Beach books need the ability to put the book down and go do something else for a while. Tempest Rising was definitely a “single sitting” read.

Anyway, I was just reading ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature,’ a moldy-smelling old book by Lovecraft I found at my UBS, and the intro makes an interesting point vis a vis the place of religious conventions in all this and a slight variation on the idea that fairy tales are there to make sense of the chaotic world:

“Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.”

He more measures the “weird tale” by the creation of a sensation of “dread” of unknown forces, and he’s dealing more in horror, but your essay made me think about it. Especially where you mention the “traditional heroes–vampire hunters, government agencies, the Church…” maybe it’s not just that their way of dealing with frightening and unknown forces has seemed noble-but-not-yet-effective to some, or wrongheaded or sanctimonious to others, but that they’re not equipped fight the fight, because of the Jungian nature of what’s actually being fought, which is literally a “war on terror.”

Laurence: First of all, I’m happy to have made you tingle. That does a gal’s heart proud. Secondly, this is such a fascinating article! It’s so true that, while I can read the most experimental fiction, and I can totally appreciate the po-mo artworks of people like Rothko (pretty colors!), most experimental music makes my ears bleed. But I think a lot of that is the reliance of some experimental music on dissonance, and the whole point of dissonance is that it sounds wrong to us. I guess it makes sense though, since the different senses each art form engages are so different. Like I said, even if you want a “real picture,” Rothko won’t actually offend because he’s giving you something lovely, even if it’s not a traditional still life or portrait. And with literature, there’s usually something to latch onto. For example, I always say Martin Amis is one of my favorite writers, but when I think about it I realize that he’s not, really. I love his ideas, but I would never pick up his fiction the way I would pick up Philip Pullman, Iris Murdoch, Robertson Davies, or Hemingway: for the comfort factor. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that our ears are such weird, delicate instruments and their function is so different from our sense of sight, or from the reasons that we read. Anyway, I do love my Foucault and Adorno, and I talk about Foucault’s Panopticon a lot, but Nietzsche is my own personal (lunatic) philosopher. Meanwhile, that’s awesome you play bass. I don’t think you really need to know philosophy to do that, and I actually think that playing bass is even cooler than Nietzsche. I’m musically challenged, but I do love experiment jazz, especially this guy: http://www.kornstad.com/. He plays experimental saxophone and it’s tres sexy. As for my book, it’s more Tom Holt or Christopher Moore than Charles de Lint. Just warning you. ;-) Hope you enjoy it! It still feels weird that it’s out there, now.

If only classical composers would write a ‘beach read’ every now and then to let us ‘outsiders’ in on even just a thin veneer of what’s going on.
I’m a musician and my guitar player just got his English Lit Ph.D. with a thesis on ‘Post 9/11 Ethics’. Huh? As luck would have it, our drummer is an English teacher and when they start discussing Foucault and Adorno, I’m SO lost. And these are my buddies!!!
If you can give me a Charles de Lint/ Guy Kay clone with a side-order of ‘pomo’…I’m be a slave for life!!:-)

Looking forward to reading the book soon and I’ll supply feedback.

And Tzi, I missed you! Thank you! The next one will be coming out in July. :-)