Classic Plural

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You might think that with our modern lifestyles, looking back would become passé.  Recently an article on Hyperallergic discussed “Ancient Greece and Rome Are Hot in Animation Right Now. Here’s Why.”  The article by Chiara Sulprizio notes that themes central to history—namely, sex and violence—animate ancient mythology.  This allows modern interpreters to explore where we are by looking back.  At the same time, in higher education, such topics and departments are being cut.  The humanities in general have come under fire lately.  Where are we going to learn about such things as the classics if we cut off the only people who spend their time studying such things?  This isn’t the only instance where universities seem to misread what hoi polloi find to be of interest.

The classics have been known as such because of their formative role in our culture.  As this Hyperallergic story shows, they can bring in money (for this is the measure by which all things are assessed).  Again it seems that higher education has followed the way of the dollar, so why not invest in the study of what makes us human?  I guess I’m a bit of a curmudgeon here because it was the humanities that came up with the idea of higher education in the first place.  Universities were places to study theology and law, and even the original concept of “humanities” included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and logic.  Only when these topics started to split off into what we would eventually call “STEM” did the humanities begin to suffer neglect.

Looks like a good story

It was, after all, the Greco-Roman world that gave us what we call the classics.  I fully agree that we can’t constantly look back—we’d never move forward then—but our heads turn for a reason.  Understanding what it is to be human seems to be something we’ve grown less interested in since the sterile clean room has given us gadgets and toys we can’t seem to live without.  Living, however, is such a human aspiration.  We want fulfilled lives.  Mythology gives us meaning.  That’s why we keep coming back to it.  In my own lifetime I’ve seen several resurgences of interest in the classics, and experts always seem surprised.  They needn’t be, however.  People have found these stories powerful well before the Greeks and Romans gave them the shapes we recognize.  Many of them go back even further to the early civilizations of the Levant.  The classics have, in other words, earned that name.

Durable Goods

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So you bought something that worked.  It was a simple thing, but you bought it many years ago.  Then something happened and the thing got broke.  (This could be just about anything here, so please bear with me.)  You go to replace said item that worked so perfectly for your needs, only to find fashions have changed and your item is no longer in style.  In fact, not even Amazon has anything like it.  Or eBay.  What is one to do?  This recently happened to me again—it doesn’t matter what the item is—and I once again reflected on how changing styles make it difficult to live a life not encumbered by having to keep up with change.  Some things need not change styles to be functional, but they do nevertheless.  And trying to replace them with exact duplicates can be difficult.  Perhaps the solution is to buy two of everything.

The speed of change is amazing.  Head-spinning, in fact.  Having studied ancient history, I often ponder how civilization got along with minimal change for well beyond a lifespan of an individual.  Or generations, even.  Take pottery, for example.  Innovation was so slow with pottery that—along with its extreme durability—it can be used as a means of dating events in antiquity.  There was very little improving an ancient bowl.  Its shape was functional and served its purpose well.  Why change it?  When it was discovered that, say, a rim, made spillage a little less common, that innovation spread and stayed in place for centuries.  Until perhaps someone discovered a spout would make for easier pouring.  Again, no other “improvements” for centuries.

Today things change, it seems, just for the sake of change.  I tend not to replace things unless they really aren’t functional any longer.  (That’s how I can afford to buy books, I guess.)  My car is old.  So is our furniture.  To me it seems more eco-friendly to keep things than to be constantly throwing them away to upgrade them.  Then something breaks.  If that particular item was an impulse purchase in some forgotten store in another state decades ago, good luck trying to replace it.  It may be out there somewhere on eBay, I suppose, but hours spend searching for that purchase that was almost an afterthought shouldn’t take hours and hours, and it likely will be even more expensive than anticipated if actually found.  Such is the nature of fashion.  Some durable goods are just fine the way they were.

Friendly Food

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The rain felt like relief after the most recent heat wave.  We’d long planned to attend the Easton VegFest regardless.  Summer is the season for street festivals and it’s always a strange kind of affirmation to find one dedicated to vegans.  And to see so many people at it.  The cities of the Lehigh Valley have quite a few animal-friendly options for eating, and although the VegFest isn’t huge it’s a good place to find others who realize that our food choices matter.  So it was that we came upon the booth for NoPigNeva.  Now, if you’ve ever tried to shop for vegan food—I know there must be a few of you out there—you know how catch-as-catch-can it is.  Around here lots of grocery stores carry vegan items, but what you’re looking for may not be there.  Even WholeFoods in Allentown has a limited selection.

NoPigNeva is a supply company run by black women.  It supports worthy causes.  And it makes finding what you’re looking for essentially one-stop.  I’m no businessman, but I do wonder why, when they keep selling out of vegan stock, stores don’t get their orders refilled right away.  It’s almost as if we don’t want to believe people will buy it.  Vegan food has come a long way even in just the last five years.  I know that when I became a vegetarian almost two decades ago now I felt there was no way to get enough to eat as a vegan.  Options seemed so limited.  That’s no longer the case.  I’m guessing the success of the Impossible Whopper caught everyone (except consumers) by surprise.  Even now, if you order one (hold the mayo, please) you’re pretty much guaranteed it won’t have been sitting on the warming shelf.

There’s big money in the food industry.  I’m not a foodie, although it’s become fashionable to be one.  I do, however, think about whether my food is causing harm.  There is, I realize, no way not to impact the environment or other living creatures when eating.  Lessening that impact, however, and supporting historically oppressed groups feels good.  There is a morality to mastication.  Most animals, it seems, have evolved a fear of being eaten.  Perhaps we’re only starting to understand that breaking chains might have to begin with us.  Any industry (big agriculture) that tries to make it illegal to see where your food comes from is hardly to be trusted.  I trust more those willing to come to a street fair on a rainy Saturday afternoon to show that there is a better way.

Making Excuses

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The internet, and computers in general, seem to think we’re dumb.  I say that because of the false information they routinely give.  I was recently on a website run by a reputable *ahem* agency.  It turns out that the information they gave me was incorrect.  The next week when I went to check the status of my transaction, it said I couldn’t do so because cookies were blocked on my computer.  Well, cookies aren’t blocked.  I had to call said agency to ask about the status.  I was then told that what I’d requested was valid “only during the pandemic” (excuse me, I thought we were still in a pandemic?) and that was the reason I couldn’t check the status online.  That service was no longer available.  So why did the auto-response blame it on cookies?  I miss the generic “technical difficulties.”  At least it was honest.

We’re all busy these days.  Keeping websites up to date matters.  It doesn’t help when some software person decides some techie-sounding excuse ought to satisfy you.  Whenever I restart my computer, for example, I get a dialogue box—it’s more of a monologue box, really, since it isn’t asking for anything but acknowledgement that its incorrect information has been delivered.  In any case, it tells me that the computer decided to restart because of a problem.  No it didn’t!  It restarted because I gave the restart command!  Is this a problem?  I thought I was authorized to restart my own computer.  Why is it lying to me?  Is it colluding with the websites that are making up excuses?

Are we really that stupid?  Computers seem to think so.  On my work computer (PC, of course) you no longer have a trash can in which to discard old files.  No, now we have a recycle bin.  Recycle bin?  Really?  While I appreciate the message that we should recycle whatever we can, this is not a case of recycling at all.  It is a matter of getting rid of something I no longer need.  I guess what I’d like from our machine overlords is a bit of respect for our intelligence.  Sure, we may be subject to biological constraints that don’t apply to the electronic world.  We do have lapses in judgment just as surely as devices have bugs.  A world that runs by algorithms alone is hardly a world in which we could live.  So my devices may well be more logical than me, and if so they should figure out that they don’t need to lie or make excuses. Just say “technical difficulties,” I can live with that.

Not That Kind

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I am not a (medical) doctor.  Nor do I play one on TV.  It puzzled me, therefore, when I received an email addressing me as “Dear Healthcare provider.”  I like to think that maybe this blog does help a person or two from time to time, but I’m not going to dispense medical devices.  The email was telling me where I could order Covid-19 tests in bulk, and it even contained a sell-sheet with facts and figures.  Now I want to see this pandemic over, just like everybody else, but I’m not sure that having my own supply of Covid tests would do anybody any good at all.  Perhaps this is just a continuation of the larger issue of wondering who exactly the internet thinks I am.

One thing the pandemic has done has been to double us down on our reliance on the internet.  It’s difficult to imagine how we might’ve survived without it.  More jobs—many more—would certainly have been lost if we couldn’t have started to work remotely.  In order for any of this to function, however, we have to have a sense of who we are and what we do.  I’m not a professional blogger, of course.  I’ve discovered from my own extended time on the internet that many people just a few years younger than me make a living as “content providers.”  They launch a successful YouTube channel (or maybe two or more), and blog, podcast, or otherwise just dispense their homegrown wisdom into a job.  Some have college degrees, but many don’t.  The ones I see make a better living doing this than several college grads I know.

You are who the internet makes you in these remote times.  Hasn’t most of our reality become remote?  We rely on content that others, or sometimes we ourselves, make.  We get our news here and we find our directions here.  We order the things we need here and the delivery drivers find our addresses here.  Yes, we can even get our medical service taken care of here.  Fortunately I personally haven’t had to talk to a doctor online, but I know people who have.  Personally I find it more reassuring when someone with special training takes a look at the area of concern, and perhaps can touch it and tell me what to do about it.  I’m glad the internet option exists, however.  I just hope that people don’t start thinking I’m that kind of doctor.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Claim This Panel

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Validation.  We’re surrounded by it.  Now that we have the internet, everyone seems to want us to verify who we are.  And we were told as kids that there are no such things as trolls!  Personally, I have no idea why a hacker would want to be me.  I mean for destabilizing the government by messing with elections, well, of course, but I mean for academic purposes.  How do you really know who I am?  I googled myself the other day—I’m curious how my most recent book is doing because I’ve heard nothing from the publisher since it appeared—and noticed that in the “knowledge panel” on Google they had the picture of the wrong person.  I guess I’d better verify myself!

The erstwhile academic (aka “independent scholar”) gets invitations via email from Google Scholar to claim their papers.  I suppose in an effort to provide competition to Academia.edu, the researcher finds her or his papers available on Google Scholar’s website.  So far, so good.  But the invitation comes with instructions to verify your “work email.”  Said email must end in a .edu extension in order to be valid.  In other words, “independent scholar” is an invalid category.  This train of logic demonstrates one of the serious problems with high education shrinkage and the industry becoming tighter and tighter with its positions.  How do you verify yourself if your email address is the same as any Jane or Joe?  You can’t.  “Scholar” is limited to those lucky enough to have picked up a very rare position, especially in some fields, such as religion.

My recent experience with the DMV was an exercise in validation.  I presented the woman my vital paperwork (which was less than I had to show to get the New Jersey license that I had to cash in to get a license in Pennsylvania) while wearing a mask.  Irony can be quite stunning at times.  How did they know I wasn’t some masked bandit stealing someone’s paperwork on the way to the DMV?  I guess they could ask me to verify by my work email.  Then they’d discover that I’m merely an independent scholar.  If they googled me they’d find the wrong person’s photo on my knowledge panel.  Won’t someone validate me, please?  It would be nice to be able to claim my own papers on Google Scholar.  But until “independent scholar” becomes a real thing, I guess you can ask that guy (who’s not me) on the “knowledge panel” that bears my name.

Which Wednesday

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I’m not superstitious but it’s still pretty dusky when I go for my constitutional on cloudy days.  I was walking along thinking about Cernunnos, the way one does, when a black cat darted out of the underbrush and across my path.  My thoughts turned to witches.  Then a large toad jumped out in front of me in the half-light.  Perhaps it was because I picked up a booklet about witches recently, but this felt very uncanny to me.  There’s a place where the woods close in on both sides of the path.  The sun wasn’t yet up, and the clouds meant it wouldn’t have much mattered anyway.  When the bird calls stopped I began thinking about turning around and going home.  Nobody else was out this morning and although I don’t mind starting my day with the weird, I was thinking “not on a Wednesday.”

A thick mist lay over part of the path and I realized just how uncomfortable we tend to be when we can’t see clearly.  Despite that, and the black cat and the toad, I’ve never really been afraid of witches.  I guess I try to please people too much to think that someone might want to harm me supernaturally (at least among those who know me).  I recently found a booklet on witches—one of those strange impulse buys after being mostly house-bound for the better part of a year-and-a-half—that perhaps prompted my thinking this morning.  Although it seems to be most interested in earth-centered religions, it has an article about Salem.  Despite the more modern embrace of witchcraft in Salem, historically it had to do with human fear and hatred, a combination that is scary indeed when applied by those who are superstitious.

Cernunnos is a Celtic god generally portrayed with deer antlers.  Although lack of literature means we know little about him, he’s been adopted as the male counterpart to the female earth-goddess in some traditions.  Modern witchcraft is based on an orientation toward nature.  It’s kind of a ground-up religion rather than a top-down one.  Christians traditionally labelled it “Devil worship,” as they tended to do with anything they objected to.  Such demonizing helps no one, of course.  And when these ideas grow into superstitions people get hurt.  So I’m out here in the half-light because in the mornings days are shortening quickly and I have less and less time before work begin after the sun rises.  And I have witchery on my mind.

The Clairvoyant and the Demonologist

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As a special bonus, here’s a post by a Guest Author. Enjoy!

For almost half a century, the couple known as a clairvoyant and a demonologist investigated thousands of paranormal cases that led to film franchises and book deals. You can find films based on their investigations wherever there are streaming horror movies.

Although the Warrens’ wider-known cases spent half a century splashing the headlines, there’s more to their legacy than how Hollywood portrays them.

Ed and Lorraine’s Spooky Origins

Even as children, the two were destined to unite over the supernatural. Ed grew up in a haunted house, witnessing apparitions of his deceased relatives while Lorraine experienced clairvoyant visions. 

After dating as teenagers, the two later married while Ed served in the Navy during World War II. They had a child, Judy. 

Despite Lorraine’s skills as a trance medium, she remained a skeptic until she witnessed more substantial first-hand accounts through their business.

Haunted House Hunters

The couple’s haunted house hunting began as a means for Ed to make a living as a landscape artist. The project quickly grew bigger as they traveled across New England painting potential haunted sites. 

Ed’s sketches became a friendly gesture to gain entry for tours and then investigations. Their novel networking attempts and cases eventually led to newspaper coverage and TV appearances.

Religious But Not Occultists

The Warrens’ religious beliefs as Catholics both hindered and aided their cause. As self-taught investigators, they aspired to balance their religious beliefs with scientific research.

“The Haunted” TV Series

Though much about The Warrens’ work is showcased in The Conjuring franchise and features spawned from their experiences at Amityville House, Hollywood also adapted an unsung investigation with a television show called The Haunted (1991). 

From the smell of rotting flesh to the sounds of anonymous screams, Jack and Janet Smurl experienced diabolical activity in their Pennsylvania house for years. After going public with their encounters, they gained national attention and then reached out to the Warrens. 

The Warrens confirmed a dark entity inhabiting the Smurls’ house and tried to expel it. Unfortunately, the evil presence refused to vacate.

The Warren’s Occult Museum

The couple founded the New England Society of Psychic Research (NESPR) in 1952, which solved thousands of cases over 50 years. They also opened their home to the public with a museum of the occult featuring artifacts such as the possessed Raggedy Ann doll that inspired Annabelle. 

Following their deaths over the past decade, their son-in-law now manages NESPR, but the museum closed in 2019.

Today, there is still more ground to cover learning about the supernatural and paranormal. Without the Warrens bridging the gap between the living and dead, vast mysteries about the afterlife could’ve been buried in the dark. 

Their legacy ultimately encourages believers and skeptics to continue searching for answers.

Monomyth Myth

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Since I’ve been exploring movies as the locus of truth, and meaning, for contemporary religious culture, I can’t avoid Joseph Campbell.  His interpretation of mythology—long discounted by mythographers of specific cultures—influenced film makers like Stanley Kubrick, the various Batman directors, and, most famously, George Lucas.  Campbell’s interviews and his eventual series The Power of Myth highlighted his work, even as specialist scholars noted the problems with it.  This is the subject of an essay in the LA Review of Books.  This story, written by a couple of professors (Sarah E. Bond and Joel Christensen), exposes the problem with Campbell’s “monomyth,” perhaps best typified by his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  This is stuff I realized as a postgrad student—Campbell didn’t footnote much and as Bond and Christensen note,  he “cherry picked” examples rather than looking at myths in context.

Image credit: Joan Halifax, via Wikimedia Commons (via Flickr)

One of my observations, when it comes to movies, is that people take their truths from movies, like they’re modern myths.  In other words, although Campbell’s method may’ve been faulty, he gave us Star Wars and the rest is history.  I rest on the horns of this dilemma.  My dissertation (and consequent first book) on Asherah was based on the idea of contextualizing myths.  In other words, I was arguing against a monomyth.  At the same time I’ve come to see that scholars don’t determine what people believe—culture does.  Consider how distorted the “Christianity” of Trump supporters is and you’ll see what I mean.  People don’t read scholars to find these things out.  Besides, wasn’t Campbell an academic?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Without reaching out to the masses, academia turns in smaller and smaller circles.  Many of us who desperately want to be in its ranks are turned away because there just aren’t enough jobs.  At the same time, people will go to movies and they will be exposed to the monomyth, and they may even build their lives around it.  Isn’t that a way of becoming true?  Mythology, despite popular perception, is a complex subject.  There’s a lot going on in what may appear to be simple, or even naive, stories.  They have similar themes, but as I was warned—stay away from that other great popularizer of folklore, James Frazer.  His “parallelomania” was also out of control.  But Frazer and Campbell both understood something that those long in the academy often forget—people are hungry for stories that give meaning to their lives.  And these stories, even if academically questionable, become truth.

Not Precisely Superstition

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It is quite fashionable, among some scientists, to equate religion with superstition.  The two, unlike religion and magic, are quite different.  They both involve belief, but, guess what?  So does science.  Superstition might best be summarized as traditional causality with no evidence, such as a black cat crossing your path causing bad luck.  Religion, on the other hand, tends to be a system of beliefs which, unless treated superficially, don’t look for causality as much as for meaning.  Superstition can be quite persistent.  It’s something that’s picked up in an ad hoc manner.  For example, I knew nothing of horseshoes growing up, apart from the very, very occasional game.  It wan’t until my mid-to-late teens that I heard my step-father say that an upside-down horseshoe was bad luck when hung on the wall of a building.

I had assumed that I had heard most of the relevant superstitions well before then.  I didn’t really believe any of them and they all seemed to be about luck, something I definitely didn’t believe in.  I was quite religious, after all.  I could tell the difference between religion—definitely true—and superstition.  Superstition was hearsay, or folk belief.  Never divinely revealed.  The thing about superstition is that it plants a doubt that never quite goes away.  Even if you didn’t believe it in the first place.  Say you break a mirror.  Seven years is a long time for bad luck to hit.  Any time something bad happens to you after said breakage, you naturally wonder.  Was it because of that mirror?

Good and bad happen to us all the time.  They are generally a matter of perspective.  A broken mirror means you may need to buy a new mirror, but it also means a seed a doubt will always be there for as long as you recall when you broke it.  You may naturally link the causality to the event, even when they have nothing to do with one another.  That’s the nature of superstition.  Some religions share some traits with this form of thinking, but entire systems or religion are seldom based on superstitions.  Black cats, mirrors, ladders, rabbits’ feet, four-leafed clovers—in what way would such things influence the world around them?  Yes, some religions attempt that as well, but many do not.  Like fear and religion, superstition has many overlaps but isn’t precisely the same thing.  Religion should be examined critically—it’s simply what humans do.  It shouldn’t be, however, be considered simple superstition.  Perhaps its bad luck to do so.

Bookshop

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I still remember when I first heard of Amazon.  It was getting on in my years at Nashotah House and one of my students, a former university faculty member that I’d know prior to his decision to attend seminary, mentioned that’s where he ordered books.  I used the internet with caution in those days and I still ordered books by mail directly from publishers.  My library grew slowly back then, in part because faculty pay wasn’t exactly competitive.  Amazon quickly grew to the point that it became a household word, and, like Google, became an internet giant.  Publishers have felt the pressure from Amazon’s bargaining power and, arguably, its market dominance led to the downfall of Borders.  Despite my love of independent bookshops, I do miss Borders still.

I don’t have a similar, singular memory about Bookshop.org.  It may very well be because I found out about it online and studies have shown that online learning is less effective than the old fashioned way.  We put up with it because it’s convenient and we can cram more stuff in that way.  It’s all about getting more.  In any case, I do recall that I was impressed with what Bookshop was doing.  At a recent seminar I learned it was even better than I’d previously heard.  The organization supports independent bookstores so that when things become more normal again they’ll still be there.  The book industry is a rather strange one, and it operates a little differently than many others.  Places like Bookshop really do help when one vendor becomes too dominant.

Reading widely is a form of education, and the key, it seems to me, is to get books people find interesting to them.  I stopped by a local independent on a recent Saturday to find it quite full.  The weather was good, of course, and lots of people were out and about.  Still, nothing is quite as encouraging as finding a bookstore doing good business.  When that happens it’s clear society is improving itself.  I’m trying to make a habit of stopping by Bookshop before the default of ordering on Amazon.  Amazon clearly has the logistics of delivery down to a science, but the world is a less rich place for not having physical bookstores in it.  Making one’s name synonymous with the product on offer is a sign of success, at least on the business side.  Balance, however, is important too.  And that’s where the Bookshop story has to fit.

Moral Compass

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Where have all the morals gone?  Well, not exactly song-worthy, but it is a question I think about a lot.  You see, I work in publishing.  Publishing, above all, is a business.  People make their livelihood at it, and so they have to find a market that pays.  Money and morals don’t mix well.  A recent New York Times story pointed out that the political polarization that’s tearing America apart is reflected in bestsellers.  Political nonfiction bestsellers have topped the charts since Trump was unfortunately elected.  Books both pro and con have flooded the market.  What’s this got to do with morals?  Well, I believe publishing should be in the business of educating.  If you’re going to publish nonfiction, it should be material that doesn’t cause more problems than it helps solve.

When I look at a book, after checking the title and author, I next look at the publisher.  Some publishers are conservative, and that’s fine.  That’s what they do.  Most, however, consist of highly educated professionals who realize the severe, and continuing damage that Trump caused.  These publishers, however, will produce pro-Trump books if the numbers look good.  There’s gold in them thar hills!  I often have these scruples working for an academic press.  Some ideas are clearly distorted.  I’m no elitist—I’m still pretty much working-class all the way down to the bones—but education reveals when something very bad (fascism) is happening.  Others see it too.  Still, the temptation of all those dollars… it’s a real pressure, almost like being at the bottom of the ocean.  There’s money pressing on us and we want it.

The gray lady story bothered me.  Instead of publishers looking out their windows and seeing the political grand canyon of this nation, they see profits.  This is business, after all.  Just business.  Is there any such thing?  Morality informs the way you live, the choices you make.  Do I promote education, reflection, and sound reasoning or do I promote a very real 2024 threat of a man who leads by refusing to lead?  After elected Trump immediately began campaigning for his next term, loving the rallies, the cheers, the adulation.  Who doesn’t want to be worshiped?  But is that what we want to see three Novembers from now?  I remember the shock the morning after election day 2016 in New York City.  I see the damage four years of environmental degradation caused just when the effects of global warming were becoming obvious.  I see women demeaned.  I see voting rights quashed.  And now I look at the bestseller list and wonder where the morals have gone.

Existential Horror

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It’s a strange and disturbing novel.  I leaned about Kathe Koja’s The Cipher from a book about women horror writers that I read some time ago.  I figured I’d get around to reading it eventually and now that I have I’m wondering what I just read.  In that regard it reminds me of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which I really didn’t find that scary.  The thing about Koja’s novel is that it leaves you feeling empty.  It is perhaps the most nihilistic fiction I’ve ever read.  A slow build to nowhere and really no explanation either.  If you like your coffee dark, this is a story for you.  It’s a story of slow decline and loss of self.  In that respect it’s pretty scary.

One of the points I made in Holy Horror—although it’s about movies instead of books the same principle applies—is that different things scare different people.  The Cipher is existential horror.  There really aren’t any moments of sudden gasps of surprise—this is a train you can see coming—but that doesn’t mean the inevitable is pleasant.  My edition comes with an afterword by Maryse Meijer that really helped name the horror.  There are no heroes here, as she points out.  These are characters who get themselves into bad situations and sometimes don’t even know why they do what they do.  As I said, this is existential horror.  It all swirls around an unexplained “Funhole” that takes over the characters’ lives.

Everyone in this book is working class and creative.  They don’t find any recognition, of course, because that’s the way of working class life.  They do, however, find meaning in the art they make, after work.  Indeed, as everyone gets more and more drawn toward the Funhole one of the worries that constantly hangs over their heads in the face of sometime truly supernatural, is work.  When to quit your job because something not natural is taking over your life?  Who’s going to pay the rent?  In my own existential crises, I often think that capitalism with it’s unvarying nine-to-five certainly doesn’t help.  When something extraordinary happens, you’d better hope it’s not during a weekday, or if it is you’d better have some vacation days you can cash in.  So it is that the young characters here, drinking and dreaming, have to come up with some way of dealing with an unexpected existential threat.  I’m trying not to give too much away.  This is unlike any other horror story I’ve ever read.

Al’s Rhythm

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Algorithms.  Who can understand them?  I’ve been having some trouble with searches lately.  Not on the internet in general, but on specific websites (including this one).  While Sects and Violence in the Ancient World isn’t a particularly media-heavy site, I find it difficult to find images by searching.  For some reason, even when I put the title of the image in the WordPress search bar, it doesn’t always come up with the answer.  Well, given the time of morning I suppose I might’ve misspelled something.  Then I went to Amazon.  I’ve been working on my author page and wanted to update something.  I tried typing the distinctive title of my most recent book (Nightmares with the Bible—it is apparently the only actual book with that title [and titles can’t be copyrighted, in case you’re interested]) and found that it didn’t show up on the first three pages.  They were filled with books with other titles.  Algorithms.

Now granted not a lot of people seek the book on Amazon (I’m a realist), but if you type an exact, and unique title in the search bar and it doesn’t come up, isn’t something wrong with your algorithm?  (By the way, algorithm is one of the many words English borrows from Arabic.  It’s named after a ninth-century mathematician, al-Khwārizmī.  You could do worse than to have something so useful named after you!)  I’m not so naive as to think Amazon isn’t thinking to throw better selling books at you first—if you’re like others you’ll buy those before you’d consider shelling out a Franklin for mine.  But still, isn’t searching made easier when what you enter is what you want to find?

The internet’s primarily about selling you stuff.  Some of us look up sites for information or entertainment, but then someone tries to sell you something.  (I’m not trying to sell you my book here, by the way—it’s not priced for individuals, or even mortals—I’m not even putting a link to it on Amazon here.)  I’m just wondering why, if you tell websites exactly what you’re looking for they can’t find it.  You have to wonder if we’ve reached the level of too much stuff.  There’s a lot of sorting to be done and new webpages are added every day.  Even though I’ve been writing here a dozen years now, there are far older blogs and many more newer ones.  Finding things is an important exercise, and maybe if we sit down with al-Khwārizmī for a while, we’ll be able to figure something out.

Image credit: Gregor Reisch via Wikimedia Commons

Still Too Close

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Parody is sometimes the best way to deal with a crisis situation.  As soon as I learned that Alexandra Petri had come out with a new book I was eager to read it.  Her last book, which I reviewed here some years ago, was such a delight—sharp and funny—that I fell in love with her writing.  Although she works for the Washington Post, I don’t regularly read newspapers (no time, if I want to read books) and therefore I don’t get regular doses.  Nothing is Wrong and Here Is Why is clearly a book written in a time of national crisis.  Yes, it’s funny, but the wound of the Trump years is still too raw to be able to laugh much about it.  Too many of his followers still don’t realize they were (are) being played and want him back.  It’s scary.

The first, and longest, section of the book are essays about the absolute ridiculousness of life under Trump.  It was a difficult and dangerous time for thinking people and although Petri excels as a satirical writer, the freshness of the terror—look at the Taliban and see if they are laughing—is just a little too intense.  Petri makes a great case for giving female leadership a try.  Any candidate, no matter which party, needs to know how the game is played.  And they must care about other people.  A pathological narcissist has no business being president of anything, let alone a democracy.  If you’re not familiar with satirical writing you’ll misunderstand just about everything Petri writes.

Once she gets beyond the section about Trump (shudder), the essays start to pick up some topics that it’s possible to laugh about.  Some of them are quite funny.  Although I enjoyed the book—when I started to put it down to get ready for work each morning I found myself saying, “I’ll read just one more.”  And three or four essays later I’d find myself rushing upstairs nearly late.  If it hadn’t been for the national tragedy called Trump, Petri’s second book might’ve been funny from the start.  Parody can be a defense mechanism.  At times things are just too painful to bear and those of us who write find ourselves doing our best to keep the mood light while society crumbles around us.  When things are ridiculous laughter is really what we need most.  We’re lucky to have Petri to provide it.  Here is why—she can bring a smile, or at least a smirk, even in a crisis.