Poets and Poems: Aaron Belz and “Soft Launch”

Poet Rae Armantrout calls fellow poet Aaron Belz the “Comic of the Apocalypse.” After reading his new collection Soft Launch: Poems, I discovered that she was right, but not entirely right. Yes, there is a strong sense of comedy in his poems, evoking smiles, grins, and the occasional out-loud laugh. And yes, some of the poems are about the Apocalypse. But take a plunge below the surface, and you find something else.

Take this poem, for example, “The Importance of Self Care During the Apocalypse.” It has comedy. It’s about the Apocalypse. But it’s also telling us, whether we confront the crackup of Western civilization, imminent climate disaster, or the complete breakdown of political and civil discourse, we should always remember to take a deep breath.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetsdpeak Poetry.

A Sign of the Apocalypse (at the Office)

When I was in college, a fraternity brother who was one of those “Christians” prevailed upon me to read The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. I sat in the living room of the fraternity house and read about the coming end times. I was still a good pagan, but the book was totally absorbing and read like a supermarket novel. (My girlfriend had just broken up with me and I was likely highly receptive to the idea of end-times.)

I enjoyed it, and was invited to a book discussion a few days later. The discussion turned out to be a meeting of all the born-again Christians in the fraternity. And me, the sole pagan. I manage to escape intact.

Lindsay was off by at least a few years. And he missed one of the most obvious and frightening end-signs. Had he only know what was coming, his timetable could have been exact.

It’s the devilish device that has strangled business, academia and government in a death-like vise for almost two decades.

It’s done more to destroy common understanding than anything else ever created by man.

It’s turned gifted speakers into automatons and audiences into rebellious serfs. Buried within its secret computer code is the number 666.

We’re all doomed.

The End Is Here

I’m speaking, of course, of PowerPoint. The end is not near; the end is here. 

Nothing can be communicated today without PowerPoint. Nothing. I can’t speak for government or academia, but nothing happens in business without PowerPoint. It’s a disease we’ve all caught, and we cheerfully spread it to others. “Forward-thinking” high schools teach it, and you can’t get a college degree without it.

It’s an industry. You can hire a PowerPoint consultant. You can take courses in PowerPoint. There are seminars devoted to it. There are whole libraries written about it, and the web sites devoted to it are legion.

PowerPoint is a cult.

Attend a speech at a conference. Every speaker must have his “deck.” Every slide typically has all white space covered in words, and the speaker will read every one of them. He (or she – this is an equal opportunity apocalypse) never understands that his audience can read faster than he can speak, finishing the slide long before he does.

People tweet and blog speeches now because they’re bored to death by PowerPoint.

And that’s despite all the PowerPoint “apps.” Business executives are nothing if not competitive. Who has the most complex graphics? How many videos can you embed on a single slide? Who can make the best use of Flash, or open up a web site right on the slide? How about live-streaming a Twitter convo?

You’re Kaputsky, Baby! 

I was one of several people presenting at a meeting recently. PowerPoint slides were mandatory. I gave my few slides to the organizer, who looked them over and smiled knowingly: You’re doomed, Young. No graphics or color. And only four or five words per slide! You’re kaputsky, baby!

Guess whom the audience paid attention to? They were rather astonished, yes, but then I was talking about something they deeply cared about. They listened. They asked questions. They forgot all the other presentations.

I gave another talk and didn’t use any slides at all. Despite the scandal, we all survived.

I’ve made a decision.

I will fight this evil, and I will fight it everywhere – the beaches, the streets, the auditoriums, the conference rooms. I will stand alone if I have to, but I will fight.

The world does not have to come to an end in an exploding deck of PowerPoint slides.

And I will write The Late Great PowerPoint.

(This article was originally published by The High Calling, and it reprinted here – slightly revised – under a creative commons license.)

Top photograph by Lode Van de Velde, and middle photograph by Ian L, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Chris Pennington’s “Rapture’s Rain”

Jason Stover is a high school physics teacher living with his wife Kristina and daughter Nikki in Lake Royale, North Carolina. They have a good life. Jason is even becoming interested in his wife’s faith, and has been attending a Bible study with several friends from church.

Then comes the day he walking in his yard, and the air cracks and sizzles. Jason wakes up a day later, still in the yard, and goes looking for his family. But they’ve vanished. So have most of the other members of their Bible study. So have a lot of people.

Jason does find some of his friends, and together they begin to try to understand what’s happened. People all over the world are reported missing. Some are saying the vanishings suggest the rapture in the Bible. Jason and his friend begin to map it out. It looks like it might be that, but there are still unknowns.

Law and order begin to break down. A second physical disruption happens. And Jason begins to realize the planet is losing power, and that food no longer had the nutritional value it did before. Earth is dying, and the people left are dying with it.

This is the story of Rapture’s Rain by Chris Pennington.

I usually don’t read apocalyptic literature. I never read any of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. But I read Rapture’s Rain, and I kept reading through workouts on the elliptical and treadmill at the gym, while waiting for my computer to power up, and at night before I went to bed. I read it almost straight through. It’s a riveting story.

But more than that, it is also (surprisingly) realistic. Instead of describing the “macro” viewpoint of what’s happening in the world, Pennington focuses on the up close and personal, the “micro” view of what happens to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And questions of faith – and what happens to faith – abound.

Thoroughly engaging, Rapture’s Rain is also, simply a good story.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The mind wanders down a rabbit hole: Apocalypse!

We’re reading Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time over at The High Calling, and I find myself thinking, not about the Sabbath, but about eschatology, or “last things,” end times or the Apocalypse (take your pick).

Blame it on Shulevitz. In Part 4, “The Flight from Time,” she’s discussing the Gospel of Mark, how urgent and immediate he is in his account, and she says it’s because he’s being influenced by the idea of the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. (Tradition says he was aiming his account at a Roman audience, who tended to the skip-the-long-introduction-and-cut-to-the-chase kind of people.) She quotes Harold Bloom in an essay he wrote on the gospel of Mark: “Apocalypse hovers.”

Then she says this: “We live as Mark wrote, in a state of apocalyptic urgency. Relatively few of us believe that Jesus is about to return, but just over the horizon of waking life, in nightmares and disaster movies and science-fiction novels, visions of the end play themselves out…”

She lost me with the “relatively few of us believe” and my mind wandered, as it is wont to do, down the proverbial rabbit hole. She’s largely correct in what she says, but she seems to attribute our preoccupation with the end of time with our changed understanding of what time actually is. And she blames clocks.

It isn’t only that, of course. I’m not going to blame it all on clocks. Don’t forget journalists (I was once, once), who thrive on disaster and tend to frame stories in apocalyptic terms. And politicians, who tell us apocalypse is imminent if they and their party aren’t elected.  (Where I think apocalypse really hovers is in the current extremes occupied by the two major political parties in Washington, not to mention the smaller parties who truly believe Apocalypse is upon us because of the two major parties.)

But where my mind finally goes is to a question. Why in this “post-Christian” era, when the Christian underpinnings of society and culture are being rather gleefully kicked out one by one, do we seem to increasingly embrace religious language and concepts to express and explain ourselves and what’s happening around us?

The environmental movement, for example, was born preaching about the destruction of the planet and the life it contains.

Corporations are “evil.” Big government is “evil.” Virtually anything big is “evil.” Virtually anything we think we can’t control is “evil.”

We flock to movies about alien invasions and end-times, and obsess over vampires and magic. We may not believe in God but we certainly believe in angels, and we devour accounts of near-death experiences and glimpses into “the other side.”

We erect science as our god and then dethrone it when it doesn’t answer questions the “right way.” We frame issues in terms of good and evil – and we’re good and our opponents are evil. Or we use the David and Goliath analogy even if we don’t know the background or context.

I don’t quite fathom why all this happening, but it strikes me as rather odd that we are increasingly using religious concepts and terminology at the very same time we’re rejecting religion.

Unless, of course, we’re created as inherently religious creatures, it’s in our genes, and we can’t escape our DNA.

Or our hearts.

To see the discussion about Part 3 (“The Scandal of the Holy”) and Part 4 (“The Flight From Time”) of The Sabbath World, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Josee Holland Eclipse via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.