Platypus of Truth

The Greeks of Classical Athens had a habit they called es meson or "putting it in the middle."  To make a matter or a person es meson was to bring them up for public scrutiny and debate.  Athens moderate climate favored this habit by encouraging as much of life as possible to take place out doors in a common area.  Thus even the homes of wealthy Athenians were relatively sparse, and wealth was often displayed in out-door public works projects that could be enjoyed by citizenry as a whole.  Along with the geographical climate, the political climate favored es meson as well.  Athens, during most of the Classical Era, was a democracy and, as thinkers from time immemorial have noted, democracies favor institutions that allow the franchise holder to have his say; a say on everything . The modern United States is a vast and geographically diverse country separated from Classical Athens by about 2,500 years.  Nevertheless, we also have a democratic habit of e...

Reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible for the first time has helped to fill in one of those lamentable holes in my high school reading experience.  Also pushed off till adulthood was Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter .  I'm catching up.  What can I say? Well, what I can say is that the historian in me itches every time I seem see the Puritans deliberately demonized to serve their descendants various pathologies: religious, political, psychological, or otherwise.  Now don't get me wrong: I enjoy Hawthorne and Miller and will be re-reading their masterfully crafted works many times over (D.V.).  Still, as a historian and former resident of Olde New England, there's a part of me that can't stand to see history brutalized to serve an agenda. Satisfying that rather aggrieved part that insists on its wie es eigentlich gewesen now seems the order of the day.  Filling that role then is John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive .  I'm still in the middle of...

Connections are forged at the oddest moments. We were discussing Tennyson's Guinevere , part of his larger work Idylls of the King , in class today and focusing in on Arthur's final speech to Guinevere.  After painfully listing every consequence of her sin, Arthur pardons and forgives the Queen, affirming that he loves her still and hopes to see her in paradise.  In the meantime, however, even if he should win his war with Modred, he tells her that they can never be together again lest the kingdom thinks that the king's justice can be set aside for family loyalty.  It's a harsh sort of self-limiting that strikes one as quintessentially Victorian: duty before love and all that.  Stuffy.  If we read Tennyson correctly, it's not, but an odd way of seeing that struck my mind today as we were discussing: I thought of Charles and Julia's pact in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to never see each other after they become convinced of God's existence.  Call...

One of the things I'm appreciating during my read through the first edition Dragon-Blooded rulebook is the way that it balances the need to create a fully-realized sub-creation with the fact that it's essentially a list of rules for a game.  A whole world is there before your eyes (government, cuisine, fashion, religion, geography, etc.), yet each and every fact is presented so as to suggest a germ of an idea for a role-playing session or campaign.  I constantly find myself pausing to consider how a tiny note on local folklore, the name of an eminent craftsman, or the relations between branches of the Imperial bureaucracy could be spun into a story.  Sure, there's plenty of flavor text and several short stories to set the tone and provide some obvious ideas, but it's the fact that even the little details are couched in such a way as to get you straight into the game that astonishes me.  As with the Exalted core book, the way that the information is deployed also pro...