Back From Greece!

Dear readers,

Our senior editor and our art editor have just returned from their honeymoon in the ancient world, and we are back! We look forward to catching up on the recent Dante's Heart correspondence - the submissions and kind letters that arrived while we were away are like a pile of gifts waiting.


You can expect to find some of our art editor's photography from this trip before long at Seaelven Studios...so keep an eye there. The photo above is actually one of mine, an amateur click from my digital - the ruins of the church of St. John just outside the remains of Ephesus in modern Turkey. By the way, we were startled to learn that of the Temple of Artemis Ephesiae, once the largest temple in the Greek world and one of the seven wonders, only a single pillar remains. One pillar!

Wedding, and a Brief Hiatus

Dear readers,

With great joy, our senior editor and our art editor married each other this week in a beautiful wedding at the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colorado. So as a good part of our staff are about to leave for a honeymoon, the Dante's Heart blog will be quiet for perhaps two weeks. We hope that you'll take these moments to enjoy our archives, and that you'll visit our journal.

Daniel and Jessica Fusch will be honeymooning in Greece and Italy, and hope to bring back a few wondrous stories from that part of the world.

We look forward to connecting again in a couple of weeks!

In the late summer, we will be reviewing submissions for our September wolf and werewolf archive.

World War Z: The Movie (2010)

Dear readers, I have some news! It is news to me, and it may or may not be news to you. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, the shockingly good journalism/horror thriller by Max Brooks (Mel Brooks' son) is being adapted into a movie - slated to arrive in theaters sometime in 2010. Brooks' novel documents humanity's struggle to survive raving hordes of the undead, through a series of recorded interviews with survivors - and provides savvy commentary on cultural and economic politics along the way. The book's twists and turns are surprising, thoughtful and dramatic, and the zombie horror is compelling and wildly imaginative. (Having a lifelong phobia of the walking, moaning dead, I could not sleep soundly for days. Imagine hunting through the pitch-black sewers beneath Paris for submerged, hungry zombies, and if that doesn't chill you, then I can't help you see the charms of Max Brooks' work.)

The book is being adapted for film by Michael Straczynski, one of the top writers for the television science fiction series Babylon 5. Here is an excerpt from an early review of the script at CinemaBlend.com:

I love this script. Love every dark, somber, upsetting page of it. There’s a story about black market organs that is just brutal, an off-the-record conversation with a CIA friend, and an insane beach sequence that I can’t wait to see on film. All in the first 50 pages.

You can read more about the script here. You can also read a review of the book here, in Issue 1 of Dante's Heart. Finally, an interview with the author about the upcoming film is available here.

Projecting the Loch Ness Monster On The Surface of the Lake

This is a genuinely strange bit of news that I stumbled across this morning:

The latest technology has been used to create a striking image of one of the world's most famous mythical creatures.

Experts projected the Loch Ness Monster on to the waters of the loch to recreate a scene from the film The Water Horse: Legend Of The Deep.

Crowds in Inverness-shire gathered to view the image of the beast, which is the subject of the 2007 Hollywood movie.

The projection was created using water jets and large semi-circular water screens.

It was staged to coincide with the DVD release of the movie on Monday.

(source)

What do you make of that?

It must have been a wonder to see. The idea of imprinting or impressing the images of our imagined monsters onto the landscape is a very old one - just look at this - but this is a new way of doing it. I am trying to picture in my mind what that projection must have looked like. It certainly makes for remarkable publicity for the movie - what a way to sell an audience on the magic of the film!

Water is already magical. Imagine being in that crowd on the bank of Loch Ness, gazing out over the cold water as such a beautiful creature shimmers into being.

Can I have a Water Horse, too?

(By the way, for those who may be fascinated by the enduring Loch Ness legend and by the continuing ardor of so many "Nessie"-hunters, you may enjoy this site, which tracks Nessie sightings and catalogues various bits of Nessie lore and memorabilia.)

A Scottish Fairytale

We have discovered a wonderful new blog, Chandra's Box of Stars, the home and artistic den of Chandra Cerchione Peltier, showcasing a wonderful range of art and story, as well as this artist's thoughtful reviews on pieces such as "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" in The Wind in the Willows. (I don't know about you, but that was one of my two favorite chapters - the other being the one about the seafarer rat - and I must have read it over and over again as a youth.)

Take a look at Chandra's elfin and faerie marionettes (above, left)! They are a feast of delights. I need to be sure to show them to our poetry editor, who is an inspired puppeteer and an enthusiast of people with strings.

Most recently on her blog, Chandra has posted an illustration (see below) and an excerpt from her children's book set in Scotland of the 1880s, a fairy tale described by the illustrator (Julia Jeffrey) as:

"...a rattling tale, featuring Victorian Oxford dons, Shakespearian fairies, selkies, tortured ghosts, and talking dogs...."


This is definitely worth taking a look. I understand that Chandra Peltier is in the final stages of editing her book, and I am eager to see it. We need more hobgoblins and maverick fairies in contemporary literature!

A Comment on the Pyramids

I ran again into this passage this morning and wanted to share it - the book is Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidon, and the narrator is the Roman mercenary Latro, who loses his short term memory each day. This is Latro's comment on the pyramids, as he passes by on the Nile, and I thought his comment poignant:

Our ship passes white temples as massive as mountains -- mountains white as snow beneath this blinding sun, and sharp and pointed as any sword. Who would have thought human hands could have made such things? Neht-nefret says the ancient kings are laid there. The people of Kemet build many temples, Muslak says, and very large ones, of which the mountain-temples are largest of all. If gods wished temples, would they not build them? They build mountains and plant forests instead, and that is what I would do were I a god.


I am reminded of YHWH's answer to David, when the Hebrew king grieved that he had built no temple for the God of his people:

In all the places wherein I have walked with all the children of Israel spake I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people Israel, saying, Why build ye not me an house of cedar?

This puts me in a deeply contemplative mood. How might human history have been different, if the resources spent on building temples (for gods who themselves choose to build forests and create food rather than build temples) had been spent instead on feeding the people?

And yet...and yet...how impoverished the world would be if there were no Pyramids, no St. Peter's, no Parthenon.

1,000 Origami Cranes

In origami folklore if you fold 1000 peace cranes a wish comes true...

That's a quotation from Angela Loveridge, an artist participating in this year's Glastonbury Festival to fold 1,000 paper cranes, as part of a growing movement of origami artists who fold 1,000 peace cranes before sending them to locations around the globe, from hospitals to war zones.

According to Angela Loveridge:

A little girl in Hiroshima was folding a thousand peace cranes to basically stay alive, but she sadly died at around 760. Ever since then people have been sending them to places like Hiroshima or for other causes. I folded 1000 peace cranes with a local primary school recently in response to problems they were having in Thailand. People fold for lots of different reasons.


You can read more here, in the North Wales Chronicle.

To me this seems a compelling movement, the folding of peace cranes in such numbers and the arrival of them in flights, as a sudden gift, on some place that has become dark and without hope. Certainly it is better than most uses to which we put the world's supply of paper, and it is a testament to the lasting and reviving strength of folk legend.

Angela Loveridge is calling for volunteers to send her folded cranes in Glastonbury, as she is doubtful of reaching her 1,000 alone. Origami is a delicate and painstaking art.

(The origami cranes pictured above are the work of the remarkable artist Giles Edsall.)