Positively plummeting on the job

You can probably guess where this is going.  It’s a pretty big week for me, at present, what with the first round of grant applications being due, three books and an article to get through, two creative projects on the go and a seminar to prepare for, and to top it all off this Thursday will mark the sinister anniversary of my birth.

I’d like to spend my spare time grousing about savages and whiners and whatnot, in the grand blogging tradition, but the luster has somewhat left that occupation in light of more compelling matters.

Posting will be infrequent, which has become its own sort of tradition here.

Falling down on the job

I’m taking a long weekend to get some real writing done.  Not, of course, that this isn’t real writing here.  I mean writing that will be read by far fewer people, if it ever sees the light of day at all.  Weird; I guess when I put it like that it doesn’t seem like such a good idea after all.

Anyway, nothing until Monday probably, unless something leaps out of the darkness and scandalizes me.

In the meantime, I’ll say that you should be reading Dan Simmons’ The Terror (2007).  It’s delightful, in a doom-in-the-endless-winter sort of way.  Failing that, you might consider James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), which is pretty much entirely different.

Coming Soon

This having been announced, a slew of other studios have rushed similar projects into production in what can only be described as a race to the bottom.

- Bartleby the Scrivener - Bartleby (Orlando Bloom), a swashbuckling undercover agent working for His Majesty’s government, has been sent back in time to sabotage a seemingly insignificant New York law firm that will otherwise produce a document capable of plunging the world into war – if it falls into the wrong hands! But can Bartleby overcome his ever-present woman troubles and learn to play by the rules long enough to complete his mission and save mankind? You would prefer not to miss it!

- The Miserables – John Johnson (Orlando Bloom), finally released after twenty years at Guantanamo Bay for dissent he never uttered, returns to New York City to find many things have changed – while many are more the same than ever. Now, Johnson must stay one step ahead of the law as he and his band of Greenwich Village freedom-fighters stand up against the tyrannical Bush regime in a street-by-street war for America’s future!

- The Return of the Native – The year: 1878. The place: Egdon Heath, Wessex. As the stars align and an unusual storm passes over the Heath, someone long believed to be dead prepares to rise. He wakes from his ancient slumber; he walks the storm-tossed hills; he… is Chingachgook (Orlando Bloom), the last of the Mohicans! His lust for vengeance hits an unexpected snag in the form of Eustacia Vye (Megan Fox), the headstrong young witch who sees in Chingachgook a means of escaping the curse that traps her on the Heath. That snag is further complicated by the attentions of Thomasin Yeobright (Scarlett Johansson), a prim and simple girl who reminds Chingachgook of someone he once knew. With another storm approaching, Chingachgook must choose: an orgy of blood? Or the temptations of the flesh?

- The Brothers K – It’s an hilarious comedy of “brotherly love” as the three squabbling sons of a cantankerous patriarch (Christopher Walken) come home for Christmas only to discover the old man dead and themselves the suspects! Could one of them really have committed the crime? Was it party-boy Dmitri (Vince Vaughan)? Egghead Ivan (Will Ferrell)? Or holy roller Alexei (John C. Reilly)? It’s a madcap dash through the streets of LA as a host of crazy cops, sexy women, dancing priests and even the army join the Brothers K in the quest to clear their name! With a cameo from Sascha Baron Cohen as the Grand Inquisitor and featuring music from The Pussycat Dolls, it’s the perfect holiday hit for the whole family!

I think I just died a little inside. Post more of them, all of you

SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER

[Note for those coming from Google (since I seem to be the second result for a common search string): the line in the post's title comes from the excellent song "Blood and Thunder" by the metal group Mastodon, from their album Leviathan.  You can find the full lyrics of it here.]

WHEN YOU SEE THE WHITE WHALE

But you won’t be seeing it on the silver screen, apparently, or at least not properly, because Hollywood’s stupidity is legendary and unparalleled in all the land.  Thanks, movie industry!  Thanks, useless Russian guy who made Wanted!  Thanks for all the nonsense:

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

“Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’ ” Cooper said. “This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.”

Split your lungs with blood and thunder
When you see the white whale!
Break your backs and crack your oars, men,
If you wish to prevail!
This ivory leg is what propels me -
Harpoons thrust in the sky!
Aim directly for his crooked brow,
And look him straight – in – the – eye!!!
WHITE
WHALE
HOLY
GRAIL

Imminence

Sean Dailey is reporting that Dale Ahlquist told him that the Ignatius Press told him that Part Two of Chesterton’s Collected Poetry is finally available after a delay of many years. Part One – Vol. X in the Collected Works series – runs to about 600 pages as it is, and apparently this second part won’t even finish the job. Part Three, writes Sean, should be coming “within the year.”

Just more of him to love, obviously.

I’ll be especially interested to see whether this new volume includes The Ballad of the White Horse (Part One did not), for while the Ignatius edition of that poem is matchless on its own, I’d still like to see it included among his other work – especially with whatever annotations or introductions they feel it necessary to provide. I suppose it doen’t seem healthy to be so interested in what people do with the poem rather than in the poem itself, but you can rest assured that I like it just fine.

Oh snap

It has long been reckoned that you can’t beat a Christian when it comes to credulous buffoonery, though some of our brighter lights have challenged this notion in word and deed – both on their own parts and on behalf of their less-famous associates. Chesterton, among others, reckoned instead on solid orthodoxy as the first line of defense against superstition and nonsense, with the real danger of such things coming once a firm belief in God and an ordered universe had departed.

Well, it’s still pretty awesome when other people say it, too:

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

8%, eh? With luck we’ll be able to get that down to a good hearty 0% with effort and hard work, but in the meantime it still feels good to be ahead of the curve.

Baylor’s page for the study and its results can be found here, and it’s certainly worth reading. Be sure to check out the article linked to above, too; it has some pretty arch commentary that’s certainly worth reading, including a wholly just lampooning of nuisance atheist Bill Maher’s promotion of reason and cool common sense in light of his simultaneous refusal to accept the legitimacy of western medicine. Which is, when you think about it, a matter of somewhat more immediate importance than how old someone reckons the planet to be.

Light day

Today is a day for running around and doing things, including, but not limited to:

- Finishing two books and one article

- Mailing things out for the current round of grant applications

- Attending an undergrad lecture as a TA, as usual

- Meeting up with my thesis supervisor (if all goes according to plan)

- Taking care of some bank stuff

- Buying drapes

You can pretty much just disregard that last one.  I never said that.

Anyway, probably no posting until later.

Ne swik þu nauer nu!

Some might ask what the devil the current masthead subtitle means.  And well they should!

“Ne swik þu nauer nu,” in Middle English, roughly translates as “don’t you ever stop, now.”  It seemed like a fair enough sentiment, and I owe my adoption of it to a reading of “Sumer is icumen in,” a Middle English song of high and infrequently bawdy beauty.  Ezra Pound’s parody, “Ancient Music” (which I’ll post in full once the first snow hits Ottawa), is legitimately hilarious, if strangely blasphemous, but the original song has enough low sentiments that it might be justly adopted by anyone, whatever their sophistication.  Mark Shea has a short but memorable article about it here.

Those curious about last week’s subtitle, “Jai Guru Deva,” may rest in the reasonable conviction that it comes from the Beatle’s masterful song, “Across the Universe,” and can be translated approximately as “victory to God the divine.”  It’s a good song, to be sure, and it proved doubly interesting to me for its strangely uncharacteristic refrain of “nothing’s gonna change my world.”  That’s something behind which I can get.  Those with glad hearts might watch this, from the film of the same name (Across the Universe, I mean):

Anyway, the subtitle will probably change every week.

People seem to be really overvaluing this

A minor celebrity shows she has what it takes:

An Italian model who swears she has never had sex plans to sell her virginity for one million euros, or £792,000.

Showgirl and men’s magazine model Raffella Fico, 20, told an Italian magazine: “I can’t wait to see who’s going to pull out the money to have me.”

Miss Fico, who appeared in the Italian version of Big Brother earlier this year, said she would use the cash to buy a house in Rome and pay for acting classes.

Sexual intercourse has for a very long time (though not for all time) been commodified, but our own age seems to have taken that commodification to heart in some incredibly distressing ways.  In the great spirit of Progress, we’ve decided to embark upon a strange adventure wherein nothing is too absurd or insane to be tried, and nothing, once tried, can ever be regretted.  To regret something would be to admit that wrong choices could be made at all, which is antithetical to an age wherein mere choice itself is fetishized.

It would be impossible to speak too disapprovingly of Miss Fico’s plan, or of the poor judgment that has occasioned it.  She is stupid beyond reckoning, and her infamy will return to haunt her in ways she has not yet even been able to imagine.  This is true whether she goes through with the prospective sex-having or not.

It gets worse!  How could it get worse?  Well, it just does:

“She’s never had a boyfriend. I swear on my mother’s grave. She’s a devout Catholic and prays to Padre Pio every night,” her brother told the magazine.

Furious roar

I can’t go on.

A Duty to Die

It’s like something out of Chesterton (parodic) or H.G. Wells (cheerfully serious):

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

The reaction to all of this as described in the article has thankfully been swift and condemnatory, but that it could be seriously proposed at all by a woman in her position speaks to the apparently indelible stain that still lingers on the land that once gave us the Magna Carta, among other things.

I think cruel and fussy old ladies have a duty to shut their cruel and fussy old faces, but unfortunately I am not England’s leading moral philosopher and as such my words lack weight.