The Manifest Song of Faerie

Comus

2010-05-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

New review up at The Juggler. Comus is an obscure folk-rock band from the early Seventies that presaged entire genres (progressive rock, goth, dark metal) which came thereafter. Good stuff.

Going In Circles

2010-05-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

I have a review of Pamela Ribon's novel of marital estrangement and contusions (it's a comedy!) up at The Juggler.

I'm Blogging at a New Pagan Pop Culture Site

2010-05-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

I happy and proud to announce that we have blaunched a new site which focuses on popular culture from a Pagan perspective. The blog is called The Juggler, and is largely the creation of Jason over at The Wildhunt.

My first post (a brief retrospective of Siobhan Magnus' run on American Idol) is now up. I plan to continue this blog, and will announce post here as I write them so that my Facebook friends can be notified.

Happy Beltane everybody!

Friday poem

2010-03-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

Conjure waffles
Conjure sunshine
Conjure palm trees
Conjure sex

OK
I’ll tell you how:
Mix the batter
Heat the iron
Or go
To the Egg Shop
And buy a goddamn waffle

There is no mystery
Magic is embodied
In life
In healthy lust
And every aspiration attempted
In every fleeting win fulfilled

Conjure waffles
Conjure midnight
Conjure failure
Conjure pain

Yeah
Life flails and decays
“The centre cannot hold”

So what

I am Shiva trampled
Better for having flared
With passion
And lost
(So many, many times
--- Does poetry ever help?)

Conjure waffles
Conjure sweetness
Conjure power
Conjure hope

We are the making
We are the righting
We are the healing
We are the convergence

The spirit manifest in the physical
The agents of wise and compassionate God
The angels of restoration
For each other
For each other
In the broken ways we can

Conjure waffles
Conjure sunshine
Conjure palm trees
Conjure sex

Addison House

2010-02-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

I found the following poem as I was checking to see if I had any other material on Jane, and now that there are at least four of us from Addison House on Facebook, I thought it might be fun to post it up and tag the group on it. I wrote it in 1992, a couple of years after I moved to So. Cal:

Addison House

     Once a month
     (Or, at least, that's what we'd hoped)
     We'd form a hug circle and listen.

     It was a time for asking and appreciation.

     It was a spider-web beautiful pattern, negotiated and cherished
     Like every kind of love
     Really.

     Do I miss that?
     Are you kidding?

     Oh, there were the rough times.
     Terri's window pane shattered exile.
     Laura's enmeshment and severing.
     Jim's retching in the bathroom from so much back-pain.

     And then there were the absurd times.
     Charles asked for something and I said,
     "Only if you stand on a chair and sing a song from 'My Fair Lady' in a high, squeaky voice."
     And he did!
     (You have to know Charles.)
     Or discovering amazing connections with Scott.
     Or the panic that swept the house
     When Jeanette's brother killed a woman in San Jose.

     But, mostly, I miss the talking
          To Jim
          To Susan
          To Nina
          To Charles
          To Terri
          To Scott
          To Tad
          To Meredith
          To Laura
          To Jeanette
          To Lori
     And the home we made together.

___________________________________________

At this point I have no idea what "Laura's enmeshment and severing" meant. Forgotten in the mists of time.

The Final Fragment/Young Love Part 11

2010-02-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

And, at last, we reach the final gem:

Untitled XI

          Unasking and surprised,
               You gave me your touches, laughter and conversation
          I asked for love
               You took back your touches
          I asked for touching
               You took back your laughter
          I asked for friendship
               You took back your conversation
          I have nothing left to ask
               You have nothing left to take

Aw, Little Mertseger!

                    But…

          You gave me friendship
               I gave you pain
          You gave me attention
               I gave you pain
          You gave me nothing
               I gave you pain

Well, no. You are being melodramatic, LM. You gave her mild discomfort and awkwardness in a tight living situation. You were, essentially, a rash. You could be ignored except for the occasional flare-ups.

          You can give me nothing less
               I can give you nothing more

                    Why?

          Because you and I could not be an us
          Because I was too self-possessed
          Because you were too afraid

No, not really. She was just uninterested and hoping that avoiding Little Mertseger would not be too much of a hassle in the short-term.

          Because I expected too much
          Because you felt too little
          Because you and I were too young in many ways

Actually, that's reasonably accurate

                    And so?

          You and I can grow from this
          If we let

And that's where it all ends, fragmentary and incomplete, like many such sagas.

I had a meeting Berkeley today. Here's where the whole tragicomedy occurred:

I found solace in music that horrible last quarter playing on the streets of Berkeley with a group called (yes) The Troubadours.

Tim changed universities after that quarter, and Jane and he broke up. A year or so later (okay, I'll kiss and tell) Lisa Nakamoto gave me my first kiss (which may amuse any of my high school friends who might find this post up on Facebook). I asked Lisa out a couple of times immediately after that, but she did not want to take it any further. Two year later I had my first real, albeit brief, relationship.

I did see Jane a few times thereafter. I had a hot tub party at my folk's place three years later, and both Jane and Tim came (I got to see Jane in a one-piece! More fuel for the fire.) Jane and I went out twice alone together in the years following: we went to the SF Zoo right after she graduated, and I had lunch with her on one visit to So Cal (I bought her a dozen safely yellow roses, but did not give them to her.)

Seven years after the mess, I took a job teaching at Cal State Fullerton while I finished up my PhD.,and gave her a call from my depressing institutional, windowless office once I was settled in. I caught a huge whiff of the "you may be stalking me" vibe from that conversation, and, finally, let it go. In following year I started dating in earnest.

I have my regrets, and the whole episode was embarrassing. However, it opened me up in a lot of ways, and I do not, for all that, regret the poetry. I do not regret the aspiration and the lust. I do regret the dorkiness and lack of anything remotely resembling cool. However, it was a step on the way, and the message in the end is that it does get better. For all the mistakes, it does get better.

...sigh...Jane.

UPDATE:

Danny has thoughtfully provided a picture of many of the participants:

From left to right, that's Chris, Danny, Some Guy From Another Floor Who We Really Didn't Like And Did Not Want In The Picture, Yvonne, Jane, Me, and Eric B. (explicitly not the same as Edie's boyfriend at the time, Eric H.) This was taken near the end of the year, and I was happy for the moment being next to her. That's probably Danny's bed we're all on. I don't know why Jane had a pillow with the word "Bullshit" on it.

The Divine Oracle of False Hopes/Young Love Part 10

2010-02-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

Back in the second quarter before the end of life as I knew it, things had gotten marginally better, and Jane was not avoiding me entirely

Untitled IX

(When I converted all these poems to HTML years ago, I gave the untitled ones a number.)

          To revel in the inexplicable
          To find delight in swirling confusion
          To laugh while facing the intractable
          To smile at deception and illusion

Mottos that I still try to live by.

Unfortunately, Little Mertseger did not think these things were good at the time.

          Do you want me to care and not to care?
          Do you want me to play and stay away?

Did Jane give me some mixed signals? Well, when your every action and expression is being monitored like it's an oracle of the Goddess Aphrodite, then mixed signals are inevitable.  Any mixed signals were purely a matter of LM's interpretation.

I carried a torch for Jane for way too long. At one point in grad-school I sent her a mix-tape(!) and letter lightly wishing we could go nude bowling on a tropical island somewhere (!!). She replied with a friendly letter, much to my surprise. The perfume on the otherwise innocuous letter was enough to make me pine for another two or three years. Did she intend to put perfume on the letter, or did she not wash her hands that morning?

          I can’t know and remain unaware.
          I want to understand you. There’s no way.

No, LM, you do not want to understand. You do not want to accept a clear and direct rejection. You want to cling to false hopes.

          I’ve watched the beauty play across your face
          Happy to be talking to you again.

I wish I could have just enjoyed those moments. But lust demands more, does it not? Sigh...

          Do you want me to help you find your place,
          And yet not want me to help at all, Jane?

Because it's her interests that I really have in mind. What bullshit.

          I guess I care too much and not enough
          Why does this friendship have to be so rough?

No, LM, Jane awoke in you a good old animal rut, and from the moment you declared your love for her and she said no it could never really be a friendship, not while your desire remained overwhelming.

Just one more poem to go in the grand saga of....sigh...Jane.

Martyrdom for Idiots/Young Love Part 9

2010-02-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

It was the last year of quarters at Cal: next year they would switch to semesters. I returned from winter-break in full wallow mode for the second quarter. I thoroughly given up the ghost that I was writing for Jane, and so these last three poems were written with no expectation that she would ever see them.

A Second Rather Poor Love Sonnet Written ‘Midst a Typical Crush

I'm sure you will be pleased to know that there is no third one in the series.

          Pound it down, the nail beaten into flesh:

Wait, is Little Mertseger really going to compare his unrequited love for Jane to ...

          Every time I see your smile I’m hung
          On a cross-spanned moment, feeling the fresh,

As Pamie said, "Jesus."

Literally.

          Daylong torture until my spirit’s sunk
          In a stormy hell of frustrate desire.
          My every strand of hope has unraveled
          And burned in the unnoticing fire

Which is it, crucifixion or immolation? Make up your mind, LM!

          Of your eyes from which I cannot travel.

Now that is an awkwardly constructed sentence.

          Dead, I am not God to rise and heaven find,
          And so my soul treads the long, awful miles
          To the Last Despair, my body left behind

Ah, yes, the Random Capitalization of deep significance. Unfortunately, I still use that device.

          An empty husk crucified by your smiles.

"Crucified by your smiles" is good. Probably not good enough to build an entire sonnet around.

          Only your touch will warm these cold remains,
          And until that time I will Rest In Pain.

The deepest irony here is, of course, that while I was perfectly aware that I was being a martyr and that I had enough detachment to connect my unrequited love for Jane to earlier crushes on women who I had never really interacted, things were not really as bad as they could be and things were going to get worse.

In the second quarter of quarter of my junior year I took the hardest class of my college career: Mathematical Analysis. The course essentially takes all the results you might be taught in your first year Calculus course if you're a science or engineering major and proves them rigorously. IIRC, we started off with the axiom that 0 does not equal 1, and proved 1+1 = 2 in the first problem set. The take-home final had us prove a version of the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem (every continuous function of a compact set to itself will map at last one point to itself) which sounds remarkably esoteric until you learn that it's very much on the same line of reasoning that results in the Nash Equilibrium of A Beautiful Mind fame. Fueled, in part, by the sublimation and avoidance of whole...sigh...Jane crisis, I got one of my three A+'s, the one that I'm most proud.

After picking up my grade that afternoon I asked Jane's roommate Yvonne if Jane and Tim were a thing. She said yes, and I became some form of the walking dead as I headed into spring break.

I suppose it could have been worse. I never heard sex sounds coming from their rooms, nor even saw them kissing. They were considerate of my feelings and discrete. But when the last episode of MASH screened that spring, the rest of the floor gathered in Tim's room to watch, and I went to watch in the lounge on the ground floor sad that she was watching in his arms as Hawkeye went insane.

The Bitter Sweetness/Young Love Part 8

2010-01-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

On Love

Yes, I'm sure this sonnet will last for the ages as one of the definitive expositions of love. Oh, yeah, right up there with Will's and Edna's.

In fact, after this episode of unrequited love, I made an effort to avoid using the word "love" in my poetry even in the sonnets I wrote for later girlfriends and my wife. "Love" is weak. Oh, It's a powerful concept, a powerful emotion, but it's a weak, weak word. Vague. Incapable of bearing the specificity of this individual, this moment, this rising tide of pulse and affection.

And I do not, by the way, find the distinctions between eros, amour, and agape all that useful.  That taxonomy seemed like such a revelation when I first learned of it in my church's youth group. But now, mostly, it just seems to be a tool for repression and sublimation.

Gah! It's okay that you want to fuck her. Really. It is. You certainly don't have to act on that fact, nor, even express that desire to her. The usual social boundaries are perfectly necessary. They largely work at keeping people emotionally and physically safe.  Learning to negotiate those boundaries does not have to be disaster (though, for almost all of us it will be at one point or another). That's okay: there is grace, healing and life goes on.

Agape is nice, in its tepid way. Compassion and service and working for justice are all worthy things. Go and do them. But agape is no substitute for good, healthy lust. For it is in lust that we are most engaged in life, in that marvelous, miraculous chain of creation and renewal.

However, I am a sucker for amour, and I'm not sure that it's entirely good for me. "To love, pure and chaste, from a far." Hell, I probably sang "The Impossible Dream" in the shower while this whole mess was going on. Thing about amour is that it can be entirely one-sided. You can carry it with you no matter what happens, no matter what the other person feels or wants. It's beautiful, but it can be a trap. It can be perfectly safe, in a way that would have appalled the troubadours who invented it. The idea of courtly love was meant to subvert the dominant social paradigm. It was meant to be dangerous and cross socially acceptable boundaries.

          How can I describe the hurting, the bliss,
          The lonely hours laying awake at night,
          The confusion about what was amiss,
          The despair that it would not work out right,
          And the blinding rush of hope that maybe
          – Just maybe, in spite of the odds – it would?

I'd probably describe it now as a perfectly normal part of learning to love that I should have confronted years earlier.

          How can I tell of my having to see
          You laughing and sorely wishing I could
          Share even that small joy with you again?

After she rejected me, Jane tried to avoid me to the extent possible given that our rooms were two doors away from each other. But, inevitably, I'd encounter her, and her face would fall, and she'd bail. It got better, but remained awkward.

          The good feelings and all those painful ones
          Are both, I believe, part of love. And, Jane,
          Love does not diminish once it’s begun.
          And so, despite the pain, I still love you
          And hope that someday you will love me too.

It was the fall of 1982 at Cal, and so I had the additionally surreal experience of getting to sit next to Jane after she rejected me at the Big Game which concluded with The Play. See, a last second triumph was possible! I'd just keep lateraling and refuse to be downed as I ran through the Stanford Band of her rejection.

And so I wrote these sonnets and bought a box of fancy gray Crane stationary, carefully typed up all seven of them on my electric typewriter and put them in a nice black report binder to give to her for Christmas! (Gray and black? How romantic.) Thank goodness I chickened out about giving them to her.

I did write three more poems about her that year, and so we are approaching the end of the story.

Shall I Compare Thee/Young Love Part 7

2010-01-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

At last we reach a poem that is a bit more like a love sonnet in that it's a tiny step in the right direction towards being more direct. It's still a failure in many ways, though.

On You

Yes, let's focus more of my unwanted attention "on you". I'm sure that will help.

          I want to say how beautiful you are.

I want to say how beautiful you are, but, instead, I will only speak of it indirectly.

There are two pertinent facts here. Jane is gorgeous, but back then she had all the normal insecurities of any other college freshman. Since men are behind the curve in our social, emotional and sexual development, most guys can not address that tangle at that age. I certainly did not have the tools. Most guys learn not to go there until we're well within in the safety of the make-out zone.

          I could write in some really schmaltzy style
          About your soft raven hair or the star
          That flashes in your eyes when you smile.

My particular issue for a long, long time was a lack of immediacy of my feelings and their expression. I'd only figure out I liked this girl when the date was over, and I had a chance to process it. And then all the emotions would pour out upon the page, by which point the girl assumed that nothing was there and had already moved on.

I would have been better off had I written directly about how hott she was. She would, almost certainly, have been incapable of hearing it amidst her anxiety about her freshman two, but, at least, doing so would have been more honest.

          But the beauty that overwhelms me so
          Is, instead, an inner glow of caring.

No, Little Mertseger, Jane sympathized with you once in a friendly way. She was no saint: just a nice, normal young woman. That glow you're seeing? It's a healthy and wonderful part of your self that your overlaying on your image of her.

          You’ve much inside of you to give, and, though
          I may never be a part of that sharing,
          I hope that you will open up to someone

Oh, oh, oh! Little Mertseger, be careful of what you wish for! If you think it's bad now, wait until she starts seeing Tim two doors down that hall.

Ow.

          So that you may know the same joy I felt
          Once the vibrations of love had begun
          To warm me and make my icy core melt.

As Maude says, "Oh, Harold... That's *wonderful*. Go and love some more. "

          Your beauty lays in what you have to share,
          As well as in your eyes and body fair.

No, not really. I mean, Jane, was nice enough. She was a little depressive for perfectly reasonable reasons that it is not my place to share. No, her beauty, as I knew it, was all from wonderful, healthy, superficial reasons. Fantastic cheekbones, large captivating eyes, a tall, mesomorphic frame, great legs, and full lips that were quick to smile. Sigh...Jane.

My Superpower: An Ineffable Capacity to Bore/Young Love Part 6

2010-01-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, so maybe whining is not the answer to winning Jane's affection. Maybe if I apply my vastly greater perspective as a JUNIOR, I can help her with her problems:

On College

          What is college life really about, Jane?

As you can see from the fact that I ended a line with it, her name really is Jane. I shan't reveal her last name, but it would not matter much if I did. The name she had in college does not seem to show up on the web, and so I presume she got married at some point.

          Problem sets, boring lectures, GPA’s,
          No time to sleep, intellectual strain,
          Declaring majors and long final days?

I managed to sleep ten-hours a night in my college days (to the envy and disgust of my floormates). I never could understand the ritual of going to a library for hours each night, talking to each other, and avoiding actually doing the assignments and then complaining about not getting enough sleep. I'd work on the problem sets in the afternoon, and if there were any problems I could not solve, I'd review them before sleeping, and then, more often than not, wake up with the answer.

          The important part of college involves
          None of these, for beneath the constant strife
          You will find that most people need to solve
          The dilemma of an undeclared life.

And that remains true.

          You must discover yourself and your needs.

Know thyself!

Is this the least romantic love sonnet ever written?

          You must find out what is important to you.
          And after you know yourself well indeed
          You will know, at last, what you want to do.
          But unless you learn that, all the knowledge
          You’ve gained will be worthless after college.

Yes, yes it is.

Neediness and the Anima/Young Love Part 5

2010-01-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

The details are hazy to me after all these years, but I apparently presented the previous three poems to...sigh, Jane. I probably copied them from the lab-book in which I wrote my poetry back then to the blue stationary I used back in those pre-internet and e-mail days using a blue, erasable ink pen. We join the program already in progress:

After That Black Friday

One week after we saw Pink Floyd: The Wall she rejected me. The exact way and location has been, thankfully, expunged from my memory at this point. I do know that she felt bad about it, and that at least it was not the more usual, "We can still be friends." speech.

          Please don’t shut me out, I need to talk to you.

Yes, please: I'm sure the puissant force of my neediness is exactly what can turn this relationship around.

          I’m sorry about what happened last week.
          I see now what I was trying to do:
          Forcing you to become THE ONE I seek.

Is this the point where we talk about projection?

Robert Bly calls THE ONE "the golden-haired one" in Iron John, and makes the case that guys project the "perfect woman" on the first woman we fall for when, in fact, that perfect woman is an idealized part of our own psyche (the anima). Most woman will, naturally enough, flee at the first whiff of such expectations. Women go through similar issues with their animus, though Bly makes the case that there are some differences in how men and women go about integrating these other sides of their personality.

          You said you couldn’t be "special" to me,
          And for days after that I raged inside
          Like some spoiled brat deprived of his candy,

Well, I am an only child, and pretty used to getting my way.

          A wise friend’s letter came to turn the tide.

Here's where I must say that my friends really came through for me during that time. John wrote me lovely letters of encouragement during the weeks of this little drama.   Then over Christmas break all my high school friends helped me commiserate.

It was a couple of years later, after he came out to me, that I learned that John was going through a similar, but far more difficult, crisis over his straight roommate at the very same time. I am extremely grateful and amazed that he would support me while his being in the closet prevented him from seeking similar support from me.

          It’s you I like, not what you can give me,

Bullshit.

          And I write because I enjoy writing,

Truth.

          Not because I expect you, Jane, to be
          Part of something "special" and exciting.

Bullshit.

          Even if you give me nothing, you see,
          You are already someone special to me.

And bullshit, yet again.

Yes, Little Mertseger, she was special to you, but you were not attractive to her. It's really that simple.  The loftiest poetry in the world (let alone this screed of neediness and bullshit) could not change that fact.

The Agony and...Well, the Agony/Young Love Part 4

2010-01-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, so here's where I reach the peak of squirm. We still have four poems to go in this first part of the...sigh, Jane saga, but I came to my senses and never gave them to her. This one though, this one is the one I regret giving her. It would be a fine poem to save and present later in a relationship, but...

The only jury I ever sat on was for an indecent exposure case. A delivery driver was dropping off paper at a local company, and thought he was getting powerful signals from the cute receptionist. She had, for instance, shown him the storage closet and stretched a bit from her morning of sitting at the phone, and he took that as the universal bow-bow-chika of a porn scene, apparently. In any case, when she turn around at her desk to sign the invoice, there he was with his pants down around his thighs. She objected, he fled and by the time he had returned the truck that day, he was fired.

He did not contest the facts, and so the case was whether his intent met that of the indecent exposure law. He took the stand, and had the following exchange with the prosecutor:

PROSECUTOR: You had delivered paper to that company several times before?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: And you had seen the receptionist at least some of the previous times?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: And you found her attractive?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: Did you ever ask her out on a date?
ACCUSED: No, Sir.

And we in the jury were like, "You know, you might just think about that before you pull your pants down next time." We deliberated a whole fifteen minutes trying to find any way to interpret the intent of the law in his favor, but we found him guilty.

And so it goes with Little Mertseger: could I not have just asked Jane out again before writing:

Thank You

          In this last poem I’d like to say thank you
          For the hours we’ve spent this past week talking,
          For caring when I felt depressed and blue,
          For telling me so much after walking
          Back from the movie that cold Friday night.

Apparently, I'd share my sadness of being a lonely guy, and she'd shared her sadness over of being away from home and the crunch of the studies at Cal. And we had said some words of encouragement to each other.

          Because, believe it or not, I do care
          That you can see the joy and delight

That line should read more towards "I do care/whether or not you can see..." but the usual squeezing into ten syllables squeezed out some sense.

          That permeates this world. I’d like to share
          The secret of the happiness I feel

[DALEK VOICE]: CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT!

          Even in the deepest pit of depression:

Ugh: I usual at least try to avoid them.

          It is the knowledge that no one can steal
          From me such moments of confirmation
          That there are people who care like you do,
          And so I say thank you and I love you.

And so that's it. My great squirmy shame: the first time I told any woman that I loved them was in a sonnet after a single, perfectly chaste, kinda, sorta, if-you-squint-the-right-way date.

The Patriarchy Strikes Back/Young Love Part 3

2010-01-25T10:53:00.001-08:00

We talked a bit into the night after watching Pink Floyd: The Wall. Jane was a freshman at that point and a bit overwhelmed by college life and the challenges of Cal. A beautiful women confessing her flaws? Like catnip. Ogg man. Ogg fix things for you. Ogg make all better. Take you to cave, Ogg will, and

…ravish you?

Nope. Write another sonnet:

Second Thoughts

See what I did there? It’s the second sonnet in the series. Face meet palm.

          Maybe you don’t like sonnets – I don’t care.

And here we see the violence inherent in the system.

At this point even Little Mertseger is dimly aware that Jane might not want sonnets written for her at that particular point in her life from this particular guy. But he’s going to write ‘em for her anyway because that’s what a man does. A manly man gives due consideration to what a woman wants, ignores it, and then does what he wants anyway.

Mary Daly died a couple of weeks ago.

          Sometimes a poem is the only way
          To say something. Because you have to dare,
          If you want to communicate, O.K.?

Just who am I trying to convince here?

          Jane, you are not a husk but a cocoon.

And what woman would not want to hear that she’s not a husk, really?

          I have seen the butterfly in your smile,
          Heard it in your laughter saying, "Soon…soon…"
          And watched the wings flash in your eyes a while.

Have we thoroughly ground the butterfly metaphor into a messy pulp yet?*

          But you mustn’t be so hard on yourself.

That could be my job, if you’d just let me in.

          You’ve got to open up your curtains, Jane,
          And let your sunshine out, not leave it shelved

“Let your sunshine out” is probably the only slightly redeeming twist in this poem.

          In some musty corner smothered by rain.

But exactly how does one shelve sunshine? And how can rain smother anything, let alone musty-corneredly shelved sunshine?

          You’ve got to see the butterfly within
          Before you’ll feel your soul fly with the wind.**

Oh, the overarching sentiment of the poem is not horrible. Jane feels bed, and I’d like to be there for her. But I probably thought of myself as a feminist at that point, but was thoroughly lacking in any self-awareness about how that might matter in, you know, dating women.

*No, we have not.

**Now we have.

The Threshold of Doom/Young Love Part 2

2010-01-25T10:49:00.000-08:00

It would be easy to blame Edie and Eric, but they were only the trigger, really.

The real question is why in my junior year at Cal I decided to apply for a coed dorm floor after two years of listing no-preference and being assigned to all-guy floors. My guess is that I just wanted to be on a coed floor because everyone else wanted to be on a coed floor. In any case, it was on the fourth floor of Freeborn Hall at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1982 where the whole disaster took place.

See, I had been perfectly comfortable as an observer of the whole love thang. It was safe and easy to keep it at a distance and watch while it happened all around me. I was, like many mathematicians, comfortable in spaces of interiority and seeing the angst and roil of the hormone-fueled couplings around me merge and purge with and air of faint amusement. How droll it all seemed.

But then, Edie and I were in Eric’s room and we decided to go see Poltergeist still playing that fall at the Grand Lake Theater. Neither Edie nor Eric knew that it was their first date, to be fair. But they were holding hands by the time we were seated. And macking intensely by the time Carol Anne in the film announced “They’re here.” Meanwhile, I broke in two, forgotten in the sidecar next to them.

And so I climbed up the hill to my sacred grove and cried. It was finally time to admit that I was human.

And so, couple weeks later Yvonne and Danny were orbiting closer, and I had gotten to know Yvonne’s roommate…sigh…Jane. That Friday we went over to the California Theatres where Danny and Yvonne went to My Favorite Year and Jane and I went to Pink Floyd: The Wall. Which we bonded over hating. (Writhing maggots lose me every time). So, of course, the obvious thing to do while she was away that weekend was write her three sonnets and then (“No, Little Mertseger, don’t do it!”) give them to her.

Here’s the first one:

Saturday Afternoon

Because it is ever so important to know exactly what I did in the hours following our talking together.

          Poets, lovers, and joggers – I missed you.

Not a bad sentiment, really. But which of these three things is not like the other?

          I went into the hills after you left
          To take in the sunlight and enjoy the view.

Fair enough.

          And to write. But words, no matter how deft,
          Just cannot describe how happily green
          The grass was as it pushed against the dry
          Brown of last year. I wish you could have seen
          The awesome blue of that warm winter sky.

California is weird. It’s the winter rather than the spring when life returns to the hills after the first rain falls. Of course, it was the green of lust pushing against the brown of my repressed desires that was really the issue here.

          And all around people walking in pairs;
          People running up hills, while I just looked.

Here’s where I stop “just looking” … and start writing?

Oh, well, at least it was a step towards interacting with another human being. A horribly embarrassing, uncool and misguided step, but a step nonetheless.

          But, Jane, I don’t want to jog, and, I swear,
          I rather take you than my poetry book.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge: say no more!

          For I would try to make you see
          The wonder and the possibilities.

“make you see” is rather problematic, in’t it? I would be her knight in shining armor rescuing the fair damsel from her own issues. Would were it ever so easy.

It’s not a bad little poem, but it is pretty indirect. However, we’d had one chaste, semi-agreeable, sort-of date, and I was writing sonnets. And that’s the issue right there. I’m sure that…sigh…Jane had no idea whatsoever that this was coming.

Pulling off the scab/Young Love Part 1

2010-01-20T09:31:00.000-08:00

So Pamie has found a journal she wrote when she was fifteen, and is presenting entries with commentary of the rage of hormones that is being fifteen, perpetually crushing, and wrestling the pain to the page. It's delightful, often hilarious, and you should read it.

It's great because it is so universal and specific at the same time. She's a pro, and the over-wrought language of her young love was, most likely, a necessary part of the development of her craft and her person. It's beautiful, beautiful stuff.

I can match her, phrase for embarrassing phrase, and so in the spirit of internet camaraderie and terrible memes, I will present the sonnets I wrote for...sigh...Jane. All my poetry is already up on the web, and you can read ahead starting here (press the red ball to read earlier commentary).

Boys develop later than girls, of course, and my emotional development was later than most, and so I really did not fall off the cliff over someone I actually interacted with until my junior year in college. Let's, however, back up a bit to the safety of a crush over someone to whom I literally said two words ("Harvard Co-op", if you must know).

A Rather Poor Love Sonnet Written ‘Midst a Typical Crush

See, even as I wrote the piece, I knew it was just another crush.

          I’d write a sonnet every day and so
          Wrench the sun to this page, if it would light
          Your cheeks in the ancient vernal glow
          That shivers me when you fill my empty sight.

Because, naturally, writing sonnets is what gets women hot.

Perhaps it's a writer thing in which it's far safer to pour your feelings out on the page rather than actually talk to someone.

I do like the phrase "ancient vernal glow": in other words, "horniness".

          But you’re encased in the amber distance,

Who's encased here? Certainly not this fine young coed who doesn't even know I exist.

          A frozen span that lets me neither speak

Ah, yes, me that's who.

          Nor know whether behind your bright laughter glance
          There’s a woman who’d understand these weak
          Words, or whether your soft spring-shine smile hides
          A void of thought, spirit, hope or passion.

Because this girl I'm lusting for is either capable of understanding, you know, English or is a vacuous zombie. Those are all the options. Yup.

          For love in all its forms will not abide
          Solely upon a body’s attraction.

No, it requires peanut-brittle as well. Or something.

          You attract me deeply, but I must know
          That you contain a heart, a mind, a soul.

Did I go there? I went there. Little Mertseger was a pig. Or just stupid.

Ah, well, as you can see LM had a lot of growing to do, and it was going to get worse, much worse, before it got better.

The Wicker Man: a Rock Opera about the Ultimate Sacrifice

2008-10-06T07:38:00.000-07:00

The first thing you need to know about the current production of The Wicker Man as a rock opera currently playing in San Francisco through Oct. 25 is that it is essentially a community-theater production of the original film. I like community theater, but it has its limitations. In this case, those limitations include a postage-stamp-sized stage, and no scenery beyond a reasonably deft faux stained-glassed window which is covered up after the first scene. Given those limitations, the production is a qualified delight.

The venue is The Dark Room, a seedy bar in the Mission which has been somewhat converted into a seedy theater. The bar remains along the left-hand wall serving as the home of the light and sound boards. Surprisingly, the sound system is audiophile-level superb and effortlessly and accurately delivered the casts' voices. The theater seats maybe a hundred and a BYOB (beer mostly) crowd of, maybe, forty showed up for Saturday night's show. I sat immediate in front of DAN FOLEY's (Captain, Harbormaster and Photographer) affable Mom and Aunt.

The script is quite faithful to the 1973 movie. I'm guessing that roughly half of the dialog is taken straight from the film. The setting has been moved "an island across the Bay", and the period is nebulous. The time-line is compressed a bit, as is the running time (maybe 85 minutes here from 100 in the movie). Minor changes to the film occur throughout. Summerisle's (STEFFANOS X) first name is "Lord", for instance, and May Morrison (ERIN LUCAS) is a tailor. The imaginary Wicker Man is placed prominently in the middle of the village green. Essentially, this stage production is The Wicker Man (1973) minus the music of Paul Giovanni plus the music of Jim Fourniadis.

The music is serviceable and suggestive of rock operas of the era (Hair,Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar) though a bit less ambitious. The rock-combo orchestrations are pre-recorded but the cast and sound-guy easily hit all the cues. The first song, a brief sermonette on a passage from Job sung by the lead, FLYNNE DE MARCO (Sargeant Neil Howie), and the finale, a contrapuntal piece between the chorus of Pagan islanders and Sergeant Howie, are both pretty good (I'm a sucker for polyphony). "The Landlord's Daughter" from the original is sung in its entirely, and a verse of "The Tinker of Rye" is sung by DAN FOLEY in an awkward scene transition.

The performances are enthusiastic and fairly broad. DE MARCO anchors the show reasonably well. He had some pitch problems in the first song, but his nerves seemed to settle thereafter. His Sergeant Howie references Woodward's fairly closely. STEFFANOS X's Lord Summerisle is suitably charismatic, and KHAMARA PETTUS' Willow is pretty and appropriately burlesque (probably the only reasonable choice given the lack of nudity or, you know, even stage walls). The various bit players generally suit their roles. Props to MIKL-EM for gamely playing the role of an eight-year old girl (Myrtle Morrison) in addition to the Grave Digger and the Doctor.

All in all, the show is well worth the price, and I recommend Bay Area Pagans checking it out. If you like the 1973 film, then this show is a lively and small variation on the same material. Be sure to bring a beer in a brown paper bag (or you will feel horribly out of fashion) and enjoy the romp.
________________________________________________

Here's some textual criticism of the show from a Pagan perspective. Both the show and original film are largely unaware of Neo-Paganism (the show includes a invocation of the elements at the sacrifice which is not present in the film suggesting some additional familiarity), and that's okay. Do we, after all, really want to be portrayed as a community capable of conspiring to human sacrifice? Been there, done the Satanic Panic of the 80's. However, I do feel that the show misses some opportunities in its update.

Sergeant Howie's Scottish Presbyterian evangelicalism is quite a different flavor to that we are more familiar with in the US. Howie's faith is stern, austere, and ascetic. It might be more interesting to explore the character as a more scary kind of US evangelical: outgoing, compelled to witness no matter how awkward the situation, and utterly convinced that there existed a golden era of traditional, Red-state values no matter how little evidence there is that such an era actually existed. I expect that the character of Sergeant Howie would relate much more to the sufferings of Paul than Job, for instance.

Similarly, it might be more interesting to tie the Summerislanders closer to California, if that's where you wish to set the play. California was the home of The Peoples Temple and Heaven's Gate, after all, and a bunch of us go out to the desert every year to burn a giant figure of a man. FBI Agent Howie at Burning Man? Am I wrong or does it almost write itself?

But, of course, that would not be the Wicker Man. Nevertheless, the show might be a spicier if it incorporated more of the languages of both modern evangelicalism (WWJD, Jesus is my boyfriend, etc.) and modern Paganism (theoretical support for polyamory, anti-patriarchal rhetoric, fanatical Green lifestyle, etc.).

Thoughts On Duotheism

2008-07-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

So, back when I was in the fifth and final semester of training for The Third Road, I somehow got into my mind that I should write an ancient holy book. And so I told a couple of my oldest and dearest friends that I was doing so, and asked them what they'd like to see included. They both happen to be gay, and so one said "gay marriage". It was 1997 and I was reading The Witches Bible by the Farrars as I rode across the Bay on a ferry at dawn because BART was on strike.

The Third Road is an off-shoot of Feri Tradition, and so duotheism does not play as central of a role as it does in Wicca. In Anderson's Feri Creation Myth (a version of which can be found in Spiral Dance) the Great White Goddess splits of into two other Goddesses and then three other Gods, one of which (Dian Y Glas) becomes Her Consort and partner.

The question I had to address as I worked on The Book of Nub was how could placing a heterosexual couple at the center of everything not be biased against non-monogamous, non-heterosexuals? I came up with several possibilities and used at least three in the piece.

First, there was this idea of transformation that is already inherent in the Feri Creation Myth. Perhaps, the sexuality of the Gods is fluid. Affirming that viewpoint would allow the pair of Gods to be at the center of everything, and, thus, their relationship could be the mythological basis supporting all homosexual and heterosexual pairings. But, then, why only two? I could imagine the Gods splitting and interacting in ways that support all healthy human interactions. But, then, why human? Was I really going to have to tell a story that would cover the thousands of mating types of some fungal sexuality? Going down this path was getting messy. I intuited that the myth was losing power.

So how about putting Goddess and God back at the center of everything, and argue that even if gays and lesbians could not relate to their relationship, they could at least acknowledge that they were the children of one man and one woman? Bleh. I want my passion for my lover and not the passion of my parents to be reflected in the passion of my Gods for each other. However worthy my parents' passion is for each other, it's not my passion. How could I accept less for homosexual brothers and sisters?

Why did I find the sexual passion of the Gods for each other as so affirming of our existence? Why did I find it so powerful? The Wiccans use the term "polarity" to describe the forces that drive the universe. The attraction of oppositely charged particles and, indeed, all physical forces are seen to be mythologically connected to the sexual attraction between Goddess and God. There is a huge, powerful idea in there that I wanted in my book.

The one thing that every healthy sexual encounter has, no matter what its stripe, is that it is one being reaching toward another. The thing that I found most powerful in Wiccan duotheism is that idea that this raw connection between my self and an other in sexual intimacy reflects and encapsulates the similar intimacy the greater Powers that drive the All That Is. Every human could certainly relate to their self interacting with an other (or others) in that dance of sexual attraction. Thus, the first pervading version of duotheism in The Book of Nub is that between Self and Other. We are Selves striving for that intimate connection to the Goddess as Other, and She reciprocates and epitomizes and fulfills that attraction in Her relationship to God and to the Universe.

But what is the best way to express how God and Goddess are intimately interconnected? Francesca (my teacher) saw the Goddess as the darkness between the stars and the God as "...the light that emerges from the darkness to fructify it." That is, They are a mutually arising pair of opposites. I thought about Mother Earth and Father Time, and thought that another way to think of Them is as space and time, providing the ground for everything to be and become. And so this second approach to duotheism that I incorporated into The Book of Nub.

But, still, even though I spent an entire chapter showing how the God and Goddess' relationship affirms all committed human relationships, I did not feel that this fully affirmed good gay sex. And so I brought in some lesser Gods and Goddesses to show how purely gay and lesbian relationships might drive our world as well. Thus, Nub 8: 10-12 reads "The beautiful Goddess of Shore lies naked before Her lover Goddess Ocean. The romance of the Full Moon excites Them, and the Ocean licks deep the sacred hollows of Shore. In wave after wave of delight They come together, and the roar of Their Passion never ceases." (As a typical heterosexual male, I must say I find those lines hot, if I do say so myself. Oh, why must we fetishize the lesbians?)

And so to summarize my duotheistic ontology, I believe that the center motive that drives our Universe is that reaching out between Self and Other. The Goddess brings others into being that She and we might experience that longing, that lust and that love. The Goddess and the God are the exemplars of that Passion which drives the All That Is, and, indeed, it is within Them as space and Time that we have our being. Between us and Them are myriads of being including other powerful Gods and Goddess whose lust for each other drives particular systems within this Universe as well.

After all this material was worked out and written down, Francesca coincidentally afforded my fellow students and I the chance to do a small ritual with Fred Lamond who was one of Gardner's initiates. He's a lovely, lovely gentleman, and after the ritual we got a-talking about Wicca and thealogy, as one might hope. I read for him Nub 4: 1-2:

The Goddess delights in Darkness as well as Light, in silence as well as sound, in the transformation of death as well as the growth in life. The Goddess darkens like the Moon. She is the silence of mystery. She enfolds you soft within Her arms at every transition of Life to Death and Death to Life. For all meaning is rooted in contrast, and She is the Mother of Wisdom.

She is the trellis upon which the vines of being grow. Everything is rooted in the same material and clings to the same structure as it reaches toward the Light of its Godhood. Her manna is your uniqueness discovered in your isolation from the Other. Her nectar is the oneness you find in your connection to, immersion in and embracing of the Other. You eat and are, in turn, consumed, "for all things feed one another."

Truly, there is but one polarity: that between Self and Other, and any other duality is merely a lesson about that polarity. Love and Hate, Man and Woman, Light and Darkness, positive and negative electric charges are merely signposts on the path to Godhood. When you claim your Self, you claim the Universe.

We then talked about polarity in Wiccan terms, and he politely disagreed with my ontology. Theirs was a fertility religion, he said. It's a sexual energy between a Goddess and God which drives everything. And so I do not think that I could convince any Wiccan that my vision is correct. Nevertheless, it was an extreme honor to get to talk to him about the topic.

Least Read Book Meme

2008-05-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

This meme started at obake, but I learned of it at Montykins.

Bold: Read.
Underlined Read for school.
Italic: Started but never finished.
Asterisk*: Liked well enough to reread or recommend.

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys*
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon*
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

Recommended Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

2008-04-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

I wrote this list several years ago and ran out of steam towards the end, but it's a good summary of my favorites.

1. Shockwave Rider, John Brunner

Distopian vision of a time not too far from now when the rate of change has gotten too high for most people to cope. The main character is an ultra-talented hacker searching for wisdom. He finds it in a small Utopian Californian town from whence he launches a digital revolution using computer viruses. Written before the advent of PC’s.

2. Stand On Zanabar, John Brunner

Distopian vision of a time not too far from now when population pressure has gotten too high for most people to cope. The novel weaves together many styles. It has two main plot lines and a raft of secondary characters which flesh out this remarkable vision.

3. Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

A truly remarkable novel about prejudice, redemption and cultural misunderstanding. The main character, Andrew (Ender) Wiggins from Enders Game is a socio-religious sleuth trying to explain the deaths of several people in the small human settlement on a planet containing the only other sentient race we have found but haven’t exterminated. Chock full of unexpected revelations that lead to healing.

4. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

Andrew (Ender) Wiggins is a young boy with a talent for military strategy who is being trained to stop the threat of alien invaders. Will he be trained in time to make a difference? A gripping read.

5. Dune, Frank Herbert

The one source for the drug that allows faster than light space travel is the planet Dune. Political intrigue about the control of Dune in an interstellar empire revolves around the son of a star-lord. The novel explodes into a struggle for religious and ecological salvation.

6. The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis

Fantasy for young adults about a magical place called Narnia that you can to get from here. Right and wrong are obvious, and the children who find their way to Narnia become better people from the experience.

7. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

There is a great evil in Middle Earth threatening to conquer all. If the evil Sauron can recover His One Ring, then all will be lost. If the forces of Good can destroy the Ring, all will be saved. Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Troll, Wizards and Orcs all inhabit a tale full of deception, betrayal, valor, rebirth, desperation and struggles against long odds.

8. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

An interstellar dark age is coming, and one man (Harry Seldon) has the mathematics to prove it. Will his efforts and those of his successors be able to minimize the darkness?

9. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

People have figured out how to teleport themselves around, but their range is limited. Can anyone figure out how to jump further to interplanetary distances? The answer rests in the mind of a deranged man suffering from synesthesia.

10. Norstrillia, Cordwainer Smith

Drugs providing the indefinite prolongation of human life are produced only on one planet from giant diseased sheep. With the help of an heirloom battle-computer one boy corners the market on the immortality elixir and buys Earth and everything on it. He goes there and receives the psychological healing he seeks from the wisdom of a cat-man and the love of a beautiful cat-woman.

11. The Lensman Series, E. E. “Doc” Smith

Good Guys vs. Bad Guys in a militaristic showdown which spans two galaxies. The Bad Guys have a ruthless, compassionless hierarchy. The Good Guys have a ruthless, compassionate hierarchy. An arms race between the two advances with each book in the series. Oh, yeah, and the Bad Guys sell drugs.

12. Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert Heinlein

The only survivor of a expedition to Mars is a boy who was conceived on the way there and is subsequently raised by Martians. He returns to Earth and discovers what it means to be human and establishes a polyamorous, love-without-limits cult.

13. Jesus On Mars, Philip Jose Farmer

Reviewing a photographic mapping of Mars, scientists discover a human-sized door on the surface with the letters Alpha and Omega inscribed on it. An expedition is sent and discovers under the surface a human settlement of Jews lead by a being claiming to be Jesus. The conservative Christian leader of the expedition has to grapple with the difference between his version of Christianity and that being practiced by the settlement.

14. Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein

Lazarus Long was born at the turn of the 20th Century and has lived a couple thousand years. He has become bored and depressed. In searching for something he hasn’t done, several stories of his long life are told. Ultimately, to cheer him up, scientists figure out how to send him back in time where he lives out an oedipal fantasy with his mom.

15. The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer, William John Wadkins

The Lagrange Corporation owns Earth as well as the habitations orbiting the Earth. A revolution is fomenting in the Grand Sphere, the largest of the habitations in space. This cyberpunk predecessor is full of inventive language and plot twists.

16. Going to See the End of the Sky, William John Wadkins

Urdon Wee is dead and leading the revolution against the Corporation. He achieved enlightenment by being kissed by a beautiful woman, being punched in the face by a strong man and drinking a powerful drug within seconds of each other. Now, his vision of the future of humanity conflicts with that of the man who punched him, and their struggle is played out through the control and influence of the lives of three children from Catchcage.

17. Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart

The children of the village have all simultaneously fallen into a mysterious coma. Number Ten Ox seeks the help of Lee Kao (who has a slight flaw in his character). The master and the young villager sleuth their way through a series of adventures which not only saves the lives of the children but also corrects a wrong which has troubled the Heavenly Emperor for centuries.

18. Out On Blue Six, Ian MacDonald

Computer programs have evolved to be smarter than people, and so people’s lives are benignly controlled by software gods. A very few are dissatisfied with being defined and controlled, and a young yuppie-caste cartoonist follows her dreams of something more into a rag-tag group of guerrilla-theater actors and into the arms of an incarnated software god. Oh, yeah, and there is an intensely loyal army of genetically enhanced raccoons.

19. The Saraband of Lost Time, Richard Grant

Richard Grant’s first novel. A haunting and strange story of a war that nobody really understands.

20. Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, Richard Grant

Tex and Molly die at the end of the first chapter, and their adventures begin. Can they save a forest in Maine from the introduction of a genetically ruthless species of conifer designed by the evil forestry mega-corp? Will their ecological protest group survive their disappearance? What do the mites have to do with all of this?

21. Startade Rising, David Brin

It seems like every chapter in this novel introduces an idea that would normally be the basis for a sci-fi novel of its own. Let’s see. The nearest five galaxies, including our own, are thoroughly populated by an ancient intergalactic culture. Planets are generally allowed to go fallow once a species has ended its life-span and new species are uplifted to sentience by the old. The prestige of a species is measured by how many species it has uplifted. Earth was somehow forgotten, and Humanity is an unheard-of “wolfling” species. We have the audacity to question the way things are done and foment an intergalactic power struggle by discovering artifacts that are possibly those of the First Ancestors. The ship which made the tempestuous discovery is mostly crewed by dolphins uplifted by men. The novel plots their efforts to elude the armadas which are chasing them and reach a political accord in which humanity won’t be destroyed.

22. The Mists of Avalon, Miriam Zimmer Bradley

A retelling of the legend of Arthur from the perspective of Morgana. Thoroughly feminist and pagan.

23. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

The novelization of the outstanding comedy-sci fi radio series. The Earth gets destroyed in the first chapter. Arthur Dent is mostly the only human survivor. He and a strange group of beings seek the reasons why. The mice, after all, were very upset about it.

24. The Restaurant of the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

Arthur Dent’s adventures continue. Arthur and his friends (?) are blown-up and find themselves at the end of time where there is a really posh restaurant (“It’s not so much an afterlife as an apres vie.”) Oh, yeah, and Marvin, the paranoid android, repeatedly sticks his head in a bucket of water.

25. A Mask for General, Lisa Goldstein

Post-apocalyptic Berkeley is the setting for a novel about how Art conquers all.

26. Dangerous Visions, Harlan Elison, Ed.

Still the greatest sci-fi short-story collection of all time. It includes Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”, a fantastic novella about what it means to be an artist; Leiber’s “Going To Roll The Bones”, a surreal fantasy about dicing with the devil, the choices we make and taking the long way home; and Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister”, a novella about the relativism of morality.

27. Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin

The children of a huge interstellar ship are admitted into adulthood only after undergoing a survival trial on a planet. A lovely novel about the process of becoming an adult.

28. Door Into Fire, Diane Duane

A sword and sorcery adventure in a land with no homophobia, and where the Goddess is known and loved by all (literally by a few lucky adventurers). Centers on a man who has the gift of magic which is rare for men there. In addition, to an on-again, off-again relationship with a handsome prince, he falls in love with a fire elemental.

29. So You Want to Be a Wizard?, Diane Duane

A young girl learns to defend herself from bullies after she discovers a magical book in the public library which teaches her how to be wizard. But every wizard must confront The Adversary, an embodiment of the entropic forces of the Universe.

30. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle

A magical novel about the joy of individuality. A group of normal Earth children confront an oppressive, conformist culture on a distant planet.

31. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper

The seventh son of a seventh son is introduced to magic in an extremely Celtic adventure in a modern setting.

32. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clark

Mankind’s saviors are aliens that look like the classic depiction of the Devil. They stop the warfare and bring advancements, but what are their true intentions?

33. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

The main character is killed in the first paragraph. He awakens on an earth transformed into one long, meandering river along with everyone else who has ever lived. How the heck did that happen and why?

34. The Darkover books, Miriam Zimmer Bradley

Darkover is a planet that was settled in an early colonization effort. Isolated from the rest of human interstellar culture for a long time, it has developed a unique culture of its own, a patriarchal feudal culture lead by psychics. The books explore themes of feminism in an extremely patriarchal culture and the impact of technology on indigenous cultures.

35. The Once and Future King,, E. B. White

The full Arthurian cycle in the form of a twentieth century novel.

36. Dahlgren, Samuel R. Delany

A strange novel about what it means to be an artist. Set in a mildly futuristic city somehow cut-off from the rest of the world in its own private apocalypse.

37. On Wings of Song, Thomsa Disch

With the help of electronic stimulation, some people can liberate their conscious from their bodies. However, the vast majority of the United States has become oppressively conservative and so “flying” is taboo except in the decaying liberality of the cities. The story of a small town boy who never learns to fly but sparks a cultural revolution by singing about it.

38. The Thomas Covenant Trilogy, Stephan Donaldson

Thomas is an author in a small American town who has contracted Hanson’s disease: Leprosy. He hits his head and finds himself in a fantasy world where he is instantly healed. He can not afford to believe in the reality of the world he finds himself because he would lose the diligence necessary to survive with the disease. And yet everyone looks to him to be a hero. An innovative fantasy trilogy with an ending that avoids being clichéd.

39. On a Pale Horse, Piers Anthony

A suicidally depressed man in a world of technology and magic attempts to shoot himself, but instead accidentally kills Death who was coming for him. The man becomes Death, but decides to be a compassionate one in the face of temptations from the Devil.

40. Pilgrimage and No Different Flesh, Zenna Henderson

The People crash landed on the Earth at the turn of the century. Most live in an isolated, insular settlement on Mount Baldly but a few got scattered in the crash. The People seem to be human, but have psychic powers like flight and telekinesis. Cited in the English translation of the Nag Hamadi Library as a modern literary work exhibiting gnostic themes.

41. The Bast Mysteries, Rosemary Edghill

Bast is the magical name of a neo-pagan New Yorker who repeatedly finds herself in the middle of another mysterious murder. The best exploration of the modern witchcraft movement and its culture to date.

42. Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg

43. Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolf

44. The Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

The ultimate paranoid conspiracy and Erisian fantasy novels of all time. The governments of the world are controlled by layer after layer of secret organizations and nefarious cabals. At the center of the web are the Illuminati. Strongly influenced by the Principia Discordia, and brilliant in its own right.

45. Lord of Light, Robert Zelazny

46. The Earthsea series, Ursula K. Leguin

St. Cuniculus Ab Ascia

2007-08-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

From our most recent Shipmeet in Berkeley:

A New Pandora Blog

2007-08-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Now that pandorastations.com has finally died, I've created a new blog devoted entirely to Pandora. Welcome to PANDORA Review.

July Listening Tests

2007-07-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

Here is the chart showing the performance of my Pandora stations through July, 07:

Simpsons Avatar Self-Portrait

2007-07-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

A Review of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality by Ken Wilber

2007-04-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote this review several years ago for a bunch of my fellow initiates in The Third Road. I brought the book up in discussion in another forum, and thought it might be useful to post the review here as well.

I finished slogging my way through Ken Wilber's 1995 book, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (hereafter, SES), a couple months ago and have been thinking about its relationship and relevance to our spiritual tradition.

SES, mired as it is in the my-metaphorical-penis-is-bigger-than-your-metaphorical-penis academic pissing contest prose that makes a morgue out of Western Philosophy, invites a kind of critique that points out every fault and fallacy that the reviewer comes across as he or she makes her way through the material. I shall try to avoid doing so as I write this review.

Wilber has a handful or so really good ideas buried in the 800+ pages of this book. The book would be more accurately titled "Holistic Philosophy" although I'm sure he's sold many more copies having the word "Sex" in the title. (Even the title invites criticism since he largely means "gender" instead of "sex". He talks a lot about gender bias and inequality, and his only real mention of sex itself is to dismiss Western Culture as sex-obsessed.)

The first of his really good ideas is shift of paradigm from the reductionist idea of "things" to the idea of whole/parts or "holons". The idea is that the Universe contains no isolated parts and no isolated wholes. The Universe, instead, consists of whole/parts or holons potentially nested within other whole/parts potentially nested within other whole/parts ad (according to Wilber, at least) infinitum. This is best understood with examples of which he provides many, and here's one: atoms are contained in molecules are contained in proteins are contained in cells are contained in tissues are contained in organs, etc. The more inclusive and dependent a holon is (like say, a human body) the more significant that holon is. The more basic and depended upon a holon is (like atoms), the more fundamental that holon is. Anything which threatens more fundamental holons is also a threat to the more significant holons which depend on them (but not vice-versa: eliminate all humans and you’d still have their atoms). Wilber outlines roughly "twenty tenets" which define the minimal properties of all holons.

The second of Wilbers really good ideas is a map of holons called "The Four Quadrants" (see here for a pretty diagram a bit down on the page). The lefthand side of the map contains the holons of interiority, that is, those whole/parts which are necessary to experience the Universe as a subject. Conversely, the righthand side contains the holons of exteriority, that is, those whole/parts which constitute the Universe perceived as a collection of objects. The top half of the map explores individual holons and the bottom half collections or groups of holons. The triumph and tragedy of the Enlightenment in the West was, according to Wilber, a belief, a mistaken-but-incredibly-useful belief, that everything could be reduced to the upper-right quadrant of the map. That is, to understand the Universe we just need to know how all the individual pieces perceived as objects work. Sound familiar? It's called Science.

More recently Science has begun to see the fundamental importance of the lower-right quadrant in such fields as Systems Science and Ecology. However, the right-hand side by itself remains an incomplete picture of the Universe that Wilber labels the "flatland".

On the other hand (so to speak), it is the left-hand side, particularly, the lower-left-hand side of the map there we find many of the things that interest us as witches: magic, myth, rationality, and "centaur-vision" (whatever that is). Wilber levels a sharp criticism against post-modern movements (of which Neo-paganism is most definitely included) because of his understanding of the lower-left quadrant. It is fairly clear, he argues, that in the Post-modern era we have reached the limits of what rationality can accomplish. Furthermore, the limits of rationality appear to be potentially fatal both physically in terms of various possible ecological catastrophes and spiritually in terms of the god-is-dead consequence of everything being reduced to the materialistic upper-right-hand quadrant of flatland. Therefore, the call-to-battle for post-modern movements is "no more rationality". That is, in an attempt to go beyond rationality in our collective consciousness, we have often been tempted to regress and embrace pre-rational, more fundamental but less significant holons like magic and myth as the "solution" to the problems of rationality.

WIlber believes it is a mistake to long for cultures which were dominated by these more fundamental structures. Mythic-dominant cultures were often the most prejudiced and gender-unequal societies, and tribal, magic-dominant cultures, while possibly more matrifocal prior to the development of the plow, were perfectly capable creating of their own more-limited ecological crises. He believes that we have to transcend rationality rather than regress from rationality in order to address the problems of modernism.

And so what is beyond rationality? SES outlines at least three stages of collective consciousness beyond rationality: centaur-vision, non-dual and causal. Apparently, these stages can only be understood and communicated between people who have experienced them, but the theory is that there are people who have experienced them and techniques for achieving them. And so, if my understanding is correct, centaur-vision is experiencing a one-ness with nature (hence, the centaur: a union of man and animal). Non-duality is experiencing a consciousness beyond all forms, and casual is an experience of the whole matrix of reality and its cohesive evolution. Should we say Goddess? Perhaps.

A third really good idea is, strictly speaking, not Wilber's but Plato's which was expanded by Plotinus. Our consciousness is capable of assent through these levels of cognitive development to touch and unite if briefly with Godhood. At the same time, God's consciousness descends into nature and pours out through it via all of the holons in all four quadrants. Our conscious is a channel of the Spirit, and the more we develop our consciousness the more of that Spirit that can pour through us. We can achieve Enlightenment and, in fact, states beyond Enlightenment (ascent), but, ultimately, must return to live in this world as it is (descent).

Wilber dismisses magic as infantile and myth as childish, and so it's easy to feel defensive as a witch when reading SES. Furthermore, since his chains of holons are portrayed as monolithic and linear in each of the quadrants and because he presents meditative techniques like those developed in Zen and Yoga as the only routes to non-dual and causual consciousness, it is easy to feel that the Craft has no hope of achieving the transrational states he values as being of greater significance than rationality, myth and magic.

Actually, I think the Third Road training is a valid path of ascent and descent as delineated in SES. Wilber points out that often when a new stage of collective cognitive development is achieved, the previous stages are initially denied. Thus, mythic cultures (like Christianity) have repressed and denied the validity of magic, and then modern rational cultures denied myth (God is dead). Ultimately, however, these earlier ways of seeing the world are more fundamental, and so they must be integrated rather than repressed if the new level of development is to stabilize. Faerie Trad, in general, seems to have a good map to the integration of magic and myth into rational consciousness and, I believe, beyond. We do not, for instance, hold any one myth over all others as being the literal truth, nor we believe that magic is a way of instant wish-fulfillment without consequences. Myth and magic are the instrumentality of consciousness. We use them along with our rational mind consciously to achieve interior transformations that we know will have exterior consequences as well.

Do we achieve transrational states in our practices? I think we fairly consistency achieve oneness with Nature and her various Spirits. I think we do peak beyond that state occasionally, but such states seem so vaguely defined (at least to me) that it’s hard to agree or disagree with Wilber as to what's out there.

If nothing else, SES provides an interesting set of vocabulary for talking about holistic philosophy. I found myself disagreeing with the details of virtually everything he presents in the book, but, as I say, that seems to be a consequence of his presenting his ideas in the competitive framework of academic prose. (He spends thirty pages in one end-note, for Goddess sake, setting up straw men and then knocking them down one by one to make a point that no one but a small coterie of obscure professors could possibly even care about.) In general, I liked the big ideas contained in SES, and while I'd hardly suggest that this book is a must-read or a can't-put-it-down classic, it does provide an interesting integration of a broad range material.

A Brief History of Magic The Gathering Online

2007-02-26T14:52:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following over at the MtGSalvation forum in response to a relative new-comer who suggested that the problems in the server archecture should have been fixed months ago, not realizing that it has been problem for over five years now.

Months? Let's review the history, shall we:

Once upon a time, in the far off land of Renton, Wizards and Lizards mated and gave birth to the evil spawn which was Modo 0.0. And the select few tested Alpha and saw that it was evil, but it kind of worked and was better than Apprentice and the Encyclopedia in the sense that it governed the rules mostly correctly most of the time.

And the less select few tested Beta and saw that it was evil, but it showed promise and clearly Wizards and Lizards would continue to make sweet love and produce successive spawn which were less evil, and so no one was worried, though everyone wondered how large the monthly fee would be to play this MMORPG.

Then came the Great Pricing Announcement of January, 2002. Oh, woe! The masses cried out and gnashed their teeth! Virtual cards would cost money. And not just the same as paper cards: retail. No card shops. No box prices! Instead, the twisted minds at Wizards offered redemption. Not of geek souls, but of virtual cards for paper! A feature that only a relative handful of collectors would ever want or use, but would, nevertheless, fetter the pricing of virtual cards to paper forevermore, amen.

At last the unwashed masses were allowed to test the Beta. And there was crashing. And crashing. And crashing. And each time the mighty Load exceed 10,000 unredeemed geek souls Modo 0.0, the infernal spawn of Wizards and Lizards, crashed. And the masses cried out and gnashed their teeth. But Modo 0.0, the infernal spawn of Wizards and Lizards, showed promise and clearly Wizards and Lizards would continue to make sweet love and produce successive spawn which were less evil, and so no one was worried.

And, Lo, Modo 0.0 became Modo 1.0. And there was much rejoicing! Though, strangely, little hype. Indeed, Wizards did decide that instead of working to fix or revamp the architecture that caused Modo 1.0, the infernal spawn of Wizards and Lizards, to crash, they would instead work to keep the mighty Load below the amount which would cause the inevitable crash. But Modo 1.0, the infernal spawn of Wizards and Lizards, showed promise, and, clearly, Wizards and Lizards would continue to make sweet love and produce successive spawn which were less evil, and so no one was worried.

And, Lo, Wizards called up Lizards, and said, “Hey, Babe, it’s been great. I hope that we can still be friends.” And Wizards offered the promise of future spawn. 2.0! Through self insemination and the metaphorical turkey-baster of internal development Wizards would give birth to Modo 2.0! And all would be Skittles! And all would be Beer! And Modo 1.0 showed promise, and, clearly, Wizards would continue in its self-love and produce successive spawn which would be less evil, and so no one was worried.

And, Lo, Wizards gave birth to Modo 2.d’oh. And there was crashing! Yea, even more frequent crashing than ever before. And the masses cried out and gnashed their teeth. And Wizards heard the crying, and pled, “Give us a year. We’ll rewrite the Server Architecture, and there will be no more crashing forever. We will bring forth 3.0. And all will be Skittles. And all will be Beer!” But, eventually, Modo 2.d’oh showed promise, and, clearly, Wizards would continue in its self-love and produce successive spawn which would be less evil, and so no one was worried.

And Wizards worked itself fitfully with the turkey-baster of internal development, but lay fallow for years, ever extending the release date for 3.0. And the masses cried out and gnashed their teeth.

And, Lo, the select few tested Beta 3.0 and saw that it was evil, but it kind of worked, and was better than 2.d’oh in the sense that the Server Architecture was stable, and so, probably, there would be no more crashing forever. And so Modo 3.0 showed promise, and, clearly, Wizards would continue in its self-love and produce successive spawn which would be less evil, and so no one was worried.

Pandora Town Hall, UC Berkely, Dec. 4, 2006

2006-12-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

Last night I attended a second Pandora Town Hall over at Cal in the Heller Lounge at the Student Union. I’m fairly sure that that room did not exist when I attended Cal – it’s one of a very few rooms in that building where I did not play music at some point. I played on the same bill as Sheila E., of all people, upstairs in the Ballroom once. Not that surprising really: she’s a local girl, and the director of UC Jazz at the time was well acquainted with her dad, Pete Escovedo. I also played a private goodbye get-together with my favorite group of street musicians up on the second floor as well. Ah, the good old days…

But back to the Town Hall. It was a warm winter evening in Berkeley and the room was hot and stuffy. About 150 people showed up, and there was still room for more. The crowd seemed to be about half grad students and half community geezers like me. This town hall had a much smaller presence from Pandora than the San Francisco one did and was, I suspect, a much more typical version of the Tim show. We started about fifteen minutes late.

Tim greeted the audience, took a couple of immediate questions, but the second, “What is Pandora?” launched him into a abbreviated version of the history of the company and a description of the player. The crowd seemed to be somewhat more conversant with the player than the earlier one.

Since July the number of analysts at Pandora has increased from 42 to 45. They are now analyzing tracks at about 15,000 per month compared to 12,000 then. Registered users have increased from 2.5 million to 4 million. My notes say that they now have registered 3 million feedback thumbs, but, given that that number in July was 100 million, I suspect that that number is really 300 million. There are now over 500,000 songs analyzed and available to play on Pandora. Pandora is still hiring which remains a good sign.

Tim outlined the current top 3 priorities of the company to be:

A mobile version of the player.

He noted in answering a question later that the infrastructure to support a mobile version of the player is not really available yet. It would really help to have a cheap cell phone connection to the internet or municipal wifi in place to get Pandora to be mobile.

I’d love to have a mobile version of Pandora. However, I seriously might never buy any music ever again were Pandora available everywhere. Thus, I’m not really convinced that Tim’s vision for a $100 billion annual market for music is served by mobile Pandora. It is, however, a service I would be willing to pay, say, $20 per month to have, and while that might help Pandora, I don’t see how that money would get efficiently back to the musicians.

International Service

Pandora continues to explore how to legally offer their service to people outside the US, and how to incorporate music which has not had a US release.

This goal is probably the one that I’d most like to see happen. I suspect, however, that progress in this area will be slow and incremental.

Listener to listener interactivity

I’m becoming more cynical about this goal. I love to talk about Pandora, but I’m finding that very few people do. Pandora-forum.com peaked at a total of four regular posters before it died a cold, cold death. There’s a lot of enthusiasm when people initially discover Pandora, but I think for most people that once they’ve incorporated the player into their lives, it becomes the music spigot, and they’re about as interested in talking about it as any other utility. There is probably more interest and activity at the P,G and E forums.

Tim, as usual, opened the floor to questions.

The desire for Classical music was once again expressed. Tim still agrees that it is something that he wants to see on Pandora, but he noted this time that it requires a different musical training for the analysts.

Someone raised the issue of the traits listed for the songs. Tim polled the audience on how many would like to be able to build stations based on traits, and the response was quite strong even when he pushed back and asked if we would do so regularly.

Tim noted that the guy in charge of designing the interface had a background in designing interfaces for children’s toy, and so was always pushing to keep things simple.

I believe that the simplicity of the player’s interface is the single most important key to Pandora’s success. The first thing that anyone should see of the player is that if they type in an artist or song that out will come an unending stream of related music. Yes, I want to get under the hood, and I want more tools to design stations than we currently have. But those tools should be relatively hidden. The first version of the player that people see must remain simple and elegant.

Tim also noted that the traits that we see on Backstage and which have been scraped onto the wikipedia page are not the traits in the genome. He called them “focus traits” and said that they were aggregate descriptions of clusters of values of the underlying genome traits. This revelation helped me to understand Pandora a bit more. The focus traits are probably being assigned to clusters on an ad hoc basis, and they are probably floating all the available resulting focus traits up to Backstage which is why there are so many more focus traits for the standard catalogue than for the Holiday songs. They probably just have not assigned that many focus traits for the Holiday genre.

The editorial process was addressed when one audience member mentioned that several bands he knew had sent Pandora their CD, but the music has never appeared. Tim noted that the process takes about five weeks, and so if the music had not been posted up by that point then it had been rejected.

I’m actually fine with the foraging process and the editorial decisions except for Pandora’s dirty little secret: they don’t analyze all the tracks on a CD, and when you successfully search for a track with the player that has not been analyzed the player does not tell you that fact, but, apparently, instead generates music as if the corresponding artist had been selected. One of the regulars at the now defunct pandora-forum found at least one CD for which only a single track had been analyzed. I am particularly frustrated when I discover that tracks that I particularly like have not been covered on a CD when tracks I like less have been. There seems to be no hope that such tracks will ever be incorporated into Pandora unless many people search for them, and how likely is that going to happen for pieces like The Bobs’ “Share A Load”?

In response to a question about musical genres, I noted how much more focused the Holiday station based on all the available version of Ave Maria is compared to the same station based on the non-Holiday versions. Part of that is the fact that there is very little Classical music encoded on Pandora, but it also suggests that meta-information tags like “Holiday” can make a Pandora station much more focused and enjoyable. Tim noted for a related question that they might be open to letting people import feedback from other music services.

A couple of different questions arose around the interaction of people’s music collection and Pandora. One gentleman wished Pandora could read his iPod track-list and not play any tracks he already had. Modulo the usual copyright issues, that would seem to be a reasonable request. Another guy wished the tracks he owned could be played they way Pandora does. This one is much trickier. If Pandora has not analyzed the tracks you own then it can’t really assess which tracks are related to each other. It might be possible to match your list of tracks and indicate when a track already own is playing, however. Which reminds me, I’d love to have flags indicating when a track is “fresh” (analyzed in the past three months) and “new” (released in the US in the last twelve months), and then be able to emphasize or de-emphasize fresh, new or owned songs for each station.

Another audience member inquired whether Pandora would ever be interested in starting a record label. Tim said no, because the principle to which they aspired was one in which no artist or company could buy preferential treatment from Pandora. The audience member then ranted about iTunes, how Apple undercut fair returns to the artists in favor of sweet deals for the record companies in order to sell iPods. Tim offered an alterntive vision of a distribution system in which people were connected directly to artists, paid, say, 25 cents per song but the artist received 15 cents of that rather than the 2 or 3 cents that they receive under the iTunes deal. Tim did not say how or who would engineer such a distribution system.

Someone asked if Pandora was going to create a genome for movies. Tim did not answer the question, but did note that someone did recently call him asking for guidance and help in creating a genome for wine. He said that it was likely that we would be seeing several other genome approaches to identifying products in the coming years.

The crowd began to get restless at 8:30, and so Tim brought the meeting to a close and released the swag. I spotted two hat designed and three new t-shirt designs.

Pandora Townhall Meeting, San Francisco, July 19, 2006

2006-07-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a town hall meeting led by Tim Westergren, CSO of Pandora. I took notes at the request of the folks over at Pandora-forum. I'll include my reaction to the various issues that came up in italics.

It was an beautiful evening in San Francisco. The temperature was downright balmy with a good breeze keeping things cool without the usual fog chill. The event was held in the small Zeum theater. By the time the meeting started twenty-odd minutes late every seat in the roughly 200 seat venue was full.

Tim introduced himself by giving a brief history of these meetings. Starting in January with a visit to Portland where two fans showed up, and including one stop in Texas where no one showed up at all, these events have become increasingly popular with 150 coming to one at NYU, and, of course, now the San Francisco event was so popular that they're having an additional event next week to accommodate the overflow.

Tim started by setting the agenda for the meeting. He planned to give a history of the company and the website. Since the whole purpose of these meetings is creating dialogue with the listeners, he encouraged people to ask questions and to feel free to depart from that agenda.

He remarked that Pandora was actively hiring, and pointed out the HR person in the back to talk to if anyone was interested in working at Pandora.

It's an extremely encouraging sign for the health of Pandora that, like, the third thing out of Tim's mouth was that they really need people. As we shall see, this last seven months as been a period of explosive growth at the company.

Tim mentioned briefly that the company is a bit over seven years old now. They landed their first bit of capital in March of 2000 immediately before the bubble burst.

He then turned to his personal history. He had tried to make it in a rock band. They toured throughout the West in van, often passing other bands on the road between gigs. It was clear that one of the major problems for musical artists in general is connecting the artists to their audience.

Tim then went into film composition where directors were often looking for Tim to create a song like one particular one the director had in mind for a scene, but that would be cheaper than acquiring the rights.

In the Internet culture of that time there was a hope and belief that the music industry would be turned upside-down: the digital technology would allow artists to produce and distribute their music without becoming beholden to the major labels. Amazon, for instance, launched a program called "Amazon Advantage" in which the company offered to warehouse any music (say, 5 cds from a band) and then sell them from the site. The problem remained, however, that the artists could not find their audience.

Tim was living Palo Alto when he came up with the idea for the genome. Pandora now has 42 music analysts encoding that genome for songs. They analysts spend an average of 20 minutes on each track. The investors complain that the process is not scalable, but Pandora maintains that in order for the genome to work the listeners must be trained.

We'll come back to this point in the Q & A, but I believe that Pandora is exactly right on this point.

After the first infusion of capital in 2000 they ran out of money after one year. The employees did not take salary for two years, contributing time as they were able. In March, 2004 they landed an additional $8 Million. During that period they had licensed the technology to a few companies, but the big thing that happened during that period was that broadband penetration in the US had grown dramatically so that a critically large market had become available for digitally streaming radio.

Further, the DMCRA (the audience boos) cleared up licensing issues. Under the act there was a spectrum of royalties from free for broadcast to specified amounts for digital sales of tracks with digital radio somewhere in between. In became clear that a good use for the Pandora database would be the generation of play-lists.

And so they changed the name of the company and spent a year and a half building the Pandora device. They tested the product by trying it out on 200 of their friends and family in October, 2005 telling the testers not to spread it around yet. Within a week there were 5,000 people listening. The genie was escaping the bottle, and so they massively accelerated the development of the software, and started charging a fee for the service to stem the tide. People just re-upped for the free first ten hours by cleaning their cookies etc.

Thus, they launched the free service in November. At that point they were Slashdotted at which pointed 250,000 visited the site in a single day, and bandwidth had to be expanded dramatically. At this point 2.5 million people have created an account. Since the site is supposed to be limited to US listeners, they require the listeners to supply a zip code. The most popular zip is "90210". Tim: "That's deeply depressing."

Now the company is focused on building out the corporate infrastructure, creating a mobile product and figuring out how to work out the licensing issues for moving legally into International distribution. (Tim is completely aware of the popularity of Pandora in other countries, and he really wants to make the site global, but it's a tricky issue since there is no international equivalent to the DMCRA for Pandora to leverage.)

Considering the industry problems from the musician's side, there are 270,000 SKU's generated in the US for recordings each year but only 5,000 of those recording account for 90% of the sales which are currently $10 billion. Tim believes that if the artists can be connected with their audience more efficiently that the sales should be more like $100 billion. His vision is that with Pandora and other internet sites facilitating the connection between artist and audience that the average musician will be able to have a good, middle-class career doing what he or she loves.

Tim points out that the cost of producing an album has dropped to next to nothing in comparison to prior decades. Quality mixing software is essentially free on modern computers. Furthermore, distribution costs have plummeted as well. Thus, the remaing production costs are purely about promotion which is where Pandora is working to fit in.

Tim then opened the floor to questions.

The first questioner referred to an essay by film director Jaron Lanier. (I've tried to find the essay in question. It may be this one.) The questioner summarized Jaron's thesis as saying the music is becoming more homogenized because the available tools limit what can be produced. (Maybe his fifth point in the link?) Tim disagreed, and promoted the position that Pandora should work against such trends.

Okay. Jaron is a friend of a friend, and a couple of decades a ago I got to hang out with him a bit. Jaron is WILDLY eclectic when it comes to music. I'm eclectic: he's orders of magnitude more so than I. Back when he was living in Palo Alto, his livng room was filled with the entire inventory of a typical Lark In the Morning. You'd ask him to identify and instrument and he'd pick it up and start playing, say, a nose-flute. All I'm saying is that Jaron's standard for diversity in music may just be a wee bit wider than the average Pandora listener.

Tim mentioned that over 100 million feedback thumbs have been clicked at this point.

That's a whopping 40 per account. It's pretty clear that most Pandora listeners are not concerned with evolving their stations.

Tim mentioned that they did run a test allowing people to give any answer as to why they gave a thumbs up or down. He indicated that they will be incorporating the results of that test into future features.

Tim dodged answering when they were going international (he deftly dodged all "when" questions). He did mention that they have two full time employees working an the problem at this point.

Someone asked how they plan to make money. Tim stated that advertising should drive the business. They would like to keep the advertising entirely graphical, but even there they've been choosey. They refuse to accept poker ads, for instance. However, the question left hanging unasked in the air was whether they would ever have to admit ads into the audio stream.

Tim was asked whether Pandora was pursuing business-to-business opportunities. Tim responding that they do not wish to lose their current focus. He did mention, however, that the software is currently being used by directors to find similar songs for their films, and bookers for musical venues are similarly using the software to find similar bands for engagements.

Someone asked about getting Pandora for their home system. Tim pointed out the Squeezebox principal in the audience and mentioned that Pandora accounts for 50% of Squeezebox listening at this point.

Tim promised that there will be more features for power users.

Yay!

Tim surveyed the audience if they felt their Pandora stations were too repetitious. There was a strong minority of hands up on that one.

I raised my hand. I can build a station with a wide variety of music that is not repetitious; however, I still hear the same track on the same station within a six hour listening session. I doubt many are doing six-hour listening session as am I. And so I'd just like the option to increase the time between repeats beyond the industry mandated minimums.

He pointed out that they've made a conscious effort to keep the interface simple. He talked about interface testing and the frustration of watching people trying to use the program from behind a one-way mirror. "The button's right there!"

A DJ from Sweden pointed out that LastFM has much better features for musicians. Pandora wants to provide similar features for artists. Currently, they'll provide some information for artists when requested, but it's not automated yet. Tim made the case that Pandora does not require an initial tagging by an audience for a song to go into rotation in a station.

Tim surveyed the audience about iPod ownership. He pointed out that studies have shown that people basically go through a burst of ripping when they first get one, and their radio listening drops. But after a few months they are listening to more radio than they did before the purchase.

There were a couple of A&R representatives from small labels in the audience. The first asked if Pandora would ever take money from labels to get their artists included in the database. Tim did say, "We're never going to slot music because someone is paying us." (the audience cheered.)

I interpret Tim's response to mean that they won't force songs to be selected more frequently by stations, but that response doesn't quite address the question about how tracks are selected to be encoded. Would they take money to get a release encoded? Or, worse, prevent other labels tracks from be being included? I doubt the latter, but what if BMG said, "Look, we'll pay the salaries for all analysts necessary to encode our entire output?"

Tim was asked about the process for selecting which tracks to encode. Pandora currently has two employees whose entire job is foraging for new music. They receiving about 30,000 to 40,000 suggestions for tracks each month but only have the capacity to encode 12,000 currently. Tim did say that they do not envision Pandora striving to be completist. They see the decision for encoding a particular track as an editorial decision. He did not address how such editorial decisions are being made in general. They see themselves as the conservators of a music library.

If so, why The Shaggs, Tim? For the love of the Goddess, why The Shaggs?

The other A&R rep asked why Pandora required the product encoded to have an SKU. Tim responded that they structured the database to use SKU as the key identification number, and told the rep to get UPC's for their product: it's apparently cheap to do so.

Someone asked if they considered scaling up the process of encoding the music by setting up something like a wiki process. Tim responded that they had tested the idea, but that without the four days of training that they put their analysts through, the average listeners do not agree on what the various genes mean in practice. He can have two trained analysts analyze the same track and get almost exactly the same encoding which is not the case for untrained listeners. He mentioned that 10% of tracks are reviewed twice to confirm this consistency.

As I mentioned above, I think that Pandora has got this part of the process exactly right. That is exactly the kind of control that one would like to have in place.

Tim mentioned that they do get a commission on sales through the site, but they did not see that as a large source of potential income.

Tim closed on a non-question from a listener who was pretty much overwhelmed (positively) by all the new gospel music she had discovered through Pandora. That audience cheered the shared experience.

Pandora provided soft drinks for a mixer after, and Tim introduced several others form Pandora that people might like to talk to. They offered free t-shirts and caps to the people who came to the meeting.

Pandora Shame Pt. 2

2006-07-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

I just gave a thumbs up to a Diana DeGarmo song on my Ecclectica station. Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando, non solum poenas a Te iuste statutas promeritus sum, sed praesertim quia offendi Te, summum bonum, ac dignum qui super omnia diligaris. Ideo firmiter propono, adiuvante gratia Tua, de cetero me non peccaturum peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturum. Amen.

The Shaggs On Pandora!

2006-06-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know what is more funny: the fact of all the albums Pandora could have covered to date they chose the infamous one of The Shaggs, or that the resulting artist-based station is surprisingly good. Unless, of course, an actual Shaggs song comes up. Of course, I'm giving thumbs-up to their songs on that station. But can you image someone creating a Who station and getting a Shaggs track? Too funny.

In other news, an infant Pandora fan forum has been launched at pandora-forum.com. Join us there if you'd like to discuss all things Pandora.

Ethic of Blood

2006-04-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Hee! I just had an article and poem published in Witch Eye #13. I came across the Witcheye Yahoo group a month or so ago, and Storm was asking for submissions with a deadline that weekend. I cranked out two poems on Friday, and then told him I could do an article on Monday. As always, I am drawn to ethical matters like the proverbial moth; hence, I explored the idea of one particular ethic of a Faerie bloodline.

I was shocked when I looked up the role of iron in human blood to see a diagram of the heme molecule in which the Fe atom is at the center of a cross of four N's. I immediately thought of our circle casting and the role of the priestess in relation to the seven directions. What fun.

1000th post at Ship of Fools

2006-03-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

Nearly three years ago I was led to the forums at Ship of Fools (SoF) by Kevin Iga (kiga) and ChastMastr at the forums of an online Pagan comic, Oh My Gods. I have posted more at SoF more than I have at any other fora, and today I hit a milestone of 1000 posts.

I feel, if anything, I am less Christian than when I start posting at the predominantly Christian SoF. I'm still actively serving at St. John's Presbyterian in Berkeley, trying to insure that our congregation survives its next hundred years even as its first hundred years come to a close. But SoF has made me much more aware how few Christians would consider me a Christian, and, further, how very little I care that they would do so.

In the past three years I have served on the Pastor Nominating Committee for St. Johns and, subsequently, as an Elder and the Treasurer. But, at the same time, I helped start the legally incorporated church for the Third Road where I serve as Treasurer as well. And I just completed an article on Pagan ethics which will appear in issue #13 of the Feri zine, WitchEye.

I do not understand the need for any myth to be historical fact, but it is clear that Christianity percieves itself as essentially different from Pagan religions in its insistence that at least some of its myths are literally true. Certainly, there are large sections of Christianity which now accept that some of its myths like the seven days of creation and the flood are not historical fact, but the vast majority insist that at least three myths must be true for Christianity to be Christianity: there is one and only one God, that God incorporated exactly once in the human form of Jesus, and that Jesus rose physically from the dead in a way that is fundamentally different from medical recussitation.

My faith subsumes Christianity in ways in which Trinitarian Christianity will most likely never be comfortable. I believe in one God which manifests through myriads of beings some of which are so wise and powerful relative to we humans that they can be justifiably called Gods. I believe that the Goddess did incarnate as Jesus, but that She can and does incarnate to a lesser or greater extent through all sentient beings. I believe that Jesus did defeat the powers of death and sin, and that the physical ressurection may or may not have happened, but that the historical truth of Jesus' physical recussitation is irrelevant in comparison to the spiritual Ressurection for all sentient beings which transcends the bounds of time and space.

I can understand the historical necessity for Christian to have clung to these myths, but I do not see the need to cling to them any longer particluarly since parts of what are attached to the Christian mythos are obviously evil and wrong. Women are spiritual equals to men and equally adept as preistesses. Gays are equally capable of commitment to God and to their relationships before God as those who aren't gay. The Bible is not a good science textbook.

And so I wait patiently for Christianity to grow up. It won't completely in my lifetime, and so I work towards the religion which augment it if not supplent in the next millenium. And I shall continue to participate at SoF in order to abet that process.

Dr. Pandora Love

2006-03-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

...Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love my Pandora Shame

It's pretty much inevitable. You'll build a Pandora station, and out will come this song that you really like and you've never heard it before and so you click over to the pandora page and ... oh, my, god: Cyndi Lauper ?!? How will I ever live with the shame?

I'm being harsh on Ms. Lauper. I really don't know her oevre other than her hits of two decades ago. It's just that a cut of her's is an example of the kind of personal issue that Pandora makes you confront. Are you going to let what you know or don't know about a particular band color your opinion of a particular track?

I've had to train myself not to immediate reject a track just because it's by someone, gasp, popular (or who, at least has been popular). It's hard to resist that condidtioning and just admit that you like a track.

Of course, it'll take a bit more for me to buy an album by a popular artist I did not "discover" before they were popular. However, I'm saying right now that if I hear two tracks that I like on the same album by someone like Ms. Lauper, then I'll buy that album.

Speaking of Pandora-based purchasing I bought my first two cd's this week based on Pandora supplied music. That's $20 so far that Pandora has won for the industry from me. I'll put up a post about them when I've worked my way through them.

Pandora!

2006-02-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

It is time for me to rave about Pandora.com. I first learned about Pandora in an article in the East Bay Express, one of several local alternative weeklies I tend to read over lunch. Pandora is a free website that streams digital music to your computer in a way that is fairly well tailored to your musical tastes.

How Pandora Works

The simple answer is that you type in a song or a band and out comes a succession of songs similar to the seed you provided. The exact methodology is known ony by those working at Pandora, and they're not telling everything. Nevertheless, they have revealed some of process.

They have apparently created a database of songs in which every song has been evaluated based upon a few hundred musical characteristics that they call "genes". I suspect that at least some of these genes are a set of binary flags indicating particular traits, and that some subsets of traits are mutually exclusive. That is, song might be considered to have the musical trait "major key tonality" or "minor key tonality" but not both at the same time.

(The application can provide a list of some of the traits used to select a particular song, and I believe I've seen "major key tonality" listed. I do not know if they lump all other tonal modes into a single category called "minor key tonality" or if they break them into seperate genes. Furthermore, I do not know how they handle cases of songs which change tonality.)

When you provide a song the application then selects a sequence of songs which are similar to that song. Pandora is not saying exactly how that selection is done, but it is possible to guess how it might work. I think that the algorithm randomly selects a set of traits for each song, and then having filtered based on those traits, it contructs a distance metric over at least some of the remaining traits and chooses a song which is within a specified radius using that metric. The radius selected is probably based on the number of songs which are considered close by the metric, so that is you're song is in a relatively sparsely populated part of the database the radius will be wider, and if the song is like a lot of other songs, the radius will be tighter.

I suspect that the initial selection of genes is not uniform distributed across all the available genes, and I'm not even certain that Pandora even reveals some of the genes that it considers important. For instance, I suspect that the release date of the track is a gene. I do not know that they even have to emphasize more recent releases over older material because I suspect the database is biased that way already. I suspect that the length of the track is a gene, as well. It would not surprise me if there were popularity genes based on sales or click-throughs to Amazon or iTunes.

When you listen to a song you may provide three forms of feedback. You may do nothing, you may give the song a thumbs-up (+), or you may give the song a thumbs-down (-). The most important of these appears to be the (-). If I understand the FAQ's correctly, a single (-) to a song will prevent that song from ever playing on that station. Two (-)'s on songs by one artist will prevent any other songs by that artist from playing on that station again. I suspect that (+)'s on the other other hand effect the distribution on the initial filtering genes. The more you (+) songs with a particular trait, the more that songs with that trait will be selected.

Why I Like Pandora

It's like having a comercial-free radio station that plays nothing but music that you like. I've never been a big fan of listening to music on the radio. My tastes just are far too broad and ecclectic to be found on any one station, or even on any one program on more adventuresome sources like college radio or public stations. One of my favorite memories was having the floor's scrounger come into my dorm room in college realize that I had a bunch of records that he could potentially borrow, having him examine my collection and watching his face fall as he realized that he recognized little if any of the records in my collection.

For me the most exciting thing about music is finding a new artist that I really like. Back in high school, someone at the local branch of a now defunct chain of record stores, Music Plus, used to put stickers with his or her comments on some of the albums. Those stickers led me to Novalis and Goblin. The first album I bought when I was in third grade was Carlos' Switched On Bach. The electronic music bin at Music Plus later led me to Synergy, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. And so, of course, I came to more popular groups like Yes, Genesis, ELP, and Kraftwerk. Often I learned of bands before the became popular, and, I admit, I was sometimes disappointed when they did. (I still think that stance is somewhat justified when the hoi palloi acclaims the Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby" when they were doing a bit more interesting stuff in the years prior to that release, for instance.)

I do like it on those rare occasions when I can turn people onto something they never would have heard otherwise. One New Year's Eve party at Leslie's old appartment, she asked me if I had anything to put on, and I tentatively put in the Hedningarna compilation released in the US as Fire by The Heathens. To my utter and complete surprise the entire room started dancing to it! Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!

Pandora completely satisfies that need I have to explore for new material while still enjoying old favorites. I've never been that enthused by the MP3 exchange explosion and iPodery. First, there was the moral considerations of peer-to-peer copying. I want the artists I like to be compensated by my purchases. Second, I like to gain some context for an artist by hearing their music within the program defined by an album side or a cd. How would an iPod or iTunes help me find the next Hedningarna?

But the potential for Pandora's finding me groups like Hedningarna seems limitless. I have station already which streams me pop-punk, folk, techno-pop and reggae, and I love it! I already found some new bands to match my tastes, and will have to go on a cd buying mission to Berkeley here shortly (I want local record stores to stay in business).

It Could Be Better, Though

Because my house is a loft, my home computer is in the same room, essentially, as our home theater where my son spends his non-homework hours playing. And so, the first thing I did when I discovered Pandora was figure out how I could get a decent headphone system to work the Pandora stream coming through my computer. I swiftly leanred about the strange and wonderful world of Head-Fi which has grown up around portable audio. Thanks to the help folks at the Head-Fi forums I purchased a nice set of circumaural headphones (Beyerdynamic DT880's from Jan in Germany) and the second-to-last Go-Vibe v4 headamp ever produced by Norm. It's such a boutique business! It took me month to get all the equipment, but I am extremely satisfied with my set-up now.

I do, however, wish there were a way to carry Pandora with me. Right now, the Pandora application requires at least a Flash 7 player. Currently, the smallest devices with Flash 7 players are laptops which are all more than I want to carry. Adobe just released Flash Lite 2.0 which should be able to run Pandora on PDA's and cellphones, but it won't be until later this year for such devices to come available.

The second complaint that everyone has about Pandora is, of course, that the selection of music is limited. Right now, any music before the turn of the century is pretty spotty, many genres are sprasely covered and some genres like Classical in particular are not available at all. My personal preferences would put World Music on the top of the list for expansion, then probably Classical. More, broader, wider!

As for the application itself, I have some minor suggestions. I really wish that the three station edit tabs were sortable alphabetically by title and artist. In particular, the second (-) for an artist is a pretty big decision for a station, and so it would be nice to warn you when your about to do so. I wish there was a way to delete songs from your favorites page as well. When I create a station, I often want to be able to publish that station and so I just pick a song as a favorite on that station to get it posted to the favorites page.

Finally, I wish there was a message board community around Pandora to share stations and station building techniques and to talk about music and Pandora.

All in all, however, Pandora has been the best thing in music to enter my life in a long, long time. I am looking forward to discovering new music and enjoying old favorites through it. I hope that it remains free, but that the company achieves financial success. I look forward to seeing how the product will evolve. I think that Pandora will be an important part of my life, hopefully for years to come.

Brigid

2006-02-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

I should write a poem today. It's my favorite holiday, and I was initiated on this day. Instead, let me do the blog thing, and post my thoughts on the various things I incountered on the web today.

Ship Of Fools had a discussion of the variations used in English language services on the Lord's Prayer. The discussion reminded me to read the version I wrote for the Goddess:

Our Lady's Prayer
Friday the 13th of March, 1992

Our Mother who art the Earth,
Hollowed be thy name.
Thy community come,
Thy cycle be done
In us as it is
In Your seasons.
Give us this day
Our daily bread,
And heal our hurts
As we try to heal
the hurts of others.
Lead us away from pollution,
And bring us all joy,
For Thou art the World,
The wonder and the glory
Forever.
Amen.

I sent that to Pastor Max once, but he never made a comment.

Looking for inspiriration I read one of my favorite Discordian pieces: Crazy Hassan and his Clearing House of Delights. I did a search on Crazy Hassan, but that meme has not gone much further than this brilliant piece. But a short chain of links led me to this wonderfully blasphemous thread.

My BART reading this week is John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity in which he mentions that the literal meaning of chi is breath.

Chi is breath.
Spirit is breath.
Ha is breath.
A Ha Prayer is a Chi Prayer.
We breathe mana.
We are breathed into life by God.
We breathe the Goddess into life.
We breathe together.
We conspire.
It's all a conspiracy, you know.
Your subjectivity is that of a still life being painted into being by God.
You are a work of art.
You are a work of art that can create works of art.
You honor the Goddess with your beauty and your passion.
Be adored.
Be.
Breathe.
Chi.
Ha!

So, I decided not to write a poem today.

Blessed Brigid.

The Rise of Early Christianity

2006-01-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

This is my response to this post at the Wildhunt Blog.

I just finished slogging my way through Robin Lane Fox's book Pagans and Christians and so I'm pretty fresh on the arguments. Fox's book is highly frustrating in that while it is exceedingly boring, long, boring, thorough and boring it nevertheless never really manages to answer the question it purports to address namely why Christianity managed to supplant classical paganism in the Mediterranean between 150 and 350 CE. Nevertheless, what conclusions it does point towards do not entirely match the six points of Chutney's summary.

"..bewildering array of new gods and cults.": not much evidence for this in Fox's book at least. Ever since Herodotus five centuries earlier people and known of many gods and pantheons. The families in power in the Roman Empire and regionally tended to be quite conservative, and so the longevity of any particular practice tended to give it authenticity. Early Christianity was dismissed out of hand precisely because it was new by the rulers of 2nd Century who also had a difficult time understanding that this new religion was anything other than a branch of Judaism.

"Conversion": Undoubtedly important, but understates how important the possibility for overachievement and perfectionism was for the movement. Christianity offered a select, dedicated few the opportunity to achieve glory through strict asceticism and civil disobedience. The teachings of Jesus pointed towards a self-control and self-denial that was both novel and quite attractive for some personalities. Thus, every wave of persecution allowed a new set of martyrs to step forward to actively assert their fanaticism and create the stories that attracted others to the faith.

Christian priests vs. pagan: nope, this is a bit off too. Christian priests did offer personal wisdom, but, more important, they provided a judicial role that was otherwise solely available through the relatively rare circuit of roman governors. Christian priests were anointed for their lifetimes, while pagan priesthoods were generally held through family lines and terms of service were generally limited to a few years. Some pagan oracular methods were co-opted whole cloth by the ensuing Christians and these oracles were generally seen as sources of wisdom before and after Christianity. It certainly true that Christian priests were more involved in people’s day to day lives.

Egalitarianism in the Christian priesthood: almost certainly true, but I'm not sure how important it was to the spread of the movement. Christianity did focus its attention on meeting the needs of Christian poor providing a role for both the rich and the poor in the community, and that delineation of roles might have been more important to Christianity’s spread.

Donations: well, particularly after the 2nd Century there were definitely some wealthy Christians already. More to the point, however, was the fact that donation to a pagan cult became a duty of an increasingly smaller set of families. There was a growing concentration of wealth in fewer families during this period which made the cultic acts become more acts of ostentation for the few than a universal service of the gods.

Mass movement: Christian leaders generally hid out in the hills during the persecutions. The biggest thing that allowed Christianity to flourish was the fact that it was eventually decided that Christianity could include more than just the overachievers and the perfectionists. You could lapse and offer the required incense to the gods during the persecutions, and Christianity would take you back after an appropriate act and period of contrition. Thus, it became fairly common for people to postpone baptism so that they could still insure their salvation while they knew they were still likely to willingly sin. Constantine was, by no means, alone in that particular tactic.

For me, one thing missing on the list is the point that Christianity managed to integrate philosophy with religion. Many pagan philosophers were not religious when compared to their contemporaries and conversely most cults had no philosophy whatsoever. Most pagan philosophers, for instance, had reached the conclusion that infant exposure was wrong. Christianity also said exposure was wrong and had a framework into which that ethic fit quite nicely. The integration was far from perfect, but it was more appealing and universal than anything that came before.

Certainly, the promotion of Christianity by Constantine mattered a lot as well. Fox seems to suggest that the growth of Christianity prior to Constantine has been overestimated by prior historians. He seems to believe that it was largely the money Constantine and his family poured into the Church that fueled its greatest period of growth.

Ranting Against the UPG

2005-12-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

I recently went shopping for a healthy Pagan message-board community, and tried out ecauldron.net for a month or so until I ran smack into the term UPG which had become vogue there. I had to do a web-search to find out what it means. Unverified Personal Gnosis: what a patronizing piece of vacuous bullshit. Put on your waders and join me as I examine this pernicious bit of effluvium.

First of all, there's a horrid redundancy in the term as it smirks behind its in-crowd initials. Are there Verified Impersonal Gnoses out there which need to be distinguished from the Unverified Personal ones? Of course not. Then why not just say “gnosis”? Idiots.

The whole point of the "Unverified" part seems to be to evoke the ghostly chains of the Vienna Circle. It's a Modernist empiricist thing: you wouldn't understand. Goddess, what bullshit. It seems to me that one of the major points of Neo-Pagan movement was go beyond Modernism and return to placing value on and acknowledging the reality of subjective, magical experiences particularly in the interplay between human and the divine. People in general do not dismiss, for instance, someone's saying "I'm in love." merely because the experience of being in love is subjective and, therefore, unverified and, indeed, unverifiable. But under the rubric of UPG we can tidily partition of all religious experiences and say "well, you may have experienced something, but that has nothing to do with me."

To be fair, I suppose that the "Personal" part is meant to distinguish UPG's from all those collective gnoses which are out there, but again I still have problem with the usage even there. Another part of what Neo-Paganism is about is the development of an intersubjective experience that brings us into a healthier, balance relationship to the world as an ecological system of interrelated sentient beings. The use of "Personal" emphasizes the individualism of our paths to the point that the emergent phenomenon of a collective sensibility gets reduced to a bunch of fruitcakes squawking about their inherently disparate trance experiences.

So I fail to see how UPG is anything other than a desiccated Modernist dismissal of everything of value in Neo-Paganism as a whole.

Mertseger In Doll Maker

2005-12-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

We all started doing self-portraits in the Circus over at SoF. Couldn't find a mustache, though.

My Memories of Rabbit Choir.

2005-10-31T07:53:00.000-08:00

Via the new Rabbit Choir Blog:

Hey all you Rabbit Choir fans out there.

Yes?

Come-on, you remember - it was when you were in college.

Well, actually I had just moved down to Southern California to teach at Cal State Fullerton while I finished up my Ph.D. from Stanford.

You met the bunch of hippies playing music on the street, selling their tapes and CDs, getting hassled by the man.

Oh, yeah: I remember exactly the place. It was on the southern steps of the ASUC building at Cal.

I had played with a band called the Troubadours for a month on the streets of Berkeley at a pivotal month of my life some four or five years earlier. I was always returning to Sproul Plaza where we'd played most of our gigs to see if I would run into one of them again. The location was and remains a touchstone for me.

And so when I heard the Rabbit Choir for the first time, I had this overwhelming sense that the same spirit of the place was speaking through them that had spoken through us. I felt like this spirit had preceded us and would continue speaking groups like Rabbit Choir long into the future.

And so I instantly fell in love with the group. I'm certain they played Full of Love and One Love that day. The religious universalism of the latter song was in full accord with my own philosphy, and so I was hooked.

You bought a tape, gave them a buck when they passed the hat and told your friends you just met a great band that is playing this Thursday (or Friday, or Sat.) at some bar or maybe some coffee house.

I still regret not buying the EP that first day: I never got another chance. I did get High Fidelity Hare Cut at Rasputin's, I think, a couple of years later.

The day of the show, you got a call from Doc, the drummer, so you decided you just had to go to the show. When you got there, you found that this hippie street band actually rocked.

Well, no. Being in So. Cal., I never made the phone list. Instead, the first thing I'd do whenever I was up for a visit was walk Telegraph looking for Rabbit spoor: the precious adverts indicating that there was a show that week.

I still managed to see the band a surprising number of times. Two I documented with poetry at the time were the I-Beam and the Berkeley Square. In addition, I also caught a show at some dive on Broadway in the City where the band wore marching band jackets (!). I think I caught shows at the Starry Plough at least twice, because I know my fiance (then and now wife) got to see the Choir at least once there. I drug my best friend from highschool to a gig at a pizza place in the Oakland hills a couple of miles from where I now live. (Jim talked to us before a show gave us tickets: how cool!) And, certainly, once at the Bison Brewery.

Your life was changed forever...

Well, of course: everything She touches changes.

But Rabbit Choir was special. The songs were hopefull, probably overly ernest and possibly dweeby. But, man, that's me too. I embrace that.

Or maybe you just drank a little too much beer, smoked a little too much weed and ended up inviting the band back to your house.

Certainly, beer. I did get invited to one after party. Good times!

And after the uncertain disolution I saw Stacie working in the Brewery. Lan embarassed me by saying we were the Rabbit Choir's biggest fans. Lan's English was not as good then, and what she meant was that Rabbit Choir was our favorite band. Stacie told us about the Love Props, but basically blew us off prefering to read a travel guide (probably just a bad day). We did check out the Love Props but the energy was so much darker, cynical and even violent. We mourned the loss of Rabbit Choir.

Ian's Initiate's Instructions

2005-10-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

Over at Ship of Fools today a young Christian was asking for prayers that the girl he had just fallen in love with would not go through with a Pagan initiation. He reported that it was her firends idea and she was just going along with it.

Initiation should be so much more than that, and it reminded me of the piece that Lurking Bear wrote while the Third Road was discussing the conundrums of multiple initiations. I need to read it more often.

Say what you want about Presbyterian ministers

2005-06-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

They give good advice about the important issues.

What I did for Beltane

2005-06-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following for a private board over at Ship of Fools, and so I can't link to it. It's a report of what I did for Beltane using the format they use to review churches:

Mystery Worshipper: Mertseger
The church: Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve
Denomination: The site itself hosts a wise variety of creation centered spirituality. The Tradition of the MW is the Third Road.
The building: The central feature of this ritual was a labyrinth (be sure to scroll down to see the picture) at the bottom on old rock quary.
The neighbourhood: This regional park contains many trails many of which pass into an area in which cows graze.
The cast: This was a solitary ritual walk.

What was the name of the service?
Beltane sunset ritual walk.
How full was the building?
I encountered maybe a dozen people, two dogs, two cottontail bunny rabbits, and I heard at least one quail.
Did anyone welcome you personally?
South-East of Round Top (lower right quadrant of the map) I was arrested by the unexpected sound of a door creaking open. As I walked on I heard it again. Finally, I saw a distant, tall stand of eucalyptis creaking in the wind. I fell quite naturallly into trance and briefly went deeply in to Faerie. I thanked the spirits and moved on.
Was your pew comfortable?
I did sit twice. First I sat at the center of the main labyrinth. That location is a bit cramped, and you can basically only sit there cross-legged. Later I sat on a boulder still warm from the afternoon sun which was quite nice.
How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?
I felt excited and expectant wondering what strange and mysterious events might occur in this ritual. I was not be disappointed.
What were the exact opening words of the service?
When I was due east of Round Top, I saw the bone white remains of some more eucalyptis that had been killed in wild fire maybe seven years ago. The trunks were glowing white in the late afternoon sun and my heart gasped at their beauty. I said, "Hello Lady."
What books did the congregation use during the service?
I used no formal ritual script, though I did invoke the Goddess and the God by singing a composition my teacher has written for such purposes. I thank them when the walk was done.
What musical instruments were played?
I sang the invocation, and much to my surprise and delight, someone had left a plastic recorder on the altar at the center of the first labryrinth. I accompanied the call of the quail with an improvised tune which matched the improvised song I sang earlier as I walked the labyrinth.
Did anything distract you?
Well, there were the usual worries that someone might interupt my private ritual as I walked the labyrinth or that I looked ridiculous. But those thoughts were fleeting, and people are generally polite and unobtrusive at Sibley.
Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?
The ritual was deeply meditative and experienced within a deep trance state.
Exactly how long was the sermon?
I did not have a watch, of course, and there was no sermon per se. However, I probably spent fifteen minutes at the heart of the labyrinth playing the recorder, appreciating the the various offerings on the altar, and writing a poem to leave behind.
On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
I'd say an 6. I flubbed several notes at the top of the range of the instrument, and both the improvised song as I walked the labyrinth and the poem I wrote were probably pretty cliched. It's hard to do top notch stuff when you're whacked out in trance.
In a nutshell, what was the sermon about?
This being Beltane, I had several prayers for my love life with my wife who is in China on business. There was also a deep joy at being to reconnect with this location and doing rituals after several years of not being able to find time to do so with work and being a father to a young boy.
Which part of the service was like being in heaven?
First as I descended into the quarry, I saw a cottontail when I had never seen one in these hills before. Next, the altar at the center of the main labyrinth included a lovely decorated goard, a white yarn dolly for the goddess and a little pewter Horned God. Finally, I later stood beneath a young oak as I watched the sun go down a bit north of the peak of Mt. Tamalpais across the Bay.
And which part was like being in... er... the other place?
I wanted to go the top of my favorite wind-swept faerie hill top (due north of Round Top at the place marked 27 on the map), but a couple headed up there as I approached. As this was Beltane I didn't want to disturb them, and so stopped at a boulder for a bit. I saw them coming down the trail a few mintues latter, and so I climbed back up only to find a nother couple already watching the light fall on Mt Diablo. I quietly walked away, disappointed that I would not be able to watch the sunset from my favorite spot.
What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
Well, I did try a new path at one point but I didn't get lost.
How would you describe the after-service coffee?
Cafeine does not mix well with trance work at all. I did have a rich Cabernet and some Nibisco Chocolate Chunk Cookies and listened to my teacher's album for the first time in years when I got home.
How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?
I'd say a 9. The ritual was certainly ecstatic as they tend to be in this Trad, and the place is certainly convenient to my home. But I do like more formal ritual and regular corporate worship.
Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?
Yes. I like that I can experience a deeply Pagan relationship to the amazing wild and fey places hidden even amidst civilization, but nothing about that negates my love of Christ.
What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?
The shear delight of finding all the marvelous items at the altar at the center of the labyrinth. It's truly wonderful to know that there are others like me connected through this amazing location.

I was just made by the Presbyterian Church

2005-06-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

Darn it, when do I get my lightsaber? More hilarious translations from the English to Chinese and back on a pirate DVD can be found here.

Authority

2005-06-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

We've recently been discussing the use of inclusive language over at the Ship of Fools. I've said my piece there, but the topic has led me to grapple a bit more with the conumdrums of authority in thealogical matters.

I find the orthodox Christian positions on authority to be vexing. I can understand and respect (though I don't believe in) a view of the universe in which the Divine never communicates to the sentient beings in the universe. And I can understand nd believe in a view in which the Divine continually communicates to the sentient beings in the universe. But I cannot fathom a view that the Divine spoke once and no longer does so.

This inconsistency is related to "the scandal of particularity". Jesus' death in ancient Jerusalem saves all the intellegent lifeforms throughout the universe? And all such beings, if they exist, must follow the Word as written by a bunch of humans living around that time? Either Jesus' death represents something bigger which is not tied to that time and location and, thus, transcends the particular in ways that manifest to all those other beings and in ways that they can know and understand in the contexts of their own lives and cultures, or Jesus' death is matters only for humanity.

I prefer for the sake of consistency a universe where God never ceases to speak to all beings everywhere throughout time. But on what basis can this preference of mine have authority? You might look to Wesley's Bar Stool of Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience. Each of these on their own have obvious flaws. What counts as Scripture? What about subjective experience which is not rational? Is the oldest religion really the closet to God. If so, wouldn't we all be animists?

I question that there can be only one absolute authority for any less than omniscient being. I think that there is a lot of wisdom in a wide variety of traditions. The fact that a religious idea has stood the test of time idicates that it has some value. The fact that a religion coordinates with your experience of the divine has some value. The fact that the religion conforms to what we understand about the world in purly scientific terms has some value.

Therefore, the authority that I trust is that of a collective working-things-out that adapts to science and culture, that has room for the passionate interaction between Self and Other which is our living in this universe, and that hears the Goddess speaking more clearly over time.

Welcome to The Manifest Song

2005-06-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

I created this blog to post a comment at Query Letters I Love. Who knows if it will ever see another post.