Sunday, September 1, 2024

Of the Faithful

Yesterday I decided that, after all these months of my syncs entraining with William Wright’s, it’s time I came to terms with his underlying worldview, which treats both the Book of Mormon and the works of Tolkien as true and interprets each in terms of the other. That means tackling the source of that worldview, Daymon “Doug” Smith’s Words of the Faithful and its sequels.

I’d been putting this off because on an earlier attempt I had found the book basically unreadable, and because even William Wright now considers it to be the work of one bad dude channeling another bad dude. Last night, though, I bit the bullet, downloaded the constituent chapters of the first two books as free PDFs, combined them into a single document, and sent it to my Kindle.

Today, as is my custom, I looked around a used bookstore in Taichung. As I was walking into the shop, a mental voice that sounded like Claire said, laughing, “Suppose one of Doug’s books turned up here!” That struck me as a ridiculous suggestion, and I answered (mentally) in my Jeeves voice: “The contingency is a remote one, miss.”

Then I saw this on a shelf and did a double take:


It’s not actually the same book, of course, but the title is so extremely similar that it’s still quite the coincidence. Claire apparently knew in advance that it was going to be there.

9 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The book also has “Beth” on the cover, which is Adunaic for “word.”

William Wright (WW) said...

Moore, the last name of the author, can be related to/ derived from Moor (I believe - some connection back to Latin and Greek), which means "Dark or Black", which is what Doug also means (from the Gaelic "Dubh", apparently).

That would seem like a pretty direct hit combining that name and book title.

Did Claire/ your mental voice use the name Doug in her phrase, or that was you swapping that name in for the post?

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Or you could tie it to Elvish mor-, with the same meaning.

Claire was the one who called him Doug. I generally just use his name myself.

WanderingGondola said...

Are you a bad enough dude to read those books?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-a-bad-enough-dude

Memetics aside, for whatever it's worth, I'm not convinced Pengolodh is a bad guy. In my mind it raises far more questions than the alternative (and I have way too many Qs already).

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Are you a bad enough dude to use pomade in your hair without wearing a bathing cap? Corn Pop was.

Leo said...

WG I'm curious what your perspective is about Pengolodh. What makes you think one way or the other about him? Also I'm curious if you have read Daymon's books. Care to elaborate?

WanderingGondola said...

Ehh, with Pengolodh I'm basically a fence-sitter whose attention keeps getting pulled in the "good" direction. Though I have multiple lines/levels of questioning, to roughly sum up the big picture view: if he *is* a bad guy, what's the deal? Why share all that in the first place, when a lot of it reads as Good? Why get Doug to write so much over such a long period of time, creating a ripple effect where you, WW and presumably others start receiving stuff too, and that stuff *also* seems Good more often than not? Granted, who are we to understand the ways of evil, but if it's not some *extremely* convoluted scheme, well... what's the bloody point?

Yeah, I've read all three books. Though there's still a lot I either don't understand or am unsure about (that's with both the books and WW's story, BTW), I see things in this bizarre mess that ring true. Beyond that my thoughts are all over the place.

Leo said...

Thanks for clarifying. Had you read the books before or only since the WW/WJT sync fest started?

WanderingGondola said...

A while after the fest began. I guess you could say I was intrigued.

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