I remember as a young man of twelve or so that one day (during the summer I believe) someone in town had seen the Virgin Mary in a live oak tree. This was naturally of great interest (what else is there to do on a hot day) so after some familial hemming and hawing I went with my mother and sister (I think my sister was there, but I am not certain). The tree was in a small field in town, and it was crowded with people; my memory is far from perfect, but I suspect that almost one hundred persons were present.

I looked into the tree, and after ten minutes or so of searching I did indeed see a likeness of the Mary one might see in a church, head inclined downward and to the side slightly, with hands at her sides and palms turned upward. I do not now, and did not then, consider it to be miraculous.

About ten minutes later, after watching a few others examine the tree, the police arrived and determined to cut down the offending section of the tree to prevent whatever idiocy they thought might result from people staring at a tree in the middle of the day. We left before the cutting began.

I do not recall being overly concerned with the fate of the tree or impressed with the quality of the purported miracle. I do recall being entirely disturbed by the thought that people were going to be very upset and possibly angry about the tree being cut. The idea that people would harm one another over such a stupid thing distressed me, and I realized that although I was not convinced that the police were correct in their actions, it was nevertheless inevitable that they would seek to exert control over the situation in whatever form they could, simply because that is the nature of police forces everywhere.

There was no way to predict this apparition, no way to prevent people from believing in it, and no way to prevent the police from interceding. There was a possibility of violence, then, for absolutely no reason at all. The only thing which might have prevented it would have been the discretion of the first individual: if they had thought that it was merely an amusing coincidence (which it was) then they could have gone on their way and nothing would have happened.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as retroactive rationality when it comes to a crowd of humans.

I watch a fair bit of anime and I read a good bit of manga as well; some might even say a great deal, but being in the fandom I am well aware of what is considered “a great deal” by people who are on the outside looking in, as opposed to the inside looking, well, further in. The anime I watch and the manga I read fall into a number of genres, but typically it is harem/fantasy (Ranma, Love Hina, Zero no Tsukaima, Rosario to Vampire), mecha/Real Robot/Super Robot anime (Macross Frontier, Gundam SEED, Mazinkaiser, Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector), and mahou shoujo (Cardcaptor Sakura, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, Sailormoon, Nanoha). There are other series, naturally; in recent seasons, I’ve watched Gosick and Tiger and Bunny, as well as Fate/Zero and a slew of others. I also avidly read Skip Beat! and a number of of other titles. Those do not feel like they fit neatly into any of the categories I outlined above.

Being a fairly active fan, I spend a considerable percentage of my free time in fan-related pursuits online and AFK. Forums, games, figures, dolls, jpop, vocaloid, etc.; the usual run of pursuits for someone with my interests. I encounter a lot of arguments about exploitative/otaku shows, moeblobs, and the general ruination of the anime/manga market since [insert arbitrarily chosen date here] when [insert hated series here]. This is nothing new; I’ve been reading things like this for years and the names and dates change accordingly. I usually do my best to ignore it, but naturally we all get caught up in chastising that elusive stranger on the Internet who is, for lack of a better term, wrong.

Let me say up front that there are plenty of shows I am not interested in, and even some I actively dislike. I don’t discount a genre whole-cloth anymore (I’ve eaten too much crow for that), but there are always going to be things I tend to avoid; there is only so much time (and money), after all. It is frequently the case that when I have known of and discounted a title for some time I run into someone (like @Gabihime) who crusades to convert me by forcing me to watch a few episodes or read a few chapters. Sometimes, I am unaffected. Other times, though…

Well, other times I become crazily obsessed with the title I formerly mocked/disregarded/ignored. This has happened to me enough times that I recognize that the tendency isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. I couldn’t care less about Code Geass for the longest time, for example; when I finally watched it, I was completely hooked. It is one of my favorites, a series I show to people as an example of what good TV anime can be like.

I say all this to illustrate that I am willing to give things a chance, and that even if I feel strongly negative about something, I can come away loving it. This was what happened with Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. I had been hearing about it for years by the time I watched it, and I had heard all the bad there was: otaku-driven fanservice show, naked henshin sequences, tired tropes, unimaginative design, overpowered city-wrecking nine-year-olds, yuri service, blah blah blah. It wasn’t as though I hated Nanoha; I was just pretty uninterested. I like magical girls a lot, but it seemed a little dishonest to watch a show created for fanservice, almost like a parody of a real show. Not my thing, so I thought.

Part of my disinterest lay in the fact that much TV mahou shoujo is pretty lame. I love Sailormoon, but only about 40-50 of the 200 episodes are really fun to watch. The manga is far better. Kaitou Jeanne is a great manga, but the anime goes into one of those weird non-conclusions and truncates the story. Precure is just not to my taste.

Sakura, though; that’s the best. Excellent manga, excellent anime, excellent movies. Beautiful animation, wonderful world design, memorable characters. Sakura has it all. Frankly, there was no way, I thought, that Nanoha would ever come close to that; why bother? Ultimately, I suppose I thought it would be not unlike Pretty Sammy, which is both laughable and mostly forgettable. Nanoha seemed to be regarded as some sort of magical girl pastiche, with panty shots alongside earnest declarations of love and trust; Pretty Sammy meets Agent Aika or something. Creepy. No thanks. Certainly no Sakura.

Eventually I did watch the first two episodes of Nanoha, and I was surprised to see that I enjoyed it. So I watched more. Then I realized that I really did like it. Quite a lot, actually; enough to understand that everything I had heard about it was basically propaganda. Nanoha had become one of my favorite series, and it happened basically overnight.

So, why would I like Nanoha? Looking at my interests in retrospect, it’s no surprise; mecha, fighting, cute girls, magical girls, scifi, love and justice- it’s all there. It was tailor-made to appeal to me, so why had I not wanted to see it? The answer is a little troubling, and it ties in with the way otaku-centric things are perceived and discussed online. What it boiled down to for me is this: I thought Nanoha was a fake magical girl show, and as someone who loves magical girls, I couldn’t stand that.

Why would I think it was disingenuous? I have high emotional involvement with the series I watch, typically. When I watch Sailormoon, I don’t watch it with the intention of offering junior grade MST3K to whoever else happens to be in the room; rather, I instead get ready to believe in the power of our hearts to overcome darkness. From what I had read, Nanoha did not seem to offer me that option. But where had that come from, exactly? There is a lot of hate, both casual and caustic, directed at the franchise; much of it seems to have come up as a sort of split in what people consider to be the two faces of modern TV anime: moeblobs and “serious” shows. In such a binary world, Nanoha must be one or the other. The truth is, though, that neither category is of much use.

There are a few items which came up consistently as marks against Nanoha: overblown combat, too-indulgent henshin sequences, and lackluster world design being the most common. To these I added insincerity, a mistake I will describe in greater detail shortly. Let’s examine these one by one to see what I was thinking about them.

First, overblown magical girl combat: this is an easy one to pick on the show about, but it ultimately demonstrates a lack of knowledge about other magical girl series. The idea that Nanoha is somehow overpowered might be plausible for someone who has never seen Usagi at work, but one should consider carefully what magical girls can do historically. Each of the sailor senshi has dominion over an elemental power, and their abilities only grow with time. Some are more obviously overpowered than others (Saturn most famously) but every one of them is an Accelerator-level danger to any military who would get in their way. Usagi is capable of crazy feats of destruction and renewal; that the series does not focus on them as combat in the same manner as a shounen series might does nothing to erode the characters’ potency. Hinamori Amu from Shugo Chara would be another example of someone whose world does not really revolve around combat; nevertheless she can wield power easily able to knock a helicopter out of the sky, and she’s in primary school. Kinomoto Sakura can do all manner of terrifying things, from wielding a blade like Athos to replacing the darkness of the world with light. She can fly, fight, and shield herself from incredible harm, and she does so never losing her earnest personality.

Next up is the issue of loli fanservice. I was under the impression, really, that there was more of this than there actually is in Nanoha. I suspect this is due to years and years of watching anime, but the fanservice is pretty tame as such things go. Nanoha and Fate are briefly naked in their transformation sequences, and one sees the occasional low-angle shot of Nanoha to catch a glimpse of her panties. It’s nothing extraordinary, and certainly something you had better get used to if you want to watch other contemporary anime (Toaru Majutsu no Index / Toaru Kagaku no Railgun comes to mind). So for the age group, there is certainly nothing excessive. Saki is way worse (or better? XD) when it comes to yuri-service for example, as are a number of other shows. Nanoha is hardly remarkable in this sense.

World design, then. I did not expect to find it so amusing, myself. The initial setup seems a little limited, but even Nanoha’s initial encounter with Raising Heart’s decidedly technological bent is promising, and the eventual appearance of the Midchildans makes the take on technological magic very fun. The personalities of the intelligent weapons Bardiche and Raising Heart are an important part of the show, carried to great effect in A’s. Is it utterly and completely new? Perhaps not, but what is? What matters is that it is engaging and interesting, and not thoroughly predictable in its unfolding.

The next point is perhaps the most subjective: insincerity. I believe that this means different things to different people. Personally, I need to believe along with the characters. I found that I could do that with Nanoha, just as I can with Usagi and Sakura. Nanoha’s desire to talk to Fate is real, and that means that her affection for Fate (particularly as portrayed in the movie) is meaningful rather than just being yuri fanservice. It is believable. Frankly, making the Nanoha/Fate pairing convincing to me was the most impressive part of the series; I would not have anticipated that it would have been so well-done.

So that’s a defense of Nanoha, at least from a few common criticisms. The viewing of the series satisfied me that it was worth watching and rewatching. But what about other series? Has it had an impact? Yes, it has. I think that Nanoha helped to create the world in which Puella Magi Madoka Magica could be produced. It functions as a sort of bridge between magical combat with older characters, like Fate / stay night and Index, and that with younger, more innocent characters like Amu-chan. More importantly, it forms a stylistic bridge between the two, giving the younger characters a chance to shine in combat and appeal to an older audience while retaining the same mahou shoujo morality. Madoka Magica also pushes a yuri pairing at the center of its narrative, and it is to be taken seriously. Characters have real risk and tragedy in their lives; this would never have happened unless Nanoha had been there to recontextualize the types of tragedy present in series like Sailormoon into a more generally palatable form.

Let me elaborate a bit on that point. Usagi watches her friends die one by one protecting her. She fights the final battle herself, and wins, knowing that she will die in the attempt, and further knowing that no one in the world is even aware of her struggle. That is just the first plot arc. Later, she has to face down Galaxia tossing her loved ones into nonexistence while she looks on, helpless. Magical girls are meant to stare down the darkest things in their world and themselves, and win. Nanoha made that into combat of a more shounen type, something that more people perhaps could get behind. It is that point from which Madoka jumps off, showing a dark world and difficult choices ahead for the characters. It should be noted, though, that Madoka makes the same sort of decision that Usagi does, and that she is able ultimately to save the world.

That’s what mahou shoujo do: they save the world despite the odds. In that sense, Nanoha and Madoka are not so different. I love believing in the power of magical girls. I love honest mahou shoujo. I just wish that we did not have to be quite so derisive and divisive about which ones we let into the club.

In late December 2010, a certain party (@Gabihime) advised me that Volks had early on produced a custom Dollfie Dream version of Excellen Browning from Super Robot Wars: Original Generation. Naturally, I was interested; regrettably, I knew that it would be challenging to track her down. Within about ten days, though, her complete outfit (sans wig and eyes) went up on Den of Angels; I snapped it up, and shortly thereafter ordered a DDII body and DDH02. I was not overly fond of the Volks Excellen’s head anyway, so I thought I could do just as well with a custom faceup.

Excellen Browning, game version

This was only the beginning, though. Within about a week of getting the DDII, body, I ordered Excellen an upgraded DDdy body with a shapely bust; it had not been available when she was produced, but it suits her character a bit better. So I had a faceup, done by Gabihime. Then she decided she was dissatisfied, and we got another faceup done, which we both love.

A succession of wigs also came though the house as I looked for the perfect match, something between her anime blonde and in-game strawberry. I also had Gabihime make two custom pairs of eyes, finally settling on an opalescent blue. In the meantime, though, there was trouble: her Dynamite body did not in any way fit the custom outfit. Well, the undershirt, vest, and skirt at any rate. What to do?

I scoured the Internets for a few months, and finally managed to get the pieces commissioned and fitted. They were delivered this past week, and I could not be happier about it! After an entire year, my DDdy Excellen Browning is complete ^__^

I think that her boots really ended up matching the new pieces a bit better than the Volks ones, but naturally I am inclined to be a little biased at this point.

That’s a good shot of her eyes ^^ I really love how they came out, and I think they look especially nice with her hair.

I love her expression. Excellen is nothing if not full of personality!

With any luck I’ll be getting some more shots of her in the near future. I have a nice Weissritter and Alteisen she should be able to pose with ^__^

It’s been a very busy 2012 so far; work and school are keeping me well occupied. I’m working on a little post about Nanoha, and I am awaiting the return of DDdy Excellen with her new custom outfit; other than that, I purchased a Kindle and have been doing some reading.

Al-Azif, the loli Necronomicon

You know, reading. XD

Remember Ragnarok Online, from way back in 2002? Yeah, I know you do, because it was awesome. Cool world design, fun classes, sprite-based characters; it was great. You know what else?

It still is.

I have been playing Ragnarok Online off and on for about eight or nine years now; just casual bouts of play interspersed with years of idleness. I played on the official servers for quite some time, but around 2007-08 I became interested in the private server scene. Gabihime and I chose a low rate (5/5/3, for those who care) server called HeRO, and we have basically been there ever since. It’s a great place with awesome GMs, and whenever we feel the urge to go adventuring, that is where we do it.

Not being a particularly hardcore gamer, I have never before had anyone very high level. In fact, I have never really played any other MMORPG for more than an hour or two. For whatever reason, Ragnarok has continued to hold my interest over all these years. Anyway, just last week I decided to log on again and go wander the world. When I logged in, I had the overpowering urge to get my main character, Duriel, to get to level 99 and reborn as an Assassin Cross.

Why elect to do this hard level grinding nine years after the game came out? I’m not really sure myself, but I threw myself into it with a will. In fact, the last game I remember working this hard at playing was probably SRW:OG2.

For the grinding, I spent almost all of my time on one map, killing one type of enemy: Hill Winds. They suck, make irritating noise, mob, and are weak to earth elemental katars. I took my level 97 Assassin there and went to town. Per the experience tables (pre-renewal RO) I earned about 206821199 experience points in the four days I was there. On a 5x server like HeRo that’s base 10660 experience per Hill Wind. With no XP penalties that would already be 19401.69 Hill Winds. Sadly, I did die and received a few 1% penalties, which puts the true total over 20000.

It takes quite a while to kill that many Hill Winds. Many, many hours were taken up staring at that map, grimtoothing those things.

Why did I do it?

This is a difficult question to answer. Partly, I have always wanted to have an Assassin Cross. Partly, I wanted to do it since I have never done it before. Partly, I was just looking for something to devote myself to for a little while.

That last one can be a bit difficult to accept, not because it is very wrong to take time away to do something fun, but rather because it illustrates something about my character: elective devotion. I suspect that I am not the only human with this characteristic. I am able to will myself into devotion, which can be quite a useful trick. It has generated many research papers and stories, allowed many long-distance runs, contributed to a myriad of projects and personal pursuits. It is nevertheless elective, though. I seem to be able to reroute my madcap interest to a degree; it is not an entirely free process, but it can be done.

It is rather like channeling a current: you can get it moving in one direction, but it takes time to establish another major shift along the way. Was this wasted time? Could I have spent it better? Well, I could always have studied, or built something, or spent days cleaning the bathroom. I could have done anything, really. But I wanted to play Ragnarok Online.

So what is the heart of the elective side of elective devotion? Is it purely elective, or purely predetermined? On one hand I want to say that I had a choice in the matter; on the other I must admit it seemed almost a compulsion. Sitting there hour after hour, repeatedly mobbing and gaining XP, getting up for coffee and getting back to work, began to be a real chore. But so are many things that I have found rewarding: translation work, study, memorization, research, annotation among them. The end makes the work worthwhile.

Duriel is an Assassin Cross now. The process of transcending with the Book of Ymir and conversing with the Valkyrie was really engaging; I’ve always liked the mythology of the world, and this big quest did not disappoint me. I’m still playing now, just more casually. There is a lot left to explore and do after all.

What drove me to undertake all that tedious leveling at once, to spend all my free time in a burst of RO activity? I don’t have any answers, even after a few days of reflection. One thing I do know is that I am likely to behave this way in the future, though. With any luck, I can keep enjoying it.

See you in Rune-Midgard!

I’ve been feeling a bit reflective during the past two weeks or so (when not working a great deal >_>), and this has engendered a peculiar sort of behavior: I am not currently obsessed with anything in particular.

It’s a strange feeling. On most days, I am really ready to dive into some particular thing, whether it is Macross, mathematics, Miku, manga, molecular evolutionary biology, or Mesopotamian archaeology. For a few days, at least, I’ve been unfocused. I feel unhinged by the experience, and it’s a curious sensation. Ought I be looking for another obsession? Is that really a good idea?

Most of my short-term obsessions are just temporary wave-crests of research from long running interests. Therefore, I sense that this is a temporary period of cancellation in the overlapping amplitudes. This is by no means a stable equilibrium. While I’m here, though, it is intriguing to notice how different it all feels.

Without a clear obsession, I wander from news article to new article, processing a bit of financial news here, a few wikipedia articles there. I spend time doing small things around my apartment, or pestering my significant other.

It’s quite irritating, I’m sure.

This mental malaise reached a tipping point yesterday evening when I began trolling ancient web links, looking for late-90’s web shrines and the like. I knew then that it was time to stop. Why is it so difficult to focus sometimes? I suspect that holding focus too long creates its own problems. These days of working and wandering the Internet seem a little unproductive now, but they may provide a necessary respite from intense enthusiasm.

The question now is what I intend to focus on next. I’m looking into possibly rereading Love Hina while I decide, so who really knows what that will lead to? It’s always fun to find out, since I can never really predict it.

Here’s to the next project, as yet unknown!

I was listening to some Hatsune Miku (初音ミク) this evening, and I decided to go rewatch a few awesome PV’s on youtube and NicoNico. As I watched “Love is War” (恋は戦争) and “The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku,” (初音ミクの消失) I was really struck by how emotional I get listening to those songs. Now, this is not something I just realized; I’ve been listening to Miku for several years now, and I really enjoy her music. In fact, she’s my #1 over at last.fm.

I’ve purchased albums, singles, figures, and blurays of Miku over the years, and I suspect that I’ll continue to buy more of them as time goes on. I don’t really buy too much music, and I’d never bought a concert DVD before I picked up the 39’s Giving Day bluray. What was it that made me pick it up? Why do I like Miku so much? Why do I find so much emotion in the songs that are sung by what I know intellectually to be a voice synthesis software application?

Let me explain what I feel, first, about pop stars in general. When someone has a vibrant presence, a distinctive voice, and a character that seems to come through no matter what they’re singing, then they are a great performer. They bring themselves into the delivery of a song, and in some measure make it their own. Whether they wrote it themselves or not, whether they are the first to perform it or not, they bring themselves into the performance. This is how a stage musical can always be different as the cast changes, and how one song can change character from performer to performer over decades.

The song “Fly Me to the Moon” is a good example here. Like most Americans, I had heard Sinatra singing this standard during my childhood; like most anime fans, I heard it again in many variations while watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sinatra was not the first to sing the number, nor was he the man who wrote it. The song is fifty-seven years old now, and has been recorded and performed scores of times. People have taken on individual interpretations of the song (like Sinatra’s) as the standard for the song, above even the original.

So which is the real “Fly Me to the Moon?” They all are, of course. Every performance brings something to the song. The performer is not the song, but the performer’s art is to adapt it. This is the way in which Hatsune Miku is very much the same as any other artist.

There is no lack of emotion in Sinatra’s recording of “Fly Me to the Moon,” despite the fact that he neither wrote it nor performed it originally. Similarly, “Love is War” is as much Miku’s as it is Ryo and Supercell’s. Miku performs songs by thousands of amateur and professional musicians; she is a pop star who performs the work of others.

The thing that ties them all together is a sort of shared hallucination (credit to @Gabihime for that observation) of Miku’s “self.” We, each of her fans, have an idea of who Miku is, what she is like, how she feels. We may not all agree; this is healthy and not unexpected. The musicians who create music with her, the artists who draw her, and the sculptors who render her in three dimensions all tap into that shared hallucination of a real person; Miku is a brand, Miku is a created character, Miku is a software program, Miku is a star, Miku is a girl. All of those are true, and in fact they are as “true” of Miku as any shared assumptions about any artist can be.

Because Miku’s fans are real people, they create her in their own image. She is human; as much as any of us are human in each others’ eyes. The emotion we hear in “Love is War” is genuine because it affects us; it is Miku’s because, after all, it is her song, she is the one singing to us. We listen because we want to hear.

When I hear people expressing disbelief, wondering why someone would go to a concert for a “virtual idol,” I want to say out loud that every idol is virtual, that every celebrity is a brand, that every artist is a creation of those who see their work. Every human is an abstraction of every other. If Miku is not quite as human as some, it is worth noting that many people do not seem to feel that there is much of a difference.

Hatsune Miku is real to me. I listen to her music and watch her videos, look at her pictures and buy her merchandise. I enjoy her singing. I want to hear what she has to say. The people who write music and have her perform it are reaching out to others, and Miku helps them to do it. That is something special, and worthy of respect.

It doesn’t hurt that she has cute twintails, either.

I was reading the usual torrent of news that flows my way via fifteen-plus hours online per day, trying to parse some meaning from the noise. With so much signal, it can take a while for general trends to emerge; today I ran across what struck me strongly as signal.

The first hit was reading about the overreaction to Hurricane Irene in the popular press and the rising tide of criticism about similar overreaction by government officials. This is nothing new, of course. As a resident of the Gulf Coast, I grew up hearing people complain about evacuation orders. People complain when they are not issued soon enough, and they complain when they are issued; after the hurricane, they inevitably judge post-facto the decision to evacuate or not, criticizing with the benefit of hindsight. With such a mess of complaining, it would seem that there could be no winner in such a situation. Everyone is angry, and no one makes perfect decisions.

At the individual level it is quite difficult to find any benefit apart from venting frustration; at a larger level, though, two groups benefit almost invariably by this cycle of endless complaining: the media and political opponents of the decision-makers. If you make a poor decision in the heat of command, prepare for your political opponents to make hay with it as the next election approaches. Meanwhile, expect that the media will continue to rake in advertising revenue at every stage of the game, escalating the situation where expedient for the purposes of viewership.

Hurricane Katrina was an interesting turning point in terms of national attention. Back when Hurricane Andrew crushed Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast, there was plenty of attention, but it was more the standard human-interest fare: television movies and building codes grew out of the disaster, and everyone moved on to the 1994 Republican Contract with America. Political capital was exchanged, people moved on, and the national news moved elsewhere.

In the next decade, two events showed the world the politics of which America was truly capable: 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, the news media did famously good business; in both cases, politicians played the blame game to make incredible political capital. These were hardly isolated incidents of the confluence of national attention and political success. It stands to reason that such times are opportunities for the media as well as politicians. What happens, then, when there are no hurricanes, no terrorist attacks, or at least none in the populous areas of the US homeland?

This would seem to be an insoluble problem – no hay to be made when the field lies empty. This difficulty, though, has been solved by a clever alignment of media and politics. There is no conspiracy here, though – just a happy coincidence. Happy, that is, for news networks and political parties; depressing and destructive for citizens and democratic government.

What is the magical solution? When there are no disasters, no catastrophes, no battles from which to emerge victorious, how do you get attention? You invent a battle, invite the press, and watch your political capital skyrocket. By polarizing the electorate around an issue, then tying it to any number of other issues in a platform based around some simple theme, one can generate both news and campaign fundraising dollars. No need to wait for a war to mount your charger – just hop on and run over whoever gets in the way. The cavalry is sure to follow.

We in America have perfected the news without substance, the anger without cause, and the grass-roots growing from the top down. The aforementioned Contract with America is one example. We call it “Culture War,” a truly perfect term. What gets more 200 point headlines than a war? A culture war, a war where we are all soldiers because we are told that we are. This has been a revolution of politics in my lifetime. Alignment based on posturing as “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” and a host of similar issues has allowed the politicians to inflate their own political currency with zero backing, while the media on both sides foments and then editorializes. O’Reilly or Olberman? Limbaugh or Maddow?

This is a time of demagogues, to be sure, and the US has led the charge. What I read today, though, helped to crystallize the notion for me that demagoguery and baseless political posturing are not just irritating consequences of the American public’s intellectual laziness. They are much more than that.

They are, in fact, marketable products. Quite valuable ones, really, beneficial for the media as well as politicians. Where is that marketing being directed? Where is it effecting change? Who is adopting these measures? The UK.

I happened to see two articles in the Guardian today. One about a very muscly Jesus, and the other about anti-abortion activists. America is succeeding in exporting at least one product in the twenty-first century: demagoguery and the associated loss of intelligent citizenship.

I just can’t wait to see what happens next. >_>

I’m in the midst of rereading Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, and in so doing I have once again seen something in them which I’d not seen before. I first read Dune when I was just a shade younger than the young Paul Atreides; I was in ninth grade, and it seemed to me to be most definitely the best novel I had ever read.

Since that time, I have reread Dune and the five sequels Herbert penned more times than I can count – well over two dozen for some of the volumes in the series. I have loved them, in each reading, and drawn something new from them each time. I am now about the age of Muad’Dib, Paul Atreides once again – this time as the Emperor of the Lion Throne, twelve years after the defeat of Shaddam IV. I have grown up with Dune, and I have profited by it throughout. It is no longer the greatest novel I have read; that title, if it exists at all, would have to go to another of my favorites. It is nevertheless a great work, one from which I suspect I will be drawing lessons when I am edging up on Leto II’s age.

Reading Dune again, I encountered the chapter near the close of Book Two in which Liet-Kynes meets his end atop a spice blow, killed by his own planet (pages 270-7 in my venerable paperback copy). This chapter, coming as it does in the middle of Stilgar’s confrontation with Paul and Jessica in the desert (plus Paul’s first meeting with Chani on the ridge) always seemed overlong, an interruption in the narrative thread. It is not as though I did not appreciate Kynes’ hallucinated lesson from his long-dead planetologist father; on the contrary, I found then and continue to find now much of interest there. Even Kynes, though, is less than impressed with his father’s oration: “Lecturing, lecturing, lecturing — always lecturing.”

Kynes calls himself a desert creature, and the chapter opens with a description of him as a man, then as a mote, his clothes rags and his life near its end. He listens to his father’s words of hope for man as a force of ecological transformation, even as the pre-spice mass builds up to an explosion beneath him. As a younger reader, the tension there escaped me, especially when counterpoised with the odd amusement of Kynes trying to turn his head to see his father, to meet his gaze. His father is not there, of course, and Kynes’ frustrated attempts to find him, despite recognizing his own delirium, form a darkly comedic element for the scene. Death approaches, as the spice blow and as the hawk.

In the early chapters of Dune Messiah, Paul is tortured by his station, holding himself and his enemies in check while he searches for a solution. The chapter in which he holds council regarding the Treaty of Tupile (pages 67-83 in my edition) shows him in a moment of near anger when Irulan pushes for him to impregnate her. Paul refuses an answer and walks to the window, and catches himself in reflection. His mind wanders over his reign and his planet, and he turns to the pilgrims who come on the Hajj from conquered worlds:

What was it that the pilgrims truly sought? Paul wondered. They said they came to a holy place. But they must know the universe contained no Eden-source, no Tupile for the soul. They called Arrakis the place of the unknown where all mysteries were explained. This was a link between their universe and the next. And the frightening thing was that they appeared to go away satisfied.

What do they find here? Paul asked himself.

Paul goes on to consider that he has “out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filed him that this universe still eluded him.” The Emperor, the Oracle, does not have the answer, does not have control. This is a rumination on personal mortality, considered by one whose first son is long dead and whose next child means the death of his wife and his own exile.

The kwisatz haderach sees this, but the man does not want to go into the desert. Kynes, as he stares down his death in the implacable words of his father, the patient hawk, and the inevitable spice blow, realizes that the danger to his dream of man as a positive force for ecological transformation is a Paul Atreides: “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.” It is the deadly personality, the desire for action, the harnessing of human energy for the immediate that Kynes sees, but he can see it only as he approaches death. Paul sees the same, from the other side: the universe is beyond his reckoning, beyond his understanding, and beyond his control. Kynes sees the same truth at the moment of his demise, which Paul will not understand until later: “Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, and that the most persistent principles in the universe were accident and error. Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.”

Again the darkly humorous comes to the fore with the frustrated hawks overhead; they rail against their lost prey, but they understand the lesson all too well that there are no certainties. Paul learns that there are none, not even for the Oracle. This melancholy brooding on mortality was not something I really understood or placed in its appropriate context until this reading. Perhaps I feel a certain sympathy for Paul at thirty, holding the universe at bay after finally coming to some sort of understanding of it. I feel his wonder at the pilgrims who find solace.

Kynes finds his solace in being enveloped by the planet he hoped to save, pursued by the hawk and at last recognizing the chaos of the natural world. It is that balance between wild, deadly forces and careful analysis that Herbert manages so well in the chapter – Kynes and his father, the planetologist and the planetologist-Fremen. Who better to lecture at the moment of your death?

Coming to appreciate the interrelated narrative in these two chapters also gave me a little better reading of the opening quotation to the Kynes chapter, a short introduction and then a piece of Fremen music called “The Old Man’s Hymn.” Here again is something I was not ready to appreciate all those years ago:

I drove my feet through a desert
Whose mirage fluttered like a host.
Voracious for glory, greedy for danger,
I roamed the horizons of al-Kulab,
Watching time level mountains
In its search and its hunger for me.
And I saw the sparrows swiftly approach,
Bolder than the onrushing wolf.
They spread in the tree of my youth.
I heard the flock in the branches
And was caught on their beaks and claws!

I don’t feel that I ought to write a proper analysis of the poem above, or at least not yet. It is visceral for me in a way it has never been before, beautiful like a chipped gem or a cracked mirror.

I love Dune. I will be reading it, I hope, for many more years to come. In so doing, I know that I will continue to find more than I have before. I recognize that my reading is changing with time, not just getting better in some teleological sense. I am a different person with each reading, and it is always a different experience.

So I was perusing Google Fast Flip this afternoon over breakfast and I ran across an article in the LA Times about Ernest Hemingway’s current place in the spectrum of popular culture. The article itself is well done, and I believe that the author does a fair job of representing the increasingly peculiar place that Hemingway holds in twenty-first century America. Nevertheless, reading it made my blood boil.

This is not the fault of the author, but the fault of his subject: our collective idiocy regarding a great writer. Admittedly, I was ready to be angry. The caricature of Hemingway as a womanizing, hard-drinking huntsman has always flown completely in the face of his work; it is much more than that, and to imagine Hemingway himself as somehow less complex than his own literature is to do him a great disservice.

The most significant, and of course the most infuriating portion of the article for me is the work The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa! This is sensationalism of the worst kind, a self-help book and cultural critique written on the dusty coattails of a great author and enduring personality. The article points out that the work is intended to also show Hemingway as a “colorful bohemian and virile man of action.” The appalling quotation from the book’s author speaks for itself:

“I think there’s a lot of lessons that Hemingway taught that definitely could apply to modern guys,” Beckerman says. “I think that guys today aren’t really living on our own terms and have lost a certain passion. Everything we know comes from Wikipedia, and everything Hemingway knew came from adventure. Get off your iPad and get off your smartphone and go slaughter some bulls and some lions!”

This is as much a caricature of our modern life as the “Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying” persona is of Hemingway the author; it is also equally shallow. The utter and complete stupidity of calling Hemingway “War-Glorifying” has to be the most egregious sin here, however. I first read A Farewell to Arms as a very young man, and I remember taking from it a bleak portrait of a world ruined by war and steeped in tragedy. There is nothing cavalier about it.

One must also wonder about the image of “guys today” as opposed (one supposes) to guys of a bygone era. We are not “living on our own terms,” it seems. We should drop our urbane pretensions and scamper off to a safari. Perhaps the author has not read A Moveable Feast, or perhaps he has tried to do so and failed completely. Hemingway’s work chronicles characters struggling to find purpose for themselves in the burgeoning urbanity of Paris between the first and second world wars. This is of course not unique to A Moveable Feast; much of Hemingway’s work is about listlessness and a desire to find meaning in a world beyond control.

Hemingway’s novels and short fiction resonate into the present because the issues he wrote about have never gone away. Unlike this contemporary work of popular self-help, Hemingway’s stories will endure so long as people find themselves in uncertain times, in an uncertain world. What books like the one mentioned in this article seek to to is to capture the audience who would be better served reading Hemingway’s novels than they would another dose of jocular jousting at popular notions of cultural norms. This works, repeatedly, because people never read the works in question. The caricature persists because the original is never even observed.

If people took the time to read Hemingway, his own fiction on his own terms, they would find something much more compelling than yet another biopic or insistent call to return to some imagined utopia of masculinity. I have to end this post with a comment on the opening lines of the LA Times article, which mention the new Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris. The film chronicles an author who wanders back and forth through time between the present day and 1920’s Paris, encountering luminaries and questioning his writing.

I’m no Woody Allen fan. I typically despise his self-effacing criticism. This movie describes a writer who chooses the present over the past and discovers the truth about his relationship concealed in his own novel. This is a terrible, shallow way to view the craft of fiction. This sort of revelation from one’s own works, though, neatly describes the popular understanding of the relationship between an author and his words. People believe that they are one and the same, that a novel is merely the author’s own life writ fictional. This is true of mediocre fiction. It is not true of great work. It is not true of Hemingway, whose lived experiences flowed into his prose, but did not limit it.

Hemingway’s work is fiction, a window into the world. It is not an autobiography. We live in a culture that adores cults of personality, and despises critical thinking and careful reading. Perhaps we should skip considerations of Hemingway the author, on the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide. His memory and our minds would be better served by reading a little of the work to which he devoted his life.

Now, I’m off to reread my favorite of his short stories, “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.”