About Us

Godescalc, real name James, was born in Bath, UK, and now resides in a small village near a small town near a small city somewhere in the Free State of Bavaria, having also resided in Beeston, Durham, Würzburg and Ottawa in the meantime. By training and education he’s a theoretical chemist; his hobbies include drawing, songwriting and playing flamenco guitar. His interests are somewhat scattershot, but include old books, sci-fi, philosophy, theology, comics, and the tackier side of emo-spiritual German pop. He grew up going to one of those awesome Pentecostal churches where people are always dancing and speaking in tongues and falling over, and is now Catholic.

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Nick Milne is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Ottawa, and an alumnus of the University of Western Ontario.  His research is focused primarily on the literature and historiography of World War I, but he is also deeply interested in Stephen Leacock, H.P. Lovecraft, the Inklings, and orthodox responses to religious and aesthetic modernism.  He is the author of a libretto to an opera that was actually performed several times and a musical that was never performed once.   His sonnets were once described as “pleasing.” He converted to Catholicism in 2008.

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Brian Visaggio was born in Long Island, New York, but grew up and was educated in Richmond, Virginia. He has been watching Star Trek since he was six, reading comic books since he was eight, and a Christian since has fifteen. He has his BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, and wrote an incredibly boring seminar paper on Christine de Pizan. He is currently a seminarian for the Diocese of Brooklyn at Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston, Queens. Yes, Queens is in the Diocese of Brooklyn for some reason. He thinks The Sun Also Rises has the best final page in American literature, completely reevaluated how he approaches comic books after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman from start to finish, and maintains that Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica is the finest English-language television show ever produced.

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The name of the blog (“There Are Real Things”) is taken from the refrain of one of G.K. Chesterton’s poems.  “A Ballade of Theatricals” first appeared in a souvenir pamphlet of poems and prose in May of 1912, the pamphlet having been produced to raise funds for survivors of the sinking of the Titanic.  The poem in its entirety follows:

Though all the critics’ canons grow–
Far seedier than the actors’ own–
Although the cottage-door’s too low–
Although the fairy’s twenty stone–
Although, just like the telephone,
She comes by wire and not by wings,
Though all the mechanism’s known–
Believe me, there are real things.

Yes, real people–even so–
Even in a theatre, truth is known,
Though the agnostic will not know,
And though the gnostic will not own,
There is a thing called skin and bone,
And many a man that struts and sings
Has been as stony-broke as stone . . .
Believe me, there are real things

There is an hour when all men go;
An hour when man is all alone.
When idle minstrels in a row
Went down with all the bugles blown–
When brass and hymn and drum went down,
Down in death’s throat with thunderings–
Ah, though the unreal things have grown,
Believe me, there are real things.

ENVOY.

Prince, though your hair is not your own
And half your face held on by strings,
And if you sat, you’d smash your throne–
–Believe me, there are real things.

We take Chesterton’s refrain as both a normative statement on how the world actually is and a rallying cry for those determined to return it to what it ought to be.  The third stanza, in particular, is the sort of thing that should be emblazoned on a banner or a shield.