Meeting King Arthur

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No, I haven’t actually met the man! A reader in Canada has asked me to recommend some reading on the subject of King Arthur: he’d like to know more.

Well, I’ll try. The only problem is, people all over the world have been adding to this story for over 1,000 years, and it’s hard to know where to begin. But at least you’ll never run out of cool stuff to read.

Here are some of my recommendations. Believe me, you can start anywhere.

Le Morte D’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory. This was the first book ever printed in English, in 1485, and it’s still great. Countless Arthur novels, movies, TV shows, plays, and poems have been based on it. If you’re worried about getting bogged down in the old-fashioned language, there are many modern English versions available. And it’s a big book, too–Sir Tom tried to tell the whole story from beginning to end.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White. A little cute for my taste, but it’s always been tremendously popular. The hit musical Camelot and the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone, were based on it.

Arthur Rex, by Thomas Berger (who wrote Little Big Man). Fast-paced, just a bit flip, and lots of fun–if you can live with a little irreverence thrown in.

The History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth–A runaway international best-seller when it came out in 1136: not an easy thing to achieve, before the invention of the printing press. There’s a very nice paperback edition by Penguin Books. No one had more influence than Geoffrey on the development of the King Arthur story (which occupies about two-thirds of his book): Geoffrey also “invented” Merlin. Don’t be intimidated by the antiquity of this book–there’s a reason why people almost 1,000 years ago went to so much trouble to get it. Highly entertaining!

If you get really curious about Arthur–sooner or later you’re going to ask, “Well, what really happened?”–I recommend two books by Norma Lorre Goodrich, Arthur and Merlin. Mainstream scholars sort of hate her, probably because she operates from the premise that Geoffrey of Monmouth mostly told the truth, and from there goes on to try to prove it. Any time you want to get a serious scholar cheesed off at you, just invoke the name of Geoffrey–and then duck. Nevertheless, Goodrich’s arguments are ingenious and reasonable, and these books will get your brain cranking.

OK, now you’ve got a few years’ worth of reading, and I didn’t even mention Mary Stewart or Gillian Bradshaw or Bernard Cornwell. Along the way, you’ll bump into many others. The treasure is inexhaustible.

Bon appetit!

A Visit to the Library

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Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of England during Queen Victoria’s reign, wrote a lot of great poems. I’ve been reading some of them online, and discovering the beauty of his language.

And so I got a hankering to read Idylls of the King–probably his most famous work, after The Charge of the Light Brigade. Back in the Bronze Age, most of us read little pieces of the Idylls in junior high school English Lit. I thought maybe I might be old enough to appreciate it now.

I went to my local library to get a copy of Idylls of the King, one of the classics of English literature. They didn’t have it. “Never heard of it,” said the librarian behind the counter. “What kind of idols?” He looks at me like I might have some potentially disruptive mental problem.

“Not idols,” I explain. “Not I-d-o-l-s, but I-d-y-l-l-s. They’re Arthurian poems.”

Now he’s really staring at me. Like, “What planet is this kook from?” I can see the adjective “Arthurian” is really throwing him. He’s also twitching a little bit, as if feeling with his foot for the button on the floor that summons the police. So I just said “Thanks, anyway,” and walked out.

In fairness, if I had felt like filling out a form, my library would have borrowed the book for me from another library. The inter-library computer system would have found the book no matter where it was, and eventually I’d be able to read it. This is a good thing. By this method I’ve been able to read several obscure books that had to be sent from far away.

But according to a librarian friend of mine, the days of the library as a place for books and readers is drawing to an end. Classics, schmassics–we only keep hot new books on our shelves. And so what? You want some boring old classic, we’ll find out who has it and order it for you. We’ve only got room for hot new stuff–no room for old stuff.

This’ll work for a while, until there is no library left that still has the classics. Our library had a set of The World’s Great Books, from Homer to Hegel, on its own self-contained display shelves, on wheels so it could be easily moved out of the way. It wasn’t bothering anyone, but the library board decided to get rid of it, selling off Plutarch and Dante and Milton and all the rest of ’em for 25 cents each. The director was sick over it, but she couldn’t get the  board to change their minds. Besides which, they are primarily interested in other things–primarily in getting children to try homosexuality: if the books they’ve been putting on the shelves lately are any indication.

Today’s hot new stuff will be tomorrow’s garbage; but the classics will still be the classics.

In Gresham’s Law, bad currency drives good currency out of circulation (because people hoard good money and always try to pass off the crummy money).

I think there’s another kind of Gresham’s Law that applies to libraries–bad books drive out good books.

We will need those classics, someday. But who will still have them?

Out of Order!

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I had this beautiful little essay I was going to compose today. But my email stopped working, and after three hours of teeth-gnashing frustration, after which Microsoft finally fixed the problem while I sat there listening to horrible music and an infinite number of ads on the phone, my head has come to a point, my brains have turned into boiling pink foam, and I don’t remember what I was going to write!

I’m too rattled to write anything coherent, anyway.

So there goes another day down the technology rat-hole.

Meanwhile, the contest is still on.

If you’re the enterprising reader who posts the 2,000th comment on this blog, I will sent you a signed copy of my most recent book, The Palace. Remember, spam comments and mere gibberish won’t count. If I stupidly post the 2,000th comment myself, I will award the prize to whosever should post No. 2,001.

The Centaurs Strike Back

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I have been getting a lot of flak from centaurs lately, email from all over the country.

“You are completely wrong about us centaurs,” writes Tomble Gezunt from Montana. “The centaur community is mad at you for depicting us as animals and savages. You seem to have got us mixed up with taurcents, which are backwards centaurs–horse up front, human behind. We don’t appreciate it!”

What about the objection that, even with genetic engineering, a centaur is impossible because the horse half would grow so much faster than the human half? Mrs. Haffa Horsy, from right here in New Jersey, answered that one.

“What do you know about it, buster? So the horse half grows faster. So what? Eventually the human half catches up. My horse-body was full grown while my lady-piece was still a baby. Don’t you think my parents knew how to deal with that? To us centaurs, that’s no big deal at all! In fact, it’s normal.”

From Washington, D.C., came this angry comment from a centaur named Roy Patterson.

“You make out like we are just a bunch of drunks, as bad as satyrs. But you don’t know ****. In my neighborhood we got centaurs who are lawyers, public servants, and even one who is a veterinarian. It’s them satyrs who run around drunk all the time. Centaurs are too busy earning an honest living!”

Well, who would’ve thought it? Apparently there are a lot more centaurs out there than I imagined. I wonder why it’s so unusual to see one.

Your Tax $$ at Work: the Columbia U. School of Climate Change Hysteria

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If you want your kid to grow into a prize ninny, Columbia University can make it happen.

In return for decades’ worth of student debt, your son or daughter can enroll in “climate change games” in which students compose tragic, fictitious voice mail messages from imaginary people about to be killed by imaginary Global Warming. (Source: “Columbia University to spend $5.7 million in taxpayer funds on climate change games,” by Katherine Timpf, May 26, 2014,  http://www.campusreform.org/ID=5641 )

This idiocy is funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National “Science” Foundation–money that real people had to work for.

Ah, what a festival of reason! A gala of clear and sober thinking! What a great way to earn a college degree! Made-up messages from people who are about to be drowned by an onrushing tsunami (“I love you, Mom–glug,glug!”), or broiled alive by the Warming, or choking for air because “I’m out of CO2 credits!” It’s Atlantis meets The Towering Inferno for a disaster movie fest.

Utterly shameless. But visit that Campus Reform site. You’ll find this left-wing drivel has completely taken over America’s whole university system.

This is how a great country winds up being governed by fools and bastards.

I’ll bet I could’ve aced that course, inventing voice mail messages like these:

“Oh! If only we’d passed Cap and Trade, this earthquake never would’ve happened!”

“This is what we get for allowing all that homophobia and Income Inequality!”

“We should have listened to the atheists!”

“Oh why, why, why did we wait so long to have a carbon tax! Al Gore was right!”

“Alas! they told us only communism could save us from Climate Change–and we wouldn’t listen! Is it really too late to collectivize?”

Shame, shame, shame…

But that’s exactly what these people at Columbia are incapable of feeling.

Writing a Novel is Like…

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As cover artist Kirk DouPonce and I bat around ideas for cover art for The Glass Bridge (Bell Mountain Series No. 7), flashes of The Temple (No. 8) are coming to me almost too fast to be written down.

I tried to explain it to my editor: “It’s like a model kit. God gives me the pieces, and I have to put them together. With a model battleship you get pieces that are obviously big guns and little guns, and other pieces that are not so obvious. The trick is to put them all together.”

When I was a little boy, you could see a big difference between a model put together by me and one assembled by my father. I followed all the instructions, but my Tyrannosaurus skeleton still wound up looking like something that got all messed up while being teleported to the Enterprise. But by the time I was 15, I could do a model with the best of ’em. All it took was growth–and lots of practice.

So now I have a lot of pieces of a story, but not all of them, and I have to fit them all together just right. Unlike the picture on the box of a Ford Falcon kit, I don’t get to see what the finished product looks like until I have a finished product.

God doesn’t give me the pieces of the story in the order in which it’s to be written and read. He has left me the fun–and it is a very satisfying pastime–of figuring that out by myself. But He does give me each and every necessary piece.

I wonder what it’ll look like when it’s done.

 

Nagged by a Cereal Box

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After being processed through day care, pre-school, school, and college, some people don’t know how to live when they suddenly find themselves on their own. They acquire families and don’t have the foggiest idea what to do with them. “Family” refers to those people who are not at day care, pre-school, school, and college–in other words, persons with whom you probably haven’t spent a lot of time with in your life. What in the world are you supposed to do with them?

Not to worry–store brand Toasted Rice to the rescue! Find instructions for life on the back of the cereal box. After all, you’ve spent your whole life up till now in some kind of institution where they make all the decisions for you. No wonder you need help!

Let me quote the Introduction verbatim.

“Family UNPLUGGEd [sic] Imagine all the things you could do instead of watching television! Unplug the tube and grab your family!”

Uh, wait a minute. Is this logical? You “unplug the tube” so that your family will be “unplugged”?

Here follows a long “You Could…” list, a menu of family activities. Would you like to guess what’s the No. 1 item on the list? Go on, try–you’ll never get it. [Play Jeopardy theme music.] What’s the number one thing you can do for fun with your family? Ready? Here it is!

“Volunteer your time at a soup kitchen.”

Y’know, even under our country’s current crop of leaders, things have not reached the point where you have half a dozen soup kitchens in every little town. A lot of towns don’t even have one. This may change, once our leaders finish turning every American municipality into Tijuana North; but for the time being, a lot of us don’t have to elbow our way through a phalanx of beggars every time we step out the front door. We haven’t been under the Democrat Party long enough for that.

Besides which, I’m pretty sure they don’t set up soup kitchens as a kind of cheap theme park for bored families. And I don’t think people who need to go there will be all that receptive to the idea of you and your family dropping in on a lark. (“ladees and gentlemen! Now, live, for your edification and amusement–poor people!”) Isn’t that just a wee bit patronizing?

This is what happens when human beings are raised like insects, in and out of one institutionalized setting after another.

How to Ruin a Fantasy

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My favorite scene in Lawrence Sterne’s classic comic novel, Tristram Shandy, occurs in the Shandys’ bedroom on the night Tristram is to be conceived. Mr. Shandy has taken great pains to choose the perfect night; and just as the begetting process is getting under way, Mrs. Shandy suddenly asks, “Have you remembered to wind the clock?” That ruined everything.

There are fantasy writers who do the same thing to their fantasies. I’m reading a book now, set in the 5th century and featuring Merlin and King Arthur, in which some of the dialogue reads like today’s text messages. Arghhh! Nothing quite breaks the spell of the story like having Merlin say something like, “Yeah, that guy sure is a crook.” (No, I’m not exaggerating. I wish I were.)

Why do writers do this? The whole point of a fantasy is to make the reader feel he’s in another place, another world. Why would you suddenly remind him that he’s stuck in this one? Why, after going to all the trouble of setting it up, does the writer shatter his own illusion? It’s like a magician letting you see him put the rabbit in the hat, so when he pulls it out again, there’s no sense of magic: it’s just some dork with a rabbit.

Lapses like this force us to ask, “What was the editor doing?” Editors are supposed to spot such gaffes and edit them out. But I think some of you would be amazed at the ignorance and laziness of certain editors.

Please! If you’re writing about King Arthur, or a non-human being in an imaginary world, do not permit him to call anybody “Dude.”

Just don’t do it. Ever.

P.S.: Happy Birthday, Paul Morphy (b. 1837)–America’s first international cultural celebrity, the greatest chess genius of all time, and my favorite player, whose recorded games continue to delight chess fans everywhere.

Idiocy Triumphant

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While our paper-clip-and-balsa-wood government in Iraq melts down, along with big chunks of the rest of the world, our nation’s glorious leaders continue to spout drivel about Global Warming/Climate change.

This morning a reader in British Columbia reported that his car window was iced up, there was frost on his lawn, his kid’s trampoline was full of hunks of ice, and the temperature was at the freezing point. But don’t let that turn you into a Climate Change Denier! Who are you going to believe–your honest-as-the-day-is-long government and its Scientific Experts, or a bunch of ice on your windshield?

Meanwhile, the dying Presbyterian Church USA, at its annual General Assembly in the dying city of Detroit, has voted to change the definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people.” This will hold until liberals want to start marrying their dogs. Apparently nobody there has ever read the Bible–or, if they have, they’ve decided it means the opposite of what it says.

Y’know, you apostate chuckleheads, if the Bible is not the word of God, then we don’t have God’s word at all. Or do you just listen for it when MSNBC comes on?

Who can keep up with all this idiocy? Our world is being run by wicked and immoral fools.

Hang in there, pilgrims–it’s gonna be a rough ride.

The Nuts Are Out There

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I received two emails yesterday from kooks.

One warned me that “the corporations” are using chem-trails (*sigh*) to kill off all their customers. What sense does that make?

The second was a self-described “Illuminati Alert” which claimed that former President George H.W. Bush had performed human sacrifices somewhere in the wilds of Denver.

Oh! And this morning a friend tipped me off to a secret plot to launch a surprise nuclear attack on Russia, to punish them for backing off on using the American dollar as a universal standard of currency. Yeah, that’d fix ’em, all right. This news came from a blog I never heard of.

You’d think “corporations” with no more customers would have, shall we say, a discouraging future.

You’d think the puppet-masters who micro-manage the world would do a better job of keeping their secret human sacrifices out of the public eye.

And you’d think the Pentagon and the NSA could keep at least some of their military secrets from Joe Blow on the Internet.

I am reminded of a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “You blocks! You stones! You worse than senseless things!”

I mean, really–our country is being bled to death by its own ruling class, the world is on fire, all of these things are happening right under our noses, in plain sight… and you’re worried about George Bush doing human sacrifices? In Denver? OK, I know Colorado has dramatically deteriorated since lefty nut-jobs began flocking to it from all the other states–but human sacrifice?

Meanwhile, I guess I’d better incorporate myself so I can be left alive when the corporations kill everybody else.