Sur l'arte d'écrivaillon

French this time. "On the scribbler's art". One finds it best to use the humblest terms for writing, since writing has become a hieratic trade nowadays in a manner not seen since Egypt and Sumer. And those people had the excuse of writing with a large number of logograms, by hand.

• I seem to have failed to convey my meaning, RE: Navajo mythology and black/white magic. My concern was with the kind of person who dislikes spiritual power being directly linked to people's behavior, which it actually is, in real societies' beliefs. Of course, what's funny is, the sort of person who thinks magic is neither good nor evil, generally also supports gun control—because (unlike spiritual power), hunks of metal can totally be evil.
  
  Huh, come to think of it, there is the issue of Donatism, though. So I suppose if a fictional society had established "sorcerer" as an office, anyone, good or bad, could call upon those powers, by virtue of the office—but limited by the actual function of the office. The evilest Catholic priest can only administer the same Sacraments as the saintliest; and if a society's sorcerers are supposed to invoke their Cookery Spirits, then cookery-magic they shall do, even if they are personally anorexic.


• The article "A Reader's Manifesto", later expanded into a book, is a healing balm. In it, B. R. Myers rips literary fiction a new one, and details how it's substituted verbal gymnastics—frequently bad verbal gymnastics—for actually good stories that are told well.
  
  Also, though, what the hell does Cormac McCarthy have against commas, or breaking sentences up into reasonable sizes? His prose sounds like a slightly slow-witted six-year-old telling you about a very exciting day.


• The section about the Paul Auster School of Writing—which is praised as "spare", yet involves lengthy ruminations on the concepts of "day" and "night"...merely along the way to informing the reader that it's dark when the protagonist wakes up—is hilarious.
  
  Although, a part of why it's funny, to me, is that the quoted passage reminds me of, "It's always April Fool's somewhere." "You have no idea how a calendar works, do you?"


• Recently got back to work on my fantasy book after a long hiatus. Changed it so the people are Asian-featured, but European-colored (and bearded). Also rewrote a chapter leading up to a battle, in order to make it more believable.
  
  Apropos of nothing (or is it?!), Templars-crossed-with-Shaolin who ride caribou are boss.


• I was thinking, it's interesting how civilization is almost exactly as old as the Young Earth set say the world is. So plainly, for a given value of "world", 6000 years is the thing's real age.
  
  Then again, phenomenological anthropocentrism is odious. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, it does in fact make a sound—that sound is just largely irrelevant. And just because 6000 years ago is when the Earth started being worth a damn, doesn't make that when the thing started as such. I wasn't worth much of a damn until I was about 22, but I don't give my age as 5.
  
  Amusingly, that rank, imbecilic anthropocentrism is involved in the arbitrary definition of "time" that has people say FTL (that doesn't involve instantaneous velocities greater than c) inherently involves time-travel. Objects only "arrive before they left" because you hubristically define "before" purely relative to your observations.


• Speaking of Biblical matters, "knowledge of good and evil" does not mean "knowledge" in the Greek sense. In Biblical Hebrew, to "know" a thing is to have mastery and authority over it...or to have sex with it ("knowing Biblically" is still a euphemism used in many rural parts of the US, which is frankly kinda cool). Hence, "knowledge of good and evil" means "presuming to define one's nature for oneself".
  
  If you don't know why that's a bad thing, you have a remarkably narrow experience of this world's moral possibilities. I assure you, there are more vices in this world—that someone might choose to claim are not vices, relative to their "nature"—than the small subset that you don't actually regard as vices.


• Apparently people are praising the downer ending of the third Hunger Games book, for showing some asinine idea that "nobody wins in wars." Well. Huh. You know, 70 million people died in World War II. That's significantly more than the entire Jewish and Polish population of 1940s Europe. And even if the Japanese had also killed twice as many Chinese people as they did, and the entire population of Korea, more people still died from the war.
  
  Thanks for that, critics (and you, Suzanne Collins)—it's nice to have you on the record preferring to let genocide go on unimpeded, rather than dirty your hands with warfare. Unless the things you say have no relation to reality and human history? Which is it—are you evil, or just stupid?


• Whenever people use the phrase "killing a sacred cow" as a term of praise, I enjoy reminding them that they are indulging in British Raj-era racial/religious/cultural slurs.
  
  Also, please recall that, if one actually knows why cattle are sacred in Hinduism, the phrase "kill a sacred cow" may be substituted with "symbolically murder your parents". Have fun with that.
  
  Then again, the proportion of the cheap iconoclasm generally praised as sacred-cow-slaughter that isn't mere Oedipal father-hating is statistically quite negligible. Perhaps the phrase is appropriate after all.


• Similarly, if "iconoclast" is used as a term of praise rather than abuse, it must be taken as a tacit endorsement of the Taliban's destruction of Buddha statues.


• It's too bad it's been about a decade since Morrowind came out—and that it's such a buggy game. I say this because that game's story—Indoril Nerevar, the Tribunal, the disappearance of the Dwemer—is far and away the best of the five Elder Scrolls games, and Elder Scrolls is currently the best work being done in Western fantasy, in any medium. All the best parts of Skyrim involve dwemer in some way, and the Ayleid ruins in Oblivion (to me, the most interesting part of that game) were, arguably, an only-partly-successful substitute for Dwemer ruins.
  
  That the main things people know about Elder Scrolls are stupid Skyrim memes—the arrow in the knee and one of the less-useful shouts—is, I think, a great injustice of our pop culture. This is the first setting I've been this enthusiastic about since my D&D campaign in high school, and I am not an easy man to please—still less when it has tropes I generally dislike, like snooty elves.


• The main thing I don't like about Elder Scrolls or Halo, and one of several things I hate about Mass Effect, is the ra-ra human jingoism. Especially since science fiction fans, at least, are always talking about how puny and insignificant humans are. I'm sorry, but if you meant that, they wouldn't always be super-special awesomesauce, in your fiction.
  
  It also doesn't bode well for a real First Contact, if you pathetic monkeys can't stand the idea that another race might be better at anything than you. I'm not sure whether the narrative "the aliens' or elves' sense of superiority is always wrong" is of Whig-Jingo or Marxist class-war origin—but then again, since Marx, like Rousseau, is just repeating the lies of the English Reformation in slightly modified form, I probably don't have to pick.