Origin stories

Book: Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal

Published: 2011 (The University of Chicago Press)

Pages: 334 (not counting endnotes)

Holy shit, comic book writers are just as crazy as you think they are.

Kripal’s conclusion is a lot more nuanced, academic, and sympathetic than mine. But all his research into the great minds of speculative fiction basically comes down to this. Everyone from Alan Moore to Jack Kirby to Philip K. Dick to pulp writers of the 1950s had some sort of paranormal/religious experience that brought them out of their own consciousness in some elaborate mind-melting way that may or may not have involved drugs (it’s split about even along the users/nonusers line). And boy howdy did they ever want to dissect the hell out of these experiences in print.

I won’t cheat or pretend to remember by paging back through for some random quotes about any of this stuff. It was confusing and blurred into one giant blob of higher intelligent beings revealing themselves to grant their higher knowledge on the open-minded. Basically, these guys did not go, “You know what would be AWESOME? SPACESHIPS and sexy goddesses!” and proceed to make it up as they went along. They were transcribing, translating, and interpreting. Their work was not their own.

To me, that’s disappointing, mostly because I want to hear how artists take control of their own creativity. I wanted to read about how they took ordinary lives and molded them into fantastical allegories about their world and its direction, disguised in mystical experiences that their audiences would use for escape. I did like that Kripal had enough insight to divide the experiences into different socio-historical anxieties, like alienation, radiation, orientation, mutation. 

But then he dropped giant musing paragraphs into the middle of everything and lost me out in the cosmos. Maybe I’m just not ready for enlightenment yet.

Scandal!

Book: Smile Pretty and Say Jesus: The Last Great Days of PTL

Author: Hunter James

Published: 1993 (University of Georgia Press)

Pages: 210

On the surface, this is a tale of greed and denial and hypocrisy channeled through one of the biggest evangelical Christian empires this side of the Rocky Mountains. Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker start their ministry with coins rattling in their collection cigar box, got on TV through a masterful puppet show that evolved into a gi-fucking-normous media/theme park thing that made them enough money to burn through with Cadillacs and makeup and Kmart shopping sprees until their financial mismanagement and Jim's sexual eccentricities were exposed. Then Jerry Faulwell took over, trip over some of the exact same problems of his own (although on a smaller scale), and the whole shebang ended on a half-finished luxury hotel taken over by Native Americans who now owned the land on which it was getting built. 

I'm pretty sure everybody knows the surface bit of the story, or can at least trace its familiar tropes. That makes it no less enjoyable to read about. Not with a malicious anti-religious smugness, but with a wonder at exactly how much people can trust their leaders and how much these leaders can built on shaky grounds before everything just goes SMASH.

But take a closer look into this, and you'll get the equally interesting and far more worrying glimpse of a newspaper man driven insane by his job.

Late nights, early mornings, no distinguishes between the two, camping out for hours to grab two seconds of a subject's time, chasing phone calls, editors spitting profanity like sparks from blowtorches--these are all pretty standard for an old-school paper journalist. James, who eventually reveals that he's over fifty during his coverage of this scandal, should be used to it if maybe getting tired of all the abuse. Instead, he drops in these stream-of-consciousness lines, even a whole chapter, that drop psychological hints about how much he hates all of this. He misses deadlines, drinks and takes downers, doesn't seem to know how to get out of all of his misery. He doesn't enjoy any of the chase.


And based on his continual failure to get close enough to any of the major people in this to fill out 500-word articles, I really wonder how he managed that for full book.

Somehow he manages to forge a great connection between his personal downfall and the one he's supposed to be covering. It does make me wonder about his career after this, though. Was it his last stand as well as the Bakkers' and Faulwell's? He never says. I hope he retired into one of those "old guy" desk jobs he was talking about by the end. 

Which is sort of a horrible thing to wish on a reporter. But dude was worn OUT. 

Not all of them have a moral.

Book: Preacher: Gone to Texas

Writer: Garth Ennis

Artist: Steve Dillon

Published: 1996 (DC, fancy paperback edition)

Pages: 199

So now I know what a face without a jaw but otherwise unharmed looks like. Also, can a guy (different one) survive with the skin of his face peeled off? I want to say yes. All he’s missing is covering and some small nerve endings, right? And do all angels have Mohawk-shaped hair they leave flowing instead of spiked? Why do the scientist/peon angels have to wear sweatsuits? What exactly are the removable pointy metal bits used for on the priest’s shirt collar? And can the journalist please keep his fedora on? I mean, it’s ugly, but the one time he took it off it looked like something has been chewing on his hair.

 This pales, of course, next to the hard-drinking curse-spitting easy-going Irish vampire and his ingenious use of his regenerative abilities. I mention him first because he’s my favorite. There’s the preacher who’s lost his faith and then been possessed by the unholy union of archangel and she-demon; he’s looking for literal God, who has abandoned heaven. And Tulip, the preacher’s ex, who has abandoned her no-firearms rule but not her piss and vinegar about getting dumped and stranded five years ago.

Oh! And poor Arseface, the son of a Texas sheriff. He shot himself because Kirk Cobain did, but Arseface survived with a giant crater where his mouth/nose/eyebrows used to be and a fierce protective instinct for the father who scorned him. He doesn’t have much of a role…this time. We leave him yelling “From now on I will be Arseface!” to the sky in the best supervillain tradition, somewhere roughly ¾ of the way through the actual story.

I’m sorry this is scattered. It’s how my brain ran through this comic, and let me tell you, it was a hell of a good time. This is volume 1 in a decently long series, but it ended neatly and with an open wink: “There are a million stories in this naked city. Not all of them have a moral.”

Excuse me while I go paste that over my writing space now.  

C. S. Lewis explains life, the universe, and everything

Book: Mere Christianity

Author: Clive Staples Lewis

Published: 1952 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 227

Three months ago, I found a copy of this book in a PUT YOUR UNWANTED THINGS HERE box on Winthrop University’s campus. I fished the book out and brought it home with me because a few hours earlier, a very dear friend of mine had recommended it to explain his faith.

It seemed like either his God or my Coincidences thought I should read it, too, so finally, after staring it down in my dorm and making sure it moved out with me and inching it higher on my to-read pile, I read it this past week.

To avoid exposing the weirder emotions I had while reading this, I’m reverting to that Internet hermit’s favorite: the list analysis.

What I Liked

1. The way the words flowed. Lewis wrote most of this book first as radio essays, which keeps the sentences short and easy to follow. His big ideas stay fairly clear
2. How he explained the “three-personal god” through a dimensional model. He talks about how 2-D squares are made up of 1-D lines, how 3-D cubes are made of 2-D squares, and how each level builds on the next to create something more than the sums of the first levels. “As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.” It’s the clearest explanation of the Trinity that I’ve ever heard.
3. His definition of faith: “…the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Yeah. Moods DO change a lot. They ARE pretty unreliable as barometers of what we’ve anchored our lives to.
4. His hate the sinner not the sin approach to forgiveness. It’s not a unique view, but it’s my favorite (as applied to humanism, my preferred moral code).
5. His distinction between begetting and creating. I’d never thought of a difference before, but begetting means producing something of you from a part of yourself so it’s like you, and creating means making something that imitates you but isn’t like you. …Yeah. “A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue.” That.
6. I’m sorry if this is blasphemous, but Lewis's Time and Beyond Time chapter made me think of Dr. Who. "Time isn't a straight line. It's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff." ("It--got away from me, yeah...") That’s not a bad thing. That’s an excellent way of explaining how God could possibly do a quarter of the things he’s supposed to attend to: time is not linear for him (or David Tennant). He’s all time at the same time.

What I Didn’t Like (mostly from the first half of the book, which I found infinitely more frustrating than the back end)

1.  How each question of logic was answered with such black and white choices. These are the only two possible explanations in the universe, and of course that one’s ridiculous, so option B is the only sane choice. …But why? Lewis rarely gives a clear reason why anything’s ridiculous except that it is. Throw in some laws of physics, theories of psychology, something please.
2. He does chase his own tail sometimes when he says he’s going deeper into a subject. Not all the time, by any means, but enough to notice.
3. The little flairs of condescending phrasing (“Now, don’t worry if you can’t wrap your head round this…”). I don’t know if these are left in from when people were listening to him and couldn’t go back and reread his words, but they still bother me.
4. His stance on women. If I ever get married, it will be an equal partnership. End of story. I’ll defer judgment to my partner only when I know he knows something about whatever he’s supposed to decide, thanks. If we disagree, we’ll get an informed expert third-party opinion (Wikipedia).

It was interesting. 

False titling

Book: Absolute Truths

Author: Susan Howatch

Publication: 1995 (Knopf)

Pages: 560

Religion. Hoo boy.

You need to know this is a touchy subject for me. I’m not religious, but a few people I love are, and that divide’s made things difficult.

It’s made me want to understand other people’s views on religion and why they think and feel the ways they do. I know your basic Southern-kid-who-went-to-church theology, but I want to learn about the human side of it. Unfortunately, this book kept me at arm’s length.

Despite spanning over 500 pages, the story never gets anywhere. It’s about a senior clergyman in the Church of England—a bishop who’s sort of like the CEO of this small town’s church system, although I never got a clear picture of the whole infrastructure so that metaphor might be off—who has to juggle his job, his God, and the death of his wife as intermingling factors he has to deal with at the same time to get some peace.

Cool! Ripe for some heavy philosophical discussion and reflection! I mean, we all know it’s going to end in a deeper appreciation of God because that’s just how these things work, but still—interesting journey is still worth the trip! Yes?

No. Not when everybody lectures instead of speaks; not when the protagonist has such a talent for drowning the truly scandalous (interesting) bits in wordy paragraphs that start with sentences like, “This is too irredeemable for me to even consider to put on paper, suffice to say”; not when the rest of the prose reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel only without the murder or quirkier human details. 

I had such high hopes at page 39, when the bishop’s wife asks him, “What happens to the people who just can’t fit into this neat, orderly world designed by the Church?” YES. What DOES happen to them?

I still don’t know. He just says that surely it’s in his favor that he has no idea what it’s like to be a homosexual, and then dodges the rest of her questions until she gets too exasperated to keep asking. And the big, scandalizing secret about his adopted son’s father (who had an affair with the bishop’s wife right before she became the bishop’s wife)? He was actually a good man instead of a bastard.

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS. THAT…wait, that’s not worth any of this massive pile of angst you’ve put yourself and your reader through. There are a couple more anti-reveals like that instead of a satisfying wah-bam climax. Shhffft. (That’s my frustrated sound, blown through pursed lips while scowling.)

No absolute truths are ever revealed. I call out Howatch for false titling. 

However, this is the last book in a series. Each novel is self-contained but interlocking, and I think maybe the one that describes the great spiritual crisis of 1937 might be more interesting, because that is alluded to CONSTANTLY as the start of everything. Except that book’s also narrated by the same protagonist. If it was narrated by the bishop’s wife, I would totally give that one a chance. Her name is Lyle and she’s awesome but she dies of a brain aneurysm.