It was roughly a year ago that I decided to scale back my movie reviewing at Cold Fusion Video Reviews.  I had a reputation through the B-movie reviewing community as one who posted new reviews like clockwork (I think it was mostly couched in the phrase, “He may be talentless, but at least he’s [...]]]>

It was roughly a year ago that I decided to scale back my movie reviewing at Cold Fusion Video Reviews.  I had a reputation through the B-movie reviewing community as one who posted new reviews like clockwork (I think it was mostly couched in the phrase, “He may be talentless, but at least he’s punctual”).  However, I realized that not only was a weekly schedule cutting into time I could be using to write anything else (like all those novels I swore I would get to someday), but I was kind of using that self-imposed schedule as a shield to keep from writing all those other things. After all, the fans of my reviews loved me! I was a fish of at least noticeable size in a small pond! Outside that pond, there were monsters!

What finally decided me was an awareness that I was simply burning out.  I was finding less and less to say about more and more movies.  Bad flicks were being produced faster than I could keep up, and that’s even only if I stuck to my screener pile and ignored the 15,000 other movies from the past several decades that fell within my purview.  My reviews were feeling more and more like… a job.  One that I didn’t particularly enjoy, and one which didn’t pay enough to overcome the growing dissatisfaction.

My original plan was to scale back to maybe one review a month.  However, I quickly found out that if I didn’t have a schedule which was both set and frequent, I’d never get to it.  A month went by. Then two, and then three, and… I didn’t exactly have a hole in my schedule where movie watching and reviewing had been, nor did I have a corresponding hole in my heart.  I had retired without meaning to, and I felt fine.

All my old reviews are still there, of course — we call that “evergreen content” in Webmasterese — with the front page now devoted to updates from the other “Cold Fusioneer” subsites.  I’m rediscovering both reading and writing (the former spurred by owning a Kindle, the latter by writer friends who kick my butt as needed).  And I certainly credit the decade-plus I spent B-movie-reviewing with a greater confidence with the written language.  But I honestly can’t imagine now writing 1,000 words or so on any movie, much less one with, shall we say, modest aspirations. I’d rather be writing my own stuff.

The Good Men Project features a post by Jim Rigby, Presbyterian minister, entitled “Ten Things I Wish the Church Knew About Homosexuality.”  I really have gone out of my way not to involve myself in the culture wars around here, but this point-form list of ten declarations — each of which is presented without [...]]]>

The Good Men Project features a post by Jim Rigby, Presbyterian minister, entitled “Ten Things I Wish the Church Knew About Homosexuality.”  I really have gone out of my way not to involve myself in the culture wars around here, but this point-form list of ten declarations — each of which is presented without further elucidation, as if they should be self-evident to all intelligent, right-thinking people — demanded at least some commentary.

I gather the unspoken thesis of his list to be that opposition by Christians to legalization of gay marriage is inherently unchristian.  (Which means that we’re already dealing with conflation, as discussions of homosexuality and of gay marriage are not the same discussions.)  If that is not the point or thesis of Rigby’s list, then I can only plead poor communication in the original, as that certainly seems to be the thrust of the list.

Tackling each in order:

1. If Jesus did not mention a subject, it cannot be essential to his teachings.

Sounds good on a bumper sticker.  Until you realize that Jesus did not once mention, say, slavery.   Does this mean that slavery should be accepted by all doctrinally sound Christians, or at worst treated as a minor peccadillo?

Jesus was preaching at a time in history in which, as in roughly 99.8% of history, the idea of a man and a man or a woman and a woman being “married” was so foreign as to be incomprehensible.  Are we really to believe that, if Jesus had been against 21st-century gay marriage, he would have interrupted his preaching to his contemporary audience to say, “Oh, and by the way, in two thousand years, someone’s going to come up with same-sex marriage, and that’s bad?”

2. You are not being persecuted when prevented from persecuting others.

What is “persecution”?  Is saying that you think someone else’s opinion is wrong persecution?  Is saying, “I don’t think your proposal is good public policy” persecution?  Is noting that there doesn’t seem to be Constitutional authority for a judge to override a public vote persecution?

Or maybe persecution is denying entrance to a public place to someone who’s been quoted as having views contrary to your own.  Or inquiring as to someone’s personal opinion (which was not being volunteered) and then ridiculing and name-calling that person in public, despite the fact that the opinion being expressed was exactly the same as the one the President Obama professed before the last election.  Or stating unequivocally that holding an opinion which assigns superiority to one household arrangement over another is “hate speech.” Just saying.

3. Truth isn’t like wine that gets better with age. It’s more like manna you must recognize wherever you are and whoever you are with.

I don’t even know what that means. Moving on…

4. You cannot call it “special rights” when someone asks for the same rights you have.

That sounds very fine, until you realize that the “right” referred to must be defined as “the right to marry whoever you want.”  Because the “right” which proponents of gay marriage are advocating for is the right for a same-sex couple to solemnize a marriage, which is a right that none of us have.  You want the same rights as me?  Fine.  I initially had the right to marry a willing individual of the opposite sex.  Having done so, I currently do not have the right to marry anyone at all unless and until that first marriage is dissolved.  Hey, howcome some single guy is allowed to get married and I can’t?  I’m being discriminated against because of my current marital status!  I also can’t marry my sister or my mother! I can’t marry whoever I want!  That’s not fair!

The fact that there are restrictions on every individual defining who they can and can’t legally marry isn’t evidence of unequal rights, as those restrictions hold for everyone.  However one wants to argue for the legalization of same-sex marriage, one can’t do it legitimately from a stance of “equal rights.”

 5. It is no longer your personal religious view if you’re bothering someone else.

Here, again, we’re getting away from opinions about homosexual behavior per se and into the arena of same-sex marriage.  I may have religious views on what you do behind closed doors, but as long as what you do doesn’t affect me, go for it.  But it seems to me that the entire point of the push toward same-sex marriage — toward a state legitimization of that relationship — is its ability to force other people to treat it in a certain manner.  Else what’s it for?

6. Marriage is a civil ceremony, which means it’s a civil right.

This one is such a jaw-dropper, I hardly know how to respond; there’s so little thought behind it, it’s  hard to criticize as a legitimate position rather than a bumper-sticker quip.

The best I can do is an analogy:

“Occupational licensing by the state is a civil procedure, therefore obtaining a license as a hairdresser is a civil right.”  It must necessarily follow that any restriction on my getting such a license (education, testing, etc.) must be a violation of my civil rights.

7. If how someone stimulates the pubic nerve has become the needle to your moral compass, you are the one who is lost.

I don’t doubt that there are crusading zealots who wake in the morning grumbling about “what those gays been doing overnight” and lie down to bed raging about “what them hummosekshuls done to this country.” However, as this post was addressed to “the church,” I can only assume Rigby is addressing either parishioners of his own denomination or the broader adherents of Christianity, in the sense of “church of all believers.”  Either way, if Rigby believes that the specific issue of gay marriage has become “the needle to your moral compass” for the average member of either group, I fear he is doing them a disservice.  In my experience, the average Christian of any religion is most concerned about he or she can live an upright and moral life, doing good to those around him or her and making the world a better, happier place.  It also seems, in my admittedly limited observation, that there are more people in the world for whom the legalization of same-sex marriage is their moral lynchpin than there are for whom blocking of that legislation occupies a similar personal standing — there are more activists for than activists against (“reactivists,” perhaps?).

8. To condemn homosexuality, you must use parts of the Bible you don’t yourself obey. Anyone who obeyed every part of Leviticus would rightly be put in prison.

And that would be true if the only mention of homosexual acts were in Levicitus.  Rigby conveniently neglects to mention or consider 1 Corinthians 6:9:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…

“Effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” were the KJV translators’ attempts to render the Greek words which specified both participants in homosex.  Some translations simply lump both terms together as “men who have sex with men,” while others still try to maintain the distinction between the “giver” and the “receiver.”  In any case, the idea that only the Old Testament condemns homosexuality, and therefore such prohibitions should be as valid among today’s Christians as those against eating pork and mixing fabrics, is at best erroneous and at worst dishonest.

9. If we do not do the right thing in our day, our grandchildren will look at us with same embarrassment we look at racist grandparents.

Which presupposes that Rigby has proven his stance is right, when he hasn’t even demonstrated it to be coherent.

10. When Jesus forbade judging, that included you.

Ah, but there’s the rub, right?  I can immediately turn around to Rigby and accuse him of judging me. And then he could wag his finger back at me and…

The scriptural injunction against judging (or, more accurately rendered, “condemning”) is not the trump card against all value judgments, either in this case or in those around which there is not nearly so much controversy (as in “thou shalt not murder,” “thou shalt not steal,” etc.).  One does not have to assume that someone who opposes the legalization of same-sex marriage for either religious or public-policy reasons is therefore condemning those on the other side of the issue; he simply thinks (as, in fact, those on the other side believe as well) that one option is better than another.

Now, the disclaimer which it pains me to have to make:

I welcome comments, provided that they are on-topic. To recap, the topic is whether it is incumbent upon Christians to support legalization of same-sex marriage, with the opposition to such marriage being implicitly “unchristian.”  You will note that I did not address the extent to which religious conviction should be permitted or curtailed in the public square, nor did I delineate any public-policy for or against gay marriage.  My point here was to show that the “argument” (loosely labeled) that “real” Christians are obligated to support same-sex marriage is not well supported by the one-liners listed.  If you can keep to that subject, I welcome your input.  Otherwise, you are welcome to wait until I am unwise enough to address one of those broader subjects here and thus open myself up for further debate.

Granted, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s the protagonist or the reader (i.e., you) who’s been spoon-fed all of the blatant hints so that the “shocking” denouement can be seen from a mile away, but I think in these cases it’s specifically the story’s protagonist (usually the narrator) who’s as dumb as a [...]]]>

Granted, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s the protagonist or the reader (i.e., you) who’s been spoon-fed all of the blatant hints so that the “shocking” denouement can be seen from a mile away, but I think in these cases it’s specifically the story’s protagonist (usually the narrator) who’s as dumb as a bag of hammers.

5. The unnamed narrator of “The Nameless City.”  Ah, a contrivance so awkward that… Lovecraft uses it several other times, actually.  It’s merely “metaphor” or “allegory” that caused the presumably human artists to portray themselves in bas-relief as hideous creatures. No, really.

4. Dr. Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  The police normally take scars and other distinguishing marks as proof positive of identity.  Not Dr. Willet, though.  He just shakes his head in incomprehension.

3. Walter Gilman in “Dreams in the WitchHouse.”  Shorter Gilman: “Something terrible is happening! My sanity is suspect! Dark forces are taking me over! …Sure, I’ll keep sleeping in the haunted room. What’s the worst that could happen?”

2. Upton in “The Thing on the Doorstep.”  Shorter Upton: “Derby’s sinister wife is reputed to be able to exchange personalities hypnotically!  Derby sometimes appears to act like he’s his wife, not himself! And Derby accuses his wife of taking over his body! I don’t understand — what could it possibly mean?”

1. Wilmarth in “The Whisperer in Darkness.” In this case, it’s not even a case of a firm rationalist constructing flimsy naturalistic causes for all of the ominous goings-on until finally he cannot hold his mental construct together and is forced to acknowledge all the sanity-shattering truths in front of him. No, Wilmarth already accepted that malevolent crustacean-fungus hybrids from Pluto (Gosh, it sounds funny when you say it that way) were plotting with human agents against his longtime correspondent Akeley, and that they had been interfering with the mail and had at least once interfered with their communication by impersonating Akeley… and yet, Wilmarth doesn’t even consider that the letter which he received — typed instead of handwritten, using a very different diction than Akeley had previously used, and advocating a position of acceptance toward the moldy crabs diametrically opposed to the panicked opposition he had exhibited up until then — could possibly be anything other than what it says it is.

Since I had to go to the doctor anyway to renew my prescriptions, I mentioned to him that I just felt tired all the time.  You know what comes next: blood test!  The nurse took four vials, some for in-house tests and some for labs they would send to.  One of the in-house tests [...]]]>

Since I had to go to the doctor anyway to renew my prescriptions, I mentioned to him that I just felt tired all the time.  You know what comes next: blood test!  The nurse took four vials, some for in-house tests and some for labs they would send to.  One of the in-house tests showed my blood sugar to be high, but I hadn’t come fasting, so that wasn’t too much of a concern… nevertheless, my doctor wanted me to come back in for a glucose test when I could.

I went back in, fasting, this morning to take the glucose test.  First they tested my sugar with a pinprick… and then the nurse said, “Yeah, let me get the doctor.”

Congrats to me! Apparently 297 is three times what my blood sugar should be — I have diabetes!  As the doc said, “Well, that could explain a lot…”

I get to pick up my prescription and my very own glucometer later today. In the meantime, I had to give away the junk food snacks I had cached in my desk… [sob]

I tell you, it’s a good thing I’m okay with diet sodas. (Although if the diabetes treatment takes care of the fatigue, it won’t be an issue.)

Here are several mini-reviews of books I’ve recently read and written Goodreads reviews for; most aren’t long enough to comprise a full post here, but in the aggregate, they’re dense enough to choke a horse.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger — [...]]]>

Here are several mini-reviews of books I’ve recently read and written Goodreads reviews for; most aren’t long enough to comprise a full post here, but in the aggregate, they’re dense enough to choke a horse.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger — Engaging and readable survey of what life was like in Anglo-Saxon England as the meter turned over on 1000 A.D. — family life, marriage customs, religion, warfare, food, bathroom etiquette, government, etc. *****

Snake Handlin’ Man (Rock Band Fights Evil, #2) by D.J. Butler — A great episode (and it’s definitely an episode) in the saga of the road-tripping rock band whose every member is damned or otherwise barred from Heaven. This time out, they run across a side-road snake cult dedicated to bringing back an antisocial Egyptian deity, and there’s no choice but to get involved or else one of their number will die of snakebite. *****

The Haunted by Michaelbrent Collings — What’s most important about a haunted house story isn’t the clever way in which the author tries to make the scenario different from previous haunted house stories (and after Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, any such attempts are easily seen as the gimmicks they are). What’s most important is simply this: Is it scary? The answer for THE HAUNTED is, “Hell, yes.” Place a husband and pregnant wife who love each other in a secluded house possessed by a crapload of spooks, and suddenly the reader isn’t worried about how original or genre-busting the setup is because the reader is worried about the characters. *****

The Pyramid Of Doom (Nina Wilde & Eddie Chase, #5) by Andy McDermott — No, I haven’t read any of the previous books in the series, but I enjoyed this as a standalone: a breezy, fun, action-packed archaeo-adventure that’s not too comic-booky — except…

This is where the book loses a star: The “booby-traps” that we’ve all come to expect in any post-Indiana Jones tomb-raiding exploit. Call me crazy, but I’d think the architects of a rich Pharaonic tomb would simply design their traps to KILL — maybe cleverly or ironically, but never with a guaranteed solution for each. ****

Solis by A.A. Attanasio — As always, Attanasio’s incredible diction is a two-edged sword, dazzling the reader with a command over vocabulary that’s almost scary but distancing us somewhat from the meat of the narrative. I think someone needs to take an Attanasio novel and arrange the text on the page as free verse. ****

The Warded Man (Demon Cycle, #1) by Peter V. Brett — I’m not a fan of fantasy novels that build themselves solely to display a new and novel magic system, but this “post-apocalyptic fantasy” novel is something else. Three hundred years after a plague of night demons has decimated humanity, people live either in one of the five Free Cities or huddled in a little hamlet, protected at night by the magic “ward” symbols that are the only defense against the demons and the only form of magic in the world. It’s an intriguing world in which the lives of several intriguing people are wound together as they seek the lost “offensive wards” which will allow humanity to fight back instead of cowering. *****

A Short Stay in Hell by by Steven L. Peck — This eschatological novella gives an unblinking look at what is often the unspoken worst part of the traditional idea of damnation: its duration. Highly recommended. *****

The Book Of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould — Baring-Gould spends too much time discussing “straight” serial killers of antiquity (related to his thesis that some werewolf legends were simply started by what we would today call bloodthirsty sociopaths), but this survey of the common threads of werewolf legends — that they were evil people and devil worshipers who were granted the ability to transform at will — is a necessary corrective to both the Hollywood notion of the infected man who is a slave to the full moon, and the current urban fantasy conception of lycanthropes as a distinct shapeshifting species. ***

The Pinball Effect: Journeys through Knowledge by James Burke — Fun and delightful meandering through the causes and effects of the history of innovation over the last 500 years. Imagine a book written by John Doe from the one-season Fox TV show of the same name (what? am I the only one who remembers that series?). ****

The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas — Admittedly, this book is a one-trick pony, but when that trick is “H.P. Lovecraft meets Hunter S. Thompson,” is enough of a trick to carry the whole book. Set in 1972, it posits an evil behind Nixon beyond the reasons for which a post-hippie gonzo journalist would assume, and so the narrator, who adopts the name “Uncle Lono” for this exploration, sets out to discover the “American Nightmare,” and finds more than he bargains for.

My only real complaint with this book stems from my complaints with Thompson and the premise of “gonzo journalism.” Yes, he (and the voice in imitation of him recreated here) is a compelling writer, but the idea that pure demonizing diatribe in which vehement opinion is elevated to the stature of a prophetic jeremiad bears any resemblance to “journalism” is — was — the beginning of the encroachment of “truthiness” into the realm of fact in American media.

That said, it’s a welcome change from the leaden and pedestrian Lovecraftian pastiches in which the imitation of adverbial excess is a wrongheaded tribute to Lovecraft’s imagination. ****

Mcgrave by Lee Goldberg — It’s a book that would never had been possible before the ebook revolution. Lee Goldberg took a TV pilot script he had written (a fact that I had pretty much concluded before the afterword told me so), changed it from script to prose, and released it as an ebook. In it, loose cannon cop McGrave gets kicked off the force because of the property damage he causes, pursues a bad guy with a vendetta to Germany, and works with the German police to apprehend his quarry (with plenty of property damage resulting).

It’s got an ’80s TV vibe, which ain’t a bad thing when I say it; yes, it’s shallow escapism, but it’s FUN shallow escapism. ****

Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter — One of the formative classics of steampunk from 1987, back when “steampunk” was just a vague, exciting frontier of alternate history and the scientific exuberance of the Victorian era… before it became a codified fashion statement and set of familiar tropes.

(Note: I’m of course grateful to Angry Robot Books for republishing Infernal Devices in both paper and ebook, but I certainly hope the spent more time proofreading the paper version than the ebook edition that I read. Most of the OCR artifacts have been cleaned up — though there is one instance of the word “dog” being rendered as “clog” — but the number of spots in which em-dashes obviously present in the original have been omitted bespeak a haphazard copyediting unworthy of a professional and dedicated label.) *****

Just so’s you know, the second issue of the venerable* Arkham Tales is now available in MOBI and EPUB formats at Cold Fusion Media for free.

*venerable, adj.: Anything on the internet more than six months old.

Just so you’ll know, over at Cold Fusion Media I’m starting to post the original five issues of Arkham Tales, originally released in PDF, in modern ebook formats (EPUB and MOBI).  Still free, natcherly, so if format was standing in your way of reading them originally, you now have nothing standing between you and [...]]]>

Just so you’ll know, over at Cold Fusion Media I’m starting to post the original five issues of Arkham Tales, originally released in PDF, in modern ebook formats (EPUB and MOBI).  Still free, natcherly, so if format was standing in your way of reading them originally, you now have nothing standing between you and some great fiction.