We do well to remember

Obviously I am back to updating this blog as the spirit moves me. Not for the first time, the spirit is moving me on September 11.

Exactly a month ago I happened to be vacationing in central Pennsylvania, and I realized I was in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Memorial. (Thank God for the racks of tourist pamphlets in every hotel and rest stop--they are not, as it turns out, obsolete.)

Flight 93 was the hijacked flight whose passengers realized what was happening, and chose to fight the hijackers. They died, but they stopped the attack before it reached Washington D.C., where it presumably would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol Building. In the year or so after the 9/11 attacks, I found the story of Flight 93 hugely compelling. So, though it wasn't part of the plan (to the extent that we had any at all), I made a point of visiting the memorial. Now I want to talk about it, because I realized a good memorial is worth praising.

I am, above all, glad that the memorial is thoughtful. I remember reading, while we still argued about how to memorialize the 9/11 attacks, about the World War II memorial finished in D.C. in 2004--the sense being that it was too triumphalist, to sterile, and so long overdue as to be perfunctory, drained of meaning. It gave me something to be afraid of in the development of the "Ground Zero" memorial in the footprint of the World Trade Center.

There is an art to memorializing events, which I am beginning to appreciate. The Flight 93 Memorial's design wasn't without pitfalls and controversy, but it came together effectively to, in essence, turn an idea into a place.

It's a big place, too, if you count the whole national park space surrounding the actual built memorial. The effect is that the whole landscape is empty as far as you can see from the memorial itself. It was the wall of names that I actually want to talk about, though.

The names of passengers and crew are carved in a marble wall, but there is a second, shorter wall parallel to it, that turns the memorial into a corridor, like the interior of an airplane, oriented toward the crash site. It ends like this:

A wooden gate (solid but conspicuously impermanent, breakable) separating the corridor from the stone marking the crash site. One remembers that the passengers of the plane used a drink cart as a ram to break down the door to the cockpit--an act that hastened their deaths by a few minutes but fixed it in this spot, where no one further would be hurt. The whole memorial points this way, and the ghosts almost call you to do as they did.

This is all to say that the memorial succeeded in reminding me of more than the fact that people died here. It mattered how they died, and it still matters.

Writing, advantages, and the myth of Athena

Rather than being born and growing, the goddess Athena was said to have emerged out of Zeus' forehead, fully grown and fully clothed, too. Writers have been trying to recreate Zeus' workflow ever since.

Or, at least, writers have a frustrating habit of doing actual work and then lying about it. (c.f. Coleridge and the poem "Kubla Khan," supposedly conceived full-formed in a dream). This is part of what got us creatives into the mess I was complaining about last month, where the general public is loath to pay for art that they think came about effortlessly.

It's not just economics that makes it a good idea to acknowledge the realities of writing--that is, it's not just audiences who need to be set straight. People who want to create suffer from the popular image of art as something that just sort of happens to creative people. (There's similar harm done by the idea that to be an artist it's necessary to be crazy or dysfunctional.) What work, exactly, I am trying to do and how, exactly, to do it, is something I'm still getting a handle on, myself.

What brought me back to the topic is a pair of articles I stumbled on today. One is a book excerpt by Matthew Weiner, the major creative force behind the recently ended series Mad Men. I'll just quote what he says on the matter right here:

Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It’s called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don’t get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it’s easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone’s head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can’t do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes.

Much of his story of the path to success is the usual one about persisting in the face of discouragement and rejection, but he also mentions being married to an architect who was willing to support him during his years of frustration. I think more people who extol the virtue of persistence should be up-front about how they ate while they were persisting. Which brings me to the second article I stumbled on (with the help of my wife--just one of many things she helps me with is stumbling on interesting writing) by author Ann Bauer, saying authors should be less coy about where their money comes from (at least, as is often the case, when it comes from family or spouses). Even Virginia Woolf said that if you're going to write fiction, you need some money (and a room of your own) first.

It's disheartening to imagine that people who succeed do so because of money or connections, but then that's not the entire truth, either. I suspect that the real secret to success (and a secret because, unlike, say, luck or hard work, we rarely discuss it) is to figure out what advantages you have and make the most of them. The right combination probably isn't the same for everyone. But aspirants should stop feeling like failures for relying on their support networks just because their heroes forgot to mention the time they spent doing the same.

Jurascible

It's not that I regret seeing Jurassic World. Wife wanted to see it and I wanted to indulge her, and after we had watched the movie we set into it with our claws, tearing it into juicy ribbons that served us as the dinner component of the evening.

Jurassic World was bad. It was baad. It was baaaaaaaaaaaad. But what's more, it seemed convinced, on every level of subtext, that it should not exist. Half a dozen conversations in the movie follow the same basic structure:

Guy 1: We wanted to do something interesting with real dinosaurs but the banal masses only want stupid things, so we mashed together a bunch of dinosaurs to build the Awesomesauce Rex.

Guy 2: That's terrible and an affront to everything I thought this franchise stood for. Why couldn't we just leave well enough alone?

Guy 1: We would but we have a directive from corporate to blindly chase profits until the whole enterprise falls down around our ears.

Guy 2: Welp.

I couldn't help but notice that Universal Pictures is now "A Comcast Company," yet one of the park folks name-drops Verizon as their corporate sponsor for the new "dinosaur." Make of that what you will.

A short post-vacation something

As I lay down for a post-church nap today, I had (what I felt at the time was) a great idea for a blog post. I assured myself that I would remember it when I woke up. I'm sure I've lost many ideas this way.

There are two reasons I didn't have a post up last Sunday. The first is that I spent last weekend at a house in another state where I had access to most of my friends but not the internet. That's only half an excuse, though, because I had meant to post this video as a filler and instead I, um, didn't.

Anyway you might have seen this already because it's not new, but Neil Gaiman (noted fantasy author who writes whatever the hell he wants, mostly) and Kazuo Ishiguro (noted literary author who also writes more or less whatever the hell he wants) got together recently on the radio and talked about the breakdown of genre boundaries. If you've got 10 minutes it's worth a listen.

My top 10 disconnected observations about Mad Max: Fury Road

First, some news: my review of the relatively new Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie Maggie is up at Monstrum Athanaeum, and you can expect to see some more of my writing there in the near future.

Unrelatedly, I finally watched Mad Max: Fury Road last night, but since no one is paying for my opinion of that movie, prepare for my thoughts in their unsifted form:

1. It was a late night showing, and the projectionist put on Entourage by mistake. It took us a surprisingly long time to be sure we were watching the wrong movie, because Entourage begins with some sort of yacht party and jet skis, and water everywhere and no land in sight. But knowing that Mad Max is about a parched dystopia, I guess we all thought this might be a flashback of some sort... that the party might be interrupted by a nuclear flash. Even knowing now what we were watching, I think that would have been an improvement.

2. The actual opening of Fury Road is quite effective at breaking Max down. They use a trick I feel like I've seen work elsewhere as well: physically scarring the hero as a consequence of their loss (and not in a badass way, like the fashionable cheek or over-the-eye scar). We, the audience, know that the hero can get out of any jam they get into in Act 1 of their own movie. We also know, at least subconsciously, that no matter how dejected the hero gets it is likely to be turned around by the end of the movie; no matter how bloodied up he gets we know he can heal up and clean up in time for the final battle. But mutilations, burns, scars, and tattoos stay with the character no matter how sloppy or glib the writing gets--they have to matter. And because a hero's good looks are sacred in a franchise, this tactic rarely gets used. Max's involuntary tattoo is especially painful because the mark is a matter of identity and identification, and in particular because...

3. So often apocalypse fiction is, weirdly, a fantasy of self-expression. Stripped of our monoculture and commoditized comforts, everything we carry with us or surround ourselves with becomes an expression of character. One thing Fury Road does well is this characterization-through-objects. You see it in other apocalypses: consider your favorite survivors' choices of clothing, weapons of choice, equipment, and accoutrements. But I wonder what it says about us that we have this recurring collective daydream, that if civilization collapsed, and day-to-day survival was a struggle, we would just have so much more time for self-expression, you know?

4. A few absurdities aside, I've realized that Fury Road is the best--if nothing else, the most successfully audacious--piece of movie world-building that I've seen since the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

5. Relatedly, the thing that might have surprised me the most in Fury Road's scorched-earth world is the underlying sense that humanity is starting to crawl out from the wreckage of the apocalypse. My knowledge of the Mad Max mythos is spotty, but this possibility of rejuvenation seems like a new thing. But the people of the Citadel have dug a well deep enough to bring water to the surface. They've established hydroponics and even open-air gardens. Functioning trade networks are starting to emerge (the Citadel peacefully receives goods from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, both separate settlements apparently devoted to producing and exporting a single commodity). By setting himself as a despotic god-king, Immortan Joe is misusing these things, but they are all markers of progress.

6. At the intersection of politics, economics, self-expression and world-building, one thing someone should write a paper on is the way characters in the Mad Max universe (one of intense scarcity) project power through conspicuous consumption. For instance, the Bullet Farmer flaunts his abundance of ammunition by wearing bullets as clothes and shooting profligately into the distance. Immortan Joe showers his supplicants with water in a naked display of power. The War Boys shoot gouts of flame from the sides of their vehicles, presumably burning precious gasoline in the process.

7. You can't talk about Fury Road without commenting on the names. For some reason in a universe where characters answer to things like Corpus Colossus, Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, and The Doof Warrior, the name I have the hardest time swallowing is Max Rockatansky.

8. Nor can you talk about Fury Road without mentioning the feminist subtext. I think turning the movie into an outright allegory for women's empowerment would be a mistake, for all the reasons that Tolkien disliked allegory: namely that it reduces a rich story to a set of talking points. But short of that, I applaud what the movie did in terms of portraying well-defined and often powerful woman characters. All the more because the movie never turns to the audience and says, "I hope we're all learning something from this." It's possible that George Miller didn't create Imperator Furiosa for Culture Points. Maybe he created her because he thought the character made perfect sense in the world he had created.

9. And the people who actively object to it need to get over themselves.

10. Speaking of George Miller, some folks are surprised that this is the same director who made Babe in 1995. But go back and watch the first scene of Babe and tell me there's no trace of horrific dystopia in that movie.

Showing your work

There's a question I've been meaning to raise for a while, but I've put it off because I couldn't suggest an answer. Then in last week's post, I sort of stumbled on a partial answer, so I'll go ahead and raise the question.

With the advent of internet celebrity and, perhaps, the "maker revolution," there seems to me to be a trend toward audiences wanting to see the work that goes into art. I first noticed this when my sister introduced me to the music duo Pomplamoose. Specifically, she showed me this video:

 

Pomplamoose's videos are brilliant, but they are the opposite of "slick" (meaning, in this case, apparently effortless, hiding the mechanisms behind the finished product). In fact they go out of their way to make sure you understand what they're doing so you can appreciate it.* You can see the same idea at work in their "video song" music videos, where they scrupulously show you the origin of all the sounds they use in the song:

 

I know that music like this tended to be a sort of blur to me: whole instrumental tracks could play without me realizing I was hearing them. I imagine lots of people experience music similarly. Playing Guitar Hero 2 was a revelation for me, and after that I started being able to tease out the lead, rhythm, and bass guitar parts in songs I was listening to. By the same token, I can hear more going on in Pomplamoose's songs because they signaled for me to listen for them.

So musicians can show the components of their songs. Visual artists can record videos of their progress for fans. I had trouble figuring out how writers could take advantage of the same phenomenon. Surely no one would want to watch me write live--it would be sort of like reading a finished piece, except only a few words would appear every minute.

Neil Gaiman has at least a partial solution, I realized. Like I talked about last week, his writing lets the reader see his work of recombining familiar elements. It brings readers closer to the actual process of writing, which is more about arranging ideas than simply having them. It dispels the hazardous myth that writers just conceive their ideas in perfect completeness and then write them down (a process which I suspect many people imagine takes no more time than reading).

I shouldn't be resentful, but the art-as-magic myth doesn't do anyone any favors. As my friend Elinor Diamond pointed out recently, writing is work. The writers of yesteryear worked hard to give the impression that they weren't working hard. Some of them flat-out lied about their writing process in order to make themselves seem like some sort of word-wizards.

The dynamics are changing, and wizardry doesn't pay anymore. The process is becoming part of the product. I'm sure there's more to this puzzle than I have figured out.

* Even in their more out-there videos, they eschew a reaction of "how did they do that?" in favor of a "I can't believe they did that."

Creativity in recombination: authors and earthworms

I recently had the pleasure of reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and, unrelatedly, some keen analysis of the "canon" of Star Wars from the perspective of 1979, and, still more unrelatedly, some engaging discussion of the soil of the New World in Charles C. Mann's 1493. It has all reminded me that there is, truly, nothing new under the sun, but you can do amazing things with a blender nonetheless.

Let's talk about The Graveyard Book. It's meant as a children's story, about a boy named Nobody who grows up in a graveyard, is raised by ghosts, and has bildungsromantic adventures with ghouls and other spooky creatures. It felt like a fresh story to me, even though you might not think it has a right to. It is, after all, an unapologetic rehash of Kipling's The Jungle Book. While Kipling's not exactly fresh in my mind, I recognized one chapter that drew thoroughly on Mowgli's encounter with the monkeys (for structure) and on H.P. Lovecraft (for everything else).

But that's Neil Gaiman's shtick. He has spent his life filling his head so full of mythologies and legendaria that he can hardly sneeze without producing a novel combination of archetypes. (Part of) what makes Gaiman so much fun is that he makes no attempt to hide his sources. In a sense, he lets you see how his creativity happened because if you recognize at least some of the elements he's drawing on, you can trace for yourself how he combines them. And that is creativity, or at least a large part of it.

While I'm at it Star Wars, as much as it's praised, deserves more credit than it normally gets for putting new skins on old archetypes. There was no reason for George Lucas et al. to hide the similarities between Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress, The Dam Busters (apparently the origin of the "Death Star Trench Run"), or Buck Rogers. The combination itself was novel enough to be something new.

Essentially, much of what we celebrate as great creativity is the work of earthworms: churning culture's litter of old ideas into a fertile topsoil. Which isn't to belittle it at all--that churning turns used-up stories into fresh ones.

How much does your writing weigh?

Microsoft Word and some other programs have a useful feature that will take your writing and tell you its Flesch-Kincaid reading level. At least, this information is useful if you have some idea what it is. Briefly, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula is supposed to take a bunch of writing tell you about how many years of education you would need to make sense of it. It goes like this:

0.39 (number of words/number of sentences) + 11.8 (number of syllables/number of words) - 15.59

Before I get to my point, let me talk about cars. Since I know hardly anything about cars, I can promise this won't take long.

Some cars are much heavier than others. Now, engineers generally try to make their cars as light as possible so they can go faster, so one reason a car might weigh more than another car is that it's not as good as the lighter car--the engineer made bad choices, the factory used lousy materials, and such. But a lot of very well-made, very fast cars also weigh a lot. Why? Because they have powerful engines, and more powerful engines are heavier. But even in a car with a powerful engine, the engineers will want to keep the weight of the rest of the vehicle down.

Back to writing. What I've discovered is that the idea you're trying to get across is like your writing's engine. Reading level makes a good, rough indicator of your writing's weight. Sometimes big ideas take big words to get across, and complex ideas take complex sentences. There's not necessarily any shame in a higher reading level. But make sure it's because of what your writing has under the hood, and not because you filled the backseat with scrap metal.

Here's a passage, for example, that weighs in at a 12.7 grade level. That means, in theory, that if you haven't graduated high school you probably won't be able to follow it:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. (Blaise Pascal)

In this case Pascal had a few things to say. Every clause adds something to the sentence in (more or less) as few words as necessary. A modern writer might throw the reader a bone and break the sentences up more, but a 12.7 grade level is forgivable.

Now, on the other hand, take something I wrote to see if I could:

I assert that it was my own personal experience and is now my very highly confident and very considered opinion that the phenomenon was, overall, very highly negative and undesirable in all or at least the substantial majority of its effects, consequences, aesthetic qualities, moral components, and/or the subjective emotional feelings which it directly or indirectly brought about and/or produced in myself and/or in others who shared the same or similar or related experience of events which had related and/or directly or indirectly comparable characteristics.

According to Word, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of that sentence is 41.3.* And let us be clear: it does not actually take 17.3 years of post-doctoral education to decipher this monstrosity. It certainly didn't take that for me to write it. I would argue that to have one's eyes glaze over is to truly comprehend the passage. It is a mockery of a sentence, not (simply) because of its length, but because it is a paraphrase of the sentence: "I thought it was bad."

Writing clearly is harder than writing obtusely. Writing clearly is also better than writing obtusely--there isn't much I'm more sure of than that when it comes to writing. Yet at some point (high school? college?) we seem to learn to "up-write" and use weighty writing to create the illusion of weighty ideas. If we're lucky, we learn to un-learn that lesson before we waste too much effort before it becomes an intractable habit.

* I started out aiming as high as I could go, thinking I might hit the high teens. On seeing that I had in fact hit the mid thirties, I thought I would try to get as high as 40. I overshot, and wondered if I could perhaps squeeze out 50 without adding anything of value. I'm sure I could, too, if I wanted to spend another half hour at it, but really it's better to call it off here.

The Last Ringbearer: or, playing in someone else's sandbox, sort of a review

I recently had the interesting experience of reading The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Yeskov. If you've read The Lord of the Rings, the name sounds oddly familiar, and it should: The Last Ringbearer is a novel written parallel (or maybe crosswise) to the plot of LOTR, with the central conceit that Tolkien's novel is a "victor's history" written by Gondor's partisans after their successful war against Mordor.*

I can't recommend the book on its own merits**, but I'm not here to rag on it either. If you're a quick reader and the above sounds interesting at all, then do read it***, or at least the first part, which tracks most closely with the events of Tolkien's book.

LRB diverges from LOTR from the first page, and it diverges hard. Beyond the broad category of "fantasy" the books don't even share the same genre: LRB starts out reading something like a Conan yarn, and it evolves into something more like a Cold-War spy thriller. What gives?

I'll tell you what. Because I could complain about the genre shift as "missing the point" of the source material--and other people have--but I think that, itself, is missing the point. In an important way, Yeskov's Middle Earth is strikingly true to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

You see, Tolkien's Middle Earth was a canvas, or perhaps a terrarium, which he filled with linguistics, Norse epics, his experiences in the Great War, and an undercurrent of Catholicism--in short, anything and everything that interested him. Later writers have mistaken Middle Earth for an archetype, and hesitated to deviate from it.

I think Yeskov did what Tolkien did, and filled his version of Middle Earth with whatever the hell he found interesting: rationalism, politics, spycraft, werewolves, parallel universes, and so on. I honestly couldn't tell you whether J.R.R. Tolkien would approve of the result, but I'm pretty sure more fantasy writers could stand to learn a lesson from it.

* Perhaps in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Jane Eyre from a perspective more sympathetic to Bertha Mason.

** It was written in Russian originally, and the English translation is the sort that you have to make allowances for. The plot itself is a little disjointed and, pretty conventional if you sift out the fantasy elements. Yeskov's Middle-Earth amalgam is certainly the most interesting thing about the book. But then, I don't think the book was meant to be sold commercially, and it's free (see next footnote), which softens but doesn't obviate criticism.

*** Because the book is from Russia, and the Tolkien estate is not a fan, the book can't be sold. The e-book, on the other hand, is freely available from the translator.

The king is a noob

Last summer several friends encouraged me to pick up Crusader Kings II, a video game which, when I had to explain it to my mother, I called a "medieval politics simulator." I have ended up sinking a good amount of time into what Wife and I have simply been calling "Europe," as in, "Have you been in Europe all afternoon?"

Part of the game's appeal is its detailed dramatis personae: you can play as a ruler of almost anywhere, from emperors down to counts, and (at least from 1066 on, I think), all the people you can play as are verified historical personages, with Wikipedia pages and everything. Of course, once you take control history goes off the rails. By the time you've played your first character's heir, and then their heir, and so on for a century or so, things can get pretty fanciful (such as, for example, a continental Cathar Irish Empire, or a Nubian king simultaneously holding the thrones of the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires). It's a game where politics are intensely personal, and some time (not today) I want to get into the ways it demonstrates 1) a game without a set story can still have a strong message; 2) game systems are worldviews; and relatedly, 3) simulation is political. (I've been paying attention to some interesting video game commentary lately that's been feeding into this.)

But right now, I just want to appreciate CK2 as a story generator, and share a few of the imagined lives that have emerged from it. Some characters, especially in the first few generations of any given simulation, I have grown kind of attached to.

Gaudiosa the Cruel, Queen of León

Gaudiosa was my first fictional ruler, the daughter of real-life King of León Alfonso VI. In real history, Alfonso ruled from 1065 to 1109, being briefly deposed by his brother Sancho (King of neighboring Castille) in 1072. He lived to be close to 70, had five wives, a few mistresses, and six children. His eldest daughter and successor married into the house of Burgundy and that was the end of the dynasty.

Things went differently in my game. Taking over Alfonso in 1066 my first move was to get him married to a Byzantine Princess. (I was a little dodgy at this point on how to marry my characters advantageously, so this union didn't do a great deal for him politically but at least it was novel.) Alfonso made war on his brother Sancho at the first opportunity and took over the Kingdom of Castille. He then died suddenly during a celebratory tournament, leaving the crowns of León and Castille to his 3-year-old daughter, Gaudiosa. (On the ruler's death, I stopped playing "as" him and "became" Gaudiosa.)

Gaudiosa was lucky in her guardian, a loyal, upright, and kindly man who taught Gaudiosa her virtues and succeeded in curbing her vices (most troublingly, a penchant for torturing small animals). Unfortunately, he died while Gaudiosa was still young and her next guardian couldn't keep her from developing a sadistic streak. But I tried (and so, by extension, she tried) to remember the mentor of her early youth and grow into an upright ruler.

Much of the politicking of Gaudiosa's regency revolved around trying to arrange a betrothal between her and the heir to the neighboring kingdom of Galicia, which would unite most of the lands that the historical Alfonso VI had managed to rule. The King of Galicia would hear none of it, so Gaudiosa began to court both the king and his heir directly with gifts. There was never a betrothal, but when the young man came of age and came into his inheritance (the one quickly following the other) he agreed to the marriage his father had rejected. There seemed to be something of a love story in it. More pragmatically, their heir nearly inherited a united northern Spain (though in fact, through some genealogical snafu, she inherited a patchwork).

Gaudiosa reigned for fully 70 years. She made frequent (and variously effective) wars on the Muslim Caliphs to her south, and dealt with several peasant revolts. There was an element of tragedy to her epithet, though, because in spite of her best efforts to the contrary she became known as "Gaudiosa the Cruel." Indeed, when you spend your nights lying awake, in a concerted mental effort to not go torture the prisoners in your dungeon, you probably won't be remembered for your gentle spirit.

Dirk V "the Old," and the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors

Oh Dirk, you sneaky bastard. Dirk V of Holland was also a real person, but his life in my game unfolded quite differently than history. When I took control of him he was a boy of 14, and he spent the rest of his upbringing learning the various combinations of cloak and dagger. Upon coming of age, Dirk was apparently far-and-away the sneakiest man in all the land.

Dirk's liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV, soon invited him to be the royal spymaster, a title which Dirk would hold through the reigns of at least four emperors.

Heinrich IV quickly died a natural death. (His successor kept Dirk in his position as spymaster.) It was only later that Dirk started working on a plan to make Holland independent of the Holy Roman Empire. Doing that, however, would require a weak ruler he could impose his demands on.

Dirk had the realization that, when all of the spooks and scoundrels in the king's service answer to you, it's astonishingly easy to knock off the king himself. Indeed, a beam soon gave way in the rail of a battlement as the emperor took a walk, and his imperial majesty fell to his death. Awkwardly, the carpenter who had weakened the battlement had an attack of conscience and fingered Dirk as the mastermind of the assassination.

Somehow, this didn't have a noticeable impact on Dirk's reputation. The new emperor, in fact, invited Dirk to reprise his role as arch-schemer. Dirk was, after all, the most qualified, and the new emperor may not have shed many tears over the passing of the old one.

Tragically, shockingly, an unknown assailant (it was Dirk) soon pushed the new emperor from a high rampart, and the second consecutive Holy Roman Emperor accelerated into the afterlife at a rate of about 9.8 meters per second squared.

And no one suspected Dirk. One wonders if the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors might have continued indefinitely, but the next emperor was a child, and so he won the grand prize: ot falling to his death but instead being presented with an ultimatum from various territories seeking independence, led by Duke Dirk of Holland.

Dirk V lived to be known as "The Old." I imagine the epithetiers were alluding to his ability to kill the most powerful man in Christendom twice and somehow still die of natural causes himself.

Aodh the Gentle, King of Ulster

Aodh was a king of the early Irish, a nominally Catholic people who lived as disorganized tribes and were, frankly (and, to be honest, because I enjoyed it this way) barbaric to their neighbors. Aodh, however, was zealous both in his Catholicism and his desire to see his people become more civilized.

As a youth, Aodh suffered from fits that his family interpreted as demonic possession. It provided an interesting bookend to his rule.

Without going into detail about administrative reform, King Aodh succeeded in moving his kingdom into a more organized way of life. He expanded his kingdom, and generally did a pretty good job kinging for most of his life.

Then one day, on a campaign for a war that didn't turn out well (at least, for his allies--Aodh himself was just being neighborly and it wasn't any skin off his nose), Aodh saw a comet and took it as an omen. That's when things started going downhill.

Aodh started hearing a voice, which he became convinced was the voice of Jesus Christ. This in itself was not a disaster for the kingdom: in fact, it might have done Ulster some good. After all, if Jesus were telling you to do things, they would probably be for the benefit of your neighbors, the poor, and so on. Following the advice of the voice in his head, Aodh began living a concertedly virtuous life. He received back into his court an aged concubine who he he had once loved and discarded, now unlovely and consumptive. His love for his lawful wife became the subject of much comment.

The voice became more insistent, as head-voices probably tend to. Aodh drained the royal coffers giving alms, and eventually ended up giving alms on credit. And eventually--finally-- the voice warned him of the scheming of bishops and cardinals around him, and Aodh broke with the Catholic Church to follow what seemed to him a simpler faith.

In his time as king, Aodh had made enemies, but he had never antagonized anyone on the scale of professing heresy. All his neighbors pounced, raising arms against him as a heathen. Aodh's allies, and he had a few, would not move to help him--kill real Christians to protect a heretical madman? Never. Suddenly Ulster stood alone, it seemed, against the whole Christian world.

That would soon have been the end of Aodh, Ulster, and the nascent Irish state, if not for something that could itself have been divine providence: King Aodh died peacefully in bed, at what everyone agreed was a reasonable age. The crown passed to his son, an uncontroversial Catholic. The armies arrayed against Ulster collectively blinked, muttered a few awkward and insincere apologies, and returned home.

Return of the blog

I promised myself at some point that however much I procrastinated, I wouldn't let this blog go a full year without an update. And like I often do when allowed to do so, I waited until the last possible... well, not minute, anyway. But a year ago today I announced here that I was getting married. And then I got married! It was busy. And since then I've been sort of piecing my life back together after experiencing the biggest distraction ever.

One silly reason I haven't been posting is that I felt (especially the longer I went without a post) that I couldn't just post any old thing after that last announcement. Obviously that was the sort of idea best gotten over. Another reason, perhaps less silly, is that the freelance writing thing has actually been taking up a good amount of my time and attention. And yet at the moment I feel I need to leave things vague... some of these projects have yet to surface publicly and I'm not 100% sure of my place in the universe relative to the terms of work-for-hire. I was pleased, though, to realize that the feeling I'd had lately that I hadn't been writing much was inaccurate--I have been writing, just not my own stuff, and my brain had been filing the activity under "working."

Enough rambling, though. I intend to resume my weekly posting schedule starting this weekend, when I will start working through my backlog of interesting things to talk about. Because zombies and pugilistic lawyers have been all over my TV, and I need to talk about that novel with John Wayne in it, and there was that thing with the Holy Roman Empire, and I sort of made part of a video game that I broke but people can play if I un-break it....