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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
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.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The new BRUTARIAN is here
Hey folks, in between my copious amounts of non-posting here on the blog, I sometimes manage to squeeze in occasional, for-real publication in actual dead tree media. Brutarian Quarterly no. 53 is a case in point.
Aside from the spiffy cover, this issue of Brutarian is worth picking up for the contributions inside from yours truly, first and foremost being an interview with the great SF writer and reformed journalist Allen Steele. Here's a sampling of what's in store:
In addition to a handful of book reviews contributed by myself, the issue also contains the usual glorious lineup of underground and off-kilter fare. Highlights include an interview with "Scream Queen" Linnea Quigley, she of countless low-budget horror flicks, including "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers," a personal favorite.
At just $5 an issue, it's cheaper than most other mind-altering substances. Drop by the website and tell Dom you want a copy or six.
Aside from the spiffy cover, this issue of Brutarian is worth picking up for the contributions inside from yours truly, first and foremost being an interview with the great SF writer and reformed journalist Allen Steele. Here's a sampling of what's in store:
BRUT: You won your first Hugo in 1996 for "The Death of Captain Future." I have to ask you, though, were you influenced in any way by S.J. Perelman's 1940 essay "Captain Future, Block That Kick!"?
STEELE: No, I hadn't even heard of that one before I wrote my story. In fact, a friend of mine, Rob Chilson, gave me that one later on, and I was highly amused. But no, I hadn't heard of it before.
What I was influenced by, of course, were the Captain Future stories themselves. I read those when I was a kid. It was a part of this fascination I had as a pre-teen with pulp fiction that started with Doc Savage and continued through with reading reprints of The Shadow, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Conan and so forth. Captain Future, although he wasn't my favorite of those pulp heroes, somehow there was something about him that really stuck in my head. Many years later I decided that I wanted to try to write a pulp story for the 90s, and it came back to Captain Future. But I didn't want to do a parody, and I didn't want to do a Captain Future story, pre se; for one thing, I didn't think I could get the rights to the character.
So I did sort of a reflection on it. I did a story about somebody who's obsessed with Captain Future to the point that he's trying to emulate him, even though this person has no right in the world to be anybody's hero, and how his personality conflicts with somebody who in some ways does have Captain Future's attributes, somebody how really is something of a heroic type.
It was a lot of fun to write and I can't be more pleased by the fact it's remained popular, is still read and has been translated many times. Now there's even an audio production out there from Audible.com.
In addition to a handful of book reviews contributed by myself, the issue also contains the usual glorious lineup of underground and off-kilter fare. Highlights include an interview with "Scream Queen" Linnea Quigley, she of countless low-budget horror flicks, including "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers," a personal favorite.
At just $5 an issue, it's cheaper than most other mind-altering substances. Drop by the website and tell Dom you want a copy or six.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Guy Debord at the Barnes & Noble
Meanwhile, back on the other side of the planet from Iran, a different sort of insurrection:
NYT: Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes
By Colin Moynihan
They arrived at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in small groups on Sunday afternoon, proceeding two and three at a time to the fourth floor, where they browsed among shelves holding books by authors like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger.
By 5 o’clock a crowd of more than 100 had gathered. Their purpose: to celebrate the publication of an English translation of a book called “The Coming Insurrection,” which was written two years ago by an anonymous group of French authors who call themselves the Invisible Committee. More recently, the volume has been at the center of an unusual criminal investigation in France that has become something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians.
The book, which predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture, was inspired by disruptive demonstrations that took place over the last few years in France and Greece. It was influenced stylistically by Guy Debord, a French writer and filmmaker who was a leader of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who encouraged the Paris protests of 1968.
In keeping with the anarchistic spirit of the text, the bookstore event was organized without the knowledge or permission of Barnes & Noble. The gathering was intended partly as a show of solidarity with nine young people — including one suspected of writing “The Coming Insurrection” —whom in November the French police accused of forming a dangerous “ultraleftist” group and sabotaging train lines.
As a bookstore employee announced to the milling crowd that there was no reading scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s recent introduction: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”
A security guard tried to halt the unsanctioned reading, but the man continued for about five minutes, until the police arrived. The crowd, mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including some graduate students, then adjourned, clapping and yelling, to East 17th Street. There they formed a rebellious spectacle, crowding into shops and loudly shouting bits of political theory, to the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
SF Site on FF2
Okay, one more late review of Fast Forward 2, this one from Derek Johnson at SF Site, with due kudos to the editor:
In 2007 Lou Anders edited Fast Forward, one of the strongest original anthologies that science fiction has seen -- so strong, in fact, that after one closed the book one wondered if Anders would be able to match both the quality and the ambition of that volume in his next. After all, the anthology's very title indicated that Anders wanted to actually incorporate the Campbellian vision into a genre that, for all of its rhetoric about being a literature of the future, too often looks fondly over its shoulder at the trails blazed in the past. Even Dangerous Visions fought to bring the genre up to the speed of the present more than chart a path to the future. But Anders did it; Fast Forward not only met the challenge to look forward, but succeeded. And with Fast Forward 2, his follow-up anthology, Anders not only continues to forge ahead and actually push science fiction into the future, but also position himself as one of the genre's most dynamic and influential editors. A reader looking for the best in contemporary science fiction will find not a wasted story in Fast Forward 2's pages. This is the Stuff.
Anders starts out strong with his introduction. Titled "The Age of Accelerating Returns," where he discusses the genre's ever-increasing popularity and opinions by Joseph Mallozzi, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss and Paolo Bacigalupi of science fiction's purpose (even futurist and The Singularity Is Near author Ray Kurzweil gets a citation) before citing what he sees as science fiction's four purposes: its predictive capability, its preventative possibility, its ability to inspire the future, and being "the literature of the open mind," which "acknowledges change and encourages thinking outside the box." And then presents fourteen tales which promise to do just that...
And then there are the standouts among the standouts. Chris Nakashima-Brown gives us a powerful, and quite funny, vision of bio-artists, sports, body enhancement and copyright law wrapped up in an air of Hemingwayesque melancholy in "The Sun Also Explodes." It's a story of gene-splicing gone amok that never lets up on the wow factor. Mike Resnick and Pat Cadigan, in "Not Quite Alone in the Dream Quarter," lead us through a surreal, haunting landscape where beings from human dreams have escaped, and try to learn what it means to be human. And in "An Eligible Boy," Ian McDonald returns to the India of River of Gods to tell the story of a young Hindu man looking for a suitable mate, and seeks out the advice of an artificial intelligence designed for a soap opera to help him traverse the hazardous terrain of dating in the twenty-first century. It is the anthology's most human, and most charming, story, a great love story without all of the sap one finds in such tales.
Thanks, Derek!
Also, check out the rest of the Pyr catalog, including Fast Forward 1, now available in Kindle edition.
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