philisha.net

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm;

Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in heaven will never do well.

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing,
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel,
But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel.

By William Blake

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I don’t know what I was thinking, putting Lem’s picture up in the corner. It’s gone now. I’d blame it on the fact that it was late, but it’s even later tonight. I guess I just don’t know what I was thinking. Sorry to all of you who suffered severe emotion
al trauma due to this. For all of his lady fans, you can still view the picture here, but I didn’t want subject everyone to it.

So I was going to brag about how awesome I am because I had web access in my apartment even when the internet connection was down to the outside world. I logged on SSH to a Linux box in the computer lab, started a web browser, and had X forward it to my d
esktop here in my room. There I was, thinking about how awesome I was… and basically that was what I was going to do: brag about how awesome that is. Kind of pathetic, huh?

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“The sprinting Abantes followed hard at his heels,
their forelocks cropped, hair grown long at the back,
troops nerved to lunge with their tough ashen spears
and slash the enemies’ breastplates round their chests.”
-Iliad 2.632

So now there’s a picture of Lem in the corner, much to the delight of all his lady fans….

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Titanomachia…
It’s why BeOS is so cool….
It’s why the American public school philosophy is doomed…..

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So today I was struck with the inspiration for a paper topic. While reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, I was fascinated with the idea of parallel mythologies. As he puts it, the gods Ares and Athena are li
terary manifestations of two opposing ways of human thought. Ares, the god of war, signifies conflict in wanton mindless destruction. On the other hand, Athena, also a deity of war, goes about the same thing through metis, which can be translated t
o craftiness, or cunning.

Take those two principles and look for them in other cultures. The Sumerian metis god was Enki, the freshwater god, who was helpful to humanity. The Norse metis god was Loki, who was a trickster fire god and eventually became the mos
t evil god. Odin was also associated with wisdom, but he too was a chaotic and unpredictable character.

You can go with this a long way and look at what it reflects on the culture. For example, we see that the Sumerians, by seeing metis in their god of fresh water, prized cunning and wisdom as much as they prized water, which had to be immensely in a
desert culture. Perhaps the Norse, on the other hand, feared metis. It could be a treacherous force, as seen in Loki. Like fire, it’s not predictable, and can be used harmfully.

But that’s probably not where I’m going to take the paper, since it’s a Torrey paper. I’ll probably end up using that to justify the use of polytheistic imagery in the Christian imagination. This would cover Dante’s invocation of Apollo in the opening of
his Paradiso, as well as invocations of the muse in other epics. Perhaps I’ll take it further to say that the “worship of Athena” is not necessarily bad when it is understood to be the prizing of the virtues that she represents. It’s a pity, becaus
e I’d much rather explore the ways in which a theogeny impacts a culture than what I will end up doing. Oh well, can’t have too much fun with a school project, now.

Including Neal Stephenson in my bibliography is just too cool.

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WOW—I just found a bunch of stuff from my high school in Singapore. Cool stuff. Also an older site by my friend Mike Cassin. It looks bad, but it was a personal site in 1999…. Think about that for a second.

And who could forget Reflection of Change? Be sure to hit their site and grab a few mp3 samples. (Sorry, only samples…)

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Jonathan Rowley is a big fat cheater. And I need to learn more Perl.

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My theory is that conservative Americans have strong aversions to drinking because Americans aren’t any good at drinking. The Germans, or even the British, on the other hand….

Anyway, this turns out to be less of a problem than it might have been, because Americans have a good substitute: Punk Rock… which they actually are quite good at. Things turn out differently because Punk Rock is obviously a stimulant and not a depressa
nt. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Incidentally, drinking is probably more sensible.

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