Ambrose & Elsewhere

Both morbid and lighthearted, here’s the paradigmatic Bergman parody De Düva by George Coe. (It’s also the first film of the unspeakably great Madeline Kahn, apparently.) If the embedded video below doesn’t work you might try Google video directly or this quicker and dirtier Quicktime video (the latter link copped from Timothy Noah at Slate).

John O’Neill has put up a preview of Black Gate 11 (which will include a Morlock novella, “The Lawless Hours”).

Things I never knew (or forgot about) until recently:

There are “Black Gates” all over the world: in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, in Trier, in Ypres, in Tokugawa, maybe even in Toki City. (I can’t quite tell whether “the black gate” in the text is merely descriptive or a proper noun there. Either way, it looks like an interesting place.) There is also a hentai movie with the English title Black Gate. (No, I’m not going to provide a link.)

For years I assumed the magazine’s title referred to the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But a while ago I saw an interview with John where he mentioned that it actually referred to the entrance to the underworld in classical mythology. (I’d link to the interview, but I’ve mislaid the URL and many minutes of fierce googling failed to unearth it. However, I did find the links in the paragraph above, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. Please don’t look like that while I’m rationalizing.)

I instantly thought of my favorite passage from Vergil, where the Sybil at Cumae explains the facts of death to Aeneas:

facilis descensus Auerno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

—Vergil, Aeneid 6.126ff

“The descent into hell is easy.
The door of the dark city stands open night and day.
But to recall your steps, and escape into the upper air…
For that you’ll work. For that you’ll suffer.”

But that doesn’t fit, because in the Latin the adjective atri is applied to Ditis (Dis, the city of the underworld). Was it a transferred epithet? Were they thinking of some other passage or passages?

I could have written John about it, of course, but instead I chewed quietly on my elbow for awhile and gave it some thought. (I go through more elbows that way. Fortunately, I know a good wholesaler.)

Then recently I came across this bit in Propertius:

desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum:
panditur ad nullas ianua nigra preces.

—Propertius, Elegies 11.1f

“Paullus, stop spilling tears on my tomb:
grieving prayers can’t pry open the black gate.”

And I realized I could stop chewing that elbow.

Hm. All this underworld stuff, and the Bergman notice I posted earlier, is giving the blog a rather funereal cast. I’ll put a cartoon or some dancing weasels from YouTube in my next post to brighten things up a bit.

Ingmar Bergman has died.

Fritz Leiber (one of the world’s great fantasists) considered him one of the world’s great fantasists.

Hilary Mantel mulls over myth, death, music and a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, mixed up with memories of her ghostlike father and (incongruously) Princess Diana.

The myth that Diana-cult makes me think of isn’t so much Orpheus & Eurydice but rather “The Unquiet Grave”. Maybe even “The Monkey’s Paw”.

[The link for the Mantel-piece snaffled from an entry by lizhand at theinferior4.]

The Weekly World News “the world’s only reliable newspaper” is ceasing publication. It was just like Lucian’s True History with ugly black and white photos.

The cool thing about reading The Weekly World News was that you never really knew what might lurk on the next page. Other publications were hobbled by the need to seem plausible, or at least possible. The News could, and did, print an interview with Sisyphus after his success in finally rolling the rock uphill. (It was the same year the Red Sox won the World Series, coincidentally.)

Apparently the website will stay live. Well, so what? There’s nothing remarkable about a website that prints a bunch of weird doctored images and false claims that it pretends are true even though both they and we know otherwise. Isn’t that why the “.gov” domain was invented?

Synchronicity can happen at any time (as someone cleverer than me once said–probably Sting or Harlan Ellison).

Yesterday I ran across two Troy-related items on the web.

First, Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope gave a fairly accurate rundown of the archaeological and historical evidence for the Trojan War. I was interested especially to see him mention the destruction of Troy VI, a generation or so before the destruction of Troy VIIa.

Unfortunately, he didn’t mention the fact that I consider the most interesting: this double destruction of Troy is represented in the mythological record (if that’s the right word): Heracles is supposed to have sacked Troy a generation or so before Agamemnon and co. got there. (As you might expect in Greek myth, a woman plays a role in the casus belli but she doesn’t get the kind of blame that often attaches to Helen.)

Something that was up on the web a few days earlier, but that I didn’t see until yesterday: Comic Book Resources interviewed Eric Shanower whose well-regarded series of graphic novels, Age of Bronze, is intended to tell the entire story of the Trojan War. The third volume is out this month; Shanower began the long-running series in 1998 and apparently he thinks it will be 15 more years before it’s done.

As addicted as I am to mythology in general and Greek mythology in particular, I’ve never quite gotten up the oomph to buy a copy of Shanower’s work. I was never sure why, but after reading the interview I have a clearer idea.

For one thing, Shanower is big on historical authenticity, and there’s a limit past which you can’t push this in a myth. What’s a “historically authentic” version of James Bond? Of Superman or Spider-Man? Or King Arthur? These stories have been told and retold so often, over such a long period of time by so many different people, that they’ve broken loose from their moorings in history (as a good myth always will). Sure, for a particular retelling, you can pick a particular setting. You could even make a movie about Spider-Man where he is in his 20s in 2007, or a movie about James Bond where he gets his first assignment in 2006. But that’s not their authentic historical setting, because they don’t have one. Shanower apparently feels the Trojan War does have an authentic historical setting and his intensive research is designed to recreate it as accurately as possible. This is like trying to figure out “the metre of the dictionary” or “the short spark’s gender”: a recipe for futility, rather than excitement.

Also, Shanower’s version has been de-godded. This significantly changes the story from any mythological source, transforming it from myth into Euhemerized history. Euhemerism doesn’t usually appeal to me: it always sounds like someone telling a joke whose point they don’t understand. In the interview at CBR, Shanower makes clear that his god-expunged version was an ideological choice, which makes it even more irritating to me: an ideologically sanitized universe is a dull one, as a rule.

None of this means that Shanower’s books aren’t good ones; he may just not be the best publicist for his own work. I looked at part of volume 2 in a bookstore a few years ago and put it back without buying it: I wasn’t excited, but I wasn’t repelled.

Maybe I’ll try them again in fifteen years or so. It’s not as if my middle name were “Early Adopter,” anyway. (My parents wavered between that and “Curmudgeonly Nutbar” and I think they went with the right choice.)

This is not a review of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Partly because it doesn’t make sense to review a bestselling, prize-winning novel from three years ago. From thirty years ago, yes, or three hundred (if they were giving prizes to fiction back then–maybe the imprimatur counts), but not three years. People are still running around telling each other how wonderful the book is, and that’s mostly what a review by me would say. It really is a stunning synthesis of folkloric fantasy and the 19th century English novel.

There were a few related worldmaking issues that bothered me while reading the novel, though. Rather than let them simmer in my subconscious and cause serious mental illness (again), I thought I’d talk through them here, with the spoilers, the carking and the quibbling hidden behind a cut for the convenience of readers who would prefer almost any fate rather than reading this stuff.

Do Not Press the Red Button.

Herbert West–Reanimator: the Musical! On reflection, it doesn’t seem as weird as the Lord of the Rings musical which is actually running now.

There’s a recent interview with Michael Chabon (the recent target of Ruth Frank’s condescension) online at the Onion AV Club.

I still haven’t read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I did pick up one of his earlier books, The Final Solution, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in 1944. Actually, it just barely merits the title of “book”–it’s a novella, well under 38,000 words.

It is worth reading, though not as mind-blowing as Kavalier and Clay. Two things bothered me a little: Chabon was very coy about using Holmes’ name (in fact, he never does) while making it unambiguously clear that the aged-detective-turned-Sussex-beekeeper in question is Holmes. I can’t figure out any reason, literary or otherwise, why this made sense and it got annoying after a while. The other involved a parrot (a major character in the story) and the scenes from the parrot’s point of view. The parrot was totally anthropomorphized, thinking just like a human being, and this put me off from the story. In my mind’s eye, I wasn’t seeing a parrot but a man in a parrot suit, which made for a different sort of impact.

Still, it’s an intriguing little mystery set against the background of bigger harder-to-solve mysteries. Some of these deeper mysteries are horrible, like the Holocaust deliberately echoed in the novella’s title, and some aren’t, like the bonds between people and other people, between people and bees, between people and parrots (or people in parrot suits). I did enjoy it.

If I sound a little tepid in my recommendation of the book it may be a function of sticker-shock: this slim oversized paperback was $12.95 (US). I won’t bore you with the tales of my youth, when one could run down to the bookstore or maybe just a drugstore and pick up a new paperback for sixty cents, and when indulging in new writers and new genres and literary classics and what-have-you was considerably easier than it is today, because that would be unconscionable waste of the few fleeting moments I have before my ungrateful great-grandchildren come to haul me away to the Old Person’s Repurposing Center they’ve been talking about. I will say that it would have been welcome if the publisher and Chabon had rounded out the book with two or three more stories, perhaps with different genre spins.

They salve their abraded consciences by including 13 pages of magazine style fluff: a profile in which Chabon is described as “handsome, brilliant and successful” (at which point I began to hate him), and a list of his top ten “genre” writers (scare-quotes from the source). This list reconciled me to Chabon again: it includes Raymond Chandler, Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Leiber and Leigh Brackett, all of whom I rank pretty high as well.

It may be a nonce-word but the best new vocab I’ve seen lately is “terror clown,” coined to describe the recent less-than-professional outings of the ideological wing of SPECTRE in the UK.

Clearly, this is no time for complacency, but the recent “terror” plots in London and Glasgow might serve as a turning point in our attitudes towards terrorism. It seems to me that the media does some of the terrorists’ work for them, acting as the medium through which terror can spread and generating spectacular images which other terrorists might be inclined to imitate.

News media should not filter out information for the public’s good. But they don’t have to treat it all with the same level of breathless urgency, either.

There are three obvious advantages to treating a failed mass-murderer not as a terrorist but as a terror-clown.

First, it would make terror alerts more amusing. Since any other function terror-alerts might have is moot, this is a consideration of the first importance.

Second, it might promote a certain perspective about the actual threat of terrorism in one’s daily life. Mike Bloomberg, not normally my favorite person, was pretty good about this recently.

Third, it might actually deter some from pursuing terrorist careers. It’s one thing for a disaffected person to think of himself as a Byronic hero-villain like the Hulk. It’d be another to risk being portrayed as a goony ill-tempered Proto-Clown.

After all, if they wanted to scare the general public by being clowns they’d just go to clown school like other people.