The root of much evil

Since we're all subject to the self-validating influences of confirmation bias, it was nice to overhear, quite by accident, an interview by a completely-out-of-her-depth Kim Hill (a strident, annoying NZ 'radio personality') with Susan Blakemore, who is one of the more interesting characters working in the field of cognitive science today, and possibly ever since that field was established as a kind of identity of its own. I may not agree with some of Blakemore's conclusions about what's what and how things work in the mind-universe-body area, but she has good reasons for coming to her conclusions, some of which were arrived at as a result of her own experimentations with her own 'body-mind' complex, placed into perspective through an integration of those with the work of others. A remarkable lady.

So, it was nice to hear her coming down on 'religion' with a solid THUMP. It made my own pronouncements on the subject appear tame by comparison. Christianity and Islam in particular copped a lot of vitriol. She stopped short of calling them 'evil', but it was a close as you'll get without using the word or any close circumlocution. A particularly interesting point she made—one I hadn't actually considered fully in its importance—was that while religion might serve to provide a unifying tool at certain scales, it does so only at the cost of being divisive at others—and that this, by and large, results directly in many of the global problems we're having today—and had throughout the last 1.5–2 millennia, those being the times of the global ascendancy of monotheisms. Before that it was either polytheisms or ethnically/culturally confined monotheisms. Only since about the year ZERO C.E. has the disease become the grotesque monstrosity it is now.

Of course, Blakemore sees it all in terms of 'memes'—but these are just descriptive models; like physicists resort to 'quarks' or whatever happens to be fashionable to explain the behavior of the world at the smallest scales.

However—and this is where 'confirmation bias' gave me the warm fuzzies, because this happens to be my personal sermon as well, and has been for a long time—when the interviewer asked Blakemore about the function of religion for the provision of values, she noted that we don't need religion, since we all have values that are built-in. Religion adopted some of those, but invariably perverted them until they became grotesque caricatures of what they actually are—if only because (to paraphrase and expand on Blakemore's comments somewhat) transforming them from evolutionarily sensible guides to behavior, personal and social (and especially social!), into absolute categorical imperatives. Religion decreases our sense of society as a society-with-other-human-beings and redirects our sense of obligation towards others into that of an obligation to a deity, which, in the two major monotheisms of the world, has become a monstrosity that's greater than the very universe we live in and whose appetites, whims and values—all of which arose from and are being fed by the imaginations and self-serving ambitions and delusions of priests, theologians and theo-politicians—dehumanize us and actually make us into less than we are: the exact opposite to what they claim they do.

(Wow! Long sentence! Long-winded, too. I hope it still makes sense, but I ain't re-writing it!)

Seriously, I ask you: when has the existence of religion ever made the world into a better place? When has religion ever prevented a war? When has religion ever nurtured respect for other human beings as human beings? When has it ever fostered, without being dragged kicking and screaming to reality, scientific enquiry? (I mean that kind of enquiry, empirical and/or that might threaten the foundations of its preposterous claims?)

"Ahh," you say. "Now he's done himself in—because what about..."

Think again. Take any example you care to think of and first, for example, demonstrate that conflicts apparently averted by the existence of religion were actually likely to have arisen if it weren't for religion to begin with. Consider also that all the sensible and humanistic precepts of any religion are those that said religions had to adopt, because otherwise nobody would have bought into them to begin with.

You may find, I admit, a few instances where religious thought may indeed have prevented a conflict or an oppression of freedom that wasn't caused by religion to begin with—but, let's face it, said instances dwindle into statistical and historical insignificance when compared to those where religion was, is and will remain the main originating cause and origin of division, conflict, wars and general physical, political and psychological mayhem and cruelty.

"Ahh," you say, "but what about the evils of Atheism? Think of Communism and..."

Absolutely. Any 'ideology' is likely to have pretty much the same effects as 'religion'. The thing about Atheism is that, as political forces go, it's self-limiting. History will nuke it in due course, and usually in a finite span of time. The gods venerated in the context of those instances where 'atheism' ruled were short lived. Besides, it wasn't 'atheism' at all, just a denial of the supernatural version of the 'God' idea. Instead of 'God', 'Javeh', 'Allah' or whatever wally name the deity is given, the great unwashed masses were given Marx, Lenin and the god-emperor Mao, the most absurd of them all. It was just religion in disguise. And then there's the soon-to-be-in-a-stable-state Fidel Castro, of course; who also will ultimately suffer the same fate as all those other pathetic little deities. With mortality will come ultimate oblivion. Mortal gods will eventually become nuncupatory, and if you need any evidence, just look at what happened to the mighty USSR and what is happening to China.

Religions, especially the monotheist kinds—though using temporary idols in human form, like Popes and Ayatollahs and the whole sickening pantheon of holy delegates—have at their heads entities that don't die! Ever! Not only that; they grant eternal life to the devoted followers. Meaning that—apart from variations in enthusiasm across the range of those idiots who 'believe', as well as the ebb and flow across history and religious fashion—you can't hope to have them attritioned in the same way that you basically can just wait out Lenin and Hitler and Mao and Castro and {insert list of names here}...

True 'atheism' denies the existence of any kind of deity and is, at its heart, of a humanist disposition. It also ultimately denies even the absoluteness of its own premise. True atheism isn't afraid of being wrong, because one can't know what is absolutely right, because one cannot know what is absolute. That's because one cannot know everything one doesn't know, or even know everything one doesn't know one doesn't know.

Religion, and especially the monotheist kind, is at its core destructive, divisive and inhumane, and its influence on those who adhere to it will be to make them behave, at worst, in a destructive, divisive and inhumane manner. It is only 'human nature'—which I believe at heart, and by and large, to be 'humane'—that prevents religion from doing, on an even larger and possibly terminally fatal global scale, the kinds of damage it would if it weren't for the innate tendency of human beings just to want to live their lives, look after their kids and propagate the species. Said activity always has and always will bring humans into conflict with each other, but religion acts like an amplifier for these conflicts, and the result is what we see today. The degree of amplification is proportional to the perceived size and significance of the deity involved.

The current 'wars' in this world may be stimulated and set into motion by triggers that are definable in the terms currently in favor—human greed, social inequality, competition for economic/military/cultural hegemony, 'national security', etc—but let nobody deceive themselves about the grim fact that these are not the engines that power them. At the heart of it lies religion, pure and simple. It is a cancer, aided and abetted by the twin basic human failings-of-thought, 'confirmation bias' and 'attribution error'; a fiendish synergy that has held up human development more than any other identifiable 'mental' phenomenon.

Is there a solution?

Umm. No. The human species will have to continue relying as a species for its survival and 'progress' on the luck that has seen it survive to this day. Let's us hope—and hope we must, for what else is there—that luck remains with us. Given the display of stupidity even among those who strut around thinking of themselves as 'intelligent', I think we're pushing it.

The Outer Reaches of Inner Space

Harking back to a recent post on the mind...

I...matured...(that post-'growing up') in a period where the commonly held wisdom by the then intellectual and spiritual elites was like "Hey, man, why you wanna go to outer space? Don't'cha know that it's all about the inside, man? Inner space goes on...like...forever. Just go inside yourself. Outer space. All that technology! Mind can't keep up with all that technology. All artificial, man. The mind...that's like 'natural'..."

All right, so I mixed in some current-day teen-speak-patois. So sue me. But you get the idea. The notion then, arising partially from the mind-altering drug culture—which then was, relatively, novel, and had, relatively, few truly nasty manufactured chemicals as are extant today, with LSD being about the most far-out of them all—was that 'inner space' was indeed infinite. You could just do your own thing, without needing to take recourse to the help of the evil technology produced by an evil and 'sick' society—which society? hey, pick any!—pop a pill or take a toke and off you went into your inner space, traveling to whatever far shores you though you discovered there.

Years later, when I was in my John Campbell phase, I picked up a book of his called The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. Great title and a great book, too. Nothing truly novel in terms of Campbellian thought and, as so often, somewhat long winded, but it was a good summary of his notions on the connection between the Star Wars phenomenon and the myths explored there and mythology in general. What the title referred to was how metaphors are transferred into the realm of science-fiction/fantasy; which provides us with the ideal 'medium' if you will, for relocating mythological adventures into 'far away' lands, while living in a world whose unexplored lands have shrunk almost to zero. The wonderful and strange lands of Karl May, the German adventure writer with whose writings I grew up, and which instilled in me an urge to travel and never stop traveling, have long been vanished in the mist of a past that never was, but one might have believed that maybe...just maybe...

My copy of Durch die Wüste was pretty tattered by the time I stopped reading it; Der Shut contains narrative imagery, some of it represented on the cover, that is indelibly water-marked onto my brain—but then I grew older and moved on to Perry Rhodan and science fiction pulps.

Crappy 'literature', I know—but in those days the notion of a benevolent 'third power' being established to avert the potential and ever-present short-notice nuclear calamity threatening humanity was something one took to; something to give hope. Nowadays I know it's a lot of bollocks and it would never work, except through coercion and mind manipulation that would ultimately turn back on its creators—á la Serenity—but then again, I've lived a bit longer now than I had then.

But the images of massive spaceships—just about all of which George Lucas ripped off, much like the creatures, plus a gazillion concepts; reminds me a bit of how Matrix ripped off Dark City; and did it badly, by the way—battling it out in the vastnesses of 'outer space, traveling at the wink of an eye, albeit by accident, right into far off galxies like M87 and into the interstellar conflicts there, between creatures at the same time oddly-human and yet alien; for something like 50 issues of the pulps...

...and just generally carrying mankind to the stars—and the whole notion that maybe you don't have to die, if only we have the technology...

...that was truly and amazingly awe inspiring—and still is, even in the hindsight of the remaining, dim memories.

This kind of early-life imprinting—all of it entirely self-inflicted, and disapproved of by my more intellectually inclined parents—may have contributed to my jaundiced view of voyages into 'inner space'; because I really didn't think, except for a relatively short period of temporary confusion, we'd find stuff there that'll ever match those heady, impossible voyages.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space was a title I found immediately fascinating. Even knowing what it actually meant never stopped me from wondering what if...

And, indeed, after all these years and with what we know know about the physical basis of that things as 'the human mind', and what we may reasonably conjecture about it in the context of what we are and how we came to be where and what we are, it appears that the Inner Reaches of Outer Space are indeed The Outer Reaches of Inner Space—and this a notion I'd like to leave you with today. Because if you dig deeply enough into yourself what do you find? After heading further and further down through the layers of perception and cognition and social context and thought and emotion—and coming upon that vast pool of 'thought' inaccessible to 'direct' inspection, unless done through the confused haze induced by hallucinogens, in which case you might as well not go there, because it won't do you much good... After all that, what do you come down to and what do you find?

'Star stuff', of course. Elements created in the cores of Supernovae, ejected into space in their death throes, and condensed into, ultimately, those structures we know as 'living creatures'. Go deeply enough through the layers of 'you' and you'll end up back on the outside. Another existential Moebius strip, embedded in an existential space of more dimensions that we can ever even begin imagine, and can indeed only experience.

This is the cosmic joke played on the middle-aged hippies or New Age moonbats of today. In order to see what's inside, they just have to look what's outside, physically and socially. And in order to save their 'essences'—their lives, is what I'm talking about, of course!—they have to make use of that which is not-their-essence, and which is, indeed, of that evil genus, the 'artificial'. The fruits and products of scientific technology, that is.

I know, I know: 'duh!'...

From my collection of great first paragraphs: from Jack Vance's Mazirian the Magician, the first of the stories in The Dying Earth.

Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. And inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes follwed the tread of his black-slippered feet.

Actually, these are just the first three sentences of a much longer paragraph, that continues with the same relentless, colorful assault of imagery.

Dummies rule

Here's another 'for DUMMIES' gem, pointed out to me by a colleague. I invite you to send me images of others with related themes for blog insertion and/or honorable mention.

And while we're on the theme—go figure how I worked that one out!—take a note of this one:

Police officer moonlighted as prostitute
20 July 2006

An Auckland police officer has been allowed to keep her job, despite moonlighting as a prostitute.

[...] police [...] refused to confirm the gender or rank of the officer but John Saunders, executive assistant to Police Minister Annette King, told the Wairarapa Times Age newspaper the case involved a female police officer...

[full article]

And why not? It can happen in the best of families—including, as some maintain, 'holy' ones.

The flow of life

This blog is written on a 'free' access terminal in the international gate area of Sydney airport. A sudden spontaneaous trip to Australia for reasons related to business is coming to an end —only lasted a couple of days—and here I am, waiting for my flight back to Dunedin.

Last time I was in Sydney—lived there, actually—was two decades ago, and I wonder why it doesn't seem like...well, two decades ago; and time has wrought some changes, mostly for the worse. Cities overall don't change for the better; the damn things just get bigger and bigger, and the airport interior has ballooned to a maze of shops that, for the most part, you can't avoid. Passage through them used to be a matter of choice; you had to veer aside from your usual route, make a decision to become surrounded by the stink of conflicting perfumes mingling into an even worse reek, while people utterly disinterested in you except as customers and providers of sales commissions ogle you openly or furtively. 'Duty-free' is a major exercise in deception on the idiotic passers-through, who used to be 'passers-by'. I've checked on some salient prices and I could purchase many of these items at the same or a lower price in Dunedin, by dropping into my local camera or electronic retail outlet.

But, yes, passage through shops is now obligatory, as you step into their brightly lit areas from the usually-dimmer passages frequented by the permanent denizens of the place. It's like the visual equivalent of what happens on TV when the ads come on and the sound levels instantly go up.

In many ways the airport is representative of the city in general. Sydney never was low-key, but the bit I've seen of it on this brief sojorun qualifies as very much 'in your face'.

Going back to Dunedin and coming into landing over the heads of herds of dairy cows and sheep is going to be a somewhat strange experience. I thought I was used to it, but it's amazing how quickly one can get habituated to the other way of things and styles of life. Here, at Syndey airport, watching the crowds line up at check-ins and flowing through the passages, shop-lined or not, I am reminded of...well, blood actually. Corpuscles of blood flowing through arteries and veins in trickles or in floods, solitary or in boluses. And then they come to a temporary rest, caught by duty-free shops or dead-ended and temporarily impeded in their smooth progress by the gate, waiting to proceed into the winged thing that will carry them wherever they go.

Such are these transient reflections, which I shall now cease to pursue any further, at least on the keyboard. Some poor bastard is itching to get onto one of the three internet terminals and I'm being a bad boy hogging it.

Signing off then; one solitary corpuscle in the flow of thousands of others, driven by their own intents and plans to destinations where what awaits them only they can know; if that, for we can never know what awaits us, even if we do have some idea of what may be likely.

I'll whip out my iBook now and sit down and do some writing--for as long as the batteries last.

I kid you not...

...and I invite you to consider the, possibly hilarious, implications of the unavailability of the following titles:
Atheism for Dummies
Existentialism for Dummies

Something Evil This Way Comes

'Evil' is a noun and an adjective. Google 'evil definition' and you'll get 22,600,000 entries.

Quotes regarding evil are legion. Here are a few:

"Do not yield or give in to evil, but proceed against it ever more boldly." Virgil

"I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too." Euripides

"When divine power plans evil for a man, it first injures his mind." Sophocles

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not just because of the evil people in it, but because of the other people who do nothing about it." Albert Einstein

"One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it." Martin Luther King, Jr

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." Haile Selassie

To say that 'evil' is a 'label' pinned on something, as moral relativists would, is a vacuous statement that tells us nothing. To say that 'evil' 'exists', or is 'real' in some sense, is probably simply false and a direct result of believing in the Platonic Idealist Fallacy.

Here's my take, for all it's worth—and, yes, please take it or leave it; but I'm not going to argue about it.

'Evil', as noun or adjective, is an attribution; that is, a quality or property assigned to something or someone which or who affects us and those in our circle of care and/or concern in a particular way. We may assign 'evil' to an agency capable of intentionality—human, godly, extraterrestrial, whatever—or to something that has no such capacity—cancer, death, disasters—though we are prone to transfer the evil assigned to such intentionality-free agencies to intentionality-capable ones lurking somewhere 'behind' it.

When assigning the property of evil-ness to other human beings we commit what in psychology is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error; we provide an explanatory framework for their behavior by attributing to them certain properties or qualities—while not doing the same for us in explaining our own actions. Committing the FAE is a basic and ubiquitous element of human behavior, if only because we simply don't, in general have the time, mental resources or information available to figure out why someone really did something.

When assigning the property of evil-ness to agencies not possessed of 'intent', we implicitly anthropomorphize them or whatever lies 'behind' them; and then commit the FAE. This, too, is 'normal' human behavior resulting from our need to make sense of the senseless.

The actions assigned to intentional or random 'evil' are those which result in the destruction of something we consider of 'value'. The more valuable what is destroyed, the greater the assigned degree of 'evil' involved.

And that is basically it. End of story.

It has to be the end of the story, because it all now comes down to what one values. For what one values one usually considers worthwhile preserving. I don't know what your values are; so I can't tell you what your evil might be!

I can guess at a few fairly common 'valuables', like the life and health of you and your loved ones and friends—at least I would like to think these are commong human valuables; though they're not for some, for whatever dysfunctionalities they might be afflicted by.

Try to look at 'evil'—and 'good' as the opposite of it—in the sense delineated above, and see if that fits into your life. It's not easy, because though the definitions are, in essence, 'simple', their consequences for each and every one of us are complex, and they don't ever, as it were, let us 'off the hook'. We are responsible for making the decisions, and while there are guidelines, dictated by what we 'are' as creatures on Planet Earth, the rest is dictated mostly by just exactly where contingency has placed us in time, space, social context and the events of our lives that shaped us into what we are.

I also invite you to reconsider such commonly accepted statements as, for example, 'world peace would be a good thing' and 'violence is evil' in the light of the above. 'World Peace'—a concept whose full import few care to consider for fear of risking dearly-held beliefs—in order for it to come into being requires the destruction of things that many people, including I, would consider to be of value and worthy of preservation. And 'violence' may indeed be necessary, for a given individual(s) or group(s), to preserve something they consider valuable and worthy of maintaining.

I also invite you to reconsider the quotes at the beginning of this blog, to check out how many of them still make sense if one accepts what I wrote above.

This is, of course, just an invitation. 8)

Ahh, the drama...

No, I'm not referring to my personal life, but the issue of what is 'good' drama. Thing is, I made the mistake of writing, in my last blog 'Gilmore Girls and House; probably the best 'drama' extant at the moment'.

Bad mistake. 'What about The Sopranos?' commented someone—rightly so. Sopranos is good and 'dramatic' 'drama', approaching Greek tragedy on occasions, and sinking into mere bathos in others—and it is, possibly and according to some measures, 'better' and definitely more 'dramatic' than Gilmore Girls. So, why do I stand by what I said—which, I do.

Thing is, drama is not just about plot and presentation and all that. It's also about 'connection'—and I just can't 'connect' with Sopranos. They're just not my kind of people. Their 'dramas', and especially Tony's, leave me cold. I've watched three scattered episodes of Sopranos and decided never again to waste my time with them or anything else watched merely for the sake of watching something that has won so many awards and has been praised so extensively. I mean, who cares, right?

But that's just me. I also never connected with Godfather. I am intellectually aware that gangsters are 'people', and, like all people, they have a point of view and a reason for being who and what they are. They have a right to be considered as 'people' with 'people rights' and so on. Just like I'm sure terrorists have points of view and perfectly valid 'reasons' for acting as they do. If they didn't they wouldn't; it's as simple as that. I don't believe in the the actual existence of that thing called 'evil'; just in actions that merit the label. More on that in another blog; maybe the next one. But there is a difference between, say, looking at a rose and being aware of its colors and shape and scent and just how amazing it is that such a thing should exist—and, on the other hand, being 'touched' by these attributes and, over and above the qualities that give the rose its appearance etc, finding it, for example 'beautiful'. The latter requires a connection that goes to a more sublime, level of...well, 'connection'.

Let's face it, this is the reason why some genres of literature will never become as 'popular' as others; either in writing or in film. People need to be able to connect; to relate the pseudo-lives, actions and value-systems of their characters to their own in some way; or alternatively they need to be fascinated by them, like mice are by snakes who are about to eat them. I can relate to and understand what goes on in the lives and minds of the people I see represented in Gilmore Girls and House. My mirror neurons fire in all the right simulation patterns, which they don't for Sopranos.

So, let me amend my imprudently generalized statement to read: 'Gilmore Girls and House; for me, the best 'drama' extant at the moment'. 8)

Still, the comment generated some thoughts I might not have had otherwise. In particular, I now have a piece of internal dialogue for Falcon to start off the next part of the book. So, that's all good. Silver linings and all that.

Episode 1.1

A few nights ago, after having the DVDs sitting in a plastic-wrapped box on a shelf, placed there because my daughter brought it over on her visit from the UK, and passing it several times a day and telling myself that 'soon' must be the time... A few nights ago the time had arrived and the box was un-plastic-wrapped and the sleeve removed—and I'm writing in 'passive voice', which, writers reading this take note, is a 'no-no'!—and the disk inserted into the DVD player, and I, and my wife, finally watched the first scene of the first ever... drum-roll... Gilmore Girls episode.

Now, you're thinking 'duh' or 'what?' or 'who gives a shit, and why's he...?" or 'what?'... but I've said that already, so let's stop here.

Well, I'm thinking that it was moderately momentous. After watching as far back in time as maybe late Season 2, the very first episode and those that follow it—and, yes, we're in the phase now where it's like "oh, why don't we just watch one more episode; it's only midnight and we only have to get up at 7 a.m. and so..."—was a religious experience of some sort. I mean, the first ever! It's like the beginning of time, almost six years back, which is like forever, sometime in 2000, when the world was carefree, Lorelai's biggest issue was her relationship with her as-always dysfunctional other-universal parents, and Kirk was just some random pain-in-the-ass and not a fixture. Luke, however, took only three episodes to turn from a guy who ran a diner, was moderately clean-shaven and even wore a shirt tucked inside his pants, to the Luke we all know and love, with the permanently reversed baseball cap. Hygiene reasons, I suppose. It's either that or one of those food-preparers' regulation shower-caps I guess. Can't see Luke with a shower-cap. Can't really see him without that reverse baseball cap either.

Rory was sweet and teen-ish, with occasional tantrums and what you expect at that age. The dialogue between the two Lorelais in Episode 1.1 reminded me of words not unheard-of in my own household maybe a decade or so ago.

Looking back from Season 6 I can see just how well this show was written right from the start, and how it kept pace with the characters' development and the swells and troughs of life. And, finally I got to see all the scenes they used in the intro sequence. It's been killing me to know! Now I can live.

I'd love to write a TV series. Well, I have, actually. Wrote the pilot and several seasons' worth of episode summaries and story arcs. Twice, though #2 took a lot of ideas from #1. But writing TV series is even more futile, basically, than writing spec feature-film screenplays. The bottom-line is that, unless they are produced they will never be read by anyone but you and a select few; probably very few, if any.

Still, like screenplays, writing TV series pilots and episode synopses can serve as a platform from which to launch into the writing of novels, which potentially do have an extensive readership. So, maybe it isn't all that futile. Think of the screenplay as an extended, and very simplified synopsis of your novel, with a lot of details thrown in, but a severely limited level of complexity. A good idea is to write the screenplay with that possible extra novelistic complexity and plot extension in mind, or at least as a potential.

Such was the case for a screenplay called Sword of Light, written many years ago, like sometime in the late 90s, which was left open-ended because my 120 pages were up. But it stopped at an interesting point, which almost screamed out for a sequel. Thing is, at the time I had no idea what to put into a sequel; hadn't even thought much beyond that last moment, which had a sort of open-ended promise and glory about it. Anything could happen—or nothing at all. But the question lingered, as it does with me for unfinished stories: what now? Pretty much the reason why Keaen kept on having sequels attached. I don't mind open-endedness; in fact I think it's all good. But I have this thing about 'unfinished business' coming back to bite you in the ass. There's an urge to tidy it up. Hence Finister, Tergan, Fontaine and Tethys. Talk about OCD. It's like scratching an itch that won't go away.

This isn't a feeble attempt to justify the sequels to Keaen, but an explanation as to why I spent time on them, rather than tackling any of the half a dozen novels I also have on my to-do list and that have nothing to do with Keaen: SF and non-SF materials, which are being pushed into the background because the Keaen story is still itching; a monkey on my back.

Back to Sword of Light. A few years later the screenplay kind-of 'became' Seladiënna. The novel was based on the original premise, extended its geographical and narrative scope, tweaked some logic and emphases, and ultimately ended up as the longest novel I've ever written. It doesn't even come some to the logorrhoeic productions of some authors, but weighs in respectably at 160k words. I'm kind of wondering—idly at this point, but things can get out of hand after 'idle wonderings', as I know only too well—if I shouldn't now go and make the book into a TV series. Reason for that is that one should never dismiss such considerations, because a good idea is worth being re-formatted into other media. Besides, I really like the notion of being able to getting to know my characters even better than I do—or maybe figuring out that they're not quite the people I thought they were in the novel. That is, of course, the most attractive aspect ot TV series—and, to get back to Gilmore Girls, it is done very nicely here; from the central characters to the, permanently or transiently, more peripheral ones.

I think I'll get Season 2 as well. Never really caught most of that part of the story. Why not? There are worse things to spend money on.

Gilmore Girls and House; probably the best 'drama' extant at the moment; drama of the kind that doesn't really rely on technological gimmickery, or on way-out premises. Just some characters drawn sharper than they usually are. I mean, somehow just about everybody in Gilmore Girls, even the likes of Kirk, is recognizably someone we probably know or know of, but drawn with a strong, determined pen.

A note on readership of this blog:

It's gone down as of recent. That either means I'm getting boring or uninteresting, or tackling topics that people don't give a shit about, or it means that there were a lot of readers who wanted more KAC pics. If the latter were the case, well, that'll be too pathetic for words. To those who have left because they're not getting to see more hot chicks, albeit in fairly chaste contexts, good riddance! As for the rest of you, thanks for staying around.