Courtesy of fpb:

My sphere is Knight (Know Loyalty and Respect), and my class is Champion (Self-Righteous and Confident). I am an Avatar. A rare breed. A person sure enough of their self-righteousness that they can take it upon themselves to act as an avatar -- an extension -- of that which they believe in. Though you might act as a delegate of someone or something else, there is no question that your faith and strength are powerful enough to instill in millions of people the deepest respect for you. What kind of Warrior are you?

Why do we hanker for magic? That is a question that the large-C Catholic fantasy writer must squarely face, and the small-c catholic reader ought at any rate to find interesting. The practice of magic as such, whether effective or not, is explicitly forbidden by scripture and canon law, and even too strong a theoretical interest is rather frowned upon. The Catholic attitude towards magic in fiction is more ambiguous. I was absurdly surprised to find, when I myself was converted, that every sort and condition of Christian, practising or pinchbeck, that you can find in the innumerable denominations of Protestantism, can be found in the Catholic Church. We, too, have our would-be book-burners, our crusaders against Harry Potter, our excessive literalists and excessive metaphorists; we even have churchgoers who look like 17th-century Puritans and loudly say ay-men after a prayer, though everyone else in the room is saying ah-men. It is a sufficiently odd mixture.

What I mean is that the same problem faces every fantasy writer in a more or less Christian or post-Christian society, regardless of denomination; it is only that Catholic writers, if they take either their writing or their religion seriously, have less room to shirk the issue. J.R.R. Tolkien wrestled with the question in a nocturnal agony of the spirit. In ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and ‘Leaf by Niggle’ he tries to show that fantasy as such is a thoroughly Christian, even a salvific, activity; but Smith of Wootton Major is a cry from the heart of a man who has lost his confidence, and some of Tolkien’s last writings on Middle-earth almost amount to a confession of heresy. He wasted endless hours trying to uproot the Two Trees of Valinor from The Silmarillion, because he could not reconcile his beautiful and moving myth of the Sun and Moon with post-Copernican astronomy, and (which was for him the salient point) because he could not pretend that the God who made the Elves would allow them to believe a legend so obviously contrary to scientific fact. Yet that legend was the heart of the whole work. For similar reasons he worked and re-worked the story of Galadriel, thinking to make her perfect with emery and holystone, but in truth only reducing her to a plaster saint. The legendarium that he meant as a profound expression of his faith fell to pieces at the rude touch of his theology.

As with the greatest, so with the less. The circle of a penny has as many degrees as the circuit of the heavens. If this were a less romantic and credulous age, there would be no trouble about fantasy, as there was no trouble about elf-shot or ‘Here be Dragons’ in the Middle Ages. When mediaeval Christians played at magic, with the unfortunate exception of astrology, it neither conflicted with their professed faith nor replaced it. But it is truly said that we live in an age of improved means to deteriorated ends. The average modern will believe any damned thing, because he has ceased to believe in holy things. I have known people who took the Necronomicon as a compendium of sober fact, who flatly refused to believe me when I explained that it was merely an excellent literary joke carried too far. I have even known a creature, a man to all appearances, who claimed that he could jump off a tall building and fly without wings if it were not for the ill-wishes of all the earthbound mundanes who did not want him to succeed. He could have done, for a few seconds; then the earth itself would step in to disabuse him. It will do the same for birds, if they forget to flap their wings, and nobody wishes them to fail.

There are people in this world who think they are elves; there are people who think they are Jedi knights; likely there are people who think they are soft-boiled eggs, and derive some ersatz certainty and comfort from their self-conceived globosity. If these people are honestly deceived, I pity them. I pity them still more if they are not. If they play at being fairy-tale creatures as a substitute for an honest philosophy, they are wasting their reason; if they play as a substitute for religion, they are wasting their spirits. Worst of all, they waste their faculty of imagination, which grows stronger and more delightful with the breadth and complexity of the thing imagined. Instead of eggs and fairies, which are very dull and homely objects after all, they could play at something more wonderful than any fantasy writer has invented: they could pretend to be men and women. A life without fantasy is a poor thing, but a life founded upon fantasy is nothing at all. Tolkien knew the tension and the danger as well as anyone:
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A very happy birthday to izhilzha!

By the way, I had two final exams yesterday and two today. My last exam for the year is on Saturday. Normal posting, if you’ll forgive my usage of the term, should resume shortly thereafter.

In this time zone, there are still five whole minutes left in amberdine’s birthday.

So, an almost belated H.B. to you! Salute!

So I’ll take the chance while it’s here to wish a happy birthday to rhinemouse on the correct day.

(But do be careful, Double-Oh-Mouse. In the wrong hands, that vowel shift could be very dangerous.)

Happy birthday!

This passed on by sartorias in one of her Bittercon posts:

Elves are glamorous. They're tall, cooler than people, dress well, have great taste in music, and are all-round athletes, as well as being immortals with magical powers. And they're in tune with nature, too. But are they really? Most elvish societies are intensely hierarchical with a few uberelfen at the top and many more peons at the bottom. And there's no way for a peon to work his way up, since the master race is genetic. Tolkien's Elves were fairly benign, but the elves in many of the derivative fantasies that followed on don't look all that different from what we could imagine finding in a world a thousand years after a Nazi victory: the horrors at the start are long forgotten, but now there is a master race. Unfair?

Certainly unfair, if the elves are not permitted to respond on their own behalf. To remedy the obvious injustice of allowing mortals to sit in judgement upon the Fair Folk by gossiping among themselves — and consulting, moreover, those who have never known or even seen an elf — it seemed natural to me to find an elf, an old and notorious one, and if possible one of the ‘Uberelfen’, and put him on the witness stand.

Since it is Tolkien’s elves who are the principal corpora vilia in this debate, that gave me a clearer idea where I had to look. After some difficult negotiation, I was able to procure an interview with a particularly senior and ‘uber’ one of his Eldar, the results of which I now humbly offer in aid of justice.
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(Hat tip to Christopher Johnson.)

It shall henceforth be a rule that whenever anyone says something is impossible to parody, a parodist shall arise with enough sheer firepower of bumflummery to prove him wrong. Case in point: Dr Rowan Williams' 'Cat Sat On The Mat'.

The need to sit on a - or "the" - mat is regularly seen as incompatible with the need to sit on a - or "the" - floor. The establishment of boundaries accessible to everyone, including cats, in which it is possible to defend, as I think we should, a mutual commitment to the entire mat-based culture of sitting whilst simultaneously re-affirming the rights of those within both the floor-sitting chair-sitting and standing communities to access their historical continuities independent of mat-based imperatives must be enshrined in our non-specific historical and social affiliations.

Before I forget to mention it, last Friday my head was unusually bad, so I asked my father to drive me to and from campus, and in between he could run some errands he’s had piling up. (He still hasn’t bought a new car after wrecking his last summer.) I wouldn’t have gone in at all that day, but I had a midterm in my History of English class.

On the way home, we got rear-ended by a bloody huge pickup truck. (It was as much the city’s fault as the other driver’s: we were in a left-turn lane covered with slick white ice, ours was the first vehicle to stop at a red light, and the truck would have been the second — except it didn’t quite stop quick enough. The judicious application of a snow plough or a sanding truck would have prevented the whole incident.) My head snapped forward at the moment of impact, and I could immediately tell that I had aggravated my concussion or whatever it is that I’d been suffering for two weeks past.

Just moments after we left the scene of the accident (having exchanged all information required by law), my head started twitching violently and uncontrollably. I was also unable to speak without stammering. Any third party watching this would, I suppose, have thought I was doing a very good impression of Derek Jacobi playing Claudius. I asked my father to take me to the hospital.

I was there four hours, during which I was strapped to a board, put in a neck brace, X-rayed, CT-scanned, and left to wait for the interminable intervals between these things on a bed shoved into an out-of-the-way corner of the ER. (I shouldn’t complain; I was lucky they had a bed for me at all. People are waiting on gurneys in corridors in ERs all across Canada these days, and some of them are dying there.) It turned out I didn’t have a broken neck or a cracked skull, so they gave me Tylenol 3 and let me go after about three or four hours.

I have a follow-up appointment with my GP, at which I shall be pleased to inform him that I have, in addition to occasional head tremors and stammering, debilitating headaches, bouts of insomnia alternating with whatchamacallit, occasional short-term memory loss, and the odd flirtation with aphasia, as just now when I couldn’t remember the word for whatchamacallit, which is when you can’t stop sleeping, or a little earlier when I had to google Derek Jacobi because the first name Derek looked so funny that I was sure I’d got it wrong. (Basse Aphasia and by no means Haute Aphasia, as Silverlock said to Don Quixote. I reread Silverlock the other day; at least I can remember that.)

The one bit of good news, other than the non-smashment of my bones: Next week is Reading Week, and I may be able to take some time to recover from the worst of my ills. Meanwhile I have a midterm in Late Roman Antiquity in ten and a half hours, and I can’t even think of sleeping right now. Besides, I still have half of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History to read before then, or at least half of the half of it that we were assigned.

Vae and oimoi and all that.


Update, 10 minutes later: Narcolepsy, that was the word. I only found it after guddling about on Wikipedia for some time. In the course of which I found this article, which describes my normal condition perfectly: Delayed sleep phase syndrome. —Complete with as-yet-unexplained correlation to clinical depression.

AHA!

So I’ll gank these words from Orson Scott Card:

It's a quite possibly the greatest website design anywhere, ever. HEMA is a Netherlands department store, and I don't speak the language. But it's not necessary in order to enjoy. Just go there and look at the screen for just a few moments. Things will start happening, and you'll see what I mean:

http://producten.hema.nl/

Go, and do likewise.

Manifesto, n. The act of walking down the street waving a baton in the expectation that a parade will spontaneously form up behind you.

I’m tired of complaining all the time, so I’ve decided to contract it out to the Finns.

(Courtesy of sarah_dimento, who tipped her LJ readers off to this story.

"We always lose to Sweden in hockey and the Eurovision Song contest" they sing. They continue, "why does no-one agree with me and why does Tram number 3 smell of pee?"

There are complaints about saunas. And there are complaints about the weather, men who snore, women who complain, TV, the dentist, sex lives - or a lack of them, and reference numbers - they're too long.

My response to all this? To quote from Bored of the Rings:

We are the chorus and we agree,
We agree, we agree, we agree.

These evening Latin classes are killing me. By the time 9 p.m. rolls around, the only Latin I can remember is Desidero ire domum atque me suspendere. But at least I’ve got that solid.

Courtesy of kriz1818 (who got the same result):

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(imipak)

Your band's name is (pick one):

Three Fingers and Their Juggler
Shaved Rockets
Four Flags and a Puppy
A Box of Thumbs
The Black Ladies
The Baby Bishop Coalition


(Wasn’t ‘Three Fingers and Their Juggler’ a B-side for Elvis Costello in 1979? And I’m pretty sure I was listening to ‘Four Flags and a Puppy’ by the Shaved Rockets last night, but I can’t remember whether it was off of the CD The Black Ladies or the Box of Thumbs compilation. The baby bishops? I got nothing.)

Some old seers say that privation refines the soul — but I say it is soon enough to refine the soul when the body has no other choice.

You’re willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing? Why, you can get a phonograph record of Minnie the Moocher for 75 cents. And for a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie.




(By all means follow the link. A lovely, belated, and slightly twisted centenary tribute to Cab Calloway and his most famous creation, courtesy of Mark Steyn.)

Good news, I think:

On Monday, the mills of the U of C IT department, which grind slowly but grind exceeding small, finally got round to spitting out my grades for the Fall term. I am puzzled to discover that I have been credited with straight A’s. Puzzled, because in at least one course it was mathematically impossible for me to receive an A. (There was no curve in my formal logic course; the minimum numerical mark for an A was 93 percent, and going into the final, the maximum possible mark I could end up with was 92.8. Apparently my A in that course was due to rounding error.)

I shall mention in passing that the final in Computer Science 231 was an exercise in sadism. I was expected to write part or all of four short Pascal programs — in longhand, in the exam booklet — no electronic devices of any kind allowed in the test room. Perhaps I’m hopelessly misinformed and antwacky, but it always seemed to me that the point of computer programming was, you know, to program a computer. Expecting one to write a program without the use of a computer, and grading on whether a computer could actually run it first time with no errors, seems a bit off the mark.

Oh, yes, I know Steve Wozniak did pretty much just that with the Apple I monitor code. He had no working 6502 system to test it on, so he wrote and hand-assembled the code for the ROM on a pad of yellow paper (which I believe is still proudly displayed on Apple’s corporate campus) . . . and when he fed the hexadecimal numbers through a PROM burner, and plugged the PROM chip into the very first Apple I prototype, the monitor did indeed execute perfectly first time. But Steve Wozniak is a genius, and even a prodigy, and I didn’t think that was where one normally set the bar for first-year university courses.

The University continues to maintain its usual standard of excellence in interpersonal communications. Today I received an email from Dr. John Archibald, head of the Linguistics Dept., congratulating me on doing so well in Linguistics 201 . . . and inviting me to consider choosing linguistics as my major. Funny, I thought that was the point of the whole rigmarole I went through last year when I applied for admission. I wrote him a kind and forbearing missive in return, saying as much, and reminding him that we had even met in person to discuss matters related to my degree program.
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Not sure which of my characters it was who said this in my head just now, but I record it for future use:

‘The First Lord really does believe, with all his heart, that one man is as good as another, and all alike are fashioned of the same clay, noble or common, learned or lay. That is just the trouble. From this he might conclude that no man has any colour of right to lord it over another against his will, but that each must be the proper judge of his own, within his liberty. Instead he concludes that he understands the common man so well, being his brother beneath the skin, that he is specially fitted to order him about.’