Don Webb's Letters from Doublesign

"Don Webb is a genius. He's not widely appreciated. There are some things mankind was not meant to know." -- Bruce Sterling.

One of our genre's great achievements in recent years has been the successful infiltration of the mainstream with a fresh infusion of winking fabulism — explorations of *everyday magic* lurking in the suburban American psychoscape — neighborhood zombies, television programs that invade reality, flea market talismans. Horror tropes repainted with anime eyes in a literary variation of pop surrealism that subtly flags the signposts of contemporary middle-class consciousness, documenting the obliteration of the barriers between reality and imagination.

Then there's Don Webb. Old school slipstream with a stiffer proof, practiced by an actual Magus. They grow their fabulists differently in Amarillo. Maybe it's the nuclear effluent in the water.



Don Webb has been floating clandestine balloons of eldritch literature (mostly in short form -- hundreds of them) since the 1980s. These tiny wonders are beautiful terrors that occupy some unlit zone between Lovecraft and Nabokov. The stories have Don's hypnotic voice, the one he uses to set off flares in the minds of his writing students, a voice that knows how to turn words into spells. They sneak up on you, burrow in behind your pineal gland, and don't leave.

Don Webb is the Left Hand Paul Harvey, broadcasting secret messages to you on an AM wavelength that's not supposed to be there any more.

So go buy the May issue of FSF, turn to p. 108, read "The Great White Bed," and see if you don't agree. Then go buy the new collection When They Came, and wait for the apparition on the cover to start illuminating your dreams.

No one would ever write these about Britney Spears.

Scholars of pop culture know that celebrity culture is hardly a recent creation. You can read the newspapers of the 19th century (and earlier) and get the same obsession with celebrities, the same celebration of people who are famous for being famous, and the same fixation on appearance and style over achievement and substance. But modern American celebrity culture really began at the end of the 19th century, with the appearance of Buffalo Bill. (For more on this I recommend Larry McMurtry's The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America and Joy Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory and Popular Culture). By the early 20th century American celebrity culture was in a form recognizable to modern couch potatoes, and by 1920 it was just hitting its peak. Everything that modern celebrity culture has now was present then. There were witless, self-important demi-mondaines and courtesans lauded in the popular press. There were actors and actresses hyped too soon and then destroyed through hubris, a poisonous press, or the machinations of studio heads. There was even a Trial of the Century, in the form of poor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's trial for the murder of poor Virginia Rappe. (As always when the subject of Arbuckle comes up, I can't help first reminding people that he was never convicted of murder--two hung juries and an innocent verdict--and then quoting David Thomson, from his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film:

...the combined forces of scandalmongery and puritanism would not be dissuaded. Arbuckle was made a scapegoat, as though after calling a man "Fatty" for years and rejoicing at his humiliation on film the public could only move in on him with trained hostility...the moral realities of Hollywood life were something the public hardly dreamed of; even so, one hit was enough to furnish it with nightmares that demanded cleansing action. Arbuckle's own exaggerated ugliness drew upon him all the public's hypocritical loathing of depravity.

Do enough research into popular culture of the 1910s and 1920s, and you're left with a feeling that, modern distributed media and 24-hour demand for information be damned, celebrity culture before the Great Depression was more prevalent, and uglier, than what we've got today. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons may have had more power, but the gossipmongers of the 1910s and 1920s had more venom. Modern celebrity culture is bad; what was present before the Depression was far worse, just as necrotizing fasciitis is worse than local tetanus.

But in one respect celebrity culture of the 1920s is to be preferred to what we have now, and that's in the area of fanfiction.

Fanfiction is of course not a 20th century invention--magazines in the 19th century had Mary Sue stories written by teenage girls about famous Native Americans--but it reached its apex in the 1920s and 1930s, in the form of Celebrity Pulps. Celebrity Pulps--and I'll have much more on them in my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (MonkeyBrain, 2008, get your advance orders in now)--were pulp magazines in which stories were written about celebrities, usually but not always actors and actresses. (I realize that, because the stories were published, they don't meet the current definition of fanfiction, but, honestly, what else can we call them but fanfiction?) In these stories the celebrities were shown (if they were actors/actresses) to lead lives typical of their film characters or (if they weren't actors/actresses) exaggerated versions of their real lives. Imagine a series of pulps in which Sylvester Stallone--not "Rocky," but Stallone the actor--is shown winning boxing matches. Celebrity Pulps (and I'm using the label "pulp" loosely) were a European creation, and appeared from Portugal to the Soviet Union.



You know Harold Lloyd, of course--one of the greats of silent film, a peer of Chaplin and Keaton. In 1924 he appeared as the hero of Harold Lloyd #1-5. Written by Paul Hain, one of the more successful authors of the heldromans (German pulps), Harold Lloyd portrayed Lloyd as fighting crime, romancing women, and finding adventure across the United States and Europe, in stories with titles like "The Cavalier in His Homeland" and "His Highness, the Prince of Film." (I've been unable to find an image of Harold Lloyd, so enjoy this one instead).



Eddy Polo you might not know, which says a lot about how short-lived fame is. Polo (1875-1961) was in his time a giant. Polo's IMDB page gives you a hint about the kind of career he had, but doesn't really give you a sense about just how widely known he was; suffice it to say that "The Hercules of the Screen" was the equivalent of Stallone or Schwarzenegger in their heydays. Polo appeared as the hero of two Celebrity Pulps, Der Zirkuskönig, Eddy Polo #1-6 (1922), and Eddy Polo Serie #1-58 (1923-1924). The fictional Polo is a circus owner and wandering adventurer who travels around the world, alone or accompanied by his circus, and helps innocents, fights crime, and pulls of stunts like...well, remember the opening to the first Matrix--you know, this one--(God bless Youtube)--with the parkour chase? The fictional Eddy Polo laughs at jumping over only one building--the fictional Eddy Polo would have jumped from the building to that passing subway. And made it. He appeared in stories with titles like "The Rancho El Dorado War" and "The Female Vampire." (I've been unable to find an image of any of Polo's Celebrity Pulps, so there's this uninspired one instead).



Yes, that's right. Al Capone Celebrity Pulps. Al Capone der König der Gangster #1-50 (1932-1933), Al Ripper. El Terror de Chicago #1-12 (1932), and undoubtedly more I haven't been able to find. (Look, if you want to spend your time going through the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, looking for oddly-spelled variations of "Al Capone," be my guest. Reading Hungarian makes my eyes bleed). The fictional Capone is shown to be a bad man, but he often ends up fighting men even worse, such as Yellow Perils and the Ku Klux Klan.



Lee Parry was never popular in the United States, but in Europe in the 1920s she was huge. And in Paul Rosenhayn and Paul Hain's Lee Parry--Die Tollkühne Abenteuerin #1-35 (1924) she was a crime-fighting adventuress, traveling around the world (Montmartre, Upsala, the Rif desert, Whitechapel), making friends (the Gypsy Princess, the White Knight), and fighting interesting opponents (the Lady in Black, the Smiling Muslim, and the Death Club). (It must be said that the Pola Negri Celebrity Pulp which appeared in Poland in 1924, though considerably shorter-lived, is the most interesting of the Celebrity Pulps with women in it. Why? Three words: Rudolph. Valentino. Slash).



Valy Arnheim, like Lee Parry, was popular only in Europe, but also like Parry Arnheim was very popular in Europe. Arnheim wasn't known by that name, but instead by the name "Harry Hill," which was the name of his character in a number of his early films. In 1921 Arnheim/Hill appeared in Harry Hill, der Weltmeister der Sensationen #1-27 (1921-1922). Harry Hill began by recycling the plots of Arnheim's movies before moving on to new adventures, using Arnheim's image for illustrations of Hill (as above), and portraying the fictional Hill in the way that the movies characterized him, as an adventurer and explorer active around the world and in the land, sea and air. He appears in stories with titles like “Mask Number 74,” “A Detective Duel,” and “The Chinese Diamond.”



No one mentioned here has been treated worse by posterity than Harry Piel. Just look at his Wikipedia entry and his IMDB entry. The man directed over 100 films and appeared in over 60 of them--and yet he only gets 24,000 hits on a Google search, and many of those not worth looking at. (On the other hand, he stayed in Germany under the Nazis rather than taking the honorable route chosen by Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre, among others, so swive Piel sideways). In the 1920s Piel was the protagonist of four Celebrity Pulps: Harry Piel – der Abenteuerer König und Verächter des Todes Innen #1-18 (1920-1921), Harry Piel - der Tollkühne Detektiv #1-92 (1920-1923), Harry Piel Abenteuer #19-150 (1922-1926), and Heinz Barkhoff’s Harry Piel, Abenteuer #1 (1928). The fictional Harry Piel is a crystallization of his film persona, with many of the stories being retellings of his film plots. The fictional Piel is a "gentleman of the world," a detective-adventurer at ease in the abysses of the wilds and in the big city, fighting for good, helping the poor and downtrodden, rescuing imperilled maidens, and so on. He is occasionally Watsoned by Murphy, a newspaper reporter. Piel appears in stories with titles like “The Sky Pirate,” “The Great Unknown,” and “A Night of Terror in Paris.”



Hans Stosch-Sarrasani (1883-1934) was famous in Europe as a circus clown, and later became the owner and operator of the Circus Sarrasani. The history of circuses in Europe would make a fine book for someone to write; circuses go back in Europe much farther than Americans might think, and the evolution of the circus in Europe is more interesting than you'd guess. Prominent circus performers were celebrities on par with actors and actresses, and Hans Stosch-Sarrasani was at the top, enough so that when he was fictionalized, his adventures sold quite well. He appeared in two Celebrity Pulps, Hans Stosch-Sarrasani #1-80 (1923-1924) and Hans Stosch-Sarrasani #1-100 (1925-1926). (That's 180 issues; Doc Savage only had 181). The fictional Stosch-Sarrasani is a circus owner but is also a cowboy and has adventures around the world, sometimes teaming up with his real-life employee Billy Jenkins. Stosch-Sarrasani encounters Apaches, visits tea-houses in Japan, goes on hunting parties in the Indian state of Baradhot, and fights Cossacks in the Caucasus. He appears in stories with titles like “The Opium Den of Tung-Sui-Men,” “The Wizard of Martinez,” and “His Last Trick.”



You won't have heard of Billy Jenkins, most likely. Jenkins (1885-1954), née Erich Rosenthal, was only a circus performer, and a German circus performer at that. But, and I say this with no hyperbole, you could put him in the ring with prime-of-life Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Master Chandgiram, and Jenkins would have made cowboy sauce out of the lot of them. Let's just say that the number of Stasi agents the 65-year-old Jenkins is supposed to have quietly killed for the BND might never be known, but it's double figures at least, and probably with his bare hands. Don't be fooled by his sweet smile in the photo above; Jenkins was a bad man. (Jenkins was no Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., of course). After college Jenkins went to the American West and worked as a cowboy--keep in mind this in 1910, when there were still real cowboys in the American West. He spent several years in America and then returned to Germany and went to work as a rider and animal trainer for various circuses, including Hans Stosch-Sarrasani's Circus Sarrasani. Jenkins achieved international fame--not just European, but international fame--in the 1920s as a circus performer, and appeared in a number of Celebrity Pulps, including Billy Jenkins #1-4 (1930), Die Abenteuer Des Billy Jenkins #1-264 (1934-1939) and Die Abenteuer Des Billy Jenkins #1-370 (1949-1963). (By comparison The Shadow only appeared in 325 issues). The fictional Jenkins is alternatively a cowboy and a secret agent for the U.S. government, active in the American West, in Alaska, and in Central and South America. He has his very own arch-enemy and is wanted by the law in Arizona for a crime he did not commit. Jenkins has a Cheyenne sidekick, Hunting Wolf, and a companion wolf named Husky. Jenkins’ stories have very Gothic settings--decayed graveyards, abandoned mines, and the like–and involve things like car hijackers, gold thieves, killer plagues and zombies.



And, finally, my favorite of all the Celebrity Pulps. (Except perhaps for the aforementioned Pola Negri Celebrity Pulp, or maybe the Lillian Gish Celebrity Pulp, in which Gish is shown to be a conscienceless playa). Julius Jäger (1889-1952) was a circus performer who gained fame in Europe under the name of "Cliff Aeros." In 1942 he founded the Zirkus Aeros, which remained active in East Germany until 1990. In 1955 he appeared in the East German Celebrity Pulp Cliff Aeros - Die Menschliche Sternschnuppe #1-16. (Yes, there were East German pulps. Gloriously demented pulps. But you'll have to read my Encyclopedia to find out more). Cliff Aeros described the adventures that Cliff Aeros had as he traveled the world with his circus, bringing proper communist justice to the masses oppressed by capitalist wickedness. Some of the story titles of Cliff Aeros were “A Dying Man Flies to Heaven,” “The Trip with Crocodiles,” “A Leap Through the Bayonet Tire,” and “Aeros at the Bullfight.”

There's certainly a lot more fanfiction now than there was in previous decades--there are literally hundreds of thousands of fanfiction stories over at FanFiction.net, and that's just one fanfiction site of many. (Harry Potter alone has almost 290,000 stories on Fanfiction.net). But given the choice, I'll take the Celebrity Pulps. After all, there are a lot of stories in which Hermione and Snape fall in love, but there's only one issue (Tom Mix, Król Cowboyów #23) in which Tom Mix fights the Mafia the Old West, or in which Pancho Villa fights Japanese spies in Mexico (General Villa, der Mexikanische Rebellenführer #3).

Turtle Habitat

I've seen as many as five turtles at one time, here, where the outflow from a sewage treatment plant spills into a drainage ditch. They weren't itty bitty wildlings or poor little pet turtles trying to make it in the wild. The day I saw five, two of them were at least twelve inches long from nose to tail tip.

They were odd turtles. Flat and pale. The three little ones looked like animated pancakes. The big ones were quick and wary - one glance at me and they dove under the patch of turbulent water and vanished from sight. When I made myself inconspicuous and waited, they resumed their usual activities. One of the big ones buried itself in some sand and debris under the water, from which it stretched a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g neck up to the air.

Given big funny-looking turtles in a smelly drainage ditch in the middle of Houston, amid outflow from a sewage treatment plant, with lurid green algae at the edges of the water, I started wondering if these were mutant turtles. With a bit of research, though, I discovered that they are probably a species called the spiny soft-shell turtle. Descriptions of appearance and behavior perfectly match what I observed.

Nature has plenty of weird wonders, and even wild things that manage to live in the bowels of a big city.

Summer residence of the Great Old Ones

I know there's going to be a rational explanation from a meteorology/planetology standpoint regarding this phenomenon. I fully understand that intellectually. But damn, that doesn't make this any less freaky. Cue von Daniken's and Hoagland's disciples:

Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
March 27, 2007

Pasadena, Calif. -- An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling
the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists
with NASA's Cassini mission.

NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades
ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it
is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the
brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures.
The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first
instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion
with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric
expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer
team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never
seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick
atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate
is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric
figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing
in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex
has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000
kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

The new images taken in thermal-infrared light show the hexagon extends
much deeper down into the atmosphere than previously expected, some 100
kilometers (60 miles) below the cloud tops. A system of clouds lies
within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon
like cars on a racetrack.

"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of
Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and
infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson. "At the
south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and
at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is
completely different."

The Saturn north pole hexagon has not been visible to Cassini's visual
cameras, because it's winter in that area, so the hexagon is under the
cover of the long polar night, which lasts about 15 years. The infrared
mapping spectrometer can image Saturn in both daytime and nighttime
conditions and see deep inside. It imaged the feature with thermal
wavelengths near 5 microns (seven times the wavelength visible to the
human eye) during a 12-day period beginning on Oct. 30, 2006. As winter
wanes over the next two years, the feature may become visible to the
visual cameras.

Based on the new images and more information on the depth of the
feature, scientists think it is not linked to Saturn's radio emissions
or to auroral activity, as once contemplated, even though Saturn's
northern aurora lies nearly overhead.

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate
and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual
rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain.

"Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated
polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep
atmosphere and perhaps the interior," added Baines.

The hexagon images and movie, including the north polar auroras are
available at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
and http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is
based at the University of Arizona.

Collect them all!

On February 1, 2005, the Associated Press reported the following:

"BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi militants claimed in a Web statement Tuesday to have taken an American soldier hostage and threatened to behead him in 72 hours unless the Americans release Iraqi prisoners. The U.S. military said it was investigating, but the claim’s authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.



"The posting, on a Web site that frequently carried militants’ statements, included a photo of what that statement said was an American soldier, wearing desert fatigues and seated on a concrete floor with his hands tied behind his back. The figure in the photo appeared stiff and expressionless, and the photo’s authenticity could not be confirmed."

Savvy bloggers quickly determined why the abducted soldier looked so stiff. He was an actual 12", 1:6 scale action figure, the gun at his head his own plastic rifle.



Score one for the media jammers. Two years later, the source of the hoax has never been revealed. Disappeared into the abyss of memory with all the other fast-burning sparklers of fear and irony decorating the spectacular mass psychic nightmare of the GWOT, alongside the unsolved anthrax mailings and the tales of the Barney theme being blasted off the walls of improvised shipping containers on the Syrian border, postmodern tool of enemy combatant torture.



The abducted "toy" was Dragon Models' "Special Forces Cody," one of a series of highly detailed real-time poseable action figures for the GWOT produced at headline news speed by postmodern Gepettos in their hidden Hong Kong ateliers. Others included "Tora Bora Ted," "Swift Freedom Delta Force Frank," Covert CIA Agents "Smith and Jones," and Operation Iraqi Freedom gunners "Jackson & Pollack." Retailing at north of $50 per figure, these are not designed for your neighborhood 9-year-old. Rather, they are cryptic simulations that bridge the gap between plasticine adolescent ideas of gear-laden action manhood and mediated CNN reality.



I admit against interest that a few of these once cluttered my desktop as ironic totems and well-armed paperweights. A ready team led by Presidential Aviator George W. Bush, fully outfitted to drop a MOAB from his B-2 — Mission: Accomplished.



The only things missing to complete the realer-than-real simulation on these are some of those secret personal dossier file cards like the ones that accompanied G.I. Joes during the 1980s — character writeups with key characteristics, specialties, skills and a bit of personal backstory, equal parts RPG and Mission:Impossible.



The master modelers need look no further than the compleat strategists over at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where you can download a comprehensive set of "Terrorist Recognition Cards" ready for compilation as the deadliest, most ass-kicking set of bubblegum collectibles ever — as if those WWII aircraft recognition cards that trained you to search the sky for enemy silhouettes had been cross-bred with the horror show of "Mars Attacks."



Organized in nifty teams by color-coded regions (red for Afghanistan/Pakistan, green for Iraq, burnt orange for The Horn of Africa, yellow for the Arabian Peninsula, and blue for Southeast Asia), they look to have been put together by some out-of-work members of the Marvel Bullpen, complete with little graphic icons to represent character types: jeweled crown for "Senior Leader," stack of documents for "Operational Planner," gamer soldier for "Tactician," cartoon scimitar for "Operative," loaded forklift for "Facilitator," notepad and pen for "Recruiter," and my personal fave, a little Stratego-style bomb with lit fuse for "Explosives." All you need is a couple of twelve-sided die and you are good to go. I'll trade you two Zakariya Essabars for your Harun Fazul!



We wait anxiously for DIA to cut a licensing deal with Hasbro for a full line of GWOT action figures.

(In another section of the DIA website, they have the agency's collection of military art -- essentially the covers of unwritten science fiction sequels to Ice Station Zebra, featuring imaginative envisionings of Cold War era Soviet weaponry. That's my kind of Pentagon bureau. I wonder if they have any openings.)



Perhaps the most important icon on the Terrorist Trading Cards is the little stack of black cash: "Reward for Capture." You know, so when you see a likely terrorist taking pictures of your office building or lurking at you nearest mall, you can pull out the recognition card, and, if there's a cash icon, run to the nearest computer, login to rewardsforjustice.net, and file a report to get your own personal war on terror lottery ticket.

"Help Stop Terrorism

What you know could be worth millions!

If you have information about past or future acts of international terrorism, send us a tip now.

CLICK HERE

You and your family may be eligible for relocation.

Strict confidentiality is assured."

Integrate all of this ready-for-play content and you have the mother-of-all killer apps for a 21st century mobile phone-based game of Assassin with a healthy dose of America's Most Wanted.

Don't believe the hype? Check out the slideshow on the hooded Filipino collecting a suitcase full of Ben Franklins from an unnamed US Embassy official who looks like Paul Bartel making his posthumous cameo on 24.



"You and your family may be eligible for relocation." No purchase necessary? Keep an eye on those secretive new neighbors. They may be under relocation, they may have their own trading cards, or maybe the kid just has his own trunkful of next generation toys for a Zeitgeist fueled by the Power of Nightmares.

Fearing and Loathing the Future in La Plata and Resistencia.

I'm a materialist, and as such have a condescending, patronizing, and even punch-in-the-face-able attitude toward devout people with out-of-the-mainstream religious beliefs. (By which I mean snake handlers, Pentacostalists, Five Percenters, religious xenoglossiacs, and the like). It's not that I'm impolite about it; my parents raised me to prefer the bastinado to ever expressing an opinion which would make someone else feel condescended to, patronized, or just looked down upon. Even so, I know that, when speaking with true believers, my face (however much against my will) takes on an expression somewhere between "You're kidding, right?" and "You actually believe that? That's so cute!"

In truth, I envy true believers. In describing one of my ex-girlfriends I said that I wished I was as sure of anything as she was of everything. I wish I was as sure of any aspect of God or divinely-dictated morality as the true believers are of all of them. Most especially, I wish I felt that I lived in a universe whose basic element was religious narrativium. It'd certainly be a more comforting place to live in than the one I've got.

For example, there's the practitioners of Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare, or SLSW. A simple Google search will turn up a number of articles, like "Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare in Historical Retrospect" or "Spirit Mapping in the City of Chennai, India," but a search of the literature gave me Samuel Hio-Kee Ooi's article in the Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies v9n1 (2006): "A Study of Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare From a Chinese Perspective."

Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare is a relatively recent phenomenon, the phrase itself having been invented in the early 1990s. The basic concept is that (quoting Peter Wagner, at a symposium on power evangelicism),

Satan delegates high-ranking members of the hierarchy of evil spirits to control nations, regions, cities, tribes, people groups, neighborhoods and other significant social networks of human beings throughout the world. Their major assignment is to prevent God from being glorified in their territory, which they do through directing the activity of lower-ranking demons.

Another evangelical site (whose text is saved here) tells us that there are three kinds of Satan-sent evil spirits: "ground-level," which only possess people; "occult-level," which empower "witches, shamans, and magicians;" and "strategic-level" or "territorial," which are the most powerful and which rule over entire territories. The latter are powerful enough to keep the people of their territories in "bondage, sin and darkness," so much so that even the gospel itself cannot penetrate. The demons must therefore be "identified," "bound," "overcome" and "rebuked" in prayer.

Toward this end, Ooi says, there are certain proven steps to take against these demons:

First, seek the name of the ruling spirit and identify its territory; second, seek the function of demons in a particular area; third, if demons occupy a neighborhood, perform a "prayer walk;" and if the demon controls a city, a "praise march;" and if a demon exercises power over a region, a "prayer expedition;" and if a demon rules in a nation, a "prayer journey." The technical name for seeking and digging out the locations and powers of demons is "spiritual mapping."

Peter Wagner's Breaking Strongholds in Your City gives the example of La Plata, Argentina, in which it was discovered that the strategic-level spirit was "the god of freemasonry--Jah-Bal-On." Jah-Bal-On's lieutenants were "a spirit of lust, spirit of violence, spirit of witchcraft, (and) spirit of living death." Also present in the city and influencing its inhabitants were Osiris and Isis. In Resistencia, Argentina, the territorial spirit was Piton, the spirit of witchcraft, who was empowering San La Muerte (the spirit of death), Pombero (the spirit of fear), and Currpi (the spirit of sexual perversion).

Your reaction to the preceding is likely like mine, and doesn't need to be described.

But...am I the only one to feel, on some level, jealousy toward the practitioners of SLSW? These men--I assume they're all men, given the Pentecostal attitude toward women--are living the lives of the heroes of fantasy novels, or comic book superheroes. The SLSW practitioners travel to a city, state, or country, confront demons, and defeat them, thereby freeing the afflicted from the grip of Satan. (From the SLSW practitioner's own perspective, of course--but isn't that all that any of us have?). The lives of SLSW practitioners are lacking the randomness and unsurety which materialists like me must accept as a fact of life. What the SLSW practitioners have instead is religious narrativium, with themselves as the heroes. The rest of us get plots written by Raymond Carver or John Cheever; the SLSW practioners get plots written by William Hope Hodgson (in his Carnacki stories) or Algernon Blackwood (in his John Silence stories). The SLSW practitioners are Buffy or Angel or the Charmed trio in their own lives. I'm...not.

I wouldn't swap my own delusions for those of the SLSW practitioners, but I do envy them their self-image.

Horrors!

I have a story coming out in Horrors Beyond II – Stories of Strange Creations. This is a new anthology from Elder Signs Press. In addition to the regular trade paperback, there will be a hardcover and a trade paperback limited edition signed by the authors. So in the last few months, a ream box containing many sheets of cotton bond paper journeyed around the country to each author in turn. We had to autograph every signature sheet, inside the margins indicated by a signing guide, being sure to leave room for the other twenty signatures. It was all meticulously organized by the editors of ESP, with crystal-clear instructions, but....

Signing one's name on enough pages to fill a ream box – now that was horror!

Actually it wasn't as taxing as I expected. With a smooth-flowing pen, the signing guide paperclipped to a firm piece of cardboard, and a good-sized desk surface to work on, it was a snap. An odd thing happened, though: about a third of the way through, my hand forgot how to make the "n" in my last name. I broke off, rested my hand, and studied my signature on the first few pages in the ream box. But the trick was to be in unthinking reflex mode. When I paid some bills and signed my name on the checks, that got my name-signing reflex right back on track and all was well.

My story in the anthology is titled "The Mortification of the Flesh."

P. S. I borrowed from the library the CD mentioned in my February 13 blog ("From the Sublime to Something Else") to give it a listen. The CD is Gregorian Chant Elvis Presley, performed by the Brotherhood of St. Gregory. It's less exotic than I expected. But more disconcerting. The music sounds like a cross between steamy Presley lyrics and guileless folk mass instruments (especially guitar) and voices (especially tenors). Pointed cognitive dissonance ensues when hearing the word "can't," as in "Can't Help Falling in Love," sung with church-chorister pronunciation: cahn't.