A Return to Ukraine

Posted on April 12, 2014 by fsdthreshold

Since even before our first date back in 2012, I’ve known that Julie would need to travel to Ukraine for a few months to conduct her dissertation research. She served as a missionary there from 2000 to 2010, and after returning to the U.S., she has made regular trips to visit her Ukrainian missionary colleagues and to continue studying Ukraine’s unique challenges through Biola University’s PhD program in Intercultural Studies. Well, that stage of her doctoral work has come: she has passed her qualifying exams, is finishing up her dissertation proposal about worship in Ukraine’s simple churches, and the next step is the field research, so that she can write the dissertation itself. She will need to visit several churches and conduct 20-30 face-to-face interviews.

I will be going along as Julie’s chief confidante, consultant, and (as she puts it) sanity-preserver, while I continue to work on two exciting ongoing writing projects from the road. My boss is very graciously allowing me to make this trip and then return to my job, for which I’m extremely thankful!

As many of you know, our window of opportunity for going between school years coincides with a time of unrest. We’ve been watching the news closely and are aware of the ever-changing situation in Ukraine. Be assured that we are cautiously moving forward with prayer, consideration, and consultation with Free Methodist World Mission, missionary colleagues, and our friends in Ukraine.

And now we come to the fund-raising plea. We will need to raise approximately $6,000 for this trip; the majority of the expenses are airfare, in-country travel, and lodging. Contributions of any size are welcome, and if you are able to pray for us but aren’t able to contribute financially, we are very grateful for that, too! (Friends of the Blog: I know this is a small, intimate setting we have here. Please do not feel any pressure or expectation. Julie and I are putting our news and request out there through every available channel, but please understand that this blog announcement is only intended as an opportunity for those interested. It is certainly not a requirement!)

If anyone does wish to contribute, please make checks out to The New Brighton Free Methodist Church, and write “Ukraine Trip” on the memo line. All contributions are tax deductible. The church’s address is: 925 11th Street, New Brighton, PA 15066. If possible, please make any contributions by May 5, as we are hoping to depart for this trip by May 7 — Lord willing. We know that things could change in Ukraine at any moment, and we want you to be assured that your contribution will be handled appropriately. Should the trip be postponed, funds will be held until travel becomes possible. In the unlikely event that the trip is called off completely, we will contact you to arrange return or redirection of your gift.

After our short-term mission trip to Ukraine last summer, I wrote a three-part chronicle of our experiences, including photo coverage. If anyone missed that or would like to see it again, here are the links to those blog entries:

Part I: The Land —

http://www.fredericsdurbin.com/?p=2236

Part II: Shadow of the Past —

http://www.fredericsdurbin.com/?p=2284

Part III: Primary Ministry —

http://www.fredericsdurbin.com/?p=2361

We appreciate your continued prayer for us and for Ukraine as we look ahead to this next adventure!

 

 

Getting Physical

Posted on April 5, 2014 by fsdthreshold

Quick story before I begin: when I go to work at the Community College of Allegheny County, I carry my stuff in a black tote bag emblazoned with a modified Tolkien illustration advertising the 75th anniversary edition of The Hobbit. I’ve gotten several compliments on it from people who love The Hobbit. Colleges are where the good nerds gather!

Second quick story: we went to the opera last weekend — La Boheme — my first-ever opera, though Julie’s been many times, including operas in Europe; it’s old hat to her. But it was new to me, and I loved it! I thought it would be good, a nice concert. It was so much more than that! First of all, the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh is a beautiful building, magnificent with age and golden embossings and frescoes and warm, soft lighting. It’s everything you’d expect in an opera house. Second, operas are staged a lot more entertainingly than I’d thought. I’d expected a chorus in costumes, standing more or less stationary as they sang. But an opera is staged like a musical, like a play, with realistic sets, costumes, and movement all over the stage! It was easy to become immersed in the world of the story. The music, of course, was extraordinary. And finally, there were visual special effects. One section was set in a snowfall, and highly realistic “snow” was falling all through the scene. The house created an intriguing effect with a transparent curtain inside the main curtain. When the velvet curtain rose and a scene began, the transparent curtain was still in place for awhile, though the action and music would begin. It created the illusion that we were watching a projection or perhaps a moving painting — a story in another world. Then this curtain, too, would rise, and all would become marvelously clear. During the breaks and intermissions (yes, there were both), we explored the building, passing along the secretive side passages, climbing up to the second floor to peer down from the balcony on the milling throng of opera-goers. It was easy to see and feel how this was an entertainment that existed before there were movie theaters; it seemed designed with the social aspects in mind, that a large part of the charm was meeting opera-loving friends, everyone bedecked in their finery, all having happy meetings and talking about great performances and the arts. We basked in this soft golden enchantment of the past — while appreciating how opera is very much here today, alive and vibrant!

So anyway, the main thing I wanted to talk about is how, in fiction writing, sometimes there’s no substitute for “getting physical” — for physically acting out what your characters are supposed to be doing, in order to see if it’s possible and plausible. Yes, I do this pretty often.

Nor am I alone. Lafcadio Hearn, who in Japan is known as Koizumi Yakumo, was the writer who revealed the folklore of ancient Japan to the West. If you’ve ever read a Japanese ghost story, it’s almost a sure bet that it reached you through the writings of Hearn. A native of the West, he spent the end of his life in Japan and took a Japanese name. And he was blessed with a wife who would act out the legends for him, showing him how certain movements and dances looked, so that he could accurately write about them.

It’s a helpful technique. When I wrote a weird western story some years ago, I needed to know what twenty paces looked like in the real world. I needed to know what ten paces looked like. So I found out on a sidewalk in Niigata, using a utility pole for reference.

For my current book, I frequently want a mental picture of room sizes — good thing we have a backyard. Most recently, I had to determine whether characters carrying supplies on their backs could crawl along a ledge just over a foot wide, and what the challenges would be. So I used a yardstick, measured myself out a foot-wide ledge on the living-room floor, and crept along it, doing everything the characters did. My wife wasn’t home at the time, but if she had been, I doubt she’d have batted an eyelash. She’s pretty good at recognizing what’s for the book.

 

Theological Language Detective Work

Posted on March 28, 2014 by fsdthreshold

It’s quite a fascinating story I have to tell you: the true tale of how my bumbling along as a writer led to the uncovering of a centuries-old mistake of sorts in the Clementine Vulgate. Does that sound like something from a Dan Brown novel? Well, we have exciting lives — both the real scholars, and those of us who venture into the cavern tunnels of classical antiquity to have a look around and — how shall one say? — borrow the rare antiquities, or their likenesses, anyway, for use in our fiction.

I will state clearly that any errors concerning ancient languages that occur in this post are entirely my fault, the result of my inaccurate reporting, and are not the responsibility of my consulting scholar and friend, introduced hereafter.

In the book I’m working on, I include a few meta-texts — books that exist in the fictional world and are real to the characters. Since these are scholarly works of a former age, I wanted to give them titles in proper Latin. Also, I had the need for several Latin inscriptions on walls. Now, I learned just enough Latin in college to get myself into trouble — though it has helped me in countless ways with English (vocabulary, spelling, and seeing relationships among words). [And it sure helps in correctly answering more Jeopardy questions than you’d think!] Also, I no longer have dear Professor Froehlich close by to ask my Latin and Greek questions to.

Providentially, I have some friends not far away who are the real thing — scholars and professors of the classics, including the languages — Ann and Dwight Castro. Between them, they have the classical world well covered. Ann graciously agreed to help me with the Latin for my book, and Dwight graciously reinforces her with second opinions.

Okay, so I needed the word “pestilence” as part of the title of a book-within-my-book. Now, I clearly remember from college the phrase “Negotium perambulans in tenebris,” or “the pestilence that walks in darkness,” from Psalm 91:6. I knew perambulans meant “that walks” (think of English words such as “ambulatory”); and in tenebris is “in the dark” — some churches have tenebrae services at night. So negotium has to mean “pestilence,” right? I slapped it together with the other word I wanted, and voila!

But when I ran my title past Ann, she asked, “Why did you use negotium?” She thought it was a strange choice indeed. I dutifully recited my Latin Psalm 91:6 and added that there was also a famous story by E. F. Benson called “Negotium Perambulans.” I found quotations of the phrase as I remembered it all over the Internet — so I certainly wasn’t the only person who remembered the words that way.

It still didn’t make sense to Ann, though, who actually knows Latin. Why were so many people in the 20th century using a word for “pestilence” that essentially means “business”?

Well, Ann got to the bottom of it, with some Hebrew help from her colleague, Mr. Rod Whitacre. The unraveling goes like this (and I’m using mostly Ann’s wording here):

1. The Psalm was first written, of course, in Hebrew. The word in question there has three radicals (consonants): dbr. This word, with vowel points added, is deber, which means “pestilence.” So far, so good.

2. However, there is another word (dabar) with the same three radicals but different vowel points which means “word,” but also a lot of other things like “thing,” “matter,” “affair,” etc.

3. It looks like the writers of the Greek Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) mistook deber for dabar and used the Greek word pragma which also means “thing,” “matter,” “deed,” etc.

4. Pragma can also mean such things as “trouble” and also occasionally “business.”

5. Jerome’s Vulgate, dating from the late 4th century, correctly translates the Hebrew deber as pestis (“pestilence”).

6. The Clementine Vulgate, written at the end of the 16th century, apparently went back to the Septuagint and translated pragma with negotium, which, as we have seen, means “business” but also possibly “trouble” (see #4).

7. The Clementine Vulgate was in common use in the Roman Catholic Church until 1979 when the New Vulgate was authorized.

8. However, the King James Version of the Bible went back to earlier manuscripts and found pestis and thus translated the word as “pestilence” — as do all subsequent translations.

9. The result of all that is that people familiar with the Psalm in the King James Bible knew the word “pestilence,” and when they looked at the Clementine Vulgate and saw negotium, they assumed that it meant “pestilence.” Ergo the various sources I (Fred) had found — including one that tried to explain negotium as “a vague, unspecified terror” — you know, that business that walks in the darkness . . . which is actually pretty creepy, like it’s a euphemism for something too terrible to specify.

Anyway, in Dragonfly, that Latin phrase from the Psalm is inscribed in the Tenebrificium, using the word negotium. I was worried about that in light of Ann’s discovery, but she says it’s okay: the phrase there is quoted in context, and it is straight from the Clementine Vulgate, after all . . . which is apparently the translation favored by the denizens of Harvest Moon. And I suppose one might make the case that the meaning of negotium actually serves Hain and his people well. What ambulates in the darkness is their thing, their affair, matter, and business — their ongoing hunt that is their means of survival.

So many thanks to the Castros for all their help! Ann, especially, is pretty much the guest blogger of this post, because I’ve used her explanation almost verbatim — except, again, for any errors you find: blame me for those. I’ve probably misplaced my vowel points somewhere.

I have to give the last word to my good friend John from my college days, who was always designing new schedules for studying the theological languages he packed into nearly every semester. One evening, all stressed out, John was telling all of us who lived on our dorm floor: “I have a test on thirty Hebrew verbs tomorrow! And they’re all dots!”

I never took Hebrew myself, so his talk of dots was Greek to me.

Yes, I should end the post there, but I have one more tidbit I’ve been meaning to write about. This house we live in is heated by hot water that circulates through conduits hidden in the walls and floors. It’s the first time I’ve ever dwelt in such a place. I’ve grown to enjoy the peaceful burbling the system makes. The colder it is outside, the more the hot water has to get around to do its job. So on winter nights, it’s cozy to crawl into bed and hear the house flowing and gurgling all around you — it’s like being inside a living creature! Aqua perambulans in tenebris? Ann, can I say it that way?

Marching To Our Own Drummers: A Question Inspired by Flannery O’Connor

Posted on March 1, 2014 by fsdthreshold

For this post, we have to hop on over to my wife’s blog. She raises a very intriguing question that I think it would be fun to discuss. Grab my hands, and jump with me through cyberspace! Here’s our destination:

http://allmanack.blogspot.com/2014/02/i-think-if-her-heart-had-been-in-right.html

 

Dragons and Hobbits and Mountain Halls

Posted on February 22, 2014 by fsdthreshold

It began with a shopping trip to Michael’s, the craft-supply store. We were there just before Christmas to get some picture frames. I, of course, wandered into the art section to admire the paints, brushes, and canvases. Well, you know how the tools of the trade can call out to any artist — keyboards, monitors, notebooks, and pens entice writers to write. The same is true of painting stuff. A stack of some miniature canvases called out to me, and suddenly I had an inspiration for some unique Christmas presents I could hand-make.

Bilbo and Smaug, Christmas and New Year Season, 2013-2014; acrylic on canvas, Frederic S. Durbin

Bilbo and Smaug, Christmas and New Year Season, 2013-2014; acrylic on canvas, Frederic S. Durbin; this was the first I did of the later, larger set. Smaug’s back legs here are strangely human. Unique to this pose is that Smaug appears to be jealously guarding the Arkenstone, almost clutching it.

Yes, from the end of December through January, the Man Cave at our place became my painting studio. As I’ve said before, painting makes a really enjoyable diversion for me, because there’s no pressure to be any good at it. I know I have no particular talent and no training. I can just experiment and have fun immersing myself in the story-world of painted images.

This was the very first one of the bunch I painted. I like the serpentine look of Smaug.

This was the very first one of the bunch I painted (my initial set was done on smaller, longer, less tall canvases as you see here). I like the serpentine look of Smaug. In this one, I wish I’d placed Bilbo a step farther forward, so that he would be against the background of the treasure-pile rather than the dark stairway. I see there are still some Japanese newspapers among my favorite art supplies!

Please bear in mind that these are close-up images of small canvases (you can get an idea of size from the newsprint visible); so at this magnification, they look blurrier than when you see them for real, displayed, etc.

Studio in the Man Cave, mid-winter 2013-2014

Studio in the Man Cave, mid-winter 2013-2014

These paintings are based, of course, on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Conversation with Smaug, which he did in pencil, black ink, watercolor, and possibly colored ink — the last of his Hobbit watercolors. Tolkien described Smaug as “a serpent creature . . . 20 ft or more.” You can easily Google Tolkien’s painting if you’re not familiar with it.

Another of the smaller canvases, the first set

Another of the smaller canvases, the first set. Here, the Arkenstone is atop the treasure-hoard. Bilbo is bowing, as in Tolkien’s version. Tolkien chose to show Bilbo’s ring-induced invisibility by drawing him all black, like a silhouette, and putting him inside a cloud. I chose to go with more realistic colors for Bilbo, as he would look to himself (as far as we know) while invisible. Tolkien makes the point of telling us in the text of the story that Bilbo only figured out he was invisible when wearing the ring by the reactions of others, who couldn’t see him.

The various elements in the paintings are all imitated directly from Tolkien’s picture: the armor and weapons affixed to the wall, the stairways descending from above and entering the treasure-hall through archways, and the vat of gold accessed by a tall ladder leaned against it. This ladder seems an impractical arrangement for anything other than simply admiring the gold in the urn; but I suppose admiring is, after all, mostly what the dwarves did with it. The Elvish tengwar letters on the urn spell out a curse directed against thieves.

This is the second of the larger painting series.

This is the second of the larger painting series. I’m fond of the realism of Bilbo’s pose in this one. With this image, I began to add the smoke curling from the dragon’s nostrils. Like Tolkien did, I used warm colors for Smaug with hints of green, suggesting both his fire-breathing nature and his reptilian aspects. In Tolkien’s picture, Smaug’s wings look too small to me, so I made them bigger. The challenge in composition is in having big wings that don’t block our view of Smaug. In this pose he’s kind of all over the place, a sprawl of wings and limbs; I think he’s in motion, crawling.

I like the basic composition of all these paintings. The deep blues of the mountain’s interior serve as a nice backdrop for the brightness of the treasure-pile — which, in turn, nicely highlights Smaug, making him clearly visible in all his glory. There are just enough other elements — the mail-shirt on the wall, the treasure-urn — to be interesting without cluttering the canvas or distracting us from the two characters. The urn gives Bilbo a prop to interact with, to partially hide behind in some of the poses.

Acrylic is the most forgiving artistic medium I know. There's no mistake you can make that you can't paint over, and pretty quickly, at that. As things dry, they tend to look better than you thought they would.

Acrylic is the most forgiving artistic medium I know. There’s no mistake you can make that you can’t paint over, and pretty quickly, at that. As things dry, they tend to look better than you thought they would. If you just keep after an element until you’re satisfied with it, you can usually come up with a painting you like. Whether it’s wise or not, I generally do most of my mixing and blending right on the canvas, as I’m coloring and shading the image.

You can probably tell that the kingdom of Erebor itself is my favorite part of these paintings. I love those dim stairways deep beneath the mountain . . . those passages receding into long-abandoned, echoing halls . . .

"Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat . . . Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat . . . Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed.” — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Smaug’s fleur-de-lys tail is Tolkien’s idea. In none of these did I manage to paint it as slender and graceful as it appears in Tolkien’s picture.

Thick, muscular Smaug.

Thick, muscular Smaug. He’s less a worm here, more of a farmyard animal, like a cow — though the wreath of smoke almost suggests that his head is swinging about. The Bilbo is my favorite part of this one.

‘”Revenge!” he snorted, and the light of his eyes lit the hall from floor to ceiling like scarlet lightning. “Revenge! The King under the Mountain is dead and where are his kin that dare seek revenge? Girion Lord of Dale is dead, and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me?”‘ — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

"Macho, macho Smaug . . ."

“Macho, macho Smaug . . .”

‘Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.’ — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I was going here for the conversation aspect

I was going here for the conversation aspect.

‘Before him lies the great bottommost cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain’s root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!’  — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

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I really like the back half of Smaug here — the hind legs and the very reptilian-looking rear claw with fingers of unequal length. Pretty huge treasure-urn!

I really had fun working on these, mostly late at night during the holidays. As presents, they mostly arrived late. That’s what happens when you don’t get the idea for them until the last minute.

This is the one, out of all of them, that we chose to keep for ourselves. Independently of each other, we both liked it the best (though there was some aspect of each painting that I liked better than all others). This is the one that we thought best suited us overall, considering all the elements. Julie says it looks like an icon of the scene (in the Orthodox Church sense)!

This is the one, out of all of them, that we chose to keep for ourselves. Independently of each other, we both liked it the best (though there was some aspect of each painting that I liked better than all others). This is the one that we thought best suited us overall, considering all the elements. Julie says it looks like an icon of the scene (in the Orthodox Church sense)! I love the stairways. Bilbo is quite lanky here! I like the S-curve of Smaug’s body. [Our second-favorite — again, in independent selection! — was the one up at the very top of this post, the “human-back-legs Smaug” — so we kept that one in the family; it went to my Cousin Phil!]

One non-Hobbit painting came out of the Christmas season, too. The one below, I painted for our friend Susannah, the amazing violinist at our wedding. It’s called Gypsy Fiddle, and it’s painted on a canvas just five inches by five inches.

Gypsy Fiddle, December 2013, by Frederic S. Durbin

Gypsy Fiddle, December 2013, by Frederic S. Durbin

Julie says that painting must be set in Pittsburgh, because there’s an outdoor stairway on a hillside above a village!

And one more version of the conversation with Smaug:

This is the most Asian-looking Smaug of the bunch.

This is the most Asian-looking Smaug of the bunch. This was the last one I did out of all, small and large. By this time, I was really getting the shading and motion of the dragon’s body the way I wanted it.

Incidentally, the order of painting was this: I laid in the halls of Erebor, then unfurled the mound of treasure. Then I did all the treasure urns — I’m talking factory-style here — all the urns on all the canvases, before any of the set of paintings was finished. So for a couple weeks, I just had pictures of dwarvish halls and treasure-vats and gold piles on my table. Then I did all the dragons, and usually the ladders at about this point. Finally, I put in Bilbos. The Arkenstone was the last element in each painting.

Here’s a last look at the bigger canvases, so you can compare various poses side-by-side:

Frederic S. Durbin, mid-winter paintings of Smaug and Bilbo, January 2014

Frederic S. Durbin, mid-winter paintings of Smaug and Bilbo, January 2014

Good times!

Paintings based on The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Paintings based on The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

And here I am again:

Painting in the Man Cave

Painting in the Man Cave

And the Man Cave itself:

Tolkien calendar!

Tolkien calendar!

My desk:

Work station -- lots of inspiring paintings by various artists . . .

Work station — lots of inspiring paintings by various artists . . .

Another angle:

The Man Cave

The Man Cave

And that great file cabinet from Construction Junction:

My cozy space for writing, painting, and dreaming

My cozy space for writing, painting, and dreaming

“If there really is a dragon down there, laddie . . . don’t wake it up.” — Balin

God bless the storytellers who work in every medium, and those who love them!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dream of the Gorgosaurus

Posted on February 18, 2014 by fsdthreshold

 

Once in awhile I have a dream that is not only vivid, but also so complete in the story it tells that I spring out of bed and scramble for paper and a pen to write down the details before they vanish in the morning light. This is one such, that I dreamed on the night of February 14th (or early on the 15th) — Valentine’s Day, and a night of the full moon.

As with most of my dreams, this one was rich with colors. Interestingly, I had no sense of being myself in it. There was nothing about the “I” in the dream that was particularly F.S.D. — rather, I was a character in it, though I was certainly experiencing everything from the perspective of that character, seeing through his eyes, feeling what he felt. I was sort of an Everyman.

As it began, I was coming home from a big outdoor picnic, cutting across a rolling landscape of grass and occasional thickets and bushes. The setting was not any place I recognized from real life. The greens were very green; the light had that rose-purple glow of the evening, when the sun is low, all pastoral and peaceful.

Looking over my shoulder, I realized a gorgosaurus was chasing me. It was running, shaking the ground with its footfalls, bounding over the hedges, rapidly gaining on me.

 

Gorgosaurus: I looked it up the next day, and my dreaming mind's identification of it was right; in the Tyrannosaur family, but a little smaller. It's amazing how the mind files these things away -- I hadn't thought about gorgosaurs in years!

Gorgosaurus: I looked it up the next day, and my dreaming mind’s identification of it was right: in the Tyrannosaur family, but a little smaller. It’s amazing how the mind files these things away — I hadn’t thought about gorgosaurs in years!

I could tell that the dinosaur was determined to eat me, so I ran as hard as I could away from it. I dodged right and left, trying to find shelter, trying to find a copse of trees big enough that I might escape into them and somehow elude the predator. But nothing worked. I would duck behind a bush, and the monster would step over the obstacle or crash through it, massive jaws slamming on branches, tearing the foliage apart in its hunt for me. I searched for small, narrow openings between trunks or stems that I might crawl into as if diving into a mouse hole, but I found none.

There was the desperate awareness that the beast was closer at every step. I remember that the gorgosaur kept sniffing me out. I would circle behind a tree, and it would follow my trail like a bloodhound, huge nostrils snuffling. My sides ached from running . . . I was out of breath . . . but the creature was relentless. I tried skirting clockwise . . . counter-clockwise . . . always, the monster would anticipate my tactics or smell me.

Strangely, there was also an indication of wicked intelligence in the reptilian eyes. When I had nowhere to hide, when my exhausted steps began to drag and the next hedge was hundreds of feet away, the gorgosaur would also slow to a stroll, watching me, closing the distance at a leisurely pace.

In the distance, I saw a community, a suburban neighborhood, with houses and streets. With a final sprint, I reached it, the saurian hot on my trail.

This was all intensely vivid. Recall the scariest scenes from Jurassic Park — it was like those, only worse, because I was “living” it. A towering carnivore was racing along behind me, doing its best to catch and devour me.

It was a still hour of the day as evening approached. No one was out in yards or on the streets. I had no more success evading the monster here than in the meadows. We circled among the houses, angled across yards . . . I wriggled over fences, and the gorgosaur smashed through them.

At last I saw a hospital (or maybe a retirement home) with a glass door sure to be unlocked. I staggered up the concrete drive, yanked the door open, and tumbled inside, fighting for breath. I felt safe, but I kept glimpsing the creature through windows — flickers of a massive tail, an elephantine haunch . . .

But then I could no longer see the dinosaur. It must have circled, I supposed, and was watching for me to come out somewhere. This was one of the eeriest moments of the dream. I sensed the thing nearby . . . I could feel it waiting . . . relentless . . . inevitable . . . I knew a wall would buckle inward at any second. I knew I would be faced with a colossal predator, shrugging concrete chunks and shattered girders. But all was silent, like the eye of the hurricane.

Now for the first time since leaving the picnic, I saw people — patients in pajamas, walking the halls — orderlies in uniforms. Someone was about to step outside, and I began urgently warning everyone about the gorgosaurus.

At first, the people reacted with surprise, then alarm. An orderly helped me keep everyone indoors and move them away from the entrance. But rather quickly, the prevailing attitude turned to mockery. “A dinosaur?” someone asked. “Hey, Bob, we’re hiding from a dinosaur!” The whole group of bathrobe-clad patients were laughing, leaning on crutches, slapping their walking casts in derision, and the orderly joined them. [I’m not sure if it’s important, but these were all men, the orderly and the patients. There were no women at all in the dream.]

But as I peeped out through some closed Venetian blinds, I saw the gorgosaur again! “Look!” I shouted, pointing. “Don’t you see that? That huge green thing right outside?”

Now, I kid you not, this is what a patient in my dream actually said in response to that — I am not making this up! The patient, a world-weary old guy in a wheelchair, lifted a corner of the blinds and said, “Hey! I do see something big and green out there!”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s a John Deere!” And everyone burst out laughing all the harder.

Then the other people ceased to be an important part. I think they were still present, but my full attention was drawn to the gorgosaur. It crouched in the front drive and pushed its enormous head right up to the window and began licking the glass. I knew the glass could not possibly keep out something that huge and powerful. I knew we were doomed.

The creature pushed its snout against the pane, and instead of breaking, the glass became like cellophane, stretching inward, the mighty snout thrusting into the room, then the head. Then all barriers fell aside, and the monster was in the building with us, and the beast was still gigantic, but somehow it could stand up inside and lash its tail and run toward me.

At this point, I was too tired to run any more, and I was convinced fleeing was pointless. The gorgosaur would catch me. I had found the only shelter I could, and it was ineffectual. The monster would follow me everywhere I chose to go. There was no escape. So, resigned to my fate, I decided to meet the creature head-on. Instead of darting into what seemed a gymnasium, I did an about-face and charged straight into the stretching forearm claws, straight into the gaping maw. I felt the right claw seize my left wrist. I felt the hot blast of the creature’s breath.

And the creature closed its jaws and smiled. The saurian lips stretched endlessly back into a wide, wide grin.

Then it began to communicate with me. I didn’t hear a voice, exactly, but I knew its thoughts. Essentially, it said to me, “Good game!”

Essentially, I answered, “Huh?!”

“When I went extinct,” the gorgosaurus said, “I begged for the chance to come back sometimes, even when the world changed, and evoke the terror I once did. I chose you as my victim. This was fun — well played!”

Then the grip was gone from my arm, the hospital was gone, and the dinosaur had vanished. I was alone in the gentle, grassy meadow where the dream had started. When my mind had caught up, when I had caught my breath and could walk again, I trudged on my way. But the grasslands felt a little different now. The darkening red-purple light seemed ominous, the sunset’s gold less trustworthy. Now I knew it to be a world in which the ghost of a gorgosaurus might follow you home from a picnic.

And there you have it — that’s the way I dreamed it.

I was telling Julie all about it the next morning, and we noted how the old “theology of October” comes through there. When the dinosaur went extinct, he asked if he could haunt the world for the purpose of evoking the old fear, and he was granted permission.

A Table Fantastic

Posted on February 9, 2014 by fsdthreshold

“Within this chamber lies a room built far away,

Brought east, then north, by wheel times eight and bed and bed;

No walls it has, but pillars six uphold its roof, and in another day

It was a fortress grand for Chris and Fred.”

Such read a mysterious clue, one of a series in a treasure hunt I put together recently for a special occasion. It led the way to the table which now stands in our living room — a table that has made a remarkable journey through time and space:

The dining room table from my childhood home

The dining room table from my childhood home

I don’t actually know where the table was built, but it was likely “far away.” It is a “room” in the sense that Chris and I imagined it to be such when we played under it as kids. It was “brought east” from Illinois in one truck and then up here in another — eight wheels and two (truck) beds. Those six ornate “pillars” holding up its “roof” seemed like many more when we were small. Back then, it felt like a forest of them. Certainly the warm, dark paneling of our old dining room added to the atmosphere of age and otherworldliness.

"A fortress grand for Chris and Fred"

“A fortress grand for Chris and Fred”

It’s just occurred to me why there seemed to be so many more legs back then. It was because the table was surrounded by six chairs cushioned in blue, their legs carved in the same style as the table’s. So there really was a forest of finely-wrought pillars.

It came humbly to our house back then, like nearly all our furniture: my parents went shopping at the Goodwill and the Salvation Army in Springfield, and this table, chairs, and a matching buffet all came from one of those — I’m not sure which it was, but I’m certain my mom picked the set out and got it all at a very reasonable price.

A Thanksgiving dinner, circa mid-eighties? -- at the dining room table when it stood in the room that would become Mom's office

A Thanksgiving dinner, early eighties? — at the dining room table when it stood in the room that would become Mom’s office

For many years, this rickety, dark-gleaming table served as the board for the laying out of special feasts — Christmas dinner, Thanksgiving meals, Easter feasts, and New Year’s Eve festivity snacks.

Its chief function for all the rest of the year was as Mom’s big, ongoing project table. Her day-to-day work took place at her kitchen table, of which she’s written eloquently elsewhere. Her typing was done at her desk. But this dining room table was for things that couldn’t be finished all at once, but that needed leaving out and accessible. Jigsaw puzzles took slow shape on it; tax-related booklets and forms piled up there as winter gave way to spring. Research projects, grant proposals, and photo albums waited among kits for making Japanese dolls, church choir music, and quilting hoops with their attendant cloth squares, scissors, backing, pin cushions, needles, and spools of thread. Each of these objects took center stage in their proper time. (Mom would sit at the table, quilting, while Dad watched TV in the next room, so Mom knew all their favorite shows by sound alone, as if they were radio broadcasts. She impressed me with her ability to recognize the cast of Star Trek by their voices.)

Although the table was primarily Mom’s workshop, she gladly shared it with me when I was home and needed a work space. One winter, much of the editing of Dragonfly took place on that table in the dining room’s gentle murk.

Farther back, in junior-high and high-school days, I spent happy hours designing dungeons there for our fantasy role-playing troupe, and many a grand session of actual Dungeons & Dragons gaming took place around that table.

If only pictures of it in those years existed! We’ll just have to do it with words. Near one end of the table was the hearth and the white stone fireplace. Next (moving clockwise), a set of windows looked down from the dining room into the lower room where Dad had his easy chair and TV. These windows originally opened to the outside, but we left them in place when the lower room was added on — so I could stick my face close to the open window and talk with Dad in the chamber below, which felt zany and magical somehow — a window between rooms, and everyone able to call to one another easily from various parts of the house. What’s more, Mom applied stained-glass stickers over the panes in those windows, so it was like being in a chapel . . . and, I kid you not, a life-sized suit of armor stood beside the windows, towering over the famous table. Then came the brown wooden bookcase (which also made the move here, to our current home) and the vestigial half-partition, a testament that the dining room had once been divided into two rooms but was now one large space. And all the plush blue chairs with their elaborate legs were crowded in cozily between bookcase and table’s edge. Not far from the other end was Mom’s piano. The buffet against the room’s north wall finished out the square.

Enchanted table

Enchanted table

After my parents passed away, when I lived for a year back in their house, sorting things out, the table became my base of operations. In addition to all its usual mountains, it held my computer. I wrote the first Agondria stories then and there. I first corresponded with the friends that drew me to Pittsburgh. I watched Seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy and Season 1 of Veronica Mars, all at that table. I managed to ease a printer into the mix on an end-stand close by. As the house emptied in preparation for the Great Auction, other furniture was moved out to one fate or another, but I knew I couldn’t let the table go. I carefully took it apart, and when I returned to Japan, the tabletop and its legs went into my storage room at the old house in Taylorville . . . and there they waited in the dark, amid the books and the films and all the other treasures of the past . . . and time went by. More than once I thought fondly of the table and wondered if it would ever stand again in a place I called home.

Well, the fulness of time came. I returned from Japan, and when I loaded up things to haul to Pittsburgh, the table and the buffet were among them. For two years in McKees Rocks, the table again became the holder of ongoing projects, a work surface, the place for entertaining and feeding guests, and the center of writers’ meetings. The people who had first made me curious about the Uncanny City were now sitting around my table with me, discussing writerly quandaries and questions. On one of our first dates, the girl who would become my wife sat at the table with me, playing her guitar as we sang hymns together.

And now at last, the old dining room table has come truly and fully into its own again. I don’t know who or how many people used it before my mom spied it among the jumbled furniture in the second-hand shop and brought it home. I think it must have been well and happily used, for it has about it an air of wholesomeness and tranquility. Certainly it has absorbed nearly fifty years of my family’s laughter and labors. It needed some structural reinforcing when it got here — it’s come by many roads and borne great burdens, and it had grown wobbly; it’s been taken apart and put back together with mismatched hardware more times than anyone can count. Now more permanent screws have gone in, so that I don’t think it will be disassembled again until its long life is utterly played out. It’s more stable than it’s been in all the years I’ve known it.

Now my wife and I eat some meals at it; it’s where we serve our guests. We put our computers and our books and papers on it, and we work and talk there, facing each other. And ever beneath our wrists, under our elbows, around our knees, the table creaks and silently remembers all the things it’s held, all the dreams that have taken shape on its scarred top, all the minds and hearts that have met around it to be nourished in the most important ways.

If you visit us with your small children, we’ll let them clamber and sit beneath it, if they care to. A room, you know, looks different when you peer out at it through a grove of beautifully-tooled columns . . . when you’re safe and sheltered in a chamber without walls, wrapped in the comfortable whispers of the past.

 

Window Into the Past: The Taylor’s Vale Monster

Posted on January 22, 2014 by fsdthreshold

A treasure has been unearthed! Our friend Hagiograph has delved into his storage boxes and discovered some reels of movie film that constitute a part of our cinematographic efforts from our childhood. I’ll put the link in here, and below it, I’ll add some notes. Here’s the link to the video on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/8gY4wPqNpkI

This piece, a silent 8mm movie film, is called The Taylor’s Vale Monster (circa 1976). Our earliest filmmaking, of which this movie is a prime example, was unquestionably inspired by Jaws, with a significant difference: we were boys growing up in Illinois, far from any ocean, and our storytelling adapted the Jaws-like plot to the setting of woods, fields, open spaces, an enormous sky, and frozen blankets of snow. Our imaginations were also steeped in tales of cryptozoology — encounters with mysterious creatures in lonely places — a literature to which we were introduced primarily by my dad (who, both fittingly and ironically, appears in this movie as the scoffer, who discounts the photo my own character has taken of the monster).

Yes, that’s me, the first person you see, that long-haired boy driving the golf cart. And the first dog you see is my dog Hooper.

Three of us had movie cameras — Hagiograph, my Cousin Phil, and I — and our typical practice was to each make a variation on pretty much the same story; whoever’s camera was being used was the director, and we all participated in everyone’s movie. We wouldn’t have wanted it any differently. There was a cluster of monster films, a group of WWII air combat stories, and a series of Star Wars spawns. By then, we were starting to work on our own projects, doing rudimentary documentaries, adaptations of short stories, etc. But what we have in this clip is from the beginnings.

(Mr. Brown Snowflake from this blog also helped out regularly, though he somehow missed getting into The Taylor’s Vale Monster.) So the film you see here is a very close cousin in plot to my version, In Search of Bigfoot. Hagiograph has taken the first step in preserving such films for the digital age, and we owe him a great debt for that. Hagiograph, thank you!

He has also created the musical soundtrack for his film, and it is amazing.

When you watch this, yes, you will see the grainy, silly product of some preteen boys who love monsters. But really, that’s the value of this film. It’s not about the story we were trying to tell; it’s about what we see now, what we experience, when we look back at those boys in the seventies. This film will show you something about who we were, and why we are the way we are.

Let the shaky images carry you to another time, to open fields surrounded by creeks and woods. Let the music transport you to an eerie world. And pay special attention to the last few frames. You might get an extra chill. There’s something to these old films we made — something a little unsettling; something well worth preserving.

 

Roundtable on THE HOBBIT: The Inkjetlings Speak

Posted on January 7, 2014 by fsdthreshold

Happy New Year to all!

For this post, please allow me to direct you to a conversation among my fellow Inkjetlings and me (that term is explained in the piece). Many thanks to Nick Ozment, who put this all together for Black Gate‘s web site. Nick put a lot of hours into the task. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

http://www.blackgate.com/2014/01/06/inkjetlings-round-etable-jacksons-desolation-of-the-hobbit/

 

 

Reverent Euphony, with a Certain Abandon

Posted on December 24, 2013 by fsdthreshold

A little more than three years ago, my friend Ryan found inspiration in a photo. The image showed a crowded English pub full of patrons singing Christmas carols with great enthusiasm — a merry company, singing their hearts out in celebration of the newborn King. “We should do this!” Ryan said, showing me the photo. “We totally should!” I agreed. “We can do it right here,” he said, his sweeping gesture taking in his apartment. At once he began the planning: “I’ll make wassail. Will you play trombone? We need brass for Christmas.”

And so Ryan’s annual caroling party was born. He invited a bunch of friends. He and his wife generously opened their home to the event. He made the best wassail that has been brewed since the Middle Ages. That first year, he and I met several times to practice the music — I remember sessions in his basement, crouched beneath the hissing pipes, and in the freezing backyard, huddled around a bonfire, with an amp for his guitar.

Caroling Party 2013

Caroling Party 2013

The actual party was held in the living room, where people could be comfortable. Babies and toddlers were as welcome as their grownup counterparts — only a childlike spirit was required to get the full benefit from the evening. People brought food and drinks. We were committed to doing the carols that some of us had loved as children but that are all too often overlooked in these modern times. Our lineup went something like this (with variations in the order):

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

In the Bleak Midwinter

Bring a Torch (This one always delights everyone, and it ends much too quickly!)

Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming

What Child Is This

O Come, All Ye Faithful

The Friendly Beasts

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent

Good King Wenceslas (also known as “Fred’s song”)

Angels We Have Heard On High

Silent Night

Joy to the World

Yes, we really do all those, and no, it does not feel long at all. You’d be surprised at how the evening flies by! We generally take one break somewhere in the middle, and we try to alternate slower songs with livelier ones. We sing all the verses.

Caroling

Caroling

So that first year, the accompaniment was trombone and guitar. The second year, Julie had come into the picture, and she played guitar, freeing up Ryan to sing and play banjo. This was our third year, and we were blessed with Susannah’s utterly amazing violin! The guitar and trombone allied themselves with a mandolin, a ukelele, and even a tin whistle on a couple tunes. Every year, people ask about this event for weeks in advance. This time, we moved the venue from Ryan’s apartment to Susannah’s.

Two highlights this time around were:

1. Going out into the street afterward to sing and play “Silent Night” one more time, for the neighborhood.

2. Singing “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” mostly a cappella (instruments on the first verse only). I’ve always liked that one, but I’d never experienced it in quite this way before. It’s an eerie song — or maybe unearthly is a better description. It’s the Book of Revelation in a hymn. The littlest child among us got a bit scared before it was over, and I think we all had gooseflesh. I’m not sure the recording (see below) will do it justice, but it was thundering. We sang it in the dimness of a glad room on the threshold of Christmas, all of us facing one another but staring into spaces Beyond . . . It reminded me of the Dwarves singing in the dark hobbit hole on the night before the Adventure. And that’s the spirit of Advent, isn’t it? Heaven is coming; the Word walks among us on human feet. The Adventure begins, and none of us will ever again be quite the hobbits that we were.

If you’ll click below, you should be able to see and hear our renditions of two hymns. Be warned that our “Angels We Have Heard on High” gets very silly — a custom of this caroling party is to sing the last stanza of the final song in funny voices. A merry and blessed Christmas to all!

 

Let all mortal flesh keep silence from Julie Allman on Vimeo.