In today’s email edition of the New York Times, the teaser to Maureen Dowd’s “Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?” reads:

The Catholic Church, which gave up its credibility for Lent, can’t hide behind smoke and mystique as it faces a cascade of child sexual abuse cases.

I’m no Dowd fanboy, but the Lent line made me laugh out loud. I’ve heard of people giving up beer for Lent—or French fries, talking shit about other people—all manner of inventive sins-petite.

But the idea of the Church giving up its final spasmodic grip on authority—waffling on the issue of sexual abuse, even at the level of the Vicar of Christ himself—is just too funny considering Easter is nigh, and the bunnies and Impressionistic eggs are out in force, awaiting the returning smile of zombie Jesus in his world-ending second incarnation (like those bosses in the Final Fantasy games who morph into harder bosses as soon as you think you’ve beat them).

Really, this Pope news is sad-funny—like a burned-down last match next to an unlighted cigarette. I wonder what Ross Douthat would make of it. Have we naughty Americans syncretized away the Holy Mother Church’s authority (as a meme, as a matrix for creating societies and viewing our world)? Or has the Church done the damning work quite on its own?

But the problem with the Church isn’t lack of pluralism. Plenty of priests are well aware what year it is and what sort of world (pluralist, global) they live in. The problem is image control. The meme has gone wild. It’s too big to fail, and too big to control, and too big to rope back into the corral. The fact is, press releases from the horse’s mouth matter. The Pope matters.

For him to have hemmed and hawed on clear-cut child abuse… I’ll leave my assessment to a rude paraphrase of amateur powermonger and professional asshole Winston Churchill:

“I may be drunk, sir. But you’re an idiot. And tomorrow I’ll be sober.”

From TED: “Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can—and should—be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.”

In “Mass-Market Epiphany,” professional lowest-common-denominator Ross Douthat shakes in fear because we Americans synthesize our religions, consider our mystical options, and generally enjoy our grand Jeu—the play of the Transcendent across a broad, globe-spanning, history-informed matrix of signs, rituals, faces, styles of dress, chants, worship-centers, and sacral texts.

It is true. We have been from the first a lovely patchwork of agnostics, Deists, Puritans, satanists, hippies, materialists, born-agains, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, and so forth.

It is true. William James gave us our own meta-genius of religion (the genius of the study of religious geniuses), so we’ve always had options, a book of faiths from which to choose.

And then we invented Anton LaVey and televangelism; and I don’t care where he was born, we invented John Lennon, too, that ur-syncretic mentality and shaggy humanist-expressionistic chutzpah (see: Melville, Whitman, the Beats).

And then we took the internet from a Brit and made it what it is (mostly a font of Japanese pr0n), and the new religion of hyperconnectivity is as ours as it is anyone’s (though I suppose that obscures the grace of the rhizome, to speak of the nationality of it).

So, Ross, why are you so scared of the power of American adaption and adaptation? Why are the deaths of the old traditions and the births of new ones—deaths and births which are forever in process, but particularly, increasingly so since Nietzsche and World War I and globalism—anything to fear?

Douthat’s are the same old conservative anxieties that have always plagued us. Times are changing too quickly! We’ve traded in religion for new-fangled séances and snakeoils, and wires and tubes! Here’s Douthat waxing at his most lyrical:

Without them [severe, ole-skool religious practices], too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

I actually quite like his take on the promise of the shattering power of the Divine, the Mysterium’s ability to transcend our ability to even contemplate it, to put it in any box. But I disagree that the loss of ye old religions in any way diminishes man’s ability to experience this shattering.

The fact is, the Divine is never familiar except to those who experience it, and then it is unique, in each case. It has never been transferable via tradition; these traditions have never engendered true revelations, hence the constant defections from them, culminating in modernity. It is ridiculous to write of America as being more or less affected than other nation’s by the world’s gyring out of a dark age of cathedrals and sharia law.

If anything, America is simply more heterogeneously affected, because to be “American” is to be any number of such a wide range of types and sub-types—each of which may transmit the revolutionary and the impossible in different ways, with different signs, while still feeling the touch of the same unnameable Transcendent.

More expandable than Douthat’s thesis (”Americans = ‘losing’ religious feelings) is any thesis that looks at how the Divine strikes us, in the era of the hypertubez. The future saints may already preach on Facebook (shudder).

In any event, I look forward to abler writers’ analyses of the machines of religion as they mutate forward through history, ever new, ever the same (hierarchically organized to make money and control populations; individually mind-blowing, as experienced by individuals, within their own matrices of signs).

The other day, the New York Times ran an article called “Tax Tax Revolution,” playing off the title of the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution (once known by the more prosaic title Dancing Stage). [Which makes me wonder if Super Mario Brothers was originally Jumping Fraternal Twins, or if Zero Wing was ever simply Funny Introduction.]

The appeal of the XXY name scheme is immediate yet hard to explain. Merely repeating a term (”Dance Dance”) is not, I don’t think, the source of the pleasure of the name. It is, rather, the juxtaposition of the perfect, symmetrical, duplicate set of terms (a term and its echo) with the imperfect dangler, the rude awakener—la Revolution, for instance. (The bullet of revolution has no echo.)

Nothing quite does the XXY construction right like Smile Big Smack Hamster, a favorite of mine in two categories—television shows and Japanese nonsense.

In SBSH (which could have should have wasn’t named Smile Smile Smackham, or Smack Smack Smilester), players strapped into giant hamster costumes chant along to a beat, answering the host’s call of “[Color 1], [color 1], [color 2]!” with appropriately colored nouns.

For instance, “Yellow, yellow, gray!” may be answered, on beat, with “Lemon, lemon, elephant!” Or “Red, red, green!” may yield “Blood, blood, leaf!”  (If I wrote the show, I would throw down the C-bomb and ask for “Chartreuse, chartreuse, glaucous!“)

The XXYs continue, full-tilt, until a player messes up three times, at which point said player is shot through a giant sculptural cat’s mouth, replete with a huge felt tongue covered in hot pepper or mustard…

Now, how the hot-hot-fire eye irritant relates to the creation of XXY gestalt nouns, I don’t know.

But I like.

Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

In a Killing the Buddha review of God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars by Benjamin Lazier, historian James Chappel writes:

Perhaps the problem is the one diagnosed by Hannah Arendt: the collapse of orthodox religion has not caused us to turn towards the world with the piety and love once accorded God.

But was God accorded that piety and love—or did we instead accord love to the old comforting myths, rituals, social institutions, and ancient traditions?

Is the problem that people have stopped sincerely believing in and loving supernal Powers Beyond Time & Space and failed to transfer that intense, gut-level belief/love to something new? Or that people have stopped putting effort into maintaining outmoded traditions, even if those traditions served valuable psychological functions?

Am I saying we should go back to the old religions? Hecks no.

Yet how we frame the question of wha’ happened to God is important. A contrast cannot be drawn between “sincere belief” and some modern or postmodern apostasy. Humans still have complex feelings about their roles as living beings, mortal but equipped with powerful imaginative faculties. We are still mortal.

(Rebecca Goldstein argues that both Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes viewed religion as based on a terror of mortality and thus anarchic forces to be curbed by the rational state.)

We have not turned to the world with the love we accorded God, because a) God is not the world and b) we never accorded God anything. We still feel deeply. But today’s world is worse at channeling intense, transcendent feelings. These feelings leave our heads at night and drift out over the city like gray bats. They cause us stomach pains at work. They are sublimated, turned into a general conviction that things are okay, because we elected Obama, because we ourselves are not starving (and sorry to anyone truly starving who reads this).

To slay the metaphor, the mash-up between a rational, urban, modern life and a very old terror is not yet finished being edited.

I, for one, am excited to see the final cut.

So there’s a British prisoner named Charles Bronson who named himself after the actor Charles Bronson. And this prisoner has, courtesy some anonymous British media djinn at Wikipedia, gifted us with a truly worthy list for us. From Wikipedia:

Bronson has been involved in over a dozen hostage incidents, some of which are described below:

• In 1994, whilst holding a guard hostage at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
• In 1998, Bronson took two Iraqi hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh prison in London. He insisted his hostages address him as “General” and told negotiators he would eat one of his victims quickly unless his demands were met… He later told staff: “I’m going to start snapping necks - I’m the number-one hostage taker.” He demanded a plane to take him to Cuba, two Uzi sub-machine guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cup of beans. In court, he said he was “as guilty as Adolf Hitler.” He said: “I was on a mission of madness, but now I’m on a mission of peace and all I want to do now is go home and have a pint with my son.” Another seven years were added to his sentence.
• In 2007, two members of prison staff… were involved in a “control and restraint incident” in an attempt to prevent another hostage situation, during which Bronson (who now needs spectacles) had his glasses broken. Bronson received £200 compensation for his broken glasses, which he claimed were made of “pre-war gold” and given to him by Lord Longford.

A fascinating monster, an artist, or an aberration utterly unconnected with the reality in which the rest of us participate every day? Gentle reader, you make the call. I am too busy laughing my ass off at “pre-war gold.” It’s even funnier if his specs really were given to him by a Lord.

But I’d rather not know the truth of these tales. The man, a bad-ass (pointlessly so) in real life, invented himself in homage to an actor who played a bad-ass on the big screen. The amphisbaena wriggles in both directions.

Francis Bacon did us a solid when he wrote a little number called “Of Envy,” an essay that pretty much trashes haterism and covetousness to death with a lead pipe of logic.

That being said, I am still well envious of commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal, who provide the meat of a New York magazine investigation into the murky depths (well, mostly shallows) surrounding the city.

Two highlights of this superb submarine report are The Case Of The Spilled Silver Ingots (in 1903, a barge between Staten Island and New Jersey capsized, spilling 7,678 silver ingots; 6,000 were reclaimed; the rest, worth $26 million, are still down there) and The Case Of The Sunken Ice-Cream Truck Armada (in 1969, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a fleet of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach in order to build an artificial reef).

Even more envy-inciting is the work of filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy, who’s dived beneath the Hagia Sophia, discovering 800-year-old submerged graves, secret Ottoman tunnels, and possible connections to the Anemas Dungeons, where Byzantine Emperors imprisoned each other for fun.

Granted, this is a free country, more or less; I could go swimming every day and apply for a job with the Underwater Eel Police, or whatever the proper department may be. Granted, my envy could be mitigated by action.

But I’m lazy, and I’m terrified of not being able to see more than a foot in front of me—and of dodging booze-cruise yachts, and encountering the aquatic octo-rats that have surely evolved off the Brooklyn coast. (Octo-rats always wanna battle, even though they can’t rhyme in English, and I don’t understand F’thskreek, their ink-twitch language.)

Green-eyed landlubber, I suppose, I’ll remain.

Written like a paraplegic f, the long s (ſ) was an indispensable, unembarrassing part of the English language until relatively recently. The long s began s-words (”ſee the gleam of the ſwords of the Franks”), and with few exceptions was the only s used in the middles of words (”words being moſtly ſcurilous tax aſſeſſments”).

Why we lost the long s over the course of the nineteenth century is easy to see: It looks like a damn f, and don’t nobody want to go squintin when they don’t have to. (”Has your ſiſter ſeen my new fave flick, the ſtupendouſly fantastic 2 Faſt, 2 Furious, ſtarring the famous Vin Dieſel?”)

But still I wonder about my name (”Marſchall”) and the other countless words whose shapes so differed only two centuries ago. And when I see emoticons, when I see the Apple command symbol, I hear the ghosts of dead punctuation marks scratching at the edges of discourse, all those daggers and commashes and ligatures, and especially the once-ubiquitous ſ.

Will people eventually un-learn other letters?  We don’t need the c, which just steals limelight from the s and the k. Perhaps, in another two hundred years, c and ſ can chill out and ſimply ſip ſex on the beaches together, in the purgatorial crappy cantina of laid-aſide orthography. Perhaps, my confuſing friend. Perhaps.

Friend and writer-adventurer Mr. Dylan Thuras (of the Atlas Obscura) recently brought to my attention the work of one Mr. Colin Low, author of both the best history and counter-history of the Necronomicon on the net.

Read in succession, Low’s Anti-FAQ and apologia for that Anti-FAQ explain what the Necronomicon is (H. P. Lovecraft’s recurring MacGuffin-grimoire, full of all sorts of evil gnostic gossip from beyond time and space), what it isn’t (real), and why so many would-be readers, myself included, care.

For my money, Low nails the book’s allure here:

I believe the importance of the Necronomicon is twofold:

• it is believed to reflect a modern consciousness of reality
• it is believed to be authoritative

As a lost evil text from another dimension, dictated to a mad Damascene before the First Crusade, the Necronomicon does not exist. But the possibility of its existence and the role it continues to play in literature, religion, and the rhizomatic maze-tunnels of the internet give it a special power over its would-be readers. One of the most talked-about artifacts to have never existed, the book’s form and content are indeed shaped by those who talk about it, making it a truly postmodern, truly potential text.

For those interested, various translations of the book exist. Versions based on the movies of Sam Raimi and Lovecraftian versions probably differ in the style and substance of their bulldada, but both will seriously up your hinter-culture street-cred.

In any event, hats off, Mr. Colin Low, to your exhaustive study of a fake book. You earn this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit, the first to be given on this website.

Fans of bizarre rap already know and love hyphy, a micro-genre from the Bay Area which is… well, bizarre. Suffice to say, hyphy is fun music. Think high-pitched noises. The 1990s. Artists like Keak Da Sneak, Mac Dre, E-40 (musically, if not categorically), and New York’s own DJ Eleven of the Rub.

Perhaps a clear introduction to the form is a song created from chopped-up sections of the Ghost Busters theme. Gentle reader, I present via hyperlink and heartily endorse “Ghost Ride The Whip” by Mistah Fab, a song about driving slowly while standing on your car, looking fly, wearing unexpected vestment, maxing/relaxing, &c.

Importantly, hyphy, a word Keak coined, is pronounced “high-fee,” not “hi-fi.” I hope an intrepid etymologist, philologist, or linguist (preferably Language Log’s Geoff Pullum) can one day trace in full the evolution of hyphy’s pronunciation. Until then, I classify it a minor, enjoyably diverting mysterium. Oakland’s version of my own hometown’s crunk.

MEANWHILE: The Sci Fi Channel needed a new look, a new steez, if you will. Some branding genius was banging his head against the wall. How could he ever possibly hope to make sci fi less, well, sci fi?

(Tangent: Fantasy got Peter Jackson, hot elves, lovably queer hobbitses, and a Halo-worthy final bodycount of about 90 million orcs dead, 1 Vigo scuffed. But the genre of speculative or science fiction has had to endure an endless parade of movie or television franchises resurrected in hideous zombie form. In fact, the only growth area in science fiction, at least in terms of massively popular culture, has been that of the zombie—though near-future vampires seem due for a New Orleans-inspired/tween-financed comeback.)

What was Sci Fi (the channel) to do? The answer, according to our hypothetical branding whiz, was to change its name to something unpronounceable and enigmatical: SyFy. I saw this word, this neoloogyism, in brilliant largeness on a poster at a bus stop and read it “sigh-fee,” because of hyphy. I read the copy around the word and found out that it is pronounced “sigh-fi,” as in “sci-fi” the genre, as in “Sci Fi” the channel. I shook my head and thought immediately of Mac Dre (RIP) and the other under-sung exponents of innovation and, yes, speculation in hip hop.

Zombies are all well and good. Sci Fi getting a metaphorical haircut to attract a new demographic is all well and good. But companies seeking to foster innovation in that strange zone between future-reading and art, between astrology and entertainment need to do more than simply repackage old concepts.

What Sci Fi et al need is the sort of willing-to-defy-popular-trends spirit that inspired Firefly, that inspired hyphy, that inspired crunk, that inspired the first rap records, and before that the first jazz jams in some broke dude’s basement in some hood I’ve never heard of, and before that Debussy, and Shelley, and so on, and so forth, back to the first cave-nerd to draw a Cubist bison fucking a waterfall.

I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.

Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?

Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:

He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.

• Book From The Sky, Xu Bing
• The Lottery Man, Benno von Archimboldi
• Margites, Homer
• Black Batman of the North, Part II, Henry Chettle & Robert Wilson, according to Philip Henslowe
• Ur-Hamlet, Thomas Kyd (?)
• Book Of The Wars Of The Lord, ? (a biblical writer insanely good at titling books/just plain insane)
• Quipu, the [according to some, telepathic] Incans