Ten Films to Get You in the Mood for Pulps Gaming!

I have a confession to make: I play miniature war games. Many years ago I got my start with these guys, though I never owned more than a handful. But now I've acquired an army of crusaders for this game, an army which is only slowly getting painted and assembled, but should take the field some time in the spring. However, there is yet a third genre of war gaming which has caught my fancy... Pulps. Yes, like the sleazy dime store novels. Well, sort of. Let me share the description of miniatures craftsman Bob Murch, whose figures you can see below and left:

Pulp Figures and Rugged Adventures are primarily designed for a fictionalized historical setting we call the 'Pulp Era'. The pulps were entertainment magazines of the early 20th century and reached their peak of popularity in the period between the first and second world wars. The pulp magazine venue introduced tough guy detective stories with famed characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlow, occult action/adventure stories from authors such as Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan or Sax Rohmer of Dr. Fu Manchu fame. They also introduced the jungle fantasy adventures of Tarzan of the Apes. Within the pages of the pulps you might join an expedition into distant lands in search of a lost city. You might sail an airship through a polar gateway to a pre-historic world at the center of the earth. It was an action packed world of brave heroes standing alone against sinister villains plotting world conquest, tough dames, spies and even the occasional brilliant scientist with a newly invented rocket ship. It was a brightly coloured world of action packed, spine tingling adventure.

Is it any wonder that folks want to game this stuff? To get in the mood, I've assembled a few films:

Zulu (1964). Too late for the golden age of pulps, this classic film nevertheless has a lot of the key elements: Europeans in nifty uniforms, exotic setting, guns, danger, heroism... The Battle of Rorke's Drift was a tad early, but there are plenty of figures from slightly later decades of the British Empire.


The adventures of Indiana Jones (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008). This fedora wearing, whip wielding, Nazi (and Communist) fighting archaeologist is probably the most iconic pulp hero known to contemporary audiences. He's also the reason any game worth its salt had better include at least a smattering of these.


The Rocketeer (1991). Though this movie came out in 1991, I have never seen it. But clearly the film (and the comic books) were the inspiration for these guys.

Michael Collins (1996). Not exactly a pulp action film, this historical biopic is nevertheless set in a real conflict featuring soldiers and policemen, spies, guerrillas and gun-runners, and a real-life hero.

The Mummy and sequels (1999, 2001, 2008). High cinema? Probably but. But they feature archaeological adventurers. And a librarian. I don't know; maybe I just have a thing for librarians...

The Aviator (2004). It's a movie about Howard Hughes. Featuring a lot of amazing airplanes. Need I say more? Incidentally, this film references a film Hughes made about World War I: Hell's Angels (1930). Which might open the door to these guys. Alternatively, one could envision a scenario built around Hell's Angels involving these folks.

First on the Moon / Первые на Луне (2005). This fictional documentary of a Soviet lunar landing in the 1930s could be quite interesting, if one could get one's hands on a copy (which might not be easy). Space travel? you ask. Sure: mad scientists are a classic part of the genre. Soviets? Well, true, the Nazis are the totalitarians of choice, but sometimes they're so overused they get a bit out of hand.

The White Countess (2005). This is not really a pulp film; it's more of a historical drama. But it's set in one of the wildest cities of the 1930s: Shanghai. I think the film does a superb job depicting that world of American businessmen, Chinese warlords, Japanese spies, Jewish refugees and White Russian exiles that it deserves inclusion here.


Public Enemies (2009). There are plenty of gangster movies from which to choose. Indeed, Bonnie & Clyde (1967) might be a better film, but a gamer's interested in shootouts more than cinematography. Likewise, The Untouchables (1987) also deserves mention.

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (2011). Nevermind that this film has not yet been released. The three comic books upon which it's based are quite fun and Tintin has more than enough pulp hero qualities: intelligence, bravado, world-wide travels and a faithful sidekick (even if he is just a dog).

Some people might worry that the pulp fiction genre - along with the movies and games it has spawned - is violent, racist, sexist and jingoistic. This is all probably true. I would, however, note two things. (1) Modern pulps tend to exaggerate, even caricature, these vices, reducing the danger that we might notice them, even while imbibing them. (2) Modern pulps knock-offs often caricature these vices to the point of mocking them. And it's rather hard to accept ideas you don't even take seriously.

My Christmas Dream Tour

Do you ever put together dream tours, groups of musicians you'd just love to see together? Every now and again, these kind of miracles happen, as when Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson played together as The Highwaymen. Oh, that I might have seen that glorious combination...

But today I've been thinking about my dream Christmas tour: Sufjan Stevens, Rosie Thomas, Denny Witmer and The Innocence Mission. They're all friends, so I don't see why this couldn't happen. And just to get you in the mood...







Have a dream tour of your own (Christmas or otherwise)? Do share!

The Intercession of Holy Women

Today is the feast of St. Jane Frances de Chantal. I must confess that I do not know that much about her, nor do I have any particular devotion to her. However, I do know that for her feast we use the Common of Holy Women, the intentions from Evening Prayer II of which I really like. I think they beautifully summarize the variety of vocations to which women (and, with minor variation, men) are called.

Through the intercession of holy women let us pray for the Church in these words:

Through all the women martyrs who conquered bodily death by their courage,
-strengthen Your Church in the hour of trial.

Through married women who have advanced in grace by holy matrimony,
-make the apostolic mission of Your Church fruitful.

Through widows who eased their loneliness and sanctified it by prayer and hospitality,
-help Your Church reveal the mystery of Your love in the world.

Through mothers who have borne children for the kingdom of God and the human community,
-help Your Church bring all men and women to a rebirth in life and salvation.

Through all Your holy women who have been worthy to contemplate the light of Your countenance,
-let the deceased members of Your Church exult in that same vision forever

St. Jane Frances de Chantal and all you holy women, pray for us!

Do the Editors of The Onion Read St. Augustine?

A recent headline from "America's finest news source," The Onion (New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths), brought to mind the first book of the Confessions, where St. Augustine reflects on his childhood, even trying to remember his own sins as an infant:

Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth.

So, even a day-old baby is a sinner. But, just in case you think he was joking, St. Augustine continues:

Who remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? What then was my sin? was it that I hung upon the breast and cried? for should I now so do for food suitable to my age, justly should I be laughed at and reproved.

But, you might object, how can an infant sin when it cannot knowingly choose sin? Well, any thoughts you might have had of the innocence of the young, St. Augustine rejects quite explicitly:

Or was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, that persons free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wise than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt, because commands were not obeyed, which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.

A little later, just to make it clear that he was sinful even as an infant, St. Augustine cites Ps. 51 for support, interpreting it quite literally:

But if I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me, where, I beseech Thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when, was I Thy servant guileless?

Now, if you go back and read the article I linked, you might notice that the "study" sounds a lot like a modern, secularized version of St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin, and of the doctrine of concupiscence. The gist of St. Augustine's arugment and of the "study" is the same. Even the cutest little kids have seriously twisted wills, are self-centered, and manipulative. Even the quote near the end of the article stating that "the disorder is considered untreatable" meshes fairly well with St. Augustine (indeed, orthodox Christian theology, in general) that sin cannot be treated like a simple disease. (Incidentally, today's feast day reminds us that it takes a miracle to make a human being free of original sin.)

Of course, the writers at The Onion turn not to theologians for support, but to psychologists. Rather than invoking a set doctrine, they rely on studies and documented psychoses. They do not speak of the essence of man, but refer to the percentage of children suffering from a psychosis. They do not call for conversion, but rather for rehabilitation.

All in all, it was a striking resemblance, I thought.

Now, to finish, and to do the unspeakable: I will try to explain a joke. Why is the article from The Onion funny, at least to someone with a twised sense of humor like my own? It is funny because everybody today believes in a doctrine of original innocence of children, not original sin. The thought that St. Augustine might be correct would probably never occur to most of The Onion's readers. And that's a problem.

Your Smart Phone Is Making You Look Stupid

Many people - dare I say most? - today have "smart phones", mobile telephones which not only engage in telephony but also have cameras and lots of nifty applications, including email. Smart phone owners may feel very proud of themselves for being high tech, "with it" and, well, smart. Alas, I have bad news: your smart phone is making you look stupid.

The data which have led me to this conclusion have come from several sources over the last few months. The first are emails from my students. An unseemly number of emails - usually asking me to excuse their absences, raise their grades or otherwise do something nice for them - lack a proper salutation. Moreover, they usually lack capitalization. And some days the students really seem to be gunning for my ire, with messages such as, "when r u going to give back the essays?"

The second source of data is an international discussion forum - by invitation only - of highly educated people discussing matters of great importance. One might expect higher standards in such a place, even if it is only an online forum. However, while the incidents are rarer, it is not by a wide margin. Typos abound. Capitalization is frequently optional. And comments are frequently terse, with antecedents unclear and thoughts undeveloped.

A third source of data comes from students who spend their class time twittering, playing games or otherwise distracting themselves from the studies for which they/their parents/the taxpayers are spending good money.

There are, of course, logical explanations for all these occurrences. Classes are boring and, besides, the professor won't notice me texting the girl sitting next to me. The buttons on phones, no matter how generous, are not as large as those on a keyboard (which, oddly enough, are usually just a tad larger than one's fingertips), making typos a fact of life. And in an effort to curtail the frustrating and time-consuming process of typing on such a thing, shorthand is common. Finally, many smart phones simply are not capable of differentiating capital letters.

However, there are good reasons to dismiss all these explanations. The professor can see you and does think less of you for allowing the little gizmo in your hand to distract you from your studies. Many smart phones can do capital letters (though you usually have to press an extra button or two - what a time-waster!), making a lack of capitalization unacceptable. But more to the point: if you cannot craft an adequate business message on your phone, what business have you using it for business at all? If you think that the ability to send über-prompt messages will outweigh their sloppy contents, I assure you it does not. The only message that your terse communiques, sans capitalization, sends is that their contents were not of sufficient concern to you to bother sitting down at a computer and sending a proper email.

It would seem that I must amend my title statement. Your smart phone is not making you look stupid: it is revealing you for the idiot you are.

Celebrating Goodness

Thanksgiving will be here in just a few days and many of us will find ourselves sharing with family and friends those things for which we are thankful. I have noticed that, from time to time, people will formulate their thanks in a negative way. That is, instead of saying, "I am thankful for my health," they will say, "I am thankful for not getting sick this year." This is rarely intended and I probably ought not read too much into it, but it seems to be illustrative of a problem we sometimes have.

St. Augustine, when confronting the problem of evil, argues that evil does not exist. Literally. He contends that being is itself good. All things that are are good. If something seems to be evil, it is deficient in being; it does not as fully exist as a proper, good thing. If I have not yet entirely bastardized Augustine, we might put his concept into colloquial terms by saying that goodness is like heat: there is no such thing as evil (or cold), only the absence of good (or heat).

However, being thankful for "not getting sick" represents a kind of anti-Augustinianism. It places the emphasis on evil (in this case, sickness), and suggests that goodness is only the absence of evil, and not a thing in itself. This is a very dreary form of thanks, since it implicitly says, "The world is full of evil, but I have been lucky to avoid most of it." Such a statement says nothing about goodness, implicitly denying that one is thankful for it.

Last month I was in Dallas for the wedding of two of my classmates. After the reception a gaggle of alumni went out for drinks together at the Gingerman. One classmate suggested that we play a drinking game. I think mine were not the only eyebrows raised just a little. Drinking games, really...? But as our colleague explained, this "game" was different. The concept was simple enough: taking turns round the table, each person would sharing something they enjoy. The speaker, along with any others who enjoy the same thing, would take a swig of beer. Most drinking games are built on coercion: if you fail to do X, you must drink. This, it was explained to us, is a mistake. Drinking should be a joy, and should be associated with joyful things. It should be a celebration, not a punishment.

And a celebration it was. We shared joys from our undergraduate days together and from our more recent adventures in various places. Stories quickly came to the fore, stories about classes and pranks and epic road trips. We toasted academic nerdery and cute children, beloved friends and favorite places. It was more than mere thankfulness for the absence of ill in our lives: it was a celebration of real, active, vibrant goodness in our lives.


Photo credit: Today's picture comes from jypsygen's Flickr account. It is, admittedly, not from our trip to the Gingerman. But it is an authentic Dallas Gingerman photo, which counts for something, I think.

Bavarian Baroque

I recently read an interesting poem, entitled "Bavarian Baroque," by Gail White:

At first it's like a painted teacup
inverted, this gold-scalloped dome
containing an apotheosis
of saints triumphant heading home

to God—a Beatific Vision
made relevant to mortal eyes
Then we discover in each cornice
angels, grotesque in shape and size,

in imminent danger of descending
onto our heads, their Sunday-best
huge wings precariously suspended,
hoping the tourists are impressed.

Faith is not like this, needs no laser
sculpture, no cheat-the-eye designs.
Baroque device is insufficient
to baffle unbelieving minds.

Faith was a gift that died with Gothic.
Only the rich medieval heart
(dazzled by love and drunk with logic)
could train the wild stone rose of Chartres.

First of all, here are a few pictures to give you an idea of the Baroque churches the poem is criticizing. These pictures comes from the church of St. John Nepomucene in Munich, often known as the Asamkirche, after the Asam brothers, two Baroque architects who built this chapel next to their house for their private use.

Since the church was originally intended as "just" a private chapel, the church is not set off from the surrounding buildings. In fact, the average pedestrian comes upon it like upon a store-front church. But, a Baroque store-front church is a little different from what we normally imagine in modern America.

The interior is even more impressive. The small size adds to the effect. Upon entering the church, a visitor is immediately confronted with this view:

If we look at some of the details, we see some of what the poet means when she speaks of "angels, grotesque in shape and size." This next picture features a saint surrounded by angels, and it certainly gives an idea of late Baroque style:


And now, the big question: Is the poem right when it says that "Faith was a gift that died with Gothic"? And, how does the supposed death of faith manifest itself in the Baroque?

To begin, I don't believe it's entirely fair to say that faith died with the Gothic. For instance, some of the Church's greatest mystics (e.g., St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila) lived during the Baroque period. Or, more a propos of this post, the Asam brothers built this church as their own private chapel out of their own private funds. Was their faith not a living faith? Moreover, the Gothic was not as free of some of the problems of the Baroque as the poet seems to think. Gothic church towers, for example, were often built to impress medieval "tourists." Just take a look here at the tower on St. Martin's church in Landshut, Germany (the tallest brick tower in the world). On the other hand, the early modern period of European history certainly did witness the spread of some anti-religious feeling, especially in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, and even saw the origins of modern atheism (e.g., Spinoza). Do Baroque art and architecture reflect this decline of faith in some way?

The poem does give some clues as to how the Baroque might reflect the death of Europe's faith. The poet's main complaint about the Baroque seems to be that it relies too heavily on cheap tricks to make us believe in God--"cheat-the-eye designs" and "Baroque device." The Baroque tries but cannot even "baffle unbelieving minds." In other words, the Baroque tries unsuccessfully to confuse us and then tries unsuccessfully to persaude us that our state of confusion is really faith. Mere confusion would seem to be a rather weak foundation for our faith.

In response to this danger of conflating confusion and faith, the poet points in the last verse to the Gothic's passion for logic. Though she does not elaborate much on this statement, White seems to be asserting that clear thought and faith are not incompatible, and are indeed indispensable to each other.

Another possible problem with the Baroque--hinted at in the phrase "hoping the tourists are impressed"--is that the Baroque also relies heavily on "shock and awe" tactics. The sheer size of the statues, the many-colored marbles, the extravagant use of gold plating, are all designed to overwhelm us, make us feel small, and thereby induce us to worship the all-powerful God. Shock and awe was certainly my initial reaction the first time I stepped inside, or even into the colonnade at, St. Peter's in Rome. But again, White seems to be asserting that merely feeling small is not a solid foundation for our faith.

This poem, then, leaves us with the question whether the feelings of bafflement and shock and awe which the Baroque sought to produce are inimical to genuine faith. I am still not entirely sure that White's historical analysis--the contrast between Gothic and Baroque--is true in every detail, but I do believe that she has hit upon two important points. First, she at least partially explains why so many people criticize and are left cold by "Baroque excess." People see through the tricks and the impression of power. Second, she gives two valid warnings about certain weak foundations of faith. Faith is more than just confusion or feeling small.