What does this mean for you, faithful reader? Well, if you're reading this via RSS, you'd better reset your syndication to the following: http://mjd.joskinandlob.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2. If you're happy navigating to it via the web, you shouldn't have to do anything. I'm going to switch http://www.michaeljdeluca.com/ to point at the WordPress version, and your links won't be able to tell the difference.

All the comments got transferred. Amazing, isn't it? And one of the pluses of switching to WordPress is the Nonsentient Beings haven't found it yet, so I can leave comment moderation turned off until they do. Be fun to see how long that takes.

Fare Thee Well, Stunted Pine!

Hello, Mossy Skull.

Apparently Boosh is planning a visit to some Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The modern Mayas are okay with that, but they are planning a cleansing ceremony for immediately following his departure, in order to cleanse the site of his bad vibes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6440639.stm

Courtesy of Luke.

http://interfictions.blogspot.com

Still waffling on the WordPress issue. I would be jumping right in, believe me, except that there are just so many wonderful little customizations I've made to this blog that I love and am loath to leave behind. But it'll probably happen eventually. When it does, you'll know.

Desert Thinking: Religion and Environmental Crisis by Chuck Groom

This is an emotionally precarious subject for me, as you will no doubt be aware if you've read at all into the backlog of this blog. I'm already worried I'll let the ideas run away with the story and turn it into a preachy mess, which will in turn force me to abandon the ideas and turn the story into something else. So please follow the link, and let this guy's persuasive talents accomplish what mine have not.

"Assuredly the creation
of the heavens
And the earth
Is a greater matter
Than the creation of humankind;
Yet most people understand it not."
--Koran, S.60.57, trans. Abdullah Yusaf Ali.

Well, I noticed I had a hole in my day, which I was mostly filling with NPR. Which is fine, but it gets repetitive. Really. Try listening to NPR news for half an hour two days in a row. Try it for 20. There is a certain style of delivery which newscasters follow without variation. It gets numbing. Lulling. I realized I'd much rather be learning to tell a good story.

So today I made my first earnest attempt at partaking of some fiction podcasts. And I liked them so much I thought I'd share what I found.

1. Elizabeth Bear, "The Chains that You Refuse". Title story of her new collection. Downloaded from her blog here.
2. Escape Pod, a speculative podcast periodical. Episode 94, which included a really cool endearing story by Kay Keynon about the Loch Ness Monster.
3. Paul Jessup, "The Happiness of Pinned Wings". A deep, dark zombie thing. Made me sad. From the Grendelsong podcasts.
4. Jeff Vandermeer on Why Fantasy is Important. Articulate and genre-independent. From the Odyssey podcasts.

I imagine I will get less comments now.

Growl.

Sending hate vibes at you spammers. Hate.

Amy: http://www.tuftsmarathonchallenge.com/runners/amydeluca
Diana: http://www.tuftsmarathonchallenge.com/runners/dianadeluca

Danielle is spending a semester abroad in Spain. I made her a blog so she could tell us all about it.

I installed a copy of it on my site and am fiddling about with it. Here is a link to the test installation, where you can go look and make comments. Please, please make comments. I have pretty much decided to switch over to it, as you can probably guess from the fact that I've already ported all nine million entries from this blog over to that one.

The only drawback, thus far, is that all the templates are kind of bland. So maybe I'll be spending some time hacking out a new custom template after all...

On January sixth it was seventy degrees in Boston. Deluded birds took up mating songs. In Jamaica Plain a cherry tree bloomed, in Medfield a honeysuckle. I drove about with the windows rolled down and went for a walk in the woods without a coat. I felt torn between a feeling of despair, of insurmountable loss, and one of defiant pleasure. Seventy-degree days in January in New England tend to put one in mind of doomsday. But it was hard not to notice, as clouds broke over mountains and fragments of rainbows appeared, how beautiful the world remained.

On the evening of February second, the first even remotely significant snow of the year fell in Sunderland. Fluff built up on the branches of fir trees. The air was filled with a quiet whisper and a subtle scent like cotton, and vast open fields felt small and comforting and familiar. People drove unnecessarily slow. I wore my Paddington Bear coat with the hood up and paused to shake off the snowflakes when I went indoors. The next morning there were footprints everywhere and the sidewalks were clear. The wind had knocked all the snow from the branches. No more than three inches had fallen.

People growing up in New England in coming years, as the world gets warmer, won't really notice the change. They'll think the nostalgia of the older generation for snowball fights and sledding to be quaint, but overly emotional, even irrational. It will be warmer, after all. Less fabric will be required for coats. Towns will get by on smaller snow-clearing budgets. Ploughs will rust. Fewer traffic accidents will occur. Nobody will bother to put snow tires on anymore. Gardners will become more daring.

I'll be one of those irrational older people, trying to convince kids that they're missing something. Which isn't to say I won't get caught up in the change, won't learn to enjoy the way things are. What I'll miss most, though, what will give me away as belonging to the class of fuddy-duddies, will be the way I cling to the metaphors.

Perhaps a new class of fantasy will emerge. Cold-weather nostalgia. The endless Winter of the Wardrobe will switch sides, become a symbol of good and beauty. Images like rosy cheeks, personifications like Jack Frost, becoming more and more inapt, will come more and more into vogue. The notion of a father building an igloo for his children in their front yard will evoke the mystical awe of knights and castles.

Maybe I ought to propose an anthology now. Get ahead of the game.

Attempt at a little digital art. A very little.

I want to go back to the single-thread format. Have a blogroll in the sidebar like everybody else. Start a podcast. Etc etc.

Not saying it's going to happen anytime soon. Got enough else to do. Just saying.

Incidents of Travel in Yucatan 4: Red Handprints

This building is called the observatory; you'll note the three small offeratory shrines at its northwestern corner bear a strong resemblance to the water god shrine I found on the beach about 30 miles to the north.

Tulum was constructed in the middle postclassic period, around 1100 AD. The Mayan cities of the southern Yucatan had collapsed, and the Toltec invasion had radically altered even the most remote remnants of the Maya culture. All the buildings are oddly skewed in their symmetry and proportion, as though they belong in something by Dr. Seuss. The idea one is inclined to infer about its builders is of a ruling elite, no longer driven by the enlightened goals of the high classic, but rather by a desperate desire to maintain the high standard of living to which they had become accustomed, without the advanced knowledge of astronomy and engineering that standard of living had originally required.

Testament to this, perhaps, are the red handprints that adorn Tulum's best-preserved structure, the Temple of the Frescoes:

(not my photo--I got this from some dude's Tulum collection on fotoslibres.com)

The red handprints are a recurrent phenomenon in Mayan architecture, to be found in ruins all over Central America. John Lloyd Stephens mentions them several times in Incidents of Travel, noting the shiver of connection they convey, the inevitable parallel drawn between the temple's ancient builders and the living human being standing before it. I indulged in a sense of temporal vertigo, and with sudden, giddy credulity, allowed myself to suspend disbelief long enough to accept those markings at face value: as physical proofs of a divine intervention in this city's construction. These were the handprints of a god, taking physical form to bestow his blessing and approval on the faithful. For a minute, standing there in the sun and the seabreeze, surrounded by sweating tourists and indifferent lizards, I bought into the myth wholesale.

Giving up the crutch of the camera had a lot to do with this, I think. As we had passed beneath Tulum's encircling wall, Erin had offered me a sarcastic consolation. She said something like, "you'll just have to remember it, instead of taking pictures." I took that to heart. I flung myself into my senses and didn't come out. If there was ever a moment when I was in danger of being sucked back nine hundred years, immersing myself in the experience of the Maya culture as it had once been, it was when I stood in front of those red handprints.

Look at the picture again. You'll note the left hand appears to have seven digits. The guide claimed this was a characteristic of the grandfather god, Itzamna--along with the supernatural height that would have been required to place the prints where they were. But she offered a more mundane explanation. The ruling class among the Maya, like those of feudal Europe, valued bloodlines too highly to allow intermingling with common stock. They also valued, even revered, certain deformities. I'd seen art depicting midgets carried atop people's shoulders like household gods. Why shouldn't polydactyls have been equally exalted? Especially, argued the guide, since the mummified corpse of the great king Pacal, the architect and ruler of the Guatemalan city of Palenque, was discovered to have seven fingers?

When I got out of the sun and came back to my senses I looked into this. Actually now that I think about it, I don't think I can claim to have come to my senses, or else I wouldn't have looked into it nearly so deeply.

It turns out that according to the most recent reexaminations of the mummified corpse of Pacal, he didn't actually have seven fingers after all. Put the word "polydactyly" into Google and you get all kinds of freakish pictures, none of which bear any similarity to the remarkably uniform and well-proportioned shape of the seven-fingered hand imprinted on the Temple of the Frescoes. Recently I went to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science--which I found, as I expected from the hype, to be on average one part disturbing, one part educational and one part egomaniacal. But they happened to have on display the plasticized corpse of a six-fingered man. (You killed my father. Prepare to die.) I examined the superfluous digit in detail, using my own hands and the others on display as comparison. And keeping in mind the extensive results of the Google search, the conclusion I drew was that even in the most innocuous cases of polydactyly, the extra finger is drastically reduced in size and functionality, even more so than a pinky. It tends to curve inward, huddling against the fifth finger like a scrawny little brother. In the specimen I examined, the sixth finger appeared to possess almost nothing in the way of independent musculature.

What I'm saying is there's no way a real polydact produced the red handprints.

So maybe what we have is proof that the priest-ruler-architects of Tulum were not believers, but corrupt oligarchs deliberately pulling the strings of their congregation's faith in order to keep themselves well-supplied with jade and mead and brightly-colored dye and willing volunteers for sacrifice. Certainly the recently laid bare failings of our own dominant religion lend credence to this view. But they also make it seem too easy a conclusion. If Apocalypto accomplished nothing else, it made clear the tendency of popular thought to read our own percieved shortcomings into the past. To turn history into parable.

I'd like to keep an open mind on the whole subject, if I could.

But look, there are only two possibilities. Either somebody faked the sixth and seventh fingers on the hand, perhaps simply by making a half-print followed by a whole one, or Itzamna really did descend from on high to bestow his blessing on his holy chosen. With the practical effect of dooming them to imminent enslavement and collapse. Unless, you know, he liked his worshippers so much that came down to retrieve them, and only left the handprints behind as proof that he'd allowed them to ascend.

Had it not been for the death of my camera battery, I suppose I might have been more inclined to take the rational view.

After floating out into the salty sea and seeing Tulum from the perspective of the Spaniards approaching through the gap in the reef, I walked barefoot through the ruins, over sharp limestone gravel, dodging thorn creepers and thumping big lizards, to the gateway in the ruins' western wall. As usual, the bus was leaving, and I didn't want to be on it. Erin left me behind with a frustrated humph, but she was the one who'd made me see the camera's death as an opportunity. It was only five minutes I spent standing alone, looking back on the ruins, burning their shape into my memory, opening my senses to the salt wind and the heat--but I undertook it as a spiritual experience. An unmediated memory, which for the rest of my life I'll be able to hold up against fiction and film and blanket advertising and say, "has any of it ever been as good as that?".

A pelican approached from the direction of the Observatory. It circled the Castillo on motionless wings, perhaps contemplating the wisdom of picking a fight with an iguana. Then it sailed down over the cliffs out of sight. A little pod of tourists shuffled past me through the gate. After another moment I followed. And I felt... I don't know. Connected.

This review, by anthropologist and Mayanist Traci Ardren, says pretty much everything I would have said about the glaring historical inaccuracies and ill-concealed racist/imperialist message:

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

To sum up: everybody speaks Yucatec Mayan, and the city depicted is clearly Uxmal (a Classic-period Maya city in southern Yucatan), but the blind, idiotic ritual massacre of everybody they can get their hands on is obviously the product of Aztec, not Classic Maya, culture. Especially since we see the Spanish arriving at the end and they clearly did not get into Mexico until 1536 or thereabouts, several hundred years after the collapse of the Maya.

What Ardren does not treat with is the complete ineptitude with which Mel's story wastes the vast and fascinating depth and complexity of Maya knowledge, art, culture and philosophy. The entire scene in the mindblowingly decadent and beautiful and horrific Maya city, which lasts for maybe a tenth of the movie at most, has absolutely nothing to do with the motivations of the characters, the conflict, or the plot. Oh my Sovereign Feathered Serpent God what a fricking waste. There is a half-second where we get a panoramic view of the skyline of the city of Uxmal. I was waiting the whole movie for that, and it had nothing to do with anything.

Which isn't to say Mel doesn't know how to do a good action chase flick with wife and kid at stake and heaping craploads of asskicking and spurting arteries to be surmounted before they are saved. He has shown that with The Patriot and Braveheart and the Die Hard movies and his whole ouvre.

But for someone like me, for whom setting and worldbuilding are pretty much the most important and enjoyable part of storytelling, well, Mel, you fecked it up. Fecker! I just hope you didn't feck it up for me and my Maya obsession. As somebody pointed out to me when I first started talking excitely about Apocalypto and how I had to see it, in spite of Mel's egomaniacal suckyness, due to the Maya content: had this movie done well, I would have been able to latch on to the ensuing wave of coattail-riding in the publishing industry, like the pirate obssession that is going on now due to Pirates o' th' Caribbean. Now, because Apocalypto will, if it has not already, utterly tank, I'm just hoping their isn't a matching backlash, where everybody in the editor chairs laughs my Maya stories off the stage.