Posts by Dana Rail

An Oxford Spring (April 18 – May 17, 2024)

An Oxford Spring (April 18 – May 17, 2024)

16 April, 2024 | No Comments

From April 18 to May 17, 2024, I will be posting from the City of Dreaming Spires, Oxford, UK. Friends have asked my husband and me, why Oxford? Why a whole month in one smallish English city when we would have the whole of Britain and even Europe on our doorstep? For one thing, we’ve done the whole if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium sort of traveling before, and it’s a young person’s game. At this point in our lives, we decided it was better to go to one fascinating place and stay as long as we could afford. Dig deep rather than skim the
Read More

Quick Take: Stephen King’s FAIRY TALE

Quick Take: Stephen King’s FAIRY TALE

22 November, 2022 | 2 Comments

I was a teenager when I first read Stephen King. The book was Salem’s Lot and the damn thing scared me so badly I didn’t pick up King again for two decades. Then came The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower series, pressed upon me by friends whose opinions I trusted. I fell in love. See, I’m not a straight-out horror fan. I can’t bear slasher stories and maniacal clowns, but I do enjoy fantasies that grapple with the (to me, obvious) darkness in the world. Any world. So it was inevitable, I suppose, that I should give King’s latest, Fairy
Read More

ANDOR, Random Thoughts: Politics and Character Arcs

ANDOR, Random Thoughts: Politics and Character Arcs

14 November, 2022 | 4 Comments

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. ON WAR, by General Carl von Clausewitz To be honest, Disney's Star Wars spinoff Andor was initially a bit of a slow burn for me. I was, however, deeply impressed from the first by the seriousness and sophistication of the writing, acting, directing, and production values.
Read More

Malcolm Guite’s Grail Quest Ballad Cycle

Malcolm Guite’s Grail Quest Ballad Cycle

18 October, 2022 | No Comments

I was only last year introduced to the books, blog, and “A Spell in the Library” YouTube Channel of Anglican Priest, Poet, and Inklings expert, Malcolm Guite. Late to the party, maybe, but I instantly came under the spell of Guite’s gentle erudition, pipe-smoky voice, and hobbity dwelling and demeanor. His poem-a-day journey through Advent, Waiting on the Word, became my daily morning companion in the weeks before Christmas, 2021, and will once more accompany my Advent journey in 2022, beginning in only a few short weeks. On one of his YT vlogs, Guite mentioned the Arthurian/Grail Quest ballad cycle
Read More

Re-reading “Foucault’s Pendulum” in the Age of Q-Anon: Pt. 2 – Ur-Fascism and the Russia-Ukraine Connection

Re-reading “Foucault’s Pendulum” in the Age of Q-Anon: Pt. 2 – Ur-Fascism and the Russia-Ukraine Connection

5 March, 2022 | 2 Comments

Apologies, but work on my little blog series on Re-reading Foucault’s Pendulum in the Age of QAnon has been delayed by a family emergency and the all-absorbing news of the barbaric Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like many of you, I have been glued to CNN and the various print media this last week, in a quest to wrap my head around what is happening, why, and what it means for a suddenly changed and (on the heels of Covid and January 6) increasingly dangerous world. But the dreadful situation has also induced me to take a moment for a relevant
Read More

Re-reading “Foucault’s Pendulum” in the Age of QAnon – Pt. 1, The Plan

Re-reading “Foucault’s Pendulum” in the Age of QAnon – Pt. 1, The Plan

25 January, 2022 | 5 Comments

I just finished my third or fourth reading of Umberto Eco‘s classic esoteric suspense thriller and sublimely wacko-satirical thought experiment, Foucault’s Pendulum. The Premise First published in 1988 in Italian, Foucault’s Pendulum tells the story of three editors at the fictional Garamond Press in Milan (and its aptly named vanity press twin, Manutius Press), who are brought an esoteric manuscript purporting to include a secret coded Message regarding the fabled Knights Templar and their alleged centuries-spanning occult Plan. (Here be potential but necessary Spoilers – Caveat Lector!) The Message is highly ambiguous—imagine a purposefully vague Nostradamus quatrain written in a
Read More

The Day I Fell in Love

The Day I Fell in Love

18 January, 2022 | No Comments

January 18 is Winnie-the-Pooh Day…Huzzah! I’m one of those folks who remembers little of early childhood. I have, however, one sun-bright memory of sitting rapt at my school desk in Mrs. G’s second grade class, aged seven, as she read aloud, over a period of several weeks, A.A. Milne’s House at Pooh Corner. That was the day I first fell in love. With books.  And now that I think of it, with fantasy literature as well. I loved Pooh so ardently, back in second grade, I begged for him for Christmas. Santa kindly came through with the hardcover edition of
Read More

Worldbuilding with Specialists, Polymaths, and Dilettantes

Worldbuilding with Specialists, Polymaths, and Dilettantes

17 January, 2022 | No Comments

The pace at which scientists are breaking down their foci of expertise into increasingly narrower fields is breathtaking. Kinda like the way fictional genres become increasingly niche-ified. (Can you say "Cat Mysteries," boys and girls?) It's all quite wonderful, but I hope all these specialists are still talking to specialists in other fields, else the forest will be missed for the trees. Nay, the leaves.
Read More

Epic Storytelling at 10 Cents a pop

Epic Storytelling at 10 Cents a pop

27 September, 2021 | No Comments

My family home was a boxy old turn-of-the-century three-story turned-student rooming house two blocks from a lively state university campus—Pig Heaven for a shy introvert who craved intellectual stimulus and some elusive beauty amid the drab and the ordinary surroundings of a working class upbringing. So it was that I spent most weekends at the movies, or in campus bookstores and record shops, or checking out the latest DC and Marvel comics at the corner drugstore. Comic books were a dime in my earliest youth, then maybe a quarter, back when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby scribbled and sketched their
Read More

Down the Nazi Occult Rabbit Hole

Down the Nazi Occult Rabbit Hole

21 February, 2021 | 10 Comments

Have you ever noticed how fascinated Speculative, SciFi/Fantasy, and Thriller writers are about Nazis? From Marvel's Hydra to PKD's The Man in the High Castle, from Indiana Jones to Wolfenstein, from The Boys from Brazil to Arrowverse's Earth X to...you get the idea. You could spend years working through that reading list. And to be honest, I have.
Read More