Dante's Heart Issue 1 is up!

Dear readers,

The first issue of Dante's Heart, "Water into Wine," is now available at www.dantesheart.com. Take a look - we have work there from some wonderful artists and writers. The title is inspired - besides the Wedding at Cana - by G. K. Chesterton's statement, in Orthodoxy, that "fairy stories make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water." That is an especially good thing to remember at this time of year amid the commercial rush and stress.

Take a look at our first issue, and drop us a comment here or a note at editors@dantesheart.com to let us know what you think. Enjoy - this is our holiday gift to you -

Cheers,
Daniel

Daniel Fusch
Editor, Dante's Heart

The Names of Planets

A few years late, I am finally catching up on Gene Wolfe's
Short Sun trilogy - which is deeply poignant. Noticing that the two planets in the story are called "Blue" and "Green," I was shocked at the simplicity of the names. I imagined the first travelers to these worlds seeing their colors from far above them. "But that's nothing to name a planet," I thought with some irritability at those pioneers. Then I stopped and thought about the name of our own planet, and of all its companions. We have forgotten what most of the names in the solar system mean, and because we are not contemporaries of Caesar, "Mars" and "Jupiter" are names that sound very exotic to us. But actually, our ancestors, both ancient and immediate, have named the heavenly bodies, from the nearest to the sun to the farthest away: Messenger, Love, Soil (that's the one we're on), War, Father of the Gods, Eater of Children, Sky, Ocean, and Death. Are these names any more or less wise than "Blue" and "Green"? Or any more or less beautiful?

Love and War are understandable enough, from the physical appearance of those two worlds: one shining and radiant, the other brooding and red in our sky. These are names like Blue and Green, just with one further layer of symbol and meaning. Death is also a logical enough name, for a satellite so far from the sun that it must be cold and dead indeed. Scientists named Neptune for its ocean-like color...so actually, we did name a planet Blue, except that we named it Ocean.

But I ask you: Saturn? The most beautiful of all our worlds? We named it He Eats His Children? What injustice. And yet...if it is true that those glorious rings that circle Saturn are the remains of tiny, tiny worlds pulled apart by Saturn's gravity, then our planet Saturn did eat its children.

I am still trying to decide if these were wise names or foolish ones. In either case, what we name our worlds does indicate a lot about us. I am glad, in any case, to be living on Soil, and not on a planet named Death or Eater of Children.

Guennol Lioness

From today's news:

"NEW YORK (AFP) - A tiny and extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia sold for 57.2 million dollars in New York on Wednesday, smashing records for both sculpture and antiquities. The carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over eight centimeters (3 1/4 inches) tall, was described by Sotheby's auction house as one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands."

A staggering price - though the sculpture is beautiful. It reminds me of the jaguar gods of Mezoamerica. See its grace and strength, and the beauty with which it was shaped. 5,000 years old, it is as old as the wheel: something that staggers the mind.

But who, in their astonishment at the beauty of this early, early piece of human art, spent over 57 million dollars? I was about to say "I hope the buyer knows the story behind this Guennol Lioness," only now that I look again, I realize it is beautiful enough to need no story.

Is 57 million dollars the monetary value of an ancient myth?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071206/ts_afp/entertainmentartusantiquityauction

Mark your calendars!

Dear readers and friends,

The date is now official: Dante's Heart will go live on Friday, December 21: our Christmas present to you. We are excited about the first issue, and hope you are, too. I'll keep this blog post short because there is much to do and so little time between now and then, but we will try to check in and post a few things over the next couple of weeks - no radio silence.

Peace,

The Editors,
Dante's Heart

New Arrivals

Disney's Enchanted is in theaters this weekend, and definitely recommended by our editors. Part parody and part inspired homage to Disney's long animated tradition of fairytale romance, Enchanted is clever, outrageously funny, and touching. Also, the scriptwriters get high marks from us: the fact that Disney is not afraid to laugh at itself reminds me of why we as children liked Disney in the first place: they just really have the knack for cinematic fun. The actors are very good, and given the premise of a fairy tale princess exiled by her wicked future mother-in-law to dreary New York ("where there are no happily ever afters") only to find herself falling for a divorce lawyer - well, what's not to like?

A favorite scene of mine: our heroine Giselle wakes to find the lawyer's house an untidy mess. She immediately does what any princess with a grain of sense does: throw open the window and begin calling the animals with her power of song. This is New York, and the sewer rats, cockroaches, and swarms of insects hurry to her aid; unfazed, she sings as she leads them in the housecleaning. The rats scrub the dishes with their tails; the cockroaches devour the scum in the bathrub. It's an inspired scene.

Prince Edward is great for laughs, but unlike his counterpart Prince Charming in the Shrek franchise, Edward is strangely sweet. My favorite line from him: in response to the wicked Queen's cry "Oh how melodramatic of you!" he rejoins: "I don't know what melodrama is, but...."

Other new arrivals worth checking on:


Marvel's graphic novel rendition of Stephen King's The Dark Tower is underway: the first issues have been anthologized in a hardcover volume, and I hope more are on the way. The volume portrays passages from The Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass, with Peter David giving a faithful and darkly poetic script and Jae Lee (whose Dracula chilled and thrilled) does dark and foreboding and very raw art: not to be missed. Moody and moody and mythic.


I borrowed the comic issues when they first came out from a good friend of our Dante's Heart art editor, who lent them to me on the strictest and most life-threatening injunction to do these precious, plastic-wrapped first editions no harm. Now I have the hardcover and can return the first editions, which I desperately hope that I have not bent or mauled in any way. The life-threatening injunction was extremely threatening - and I thought I was scary when I loan reading material....

Also, Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom, quick on the heels of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean success (hmm...another triumph for Disney), promises a grittier and deeply compelling take on pirates. In an interview with I forget whom, Wolfe claimed that he wrote The Wizard Knight in response to a young boy he met who was obsessed with knights and chivalry. Wolfe's quest to uncover the reason for the appeal of all things knightly led to the novel. (My personal thought is that Wolfe can never be trusted in his tales of how his books came to be, but everytime someone has the audacity to ask that hated question, "Where did you get the idea?" he tells a good tale in response.) Wolfe appears to have made a similar experiment here, digging into the mythos of the pirate captain. The epigraph that opens the book is H. L. Mencken's: "Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

I wonder if there is any equitable yearning for readers of the other gender? To hoist the black flag, strap on something outrageous, and damn all conventions and expectations, just sail out and enjoy the breeze, live fully and sink anything in her path? As one who is new to pirates (though not to knights), and who never cracked the cover of Treasure Island as a boy though I devoured Pyle and Malory, I look forward to interviewing other readers of both genders on the subject and digging into what it is about pirates that excites our cultural imagination. Captain Jack Sparrow and our fellow with the octopus beard boarded and captured my imagination recently, and I suspect that Gene Wolfe will complete the conquest. I picked up my copy of Pirate Freedom this afternoon.


Speaking of interviews, check out this one, conducted by Neil Gaiman. It's brilliant - Gaiman and Wolfe take on the interview as an art form itself, and have a laugh in doing so. The opening salvo of the interview:

"Gene Wolfe: I'm anxious to get our interview under way, so I've decided to answer your first three questions before you ask them—You can work out the questions at leisure.

1. Although I considered placing The Knight in the universe of the Book of the New Sun series, I soon saw that there were too many dragons.

2. The Knight is to some degree autobiographical, as all my books are. For example, Able falls off a horse. I have done that myself. One is encouraged to remount as soon as possible, but not by the horse.

3. I do in fact own a sword. It is possible, as you say, that it is under some subtle, obscure spell. That might account for a few of the things that go on around here.

Are these satisfactory? I can elaborate on my replies if you wish, but they are certain to get worse.

"My Best Friend Rusts"

I ran into this poem a year back:

Soft rains
My best friend
rusts

So evocative -

- and a skilled minimalist haiku (a haiku is like a drop of water on a pond surface: you catch your breath and, after a still moment, feel the ripples). But for the life of me I can't find out who wrote it. I suspect Tom Brinck. If anyone can help, please post a comment.

In the meanwhile, here is an intriguing website:

http://www.scifaiku.com/what/

Goofy name aside, this manifesto for "scifaiku" is actually informed and very good. The samples of haiku offered are also very good, though most of what is currently written in this sub-sub genre isn't. The manifesto deserves a look, and cries out for more poets to discover it. An unexpected genre, and one dedicated to the celebration of the unexpected: and in its best moments (like that posted above) there is potential for staggering beauty.

Update: Journal deadline

Dear readers,

We are moving back the deadline for submissions for the journal to December 5. We have received quite a few submissions, several of them extremely good, and we are in the early stages of getting back to our writers and artists with feedback and selecting contributors. We are, in fact, ravenous for more submissions of lightning-in-the-night creativity. Thank you everyone who has already submitted! You will be hearing from us very soon.

Please spread the word - for the next few weeks we will continue accepting submissions for the December issue of Dante's Heart. We are very excited to bring you our first issue.

Cheers,
The Editors
Dante's Heart