The Invisible library

Sorry it’s been almost a week with no new post but I’ve been traveling, getting set back at work and trying to resolve internet access issues. Well, all of those things are taken care of now, so posting will resume promptly. However. I don’t want to continue on the same old road of ranting and raving. This year (think of this as a new years resolution if you must) I want to talk a bit more about my own writing endeavors. To that end, I’ll have more posts (the first one coming soon) about some creative writing I’ll be working on. I have a novel that’s been languishing in various stages of rewrite, and a few half started short stories I want to finish up so there should be plenty of writerly craftwork to discuss. I’ll post some excerpts here or on an adjacent page and ask for feedback and just toss out some plot knots and general ideas for consideration. Think of it as interactive writing.

Via Xeni over at Boing Boing, I found out that Emperor Bill the Magnificent thinks that Free Culture advocates are, “Sorta like communists.” In response, Ian Meyer among others, have put together a few Creative Commie flags and images and are encouraging their distribution. Take and share, comrades.

Bill Berkowitz over at Working For Change has discovered that not a single website for any Christian Right Political Groups has links for donations or aide for the Tsunami victims. They still have plenty of time to gripe about immoral TV shows, the lack of Jesus being mentioned during Christmas and to bash gays, though. And my personal favorite:

…Over at falwell.com, the Rev. Jerry Falwell is explaining “The True Meaning of Christmas,” recruiting for his new organization, The Moral Majority Coalition, and soliciting cruisers for a late July sojourn aboard the Queen Mary II.

While many Christian evangelical organizations have rushed to help the victims, why aren’t the nation’s major religious right political groups — quick to claim the moral high-ground at every opportunity — putting their organizational muscle to good use? Why hasn’t the devastation from the earthquake/tsunami been on the radar screens of these groups? Are they all on a values vacation?

Compassion for the sick and needy? That must have been some other Jesus, preaching on some other mount. Republican Jesus don’t give a shit.

I’m a big fan of conspiracy theories. Kevin and Jay can both back me up on this; I love nothing more than sitting around getting drunk, talking about the Free Masons, synchronistic mysteries of history and the Knights Templar. The whole idea of secret societies really feeds my imagination and pondering the various threads of these stories is like generating spontaneous fiction. But I don’t take any of them seriously for a second.

So of course, I was intrigued when I heard that the current Grand Master of the Knights Templar has asked the Vatican for an oppology:

If there is something implausible in the idea that huge stretches of world history have been secretly coordinated from a market town just north of the M25 - well, maybe that’s what they want you to think. The local newspaper, the Hertfordshire Mercury, certainly seems convinced: over the past few months it has published several intriguing stories quoting local Templars, who told its reporter of a secret network of tunnels under the town that was still in use by the order. “It reaches beyond well known central Hertford locations,” one Templar said, “including the tourist office, the castle, Monsoon, Threshers, the post office, Bayley Hall, and the council offices.” Treasures of “immense importance” were hidden there, it was claimed. Was the quest for the Holy Grail finally about to come to an end? More surprisingly still, was it about to come to an end underneath Monsoon on Market Place?

The man who has persuaded the Vatican to consider apologising, Tim Acheson, meets the Guardian in icy morning fog in Hertford, wearing smart pinstriped trousers and a thick winter overcoat. His midnight-blue sports car is parked nearby. “As you might expect,” he says, setting the tone for the day, “there are going to be some things that I’m not able to discuss.”

Acheson claims to trace his ancestry to a renowned Scottish Templar family of the same name, though he won’t confirm his own role in the group. Might he just be a practical joker who managed to fool the Vatican? “That could well be, couldn’t it?” he says, as we order coffee in a Hertford establishment closely modelled on All Bar One. “I can’t tell you anything to prove that I’m not. I think that would be a perfectly reasonable theory.”

There are a number of suspiciously sharp points to Grand Master Acheson’s story and the article is full of mystery and shadowy hints about strange and important information coming to light very soon, but nothing concrete. But then, it is rather hard to keep your society secret if you’re the Grand Master and you go blabbing about where you keep the Holy Grail to every reporter that comes knocking. But for those of us who enjoy a little mystery and a hint of intrigue, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks to David over at Boing Boing for the link.

It never ceases to amaze me what sore winners Christians are. Various churches have conned, brainwashed and beaten 70% of Americans into believing in their fairy tales about a Jewish Carpenter and his gang of merry whores, tax collectors, and fisherman.¹ A Born Again President and a Born Again GOP control all three branches of the US Government, with a little gold cross dangling around their necks and a copy of the ten commandments tacked to the wall. Drive through the South or Midwest of the US and you’ll see billboards quoting scripture every hundred yards. You can’t walk five blocks through any city without bumping your nose against a church. And yet, many Christians act as if we heathens are about to set the lions on them. Wish someone a Happy Holidays instead of a Merry Christmas and the holier-than-thou talking heads act as if you just crucified Jesus. Again. Make a movie that muses about the Humanity of Jesus and they start licking their lips and looking for the book of matches.²

It strikes me as odd that a the followers of the supposed Son of God can’t handle a little criticism. That every suggestion that they might be a little off about putting so much stock in 5000 year old shepherd poetry and the ranting of ergot addicts is met with feverish derision and screams of moral outrage.

Christians are the thinest skinned hegemony in history. Despite their omnipresent influence in society, their faith can be challenged by movies, weakened by Rock and Roll and completely undermined by children’s literature. In spite of the face of Jesus on billboards and God-themed television shows, the faith of the faithful seems poised to wither away at the mere hint of a bare breast. And sugest that there might be no God? Well, then you’re a blood drinking satanic commie and you like to kick puppies, too. If there’s no God, than what meaning is there in the world? The very thought shimmies the spines of the true believers. For a lucid example, see David Brooks’ most recent existential crisis concerning the Tsunami:

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe’s main concern. We’re just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

Most of the stories that were told and repeated this week were melodramas. One person freakishly survives while another perishes, and there is really no cause for one’s good fortune or the other’s bad. A baby survives by sitting on a mattress. Others are washed out to sea and then wash back bloated and dead. There is no human agency in these stories, just nature’s awful lottery.

[...]

In the newspaper essays and television commentaries reflecting upon it all, there would often be some awkward passage as the author tried to conclude with some easy uplift - a little bromide about how wonderfully we all rallied together, and how we are all connected by our common humanity in times of crisis.

The world’s generosity has indeed been amazing, but sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it’s wrong to turn this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm this holiday season. It’s wrong to turn it into a story about us, who gave, rather than about them, whose lives were ruined. It’s certainly wrong to turn this into yet another petty political spat, as many tried, disgustingly, to do.

This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for those of us who have no explanation.

I agree with him on one point: It is a time to feel bad, but just about the dead and dispossessed. Then you shake yourself off, roll up your sleeves or pull out the checkbook and look for a way to help. This is not the time to natter on about the thinness of your fairytales and gaze at your navel and wonder aloud why God let this happen. Perhaps there is a reason events like the Tsunami fill us with horror and fear of the abyss: because it’s a concrete reminder that stories about a man who lives in the sky are just that: stories told to children to shut them up and rock them to sleep. We’re alone in this world, with just each other to get by on. Of course, admitting this would require a reexamination of the claims to infallibility of the witch hunters, past and present. Who wants to think about God’s Plan in Iraq (as revealed to George W. Bush) when it’s simply easier to believe that their is a plan and someone else knows what it is? Because if there’s no plan, no simple moral message, painted on the clouds and illustrated in the blood of the dead, what reason is there?

We in the reality based community realized a long time ago that we all stand naked before the pit. That nature is beautiful and tragic and unconcerned with our days and ways. And you either accept that and get on with life or go hide in monastery somewhere and pretend that if you just believe hard enough, in Jesus, God or the President pretending to talk for them, that somehow you can avoid the next Tsunami. But you can’t and you won’t and you’re just fooling yourself by anthropomorphizing nature and ascribing human reasons and applying broad moral shoehorns to events that have no reason or purpose.³ The 200,000 dead Tsunami victims weren’t Noah’s neighbors. They weren’t wicked or decadent or Unchristian. They were people. Just like you and me. To try and find some Sunday School Moral Theme to this tragedy is not just petty and disingenuous but vile and unhinged. It disgraces the memory of the dead.

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1. Though church attendance in the US is at or bellow the 50% mark. He resides in their minds, if not in their hearts, at least.

2. However, a movie that graphically depicts Jesus’ torture and crucifixion, that’s a religious experience. Seems we Americans really do like torture.

3. Or worse have an all too human purpose. Sometimes I wonder if the majority of my fellow Americans are willfully deluding themselves about the President. For them, he has become a substitute savior (and a piss poor one at that). They realize this on some unconscious level but are so used to believing in their authority figures (it’s a short ride down the elevator form King of Kings to the Office of the President) that they just ride a wave of blind faith and hope that somewhere, someone knows why we torture and kill. I guess it’s easier than admitting that it’s all human folly and greed. Good to know someone can sleep at night.

Will Eisner has died at the age of 87. Neil Gaiman has an appropriate obituary.

I had the pleasure to meet Will Eisner once, a few years ago. It was at a Sequential Art forum at my undergrad. A panel of artists and writers were discussing their art, the medium as a whole and generally being very nice to a bunch of geeks who desperately wanted to be just like them. And there he was. This old man with a white beard. He looked like Santa Clause and even acted a bit like him too, sitting there after the panel, enthusiastically chatting with a bunch of students who were hoping that if they stood there next to him long enough, some of his talent might rub off on them.

it’s always unfortunate when someone who effected the way you look at the world (even indirectly) dies. It’s like a thread has been cut and the tension it held, released. Now, a part of you, held in place by that thread for so long, flaps in the breeze, unteathered to anything substantial. I guess that will happen more and more, and in substantially more significant ways as I get older. But at least he left behind a body of work that will forever inspire young kids like me to go out into the world and make art, or at least, try to, anyway.

I’m all for boycotting corporations and businesses that promote a conservative ideological message, employ sweatshops or violate environmental and human rights regulations. I haven’t bought a Domino’s pizza in over a decade and for nearly two years, I’ve been actively trying to dissuade all of my friends and family from shopping at WalMart. But I was disappointed when I found out last week that the new name on the liberal shopping shit list is Amazon.com. Atrios, among others bloggers have decided to drop Amazon.com partnerships and links and are encouraging their readers to stop shopping there because it was revealed that 61% of their political donations go to Conservatives. However, as Ezra at Pandagon points out, it isn’t quite that simple:

But cases like Amazon are more complicated. If you look at where the money’s going, the trend is less ideological and more pay-to-play. Utah Republican Chris Cannon, for instance, got the most in congressional contributions, with $4,000. But he’s been a leader on the internet tax moratorium. And following Chris Cannon is Democrat John Dingell, with $3,500. In the Senate, McCain leads with $4,000, and Byron Dorgan (D) and John Ensign (R) bring up his rear, with $2,500 each. No donations were made in the presidential race. Further, Amazon is a good company. Their reaction to the earthquake was inspiring. They’ve created a viable e-commerce model that bursts with ingenious and unbelievably helpful innovations. I spend hours going through lists and reader reviews, and more time than I even want to admit discovering new bands through ever-elongating chains of recommended clips. Their used sellers marketplace has saved me a ton of money and allowed me to try all sorts of books I could have never otherwise afforded. Is it right to drop them because their political contributions tilt away from my ideal?

The Amazon situation is different. They don’t push any ideology, they just make donations to Politicians that are backing legislation that helps them. That’s not great, from a progressive-ideals standpoint, but from a business stand point it makes perfect sense. The problem is that so far, the alternative of choice among my fellow bloggers is Barnes & Noble. But B&N isn’t any better, really. They may make donations to Democrats but they treat their employees like shit. I know, because I used to be one. And B&N is still a corporation and Democrats are still spineless. So this particular boycott is rather silly. Choosing to shop at one vapid corporation over another is splitting hairs to such a fine degree that it makes my head hurt. We have bigger problems, like our country’s continued slide into fascism to worry about whether or not the money I just spent on a book at Amazon might end up in the pocket of one of the few moderate Republicans left in Washington.

If you really want an alternative to Big Corporate bookstores on line, you might try supporting Powell’s, since they’re really a good, independent company, instead of just a not-as-bad-as-the-other-guy supercorporation.