton’s Satan and the Sensibility/dämonisch to create the Hero-Villain, the dominant villain of the Gothic genre. The Hero-Villain commits evil but is never purely evil. He is a mix of violent passions and uncontrollable impulses which he knows to be evil but cannot resist or overcome. He has great intellectual and physical gifts, great strength of character and will, but uses them for evil ends. The Hero-Villain is attractive to the reader because of his passion and great abilities as well as for his temptation and suffering, but he is villainous because of his final surrender to evil. The Hero-Villain is tormented by his own dark urges at the same time that he torments others. He is, in the words of Charles Maturin, one “who can apprehend the good, but is powerless to be it.” He is not an anti-hero, for he is set in opposition to the hero or heroine of the Gothic, and his downfall is the hero’s triumph and the victory of good. But the Hero-Villain is a waste of potential and a lesson in what the inability to resist temptation and one’s impulses can lead to.

I give you Michael Jackson, the world’s biggest fan of the Gothic. Does not the preceding description fit what we know about Michael Jackson? More, doesn’t his life embody not just the Hero-Villain, but the Gothic itself?

Consider the main themes and symbols of the Gothic. There is the villain as ethnic Other--Jackson turning himself from African-American to some sort of visually Unheimliche being. There is the scary castle with secret passageways--Neverland Ranch. There is weather as an objective correlative (physical manifestation of emotion and other immaterial things) for the protagonist and villain–the sunshine of Santa Barbara (home of the Neverland Ranch), like the sunshine of Southern California, is too bright, too sunny–a kind of desperate and even ominous sunshine, like a smile that widens and widens until it is literally rather than figuratively from ear to ear. There is the notion of the body as monstrous–witness what Jackson did to his face.

The Gothic has innocents threatened and pursued by the Hero-Villain, and we can only imagine what horrors went on in the Neverland Ranch when one of Jackson’s overnight guests didn’t want to cuddle in bed with Jackson. The Gothic has the supernatural as an accepted part of life–and “Thriller” introduced more people to zombies than every George Romero film put together. The Gothic had high-pitched emotions aplenty, including swoons and fits–well, just read Jackson’s lyrics. In the Gothic, patriarchal figures are almost always revealed to be tyrants–and we all know about the abuse which Michael’s father inflicted on him. In the Gothic, clergy are nearly always corrupt–something the adult Michael said about the Jehovah’s Witness authorities who were a part of his childhood. In the Gothic, birthmarks are often crucial in the resolution of a plot–as was Jackson’s vitiligo and the marks on Jackson’s penis which Jordan Chandler described in the 1993 sexual abuse case against Jackson.

Consider, too, the categories of Gothics. The two main ways of categorizing Gothics have always been male-vs-female and external-vs-internal. The “male Gothic” puts a male figure at the center of a story of social, sexual, and/or religious transgression and usually reduces the heroine to the status of object, to be sexually and physically threatened, rescued, and eventually married. Jackson’s life was full of transgression–sexual (the pedophilia), racial (from black to Unheimliche), and religious (from activist Jehovah’s Witness to atheist, both of which Middle America fight transgressive). And how else can we describe Jackson’s “marriage” with Lisa Marie Presley but his acquisition of a thing, an object, which he can use as a shield against rumors?

The “external Gothic,” or socially-oriented Gothic, is concerned with the home: the lineage and patrimony of the hero, his disinheritance by the villain, and the revelation of the hero’s true identity and the restoration of his estate. In the external Gothic the home is defined by the male’s possession of it (or the lack of same). Doesn’t this define Jackson’s entire life? His patrimony (the atrocious, abusive Joseph Jackson), his disinheritance (Jackson’s estrangement from his father), and Jackson’s quest for the epiphanic revelation of his true identity (what else can we call the ongoing transformation of his face) and for the restoration of his estate? The external Gothic is about regaining the true home--remember what Frost wrote in “Death of the Hired Man:”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Jackson never got either, did he? He had to create his own home, and fill it with odd animals, and ship in children who could however briefly fill the role of the “they” who had to take him in, and take part in a painfully awkward arranged marriage so unconvincing that his wife had to reassure the public that they were, in fact, having sex.

I call that devotion to the Gothic, and to performance art–taking your embrace of the Hero-Villain role and the core elements of the Gothic. Well done, Michael Jackson, well done.

When Björk attacks

Courtesy of Ballardian's Simon Sellars, an amazing collection of the world's best celebrity versus paparazzi smackdowns via Oz's thevine.com.au. See THX-1138 bald Britney smash the windows of an SUV with her umbrella! See Matthew McConaughey and his Malibu surfer posse going all Jets and Sharks on the photogs! Feel the unleashed Njalster tantrum fury of Björk! This is your reality.



If that's not enough, try this speculative version of celebrity culture jamming in my story R.P.M., courtesy of the fine fellas over at Futurismic, in which near-future revolutionaries take paparazzi tactics to the next level by creating intentional accidents with movie stars and dutifully documenting the results:

Seven long seconds across the yellow line, four overpowered bald tires balanced on the edge of totally out of control.

KKKKKKEEEERRRRUUUUUUUUUUNCHH.

The windshield fills with white as the Monte Carlo punctures the left drivers’ side door and rear quarter panel. Elegant forms of sheet metal assembled with attentive precision by North America’s most diligent factory robots krush, crumpled like the aluminum foil of the Gods. The busted hymen of new car virginity rended in an act of loving violation.

“To free the world, we must rape the Spectacle,” says Avineri in the Prison Blog.

Tinted windows shatter and blow, exposing Jessica as she screams, the secret sphincters of her facial muscles contorting her pampered dermis into a horrifying rictus a hundred times over, once for each of the dilating shutters excitedly popping off in her face—our half-dozen cameras and those of the true paparazzi excitedly seizing upon the sudden scene.

The best of our photos and video clips will be posted on one of 0z0’s myriad websites that bounce from host to host as the cybercrime brigades hound the ISPs. The straight paparazzi images will end up in checkout counters and dinnertime television broadcasts. Percy usually manages to sell a few of our choicest illegally procured spots to the same outlets, financing our future efforts with the fruits of our transgression. The best of the celebrity accident photos will go for a few thousand bucks; clean video can reap five figures.

“Our home invasions are legitimate, virtual, and totally commercial,” says 0z0 in his manifesto-in-progress. “We merely insert a slow-burning virus into the mediascape to hasten its self-immolation. No one makes you watch, right?”

See also: Invisible Literature for the Age of Celebrity: The Assassination Inquest of Diana, Princess of Wales Considered as an Unintentionally Ballardian Remix of the Warren Commission Report.

Celebrants

My friend Bridget asked me, "Have you ever heard of a celebrant?"

Oh yes, it's the Roman Catholic or Episcopalian priest or other Christian minister who celebrates a sacrament on Sunday morning and at weddings and funerals. But that wasn't what Bridget meant. She didn't mean the river Celebrant in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings either. (The latter is pronounced with an initial hard "k" sound and not an "s" sound.)

It seems there's a growing movement to have trained, credentialed, but secular celebrants for the important moments of life in our society. The occasions can be anything from the death of a pet to the death of a person; weddings and funerals; divorces; graduations, promotions, or the loss of a job—practically anything important to someone.

How interesting. Traditionally, clergy do some of these things—more than you might realize. There are liturgical ceremonies for blessing pets (on or around the feast day of St. Francis), boats, and homes. An Episcopalian home blessing is especially nice. Where I live now, my priest made her way from one room to the next, followed by everybody else with one person holding a candle and another sprinkling holy water with a sprig of rosemary. The priest said special prayers for every room, including living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and study. Even the bathroom—into which twelve people cheerfully fit themselves, with two standing in the tub, to participate as the well-crafted and tasteful words of blessing were pronounced.

Less formally, some church services take a few moments to celebrate occasions in the lives of the people. At my church, St. Stephen's Episcopal in Houston, there's a time in the service for people to come up and put coins into a little model church as they announce celebrations or thanksgivings for everything from a new baby sister or brother to a union or wedding anniversary to a 2400-mile road trip in which the only problem was a flat tire that happened in the driveway of a friend's house.

And a lot of clergy are willing to informally all kinds of things that you feel need blessing. According to the Houston Chronicle, one passenger on a recent flight from Belgium to Houston never flies without a rabbi's blessing. In Antwerp, he had to wait until late in the night before his departure to get a blessing from a busy rabbi. He was glad he had done so after the airplane's pilot died of a heart attack over the Atlantic Ocean and the other flight crew brought the jet to a safe landing in Houston.

On the other hand, a lot of religious traditions leave much to be desired when it comes to celebrating the occasions of our lives. The most glaring example is same-sex weddings or unions. It has been pointed out by gay Catholics in the Houston-Galveston area that in the Catholic Church it is OK for all kinds of things to be blessed, and this includes pet parakeets and Galveston's shrimp fleet. Why not two people who love each other enough to want to make a life together?

Thus the need for secular celebrants. A Web search turns up several venues for the training and credentialing of people to serve in that capacity. One is the Celebrant USA Foundation and Institute. Another is the Council for Secular Humanism. Yet another is the Humanist Society.

And according to Wikipedia, in Australia an "authorized celebrant" is a person who can conduct legal marriages, while "general celebrants" perform a range of extra-legal ceremonies including funerals, renewal of wedding vows, funerals, birthdays, commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples, scattering of ashes, boat-naming ceremonies, citizenship and naturalization.

This is all to the good. Life gets thin, strained and tiresome without ceremonies. I don't just mean celebrating the good stuff. As much and more, we need ceremony for funerals and other really bad stuff—of which there is a lot these days. Ceremony is food for the soul. Without it, we have an emptiness inside that we may try to fill with food, entertainment, and possessions. Without ceremonies we are reduced to consumers. Insatiable ones.

Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples must do their part as they are able. Some are surprisingly able. Others are mired in the kind of religious judgment-mentality (judgmentality?) that drives hurting people away. Meanwhile, a secular celebrant movement has arisen because the need is great, and the stakes are high: people who may have been secretly unhappy consumers in flush times are openly suffering now, and all of us feel the weight of jobs lost, dreams derailed, retirements deferred, and the whole rest of the trouble we're in. We desperately need celebration for the good things, the bad things, and all of our hopes for something good hidden inside the bad.