Huge and Ravenous

A long time ago now, I conducted a little literary experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to see if my students were 'awake' to mythological or magic-realist imaginings. The means by which I tried to do this was to post — every day for roughly six months — a short piece in an ongoing narrative, and capture their responses.

The narrative was about two ravens, named after Odin's companions Huginn and Muninn (or Thought and Memory), and described their combined musings in dialogue and short poems. Thought was characterised as an intense bloke, while Memory was always a more reticent lady.

You can find that experiment here. What you do, if you want to try it out, is scroll to the bottom and then read the posts in reverse order. They come in groups of three — a short poem with a numbered title (e.g. 'Two Ravens 001') and two dialogue posts. By the end of the 181 posts, think about what it all means... and above all, have fun!

Legacy

Today I watched a long-delayed legacy materialise. At the end of it, I could only think that this was what some other franchise lacked. Ah, the constant recurrence of Hamlet in our cinematic experiences, like some subtle watery undertow aimed at poor dead Ophelia!

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death —
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns — puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Gods, mortals, puny or not; playing or not; fantastic or not — I find the rich legacy of old William everywhere, and I realise that I wish the lost treasures of Cathay had been preserved as much.

Score (Part Va)

In between two reds must be interred. Inside a red must be intrared. As above (suprared), so below (infrared). And so, I found myself teaching Literature.

Sleight of Hand

Dear Unicorn,

It is all your fault I have resumed my acquaintance with the Beagle. After figuring out why we never talk about my brother, I am now working my way through sleight of hand. The which is now available at the local havens of esoteric tomes somewhere in the middle of the orchard.

We have had a long friendship. Fortunately, it has been sparse and hugely variable. This has made it a lot more fun than it might otherwise have been. It has quirky side-effects too.

I note, for example, that I seem to have a fashion showcase somewhere online which I can say is quite 'me' — except that I shudder to think of what my students and ex-students might say. In my own half-hearted defence, I had no hand in creating it, which is all for the best.

Wolff

Queen Steam

The Age of Steam is Victorian by nature; it spans what is often called the 'Long 19th Century' of human history (1776-1914, by some accounts), as did much of Victoria's life and reign as Queen of England. This is an important coincidence.

Why? Because of the whole relatively new genre of steampunk, which in fits and starts (much like an early steam engine) began during that period, with authors such as Verne and Wells, and continued sporadically to flower in the spirit of Golden-Ageism.

As I've often remarked to my students, 1901 was when the certainties of the world seemed to shift — the queen of half the world had died after being Queen for more than 60 years, two generations at least of all mankind. Fifteen years later, in 1916, another certainty crumbled when the Battle of the Somme saw 1.5 million casualties, mostly due to machine guns, barbed wire, mud, germs and explosive bombardment.

Steampunk harks back to the mythical Golden Age of Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix. It was a time when scientific invention still remembered its mythic roots, the time of Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde, Sherlock Holmes. Tarzan of the Apes came along in 1912. It was a good time, and a dark time, and the inspiration for those who would revive the baroque of its ideas in the 1960s.

In 1886, Arsenal Football Club, the Citadel of the Wyverns, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola, and the Statue of Liberty all arrived. And that was just one of those wonder-filled years of the Victorian Era.

I have been reading a lot of this steampunk stuff in the last few months. It has become rather the rage in some literary circles, and for a long time, I diligently avoided it because of that. But I am, as the Gnome pointed out, a member of a society which has strangely Victorian traits — liberality and adventure mixed with formality and custom. And so, I have succumbed.

I wonder to what extent that world still affects (or afflicts) the neo-moderns. Post-modernism may be passé now, but yet there is still a love for brass and steam, elegance and velvet, iron and raw courage. These things have their counterparts in many ages, but seldom have they formed such a durable mixture. Or maybe I feel that way only because I am an incurable romantic.

The Ides of December

Do you know who the saddest villains are? They aren't the ones who chose the dark side on their own, and neither are they the ones who could have been heroes but made the wrong choice.

The saddest villains are the ones who told themselves they were doing the right thing, and were not. Even when their leader reveals himself as the Red Skull, or a Dark Lord of the Sith, or some other sort of archvillain, they continue believing. Countless, voiceless, nameless — and above all, desperately trying to be decent folks doing the right thing — they will take the bullets and the collateral damage.

In the aftermath, as the HAZMAT teams rake over the radioactive debris and their bodies are found, there will be shaking of heads. Some might uncharitably say, "They deserved it."

But that is where 'sad' comes in. They don't really seem to deserve it. They just made the best choices their intelligence and perception allowed them to make. They trusted in their own understanding and that's where it led them. They stood by the wrong principles because they had not considered what ground they stood on, and so were misled and fell.

There are important reminders for those of us who say, "They deserved it," or, "They were [not very clever people]." One of those is this: "Let those who think they stand be careful lest they fall." And it goes for all of us.

So yes, it's fine to be sad about the saddest villains. But learning from that is more important, just in case one day we find ourselves on the wrong end of, "They deserved it."

Goatsong

The Greek word from which we get the English 'tragedy' is τραγῳδία; it is best translated as 'a song of the he-goat'. Most people believe that this is because such performances were carried out just before a goat was sacrificed to the gods.

I was having one of those fractured chats with the Hierophant, about current events, when we noticed the similarities between some of those events and a traditional Greek tragedy: there is a heroic figure with a flaw (hamartia, ἁμαρτία), which blossoms into overweening pride (hubris, ὕβρις); there is a Greek chorus of wailing women; there are aspersions and dispersions with interspersions; there is an agent of retribution (nemesis, νέμεσις). There was only one thing missing.

We wondered if there would be a modern Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides to write the play. It would probably have been a smash hit in some circles.

As it is, in local circles, already some supporters have made mention of the terrible opposition this figure has faced since he dropped the green and black for the blue and gold, and found favour with neither. It is like invoking the Angry Ones (Erinyes, Ἐρινύες) to say such things.

Responses 009 (2011-2012)

Almost there. This is the penultimate post in the main analysis line of my responses to the most recent list. Question 9 states: "As an IB student, how has your learning of literature and science contributed to your understanding of individuals and societies?"

Without the first clause, this would be a rather stodgy question, in which two conveniently different-looking lenses from C P Snow's The Two Cultures are trained on what we might think of as their thematic synthesis, modern society. However, in the light of those four words, a different context presents itself.

IB students are of course exposed to a curriculum schematically represented as a hexagon of areas of knowledge around a set of core activities. The six broad areas are literature, language, individuals and societies, experimental sciences, mathematics and aesthetics.

To an IB student, therefore, the question takes on the nuanced meaning of 'having studied a Group 1 subject and a Group 4 subject, how have they helped you study a Group 3 subject?' That might be putting it too simplistically, but it's an obvious conclusion to be drawn, given the context-framing first four words of the question.

Like others in the present list, this appears to be a very IB-centred question. A non-IB student might answer it with a slightly different approach because to a non-IB student, literature is a humanities subject, and it comments on human nature and human society through the lens of human creative interpretation and description. Similarly, the sciences allow for analysis of individual human beings as well as human society through biology and materials science and suchlike.

However, that kind of reasoning (IB/non-IB) might be a trap. Perhaps candidates are really required to interpret the main question literally, but drawing on their experiences as IB students. IB students, perhaps you aren't supposed to be thinking about Group 1, Group 4 and their impact on your learning of Group 3? Or are you?

I like this question. It requires a fine balance. It is also slightly unfair.

Head Knowledge

I get very distressed when I hear Christians look at hermeneutics and theology and say, "It's all head knowledge. It isn't necessary." They are terribly wrong, by their own lights.

II Timothy 2:15 says, "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." It is a clear command to be diligent about handling the scriptures.

The wrongness of the phrase "it isn't necessary" is that it is a half-truth. The Bible and its contents and understanding of it are all unnecessary for salvation, according to Christian doctrine. But study of the Bible is necessary if you intend to use it as a workman uses his tools.

The problem arises when Christians bandy their own scriptures around without first trying to understand what they mean. II Timothy 2:16 says, "But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness." In other words, if you haven't studied the 'word of truth' and are sloppy at parsing or analysing (or 'rightly dividing') it, then you should avoid making irreligious and pointless statements.

That's not to say that those of us who have studied it should be arrogant. The text is complex. But the point is that anyone who makes a comment about a text should at least have a) read the entire text, b) learnt how such texts are to be examined, and c) learnt how to interpret the examined text.

Until one is reasonably experienced, one should avoid making statements about the text. And one should always be humble about accepting new input that is congruent with the entire text; you learn from fellow-labourers how the work is done. What one shouldn't do is blindly mimic or quote the words of someone else who is interpreting the text but not showing the principles by which he does it, or is using spurious principles.

All this applies also to the study of literature. Actually, this is why people who study any kind of religious text would benefit from being students of literature.

Anathem

Some time ago, somebody said I should gather my entries from all my blogs and the places where I submit poetry, edit it a bit, structure the mass, and make it into a book. Occasionally, I think it might work, and I toy with that idea a bit.

Once in a while, I shelve the idea semipermanently because somebody's writing has impressed me so much that it rubs my face into the inferiority of my writing. This has happened so far with both Iain Banks (see official site) and Neil Gaiman (official site here).

However, with Neal Stephenson, what gets to me is the sheer baroque exuberance and depth of construction that he is able to muster. His writing is sometimes too dense, too full of half-ideas and full-ideas. Of late, however, I've been digesting his latest book, Anathem.

I think that it's a beautiful ideas book. Any student of epistemology or of ideas about knowledge, in general, should read this book very carefully. Go to the website and explore the links. It's not easy work, but if you can digest this book, it becomes a lot easier to understand the ideas people have come up with about reality.

I don't think I've ever recommended a work of fiction as a textbook for anything except literature. This is one rare exception; I think all serious students of mathematics (as opposed to those who do math just because they have to) should read this book. In fact students of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences would also benefit a lot.

Well, at this point you'll notice I haven't actually said anything about the plot or the characters. I think that if you're not going to read the book, it won't matter; if you do, it's best you find everything out for yourself. Or go to Stephenson's site and explore, before you decide to take the plunge.

Narrative Troubles

Over the last 18 months or so, I've come to realise the truth of a problem which I thought might just have been a mirage. The problem with some of the brightest young people I've met is that they don't read enough. They are a throwback to the idea that ingesting the quintessence is equivalent to ingesting the rest of the materia mundi.

So when discussing literature with one young person, I was not appalled, or even saddened, to realise that he'd not read any literature at all. He had been reading the pre-digested pap of other people's commercial notes, and using their insights and analysis to procure a grade that was a reasonable one.

Ah well. It's too early to tell, but my gut feeling is that people who can't construct and deconstruct a narrative for themselves are doomed to follow other people's narratives. It's like a sort of metaliterary Huck Finn idea; Huck follows the river 'there and back' because Samuel Clemens, or 'Mark Twain', makes him do it. Huck really has no control over his destiny.

These thoughts do bug me at times; if God is a narrator, the author and perfector of my faith, then have I no control over what I should be doing? Am I merely a character in a narrative myself? Should I just go look for some pre-digested pap that will tell me what my significance and the themes of the story are?

Then it occurred to me. At the very least, as I've found when writing, and other writers have found too, you can have characters that seem to write themselves — they are entertaining, they are easy to write about. I will try (if it is at all possible) to be an entertaining character that will give other people pleasure when they read about me, and hopefully, that will give pleasure to my Author when He deigns to mention me in the narrative.

The Bible — Unique or Synthetic?

Much of the criticism of the Bible as a religious text (that happens to be the basis for the most influential religion in the world) comes from a few interesting arguments:

• It is just another religious book.
• It is mythical and/or legendary in content, at best ahistorical.
• It is inconsistent.
• It is arbitrarily assembled.
• It is a piece of artfully-assembled cold-blooded propaganda.

And so on. Frankly, I find that all of these arguments are somewhat spurious; I also find the claim that the Bible possesses a supernatural aura or built-in divine imprimatur to be spurious too.

Let me explain, from a purely literary point of view.

To deal with claims of being just another religious book, I would like to ask just one question. Do you know any other religious tradition in which the moral exemplars are such bad people? The only good one is Jesus, and he is totally unlike anybody's idea of what he ought to be. These characters possess true-to-life traits, something you can only appreciate by reading literature contemporaneous with the Bible. Such psychological consistency comes only with modern literature, with the first instances found in Shakespeare (compare his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, and you will see it at once).

To the idea of it being mythical, legendary etc, I freely admit that it sure sounds like it in parts. However, I am sure that if there were such things as angels and God and so on, any objective record would sound like it was mythical, legendary etc. As for ahistorical, I think there is far too much history in it for my liking. However, I suspect that part of the history was cobbled together from incomplete records, much as our own histories of the much-more-recent Cold War will never be definitive.

To the charge of inconsistency, I think it is inconsistent in the literary sense, as would be any collection of 66 books written by different authors. It's a bit like opening a Penguin Classics collection and expecting the style and content to be uniform throughout. Is it inconsistent in a moral sense? Actually, I'm not sure that question can be asked and answered so easily. If God says that whatever God does is right, what if he appears to contradict himself? Is he still right? By definition, yes. God tells humans not to bear false witness, but he assents to the enterprise of lying spirits (angels bearing tidings of great, err, incorrectness of fact). He himself doesn't lie, though.

The last two claims contradict each other. My opinion is that the Bible was assembled by clear criteria, and hence was not arbitrarily assembled. At which point, some people would say, "Aha! Humans assembled it, how can it be the work of God?" and I would reply, "Aha! I assembled the bookshelf, how can it be the work of Ikea?" The same people might say, "Aha! Humans assembled it, it must be propaganda, subject to human bias!" and I would reply, "Well, I needed a bookshelf, and Ikea makes good cheap ones. It's better than looking for random driftwood and rocks and building a bookshelf."

These are all just starting thoughts. Or maybe, startling thoughts for some of you. But whatever they are, I am 100% certain that the Bible is not just another religious book. It is a weird book. It is not holy by virtue of itself as a printed text, neither does God craft some runes of power into every printed copy. But it is a life-changer for anyone who can stir themselves to read it. I mean, what 1st-century book would record that the resurrected man ate bread, and then broiled fish? Bread might be symbolic, so is fish, but broiled fish? Quirky!

Literature By Formula

I remember that in my second lecture on Science (which I've mentioned a couple of times in my last few posts), I had occasion to talk about the science of literature. Famous fellows like Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell (and of course, their great thematic ancestor, Sir James Frazer) have of course attempted to codify the origins of human narrative in their own ways. You can also add to their number people such as Robert Heinlein of SF fame and many others.

But here is a summary of the various basic plots that a story can consist of, and what they might mean in terms of the seasons of a man's life, or the tone of it, or the politics of it. It makes for bitter-sweet reading, but also farce and beauty. Without further ado, I present to you...

Literary Formulae

Mar-Apr:

• Boy meets girl
• Spring
• Comedy
• Liberal-Conservative

This is the most innocent phase of the hero's life; it's all about beginnings, ideals, and youth.

May-Jun:

• Boy grows up
• Early Summer
• Comedy-Romance
• Conservative

This part is mostly innocent, but it's also the season in which things begin to get serious.

Jul-Aug:

• Boy goes questing
• Late Summer
• Romance
• Anarchistic

This is the phase in which things begin to turn, and the hero questions his identity and purpose.

Sep-Oct:

• Boy saves world
• Autumn
• Tragedy
• Anarchistic-Radical

This is when the hero discovers what he thinks his purpose is, and his ideals and ideas are tempered by bitter experience.

Nov-Dec:

• Boy comes home
• Early Winter
• Tragedy-Satire
• Radical

Of course, when the boy returns, he is not the same boy, and neither is his home the same home...

Jan-Feb:

• Boy grows old/dies
• Late Winter
• Satire
• Liberal

By this time, our boy has reached the point in what's left of his life at which he feels he can say anything and do anything.

(Sources: Campbell, Frye, Gellis, Heinlein, White et al)

There's an interesting afternote to all this. The infamous David Eddings was very frank about how his best-selling novels were written to prove that books could be written to a formula and make lots of money. To prove it, he wrote five fat books, then wrote the same thing again a different way, and made twice as much money. If you were one of those suckers who enjoyed the Belgariad and the Malloreon as much as I did, consider yourself a victim of literary science.

Excursive

I remember looking at the list of books, and it had Siddhartha and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in it. I remember reading both as a child, and I was interested to see what the First would make of it (and the Second, as well). What these books have in common is the idea of a River.

I've always had this idle preoccupation for rivers; one of the first pieces of trivia I picked up was which rivers were the longest and biggest, and which civilisations depended on them. When books like PJF's The Magic Riverboat came along, I was greatly cheered. Every great city needs a proper river; the Thames is a small one relative to its great city of London — but as the lifeblood of that city, and with its many hidden tributaries and rivulets, it is one of great mythic power.

But as I read various riparian stories, I came to realise that in the end, Heraclitus the Ephesian was right when he said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice: for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man."

All the riparian tales are the same: a man (and sometimes his friends with him) proceeds down a river, and by the end, he is changed. If his is a classical hero's quest, he will return home, only to discover that home is no longer home and he has to 'sail beyond the sunset', as Tennyson wrote of Odysseus, in order to find his rest. This is as true of Huck Finn as it is of Odysseus, and it is true (in a metaphorical sense, of an allegorical character!) of Hesse's Siddhartha.

Life, it seems, is only an excursion down a river and back again. And like Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien's magnum opus, a person can try to go 'there and back again', but the sunset lands are everyone's last, true home.

Two Ravens

Over the last three days, by some strange synchronicity, several very different and probably unrelated people have expressed interest in the little project I designed and implemented at the end of 2004. It's an odd little project, combining as it does threads from C S Lewis, Neil Gaiman, various mythologies, modern technology and computer science, and half a dozen other peculiar things that have been known to run through my head.

The project revolves around two entities of dubious provenance who call themselves Huginn and Muninn, or Thought and Memory. On one level, they are the two ravens said to accompany Odin All-Father. On another, they are two angelic beings neither fallen nor unfallen; on a third level they are powerful archetypes and key elements of the universe in which we live. In fact, there are other levels, and part of the interesting thing about these levels is that Thought, of course, doesn't remember very well — and Memory sometimes lets Thought do all the thinking, or not.

The form is unusual; there is a short poem followed by two snippets of dialogue. This doesn't vary, although the style and shape of each triptych does. A lot of it probably requires explanatory notes, but it's more fun to just read through the whole thing in the way prescribed (that is, scrolling up from the bottom of the very long page). There are 180 proper entries. You can ignore all the embedded links if you want — they're not particularly interesting or important.

I think it is possibly one of the best pieces of work I've ever created. Some of you will realise from this how limited I am, while others might be kind enough to say nice things. But it's mine and I like it. So there. Heh.

Hot Nights

Sweltering, the air bakes itself into a meringue around you, somehow dry but sticky given the slightest chance. It seems churlish, temperamental, maleficent. It is a Hot Night, one of those in which every few minutes brings a flash of heat that makes you wonder if menopausality is to be your fate.

And then the corner of your eye is tugged towards Seth Grahame-Smith's sublime effort. If 'prosaic' is to prose as 'poetic' is to poetry, then this man has ennobled the former and raised it to the realms of the latter.

Why all of that?

For the spawn of Grahame and of Smith hath wrought a mighty deed. He hath co-opted that doyenne of ancient chick-lit, Jane Austen, and created from her carrion a true classic in a Mary Shelley Frankenstein sense. He hath taken up his pen to write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I do not speak in jest. It is classic. It is wondrous, and Bingley will never seem the same again to you.

Read it! The first paragraph alone is worth the price of admission.

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

Glorious, glorious prose. Even in the hot and heavy dead of night, it glows.

Doctoral Inquisition

Yesterday I attended one of these events; they are quite common and come in several varieties and flavours. By variety, I imply a difference in intent ranging from exploration to confirmation of candidature to defence of thesis. By flavour, I imply a difference in the nature of the panel applying the instruments of inquisition.

Yesterday's was a confirmation of candidature, in which some slightly nervous or incompletely prepared proto-candidate is subjected to the intellectual equivalent of a gentle grilling and racking (which makes me think of lamb, somehow). I and my neighbour enjoyed it quite a bit, probably because I've already gone through that stage and was looking for points of interest applicable to my end-stage; my neighbour was interested because of the nature of the evolving dissertation.

The real problem wasn't that everything seemed to be anchored to the überzeitgeist of Foucault and his merry sociology, or Fullan and his equally merry 'change is simple, look you can break it down into eight bullet points' approach. The problem was that there seemed to be some sort of empty space between ground-level micro analysis and global-level macro analysis. The scope was too great in range; it was analogous to doing research with one eye on an electron microscope and the other on a radio telescope.

As an aside I am so glad that the inquisitors panel pointed out that you couldn't take for granted that any old innovation (say 'Understanding by Design', for example) was necessarily innovative, useful, successful or educationally good just because a bunch of people spent a lot of time on it.

On a smaller scale, I've noticed this in TOK presentations and other kinds of presentations. Some candidate will zero in on two minor Scandinavian authors like Ibsen and Strindberg, call it 'World Literature' and generalise the findings to include literature in general. And the worst part is that the examiner will merrily (I'm using that a lot today, aren't I?) accept it.

It is like some sort of stream of consciousness robin hoodwink with one eye up and the other down in the dirt where the dead men have their bones and good is oft interdiction is important because without it Rome was not built in a day in the life I miss the Beatles. Heh.

Long Journeys (Part I)

Long journeys are the main course of a literary diet. In some cases, the journey is such an epic one that it takes on a life and significance of its own, eventually settling down as the cultural ballast for an entire civilisation.

This was the case with the Hebrews and Moses' sojourn in the wilderness (and to some extent his antecedent in Abraham, whose journey from Ur covered the entire Fertile Crescent and the Nile Delta), with the Greeks and Odysseus' eponymous voyage around the Aegean Sea and parts unknown, and with Aeneas and his flight from Troy (funny version here) which ends up with being the basis for both a legend of Rome and one particular dream of Ancient Britain (vide Geoffrey of Monmouth). It is even the case with Dante's phantasmagoric La Divina Commedia, and its resonances (or reverberations) on Italian culture.

In each case, the idea of the journey is that of a great and complex and divinely-inspired test of the protagonist. By the ordeal of the journey, he is made fit to assume legendary stature as the leader of a people and the founder of a nation. By contrast, modern nation-building myths are not so heroic, and have to be conflated, inflated and insufflated (by the adoring masses, of courses) before they reach the same effective stature (if ever).

The old-fashioned heroic story-telling, I think, was about excellence: the protagonists looked larger because their peers and accomplices and friends (like the Paladins of Roland, or the Fellowship of the Ring) were great in their own right or grew to greatness with them. Since the protagonists excelled even these, they were champions and heroes of even greater merit.

Nowadays, sadly, the norm is to make the protagonist look bigger by tearing down his rivals and diminishing his peers. It is all very depressing.

Sainted

In 2008, I had the enormous but somewhat guilty pleasure of buying a big chrome-yellow book. People who know me, of course, will not find this unusual: "...enormous but guilty pleasure? big book? bah, that's normal!"

But what book was this, that it deserves a special place in this blog (and not the other)?

Well, it's the first installment of a reprinting of works starring the Saint. Over the last few years, heroes of yesteryear have been coming out of the woodwork: the Shadow, Bulldog Drummond, Flash Gordon, Modesty Blaise, the Spider, Doc Savage, even Tarzan. But the Saint was one from the lineage of Richard Hannay and his ilk: a gentleman amateur with brains and a good punch.

The steely-eyed Saint, once acted by Roger Moore, liked fast cars, vigilante justice, beautiful women and unusual wines. He was a hero far ahead of his time, and he was the brainchild of Singapore's greatest literary phenomenon. Sadly, thrillers and mad adventure novels don't make it to the holy canon of literary orthodoxy, so unless you do a bit of digging, it's hard to know who this was.

And so, 16 years after his death, I present to you Leslie Charteris!

Two Heads

There were two heads. Let's keep them disembodied for now. Wouldn't do to identify them; they'd get killed. Or at least, more killed than they already are. Haha.

One said to the other, "He's looking really tired. But manic."

"Yeah, all that talk about blue sky, blue ocean and other blue things must be turning him blue."

"Does he know what he's talking about?"

"He always seems to sound as if he knows what he's talking about."

"But he doesn't really, right?"

"Yeah, after working for him so long, we all know where he gets his ideas from. Mostly from DOS meetings and Howard Gardner. Heh."

=====

I sense an interesting time ahead. Already the globalisation theorists are saying that the total number of jobs (i.e. well-defined fixed work appointments) will fall drastically while the opportunities for entrepreneurship, consultancy, and project-based endeavours will rise commensurately. I've seen this in action: a person with a broad range of skills (trans-, inter- and multi-disciplinary) can now command a huge premium for flexibility. Such a person can command a price of USD2400/day to begin with. Amazing.

=====

In other news, I was reading Dean Koontz's latest offering, Odd Hours. Then I came across an innocent looking passage that had interesting resonances for me, somehow.

The MYSTERY TRAIN sweatshirt had been lost to the sea. A similar thrift shop purchase featured the word WYVERN across the chest, in gold letters on the dark blue fabric.

I assumed Wyvern must be the name of a small college. Wearing it did not make me feel any smarter.

All at once, I laughed. I startled the two ravens outside my window and they gave me dirty looks. That's life...