#TBT – Can we bring the Greek Gods back, Please?

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That time Rob Bricken wanted to bring back the gods as if they ever left. 2013.

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“Has anyone else noticed modern organized religion is kind of a bummer? Even if your divine belief system isn’t violently persecuting another, it seems like you’re still trapped in a church singing dirges all Sunday. Modern religion doesn’t have any flair. This is why I’d like to offer a modest proposal: Let’s bring back the ancient Greek gods. Yes, I mean Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, the whole shebang — and here’s why I think they’d make a significant improvement over our current options.

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Greek gods will have sex with you. That’s pretty awesome. Just knowing you have a chance to score with a god or goddess adds a certain zest to life. Now admittedly, some time the Greek gods got a little… er, rape-y, and that’s not cool. On the other hand, Law & Order: SVU would become super exciting.

They make at least as much sense as the other guys. One of the biggest problems with the Judeo-Christian God that Christian scholars have tried to rationalize over the centuries is how a good and loving god could allow evil to exist; while they’ve come up with plenty of answer, none of them are particularly satisfying. This isn’t an issue for the Greek gods, because they aren’t pretending to be omnipotent and loving. Like humans, they can be good and evil themselves. You don’t have to wonder why the Greek gods let bad things happen to good people, because the Greek gods can simply be assholes. They care about you as long as you’re caring/genuflecting/sacrificing bulls to them. Tit for tat. Honestly, just take a look around. Does it seem like the universe is currently being run by one omniscient guy who completely loves everybody or by a bunch of over-emotional, self-centered jerks? I rest my case.

They’re so much more fun. Here’s a short list of things we could do if we brought back the Greek gods:
• Go to oracles.
• Go on quests.
• Fight monsters.
• Challenge gods to contests.
• Go to Hades and try to rescue dead loved ones.
• Dip babies in magic rivers, making them invulnerable.
Now, not all of those are good ideas — most of them are insanely dangerous — but man, they’re still a hell of a lot more exciting than sitting in church for an hour every Sunday.”

[Via]

BookTuber Tuesday – Monthly Reading Wrap-ups

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Have a book vlog video you want us to check out? Submit a link below in the comments and it could make the CIRCO blog.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.

Social Medea: No Binary Athenian Philosophy

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{Feast your eyes}

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http://theeditorandnarratorcollaborate.tumblr.com/post/147545727568/epic-catalog

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http://theeditorandnarratorcollaborate.tumblr.com/post/147545753848

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Ghostwriter for “Art of the Deal” on Why Donald Trump should not be president:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

‘”One of the chief things I’m concerned about is the limits of his attention span, which are as severe as any person I think I’ve ever met,” Schwartz says. “No matter what question I asked, he would become impatient with it pretty quickly, and literally, from the very first time I sat down to start interviewing him, after about 10 or 15 minutes, he said, ‘You know, I don’t really wanna talk about this stuff, I’m not interested in it, I mean it’s over, it’s the past, I’m done with it, what else have you got?’ ”

The idea of a president in an “incredibly complex and threatening world who can’t pay attention is itself frightening,” Schwartz says.

Add to that the fact that Trump is so easily provoked, that what Schwartz calls Trump’s insecurity “makes him incredibly reactive whenever he feels threatened, which is very, very often.”

As an example, Schwartz says, his interview in The New Yorker came out on Monday. On Tuesday, he received “a long and threatening letter from his lawyer designed, I think, to muzzle me.”

“For 25 years, I think Trump has done a very, very effective job of muzzling anyone who has worked for him or with him by signing very, very strict nondisclosure agreements before they start working with him,” Schwartz says. “It just turns out that I started with him so early that he hadn’t thought of it yet.”

“The reason I’m stepping up is because no one else seems to be free or willing to do so,” Schwartz says. “Believe me, it is not fun.”‘

[Via]

See also: Why Literature Is No Longer Art.

When readers aren’t in on the joke/art:

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‘Literature is full of impostors and noms de plume, from George Eliot to “Robert Galbraith” (aka JK Rowling), but JT LeRoy is something else. George Eliot never did high-end fashion shoots, or received backstage passes to U2 gigs, or was sent Kabbalah books by Madonna. Some see Albert/LeRoy as a fraud on the make, a player exploiting the kindness and credulity of celebrities, care workers and fans; others regard her as a complex, postmodern artist, whose literary talent justified the masquerade. Was this one of the greatest literary hoaxes of the modern age? Or a strategic confidence trick?

“It was a fiction that went way off the page,” says Jeff Feuerzeig, director of new documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. “It raises the question of where does fiction come from? What is fiction? I found that to be interesting.” Having turned down previous approaches, Albert agreed to tell her story to Feuerzeig, partly on the strength of his 2005 music documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, but also, she told him, “Because you’re a Jew and you came out of punk rock.”

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On being told by JT that he’d never had a birthday present, one of them sent her a present for every year of his life, another bought her a new computer, another cancelled his own Christmas on hearing that JT was going out turning tricks. “This person made me feel like if I didn’t talk to them, they were going to kill themselves,” one of them says. The Cult Of JT LeRoy also goes deeper into Albert’s 2007 trial and conviction for fraud, having signed a contract in JT LeRoy’s name rather than her own, then set up a company in the name of her alias

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Laura Albert does not see what she did as a lie or a hoax or a masquerade. She refers to her unmasking as “the reveal”. She has made various justifications for her actions in interviews over the years. One is that JT LeRoy was a valid artistic device – “art should confuse”. Another, which she explains to me via email, is that the LeRoy persona was her own, unique form of therapy.

“JT was asbestos gloves to handle material I otherwise could not have touched,” she writes…

That’s Albert’s ultimate defence: the work itself. “I was writing Jeremy’s [JT’s] story and publishing it as fiction, and everyone who was interested got a real live book in their hands,” she writes. “Since the reveal, I’ve heard from more people who understand the need to hide that I had then, how it freed my voice to have someone who wasn’t me. They recognise the felt authenticity of my fiction, the emotional truths.”

The question is whether or not those books have changed now that their author’s own convoluted story has all but eclipsed them. Is there a difference between “honest” fiction and “dishonest” fiction? LeRoy’s books are being reissued to coincide with the release of Feuerzeig’s documentary, so perhaps we’ll see. In the mean time, Laura Albert is currently writing her memoirs. As herself.’

[Via]

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.