Black Gate

Virginia: Please snap out of it. The world is drenched in things that don’t exist. I could mention the evergreen genre of “what I shoulda told him was…” conversations, or all those stories about “the fish (or the mastodon or the mating prospect) that got away.” But just because it’s fresh in my mind–and seasonal, too–I’d rather discuss the Attack of the Glittering Trees.

A few nights ago an ice storm swept over the Great Black Swamp (where I live). It was kind of a weird storm: there was warmish rain right before the temperature dropped steeply, so the ice was dripping, heavy, weighing down everything with a thick bright glaze. The ice started to rip branches off trees. A heavy one smashed through a skylight in our basement. (I know that sounds weird, but we really do have skylights in our basement.) Another one hammered on the roof of my daughter’s room. One gave a glancing blow to the living room window.

Clearly the shiny trees were angry and were trying to kill us. When my son tells people about it he always starts by saying, “There were three direct assaults on the house itself…”
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Yesterday we tried to stream the webcast of the winter solstice sunrise at Newgrange, Ireland, but were hampered by severed cables that rendered the Middle East virtually without internet. (Apparently it was also so cloudy in Ireland that the sun wasn’t visible at dawn, so we didn’t miss much.)

Newgrange is a 5000-year-old neolithic passage tomb built before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Newgrange features in several stories from (the much later) Irish mythology, including that describing the conception of the great Irish hero Cúchulainn, son of the god Lugh. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the spiral designs carved into its stones and those of the neighboring Knowth tomb have inspired New Age labyrinths to help create “peace and tranquility” and paintings celebrating “sacred space” and “Ireland’s holy places.”

Another British Isles passage grave with a winter-solstice webcam, albeit decidedly less hyped, is Maeshowe in the Orkney Islands. Somewhat more is known about the relatively recent history of Maeshowe because of the Orkneyinga Saga, which describes how Earl Harald and his Vikings looted it in the 12th century, and because of the runic graffiti with which the Vikings subsequently defaced it. Inscriptions such as “Thorni f****d; Helgi carved” support the theory that the Vikings subsequently used it as a trysting spot. It perhaps says something about human nature that this is one of the largest single collections of runic inscriptions to survive.

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Christmas was the most fun when I was a little kid, and when I had a little kid. Since neither applies these days, the lights don’t burn as brightly anymore. I’m not entirely a bah-humbugger, it’s just that, well, the magical feeling the holiday used to instill just isn’t there anymore. As a non-believer, the magic I’m referring to is rooted in that of the imagination of fairy tales and Old St. Nick, not the sacred version; although I recently attended a Messiah sing along and have been to the occasional Christmas service, I participate as an anthropological, not a religious, observer.

Now, maybe I’m just not paying attention, but I don’t seem to hear the outcry of putting “Christ” back into Christmas that was prevalent a few years ago. Possibly it has something to do with the economic crash that has lessened the crass commercialism the holiday is famous for (or, again, maybe I’m not paying much attention). In any event, I always thought the whole outrage about saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” was silly, as the holiday’s origins arguably have less to do with the birth of Jesus than paganism and general debauchery. All of this is nicely summarized in A Narnia Christmas by Laura Miller, a staff writer at Salon, author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.
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A common refrain about the publishing industry – heard clearest of all in those places where writers gather online – is that editors and agents are more interested in making a fast buck than in finding a solid author, that they’d rather have cookie-cutter fiction instead of something that breaks new ground, that they just don’t get it.  While I naturally cannot speak for every writer, my own experiences have led me to believe that the opposite is true.

To be sure, publishing changed when the conglomerates took over.  What was once a gentleman’s enterprise became instead a ruthless business, one replete with attorneys and accountants for whom books are merely a curiosity, a commodity.  There is an apocryphal tale from the late 80’s about a financial analyst who crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that, since only a small fraction of books were destined for bestsellerdom, the editor-in-chief would do well to focus the company’s resources just on those few books.  Wearily, the editor explained that no one could predict which books might outperform the others until after they were released.  It’s frightening to think that the people who are ultimately in charge of our creative destines might not have the first clue what they’re doing.

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