Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I have a story out in the new issue of The Future Fire, a politically-oriented online SF magazine featuring a super-awesome ironical Nietzsche quote (perhaps the best kind of Nietzsche quote) about the value of escapism.

To invent stories about a world other than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, belittling, and suspicion against life is strong in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of another, a better life.

—F. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung

“Maryann Saves the World” is a piece of full-on, unapologetic, angry environmentalist escapism I sat down and wrote in a huff after watching some of my favorite woods in the whole world (in Westwood, a little town where I grew up, named for its awesome, under-appreciated, steadily vanishing woods) get knocked down and dynamited and replaced with landscaping and mcmansions. Writing it was a wonderful catharsis, which will completely justify that Nietzsche quote—and in by-no-means ironic fashion—unless, by some miraculous stroke of wish-fulfillment, a few complacent armchair environmentalists find their way to it, read it, and are re-energized to change their evil ways.

If you fit that description, please go read!

Here’s a little piece of the super-cool angry mansion-eating thicket illustration the story got from crafty artist Carmen:

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I love the Mayans. That ought to be obvious to anybody who’s even looked at my WordPress theme. And I guess that makes me biased. Look back through the film category of this blog and there’s a lot of needley criticism of a lot of movies with Mayan themes. For a movie that’s blatant about it the way 2012 is blatant about it, I go into the thing harboring at the same time a sense of dread and a set of unattainable expectations. Which is, of course, not anything like the state of mind that causes people to make movies with Mayan themes. They do it because human sacrifice and murky prophecies penned by ancient mystics from lost civilizations are freaky and cool, and there are a lot of other people out there like me who drool over them.

And I guess because of the mystery involved, people’s imaginations seem to be more inspired by the iteratively more far-fetched folkloric misinterpretations of these myths than the real thing. Crystal skulls, for example, sure do seem a hell of a lot cooler in the popular perception than, say, mossy ones. And I can get behind that. I can sit and enjoy the popcorny adventure elements while managing to mostly ignore my nagging annoyance with the associated historical inaccuracies, cultural insensitivities, even the occasional new-agey hyperbolic pseudo-prophetic ego trip. For the sake of the story, I can look past that stuff. I know what poetic license is. And to a certain extent, the organic, evolving, cyclical nature of Mesoamerican and precolombian mythology lends itself perfectly to that kind of speculation. These are stories that propagate and develop through oral tradition, improvisation. Changing old stories to tell new truths, and vice-versa. There’s room for sprawling, reverently researched historical epic like Gary Jennings’ Aztec, transportive surrealistic allegory like Asturias’ Hombres de Maiz, absurdist, hallucinatory postmodern ultraviolence like Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex and intimate, intense contemporary fairytale like Aliette de Bodard’s “Blighted Heart”.

I love all that stuff. I love it to death. Which maybe means I’m less critical of Mayan influence in fiction than in film…or maybe it means that fiction’s better! Ha! But anyway.

All that said, every time I see the 2012 trailer, it gets harder to sit through, and my inclination to see it gets tinier. The best thing about that trailer is over before the titles have even finished rolling, and it’s this:

An actual, beautiful piece of Mayan relief art, CGI’d to look like it’s carved into the side of the three-million-foot high movie title logo. That one tenth of a second gives me tingles. The rest of it can go throw an aircraft carrier at itself for all I care. Because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a story. It may have a character or two, but mostly it appears to be about some CGI death and destruction. It doesn’t even seem to be bothering to use the mythology at all, even for entertainment purposes—it’s just a convenient date they can assign some doomsday to. And that kind of thing really does have the potential to make me mad. Because not only is it playing to the lowest common denominator at the expense of practically any resemblance to the noble, ancient art of mythmaking, and frankly bears more resemblance to a fireworks display or a line of cars slowing down to look at a wreck than it does to storytelling, but it’s perpetuating the worst, most irresponsible part of the stupid pop culture folklorification of Mayan culture. And it’s making me afraid that what I’m about to say actually still does need to be said.

There won’t be any %&*@ 2012 apocalypse.

Now, if we’re lucky, maybe there just might be a singularity. Or at least a global reawakening. I sure hope so, because for crying out loud, we could use one.

More about all that, and what the Mayan mythology and “prophecy” actually predicts, next week.

But the main point of this week’s angry anti-2012 rant is simply this: go ahead and entertain me with alien-powered crystal skulls and doomsday scenarios if you must—but couldn’t you at least try to engage with the underlying ideas a little bit? The history, the art and culture and mythology of the Mayans has so many fascinating, pertinent, complex and thought-provoking lessons to convey. Can’t we talk about that just a little?

More of that next week too.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

O how dearly I wish I had posted this post:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/09/living-growing-architecture.html

I am going out in the backyard and starting one of these for myself right now.

So jealous!

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

At 12:00 AM (now), “Of Thinking Being and Beast” goes online at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, alongside a story called “Dragon’s-Eyes” by the significantly-better-than-me Margaret Ronald. Yah! It is a high day to be me.

A disclaimer: the centaur stories—of which there are many more, though this is the first I’ve sold—are bleak, vicious, and include not a little of the old ultra-violence in the Anthony Burgess sense. Kid friendly they are not.

This is Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur. Doesn’t he look innocent and retiring. Don’t be fooled.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Yeah. I’m a Whistler fan.

Birch and oak near dark.

Shadows of my backyard apple tree by the almost-full moon.

The tree casting the shadow.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I know this is kind of an odd digression from my usual pagan insanity. But something about this really gets me. The themes are all there. And the expressions on these ladies’ faces… damn.

John Everett Millais, The Vale of Rest, 1858

Millais was an English Pre-Raphaelite. You may be more familiar with his Ophelia or The Princes in the Tower.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

My ally Scott H. Andrews has put up a beauty of a placeholder for his upcoming literary fantasy web zine:

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

‘Master,’ said the lion, looking at the boy with glowing eyes. ‘You who bear the emblem of the Childlike Empress, can you tell me this: Why must I always die at nightfall?’

‘So that Perilin, the Night Forest, can grow in the Desert of Colors,’ said Bastian.

‘Perilin?’ said the lion. ‘What’s that?’

Then Bastian told him about the miraculous jungle that consisted of living light. While Grograman listened in fascinated amazement, Bastian described the diversity and beauty of the glimmering phosphorescent plants, their silent, irresistible growth, their dream-like beauty and incredible size. His enthusiasm grew as he spoke and Grograman’s eyes glowed more and more brightly. ‘All that,’ Bastian concluded, ‘can happen only when you are turned to stone. But Perilin would swallow up everything else and stifle itself if it didn’t have to die and crumble into dust when you wake up. You and Perilin need each other.’

—Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

I visited Montreal for the first time this past weekend, on the event of my sister’s graduation. Had an enjoyable time drinking fine French Canadian beers, pretending to speak French and struggling valiantly to hold my own with idealistic, new-minted Canadian intellectuals. Also spent a fair amount of time wandering the streets presenting my country-boy fish-out-of-water colors to the absurdly thin and fashionable Quebecois in my unhip hick flannels and wool and silly aussie hat. It rained a lot. I stood under a lot of awnings in zen contemplation of clouds, hid out in bookstores (found a nice used copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) and the Musee des Beaux Arts (viewed ghostly panoramic tintypes of the Bay of Havana, glorious hyperbolic propaganda posters of the Cuban revolution), stepped in a lot of puddles and got a lot of drenched. Like I said, an enjoyable time. But I am a simple man, and I have to admit, the best part of the weekend was last night at 11 after the long car ride home, standing in my garden with the stars and the seedlings and the dregs of a half-pint of homebrewed kolsch.

It’s the contrasts that make meaning.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Those Facebook status reports are always either too flip and pithy or too short.

I am sitting in my backyard watching the sun go down, drinking homebrew steam lager and taking scrawled marginal notes for revisions to my HomelessMoon chapbook story. For a hard surface, and occasional inspirational distraction, I’m using justinhowe’s copy of the mindblowingly awesome Art of the Maya Scribe. A gaggle of local kids swarm around me, full of irrational, unanswerable demands such as, if I’m drinking beer now, do I plan to throw up later? and, why would I assign homework to myself?

Eventually, the sun sets, the wind picks up, and I’m driven inside.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

In honor of the Winter Solstice, a by-no-means exhaustive gallery of forms of the horned god.

Cernunnos, Celtic god of fertility, death and wild creatures, from The Gundestrup Cauldron, 1st century BC.

Pan, nature god, on a Roman memorial frieze, 1st century AD.

The Sorcerer, primal shapeshifter of the cave paintings at Trois-Frères, France, circa 13,000 BC.

Michelangelo’s “Horned Moses”—representations of Moses with horns for the most part derive from an ambiguity in the Hebrew scriptures, in which a description of Moses’ physical appearance upon returning from Mt. Sinai can be translated to suggest either horns or rays of light protruding from his head. There’s a lot of fun (mostly specious) debate, though, as to whether Michelangelo might have been intentionally acknowledging Christianity’s pagan past.

Pashupati, Lord of Animals, an incarnantion of Shiva, Indus Valley circa 2,000 BC.

Herne the Hunter, a restless ghost that has haunted Windsor Forest since the era of Shakespeare, here illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1843.

A couple of other horned gods I can think of that I don’t have pictures for:

Gwyn ap Nudd, mythical hunter from Welsh Mythology, leader of the Wild Hunt, usher of souls to the afterlife, featured in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles as Gwyn the Hunter.

Oromë, huntsman of the Valar, from Tolkien.

Anuket, the gazelle-headed Egyptian fertility goddess of the Lower Nile.

Actaeon, the hapless forester of Greek myth, who, as punishment for having stumbled upon Artemis bathing au naturel, is transformed into a stag and harried to his death by the huntress and her hounds.

And, of course, I couldn’t really have gone without letting slip a hint of geekdom.

Happy Solstice.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Mochica Headdress-Condor - This is a public image (see rules)

What an absolutely beautiful and flabbergasting thing. I’ve been staring at it awhile and I keep seeing it in new ways. The Moche were a pre-Inca Peruvian people, around 300 - 800 CE. Their pottery is amazing, and until now I have to say I preferred it to their goldwork. But this thing….

How am I to interpret this? My first inclination is to turn it sideways and read it as a condor perched atop the sun, gazing at its reflection in the sea. Then it occurs to me that the baldness and bulbosity of that angry dude’s head makes him look a lot like an Olmec head–one of those monolithic stone heads from Mexico–which sort of evokes that semi-mythical ancestor race of the Americas, the Atlanteans or whatever you want to call them. Makes me think these condors, those immense, indomitable scavengers, represent survival, that the Moche have outlasted their progenitors and at the same time preserved their craft and wisdom. Then again, it looks a lot like a Moche head too. And I keep wondering about those things that look like horns, trying to justify that they represent a rock the condor is perched on, or else some kind of headdress, and not in fact horns. But maybe they are horns. Maybe this is a figure I’m supposed to recognize, a god or demon, in which case I’m pretty much lost. The condors are obvious, but there are only a few gods that consist between cultures, and many, like the old man god/aged maize god/ancestor god, called Itzamna by the Yucatec Maya, are amorphous and archetypal enough to be unrecognizable from one incarnation to the next. Maybe it’s a man-crocodile-jaguar-bird hybrid. Stranger things have happened. The breadth and complexity of precolombian culture humbles me. I am scratching at the door.

I found my way to this piece of art, by the way, via an article fragment that seems to be all that thus far has been shared with the English-speaking press regarding a recent find in Lambayeque, Peru.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Normally I would not be propagating some inane online categorization quiz, purely for the purposes of not wasting your time, gentle reader, or my own. I also must disclaim that I know and care little for astrology and believe less. There are just too many other far more interesting and obscure newagey systems for analyzing the underlying fabric of the universe for me to waste my time worrying what month everybody was born in and whether I should hang out with them or not as a result.

The Tarot, on the other hand… well I’m not sure what it is about the Tarot, except that it’s based on these archetypal symbols. I suppose you could call them prepackaged monumental metaphor. And the great thing about it is that it can be tailored to the individual. Find an artist you love and construct an inner cosmology, and there you have it, in a tangible form you can shuffle or mark your place in books with or flick one by one across the room into a hat. Maybe this is why you find me marking all my books with Magic cards.

Anyhow, the outcome of this particular inane quiz just made me so damn psyched, just fit so well my ideal conception of myself, that I had to put it up.

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged Man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

(What Tarot Card are You?)

Halfway between the Fool and the Magician.

Wishing all of you a safe, ecstatic and enlightening Autumnal Equinox.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Saturday I drove through downtown Boston in torrential thunderstorms to drop off Justin at South Station. Made it back to my parents’ house only mildly soaked, ducked into the kitchen, and what do I find sitting on the table?

It’s the cover art for a YA urban fantasy novel called The Lightning Thief, whose content, judging by the prologue and my mom’s astute appraisal, sadly fails to live up to the quality of the illustration. A little bit shallow, a little bit derivative bandwagon-jumping, though action-packed, I’m sure. Her kids are supposed to be reading it at school. Who makes these decision, I wonder?

Anyhow, I’m content to ignore the attached work of fiction and drool over the cover. A kid with a conch shell and an orange-glowing sword wading through the flooded ruins of Manhattan–what’s not to love?

The artist is John Rocco; his gallery is here.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I was initially skeptical about the whole crazy viral-apocalyptic-subversive-time-travel-guerilla marketing for Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails’ upcoming concept album. Their previous album was just ok, rehashing some riffs and some themes from the glorious The Fragile; and ole Trent Reznor, formerly the wiry ball-lightning with its finger on the jugular pulse of the MTV teenager’s cathartic rage, was assessed in his burly, bald new incarnation by certain critics (myself included) to have retreated from relevance into his own head. This new campaign of hidden messages left on USB drives in concert venue bathrooms was definitely a new direction, but it struck me as being a little too derivative of LOST’s vast peripheral storyline of fake tv ads, fake websites and lowbrow book tie-ins, not to mention older examples of the same thing going back through X-Files and Twin Peaks to Lovecraft and Borges. I just didn’t think poor Trent could pull it off.

Then I found the mp3 for My Violent Heart. I thrashed around my office a bit–at least, to the degree that my headphone tether would allow–and after that I started paying a little closer attention. By the time I came across artisresistance.com, I realized Trent really has an agenda going here, and he (and his marketing crew) have put a hell of a lot of effort into building that agenda into something with a fair amount of depth and complexity, something that will suck in fans, challenge them to think and work together, unify them, and at the same time maybe direct all their cathartic rage at something real.

I can’t believe how deep some of these clues have been hidden, and people find them anyway. Coded spectrograms tacked onto the ends of mp3s. Obscure literary and biblical references. Even a bit of actual, low-grade hacking.

The premise of this whole fragmented, chaotic narrative is some kind of temporal anomaly that has allowed pieces of data from a seriously fucked-up, drug-addled, post-apocalyptic future to filter backwards into the present day, forming a sort of parallel timeline which just happens to work as a disturbing, angry, empowering parable for our own. Trent is playing all sides here: terrorist, fanatic, warmonger, conscientious objecter, social revolutionary, spiritual leader. And he’s doing it in such a way that he doesn’t have to be some incredible storyteller–he just gives us the fragments, and lets our own socially-ingrained tendencies to narrative thread them all together for him.

So now I’m hooked. They just put the whole album up for streaming over at yearzero.nin.com. I’ve listened to it twice straight through, and I’m starting on a third.