A pouring out of words....

Where to begun...this post (the first in a long time....) was supposed to be about Game of Thrones, but the mind just won't concentrate...Spring is coming, Summer not far behind, warm weather being a salve on the worst hurts of the world. Modern society is set up to slowly grind the human soul underfoot, until nothing left can be used, they take it all, hope, joy, happiness...all the things you are supposed too want will destroy you in the end. Born, live, die, have kids, find a wife, go to work, day in day out until one day you crack and either gain enlightenment from sheer boredom or more likely dive to the bottom of a whiskey bottle or eat a bullet....guilt is a useful thing in this particular situation, which explains the continuing allure of Catholicism, since it makes watching the steady decline of what used to be known as Western Civilization relatively painless....I dream of bohemian freedom, a life lived soley for art and beauty, but the problem with illusions is evetually they get crushed under the steel boot heel of reality, yet our world is one run for illusion, it is an illusion. We spend our lives chasing green pieces of paper that in another context would only be good for cleaning up that pile of gunk left behind by your cat. If our ancestors could travel in time from ten thousand years before and look upon the world we created, would they marvel at the steel and concrete towers, the glories of the internet and the conquest of nature, or would that shake their heads at the way we kill ourselves eating bad food, having worse sex, breathing polluted air while nature shrivels and dies around us without anyone even noticing, and chasing the next dollar, the next piece of paper with the head of state of your choice printed on the front? At least when you brought down the mammoth with your stone spear, your got a handful of meat, something that was real and that you could eat....

All right...done. Mind had finished spewing out all thing negativity. This has been a purge of boredom induced madness...one of these days I will tell the boss to stick this job someplace unpleasant, and walk out into the sun, walk into the woods and never come back, seek out the hidden world spoken and myth and find out if it's real. And if it isn't, I will make it real.....

Game of Thrones and the death of fantasy?

Game of Thrones is almost upon us. Not since LOTR came out in the theaters has a 

fantasy work been such a focus of critical analysis and acclaim. Thus saith
the New York Times in an appriasal of GoT and the genre in general:

"In this way, fantasy as a genre seems to have an almost unfair advantage at allegorically chronicling our age. Elsewhere, the crudeness and savagery of modern life are artfully encoded in the palm-sweating desperation of the meth-dealing dad in “Breaking Bad,” the terse detachment of the pill-popping mom in “Nurse Jackie” or the quiet machinations of the enigmatic assassin in “Dexter.” But that brand of darkness has so thoroughly become the default syntax of cable dramas that even these sensational figures can’t quite jar us out of our somnambulant state. We apparently require gigantic walls of ice, supernatural wolf puppies, gory jousts, dragon eggs and a nomadic warrior who looks like Dave Navarro after heavy steroid use. Maybe it takes the grand scale of sybaritic kings and imaginary kingdoms to do justice to the perversions and the nihilism of post-empire America."

Far be it from the likes of me to turn away such appluse. Most fantasy geeks my age first turned onto to back back in the Dark Ages of not many years past, where its was still regarded as an outcast thing, suitable only for those two inept to pursue the more socially acceptable pursuits of sex, drugs and what remains of rock 'n roll. After all, if something isn't degrading and deemed 'rebellious' or 'transgressive' with a dash o social commentary thrown in, its deemed unworthy by the cultyural elites who run this country(9or at least like to think they do...)


Which makes all this sudden love and affection from the upper echelons very worrying. In the old days fantasy was a ghetto, basically. It was a fairly large one, and nto withotu it own prejudices, but a gehtoo the just the same, ignored for the most part and despised when noiced. The flipside of course, was that those within its walls could make up their own rules. In that little world they weren't the outsiders but the insiders, and could create to their hearts content. Being ignored has its advantages - if no one cares what you do, then you can do whatever you want.


Times change. What was inside is now outside. The world peeked over the walls long ago, liked what it saw, broke down the gates and installed a highway. The cultural movers and shakers are claiming the beloved genre for its own...bringing alogn their neuroses, fetishes and preconceptions. Gawd help us all the day Fantasy becomes Literary.


In some ways, this is a good thing. It's certainly about time fantasy got a modicum of respect. On the other hand, one can't help but feel that something is being lost, that the things that made this genre are being appropriated and diluyted to the point of invisibility, never to be regained. The old days are passing. For better or worse, it belongs to the world now. 

Game of Thrones-ism

Can't blog...too busy obsessing over Game of Thrones...must write post....brain lock...

WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING WINTERISCOMING

...(ack...)

Creating our own reality...cont.

Things are never as revolutionary as they first appear...what first begins on the margins, despised and ignored gains a modicum of notoriety by the mere fact that it is not acceptable by the polite society of time time, gains ascendancy by virtue of it's outsider cool, until the day comes when, lo and behold, it is Bo the establishment position. Same as it ever was...

Yet today, in this sad state of affairs that we call modern society, there is nothing left to rebel against. The outsiders of yesterday, the ways of life and ways of thinking that for so long were relegated to the fringe until they were picked up by the Boomers in their never-ending quest to flip the bird at their parents and deny the fact that one day they too would grow old, sucked dry vampire-style of all beauty they possessed until they were nothing more than withered husks, their one transgressive ways now nothing more than another bland variety of bourgeois mediocrity...

The default position of today's culture is rebellion...but rebellion against what? We are supposed to define ourselves against the mainstream, defined somewhat arbitrarily as a current that flows male, heterosexual, white, religious, or horror of horrors all at once. But the act of rebelling against this admittedly hazy state of affairs is in fact the real mainstream. Our normal is is a state of anxious self-conscious revolt against normality. Which begs the question, how do you rebel against rebellion itself?

Sometimes...

Sometimes you feel like running down the street arms flying and laughing like a madman fir no reason. Sometimes you just wanna curl into a ball and fade from this mortal plane. The world is a drab place and only cones alive in our own minds.

This, I think, is the secret of human existence. The physical world does not exist. Instead we create our own reality.

This is a mighty power indeed. Imagine what could be accomplished...


Hmm. Interesting line of inquiry. I'll have to ponder it some more...