A fiend out of hell

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Beowulf, although you will also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

I've been blogging on this subject for a while now but am just getting around to the cool parts, i.e. the monsters. You may recall there are three in all, Grendel, a kind of humanoid man eating giant; his unnamed mother, who was if anything nastier than her son; and a dragon. Grendel first appears after Hrothgar, king of the Spear Danes, builds Heorot, his grand mead hall. All that nightly carousing by drunken proto-Vikings gets on Grendel's last nerve.

Things were going just fine for Hrothgar and his drunken buddies, but trouble was waiting in the wings. Here's a passage from Seamus Heaney's translation:

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain's clan, whom the creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.

The Anglo-Saxons had a real thing about the story of Cain, and found in it an explanation and origin for all kinds of nasty creatures that inhabit northern European folklore. More on that tomorrow.

REJECTING THE FRAME. Economist Dean Baker takes on one of his favorite targets here.

AMERICAN WORKERS. Does American business need them any more?

HEALTH CARE REFORM. What will the US Supreme Court do when it lands in the docket?

OH GOOD. Meat eating machines and furniture are here.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on walking.

BACK TO MONSTERS. Here's an interesting if lengthy New Yorker profile of filmmaker, author and monster fan Guillermo del Toro.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

In praise of literary crack

I usually fill in the blogging days between Christmas and New Year by going over the highs and lows of the year in reading. I'm jumping the gun a little bit now to say a few words in favor of literary crack.

Ordinarily, I have about five books going at any given time, often of a fairly solemn nature. I try to turn the page of each twice daily. At the moment, my pile includes Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (I'm up to Justinian), the Bhagavad Gita, Beowulf, Collapse by Jared Diamond, and a book on Tolkien.

But sometimes you've just got to blow it all out with some fun stuff. This week that meant listening to an unabridged audio of volume 2 of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's vampire trilogy The Fall. I mentioned volume 1, The Strain, here a while back.

These are not wimpy, sparkly, sexy or existential vampires. These are gross nasty viral parasites with bloodworms that do all kinds of nasty things, of which blood sucking is way down the list.

Reading something like this is kind of like gorging on burgers from White Castle or Five Guys. Not something to do every day but damn good every now and then.

I can't wait for volume 3.

END OF AN ERA. Here's an item on the departure of Don Blankenship from Massey Energy. The link includes video as well as text.

DENY THIS. Here's a profile of a pioneering climate change scientist and his work.

THE NEXT BAD DEAL? Dean Baker predicts a looming fight over the future of Social Security.

IN LIEU OF BARBIES, girl chimpanzees may play with sticks as if they were dolls.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED