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The Da Vinci Code film

Catholic tastes, Catholic-bashing tastes

I thought I had a catholic taste in Catholic-bashing, but I guess I don't. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has, from the first (that is, from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail), seemed utterly nuts to me. I've avoided reading it, even as friends and relatives recommended it to me.

And yet, I do hope to watch the damn movie of the book this weekend. I've been too busy for much fun recently, too busy even to blog, so . . .

. . . it might be fun to go to a movie just to make fun of it. And, after all, it would be droll to have gone to a movie the sole purpose of which is the taking literally of the vile swear phrase Jesus Fucking Christ.

T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 17, 2006 | permalink

Notwithstanding Anthony Giddens's best efforts to put an appealing spin on the Third Way, it remains what it has always been, an ill-disguised Second Way, a species of sugar-coated despotism that recommends itself to those who fancy that slaves can be jived into loving their masters. There can be no Third Way. Either our rulers remove their spurs from our ribs, or they don't.: Robert Higgs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society, The So-Called Third Way, p. 366

horror madness See, er, listen to: Buffycast 13

Normal Again again

One of my favorite episodes of prime time television is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode titled Normal Again, written by Diego Gutierrez. I understand he was Joss's assistant, and the story of his coming to write this one episode must be interesting. Normal Again sounds like the kind of idea a young assistant might pitch, and Joss would say, Hmmm, we should work on that. But I know nothing of Gutierrez's work other than this one product, so I will stick to the episode itself, as filmed.

My reason for appreciating this episode is simple: horror. It's one of the more intellectually exciting episodes in the series, and also one of the most horrifying. Loss of identity and loss of self-control and sane perception is intensely horrifying. Perhaps a different kind of horror than we usually experienced on Buffy, but horror nonetheless. Very elemental. And frankly, I found the suggestion that the Buffyverse "could be," from within the confines of its own frame, a paranoid fantasy, was a great way of upping the ante on fear and paranoia.

Some other Buffy fans related to Revello of the podcast Buffycast their delight in the mere idea that we could be living a dream, or someone else's dream. But Chuang-Tzu's butterfly dream hypothesis, as gentle as it was entertained by Chuang-Tzu, does not strike me as pleasantly, dreamily fascinating. It strikes me as alarming, even in the butterfly version.

Thus, perfect for use in fantasy, as a challenge to fantasy's frame of the suspension of disbelief, and also as a metafictive exploration of that frame.

Surely one of the reason this episode succeeded whereas most such it's all a dream stories fail is the result of the seriousness with which the magical element is used in the story. Not only is the magic treated as serious and powerful within the storylines, it is treated seriously as metaphor, too. And the metaphor is almost reified in this tale, as the magic points us to the horrifying plausibility of madness.

Schizophrenia, Gregory Bateson insisted, is a condition where metaphors cannot be maintained as literary devices, but are made reality. A schizophrenic cannot see the origin of metaphor in simile, and the play involved. When a schizophrenic says I am a rock, we should worry as to what kind of rock he thinks he is, more than were a normal person to say such a thing. A normal, healthy individual uses I am a rock as simile, as I am like a rock; I'm hard, I'm cool, you can count on me not to change easily. But a schizophrenic's use of the sentence has a very different meaning, and he loses himself in the meaning. The simile drops and a stony impenetrability remains.

It's not for nothing that the most popular author of fantastic literature of our time, Stephen King, returns again and again to the horror of madness, or that his wife even suggests that he thinks madness is easier to slip into than it probably is. Madness is in a sense the ultimate horror. It is the collapse of all metaphor, demonstrating the results of the inability to keep the many levels of reality separate.

And in Normal Again we notice that the fictive storyline of the series, with its magics and powers and such — all expertly used as metaphors for the troubles of living within our world, or at least as devices to explore such trouble in a heightened setting — is undermined by the ultimate horror, with the metaphors coming down a-crashing. It may disobey the integrity of the frame of the story, but, for one episode it becomes even more serious and even more meaningful.

So of course Normal Again is the most challenging, intellectually, of all Buffy episodes. That it was done as well as it was is a testament to the production values and editorial control of the show itself. It's one of my favorite episodes, right up there with Doppelgangland (the funniest) and Hush (the scariest) and Once More With Feeling (the feelingest).

It also makes a big difference that this episode is not a surprise it's all a dream story, but a methodically worked-out one, where the nature of that dream reality is the focus of the story itself, from nearly the beginning. So the cheapening of the idea into a shaggy dog or shaggy god story (as in Signs) does not happen. (That's the usual objection to such stories. They're jokes, as in Lord Dunsany's Jorkens tale where Jorkens reveals to the listening children that he is, himself, a ghost. A cheap, if fun, trick.)

T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 17, 2006 | permalink

Basically decent people will go along with indecent schemes if these seem to be inevitable features of their world. To many, questioning the need for the state seems as daft as arguing with gravity.: Gene Callahan, The State and Illusion

Mt. St. Helens vulcanology See: The 26-year question

The Mountain That Won't Quit

Mount St. Helens used to be the most beautiful mountain I knew — in a Joycean Stately, plump sort of way, not the sublime cragginess of, say, nearby Mt. Hood — but since it blew its top off in 1980, now merits being listing as merely the most interesting local mountain. The volcano has been growing steadily and without much cataclysm since 2004. At this rate, it will reach its old height again in 100 years.

Here's an update in the local paper, the paper of the community that was covered in ash weeks after the original explosion a generation ago, The 26-year question.

I remember sledding in winter on St. Helens's slopes, c. 1976. I will probably never get the chance to do that, again . . . too much worry about sledding into lava.

T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 18, 2006 | permalink

. . . the Progressive Era was . . . a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation.: Damon W. Root, When Bigots Became Reformers, Reason, May 2006, p. 60

fib epigram See: WordWorks: The Fib

A judgment

Most Fibs Reveal Little more Than the common touch Of finger on the return key.

T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 29, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters

. . . has put the idiocy back into theodicy.: Yours Truly, way down on this page

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