Fencing Bear at Prayer

Strictly speaking, my family and I do not watch television, but we do have one, and every so often we get DVDs of almost-but-not-quite-current series. This week, while our son is at camp, my husband and I have been more or less obsessively watching the first two seasons of Dexter . You know the premise: attractive and congenial Dexter works for the Miami Metro Police Department as a forensic specialist in blood spatter by day, but by night he becomes a ruthless serial killer, hunting down others who have taken innocent lives, his killing governed by a strict procedural code but motivated only by his need to feel something other than the great emptiness that otherwise threatens to consume him. Over the course of the first season, we learn the reason for his emptiness: as a young boy, he saw his mother hacked to death with a chain saw, only to spend the next several days locked in a cargo container inches deep in her blood. By the time that the police found him, he had lost his humani...

Overheard while sitting in Regenstein Library, following the attack of the Snailox ... click to enlarge What the dragons are saying: Praise the Lord from the heavens; Praise him in the heights. Praise him, all his angels; Praise him, all his powers.... Let them praise the name of the Lord. Because he spoke, and they were made. He commanded, and they were created. He established them in eternity, and for all ages.... Praise the Lord from the earth.... The answer to the last dragon's question is in the next line of the psalm: dragons are here, on earth!* *At least, according to the Vulgate. Modern translations turn them into sea-monsters or whales. I'm pretty sure this is why the dragons came to Chicago this evening, along with the hail, snow, ice and stormy winds, thus keeping me from fencing practice so that I could finish this post. See Psalm 148:7-8.** **And, yes, this is one of the reasons medieval Christians believed so firmly in dragons. They're in the Bible, after ...

The dreaded Snailox, pronounced "snay-lox" (with thanks to TE for the suggestion!) Habitat: the lower margin of University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, MS 348 fol. 31, opening folio for the hour of Terce for the Little Office of the Virgin Mary. Diet: acanthus leaves , thistles, (possibly) butterflies. Strength: that of an ox. Speed: that of a snail. Powers: induce sloth and distraction in the minds of readers, forcing them to ruminate for hours over the same text. May also encourage web-browsing in search of images of, for example, acanthus leaves, leading to discoveries such as the site linked above on how to draw said leaves. Very dangerous, but easy to escape if you can manage to turn the page.

Is evil relative? One of the things that I have learned from my students this quarter is the great strength of the desire to believe that it is. At least, when our discussions about The Lord of the Rings turned to monsters, it was very hard for us to find a way to talk about them that did not presuppose another perspective (i.e. the monsters’) from which their actions would seem not evil as such, but simply self-interested. Consider, for example, Shelob: there she is in her tunnel, hungry, waiting for meat. And then along come two potential dinners, lured there by a creature who had promised her something juicy to eat, and first one of them blinds her with a terrible light and then the other stabs her in the gut with a sword. Isn’t all of this just a little bit unfair? Would we blame a cat for wanting to catch mice? Or Sauron. All he wanted, at least at the outset, was to “reform” Middle-earth, correct the errors allowed in its planning by Ilúvatar and the Ainur; much like his master ...