Green Hell

Got Some Catching Up to Do...

   Hectic couple of months -- and painful, as well. My friend, knife-designer Terry Trahan, died over the winter. As he wasn't much older than I am, his passing was difficult to take. Then, without warning, another of my friends, Kirby Sanders, died a few days ago.
     Kirbs wasn't just a good friend, he also contributed pieces to both of our anthologies,  Biohazard and First Love. His passing, naturally, has changed my priorities. I'm putting Irish Need Not Apply on a back-burner for a while, in order to complete our last project together, an anthology of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror intended as a tribute to Weird Tales and similar pulp magazines of the last century. We'll be dedicating the collection to Kirby, and publishing what I believe may be his last story alongside a piece written by his son, Tristan.

     Maggie is finishing her first full-length novel, a (Gag! Retch! Heave!) horror/romance crossover, and I've just learned that "husband" is a euphemism for "unpaid editor." Yesterday, we met with a photographer/artist/graphic designer  whose work impressed both of us, and discussed her fee for taking care of the cover. As this wasn't an '80s "power lunch," we met at our favorite watering hole, Mazzy's Sports Bar. Mazzy's occupies a spot in both our hearts, as it was the setting for the touching, kiss-and-make-up scene that postceded our first truly nasty fight.

    It's also worth mentioning that we had our first truly nasty fight because of Mazzy's. Johnny-O and I called in at ten or eleven in the morning, having promised to meet the gals later. Bear in mind that this is South, and that in Southernese, "later" can mean anything from "in ten minutes" to "sometime next week." Six feckin' hours -- and God knows how many pints -- later, we were still there. And hell hath no fury like a woman stood-up. Maggie was pissed off, Mayna wasn't very happy, John and I were in the doghouse, and we both learned that irresponsible bogtrotters have no business getting mixed up with Indonesians and Mexicans -- unless they plan to mend their profligate ways.
   Worst of all, there was no chance of weaseling my way out of it by pouring on the Rhett Butler bullshit. God's gift to women though I am, even I'm not very attractive when I'm red-eyed, shitfaced, and bellowing an a capella (and off-key) rendition of "Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms" or "Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer" at the top of my lungs. 

   Anyway, we liked the kid's work. All systems go.
   She's a very nice girl, and I was also very favorably impressed by her boyfriend. Very intelligent, very well-read, and very well-traveled. Artistic and athletic at the same time, which is a rarity these days. It's very gratifying to know that some younger people still pursue the Classical ideal, mens sana in corpore sano. 
   
    And speaking of classics, the book in the photo below was a real find. It's a quarto-sized Heritage Club edition of the Argonautica, by Appolonius of Rhodes. It's hardback 1960 printing, with a slipcover. Not quite mint condition, but very, very good. Best of all (as you can see in the photo) the text is bilingual and parallel, with Greek and English on the facing pages. This makes it as much an exercise book as an epic. When I cover the right-hand pages, I can try my hand at translating the Greek, and then compare the results to the English text.  
    Grr. I could kick myself for screwing around and dabbling for so many years. I wish I'd gotten off my dead ass and studied Greek and Latin seriously when I was younger. I suppose I'm overcompensating now, by  way of making up for lost time. I real all the "biggies" in high school and college: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and quite a few plays, as well -- "The Trojan Women," "Oedipus the King," "Antigone," "Agamemnon," and a forgettable, ho-hum piece of crap by Terence (Roman drama, in my opinion, was never more than a pale imitation of the Greek. I love Roman poetry - especially Juvenal and Catullus -- but as dramatists, they left much to be desired.) Reading them between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, because one has to in order to pass one course or another isn't the same thing as reading them voluntarily, as an adult, though. 
    I really do owe Prof. Ross, Prof. Schwenk, and Mrs. Moore a sincere (if belated) apology. I've spent the last couple of years giving myself a real, classical education -- when I could have done it ages ago. As a young man (alas and alack), I didn't see the point of having one in the modern age. This is to say that I was a fucking idiot. As is true of so many other endeavors, I didn't know what I'd been missing until I acquired it. As a younger man, I was more interested in Medieval literature, especially Irish, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon. The Greek and Roman classics were required reading, but that was it. And sadly, I lacked the maturity and the life-experience to recognize their value. 
    At seventeen, I tolerated them for the sake of making the grade. At forty-seven, I've had lines of Catullus, Euripides, and even Aeschylus leave me in tears. That isn't just a figure of speech, incidentally.  
    C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote: 

     Have you not seen that in our days
      Of any whose story, song, or art
     Delights us, our sincerest praise
     Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart.'?



      Since I've mentioned Lewis, I might as well recommend another book, his Poems. (1964, Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 0-15-672248-8). In addition the epigram I quoted a few lines ago, the collection contains several other memorable pieces. 
    As a poet, Lewis wasn't in the same league as Lawrence or Auden, and he couldn't touch Yeats or Eliot. The collection is, admittedly, uneven. A few of the selections, I'm sorry to say, are outright doggerel. But damn it if the man doesn't turn right around and knock the reader's socks off a few pages later! 
     Before I continue, I'd like to make it perfectly clear that my taste in poetry his highly subjective. Generally, I despise rhyming couplets, A/B/A/B schemes, and anything breezy or sing-song. Emily Dickinson gives me the dry heaves. Ditto Whitman and the other acknowledged "luminaries" of the medium. Having said that, I'll admit that I have a diamond-cutting blue-veiner for Walter Scott's work -- even though I know it's garbage. I can best liken his poetry to that dorky film, 300. It's a guilty pleasure; a Big Mac for the soul. 
   Overall, I prefer "serious" poets, especially Eliot. I can quote most of "The Hollow Men" from memory, and my wife and I spent most of Saturday afternoon trying to interpret "Sweeney Among the Nightingales." (That one put the hook in me right away, for the record. Talk about "in your face"! What can you say about a poem that begins with Agamemnon's offstage death-rattle: "ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγήν ἕσω!"?) 
    Sorry about that. I'm really becoming a pompous, sciolistic fuck in my old age, now ain't I?
     Lewis isn't as "serious" as Eliot. But on the positive side, neither is he as recondite. Unpretentious and forthright, he disarms and enchants the reader with his directness. At his very best, he wrote from the heart, eschewing cryptic symbolism and overindulgence in metaphor alike. Odd and ironic, coming from a man so openly enamored of allegory -- but then again, most good writers are a bit touched in the head. 
    "Write what you know" is the first commandment of literature, and Lewis obeyed it scrupulously. Although seldom maudlin, Lewis, at his best, packed the emotional wallop of a .416 Rigby. I've admitted that my tastes are highly subjective, but I can't imagine any real man failing to respond to his work. 
    Lewis on cultural decay (from "Re-Adjustment):

     Between the new Homindae and us who are dying, already
    There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry,
    For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.
     Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future,
    And trusting to no future, receive the massive thrust
     And surge of the many-dimensional timeless rays converging
     On this small, significant dew-drop, the present that mirrors all.

    On loss (from "Joys That Sting"): 

    Oh do not die, says Donne, for I shall hate
     All women so. How false the sentence rings.
     Women? But in a life made desolate
    It is the joys once shared that leave the stings.

     To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
    To order one pint where I ordered two,
     To think of, and then not to make, the small
     Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

     The best poem (and the one that meant the most to me) is a long piece entitled "Infatuation."
If I reproduce it in its entirety, I'll rob you of incentive to buy the book (and risk copyright violation). 
Here are few teasers, though:

     The thing I seek for was not anywhere
    At any time on earth. That huntress air
    And morning freshness was not hers by right.
     She spoke, she smiled; put out what seemed the flame,
     Left me the cold charred sticks, the ashes white. 

     How could she learn, who never since her birth
     Looked out of her desires and saw the earth
     Unshadowed by herself...

     Her holiest moods are gaudy desecrations
    Of poor half-holy things; her exaltations
    Are frothed from music, moonlight, wine, and dance;
     Love is to her a dream of bridal dresses,
     Friendship a tittering hour of girl's caresses,
   Virtue a steady purpose to advance,
    Honoured, and safe, by the old well-proven roads,
     No loophole left to passion or to chance. 

    And I've gone on long enough for one session. Gotta go draw and then practice guitar for a while. 

My Sentiments Exactly

    A few selections from Guy Lee's superb translation of Catullus. (Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-283587-4).

    Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the first century B.C., and a contemporary of Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Cicero, Marc Antony, and the rest of that wacky, fun-loving bunch. Although 116 of his poems have survived, he is perhaps best known for his love poems to the pseudonymous "Lesbia," of which these selections are examples. Born in Verona (the modern region of Veneto, formerly Cisalpine Gaul), Catullus relocated to Rome as a young man, and became the archetypal country boy who moves to the big city and makes good. 
    It was during his stay in Rome that he met and became romantically involved with "Lesbia."
    Whilst skimming through the notes and introduction, I discovered that "Lesbia" was the pseudonym Catullus assigned to a woman named Clodia, who was -- well, a bit of a tramp. I knew something about the story was familiar, and I soon discovered what. She was the same Clodia Metelli whom Cicero tore a new asshole in his Defence of Marcus Caelius Rufus. (Reprinted in Selected Political Speeches -- Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-14-044214-6.) 
     This Clodia was the sister of Cicero's arch-nemesis, Publius Clodius Pulcher, and the wife of a patrician named Metellus Celer (whom she was later rumored to have poisoned). In the course of her life, she had adulterous affairs with a veritable legion (no pun intended) of men, including Catullus and the aforementioned Marcus Caelius Rufus, upon whom she eventually turned like a rattlesnake. 
    Now for what I suppose are obvious reasons, I have a soft spot for writers who've endured the deaths of siblings, and who, as young men, had wretched taste in women. (As the very snarky saying goes: "You can take a white-trash whore out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of a white-trash whore.") Catullus wasn't the first writer to fall desperately and obsessively in love with a fickle, narcissistic shitweasel of a female, and he certainly wasn't the last. At times, I think hopeless affaires de coeur are the price of admission to the club...
     What sets him apart from poets like -- say -- Dante Alighieri is the fact that he had no illusions about Clodia. Dante's mewling praise of his Beatrice in the Divine Comedy is so overblown as to be downright fulsome at times. Not so Catullus. Catullus knew that Clodia had handled more peckers than a gay urologist, and if anything, it only increased the pain and poignancy of his situation. 
    When it comes to Roman literature, I generally prefer satirists like Juvenal or Petronius -- although I do enjoy Martial's nastier epigrams, and even a few of Horace's pieces. (Now that my Latin is improving, I'll have to go back and read them in the original. Like the Greek playwright Aristophanes, many of the Roman poets suffer in translation. As the parallel Latin/English Oxford edition of Catullus reveals, the unexpurgated, untranslated Latin and Greek are often shockingly and delightfully obscene. What can one say about a poem that begins with the line "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo"?) What immediately impressed me about Catullus, though, was the man's intensity.
     Bam! Bam! Bam!
     He didn't fuck around. 
     Whether it's the result of my stereotypical "Celtic temperament" or the manic-depression (at times, I suspect that the former is merely a euphemism for the latter), I've loved with equal fervor, and endured the same hell when the affair ended. This is to say that Catullus and I were on the same wavelength from the get-go. I began reading the book on Monday night, and finished it Tuesday afternoon. 
    Except for LXIV (a tedious epyllion  -- my least favorite piece), it's all great stuff. The following pieces, though, are my favorites.

Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
  quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
 dicit -- sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti
  in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua
                                                    (LXX) 

 "My woman says that there's no one she would rather wed
   Than me, not even if Zeus himself proposed.
 Says -- but what a woman says to an ardent lover
 One should write on the wind and the running water."

    And the second half of LXXII:

     nunc te cognoui. quare etsi impensius uror,
     multo mi tamen es vilior et levior
    'qui potis es?' inquis? quod amantem injuria
     talis
    cogit amare magis sed bene velle minus.

    "
   "I know you now. So though my passion's more intense,
   Yet to me you are cheaper and more frivolous.
    'How can this be?' you ask? It is because such injury
     impels
     a lover to love more, but to like less."

     LXXV

     Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa
     atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
     ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,
     nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

     "Lesbia, my will has sunk to this through your frailty
     And so destroyed itself by its own kindness
     That it could neither like you, even if you were perfect,
     Nor cease to love you, though you stopped at nothing."

        And my favorite, LXXXV. Short, sweet, and to the point:

     Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris?
    nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.  

     "I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why?
     I don't know, but I feel it happening, and I am in agony." 

Good, Clean, Juvenile Fun

    I wasn't kidding about the book I reviewed. 

    I haven't drawn anything but flies and odd looks in nearly twenty years. Even then, I was more given to painting monsters and landscapes in oils and acrylics than I was to drawing. 

    In a nutshell, Hart's Young Artists Draw Manga is so good, and the instructions so easy to follow, I was able to draw the li'l cutie below with only twenty minutes' practice -- with a no-frills sketch pad and one of those fifty-for-a-dollar plastic Papermate pencils. (You know -- the kind with the needle-thin stick of lead inside, the kind that always leaves crumbs of graphite on the page if you apply more than two grams of pressure.)

     You won't see the drawing in the Louvre any time soon, but I'm kinda  proud of her - especially as I shelved all forms of visual representation some time ago in order to pay closer attention to music, writing, and martial arts. 



    I'd like to see what I'm doing a year from now, with real equipment, and an hour or so of daily practice under my belt. The symmetry needs the most work, and I need to be less hesitant with the pencil-strokes, but I'll just betcha I'll be producing butterfly-winged princesses and cuddly li'l quasi-dinosaurs in no time. 

    Once again,folks: I'm 47, I haven't drawn anything since my twenties, and I was always much better at music and writing than ever I was at any manner of visual art. If I can pull this off in just a few minutes, imagine what an eager kid armed with a copy of Hart's book could do.

    Perfect Christmas gift or birthday present, if you ask me. 

    

A Fun Book

     

Like many guys my age (I was born during the "Summer of Love," 1967), I grew up watching Speed Racer. Unlike most guys my age, I later developed what I now gather was an unhealthy obsession with the programme. 

    1.) This "gateway drug" of a cartoon eventually led me to the "hard stuff": Battle of    
         the Planets, Starblazers, etc. This, in turn, led to any number of movies, many    
         of which are still in my collection: Battle Angel, Vampire Hunter  
        D, Akira, Kabuto, and even worse. To this very day, I still (not without a certain
        measure of guilt, mind you) catch the odd episode of Full Metal Alchemist when     
        my wife is out of town.

    2.) During the autumn of 1990, I found myself singing the Speed Racer themesong    
         with my two best friends as we barreled down 411 and I-75, trying to make it
         home by nightfall, as the headlights on "the Mach V"  (John's pickup truck) had   
         died the night before. Thanks to a mysterious, masked driver (some say he was  
         John's older brother Rex, who had run away 
         from home while John was still an infant), we made it from Knoxville to Atlanta
         in three hours --without getting a single traffic ticket.

    3.) The same bunch of us celebrated New Year's '91 with beer, champage, and an   
         all-night Speed Racer marathon.      

    4.) Photos of me posing with Apollo Smile at DragonCon '98 are still out there
         somewhere.

    5.) In my opinion, this is the coolest South Park send-up tune ever recorded. 

    In short, I've been hung up on bug-eyed cartoon characters with skinny legs and pointy chins since I was a kid. 
     Hmmm. When I give the matter some thought, it occurs to me that my peculiar (for the time, that is) taste in cartoons may have subconsciously influenced my equally peculiar taste in women, as well. My high-school, girlfriend, after all, was a bug-eyed cartoon character with skinny legs and a pointy chin. P'raps I'll mention it to the doc when next I renew my Timonil prescription... (Don't you just hate that, by the way? Every time you go to have the fucking thing filled, you have to bull your way through a crowd of yuppie larvae in line for their Ritalin and Risperdal. "Outta the way, ya little she-troll! Uh, sorry, kid. Didn't realize you were a boy. I guess the tits threw me off a bit...) 

    Uh, now where was I? 

    Oh, that's right!

    Last night, the wife and I went to the local craft and hobby shop, in search of a few items to enhance a display she's set up at work. (Less than a year on the  job, and she's already made the store #1 in the division, by the way. Not exactly a herculean feat for a woman who put her ex through med school and who, twenty-five years ago, turned a $1m/yr. company into a $43m/yr. company, but I'm still indecently proud of her.)  
    While she searched the seasonal merchandise for gew-gaws and "pretties," I wandered over to the arts and crafts section. The selection of leatherworking tools was as disappointing as ever (if your only choices are Michael's and Hobby Lobby, by the way, you might as well make or improvise your own tools. One of these days, I'll post an article on making a stamp with a hex bolt, a hacksaw, and a rat-tail file. It's the least I can do after Aaron taught me how to re-crown a rifle with a round-head machine screw a couple of years ago...), but the selection of drawing materials was a refreshing surprise.

    I don't put much stock in "how to" books. They're no substitute for person-to-person instruction. Unless you have previous experience in a given field, or are a natual autodidact (I'll plead guilty to the second, but I'm not a "normal" person), they're useless. Every now and then, though, I'll find an exception to the rule.
    One such exception is the book I purchased last night: Christopher Hart's Young Artists Draw Manga. (2011, Weston-Guptill Publications, ISBN 987-0-8230-2657-9, ~14.99 retail).
    Assuming the possession of basic rendering skills on the purchaser's part, Young Artists will have him/her drawing honest-to-God anime/manga characters in an hour or so -- no kidding.
    Even though I handn't drawn anything in years, I was able to churn out passable shoujo and bishonen-style characters in the space of a single episode of Spartacus: Vengeance. That was quite enough to convince me that my hard-earned shekels were well-spent. I gave the book a four-star rating on my Goodreads page,  and I thought of recommending it to all my friends -- until it occurred to me that the twisted bastards would probably just sit around drawing hentai all day... 

     Anyway, if you have an artistically inclined kid (or still feel like one at times), you could do a lot worse than to purchase this title. 

 

 

AD&D: Nanny-Nanny-Boo-Boo!

     If gloating is indeed the mark of a small person, I suppose I could have a piss on the edge of a dime -- lying flat. 

     A couple of weeks ago, I was raiding my favorite used bookstore, in search of something to impulse-buy with the ten bucks a week Margarita (who apparently spent far too much time jiggling her beads in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Blessed Parsimony during her formative years) magnanimously allows me to spend. 

   Shopping in used bookstores is generally a hit or miss proposition -- the selection consists entirely of trash or entirely of treasure, it seems, with no happy medium between the two. 

    The latest foray, though, was unquestionably a hit. 

    There, staring me in the face (for which I flipped it off and said, "Take a picture, motherfucker! It'll last longer!") was a not-quite mint (note the wear at the edges of the binding) 1979 printing of the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. 
     The best part? 
     I scored it for a quarter -- and by that, I don't mean that I traded the clerk a quarter-ounce of "the Devil's lettuce." I mean that I got it for twenty-five cents. 

   Pretty sweet, nicht wahr? 

Updated Reading List

    Today's the wife's birthday, and we're celebrating with crab legs and Grade-B horror movies. (Anything featuring summer camps, giant arthropods, and makeup that looks suspciously like it came from an old Pressman "Monster Magic" kit.) No time for ranting. Instead, I'll post my updated reading list. 

Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in the Struggle for Self – Elan Golumb
Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire – William Rosen
Way of the Samurai – Mishima Yukio
The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America – Howard K. Philips
Showdown: Why China Wants War With the U.S. – Jed Babbin*
Hard Sayings of Jesus – F.F. Bruce
The Two Cultures and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution – C.P. Snow
Sounds of the Passion: Meditations on Jesus’s Journey to the Cross – David M. Owen
The Republic – Plato
The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds – Tammy Bruce
National Museum: Sculpture – Bronzes – Vases – Basil Petrakos
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality – Anthony de Mello
Atlas of the Ancient World – Christopher Fagg
Dynamics of Faith – Paul Tilllich
Existentialism – Mary Warrnock
One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance – Christina Hoff-Summers
unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation – Kathleen Hall Jamieson
The Control Freak – Les Parrott
The Politics – Aristotle
Chinese Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality – Charles Luk
Acupressure Techniques: A Self-Help Guide – Julian Kenyon
The Art of Greece and Rome – Susan Woodford
Christianity and Culture and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture – T.S. Eliot
The Lords and The New Creatures – Jim Morrison
The Grand Miracle  -- C.S. Lewis
Around the Wicket Gate: Help for Those Who Only Know About Christ – Charles H. Spurgeon
The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius
The Complete Odes and Epodes With The Centennial Hymn – Horace
Charismatic Chaos – John F. MacArthur
The Satires and Epistles of Horace – Horace
Myths of the Greeks and Romans – Michael Grant
The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome – Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) – Lucretius, trans. Anthony Esolen
The Civilization of Rome – Donald R. Dudley
The Roman War Machine – John Peddie
Sex, Literature, and Censorship – D.H. Lawrence
The Nature of the Gods – Cicero

*This one was dreadful. The author took a very real concern, and spun it into an absurd, neocon fantasy. I include it only as a cautionary tale, the moral being that it doesn’t pay to put too much stock in prophets and pundits.

     And (of course) the “Injured-List Playlist.” Dedicated to the blue-and-white Kachina.  (It’s an inside joke.)  

“I Am the Storm” -- Blue Oyster Cult
“Black Juju” -- Alice Cooper
“Black Magic” – Slayer
“Elric (The Enchanter) – Hawkwind
"Nightmare: The Dreamtime"-Motorhead
Psi Power -- Hawkwind

Miscellaneous, Mucilaginous Crapola

Worth Reading

     I’m thirty pages into The Way of the Samurai, Mishima’s commentary on Yamamoto’s Hagakure. Whatever one may think of Yamamoto or Mishima, the latter, in particular, closed his life with the same post script Ayn Rand claimed she’d put at the end of hers: “And I mean it!”

     You’ve gotta respect that…

     Speaking of books, I’m not as sold on Lenox Cramer’s War With Empty Hands as I was during my impulsive, wayward youth. The recommended fitness program simply doesn’t allow enough recovery time, especially for hard-gainers. Unless the trainee takes a clear weak off every 8-12 weeks, it’s a quick ticket to burnout/overtraining.
     The techniques and combinations in Brad Steiner’s Subway Survival are more practical, more “human engineered,” and easier to learn and teach, especially if you happen to be teaching women. Moreover, Cramer’s method pays little attention to grappling and infighting, and none to awareness, E &E, or the legal ramifications of “pulling a Kung-Fu Jones” on another biped – however worthy said biped is of complete and instant neutralization.
     And the training-wear suggested in the book is downright silly. Being somewhat traditional in my outlook I train in a formal uniform when the mood strikes me. Being a realist, I also train in the clothes I wear every day. For some reason, I can’t imagine myself saying, “Ok, asshole! You just screwed the pooch! Now wait a sec while I change into my gi” in the course of a real altercation.  I’ve trained in BDUs, as Cramer recommends, and while there’s much to be said for the freedom of motion they afford, I’m not in the habit of gallivanting about town dressed like a reject from the Michigan Militia. Call me paranoid, but it occurs to me that doing so might attract unwanted attention. Unless I’m wearing plain black or khaki (in which case they’re indistinguishable from cargo-pants), I usually wear jeans. Ergo, it makes more sense to train in jeans.  

     I do wear a bandana to keep the sweat out of my eyes, and to hold my hair back when I’m not wearing a pony-tail. I encourage my wife to do likewise. I do not demand, however, that she wear a specific color. If she prefers lilac or day-glo pink to the basic black or khaki I employ, more power to her. As long as she’s polite and attentive during our sessions, I see no need to play the “I’m the instructor, you’re the student. That means I get to wear this color, but you have to wear that one! So nyah!” game.
     I’ve found that I fight equally well (or equally poorly, as the case may be) no matter the color of the belt or headband I’m wearing. Moreover, I’m temperamentally leery of the kind of power- and ego-tripping the belt-mill mentality breeds. The longer I train and study, the more convinced I am that there are no masters – just serious and not-so-serious students. I suppose it’s a classic case of increased knowledge and understanding serving only to illustrate just how much one still has to learn. That, incidentally, is one of the things I most enjoy about teaching (for all that I do so infrequently, informally, and never for money): having the responsibility of hunting down the answers to questions I might never have thought to ask.


Training Notes 8/16/14

     I actually did it!  For once, I managed to complete a workout without my perv of a wife committing my arse to film/video chip while my back was turned. It’s rather a tough job, bein’ this feckin’ GAHR-geous, but somebody has to do it. And I suppose we can’t all be me, after all…

     Been tried for murder
      In the first degree
     The Judge’s wife
     Said, “Let da MAAAN go free!” 

    Now allow me a long digression, if you’ll be so kind.
    When I began weight training seriously, a little over a year ago, I dreaded the prospect of performing squats. Owing to various injuries, my knees, if you don’t mind the slightly off-kilter reference, are my Achilles’ heel.
     In a freak accident during January of ’99, I managed to screw up the right member of the pair eight ways to Sunday. By way of conveying the seriousness of the injury, I’ll mention that I had to employ a cane for six months, and it wasn’t until over a year later that I could walk without a limp.
     The joint’s mobility suffered, as well. For the first couple of months, I could only bring the calf/shin perpendicular to the thigh. Beyond the obvious, physical handicap, the psychological effects were devastating. I’d reached the brown belt level in mid ‘96, and at the time I sustained the injury, had 150 or more training-hours in-grade. All that work: 3-6 hours of training a day, six days a week, and now it seemed that I’d never earn my black belt. Worse by far was the fact that I’d lost the use of my longest and strongest weapon – my right leg. Not only was I unable to kick with it; I was unable to kick at all. The joint was too weak to support my weight when I tried to use my left.  

    Now the spinning side kick, which I mention for a reason, is practically useless in a serious fight. Turning one’s back, even for a fraction of a second, on a determined adversary is tantamount to inviting a knife to the kidney. In my opinion, the technique is good for two things: 1.) Finishing an already-stunned adversary; 2.) Impressing chicks. As I’ve mentioned, it necessitates turning one’s back on an enemy, and it’s nearly impossible to throw without telegraphing it in from Dallas.
    
     Flashy, impractical, and as dangerous to the user as it is to his intended target.
    

     Yep. You’ve guessed it. It was my favorite technique. I honestly don’t know how many hours I spent working on it. I practiced it at the dojo before, after, and in-between classes. As my instructors had given me a key, I went in and practiced it on days when the dojo was closed. I practiced it against trees, walls, and my Century Wavemaster when I was home. By the time I earned my brown belt, I could bowl the Wavemaster over, and whereas other students practiced theirs against an air-shield, I had to work mine on a folded gym-mat, with two guys on the others side, holding it up. When I tested for my brown belt, I used it to break three boards (no shims or spacers) – after running three miles, performing seven different kata (with demonstrations of bunkai), multiple sets of nine different offensive and defensive combinations (18 combinations total) on each side, and (Happy, happy! Joy, joy!) free-sparring all the black-belts. The kicker: the next-highest tester was going for his green belt. I was performing solo, with little chance to rest, for most of the examination.
      And now, all of that was gone. The resulting depression lasted for months, and it was the worst I’d endured since my ex-girlfriend ripped out my guts and tap-danced on them in ’89.

    Although the knee has long since healed, it’s still temperamental. When I began lifting weights again last year, I was barely able to squat with 60 on the bar, and my knees were cracking and popping in protest even then. To make a long story short, I kept at it, increasing the weight five pounds at a time, and supplementing the squats with leg-curls and leg-extensions during the lower-body phases of my workouts.
     Last Wednesday, I managed to break the 200-mark, and today, I upped the poundage to 215. I don’t imagine the typical Olympic power-lifter has much to worry about, but for a guy who could barely walk fifteen years ago? I’m pretty happy. This week is the last of my shoulder phase, and the real test, the leg phase, begins on Monday. Let’s see how that spinning side kick works now…. {{Evil Chuckle}}.

    For whatever unfathomable reason (prolonged manic episode, perhaps?), I’ve been in higher spirits of late. I suppose the current playlist betrays the fact.  

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – Gene Pitney
Little Red Riding Hood – Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
Mother’s Blue-Eyed Angel – The Herd
All American Man – KISS
Henry VIII – Herman’s Hermits
Fish Heads – Barnes & Barnes
They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha! – Napoleon XIV
Double Shot of My Baby’s Love – Swingin’ Medallions
Nobody But Me – Human Beinz
Ain’t Got No Home – Clarence “Frogmouth” Henry
Little T&A – Rolling Stones
Boom Boom – John Lee Hooker
Pearl Necklace – Z.Z. Top
Howlin' for You - The Black Keys
Promised Land -- Elvis Presley

Worth Reading

     Charismatic Chaos, by John F. MacArthur, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1992, ISBN 0-310-57570-2). If you aren’t a Christian, this title is unlikely to interest you. If you are, though, it’s required reading. Like it or not, the Charismatic movement is one of the fastest-growing heresies in the United States. For all that its teachings are un-Biblical to the point of apostasy, modern, Charismatic Christianity’s ever-increasing popularity owes itself to undue emphasis on “the three M’s” (miracles, mysticism, and materialism).  It is a designer drug, formulated to satisfy and stimulate, by turns, the cravings of a morally bankrupt, experience-hungry society. As our Lord himself said: “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign…” (Matthew 12:39, KJV)

     “…Let us reason together,” says the Lord in Isaiah 1:18, and MacArthur answers the call, offering rational, scripturally sound rebuttals to the absurd, heretical claims and pick-and-choose doctrine of the Charisma Cult. Charismatic Chaos begins will a full-scale assault on the belligerent anti-intellectualism so annoyingly characteristic of the movement, and proceeds to demolish subjectivity, mysticism, post-Biblical revelation, the hallucinations and parlor-tricks so beloved of the “signs and wonders” crowd, and the so called “Prosperity Gospel.”

    If ever you’ve had to endure the spectacle of an overweight, pompadoured, semiliterate demoniac (straight out of II Corinthians 11) as he bellows, “I once healed me a li’l AW-tistic boy by pourin’ a bottle o’ Perrier over his haid! Puh-RAISE JAY-sus!” you’ll enjoy this book. If, like me, you’re disgusted by the Charismatics' wholesale scrapping of the Epistle of James, and their indifferent, often sadistic treatment of the poor, the sick, and the handicapped over their presumed lack of faith, you’ll love it.

Belated 2013 Reading List (Including 1/14-4/14)

With all the nerve-wracking, enervating bullshit excitement that’s befallen us over the last few months, I forgot to post my 2013 reading list. When I took a closer look at my GoodReads page, I realized that this was probably for the better, as much of what I read that year was garbage.

Unfortunately, staying informed (especially with regard to how/what the other guy thinks – an absolute necessity, for what I hope are obvious reasons) requires wading through mountains of dung in search of the occasional diamond.  This, however, is no excuse for inflicting my suffering upon you, the Gentle Reader.

This year, I’ll stick to posting the best of my reading from 2013 and the first four months of 2014. Some of the titles below are out of print, but nearly all are readily available on Amazon, or at well-stocked used bookstores. (And if you’re anything like me, you need as much excuse to raid a used bookstore as you do to eat, sleep or breathe.)

Christianity in Crisis: 21^st Century  -- Hank Hanegraff
The History – Herodotus
The Civilization of Rome – Donald R. Dudley
The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted – Mike  Lofgren
The Art of Thinking – Ernest Dimnet
The Greek Experience – Sir. Cecil Maurice Bowra
Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home – David Philips
The Men Who Stare at Goats – John Ronson
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life – C.S. Lewis
Warfare in the Classical World – John Warry
Blood of Amber – Roger Zelazny
The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of  Disconnected and Unhappy Kids – Madeline Levine
Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium – Dick Meyer
Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan – Frank L. Holt
The Hand of Oberon – Roger Zelazny
Becoming a Writer – Dorothea Brande
What Have They Done With Jesus: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History – Why We Can Trust the Bible – Ben Witherington
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter – Thomas Cahill
Antiquity – Norman F. Cantor
Arabs, Christians, and Jews – James C. Hefley
Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages – Richard E. Rubenstein
Greek History, Literature, and Antiquities : An Introduction – A. Petrie
Sign of the Unicorn – Roger Zelazny
Brennan’s War –Matthew J. Brennan
Just As I Am – Eugenia Price
Classic Christianity: Life’s Too Short to Miss the Real Thing – Bob George
Scholar-Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Every Day Life – Deng Ming-Dao
The Fine Teachings and Perfect Wisdom of the Kings of Rock’n’Roll – Mark Edmundson
Slackjaw – Jim Knipfel
The Heartland – Stuart Legg
Rome and the Sword – Simon James
The Unknown Socrates --  William M. Calder
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions – Richard Ben Cramer
The Greeks – Anthony Andrewes
Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem – Amir S. Cheshin
A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government – Nakae Chomin
Alone With a Jihadist – A Biblical Response to Holy War --  Aaron D. Taylor
Winning the War Within --  Charles F. Stanley
The Zen Way to Martial Arts – Deshimaru Taisen
How to Win the Culture War: A Christian  Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis – Peter Kreeft
Acupuncture Without Needles – J.V. Cernery
Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy – Fawaz A. Gerges
A History of the Vikings – T.D. Kendrick
A Time to Dance – Bernard MacLaverty
The Greek Way – Edith Hamilton
Freedom in the Ancient World – Herbert J. Muller
The Celtic World – Barry Cunliffe
Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton
The Druids – Peter Beresford Ellis
Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton – Kevin Belmonte
How We Got Our Bible – Thomas W. H. Griffith
The Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Divine Comedy III: Paradiso – Dante Alighieri
Protagoras – Plato
Unholy Wars: America, Afghanistan, and International Terrorism – John K. Cooley
Blood Brothers – Elias Chacour
The Gothic War: Justinian’s Campaign to Reclaim Italy – Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen
100 Wild Little Weird Tales – Martin Greenberg (ed.)
Thieves’ World – Robert Lynn Asprin (ed.)
Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon – the Case Against Celebrity – Andrew Breitbart
Works and Days/Theogony/The Shield of Heracles -- Hesiod
A History of the Vandals – Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen
With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful – Glenn Greenwald
Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times – Jerry H. Bentley
Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of the Planet Earth
The Mad God’s Amulet – Michael Moorcock
The Germanic People: Their Origin, Expansion, and Culture – Francis Owen
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Divine Comedy II: Purgatorio – Dante Alighieri
The Aeneid – Virgil
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream…Nightmare: 30 Terrifying Tales – Martin H. Greenberg (ed.)
Baptism and Fullness: The Work of the Holy Spirit Today – John R. Stott
Aristotle: Founder of Scientific Philosophy – Benjamin R. Farrington
Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu of Taira Shigesuke – Yuzan Daijoji
Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand – Nathaniel Branden
The Three Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus – Sophocles
The Seven Deadly Sins Today – Henry Fairlie
The Outlines of Mythology – Lewis Spence
Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta – Gore Vidal
The Celts – Gerhard Herm
Spiritual Warfare in a Believer’s Life – Charles H. Spurgeon
Three Tales – Gustave Flaubert
Electra and Other Plays – Sophocles
The Fall – Albert Camus
The Last Days of Socrates –Plato
Tudor England: 1485-1603 A Bibliographical Handbook – Mortimer Levine
Islam and the West – Bernard Lewis
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia – Ahmed Rashid
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Virginia Woolf
For the Good of the Cause – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Greek Civilization and Character – Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The Bacchae and Other Plays – Euripides
The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World  -- Ian Barnes
On Free Choice of the Will – St. Augustine
Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle
The Problem of Pain – C.S. Lewis
The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures – Daniel E. Fleming
Myths and Legends of the Ancient Near East – F.G. Skinner
Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning – Viktor E. Frankel
Roman Fever and Other Stories – Edith Wharton
Medea and Other Plays – Euripides
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – T.S. EIlot
The Celts – T.G.E. Powell
A Hero of Our Time – Mikhail Lermontov
Human Science and Human Dignity – Donald MacCrimmon MacKay
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Buddhism and Zen – Senzaki Nyogen
Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party – William H. Schmaltz
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq – Sheldon Rampton
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense – David Cay Johnston
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Mental Illness and Leadership – S. Nassir Ghaemi
Heroes and Villians: Inside the Minds of the Greatest Warriors in History – Frank McLynn
Greek Tragedies, Vol. II: The Libation Bearers, Electra, Iphigenia in Tauris, Electra, and The Trojan Women – Richard Lattimore (ed.)
The Civilization of the Middle Ages –Norman F. Cantor
Aristotle for Everybody – Mortimer J. Adler
The Rise and Fall of the Shah – Amin Saikal
The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life – Hannah Whitall Smith
The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera – Edward Muir
Makers of the Western Tradition: Portraits from History, Vol 1 – J. Kelley Sowards
The Philosophers of Greece – Robert Sherrick Brumbaugh
The Man Who Knew Too Much – G.K. Chesterton
On Christian Doctrine – St. Augustine
The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism – Ahmed Rashid
The Art of War – Niccolo Machiavelli
Greek Tragedies, Vol 1: Agamemnon,  Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the King, Antigone,  and Hippolytus – Richard Lattimore (ed.)
Short Stories – Edith Wharton
Herakles – Euripides
The Hungering Dark – Frederick  Buechner
The UnDutchables – Colin White
Dark Imaginings – Robert H. Boyer (ed.)
Mohammed and Charlemagne – Henri Pirenne
Christian Liberty: Living for God in a Changing Culture – Rex M. Rogers
The Messianic Character of American Education – R.J. Rushdoony
In the Name of the Father: The Story of Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four – Gerry Conlon
Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia – Ahmed Rashid
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 11 – Lester Del Rey (ed)
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 4 – Lester Del Rey (ed.)
1066: The Year of the Conquest – David Howarth
How the Irish Saved Civilization – Thomas Cahill
Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism – Douglas R. Groothuis
Luther’s Small Catechism With Explanation – Martin Luther
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 2 – Lester Del Rey (ed.)
The Da Vinci Deception – Erwin R. Lutzer
New World Order – William T. Still
Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis – William Bonner
The Irish Famine: An Illustrated History – Helen Litton
Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone is Asking – Darrell L. Bock

And it would be downright un-American of me not to shill BeanPods Press’s latest anthology, First Love. At a mere $8.50 (plus postage; see our website for details), it’s a steal. So order your copy now! Who knows? It might eventually become a collector’s item.

OK, enough hawking for one day.

Take care, y’all.

Ooops! Mea culpa! Anywhere you see the name "Lester Del Rey", substitue "Lin Carter". Been readin' 'em both since high school, and I still can't tell 'em apart at times. :-) 

End-of-the-Year Reading Wrap-Up

Well, I did it.

Once again, I exceeded my minimum quota of 100 books a year. 155 by my count, and New Year's is still a few days away.

Here then, in no particular order, are the titles that alleviated my insomnia, upset my digestion, and otherwise occupied time I might've spent watching television, listening to Talk Radio, or wanking off. As I loathe the "star" system so beloved of other reviewers, I've assigned each weighty tome a letter grade.

My opinions are my own, and, I'll admit, highly subjective. Many of the titles whose content I most enjoyed were poorly written, and vice versa. Hopefully, this explains my adoption of the dreaded "Skool Daze" letter-grade system. 

January 

Bold, Independent, Unconquer'd and Free: How the Scots Made America Safe for Liberty, Democracy, and Capitalism (Alan Frey)  C+

The Will of God (Leslie D. Weatherhead) A-

Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (Gary C. Anderson) B+

A Foxfire Christmas  (Elliot Wigginton) A+

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History  (Mary Lefkowitz) A-

Psychologist's Book of Self-Tests: 25 Love, Sex, Intelligence, Career and Personality Tests Developed by Professionals to Reveal the Real You (Louis H. Janda) C-

True Spirituality (Francis A. Schaeffer) A+

The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society  (Arthur M. Schelesinger, Jr.)  A

Tao: The Watercourse Way  (Alan Watts) C

Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide (Jane Walmsley) C+

Steppenwolf  (Herman Hesse) C+

'Tis a Gift to be Simple (Barbara Sorensen) C
 
It Takes a Church Within a Village: God's Grand Design for Building Values and Character in Our Children  (H.B. London, Jr.)  B

They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped that Sucker Flat (Lewis Grizzard) B

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Gore Vidal) B+/A-

America Unchained: A Freewheeling Roadtrip in Search of Non-Corporate USA (Dave Gorman) C+

February 

Rogue Economics  (Loretta Napoletani) B-

Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth (Joe Conason) F

Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun (Wess Roberts) F

Behold a Pale Horse  (Milton W. Cooper) C-

The Martial Artist's Book of Five Rings (Steve Kaufman) C-

Mencius  (William Dobson) A-

Escape from Reason (Francis A. Schaeffer) A+

Getting Even II: More Dirty Tricks from the Master of Revenge (George Hayduke) C

Hong Kong  (Jan Morris) A-

Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (Nicholas D. Christof) C-

March 

Brain Droppings (George Carlin) C-

Mayhem: More from the Master of Malice (George Hayduke) C+

America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving US Sovereignty  (Jerome R. Corsi) A-

Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor (Thomas  R. Brooks)  A-

Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second Punic War (Gregory Daly) A-

The Sardonic Humor of Ambrose Bierce (Ambrose Bierce) A-

Mortified (David Nadelberg) C-

The Church of Our Fathers  (Roland Herbert Bainton) B+

The American Indians: The Way of the Warrior  (Time-Life Books)  B+

Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (Alvin Toffler)  F  

April 

Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest (H.L. Wormington) B+

The American Indians: People of the Lakes (Time-Life Books) B+

The American Indians: Hunters of the Northern Forests (Time-Life Books) B+

We're With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics (Allan Huffman) A-

Finding Facts Fast (Todd Alden) A-

The American Indians: People of the Ice and Snow (Time-Life Books) B+

The American Indians: Realm of the Iroquois (Time-Life Books)  B+

The Short Reign of Pippin IV (John Steinbeck) A-

A Single Pebble (John Hersey) A-

The American Indians: Tribes of the Southern Plains (Time-Life Books) B+

The American Indians: Tribes of the Southern Woodlands (Time-Life Books) C

The American Indians: Algonquians of the East Coast  (Time-Life Books) B

Alcestis and Other Plays (Euripides) A-

Chuang Tzu: Genius of the Absurd (Clae Waltham) B

Zen in the Martial Arts (Joe Hyams) B

Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury) A-

Walpurgisnacht (Gustav Meyrink) A-

The Spinoza of Market Street (Isaac Bashevis Singer) A+

The Journey to the East  (Herman Hesse) C+

May 

Understanding Europeans  (Stuart Miller) B-

The Magician of Lublin (Isaac Bashevis Singer) A-

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)  A+

White Fang (Jack London) B+

Chance  (Joseph Conrad) B+

Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabokov) A+

The American Indians: Indians of the Western Range (Time-Life Books) C-

The American Indians: Indians of California (Time-Life Books) C

Mom, Have You Seen My Leather Pants?: The Tale of a Teen Rock Wannabe Who Almost Was  (Craig A. Williams) A-

The American Indians: People of the Desert (Time-Life Books) C

The American Indians: War for the Plains (Time-Life Books) B-

Essential Zen (Tanahashi Kazuaki) B-

The American Indians: The Mighty Chieftains (Time-Life Books) B-

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (Marcus J. Borg) D

The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition (Huston Smith) C

There is a Happy Land (Keith Waterhouse) A-

June 

Puckoon (Spike Milligan)  A+

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (Spike Milligan) B+

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Kay Redfield Jamison) A-

Rommel? Gunner Who? (Spike Milligan) B-

This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (Barbara Ehrenreich) C-

The Conscience of a Conservative (Barry Goldwater) C

Existentialism: The Philosophy of Despair and the Quest for Hope (Stephen C. Evans) A+

Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd) B-

I and Thou (Martin Buber) B-

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Jack Weatherford) B+/ A-

The American Indians: The Spirit World (Time-Life Books) C

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Danilo Kiš) A+

July 

A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter Miller, Jr.) B+

God Our Contemporary (J.B. Philips) B

Great Religions of Modern Man: Protestantism (Leslie J. Dunstan) B-

Crash (J.G. Ballard) D-

Egil's Saga (Snorri Sturlusson, tr. Christine Fell) A+

The Rubaiyat (Omar Khayyam) B-

We Never Make Mistakes  (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) A

The Revolution: A Manifesto (Ron Paul) A-

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Eric Hoffer) A-

Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (Nathan Glazer) C+/B-

The Genteel Populists (Simon Lazarus)  A-

August

One Hundred Favorite Folktales  (Stith Thompson) B-

The Mammy (Brendan O'Carroll) A+

The Man Who Was Magic (Paul Gallico) B+

The Mouse that Roared (Leonard Wibberly) A-

Ramses II  (Mark A. Simpkins) C

Bali and Lombok  (Andy Barski) B-

Initiations and Initiates in Tibet (Alexandra David-Neel) B+

Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North American (Aby Warburg) B

Against the Grain  (Joris-Karl Huysmans) A-

Elements of Buddhism (John Snelling) D+/C-

Miracles (C.S. Lewis) A-

The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (W.Y. Evans-Wentz) B-

The Stranger (Albert Camus) C-

On Moral Fiction (John Gardner) B-

Castle Rackrent (Maria Edgeworth) A-

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) A-

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition ("Twelve Southerners") B-

September

A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat (Arthur Rimbaud) B-

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) B-

The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Victor Hugo) C

Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata) A-

Zen in the Art of Archery (Eugen Herrigel) A

The Little Prince (Antoine de St. Exupery) B+

Splendors of the Past: Lost Cities of the Ancient World (National Geographic Society) C

Hermes the Thief  (Norman O. Brown) A-

The Romance of Tristan: The Tale of Tristan's Madness (Beroul) A+

Irish Proverbs (Karen Bailey) B-

War Before Civilization (Lawrence H. Keeley) A+

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (Anon. tr. J.R.R. Tolkien) A-

War Songs and Poems of the Southern Confederacy 1861-65  (Various) B-

Warfare in Feudal Europe 730-1200  (John Beeler) A-

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾  (Sue Townsend) A-

October

Laxdaela Saga (Anon.) A+

From the Dust Returned (Ray Bradbury) C+

The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) C+/B-

The Easter Rebellion: Dublin 1916 (Max Caulfield) A-

The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson) B-

Political Correctness: The Cloning of the American Mind (David Thibodeaux) A-

The Faith of Epicurus (Benjamin Farrington) A-

11 Great Horror Stories (Betty M. Owen, Ed.) A-

Horror Times Ten (Alden H. Norton, Ed.)  A

Irish Tales of Terror (Peter Haining, Ed.)  A

The New Tolerance: How a Cultural Movement Threatens to Destroy You, Your Faith, and Your Children (Josh McDowell) B+

November

Medieval Political Thought  (Walter Ullmann) A-

Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It  (Jane M. Healy) A

Disney and the Bible: A Scriptural Critique of the Magic Kingdom  (Perucci Ferraiuolo) B-

The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: The Theology of C.S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children (Kathryn Lindskoog) A-

The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (Richard H. Niebuhr) C+

The Chisellers (Brendan O' Carroll)  A

Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment  (Sissela Bok) C+

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) A+

Dark Thoughts, Dark Forces (J.K. Dark)  A
     (Yes, I'm biased as hell. Dark is a friend of mine…)

Biohazard 2012: An Anthology (Maragarita Bean, Jocelyne Thomas, David Bean, Eds.) A
    (Yes, I'm biased as hell yet again. Four of my dearest friends: Liam Jackson, Cat Connor, Dawn Scovill, and Talon Overland contributed to this one, and I sank quite a bit of time and money into it.)

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Bill McKibben) B-

The Pilgrim's Regress (C.S. Lewis) B+/A-

Legacy of Truth: Great Minds That Made Great Lives (J. Kennedy Schultz) C-

Apocalypse  (D.H. Lawrence) C+

Myths of the Norsemen: Retold from the Old Norse Poems and Tales (Roger Lancelyn Green) A-

New Age, the Occult, and Lion Country (Nelson L. Price) A-

December 

Larson's Book of Cults (Bob Larson)  B+

The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in the Da Vinci Code (Carl E. Olson) A-

More Fun

Co-author Joe Johnson and Yours Truly, autographing copies of our multi-dozen-selling, pot-boilin' page-turner. Now that I'm a "real" author, I no longer have to compose and edit the fake, penny-a-word letters one finds in porno mags. I still miss my newspaper job, though. For some reason, muckraking just came naturally to me... 

Overnight Success -- in a Mere Six Years

The book is out, mothafuckaaaaaz! Feast yer yeën!


 
Merci beaucoup to Jocelyne. Has it really been twelve years? Go raibh maith agaibh to Liam, Talon, Cindy, an' me mither (fer puttin' up with me). Muchas gracias to the Lovecraftian horror I married (I was drunk when I proposed to her  - I swear it on a stack o' Bibles...), a plain, English "Thank you, I love you, and I'll never forget you" to Cat Connor and Dawn Scovill; and a rousing, "Hell yeah!" to all of us.

"Here's to all the Guns'n'fuckin' Roses fans who stuck with us through all the fuckin' shit. And to all those opposed? Well?..."