Faith

"St. Lucy couldn't help crying when she saw Jesus die on the cross. She missed her friend."

Jacqueline

Jacqueline Says...

Cause You Got To Have Faith a-Faith a-Faith.

Just read this in A History of Philosophy: "To affirm one's relationship to God, the personal and transcendent Absolute, is to affirm oneself as spirit." And just a few lines later, this: "...the man who appropriates and affirms his relationship to God in faith becomes what he really is, the individual before God."

Which got me to thinking.

This Faith thing seems to be very easy for some people. Like it's the default setting or something. And that's hard for me to swallow. It's hard for me not to assume that that's ignorance in action. And having talked to more than a few of Those People, I am pretty sure that the ignorance accusation would hold up in any court of law. 

Still....

Those lines from A History of Philosophy resonate with me.

I had been meaning to write about this in another way a couple of weeks ago, framing it as

What does denying the existence of God say about a person?

Copleston has an answer to that here, I think. He says that it says that that person has denied their own spirit. Is that an inescapable conclusion? Maybe it is. If you deny the existence of God, then I don't see how you can affirm the existence of your own soul. Definitely not in the sense of an immortal soul.

And maybe that's okay. We live our lives, we do some stuff, buy some things, and then we die. Enter the next generation.

Doesn't strike me as worth doing, though. 

Hmm. I had to step away from the car for a minute (since I have no computer of my own, I have to catch as catch can), and it hit me that something I'd read a few pages earlier on in AHoP leaned into these thoughts on God and faith and religion. It went like this: "...a mob is capable of performing actions which its members would not perform precisely as individuals." In other words, joining up with a mob. ..whether it's a Christian mob or an atheist mob...is going to affect your actions....obviously....and your thoughts, too. So if you identify as Christian, you abdicate your incredulity, perhaps? Sure. But if you identify as atheist, what is abdicated there? 

That's what I'm talking about.

Don Shirley, Water Boy, Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man

Just saw a trailer for a movie called Green Book. And it really looked good. A story about a black piano player who toured the Deep South in the 60s. The trailer didn't tell the name of the musician, but when I got home I looked it up and found out that it was Don Shirley. I'd never heard of him...and I know a whole lot of music. So I went to YouTube to see if I could hear some of his stuff. The first offering was a piece called "Water Boy," and I gave it a spin. So to speak.

 And it was just fantastic and amazing. I listened to it again. It was even more amazing, but another thing was going on, too. I was hearing some echos of something else. I quickly realized that it was the same tune as was used in the song "Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man," which was recorded in 1970, and was written by Gene MacLellan. Just one problem. Don Shirley recorded this song...which was written by Avery Robinson...in 1965. Finding information on "Water Boy" was a bit challenging, but I found one indication that the part of this song which obviously forms the basis of "Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man" was actually a variation on the melody of Avery Robinson's song which was created by Don Shirley. 

Too bad he didn't get any royalties from the white folks who made a mint off of that song, isn't it? I mean, not just Ocean (and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of the band members was black)...this song was also recorded by Anne Murray and Bing Crosby and Lynn Anderson and Elvis Presley. And Joan Baez, Loretta Lynn, and The Oak Ridge Boys. And Johnny Cash. 

Song about Jesus, too.

Hmmmpf.

I'm going to go listen to some more Don Shirley now.

And come November 21st I'll be heading out to the theater to see Green Card.

You come too.


P.S. Breaking News: I just listened to Avery Robinson's recording of "Water Boy," and I can categorically state that the "Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man" section was not in his version. Avery Robinson's song was good, but Don Shirley's version is just amazing, life changing. Seriously. Check it out and improve the quality of your life immediately.

R.I.P., Harlan

I remember the first Harlan Ellison story I read. It was "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" which appeared in Volume 2 of the Isaac Asimov edited The Hugo Winners. I'd come for the Asimov and the Simak and the Anderson, but it was this "new fellow" Ellison who stopped me in my tracks. I'd never seen anything like him before. And as I read on in The Hugo Winners Volume 2, I was surprised to encounter Ellison again... "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"...and again..." The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. " Well, he'd had me at Ticktockman...so by the time I'd finished Beast, I was totally his bitch.

That was in 1972, I think. I was 15 years old, and I read a lot of science fiction. Especially Asimov and Bradbury and Simak. But I got most of my books from The Baltimore County Public Library, and in those pre-internet days it wasn't all that easy to find books that weren't seeded on the beaten path. I was a member of The Science Fiction Book Club...which is how I got the Hugo Winners books...but I know that my first Asimov did not come courtesy of them. I do have a memory of finding From the Land of Fear on the bookstands at a drugstore (The Copper Kettle...which was also one of my primary sources for comic books), so that might well have been my first book. 

Alas, I went through a period in the 90s when I sold off a lot of my books, and many of my Ellisons (I had acquired lots by then--for one thing, because Pyramid Books did a reprint series and put out eleven titles)...maybe even all of them...went, including that copy of From the Land of Fear. Just now I went to check my bookshelf, sure that I had re-acquired this title only to discover that not only had I not done that, but that I had only 3 of the 11 Pyramid publications...and even though some of the other 8 I had found in different editions, I was missing several completely.

Sigh.

ANYway...over the years (since those lean 90s), I have re-acquired a number of Harlan Ellsion books. It grated me when he began to release super-expensive paperback collections of his earlier stories

--Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word goes for $50 new, and not much less used...and there are at least a dozen of these volumes--so I only bought a couple of Must Haves there...but I continued to follow Harlan and when a new new book came out, I bought it...even the execrable Li'l Harlan and His Sidekick Carl the Comet in Danger Land. 

But Harlan was a little off the beaten path in the past decade or two, so I didn't find out that he had died until almost three months after the fact.

I miss him. He was such a vital and important force in my life in my high school years, in my army years, in my living alone in Baltimore years. He was angry and eloquent, and I was the former and longed to be the latter. His syntax and diction invaded my own writing. I remember sending a story entitled 'Scream My Brain!' the Policeman Cried as Pigs Flowed Mucously Through the Streets" (I got a form rejection back with a single handwritten word: Who? Not sure what that meant. J'Accuse? Snide? Dunno.) to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when I was still in high school. I sent another story to them years (at least five) later (entitled "The World and All There Is That's In It") and when the editor sent back a nice handwritten rejection note, I immediately submitted another story and in my cover letter said something like, "I wanted to have another try after receiving your encouragement, and wanted to do it before the wine had been left open too long and the memory gone flat," which was an allusion to a story by Harlan. And Harlan introduced me to a whole slew of writers I later came to love via his Dangerous Visions anthologies: Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis and Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon and J. G. Ballard and John Brunner and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Ray Nelson and Barry Malzberg and James Sallis and James Tiptree, Jr. and Richard Lupoff (whose "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" infected me for a very very long time, especially evident in the second novel I wrote (during my senior year in high school), The Lone Cry of a Wolf.

Yep. Harlan had a profound effect on my reading and writing life. He was a cantankerous, violent, and sometimes nasty son of a gun, but I loved him. 

And still do, of course. 

And I always will.

P.S. You can (and should) check out the superb documentary, Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008), which is available via Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Harlan-Ellison-Dreams-Sharp-Teeth/dp/B002TZS87G/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1537445874&sr=1-2&keywords=harlan+ellison). I've also just now discovered that someone has posted the 1966 movie The Oscar, which Harlan (1) had a hand in writing and (2) was absolutely livid about what had been done to and with his script. I think I'm going to have to go watch that right now. Sorry, Harlan. It's the OCD.

Here Comes the Moon, the Moon, the Moon, the Moon the Moon.

The end is nigh. Of the 84 Edgar Rice Burroughs books I've been able to identify (it's harder than you'd think, for various reasons), I have now read 76...45 of them out loud to Joe over the course of the past decade. All that remains to me (barring the appearance of some of the thus far unpublished works, of which there are a few that are of substantial length--come on, people now!) are The Amtor Series 1 (5 books) and The Caspak Series  2  (3 books). I'm planning on reading those to Joe, so it looks like my solo Burroughs First Time Reading is at an end...though I do have a volume of letters--Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston--which I've just recently acquired. (I couldn't help but notice that Wikipedia does not yet have a page on this book, so if that's still the case after I give it a read, I may attempt to rectify that situation.) 

It's been at least good most of the time. There were a few books that were not up to snuff...but there were also some truly delightful reads--most of which were not books that ERB is known widely for. The Moon Trilogy, for instance...which I've just finished reading...was not something I had high expectations for. For one thing, I was unfamiliar with the title, and that carries some negative karma in and of itself, I suppose. But for a bigger thing, I had read negative comments in some of the ancillary Burroughs material I've been reading. As a matter of fact, even the introductory / postductory material in The Completest Edition I read (courtesy of Bison Books / The University of Nebraska Press 3) had some scathing things to say about The Moon Books. (Which is just inappropriate, I must say. Don't shit where you feed, boys and girls. And keeping it real doesn't mean you have to be mean, for fuck's sake.) So one of the reasons I decided to read it now was because I didn't want my last new solo ERB read to be of a mediocre or even bad book. 

Now I'm kind of wishing that I had saved The Moon Trilogy...because I think it really kicks ass. I may even re-read it with Joe (after we finish off Amtor and Caspak) if he's interested.

I had purchased some paperback copies of The Moon Maid and The Moon Men (which also included the third "novel," The Red Hawk) some time ago. And they were nice...especially The Moon Men with its Frank Frazetta cover:

But as I was poking about in preparing my ERB checklist, I began to wonder if The Moon Trilogy was really a trilogy or not...since I could not find a separate book version of  the last book anywhere. (Hey, I told you that I had OCD tendencies.) And in my poking about, I found this bit of a blurb for The Moon Maid: Complete and Restored (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) on Amazon:

"The most complete version of The Moon Maid saga ever made available, this edition contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author."

As a matter of fact, this version purports to have 18,000 more words than the "other" versions. That's a whole lot of ERB 💘 there.

And so, despite the truly awful cover art--

--I decided to go for it.

Well, I make mistakes so that you can avoid them, after all. I only spent $7.94 (new it lists for $21.95!) on this item (about equally split between book and shipping cost), but I wish I had just trusted Ace Books and read my nice looking paperbacks. So far as I can discern, there is no difference between the text of The Completest Version and the Ace Books Version(s) 5 ...and there are three reasons why I don't like The Completest:

Uno: It is ugly. Ugly cover, and more ugly drawings within.
Dos: The editor saw fit to include some really negative and unnecessarily harsh criticisms of Burroughs in the ancillary material...none of which offers any enlightenment vis-à-vis the books or ERB.
Tres: There are quite a few typos in the text. Like a dozen. And that's just sloppy. Especially in an edition put out by a university press. I emailed them to ask if they were interested in a list of the typos with an eye toward correcting them in a future edition. I'll let you know if I hear from them. But don't hold your breath, right?

So...yeah. I wish I had known all of that beforehand, because then I'd have been reading those pretty Ace editions. If Joe decides he wants some of this Moon action, I will definitely read from those books instead of The Completest.

And speaking of the book itself....

Well. The first volume, The Moon Maid, is pretty typical ERB science fiction in many ways. Some of the familiar tropes are here: the journey to an inner world (hey you'll just have to read it if you want that to make sense), the fair damsel in distress who needs rescuing, the need to learn a new language muy rápidamente, the seriously ugly bad guys. The I'm Going to Tell You a Story framing device. Yep. But I don't mean to imply that any of that is bad. Au contraire. I found The Moon Maid to be an exciting read, and I was sad to see the story end. But there was an extra little twist to it that I'd never seen in Burroughs before...or in any other writer, for that matter, with only one exception--Yukio Mishima, and years after The Moon Maid 4  : the hero, Julian, is reincarnated a whole bunch of times. Twenty, to be exact. So Julian I is born in 1896 and dies in 1918, and Julian XXI is born in 2434-ish  (further information redacted). Not all of the Julians appear in the trilogy--this ain't 100 Years of Solitude, after all--but there are a few others who pop up along the way. And that's pretty cool, isn't it? I thought so, too. And lest I forget...there's also a bit of a mention of John Carter. There is something about literary crossovers which really pleases my soul, and while this is just a slight one, it still made me happy. 6  

The second volume of the trilogy, The Moon Men, is a totally different animal. It is unlike any of the other Burroughs books I've read. In fact, more than anything else it reminds me of Orwell's 1984. This story is set some time after the events of The Moon Maid, and in it the Moon Men have conquered the Earth and subjected humanity to intense degradation. The Julian of this era fights back against the occupation forces...and the ending is quite a surprising twist. This would make a superb science fiction movie...and I really can't understand why no one has gotten around to doing that as of yet.

The last volume was a bit disorienting. It skips way ahead in time...I think it was 400 years...and it a lot of ways it is more like Burroughs's The War Chief and Apache Devil novels. Other than the fact that the bad guys are the descendants of Moon Men, I don't think there's any science fiction element to this part of the story at all. Well, it is set 400 years in the future, so I guess that alone puts it into the science fiction genre, but you know what I mean.

All in all, though, this was a really great series. Highly recommended!

And...I received a reply to my email to Bison Books / The University Of Nebraska Press a mere two days after I'd sent off my query...and get this: not only was the fellow who responded polite, but he thanked me and said yes, please send the list of typos along, and gave me the email address of the guy in charge of such things. Yowza. I am used to either being ignored (most of the publishers I've emailed reference corrections) or actually attacked (the Ed "What An Asshole" Brubaker response, so this was quite a nice contrast. I'm going to sit down and compose that email right now, as a matter of fact. (The final tally was 14, by the way, which isn't terrible, but still.... They definitely should hire me. Willing to work for free books, boys and girls. Just sayin'.)



1  Venus, as in Carson of.
2  The Land and People That Time Forgot and The Abyss.
3  Speaking of...these folks have a little Burroughs Cottage Industry going, with 14 ERB titles on hand and 2 more "about." 
4  Which doesn't mean that no author had done this, of course. Just that I hadn't run into it. And I've read a lot of books. About 6,000, I'd guess. Just sayin', sir.
5  I think those 18,000 words were cut out from the magazine versions when the books were first published, and the Ace texts were created from the magazine texts.
6 ERB did a bit of that crossover stuff, didn't he? Let's see...Tarzan did a crossover with the Pellucidar series and with the Barney Custer "trilogy"...and there's even a little nod to him in The Mad King. And in the first few pages of Pirates of Venus there is mention not only of Tarzan, but also of David Innes and several other key characters from the Pellucidar series. I have the feeling that there are other crossover moments that aren't occurring to me right now, too. Feel free to amend me if you have knowledge of this matter.

Stupid Fake Sharks

Jack Ryan / John Krasinski

wiðcwedennis

"...Hegel speaks as though contradictions were a feature of the process of reality itself, of the life of the Absolute, whereas for Herbart contradictions emerge only from our inadequate ways of conceiving reality: they are not a feature of reality itself." 

Frederick Copleston 

A History of Philosophy Volume VII: Fichte to Nietzsche

page 251

There goes old Father Fred, making me think about shit again.

As I read the line quoted above, my brain immediately turned it into a question which I wanted to pose to lots of people I know, chief amongst them my big sister, who is a rocket scientist (no, really), a logical thinker, and an atheist. I would frame it in this way:

"Do you believe that contradictions are a feature of the process of reality itself, or do they only emerge from our inadequate ways of conceiving / perceiving reality?"

To me, this is the same thing that Dostoyevsky addressed when he said, "Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes From the Underground

Part I, Chapter IX

I'm pretty sure that Sister would be inclined to embrace the Inadequate Ways of Conceiving / Perceiving Reality response to "my" question. As you may have intuited, I am not of that persuasion.

And this got me to thinking about coincidences. I experience what I think of as highly improbable coincidences on a regular basis. Almost every time I try to tell someone about one of these coincidences, their reaction seriously underwhelms and frustrates me. With some exceptions. My friendgirl Pat, for instance, is usually either appreciative or even very appreciative of my coincidence stories. And my last (absolute and relative senses of the term) girlfriend was the best reactor ever...she would actually scream when I told her a good coincidence. At least a part of the fuel for that fire was PTSD, but I appreciated it nonetheless. But you know...maybe this comes back to "my" question, too. Maybe the majority of people to whom I relate my coincidence stories are unimpressed because they see reality as essentially contradiction-less...and are, therefore, inclined to dismiss coincidences as a lack of understanding of a larger picture. 

Which means that I'm equating coincidence with contradiction. I'm good with that. The concept, that is. A coincidence is an event which seems to indicate that there is a contradiction in reality. For me, that's fine...because contradictions are a feature of the process of reality itself.

Hmmm. Now I'm thinking about The Miracles of Jesus. At this point...after a minor in Theology from Bellarmine College and a second hand Master's Degree in Divinity Studies from Notre Dame (I read X1's books and papers when she got her M.A. in etc.), I'm not certain that you have to believe in the reality of The Miracles to be a Catholic...or a Christian, for that matter...but I think that the unwillingness to believe in the reality of The Miracles probably goes back to this same point, doesn't it? I live in a world where all kinds of crazy shit can happen. That doesn't make me completely gullible, but it does mean that I'm open to listen to a story that might could be a Tall Tale. 

I'm okay with that.

After all, 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Right?

I Think We're Still America.

I was taking Joe to work yesterday morning, and just before I went to turn into Breckenridge Plaza, traffic came to a stop. Cars ahead of me were moving into the other lane, and after a bit of that I could see why: a blue pick-up truck had stalled out as it had started to make a right, and was partially blocking the way in. I took my turn going into the other lane, and as I passed the truck I looked over and saw that the driver was an old man. I immediately thought, "I wonder if I could push that truck far enough to get him out of the traffic?" I went to drop Joe off, and as I headed back the way I had come in, planning to pull into the parking lot and have a go at pushing the truck, I saw that it had already been moved off of Dutchmans Lane. A large (as in strong-looking) young guy was walking away from the pick-up, and he got into the passenger's seat of a heating and air-conditioning truck which had just pulled up to get him. I was amazed that it had only taken about two minutes for someone to come to the old guy's assistance. 

It's pretty easy to become cynical and to think that people don't give a shit about others these days...but that's not really what happens in the world. Despite all of the terrible things that go on on a daily basis, there are still people with good hearts. And strong limbs.

I think we're still America.

My Cat is Trained to Do Tricks

Statues, Etc.

In case you haven't noticed, I tend to be a little bit obsessive compulsive.

So if someone says something which bothers me, it doesn't just bother me for the nonce or even for a little bit. It keeps coming back at me. I can bat it away, but its ensuing flight is only temporary.

So when I had coffee with that friend and he (strongly) implied that my comments about the churches I visited indicated that I was primarily interested in superficialities, even though I did attempt to explain why I was attracted by statues and stained glass windows and incense and choirs...his criticism still hurt me. And his words have come back to me again and again.

Which could be indicative of my own uncertainty about my motivations and perceptions, I suppose...but I don't think that's it.

Today I made it to page 3,200 (of  5,344...so about 60% of the way) in Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. And a lot of what I read today had to do with Hegel's ideas on the manifestation of The Infinite in The Real (for lack of a better term) World. Lots of interesting things there that I wish I had someone to talk to about, but here's the one that meant the most to me in terms of my preoccupation with Friend's Barb:

"...the Absolute is manifested first of all in the form of immediacy, under the guise, that is to say, of objects of sense."

The same idea was expressed in other ways, but this one really locked into the whole I Like Pretty Churches thing. It is actually the same concept that I tried to express to Friend, but much more profoundly expressed. My translation goes like this:

"God manifests Himself in the Statues, in the Stained Glass, in the Incense, in the Choir...."

Come to think of it, that's not quite the same thing that I attempted to express to Friend. I told him that I felt that those things gave me access points to the spiritual realm...they let my brain know that I wasn't in The Real World anymore. But this Hegel thought goes a step farther than that, doesn't it? It's not that those Statues etc. give access to the spiritual realm, it's that they are manifestations of that realm. They actually are, in a sense, the presence of God in the material world.

That's big.

And of course that could lead right into the old Idolators argument, but that's really just Protestants being envious. Because you aren't worshipping the Statues etc. You are worshipping God.

Jacqueline and St. Lucy

Jacqueline, Joe, and I went for our second visit to St. Lucy's Parish in The Bronx yesterday. We arrived very early (because we were a few minutes late last year, and I've never heard the end of that), so we had plenty of time to walk around the Grotto. When Jacqueline came over to a statue of St. Lucy, she saw that a light rain had left the face of the statue wet. Jacqueline carefully wiped off the rain, reminding me of a mother wiping moisture from her baby's face, then just touched her before parting. A perfect moment.