My latest at Mere O, on literary conflict and the malaise besetting Hollywood:

I highlight this not to jump on Jackson’s team in particular — these are old, staid criticisms of their treatment of The Lord of the Rings by now — but because this trend is endemic in popular culture at the moment. Every superhero must confront not only a pantheon (sometimes literally) of enemies, but a host of internal conflicts. In some cases this is appropriate: Spiderman has long had his constant, nagging self-doubt and guilt; Batman has long been a tortured figure. Superman? Not so much. Yet Superman Returns spent a great deal of time building up Superman’s angsty relationship with the world, and trailers for Man of Steel suggest that director Snyder may take the reboot in the same direction.

Read the whole thing→

In which Jaimie Krycho kicks off a piece of serial fantasy:

She was standing on his shoulders. Literally.

Sifani might have marveled at the strength and breadth of them, if Lorin wasn’t such a great buffoon. A beautiful buffoon, but a buffoon nonetheless. If he was aware of the fact he certainly didn’t care.

He grunted beneath her weight and looked up at her from below, waiting until she looked back to make eyes at her legs. That was just to stoke her temper, Sifani reminded herself firmly. He did excel at that.

“Do you see anything, my milk-tempered maiden?” Lorin asked sweetly.

Sifani dug her heel into his shoulder bone for good measure.

“Bloodlines”, part 1→

Güngör is really good. Great music, and getting better. The lead is also a good thinker and writer. In a blog post a few months ago, he really nailed contemporary Christian music to the wall. He wasn’t harsh or over the top, but he did say things that need to be said:

Do you notice that nobody really uses that word [creativity] about other types of music? I just was perusing some Itunes user reviews to see if this holds up. I checked John Mark and mine, and “creativity” is very often found. But it’s not often found in reviews of bands like Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens or other artists who are certainly very “creative.”

Nobody goes to an art gallery and says, “boy, that painting is so creative.” Why? Because it’s art! Of course it’s creative! Why else would it be there? It’s very nature is creativity. Or like Lisa pointed out to me today, “that would be like saying, I love your house, it’s so architectural.”

But when someone in the Christian industry actually takes their art seriously, everybody is like “holy crap, listen to how creative it is!”

It’s like a person that’s been living among zombies for years seeing an actual human being and exclaiming, “wow, look at how clean her face is! She doesn’t even have any blood on it or anything!”

Zombies, Wine, and Christian Music→

Readers interested in subscribing to more than one of my blogs should take a look at my post over at Designgineering: subscription info→

Fantastic poem over at Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth:

we’d call a tree a fool
who’d give leaf to
january…

“we’d call a tree a fool”→