Myers’ Amendments to Godwin’s Law

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Brendan

You might have heard of something called Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

I would like to suggest “Myers’ First Amendment to Godwin’s Law”, as follows: If the online discussion includes at least one conservative Christian, then as it grows longer, the probability that the topic will divert toward abortion or gay marriage approaches 1.

I would also like to suggest “Myers’ Second Amendment to Godwin’s Law”, as follows: If the online discussion includes at least one American, then as it grows longer, the probability that the topic will divert toward the right to bear arms approaches 1.

Because, whether the (American) speaker is in favour of gun control, or against it, or somewhere in between, the topic just keeps cropping up again and again, in the weirdest of places.

It’s the same with conservative Christians. it seems as if they almost always somehow end up talking about abortion, one way or another. Or gay people. It’s so habitual now that the Pope said that Christians should knock it off, and start talking about compassion, and poverty relief, or something else at least.

And finally, here’s “Myers’ Third Amendment to Godwin’s Law”: If the online discussion includes at least one Canadian, then as it grows longer, the probability that the topic will divert toward the weather approaches 1.

And don’t ask me what the Fourth Amendment might be. But it has something to do with what the Irish talk about. Especially on Arthur’s Day. (Oh ye gods.)

Discuss! (But not for too long, because we’ll end up talking about gun control, or abortion, or…)

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Some thoughts about the Charter of Quebec Values

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Brendan

I am a professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Heritage College, which is a regional anglophone college in Quebec’s unique CEGEP system of higher education. As such, I am also a provincial public servant, and the proposed Charter of Quebec Values will affect me personally, as well as all of my colleagues and students. I am also the author of twelve philosophical and/or pagan books, and (to my knowledge) I am the only openly-pagan philosophy professor in the world.

There are a number of things about the proposed Charter of Quebec Values which are interesting, but some of those things are at the same time troubling. Among both my colleagues at work, and also my friends in the Quebec pagan community, there are mixed views: some support it and some are against it, either in whole or in part.

Most everyone I know is in favour of the separation of church and state in Canada. For that matter, so am I. Although Canada does not have such a separation guaranteed in our constitution (we have, instead, a history of political traditions and a mountain of judicial precedent), Quebec has its own charter of human rights and freedoms, its own civil code (no other Canadian province has one), and other similar legal statements defining Quebecois social values, which provide that separation quite robustly. The three most important Quebec values embodied in those statements are the equality of men and women, the separation of church and state, and the primacy of the French language.

In the 60’s and 70’s, Quebec underwent a radical secularization process in which major social services which had previously been provided by the (unelected, unaccountable) Catholic Church, services like housing and education and health care, were taken over by the provincial government. This process is now known as the Quiet Revolution, and no other Canadian province or American State has done anything similar.

In that sense, Premier Pauline Marois’ Charter of Quebec Values doesn’t do much that hasn’t already been done. However: Marois’ proposed Charter will require that public servants (like me) do not display religious symbols openly while functioning as public servants. It may also require that members of the public cannot wear prominent religious symbols while receiving provincial government services. Apparently, we can wear small symbols, and there’s a specific list of which ones we can wear, and how small they have to be.

Were that all, it would be fine by me. But it’s not all. For instance, for a charter that supposedly is about secularism, there’s rather a lot of exceptions for “traditional Quebec values”. And most of those exceptions, suspiciously, involve Roman Catholic symbols, including the huge Catholic crucifix which hangs in the Quebec national assembly chamber, and the giant illuminated cross that stands at the summit of the mountain in Montreal. This strikes me as a little bit hypocritical.

It’s the exceptions that we should think about here. They indicate what the proposed Charter is possibly really about. Given that the majority of the exceptions are about Catholic symbols, I suspect that the Charter is a disguised attempt to protect Roman Catholic symbolism and culture in Quebec.

I suspect it’s also a disguised attempt to attack Muslim women. For although Marois said that the Charter would unite Quebecers, so far the real practical result has been to divide them, between those who are happy with Quebec’s mostly-healthy multiculturalism as it is, and those who would rather see a more homogeneous, secular, but also informally Catholic Quebec. Since the Charter was floated by the Parti Quebecois, Burka-wearing Muslim women have had to endure more harassment and violence in public places than ever before.

The Charter is being informally proposed as a way to liberate Muslim women from the oppression of the burka. But I’m not fully convinced that all Muslim women who wear it are oppressed. One needs to ask: if a Muslim woman chooses to wear the burka, is she really being oppressed by her husband or father? Maybe not. But almost no one is taking much time to ask these women why they wear the burka, or why they don’t, as the case may be. Indeed, I suspect that there is a lot of latent xenophobia quietly presupposed in the Charter. Perhaps the Charter’s real purpose is to liberate white, secular and/or informally Catholic Quebecers from having a Burka-wearing Muslim woman as their next-door neighbours.

Personally, I’d rather see a complete ban on religious symbols, with no exceptions. But even a complete ban on wearing such symbols has its problems. Many of my colleagues are religious, but very few of them wear their religious symbols openly anyway. I’m religious: I’m a spiritually druidic humanist. But I keep my triskele under my shirt. Because my religion is nobody’s business but my own. So, the charter will stop us from doing something that we’re not doing anyway – a clear absurdity.

But while that’s true of most of my colleagues, it isn’t true of all of them. Some of my colleagues do wear highly visible religious symbols: they have to, because their religion requires it. Think of it this way: no one would seriously demand that a Catholic man should be Catholic at home and a secular atheist while at work. But Catholics don’t have to wear their crosses openly if they don’t want to. He can be a Catholic man at all times, and no one else need be the wiser. But the same cannot be said of those whose religion requires them to wear a turban, or a Jewish skullcap, or a Bindi mark on their brows. To such people, to give up those symbols is the same as to give up part of their religion. I worry that some of my very talented and well-liked colleagues might lose their jobs if they refuse to abstain from their symbols. This would be a great loss to my college; it would also be a great injustice, as these people might lose their jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs.

But all this might be smoke in the wind anyway. Canada has a national Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is part of our Constitution, and which theoretically trumps any provincial legislation. Our constitution guarantees to every Canadian the freedom of religion. If Marois’ proposed Charter of Quebec Values becomes law, it will certainly conflict with our national Charter. Federal politicians have already indicated their willingness to fight the charter in the courts. Moreover, Marois has only a minority government right now, which means that if enough opposition parties reject the proposed charter, it won’t fly anyway.

And finally, I’m certainly convinced that Quebec has more serious problems to deal with, such as its ancient infrastructure. There are bridges collapsing all around Montreal; there are highways with potholes big enough to swallow whole cars. I suspect that the Charter is intended to disguise the fact that the PQ has no freaking clue about how to handle real problems that really matter – problems like unemployment, homelessness, underfunded schools and hospitals, Aboriginal land claims, decaying infrastructure, and the like. They only understand the politics of identity. They don’t understand anything else.

When you vote PQ, you may or may not get the socialist paradise they promise, but you always get the identity politics.

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Free Books! “Clan Fianna” and “The Earth, The Gods, and The Soul”

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Brendan

This fall, I am publishing two new books:

in Nonfiction / Philosophy:
“The Earth, The Gods, and the Soul: A History of Pagan Philosophy” (Moon Books / John Hunt International)

in Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary:
“Clan Fianna” (Northwest Passage Books*)

Want a free copy of one of these? Write a review of any of my previous books (200 words minimum please) to your blog, or to your favourite online retailer (Amazon, B&N, Chapters, etc) or Goodreads, etc. Then share the review on your favourite social network (Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc.) and with me. And then, when these books are published in hardcopy, I’ll send one to you.

Alternatively, since Clan Fianna is already available in Amazon Kindle, you could review it, and I’ll send you a copy of any of my other books which you may choose.

The idea here is to get as many people as possible to spread the word about my books as widely as possible; and for me to show my gratitude by offering this simple giveaway.

Post your review between today (17th September 2013) and 1st November 2013, and you’re in!

* Northwest Passage Books is my own imprint.

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Why I love The Waterboys

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Brendan

I was eighteen years old, and drinking my first (legal) pint of Guinness in a Scottish pub in Fergus Ontario, with both my parents beside me, when I heard The Waterboys “Fisherman’s Blues” for the first time. The barman was playing the whole album, start to finish. We were well versed in Irish music already: my dad was born in Ireland, and he inherited a large collection of Irish trad albums from his father, so Irish trad music was a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood. (That and 60’s classic rock, especially the Beatles, but that’s another story.) And as we heard the first tracks of Fisherman’s Blues, my parents and I stopped talking about whatever we were talking about, and just start listening. We heard the fiddle used as a rock instrument for the first time in “We Will Not Be Lovers” and “World Party”. We debated the double or triple meanings in certain lyrics. We invented stories about who Hank was, and who else might deserve a bang on the ear. Dad asked the barman to play “When Ye Go Away” twice. And then dad and I just stared at each other in shocked silence – a true state of aesthetic arrest, as Joyce coined the phrase – when we heard “The Stolen Child”. Dad was an english major when he was a student at university, and Yeats was his favourite poet. So he ensured that my siblings and I knew and loved his poetry too. So when we heard the Yeats poem set to music, we could do nothing else but listen. And then we asked the barman to bring us the cd.

The very next day, I went to the record store and bought a copy of all the Waterboys albums they had on sale that day.

I had been playing guitar for about a year at that point, but mostly as a kind of diversion. But when I heard Fisherman’s Blues, it was like I knew what kind of music I wanted to play. So I taught myself to play every song on the album. Badly, alas — and if asked to play those songs today, I’d have to re-learn most of them. But the point is: the music of Fisherman’s Blues, and it’s successor album Room to Roam, is the music that made me want to be a guitarist.

That was also the year that I move out of the family home and got my first apartment. And I had time now to just sit and listen to an album – not as something playing in the background while doing something else, but as something I was deliberately doing, for it’s own sake. Partly because I wanted to play those songs myself, and partly because I was taking the time, I gave close attention to the lyrics. And those lyrics really spoke to me. Most Waterboys songs are not like other rock songs because the subject matter of the lyrics often address serious topics that other pop songs don’t touch. Songs such as “The Whole of the Moon”, “She Is So Beautiful” and “A Man is in Love” are love songs, but they have none of the interchangeable, bog-standard “I wanna love you to the end of time” flappery that dominates pop music lyrics. They tell stories, and they find elegant and powerful words to tell those stories. As an example, look at these lines from “The Girl in the Swing”:

Well, you just asked me: do I know what love is?
I said, sure I know, sure I know what love is!
It’s the thief of my sleep, a boy and his dog,
a red rubber ball, these old foolish things,
A rain that falls a long, long way from home.
And it lives in the girl in the swing.

And this lyric is sung when the chord changes up from the home chord of A-minor to its relative major, and then follows an ascending arc that leads to a dramatic climax right on the achingly lonely but wonderfully beautiful lyric right at the end. It’s epic music.

But this is to compare Waterboys music to other pop songs, and there are a lot of Waterboys songs that just can’t be compared that easily: they are so radically different, in lyrical content and in sound. The subject matter of the lyrics is much more varied, and often much more honest about human relations and experiences. There’s epic storytelling (“Red Army Blues”, “Bury My Heart”), there’s fun and spontaneity (“Spring comes to Spiddal”) there’s anger and darkness (“Suffer”, “Be My Enemy”, “Malediction”) there’s gospel influences (“On My Way to Heaven”, “A Rock in a Weary Land”), there’s moments of exquisite beauty (“The Wind in the Wires”, “Too Close to Heaven”). And there’s a lot of sonic experimentation: Scott produces sounds on stage and in the studio that I’ve never heard anywhere else. The closing bit of electronic wind in “The Charlatan’s Lament” is one example that comes to my mind. I have no idea how he made that sound, and that is part of what makes it awesome. “The Return of Jimi Hendrix” is like getting hit with a flood of sound. And “Seek the Light” is so acoustically weird that I don’t know what it is, but I love it anyway.

Most fans agree the music of the Waterboys goes through three phases, on their almost 30 year career. There’s “The Big Music” of the early albums, the “Raggle taggle Celtic folk rock circus” of the middle albums, and the “sonic rock” of the later and current albums, although the most recent album combines the sound of all three phases. Since the Raggle Taggle days, the band lineup consists of Mike Scott, Steve Wickham, and whoever they are jamming with at the time – something like 70 people in all.

And through it all, there’s a lot of spiritual seeking. In my mind, this is is perhaps the most prominent theme in Mike Scott’s songwriting. And this is also the theme in the music which drew me in the most. I listened closely to the lyrics and the sound of “The Big Music”, and I wanted to hear that sound too. I went into the forest near my home looking for it, and I believe I found it in the sound of the wind in the trees and the rapids below, and the calling of birds, and the turning of the earth from each day to the next. Ever since, when I want to write a song or a new book, I go to a sacred place, and I try to listen for the music of the world, and then I write down what I hear.

Sometimes the spiritual influence in a song is clearly from a particular cultural tradition: Native American (“Only the Earth Endures”), Neo-pagan (“The Pan Within”, “The Return of Pan”, “A Pagan Place”), and esoteric Christian (“December”, “Peace of Iona”, “The Christ In You”). Sometimes his spiritual feelings are suggested by his choice of literary influences, especially WB Yeats and CS Lewis. But much of it is also Mike Scott’s own idiosyncratic path, with songs like “Glastonbury Song”, “Higher in Time”, “Bring Em All In”, and “Let It Happen”. And some of his personal spiritual songs seem perhaps autobiographical: “Crown”, “Long Way to the Light”, “I’m Still a Freak”. Listen to the lyrics of “Bigger Picture”, which expresses a kind of pantheism:

My soul the sky, my heart a sun
My mind a world – my only one
My thoughts the people, the world around
My dreams the kings – or the clowns
I’m starting to see a bigger picture
I’m beginning to colour it in.

And here is a sample from “What Do You Want To Do?”, which is a plain spoken statement of self awareness, and also a plaintive call to God or some higher power or loved one, for help:

I can see the lights of home,
But I can’t get there on my own.
I can see the landing strip,
But I need you to steer my ship.
What do you want me to do?

Mike Scott doesn’t publicly subscribe to any particular religion. It seems to me that he probably sees himself as a musician and a human being first, and everything else second. And I respect this: in a similar way, I see myself as a philosopher and human being first, and everything else second. Still, if a philosopher became a rock musician, the music of The Waterboys is the music he’d make.

That first year I moved out to live on my own was also the first year I attended WiccanFest. I played “The Return of Pan” at the WiccanFest Bardic Competition and I won second place. And ever since, when I attend events in the pagan community, I am almost always asked to play that song, or other Waterboys songs that have spiritual themes in their lyrics. In early 2000, I picked up a copy of “Bring Em All In”, Scott’s solo album and perhaps his most artistically introspective, soul-bearing album. I think it is one of his best. I saw Mike Scott perform in a solo concert just after the release of that album. The venue was a church in downtown Toronto: a perfect place for such spiritual and personal music. I sat only three rows in from the front. A lot of audience members called out requests and even had side conversations with Scott on the stage. It was a very intimate concert. I cheekily called out “Can I jam with you?” It seemed fun at the time, but in retrospect, I think I was too presumptuous. His wise answer was “Not today.”

Not long after that concert, a woman I loved very much died. So I learned to play every track on “Bring Em All In” as a means of grieving and healing. Mike Scott’s music helped me get on with my life again.

In the summer of the year 2001, I moved to Galway to study philosophy at the university, and to find the places where the band made the sound of their raggle- taggle Celtic folk-rock years. The town of Spiddal, where the band recorded Fisherman’s Blues and Room to Roam, was not far away, and I visited there occasionally, as well as the nearby Aran Island. That same year the band released Too Close to Heaven, a compilation album of material that didn’t make it to the final track list for the first two Raggle Taggle albums. Looking back now, I think those were five of the best years in my adult life. (But also five of the most stressful years too.) I was working on my dissertation, researching at the cutting edge of my discipline, talking to experts in my field from all over the world, traveling to stone circles and passage mounds across the country, tripping over to England and to Germany to explore castles and cathedrals and forested hilltops and magical places. The music of the Waterboys, especially the album Too Close to Heaven, was the “soundtrack” of those years. In fact it was during those years that I met Mike Scott and Steve Wickham in person. I went to a concert at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, and after the show I snuck into the pub in the back of the theatre so I could meet the band. Scott was tired but very gentlemanly, and although I spoke with him for only five minutes or so, it was long enough to sense a great depth of honesty and sincerely in his character.

It’s many years later now. The Waterboys last album was “An Appointment with Mr. Yeats”, in which every song is based on a poem by Yeats. It is undoubtedly the most astonishing music I have heard all year. I love the ballsy-ness of taking poems that are normally treated as sublime and literary, and turning them into rock songs (“The Hosting of the Sidhe”, “September 1913”), pop songs (“Sweet Dancer”), blues songs (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”), whimsical dark theatre (“News for the Delphic Oracle”), even rock and roll wall-of-sound sonic floods (“Mad as the Mist and Snow”, “A Full Moon in March”). It’s like Scott is saying that these poems don’t have to remain locked in glass cases in museums or in ivory tower universities. They belong to everybody, and so they can be rock songs too.

This is the music that taught me to appreciate Mike Scott as a fellow human being here on this earth, enduring and riding the tides of life just like everyone else. But this music also taught me to see myself as a man who, in the words of the seannachie, stumbles between the immensities of birth and death. This music taught me how to love this life of Sundays, even if I’m taking a tumble, or the thrill is gone, or there’s a war in my head, or I’ve had enough of the ways of men. His music taught me to go farther up and further in, and to see the ladder ascending in front of me. It showed me the beauty in silent fellowship, and in that lonesome old wind upon the wind and waves. It showed me that whatever needs to happen, it’s okay to let it happen and let it be. It’s a long way to the light, but I am able to go anywhere. And I know She is is in the building, so I don’t have to bang the drum: I just have to go in search of a rose.

Naturally there are a lot of other bands and other composers who I love. But the music of the Waterboys has a very special place in my heart. There’s still two or thee Waterboys albums that I don’t have. I’m going to buy them soon.

Dear Mike and Steve: if you are reading this: thank you.

And, I’ll be visiting Ireland again next year. I’d love to have a beer with you.

(Everybody: here’s the band web site, for info about album sales and concerts.)

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Politics is theatre

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Brendan

A selection from the novel that I’m currently writing. (Although I might edit this, when the manuscript is complete.)

I’ve been studying history for a few years now, and one of the things you learn by studying history is that politics is a blood sport. But at the same time, it’s also theatre. It’s deadly serious, but it’s all for show! When you see someone punished and someone else rewarded, when you see one group oppressed or another group killed, all because someone laid down a new law, well, its tragic and terrible and all that, but it’s also a performance! Someone is putting on a show! So you have to ask yourself: who is that guy performing for? Who is he trying to impress? Does he want us to feel fear? Or does he want us to feel love? What does he want us to see? And what’s he got hidden backstage? And if we get caught in the act – make no mistake, it is an act – then what will we do? If you want to understand politics, those are your questions. Because politics is theatre – where the props are people’s lives, and the stage is the whole world.

Well, what do you think? Do you agree, or disagree? Seen anything in the news lately that might suggest this character’s idea is true?

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Two facts about ebooks that every writer should know

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Brendan

Prompted by messages from readers of my books, and various agencies and professionals offering to sell me various services, I feel the need (yet again!) to dispel some illusions about the nature of self-publishing.

It seems to me that the majority of the hype about the greatness of self-publishing and ebooks is written from the perspective of the publishing industry. What about the perspective of the writer?

Having published and worked hard to promote two self-published novels, and as I come near to the end of writing my third, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-publishing, and why it is not the market miracle that many pundits say it is. Not for the writers, that is.

There are a lot of rags-to-riches stories about people who write books, publish them electronically, and then unexpectedly get very popular and very rich, in a short reach of time. As it happens I know at least one writer who has become remarkably successful as an independent writer. (And I believe he deserves it; his books are awesome. Check them out here.) But his story is the exception, not the rule.

For every ebook that becomes massively successful, there are literally thousands of ebooks that sell very poorly. They’ll sell perhaps only a few hundred copies in the first six weeks, and then sales will dwindle to one or two copies a month, six months later.

So here is an uncomfortable, but true statement that everyone involved in e-publishing should acknowledge. Self-publishing an ebook is absolutely NOT a get-rich-quick scheme for writers, unless you are really, really lucky. And there is no polite way to say this: anyone who tells you differently is lying to you. There is simply no guarantee that “if you build it, they will come.”

This leads to a second, less uncomfortable but still true statement that every writer should acknowledge. Writers therefore need a reason to write which has nothing to do with economics. Similarly, artists of every kind need a reason to make art which has nothing to do with economics. Because if your only reason to write is to get rich, then you probably will not get rich. So if that’s your one-and-only reason for being a writer, then stop writing, right now, and do something else.

Suppose you put a lot of time and effort into marketing your ebook. The success of an ebook is impossible to predict, no matter how much marketing you do; although marketing does help. (And, admittedly, I don’t do enough to market my own books.) But a well-promoted book could be a commercial success for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the book’s quality. Crappy books can sell very well, excellent books can sell poorly. There’s no correlation, one way or another, between a book’s quality and its commercial standing.

(Although I suspect that if the writer cares more about commercial success than about artistic quality, then the artistic quality will probably suffer. And that benefits no one. Not even the writer himself. But I digress.)

But this is not to say that writers shouldn’t be paid. Artists in our society are almost never paid what their work is worth. Sure, I’d be delighted to make enough money from my book royalties to retire at 40 years old and build a castle in a small town in the mountains or by the sea, and then write more books for the rest of my life. But the likelihood of that happening is so enormously small that it would be irrational to even wish for it.

(And no, “positive thinking” is no help here either. To be successful one must be ambitious and willful, but one must also pay attention to the facts. The gurus who teach “visualizing success” and “manifesting your reality” are all scammers who are bilking you for money. Ignore them.)

But to return to my point. Artists, musicians, writers, and creative people of every kind need a reason to do what they do other than making money. Now I’d like to add that some of the usual non-economic reasons to write seem pedantic to me now: “Because I have to,” or “Because I’ll die if I don’t,”, etc. A better reason might be like this: “because I love something so much that I want to do something about it, I want to tell everyone about it, I want to encourage others to love it too.”

Ideally, it should be something that genuinely deserves your love; not just something that you chose on a whim, as if you merely rolled some dice. Think of something that you believe everyone should love, not just something which you happen to find personally interesting. And turn it into art, and offer it to the world.

For my part, I write because I love ideas, and people, and beauty, and justice, and the earth. Most of all, I love knowledge. And I think everyone should love those things too.

And yes, I do hope to make a living by writing about such things. I’m not saying that I will write for nothing. But I am saying something like this: A good medical doctor cares more about health than about the money she makes; a good lawyer cares more about justice than about the money she makes; a good teacher cares about knowledge and education more than about the money she makes; a good minister cares more about spirituality than about the money she makes. No one expects those people to work for free. And no one expects them to work for pennies, either. We expect them to be paid very handsomely. But they succeed at their tasks best when they care about the good of their profession more than almost anything else. Perhaps I equivocate a little bit on the meaning of the word “success”: to some it means making lots of money, to others it means making an intrinsically desireable life experience. It’s in this second sense of the word that I am emphasizing here. Artists and creative people should care more about art and beauty than about getting paid – again let me repeat that they should get paid, and generously so – but artists succeed best when they care more about art and beauty than almost anything else.

I originally wrote this as a series of notes on my Twitter feed, but it seemed to me that it deserved a more thorough expression. Please, share it with everyone who you think needs to hear it. Actually, share it with everybody: as an independent author, I need everyone’s help to promote my work. And please accept my thanks.)

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You don’t have to cast a circle

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Brendan

My best friend Frosty and I normally attend a large pagan festival at this time of year. But this year we just didn’t have enough money. At first we wanted to go camping elsewhere, but we eventually settled for hanging out at his girlfriend’s house, where we can play our guitars as loud as we want. Of course this meant missing a lot of the friends and fun people who we see only at Fest, or maybe two or three other times a year. (Although we did receive a guest who came to hang out with us one evening- a pagan friend I’ve known since high school, and I was very happy to see her.) By day, we built a new fire pit in the back yard, made repairs to a shed, trimmed some hedges and trees, and then went swimming. We dug a new garden too, and the next day I planted some tomatoes and beans in it. By night, we played guitar music together, watched movies, discussed ideas, and watch back episodes of Doctor Who.

My friend and I are not elders, but we are not young pagans either. So we don’t have the same habits or needs as we did when we were in our early days. Correspondingly, we don’t practice our craft the same way anymore. We don’t do much ritual anymore; the values we learned when we were doing a lot of ritual 20 years ago are now more integrated into our lives in a normal kind of way. And we don’t consult oracles like tarot cards or runes; we don’t “raise energy”; we don’t cover our houses and cars in pagan bling. (well, a pagan visiting his house or mine would see the signs right away, but another guest might not.) At the camping festivals we almost never go to the workshops or rituals anymore: we are there to spend time with friends and interesting people. What makes us “pagan”, I suppose, is the way we find the sacred when we give to each other our friendship and generosity. That means playing music together, eating together, helping each other out around the house, cracking jokes and having fun, sharing and debating ideas in politics and religion and culture, offering understanding and counsel for each other’s problems, and all the many things friends do when they gather. A weekend spent doing such things is magical and spiritual enough for me. You don’t have to cast a circle before you “dance, sing, feast, make music and love”, if you don’t want to. You can just go ahead and dance and sing! (or whatever…)

I tend to be a solitary and contemplative fellow, with a spirituality that involves a lot of quiet and introspection. (I’m a writer, after all.) So it is a special treat to come out of my library and my forest in Gatineau, where I live alone, and give my time to people I care about, and who I get to see only three or four times a year. That, too, is spiritual enough for me. In fact the whole experience for me begins when I board the train to get there, because 20 years ago, when Frosty and I were members of a regular ritual group, it was often by train that I went down to London to join everyone. To this day, the sound of a Via Rail engine whistle makes me feel nostalgic.

In ancient European pagan heroic societies, friendship and generosity were among the highest of social and spiritual values. As I see it, when I gather with the people I care about, we enact those values again. And that is spiritual enough for me.

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Professor Bren Experiments On His Students

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Brendan

About two weeks ago, I caught a plagiarism case in two papers submitted to me by two students, in which it large portions of the text of their papers were identical to each other. (I caught it “old school”, by the way: without using Google or Turnitin or any of those things.) Later it occurred to me that some of what counts as plagiarism in the academy might count as collaboration when students go to work in the “real world”. It made me wonder if we’re sending our students mixed messages, or even the wrong message, about how to gather and use information.

Around the same time, a friend of mine forwarded to me a news article describing a UCLA biology professor who allowed his students to “cheat”. (Read it here.). He gave his students a difficult exam question but allowed them to copy their answer from any source they wanted, including from each other; the idea was to encourage them to collaborate to discover for the best answer instead of compete for the highest grade. It was a risky move: group-work assignments often make it possible for freeloaders to contribute little or nothing and yet receive the same grade as others in their group who worked hard. But the UCLA prof found that incidents of freeloading tended to be minimal, because students were not ‘fixed’ in their groups. They could join or leave any group they wanted; and they didn’t have to join a group and work collaboratively if they thought they could work better on their own.

I was also reminded of the physics professor who put a computer in a slum in Delhi, India, just to see what would happen. (Link here). Within hours, local children were using it to surf the internet and teach themselves to speak English. I was also curious if I could create a learning experience in which students were given a problem, and they had to solve it mostly on their own. We learn best by doing, after all. There are probably many topics which are best taught, and perhaps can only be taught, in the traditional “lecture and exam” style; but skills and talents can’t really be taught that way. Besides, I’m a big fan of the education theories of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, who asserts that people learn best when they all teach things to each other, and that the usual teacher/student distinction may actually be a form of political oppression. Various college-level and provincial-level policies require me to give “formative” evaluations, but no one has ever explained to me what that means. In the past I’ve invented strategy games (like this one) to meet that requirement, but they require small groups to succeed. And I teach between 30 and 40 students in each class, on average. More, if there’s been a budget cut. So this week, I decided to try something new.

This week, I decided to do something similar for my Nursing students. These are students who, in their careers, will have to collaborate a lot to do their jobs. Leadership and teamwork are essential for medical professionals; without it, patients almost always stay sick longer, and don’t get the care they need. And as their ethics professor it seemed to me that an assignment that required them to use (not merely write about) the ethics theories discussed in class might be helpful for them.

My usual procedure for a test is to give students a study guide about a week in advance of any test, so students know what lectures and textbook readings are relevant for a given test. This time, instead of posting a study guide, I posted a “clue”, and the students had to figure out what it was. (In this way my experiment was different from that which was conducted by the UCLA prof.) And then the students had to research whatever ethical and moral issues are associated with the “theme” or the “concept” represented by the clue. It was up to them to figure out what the clue was, and up to them to decide what research sources, and what research topics, were relevant. They got very little guidance from me at this point. But they were allowed to collaborate with each other, to figure it out.

In this sense, the test began the moment the clue was revealed. The students had to figure out what the thing was, and then they had to figure out for themselves how to find out about any and all ethical issues related to it. And the test involved a little bit of game theory (in the sense of the word as used by mathematicians). Would the students who figured out the clue quickly share their knowledge with those who didn’t? Or would they hoard their discoveries? Strictly self-interested players of such a game have an incentive to hoard their knowledge instead of share it, because that way they’re more likely to get a higher grade. But in fact most students did share their knowledge of what the clue was, and I later learned that a few small groups of students – not the whole class, but many of them – discussed among themselves what they thought the clue might mean, in terms of what the test question was likely to be.

Education is not the kind of game in which someone must lose for someone else to win. In fact it’s not a game at all, however much the final grades make it look like one. And although we do praise those who are good at this thing (by giving them honour roll credits, and diplomas, etc.) and shame those who are bad at this thing (by assigning failing grades), in actuality education is the sort of endeavour in which everybody wins or nobody wins. That is to say, education succeeds when society as a whole maximizes the intellectual, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual level at which the majority of its members operate. It benefits everyone to belong to a society in which as many people as possible are highly knowledgeable and highly skilled. And besides that: wherever you go in life, and whatever you do, you have to deal with people. So it seems to me that a pedagogical style which teaches, encourages, and rewards people-skills is probably better than one which doesn’t. How to do that? Well, “group work” is one way, but it has its problems as already discussed.

The test itself came a week later. I told students that they would be given two hours to write an answer to one question, though it would be the most difficult question I had ever laid before them. But I also told them that they could collaborate to answer it. Just this once, two or more students submitting a word-for-word identical essay would not be hauled before the department head, accused of plagiarism. I also told the students they could bring to the test any research resources they wanted: not just our textbook, but any notes they made and anything they discovered in the library or on the internet that they guessed might be relevant. I also told them I would provide a few research resources during the test itself, although it would be up to them to decide how relevant they were, and what to do with them.

I also clownishly played-up the idea that the test question they would have to answer would be the most mind-bogglingly, heart-breakingly, difficult question ever. A few were genuinely worried, but it was the 14th week of the semester and by now most students had realized that I can be a bit of a comedian in my class once in a while. (As one former student told me, I’ve a reputation as “the fun prof who doesn’t put up with anybody’s shit.”)

The test day was this afternoon. Unlike the UCLA professor, I did not allow my students to use the internet during the test itself. My presumption was that they already had a week to do research on the internet, and they had to come to the test prepared in advance. And they did! Admirably so! In fact most students had already formed the groups they wanted to work with, and they came to class with arms full of notes and photocopied pages.

I’d say this experiment worked very, very well. I’ve very rarely seen a group of teenagers so single-mindedly committed to solving an academic problem to the best of their ability. And although I did spot a few of them distracting themselves with Facebook on their phones, for the most part they worked a solid hour-and-a-half on this assignment without demanding a break. Not only that: they actually enjoyed it. The room was full of brainstorming, experimentation, back-and-forth debate, and even laughter – something almost never seen in a test situation! Some of them actually thanked me – and nobody thanks a prof for a test! I stood nearby to clarify things once in a while, and to drop hints, and every group asked for my assistance at least once, but they got back to work quickly. They knew what they wanted to do. And there did not appear to be any freeloaders: it seems that by letting students choose their own group, they organically went to work with those who they already trusted. And as I sort through the papers they gave me here at home, I’m finding myself really impressed by the quality and insightfulness of what they gave me.

So: as far as I’m concerned, this experiment was a success, and I’m going to do it again in all of my classes from now on.

PS: this is the clue I gave them (PDF link). Without looking at the filename, do you know what it is? Want to guess what my test question was?

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The Lunsford Test, or, What’s Wrong with “Boob Armour”?

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Brendan

Within twenty minutes of my tweeting this link about putting an end to “boob armour” in fantasy game development, I got three private messages in my twitter inbox about how it’s all just fantasy and it doesn’t matter, so I should leave it alone.

That’s three complaints, within twenty minutes. And with only 307 Twitter followers (as of the time of writing), I’m not broadcasting to the whole world here. Think about that for a minute.

This is only a tiny, tiny, infinitesimally tiny fraction of what women themselves deal with when they assert their wish to be represented in fantasy fiction as real human beings and not as mere tropes. Consider, as an example, the astonishing and ugly misogyny faced by Anita Sarkeesian, who ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to produce a series of videos about misogyny in video games. (Here’s where you can hear her story.) My three complaints were mostly polite; Sarkeesian’s complaints included death threats. There’s a real problem here.

So here’s my overall reply.

Yes, it’s fantasy, but still, it matters. The question that needs to be asked here is: What kind of fantasy do you want? Do you want female characters who are only “girl-toys” for the male characters? Or do you want female characters who are independent, autonomous, free-willed, and accomplished human beings, with any number of merits and flaws like any male characters may have?

To me, the latter are much more interesting. Most of the female characters in my novels are sexual beings but their sexuality runs on a spectrum: from one character who uses sex as a tool for social manipulation, to others (several in fact) who aren’t interested in sex at all. I admit that several of my female characters wear heels sometimes, because I happen to find them sexy. But none of them are walking “girl-toys” for the male characters. They have wants and plans, they have problems, they have strengths and weaknesses, and they have histories and identities. And so do the male characters. That’s what makes them interesting. If a female character is only a “girl toy” for the male characters, then she’s not really a person; she’s a piece of furniture. And so she’s not really interesting.

To which a critic might reply by saying, “But it’s only fantasy”, or “But it’s my fantasy”, or “But no one is harmed by my fantasy”. Well, it is fantasy – but I say again, it still matters. Fantasy fiction, like any fiction, is a way we reflect, contemplate, experiment with, explore, criticize, and sometimes escape from reality. But it always exists in some complicated relationship to reality. So behind that fantasy of a girl-toy, there’s a real human being somewhere in the world, with real feelings and real thoughts and real problems. Behind that fantasy is a woman in your family, your workplace, your neighbourhood, your school, your church, or any other social group that you belong to. How do you think she feels when you show your interest in a girl-toy fantasy character? Did you even ask?

The point of objecting to the “boob armour” (the thing that got me started here in the first place) is that it represents an unjust power-dynamic between men and women. In this unjust power dynamic, women have to appear as if they are perpetually available for sex. They do not normally act from their own initiative: for the most part, they only respond to others and serve others.

Now in the real world, if a woman wants sex, she might say or do something so that the man who interests her will know it. But even if she doesn’t do anything to demonstrate her sexual desire, it’s not right for a man to demand that women present themselves as if they’re available for sex all the time. She might not want sex all the time. Or, she might not want sex with You. And to assume that she does – and to demand that she should – is to disrespect her humanity. And guys – if we are honest with ourselves – neither do we want it all the time either. So there’s a justice issue here: it’s unjust to make others keep to a standard that we ourselves are not willing to keep.

I think our fantasy stories, whether in fiction or television or film or video games, should reflect reality in a more critical, more experimental, less escapist way. It should expose and question social injustices, rather than systematically presuppose them as given truths of reality. It should do this by portraying all its characters, whatever their gender, orientation, ethnicity, age, education, wealth, poverty, or whatever, as interesting human beings, and not as furniture. This really isn’t too much to ask. (And if you think it is too much to ask, then I think something might be very seriously wrong with you.)

Therefore, in keeping with the Bechdel Test, I’d like to propose a “Lunsford Test”, named in honour of Michael Lee Lunsford, the artist who created this series of images of popular fantasy heroines in sensible dress. Let’s say that a film, TV show, video game, or whatever, passes the Lunsford Test if:

1. The lead and supporting female characters choose their own clothing,
2. The clothing they choose is appropriate for whatever they are doing, and
3. The clothing they choose portrays them as human beings with a distinct and interesting identity.

Notice that the characters in Lunsford’s gallery are dressed for adventure, action, and initiative, like a hero (or a villain!) of a fantasy story should. And they’re kind of sexy; the Lunsford Test as I propose it here does not rule out sexiness. Curiously it might rule out women who wear a uniform of some kind, except insofar as she chose the career which requires the uniform, and the career allows her some meaningful autonomy (career army officers, maybe? Airline pilots?). But the important thing is that it rules out costumes which do nothing more than demonstrate sexual availability. And that matters.

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Question: Are We Getting More Aggressive?

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Brendan

On a train, back in February, the fellow sitting next to me complained that the train had slowed down when it entered Toronto. “All the other trains should just get out of our way,” he said. When I replied that there are other people on those trains too, he said, “Yeah, but do you know any of them? Fuck them.”

A few weeks before that, a friend of mine was nearly run off the road, twice, by a sixteen-wheeler truck, as the truck tried to merge into the lane on the highway 401, in which my friend was driving. When the police questioned him about this, the truck driver said, “He should have known to get out of my way.”

These are unrelated incidents, of course – but are they? Have you a story about someone who was not just indifferent, but actively hostile to the idea that other people have needs and rights? Do you think our society is getting a little colder, a little more aggressive, a little less compassionate, a little less empathetic?

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