behold the things which are written upon the ball

Spiritual thought of the day, taken from Screwtape:

"In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual 'taste.' This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all of the females--and there is more in that than you might suppose."

That's right: in encouraging shaving, Honor Code, you not only instill despair in me upon my waking each morning, but support the infernal machinations of the Dark Lord. (I have discovered, however, one way to find joy in shaving: confidently striding into the ID Card office and asking to use their shaving supplies. Buwahaha, turning my two great enemies against one another.) I bear fervent witness of the powerful effect this principle has played in my own life.

(It took me forever to prepare that; Amazon's a pack of tricky devils with their "look-inside" feature. First, the image has no file extension; it's served as an application/octet-stream. Next, they disable right-click. Finally, just in case you've turned off JavaScript, they stretch a transparent pixel over the entire image. Would really like to write a script designed to facilitate ripping entire books off their servers and compiling them, but the girlfriend tells me it would violate Fair Use laws.)

I guess we aren't being secret anymore, so by "the girlfriend," I mean Ambrosia. That's right, 100 Hour Board fans, I'm the coolest person ever. Erm, luckiest. Yes. (Thanks for the reproof, Katya. She watched me play Age of Empires for a while the other day, establishing eternally and incontrovertibly that every moment spent away from her is in fact a tragic loss.)

I think I figured out the scariest story-telling technique ever last night: reverse dramatic irony. I mean, canonical dramatic irony is a staple of the teen slasher industry ("No! Don't go in there!"), but the reverse actually seems to me much more chilling: a story in which the characters know something the audience does not. A reasonable example would be the classic Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder". More recently, Shyamalan uses this to great effect in The Sixth Sense, but it was somewhat flat in The Village, mostly because everyone knew that it was a Shyamalan film and the twist was coming. Some kind of misdirection, a red herring like a note passed around but never shown or read to the audience (a la 1 Ne. 16:27), would be quite useful.

To make it truly horrifying, break the fourth wall. A movie in which, after you come to know and love the main characters, they suddenly turn to the camera and remove their masks, revealing dead, rotting faces, and laugh at your gullibility, would be to me weepingly, nauseatingly frightening. Critics would, I imagine, universally shun it, and I find this reaction to breaking the fourth wall fascinating; it is, I suspect, analogous to the scorn of logicians in deeming second-order predicates "set theory in sheep's clothing." I think that we shun it not solely for its emotional potency but necessary semantic upheaval: where art universally pleads a suspension of disbelief, breaking the fourth wall assigns truth values to the story presented, then declares this new meta-story that which you must trust. I suspect that even our social scorn for emo, "this is how I really feel, deep inside" confessions stems from the same anger at throwing away the story we write in every handshake.

That's all I can remember for now. In the meantime, the poem I wrote for Poetasters this week, the gracious reception of which I appreciated enormously:

Surplus

In days of yore we gathered by the brow
Until we learned to harness ox and plow
We wandered, nomads, every man at hand
To take the sword and fend off roving bands.

Afraid alike, we were egalitarian,
Until we stowed our tents to be agrarian.
A new perspective came with crop retention,
For surplus is the mother of invention.

Now we didn't need to wear
Our lives out in quotidian care!
One man's farming nourished twelve
Free at last in thought to delve.

Or in art, in sport, in science,
Anything but self-reliance!
So arose our castes and layers
(And our loaded football players).

Plato thought we should have three:
Soldiers, artisans, and me.
Each a rivet, each a beam,
Each the coal or fire or steam.

And now we learned to write and read,
For suddenly we didn't need
To spend our life on bended knee
In searching stalk and bush and tree

And so it went on through the years;
Industry had conquered fears.
But then a cry, an awful den:
"Let us do it all again!"

Each a family, each a nation,
Each a factory in creation.
All should try each art, from very
Small to big, like culinary.

Housewives? Never! How appalling!
All can soothe a baby's squalling.
Except when we're occupied
With work, or school, or pleasure rides.

Rushing 'round until we're dizzy--
Children? No, we're much too busy!
Matrimony's for the snobbish!
Why stay put? For love? What rubbish!

And those who try become defendants
Accused of crimes like "codependence"!
Those things are beneath a nation
Of individual actualization.

If we shall reclaim our state
Each must do one job, first rate.
Volunteer by raise of arms.
Who would like to run the farms?