Platypus of Truth

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I have a fee

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raises a good point.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland There was once a Tiffany Glass factory in the town where I grew up.  I didn't know that.  It's in ruins now, but apparently you can still pick up handfuls of brightly colored glass if you know where to look. Brightly colored glass. From pieces of brightly colored glass came all the amazing works of the Tiffany studio.  I've seen them in Boston, Ohio, and even Redlands California.  Wherever I have seen them, Tiffany windows are remarkable for their beauty -and my home town played a part in the making of that beauty.  Much of the downtown is in ruins now and those ruins are slowly being cleared away in a decades-long process of urban renewal.  Whatever once flanked the downtown has been covered by the woods and is now a state park.  I don't know what will happen to the old glass works.  Maybe they've already been cleared away.  What is certain is that those pieces of glass will disappea

I'll drink up all the mead that you got on your shelf But first let me introduce myself My name is Sin-Fee-Oat-Lee I like my poisons topical most-lee But if any a you want to go rounds with me I'll bust out my sword and make you Dee-Ee-Dee.

Our next two authors are husband and wife team Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  This serves as a reminder that the American Fantasy Market did not stay a boys club for long.  Exactly how hard women had to work to bust up "the smoke filled room," I don't know, but the fact is that they did and its been a co-ed party ever since. Call Him Demon by Henry Kuttner We continue our trek through the history of American fantasy with yet another piece in the horror genre laced with Sci-Fi and Fantasy elements.  Kuttner, unlike Boucher, takes up Henry James' cue in A Turn of the Screw that horror is always worse when encountered by children.  James gave us two children in his classic as a way of "uping the ante."  Kuttner gives us four.  While I don't know that that increases the horror, it does allow him to play with the line between children's games and their experience of reality.  Throughout the work, we are always free to doubt the nature of the children

Yesterday Was Monday by Theodore Sturgeon I've already reviewed Theodore Sturgeon's Yesterday Was Monday , so I'll post the link to those thoughts here. They Bite by Anthony Boucher Every now and then I come across a story that really scares me .  This was one of those stories.   What starts out as a spy thriller takes a turn towards folk lore, then urban legend, and finally into outright horror.  The pace is slow and leisurely, allowing the horror to grow without alerting the reader to its presence at any given point.  Then the end comes and wallops you in a literary master-stroke that leaves no room for mercy.  The authorial restraint such a move takes must be phenomenal.  If you have an interest in literary horror, this is one to pick up.  If you have any interest in writing horror, pay close attention to how Boucher manages the ending.  If you scare easily, take a pass.

We continue our journey through A Treasury of Modern Fantasy  edited by Terry Carr and Martin Harry Greenberg with tales by C.M. Kornbluth and Clark Ashton Smith. Thirteen O'Clock by C.M. Kornbluth The rise of modern Fantasy has been closely linked with that of Science Fiction.  In some pieces, it's hard to tell them apart.   Thirteen O'Clock  by C.M. Kornbluth is one of those pieces.  I'm not sure whether we're in a bad parody of Phantastes  or an episode of Buck Rogers ; possibly, we're just in a seeder part of Oz.  I think this confusion may be intentional.   Thirteen O'Clock  has all the hallmarks of a story meant to sell: genre mixing, thin characters, fast-pacing, a little sex, and lots of surprises.  This isn't a work of carefully crafted epic fantasy, but a quick yarn meant to bring home the bacon in a crunched publishing market.  In that respect, Thirteen O'Clock  reminds us that American Fantasy grew up in a very different climate f

The next short story up for review is Abraham Merritt's The Woman in the Wood .  I read Merritt's The Moon Pearl  several years ago and highly enjoyed it.   The Woman in the Wood  was a welcome return to Merritt's weird world of pagan peril.  The central image, a shell-shocked World War I vet who finds healing in a chivalric grove of sentient trees is worthy of Tolkien (indeed, I wonder if he read it -the time period would be right).  The eerie tone, however, is all Merritt's own as is the unnerving moral ambiguity of the ending.  Tolkien wouldn't have put much stock in such trees, even if the men who opposed them were as orc-like as those of  The Woman in the Wood .  I won't say too much more in case you want to go out and read this one.  Sufficient to say that Abraham Merritt now has my attention and I will look forward to my next encounter with any work that comes from his pen. After the creepiness of the first two selections, a little levity is in order an

After finishing up Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts , I've decided to add a little lighter reading to my list.  Interspersed with my academic reading will be A Treasury of Modern Fantasy , a collection of the best magazine fantasy short stories up to 1980 compiled and edited by Terry Carr and Martin Harry Greenberg.  It should be a nice complement to The Mammoth Book of Fantasy   which I read several summers ag o.  First up on the list of stories is an old favorite by H.P. Lovecraft: The Rats in the Walls . The Rats in the Walls  is one of Lovecraft's best short stories.  Lovecraft's normally over-articulate prose is paired down and his mythos is deployed in a careful, subtle manner that avoids any of the usual C'thulhu gooberishness.  As always, Lovecraft is careful to link the story back to his beloved New England, but the setting in old England adds a sense of the classically gothic that strengthens the tale's atmosphere.  We also get to see Love

So, at long last I'm getting set to wrap up the first draft of my second novel, "The Place of the Skull."  I should have the conclusion and epilogue done by the end of the week.  Then it's forward to editing and back to applying a few things I've learned to draft four of the earlier work in the series, "The Corpse House."  Once that's done (I move on a glacial time-scale), it will be on to plotting the third book tentatively titled "Our Lady of the Wastes."  I may also take a break to mess around with a short story that will go into "Casebook: Volume I" just to get a bead on some of the characters' further trajectories.  Anyhow, it's been lots of fun and I look forward to being able to tie this one up with a big, black bow.

Houston has been a bustling place this fall with a host of conferences, lectures, and debates.  For as many as we've made, there have been two or three that we missed.  Of particular note for us was the Providence Classical School Colloquy which turned out to be an even bigger success than the one two years ago.  All the plenary and breakout sessions are now posted online at the school's website .  We've also enjoyed the seasonal round of Lanier lectures , but of particular interest was the HBU debate on the existence of God between Reynolds and Barker (now on Youtube).  Our seniors attended the lecture along with an assortment of teachers and family making for a particularly fun and informative evening. All of this, of course, is really an elaborate apology for the lack of content on my blog this month but it's also an update to let you know some of the things we've been doing (it also consoles me just a little for missing all the amazing things that have been go

This picture of Sigurd and Fafnir is loosely based on the Hylestad Door .  It's my attempt to honor our transition from Beowulf  to The Volsungsaga .

Who can catch a forest of falling leaves? I think every New Englander is born hearing the drumbeats of Armageddon.  Those drumbeats are always there with them: a sound in the back of their minds.  The sound rolls on, soft but steady, without a stop; always heard and so never heard.  Every New Englander is a Puritan in the end: Protestant, Catholic, Agnostic -even Atheist...  Sometimes those drumbeats rise to the fore, and then the quiet hills and meadows erupt.  Ask Sasacus, Philip, Gage, Lee... I think all of us have some intimation of the Eschaton.  It comes to us when we're not ready: the sudden crack of starry banners caught in a celestial wind.  Then we remember that we are in occupied territory; that we were meant to be more than what we are.  It comes most clearly in our dreams: the first time we fly among the clouds, the sword fight on the tips of the bamboo, the morning we drank from the Firefall and danced.  Look at our dreams, our legends, our deepest longings.  They

Trying to help the students envision what the monsters might look like.  Prior efforts can be found here .

It's another hot and green October in the American Southwest.  In Northern lands, the air is cooling and the leaves are changing while pumpkins ripen and cider mulls.  I caught a glimpse this summer of the old pumpkin patch.  Pumpkin picking was always fun -not to mention looking at all the weird and gnarly gourds.  If you could find the right place to stick those, they would dry and keep.  I never did find quite the right place.  Pumpkins occasionally got smashed.  More often they rotted and had to be unceremoniously chucked into the nearest patch of woods.  Still, their decaying bulk added that extra bit of color to that most colorful season. How much do I really remember, and how much is pictures and endless re-tellings of the same tired old stories?  Augustine thought that memory was a sign of the soul's distention in time.  How far can the members of one soul stretch?  How do I re-member?

There was a time when I stood at the top of my drive way on a boulder (it was the highest point I could find) and looked out across the valley all the way to Monroe.  It was Autumn, and the leaves were turning so that all the miles beneath me looked like a bowl of Halloween candy or a fire in a painting hanging on the wall.  That's a trite way of putting it.  Could you have been there, and felt what I felt you would know it for what it was: what Moses saw in the cleft of the rock, or Isaiah in the Temple: the oblique angle of the eschaton, the hem of the garment of the LORD.  But how does one catch hold of falling leaves?  It's not the passing garment of a Jewish rabbi.  If I can but touch the hem of his garment I will be clean.   How do I touch the hem of his garment? 

The Ballad of William Goffe I Raise the cry in Narragansett Sachem Philip treads the warpath Come to drive out all the English Burn their villages and townships. Who has heard of old Sassacus And the terrors of the Pequots Knows but Philip’s little finger; Like the bite of whips to scorpions Are those sachems to his chieftains. They will come with brands of fire To the men who burned down Mystic. Who of them shall bide his coming In the hour of God’s judgment? These the words that came to Hadley With the fear of Philip’s legions, Of the natives loosed upon them, By the anger of Jehovah At their arrogant presumption. Now from feast they turn to fasting, Turn from revelry to sorrow, To beseech the Lord Almighty That He turn from them his anger, Spare them from the wrath of Philip, From his sagamores and chieftains. II When the leaves first fell in autumn, Came the rumor down to Hadley: Now the natives are against yo

About a month back, I wrote about a conversation I had with one of my students about the perfect video game.  That conversation sent me back to the old SNES and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Feeling it only fair to consider its equally monumental successor, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time , I've been working my way through that N64 classic over the past few months.  Since I'm busy and in no particular hurry to finish, progress remains slow.  Still, I think I've made it far enough to begin making some some preliminary comments. Ocarina of Time  is giant leap ahead of A Link to the Past  in graphics, game play, expansiveness of the world, and story.  The attention to beauty and creating a sense of wonder was noted by gamers almost immediately.  It was a big deal back then to be able watch a sunrise over an imagined world.  The technology was not quite up to snuff with the designers' artistic vision, however, and there are distinct points where the

Do you remember being a child?  Do you remember making some new discovery and rushing with it to the nearest adult you could find?  You tried to make them see how absolutely astounding it was but the words wouldn't come.  Maybe they smiled at you.  Maybe you got a pat on the head.  Maybe you were just ignored.  It happens again as you get older.  Think of your teenage self: a whirlwind of confusion.  Expectations are everywhere; desires, longings.  Once again, you try to tell someone but the words won't come.  You're laughed at -ignored.  The moment passes.  The thing slips away and is lost.  Perhaps you experienced this in college.  You had a better command of words now, it was just a matter of finding the right ones and putting them into the right form.  Words slipped, caught, and broke, falling through your fingers and with them the thought, the discovery.  Then career came with the whirl of adult responsibilities.  Discoveries were limited to one's field and had to

I've been reading The Hobbit since I was in fifth grade and it's the first book that really sparked my life-long interest in reading.  Along the way, I've also developed a love of Ancient Greek literature and I am currently in the middle of a book on Homer's Odyssey .  With the upcoming installment of  Peter Jackson's Hobbit on the horizon, I also decided to go back and read The Hobbit .  This brought about and interesting intersection of my two literary loves, Greece and Middle Earth, and I have started seeing The Hobbit with new eyes. Before Tolkien studied Anglo-Saxon, he was a Classics scholar.  The official change came about during his sophomore year of college.  Early influences are, however, hard to shake, and I believe that there may be quite a bit of to hellenon hiding out under the anglo-nordic surface of Tolkien's first great tale.  Let's take a brief look at some of the key scenes of The Hobbit and see how they match up with Greek myth.

Do you remember this one?  It had Timothy Dalton and Jennifer Connelly -you know, the guy who used to play Bond in the '80s and that girl from Labyrinth ?  Disney released it in 1991 and it didn't do so well but a lot of people liked it.  So I went back and watched it... The Rocketeer was worth seeing again.  There was so much more going on there than I realized when I was a kid.  There's all the classic pulp material: clean-cut heroes, a Commander Cody rocket pack, Nazis, mobsters, G Men, air planes (and an air ship!) along with that wonderful, un-ironic spirit that soars above so much of today's pop entertainment.  Then there's the little historical tidbits: Howard Hughes, the Spruce Goose, Carey Grant, an Erol Flynn knock-off, and W.C. Fields (not to mention the Copeland-esque soundtrack).  Above all, it's an homage to the state of California and the free-wheeling, independent spirit that made it the fifth largest economy in the world in just a half-centur

Our travels now are ended. These our pictures, As I foretold you, were all pixels and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this blog-p'st, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.   Summer travels 2013: Italy and New England  

Where did it all go?  I grew up on a lake.  I'd show it to you, but the developer has walled it off with houses and let the trees and scrub grow so tall it's hard to see.  Maybe that was wise of him.  People did go down there and make trouble.  Besides, land that isn't developed doesn't turn a profit.  It's a reality of this world that loving something doesn't make it yours, especially in one of the wealthiest states in the union .  But perhaps there's a world with a different reality where love is the very coin of the realm.  In that world, I will walk the hills and vales of Naugatuk in Autumn when the leaves burn like fire in the presence of the LORD. When these things are washed away The River will keep flowing Wei la lei And the daughters of the River God Will sing Qui Transtulit Sustinet

The Green.  At the heart of any New England village was the "common" or "village green."  Flanking the green would be a Congregational church at one end and an Episcopal church at the other.  Then there would be a burial ground and the most important homes and buildings.  This is my green, or simply The Green .  We drove past this little patch of grass multiple times each day.  I still don't know why it has a statue of an amazon smiting a lion, but I don't have to.  Humans lived for millennia without knowing why the sun rose.  Finding out would only add to the wonder.  The Congregational church, right where it should be.  My apologies for the power lines.  There are still places in the U.S. where modernity is tacked on as an afterthought. The Episcopal church sporting its new dome.  The original was gray from a fire that started when the sexton decided to shoot pigeons off the roof and his rifle wadding ignited cupola.  And the burial ground.

Church. We're all formed by the places we grew up in.  There's greater continuity between past and present in New England.  It's like Jackson's vision of Tolkien's Shire: things are made to endure ... passing down from one generation to the next.   I'd like to say that there's always been a Baggins at Bag End and there always will be ...  Moving back to the idea of continuity, the church is like the library: a Victorian original with a modern edition discretely added in a way that doesn't detract from the beauty of the older structure.  As with the building, so with the worship and theology.  Places form people and this place and this people formed me. It was a Thursday.  The pews were empty, but I knew the place and the place knew me.  On our way out, my wife spied a curious thing: a tiny clump of red leaves on a green tree.  I miss you too... Burning, burning, burning Tell me, are the leaves still burning; Can they teach me how to burn

The summer is coming to a close (though the weather down here will be in the 80s and 90s until November).  That means it's time again for the Seven Heavens of Summer Reading awards.  These awards were created in honor of Michael Wards' groundbreaking book Planet Narnia which asserts that Lewis ordered his famous children's series around the seven planets of medieval cosmology.  Following this idea, I award seven books from my summer reading list that best exemplify the virtues of the seven planets.  Following the "summer reading" label at the bottom of this post will link you the lists of prior award winners.  Without further ado, let's get to it. Moon: This year's winner for the planet of change and madness has to be Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  Following the adventures of three board editors to create the ultimate conspiracy theory is enough to blur the boundaries of reality for anyone. Mercury: For the wordsmith's heaven, the award