Rambling On About Anchovies and Art

'Write about what you know' is good advice. So is 'paint what you see.' In my case, though, my mind's eye occasionally sees folks like the ones at that little get-together you see on your right.

They look interesting, but what they're doing - it's the sort of thing that happens occasionally. Someone organizes a little get-together, everything's going fine: and then someone orders a pizza.

The scenario is fine, as far as it goes, but there's not much of a 'story' there. At least, not one that occurred to me.

On the other hand, I've learned that I can usually crank out a weekly snapshot taken from my imagination. That's been showing up on another blog, Apathetic Lemming of the North, hosted by my flannel-wearing alter ego.

My non-fiction writing is chugging along just fine: mostly two posts a week, each Friday and Sunday, on A Catholic Citizen in America.

Okay, I've done the shameless self-promotion — except mention that my art is available as photo and canvas prints, up to poster size; and occasionally on gift cards.

That's at Brian H. Gill's Shop on the DeviantArt.com website. The site's name may be off-putting, but I've found some quite talented commercial and amateur artists there. Not in my shop, though: that's just my stuff.

I had something in mind when I started this post. What was it? Writing, paint, pizza: right!

I'm dusting off an old 'slice of life' idea I had, years back, that might turn into something readable. Then again, maybe not. I won't find out until I give it a try.

Oklahoma Earthquake - or - THEY Awakened the Sleeping Spawn of CTHULHU!!!

Considering the crazy things folks have been known to take seriously, I'd better make a disclaimer: Cthulu is fiction. Make-believe. Not real. Moreover, I don't really believe that Old Ones imprisoned the star-spawn of Cthulhu deep under our feet. Mainly because 'all of the above' are not real. Neither is what I suggest in this post, for the most part.

After writing about the big Oklahoma earthquake in another blog, I realized that part of the post belonged here.

Now, let's see how the desire to blame someone (preferably someone using newfangled technology) the unknown, and a little craziness might make the Oklahoma earthquake even more interesting than it really is.

'Inspired by Real Events' - Awakening Horrors from the Deeps of Time

Ignoring warnings by the Last Seminole Shaman and the Earth First! Society, heartless Big Oil carelessly used hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to release - as they thought - natural gas from the rocks below Oklahoma. (Drama aside, this is true: fracking has been used to extract natural gas in the Oklahoma area.)

But in their Greed and Perverse Ravaging of Fair Mother Nature - whoops, that's more a Captain Planet thing - these unwitting mortals have awakened an Ancient Evil!!! Even now, "unexplained" tremors abound as forgotten horrors from the depths of time burrow inexorably upward, seeking to destroy those who released them, and re-establish - - - well, you get the idea.

Keep doing that for about 100,000 words, and you've got a novel.

Hey! Maybe Big Oil woke up the big guy himself: Cthulhu.

More-or-less-related posts:

• "Lemming Tracks: Oklahoma Earthquake, 'Unexplained Increase,' and Sounding Crazy"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 7, 2011)
• "Gods, Demons, and Used Spaceship Dealers"
  (February 13, 2010)
• " 'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
  (December 9, 2009)
• " 'Waiting on a Dead World' "
  (October 31, 2009)
• "Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
  (September 28, 2009)

And Now for Something Completely Different: A Different sort of Christmas Rhyme

Clement Clarke Moore's "Twas the Night before Christmas" - or "A Visit from St. Nicholas" - is a well-known poem. And often parodied.

I think the simple rhyme scheme and meter help.

I had 250 words to post for another blog today, an illustration that I'd given the working title of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" - and no terribly good ideas. So, Thursday, I sat down and set a sequence of events I'd been playing with into a rhyme that mimicked Moore's best-known work:

• "Not Your Usual Fluffy Christmas Rhyme"
  (December 25, 2009)

Oh, what the hey. I'll repeat the thing, here.

Pip

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the shop
Nothing was stirring, you could hear a pin drop.
The sleigh was not ready, the toys were not packed,
Santa was fuming and quite lacking in tact.

"Pip!" he called out to the foreman on duty,
Where is your crew? And don't act so snooty!
Pip's feelings were hurt, but he wondered the same
Were they lost? Had they left? Were they playing a game?

"Never mind!" thundered Santa, while grabbing his sack,
"We'll do it ourselves: There are toys in the back."
So into the warehouse like madmen they flew.
Santa and Pip had much packing to do.

And then, down a corridor seldom in use,
They heard something like an hysterical goose.
But no, there were words in that hideous shriek,
It was music: now Santa was prone to critique.

Santa strode to the source of that hideous din,
Closely followed by Pip, who beheld with chagrin:
Three elves and four bottles and, there on a chair,
A boom box whose music was filling the air.

Santa stood for a moment, transfixed by the sight
Then he bellowed so loudly that Pip shook with fright.
"You! Chuckles! And Bubbles! And you, mister Suds!"
Why are you carousing while in your work duds?"

The fate of that threesome Pip would not relate,
Except to recall that the hour was late:
And Santa was anxious to fly in his sleigh,
And dealt with loose ends on the following day.

Humanity Is Not the Eldest

There isn't much to this post, apart from the following link:

• "Precursors"
  Television Tropes and Idioms

That page actually doesn't have all that much to do with television science fiction and fantasy: a great many examples are from written literature.

Still: interesting material, including

• "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy"
  (Douglas Adams)
• The "Marvel Universe"
• The "Known Space" stories
  (Larry Niven)
• "Gateway"
  (Frederik Pohl)

And, of course, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu and that merry band of "Old Ones" in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Which reminds me of what I wrote, toward the end of "A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers" (August 17, 2009) (Getting Imaginative): Maybe H. P. Lovecraft was an optimist.

Names: Castle Dampthorn, Regsellend, and the Indo-Europeans

Around the start of July, 2007, I got together with my oldest daughter and brainstormed about a fantasy setting I'd been putting together. We came up with what I think is a (barely) plausible dramatic situation that could be spun out as several stories.

I collected our notes, a map I'd drawn and some other material, put the lot in a manila folder (two of them, actually, just to confuse myself), and let the set of ideas lay fallow. I'd labeled the folder "Castle Dampthorn."

The only public evidence of that setting were two images I created, "I Come in Peace" (below) and "Kenningward." The latter was a technical study: I'd intended to make more use of the final result, but the more I look at it, the more it reminds me of a late-20th-century American convention center. Not the visual impression I wanted for tales of bravery and wonder.



Within the last month or so, partly as a result of watching some of the movies Disney Channel's been showing ("Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge" (2001), for one), I started remembering Castle Dampthorn - and noticed some vague, emotion-laden, half-formed notions bobbing to the conscious surface of my mind.

"Halloweentown II"?! Where's my artistic pride?!

I am pretty sure that none of the Halloweentown movies is going to outshine works such as Macbeth or Fall of the House of Usher in any literary or dramatic sense. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy them - or notice potential in their elements.

I have no intention of re-creating the "Halloweentown" stories - or Macbeth.

On the other hand, I won't be above telling a story that involves an unexpectedly simple (short, anyway) solution - or foretellings that aren't quite what they seem.

Remember Macbeth's optimism, hearing that he wouldn't be conquered until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane; and that 'no man of woman born' would harm him? (Act 5, Scene 3, 4, and particularly 8, where Macduff tells Macbeth that he "was from his mother's womb Untimely ripp'd." Macbeth was having a really bad day.)

Names of Fantasy Lands: Gibberish, or Something Else?

It'd be possible to use nonsense sounds for the names of people, places, and things in a fantasy story - or science fiction/speculative fiction. No problem, except that you're not making use of associations that readers might have with real words and names.

And, there's a danger of getting names that sound a bit too familiar. Not that anybody'd tell a tale of Princess Oolala of the lost realm of Yagattabekiddin.

Or, an author could use existing, but little-known place names (Captain Antilles, for example, in the original Star Wars movie.) It's been done - successfully, at least from a commercial point of view, in the Star Wars universe.

Or, a storyteller could cobble together names from an older form of the language he or she uses.

That's one of the approaches I'll be taking with the Castle Dampthorn stories.

Old English, Welsh, and Gaelic are fine sources for words and names - but I think that particular vein has been almost mined out. Not that I'll reject any nugget I find lying around, of course.

Words From a Really Ancient Language

My idea, at this point, is to go back a bit. Quite a bit, actually.

Around the 19th century, people studying the European languages found that they had quite a lot in common. And, that European languages had a great deal in common with languages spoken across a wide swath of land, all the way to India.

By the 20th century, quite a few pieces of the puzzle had been found and put together - to the point where it was possible to reverse-engineer the 'original' Indo-European language. Or dialects thereof.

Odds are pretty good that the people who spoke Indo-European lived north of the Black Sea, between the Volga and the Balkans. More or less. That was around five thousand years ago now.

Times change, people move, and dialects shift until they're different languages.

Unlike professor J. R. R. Tolkien, I'm no philologist.

My Indo-European Roots are Showing

On the other hand, an appendix of one of the dictionaries I have includes a sort of glossary of Indo-European roots. I pulled a few out for this post:

ag-

To drive (>Latin agere, to do, act, drive, conduct, lead)

agro-

Field (derivative of ag-, to drive) (>Germanic arkaz > Old English æcer)

alek-

To ward off, protect (>Greek alkë, strength >> English Alexander)

alu-

In words related to sorcery, magic, possession, and intoxication (>Greek aluein, to be distraught >> English hallucinate ) (suffixed form *alu-t- in Germanic *aluth- in Old English (e)alu, ale >> English ale)

gher-

To grasp, enclose, with derivatives meaning "enclosure" (>Germanic *gurdjan)

lendh-

Loin

Open land, heath, prairie (>Germanic *landam > Old English, English, Middle Dutch land)

math-

Worm (>Germanic *mathon > probably in Middle English mathek, worm, grub)

reg-

To move in a straight line, with derivatives meaning "to direct in a straight line, lead, rule" (>Latin rex, king >Old Norse riki, realm >Sanskrit -räjä, räjan, king ('rajah') >Germanic rehatz >Old English riht, right, just, correct, straight >English realm, rectilinear, regent, regime, region ... )

Moist (>>English rain)

To dye (>Sanskrit räga, red)

regwos-

Darkness (>Greek Erebus)

saus-

Dry (>Old English sëar (withered))

sel-

Human settlement (>Italian sala >> English saloon)

Of good mood, to favor (>Old English gesaëlig, happy)

To take, grasp (>Old English sellan, to sell, betray)

To jump (>Latin salïre >> English salacious, sally, salient, assail ...

wei-

To turn, twist, with derivatives referring to suppleness or binding (>Germanic suffixed form *wï-ra-, in > Old English wïr, wire)

To go after something (>Germanic *waith-, pursuit)

To wither (>> wizen)

Vice, fault, guilt

Vital force, perhaps related to wiros (>Latin vis, force)

wiros

Man, perhaps related to wei- (>Germanic *weraz, in > Old English wer, man >> Old English weorold, world)

(Source: Appendix, Indo-European Roots, "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language" Houghton Mifflin Company (1969-1978))

People who have made a serious study of the development of languages found regularities in the way words are formed, and how the sounds of words are passed along from one language to another.

I'm not going to try to follow those rules systematically. And I'm not going to be too fussy about how I cobble elements of the Indo-European language together. Love to, but who has that kind of time?

So, I pulled a few elements out, and came up with these two words:

• gherlendhwiros or Gerlendwiros (to grasp/enclosure-prairie-man)
• regsellendh or Regsellend (to move in a straight line/rule-settlement-land

I particularly like Regesllend. It could be the name of a place.

Or, not.