December 9, 2009 Excerpt

The most merciful thing in the world

Perhaps the most famous of H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling SciFi stories, The Call of Cthulhu (full text here) hooks you from the first line:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

December 9, 2009 Travel

Preparation be damned! (and my fully justified fear of that Vandersexx scene in Eurotrip)

With four days until departure, and a week of traveling ahead, the most German I can manage before my arrival in Frankfurt is to memorize a few basic phrases. Ja, Nein, and Wo ist die nächste Kneipe? (Where is the next pub?) ranked high on the list, so I’ve got the important things down. Between now and then I’ll be so busy packing, driving, flying, visiting family, and slogging through security checkpoints that learning more German seems a distant concern.

All the same, I figured I could read on the plane, so I scoured a half dozen bookstores for a pocket reference guide for German phrases. They typically had several sizes of dictionary and nothing else. I was hoping for a handy and amusing book, something like Common German Insults and Pickup Lines, with which I can anger the men and woo the women. My antics with such a guide would all be forgiven, of course, because I’ll massacre the delivery, but there are no limits for good entertainment. Publishers take note. Need I point out the vast untapped profits (and laughs) ripe for the picking in such a market?

When I finally found a common phrase book, it was priced at twenty dollars, so I figured I’d save cash and not make a fool of myself, at least not at first. I’ll just pretend I’m mute instead. Nod and smile, or hope to god they speak English. If things gets out of hand, and my safety depends on recalling on cue that thirty letter safe word, and the metal chair they handcuffed me to is bolted to the floor, I’ll have to rely on my survival skills and the panic-induced strength that surges through my limbs when confronted by whip- and chain-weilding leather-clad vixens.

Once I got home from the bookstore, however, that thought began to worry me, so I dug around for a while and found a few websites to help me out. I bookmarked a basic German course on Wikibooks, the Google translator, and the jackpot of all reference pages for German (discovered after wading extensively through ads and other Internet muck). If you prefer video lessons YouTube has some decent ones, too, and it helps just to familiarize yourself with the sounds.

These resources will be more useful as a reference guide once I’ve been exposed to the language than they are right now, but anyone with considerable motivation and persistence could conceivably learn German without spending a cent beyond access to the Internet.

When I get to Frankfurt, I’ll do my best not to agree with anything I don’t fully understand, especially when it’s offered by a woman in tight leather. And if I don’t heed my own advice, at least it’ll be a good story. Otherwise I’m just going to jump right in. Klingt Spaß, ja?

December 8, 2009 Excerpt

“… and I had played with magic.”

This is a passage from Norman Mailer’s third novel, The Deer Park. It takes place after Sergius’s first liaison with the beautiful actress Lulu in Desert D’Or, Hollywood’s secluded party resort:

“With the dawn spreading out from me until it seemed to touch the Yacht Club with its light, I began to think of those mornings when I was out on a flight which started in the darkness of the hangars, the syrup of coffee on my tongue, the blast of my plane flaring two long fires into the night. We would take off an hour before dawn, and when morning came to meet us five miles high in the air with the night clouds warmed by a gold and silver light, I used to believe I could control the changes of the sky by a sway of my body as it was swelled by the power of the plane, and I had played with magic. For it was magic to fly an airplane; it was a gimmick and a drug. We knew that no matter what happened on ground, no matter how little or confusing we ourselves could be, there would always come those hours when we were alone in formation and on top of life, and so the magic was in the flight and the flight made us very cool, you know? and there was nothing which could happen once we were down which could not be fixed when the night went into the west and we ganged after it on our wings.

I had been careful to forget all of this, I had liked it too much, and it had not been easy to think that I would probably never have any magic again; but on this dawn with the taste of Lulu still teasing me, I knew that I could have something else, and I could be sad for those airplanes I deserted because there was something to take their place.”