Reading 2023

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As has become my tradition, I’ll end the year reflecting on the books I’ve read.  For a variety of reasons this is the first time in nine years that I haven’t cleared seventy books.  (I ended up one shy.)  But looking back over what I read, I may see some logic behind this.  Many of the books were academic, and specifically, academic in fields outside my formal training.  That also means they generally didn’t make it to my list of favorites.  2023 was also unusual in that it wasn’t until about late spring that I started to read books I really enjoyed.  The first on my list of memorable titles is Andi Marquette’s The Secret of Sleepy Hollow.  This was followed by a couple other fiction titles, Grady Hendrix’s Final Girl Support Group and Gina Chung’s Sea Change.  Those ended up being my favorite three fiction titles of the year.

For nonfiction, I finally read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, memorable, if terrifying.  Also along the lines of history, I found Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s two books Halloween and Halloween Nation, to be particularly good.  Mark Dawidziak’s Mystery of Mysteries may well have been my favorite historically-oriented book of the year.  Donna Kornhaber’s Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction was also quite well done.  I always enjoy books on horror films, and two on The Exorcist were noteworthy: Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy and The Exorcist Effect by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson.  Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies by Matthew Strohl, which I read a bit earlier in the year was also quite good.  By far the most helpful book in a personally troubling year was The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.

In years past I’ve generally had more commendable books on my list.  I did, however, finish the last three Dark Shadow’s novels by Marylin Ross, reaching the bucket-list item of having read the entire series.  I also found Jessica Verday’s three-volume series strangely memorable, although written for young adults (found here, here, and here).  While the number of books I really enjoyed wasn’t as high as in some other years, these highlights make me optimistic regarding 2024.  I used to follow the Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge guidelines, until they stopped being published, and now I find myself left to my own devices, for the most part.  Much of my reading is driven by research, and I suppose I should also mention that my own fifth book was published in 2023 as well.  I don’t expect it’ll be anybody’s favorite, but it is nevertheless an honor to be part of the conversation.

Self Reflection

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The desire, for some people, is very strong.  The need to record one’s life in words can be undertaken for any number of very human reasons.  Perhaps we want our descendants to know who we were.  Maybe we have a message that we’re trying to give to a world reluctant to listen.  Some may just want to brag.  Now I have to confess that, like most kids of my vintage, Hanna-Barbera cartoons were standard fare in my childhood.  I personally preferred those of Warner Bros., but like a typical addict, any fix will do.  I watched The Flintstones, The Jetsons, but preferred Scooby-Doo and Johnny Quest.  They all had Hanna-Barbera in common.  Bill Hanna published his autobiography, A Cast of Friends, in 1996 and I was curious.  I located a used copy and realized something right off—here was a guy who had a knack for leaving out the best parts of the story. Perhaps it was a cartoonist’s desire to look for the fun?

We generally read autobiographies to learn about the struggles faced, the odds stacked against someone that they somehow overcame.  Often with lingering trauma.  To hear Bill Hanna tell it, his was a bland life with a stable upbringing, good career breaks, and commercial success that led to wealthy old age.  Throughout the narrative there are hints that more was going on behind the scenes, but the carefully controlled image of the Boy Scout who ended up accomplishing much with few obstacles to face prevails.  Image control is also, I suppose, a major reason for indulging in autobiography.  Getting the job you want with minimal drama, however, makes me think there’s something more to why this autobiography was written.  That said, I learned quite a bit about the early animation business—my reason for reading it in the first place. 

Before my mother’s death, I had urged her to write her life story.  There was plenty of drama there, and a strong desire to keep going, for her kids.  Her father, her personal hero and therefore one of mine also, led an interesting life that he summarized in about four pages for his children.  Apart from one or two words I can’t make out in his handwriting, I devoured it with fascination.  He pointed out the oddities, the unexpected things.  Elements that make for an interesting life.  I got the sense from this brief book that more was left unsaid than was being revealed.  Of course, some personality types tend to remember only the positive.  And I suppose that’s cause for rejoicing.  Some of the rest of us, however, wonder about what’s beneath the surface.  Unless someone records it, however, we’ll never know.

Dryad?

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There are so many movies out there.  The prudent horror fan knows not to be nickeled and dimed to death by renting/buying everything available, so you stick with a streaming service and take what they offer.  That’s how I find many of the movies I discuss on this blog.  It’s how I found Ayla.  You won’t find much information on this indie, art-house horror beyond IMDb, and it doesn’t say much.  Although the ratings are low the premise is good and it is beautifully filmed.  It is a little weird, though.  Elton, a mentally disturbed man, has never gotten over the death of his sister when she was four.  He supports himself by working in a bookstore and has a regular girlfriend, Alex, but he hasn’t let his sister go.  Going to a remote, dilapidated house that Alex showed him, he digs under a tree until he finds an adult Ayla.

Ayla’s alive but she doesn’t talk and can’t tolerate solid food.  She seems to be part of the tree where Elton found her.  His brother and mother tell him this woman isn’t his sister.  Alex, who lost a brother when she was a child, doesn’t say whether Ayla’s Elton’s sister or not.  Accepting that this woman now lives with him, she’s just not sure if the dead do come back.  Elton quits his job and tries to move home with his mother, but it doesn’t work out.  While driving at night, Ayla, ahem, distracts him, and his car hits a tree.  Elton understands that Ayla has returned to the tree and begins digging for her, but doesn’t find her.  Alex finds evidence that Elton has begun to turn into whatever it was “Ayla” is.

Apart from being a study of grief—very much like A Ghost Story in that way—Ayla also explores mental illness and incest.  This is done with a high degree of artistry, however.  Those who rate the movie poorly probably haven’t considered metaphors much.  To me, there’s a lot going on in this film.  It’s the kind of movie where you want to talk to somebody about it after it’s over.  Was Ayla really a dryad?  She’s found in a nymph (insect variety) state and quickly transforms to, apparently, Elton’s missing sister.  Meanwhile, his family doesn’t give him the affirmation he requires.  Metaphorically, it seems, like Outpost, to be a movie about dealing with trauma.  Such films are well worth watching and pondering.  And they make me thankful for streaming services that occasionally bring good, if obscure, movies to light.

Not Tomorrow

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Two of the sweetest words I know are, in the context of a vacation, “not tomorrow.”  They’re especially sweet after you’ve had a couple days off and you start feeling anxious that time is running out, only to realize that although work will start again soon it’s “not tomorrow.”  You have another day when you can stay in your pajamas, read, watch movies, or, if you’re a certain personality type, write.  Or play games, put a puzzle together, visit friends.  Whatever it is you do to find meaning in life outside work.  Outside academia I’ve never worked for a company that gave more than one day itself for the Christmas holiday.  (Two, if you count New Year’s Day, but that’s technically on next year’s meager holiday tally sheet.)

Each year I cash in vacation days so that I can feel “not tomorrow” more than a day or two in a row.  One of the more depressing recollections I remember is climbing onto an empty bus well before sunrise to commute to an otherwise empty office my first December working for Routledge since I hadn’t accrued enough vacation to take the week off.  I’ve worked for two British companies and it doesn’t help knowing our colleagues in the UK automatically have that week off.  Colonials, however, have far fewer holidays, and if that means trooping to the office for form’s sake, so be it.  Very few people answer their emails between Christmas and New Year’s.  Her majesty’s realm thrived for my presence, I’m sure.

The pandemic has taught us that many, if not most, workers are self-motivated when not confined to an office.  We also know that the United States has the lowest life span among developed nations, and my guess is that one contributing factor is that we don’t have enough “not tomorrows” until it becomes literally true.  Life is a gift, and spending it doing the things we value is something we tend to deny ourselves in the hopes that someday we might retire.  Many companies have begun to cap the number of vacation days you can accrue at numbers so low that the year looks like a desert from January through late November.  It’s that stretch of “tomorrow is a work day” punctuated by weekends so vapid that they vanish by the time errands you can’t do during the week are done.  Why have we done this to ourselves?  For me personally, I only have two more regular work days off.  I’m beginning to feel anxious about it.  Then I tell myself that, for today at least, although I have to start work again soon, it’s not tomorrow.

Ushering In the New

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I’m not at all certain I’ll finish it, but at my daughter’s suggestion I watched the first episode of Netflix’s new series, The Fall of the House of Usher.  This isn’t set in Poe’s day.  The action is in the present and it opens with a funeral for three of Roderick Usher’s children.  What’s particularly striking about this funeral is that the priest’s homily is composed of lines from Poe.  I think we all know that Poe is undergoing a great surge of popularity these days, but this series seems not content just to name characters and companies after Poe’s names, but it also weaves his thought deeply into the fabric.  It uses his images in literal ways that add depth to the plot.  I’m not sure that I can spare the time to watch it the whole way through, but I’m sorely tempted to do so.

With C. August Dupin as the Assistant District Attorney, the series ties Poe’s ratiocination stories in with his horror tales.  Like most recent media efforts, the cast reflects diversity in many ways.  This diversity isn’t the reason the house of Usher is falling, but it’s because of disloyalty.  The family owns an unscrupulous company that has shown disregard for the suffering it causes, buying its way out of legal difficulties.  (This part is quite realistic and one can’t help but to think of Trump and others like him who simply buy injustice.)  But someone in the Usher family has decided to speak out.  Dupin won’t reveal who it is, so Roderick and Madeline Usher put the family up to the task of rooting out, and killing, the informant.

Perhaps with some time off over the holidays I’ll be able to catch more of the series.  It intrigues me, however, that Poe is being used essentially as scripture.  Literally.  The priest’s homily fades into the background as the surviving family members check in on each other, but his words are drawn from a variety of Poe’s writings.  I’ve long felt that our canon of scripture is too small.  Inspired literature did not cease to be written in the second century.  As someone who has listened, and still listens to sermons, it’s clear that the Bible alone isn’t a source for knowledge.  I haven’t read all of Poe—he left a massive paper trail through his life—but what I’ve read sticks with me and hearing him as sermon material makes me think I need to try to find time in coming weeks to pick up another episode or two.

Boxing

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Christmas is too large for just one day.  I know that, of course, not everyone can take a string of days off work.  I realize there are people who work Christmas day.  For the rank and file of us drones, however, who sit in front of computers 9-2-5 making money for “the company,” this season should be a respite.  The day after Christmas goes by many names—the second day of Christmas, the feast of St. Stephen, Boxing Day.  Christmas, like ancient Roman winter festivals, couldn’t be contained in a single day.  For me, being a professor meant living life in semesters.  And semesters had breaks that included a couple weeks in December to regain your bearings.  To me, that remains how it should be.  So we continue to celebrate Christmas another day.  We do so without an agenda.  We do so by relearning how to relax.

Mental work is harder than it looks.  The work day takes up so much time that when I finally have a few days off I wonder how I ever get things done for the rest of the year.  Out of necessity, obviously.  You have to work.  You have to mow the lawn.  You have to visit the tax guy in tax season.  And so on.  I’ve been reading about bees lately.  They’re a lot more intelligent than people tend to think.  The hive mind has its own logic.  Still, worker bees literally work themselves to death.  Lifespans are measured in weeks.  It’s the price they pay for the success of the life of the hive.  And when, after a few years a queen dies, changes take place that make a worker a new queen.  The hive can continue.

Humans aren’t bees, of course.  Our society has different values.  We investigate when any of our species dies under mysterious circumstances, believing that all have certain rights.  (War, of course, cancels those rights, but we think and dream of peace during the Christmas season.)  Since the Christmas season remains with us but a few days each year, it makes sense to me that we build in some time for the drones and workers to recharge.  Across much of the world Boxing Day is a bank holiday—a day off work.  A time when the hive isn’t so worried about the concerns that mark most of the other days of the year.  Holidays are important.  They make us human.  As much as I appreciate bees, even the hive hibernates during winter.  Let’s give Christmas its due.

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

Christmas Silence

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Christmas seems to have come too fast and not fast enough this year.  Like Halloween, it’s one of those long anticipation holidays.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the silence about it.  Not in a Grinch-like way, I hope.  More along the lines of “Silent Night.”  We spend so much of the year—so much of our lives—hustling about, barely having time to think.  Speaking personally, it takes about a week off work just to begin to get to that phase.  I need time to let the daily onslaught of work and capitalism and angst tune down.  There’s a quietness about Christmas that’s profound.  I suppose that’s why I like to spend it with my small family and not feeling obligated to go anywhere.  It’s like those precious moments before sunrise that I experience daily, only all day long.  That’s truly a gift.

The newspapers and internet sites have been summarizing the year for the last couple of weeks.  That always seems premature to me.  I understand why they do it, but Christmas and the days following are some of the very best of the year, and it makes sense to include those along with the stress, darkness, and ugliness that are the daily headlines.  I can’t help but think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.”  Especially this year.  Christmas is for everyone, and the insistence that we make it exclusive (putting Christ back into it) makes it divisive.  Why some people have to be right all the time I don’t know.  I prefer Hamilton Wright Mabie’s take: “Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”  Simon and Garfunkel are both Jewish and I think they understood “Silent Night” better than many Christians did back in 1966.

I’ve been writing quite a lot about horror movies this year.  The months and days leading up to Christmas have often been difficult ones.  Such movies are therapy.  They can even fit into the beautiful silence of this day.  That’s my hope, anyway.  May this day include enough silence for you.  The rest of the year has no difficulty filling itself with trouble.  We need holidays.  Christmas has always struck me as the most peaceful of them all.  Ministers, and even those of us who never made the cut, tend to be holiday experts.  Those who don’t get caught up in the dogmatism of it all are the most blessed.  Christmas is for everyone.  And may it be peaceful this year.

Morning Reflections

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Morning thoughts are different from evening thoughts.  As we spin recklessly through the blackness of space on this globe, we really have no idea how consciousness works.  We assume, unless some “pathology” is present, that personalities are stable.  But we also think differently at differing times of the day.  I’ve long observed this as the work day progresses.  Anxiety tends to ratchet up during the afternoon, sometimes getting a head start in the morning.  Of course, all of it will depend on whether I slept well and have rebooted properly.  So the person you encounter when you see me will depend on when it is you come calling.  Many people prefer to know someone is coming.  Not only does it give you time to groom for the role you’re going to play, but it also allows you to prepare mentally.

I don’t see many people in the course of a day.  My job is such that I do not regularly have lots of meetings—sometimes going days without any.  During those times the only person I regularly see is my wife.  She’s more aware than most that my morning thoughts are different than my latter-day thoughts.  Those who think of me as a pessimist mostly know the me that’s been awake for several hours.  The morning me is generally optimistic.  And productive.  That cycle for me may begin a few hours before others awake, but it’s characterized by, in a word, inspiration.  The whetstone of a day grinds you down without always making you any sharper.  The problems of work are generally other people’s problems, but without the benefit of seeing them.  And I wonder, at what stage of morning to evening thinking are they?  That changes things.

Thinking is something that is constant.  It doesn’t slow down much, until the afternoon drowsies (with all that that implies—think carefully), but when it picks up again it’s quite different than morning thinking.  I tend to do my writing in the morning.  The freshness is important.  I realize others are on different timetables and at different points in their thinking day.  I wonder how much this has been studied by experts.  Me, I’m an amateur thinker.  I have some formal training in philosophy, but not as much as the professionals do.  I’m more of an experiencer.  An experiencer trying to make sense of life—or to assign it some meaning to help me get through the changes the day inevitably imposes on my thought process.  There’s a reason we appreciate sunrises on this wildly spinning planet, and it has something to do with the way we think in the morning.

Bears Repeating

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I read Robert C. Wilson’s Crooked Tree before I began this blog, I guess.  I remembered it being better than it seemed this time around, but it works as a horror novel.  In fact, the first third or so was quite unnerving, although I’d read it before.  After that the plot tends to require greater suspension of belief.  But then again, American Indian horror has come a long way since then.  Wilson, according to the limited information about him online, isn’t an Indian.  These days publishers are very concerned with appropriation—something that wasn’t an issue back in 1980.  And these days the work of Stephen Graham Jones, who is both a Blackfoot and an excellent horror writer, raises the bar considerably.  But Wilson is honest about the situation in his laying out of the novel.

Axel Michelson is a lawyer and he’s working to preserve the fictional Crooked Tree State Forest and prevent development.  Many of his colleagues and neighbors in Michigan are Indians, and so is his wife.  Axel’s efforts are hampered by a sudden onslaught of black bear attacks.  The description of the first three or four are scary enough to dissuade you from ever going camping again.  Axel’s assistant is an Ottawa and and he and his family suspect a bearwalk is involved.  This is the reason I read the novel the first time.  As a Native American folkloric monster, the bearwalk is difficult to uncover.  There are a couple more novels—one of them hard to find—that feature the tales, and there’s a university press book on folklore that has some accounts.  Not much more is out there that I can locate.

A bearwalk is a kind of shape-shifter.  A spirit that can control bears, in this case.  Axel becomes the white savior who uncovers the ancient ritual to stop the bearwalk, which has taken control of his wife—his main motivation for stopping it—while the Indians can’t figure out what to do about it.  They do tell him about the ritual, but mourning the loss of their culture, they fear it’s gone forever.  Meanwhile the bear attacks continue but once the shock of the first few attacks has worn off, they don’t scare so much.  There’s also a lot of supernatural involved, mostly drawn from native traditions.  It seems clear that, like Axel, Wilson did quite a bit of research on American Indian folklore.  He treats the Ottawa culture with respect and wrote a novel that might’ve had more influence than it seems. It’s well worth the read the first time around.

Movie Ancestors

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I’ve read quite a few Very Short Introductions, but this one struck me as particularly good.  Donna Kornhaber knows how to write for non-specialists, and she knows how to single out what’s interesting in the vast collective known as Silent Film.  As is the series trademark, this book is very brief, but it covers the essentials.  Kornhaber divides the silent film era, roughly 1895 to 1927, into three periods: early cinema, the transitional period, and the classic era.  During each of these, new developments demonstrated the sophistication of the industry and groundwork was laid for cinema as we know it today.  I learned quite a lot from this short treatment—so much that it’s difficult to know how to summarize it here.  Of course, it’s short so you can read it for yourself if you’d like to learn more. 

Perhaps what stood out to me the most was the correction of a misperception that, I hope, is not unique to me alone.  I’ve always thought of silent films as being grainy, poorly exposed, and choppy when showing people’s movements.  Kornhaber explains that most movies were of sound quality in their day, when projected properly.  Early film stock deteriorates, however, and not all stock was properly preserved.  This accounts for the graininess and the sometimes “overexposed” look of such films.  Even modern projectionists don’t use the proper speed and that leads to choppy motion.  In their own day, and with film handled by people who knew their business, early movie goers would have experienced realistic, well-rendered images.   These issues are our issues, not those of the original footage.

Another feature of the book is its focus on diversity in filmmaking.  Early silent film was dominated by France and the United States, but several other nations contributed to what we now think of as standard elements of cinema.  And the fact is that until sound was introduced many women played important roles in the development of what we expect from films.  Women directed.  Became business-savvy.  Ran their own studios.  Once the industry established itself as particularly lucrative, men began to edge women out.  The majority of early films—Kornhaber suggests around 80%—were lost as studios saw no reason to preserve them once “talkies” were the way to make money.  Consequently we’ve lost a good part of that early history.  We pretty much take movies for granted.  We can stream them any time, and we know what to expect (roughly, anyway).  What we don’t often consider is how much we owe to those who established what the movie-going experience should be, and did so before sound was added to the mix.

Running out of Time

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How can you let a solstice slip past without noticing it?  Admittedly, it’s sometimes easy to do in summer, but for the winter solstice it’s more serious.  Ironically for me, the issue is that I’m still a jogger.  When you start your work day early, and you try to jog before work, the shortness of the day works against you.  Even if you prefer the after-work jog, December and January give you that perpetual feeling that you’re running out of time.  Each year around about now I look at charts.  Some organizations helpfully publish sunrise and sunset charts free on the internet.  I trace them to see when there will be enough light to jog in the morning.  Because of the offset between latest sunrise and earliest sunset, the evenings have been getting microscopically longer for a couple weeks now.  Sunrises, however, are still coming later.  They’ll continue to do so until about mid-January.

For those of us who parse out our days into minutes, trying to feed the beast that requires our utter devotion, finding time to jog can be difficult.  It’s dark after work, and besides, I’m exhausted and hungry by then and need to start on supper.  Morning’s an easier thing to control.  With pagan fervor I await the lengthening days.  Particularly the early mornings, which I crave to be earlier again.  So we light a Yule log and pray for the best.  Not that it ever changes sunrise times.  Around here there’ve been a couple of epic December rainstorms and cloudy days push available light back even further.  With the sun technically risen, it can still be dark.  There’s a metaphor here, dear reader.

Winters are for reflection.  Unless we’re busy cramming each day full of seasonal festivities, we spend a lot of time indoors with our thoughts.  That’s one of the reasons I jog.  It clears my head.  It’s the reboot that comes after the reboot of a night’s rest.  I’ve generally been awake for hours before sunrise.  These little thoughts I share with you daily are courtesy of those quiet moments in the dark.  A winter is wasted if we don’t use it for reflection.  Employers should be more generous with their December holidays.  It’s in sync with nature, which is more in keeping with being human than “business,” or “busyness” is.  Today is the winter solstice.  Around sunset we will light some candles of hope.  And we know that even if we can’t really tell, tomorrow will have a bit more light than today.

Which Love

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Perhaps some content creators use genre as a guide when writing, or when filming a movie.  Some categories are pretty well defined—the western, the romance, or in writing specifically, the literary.  Others are less easily settled.  Horror is particularly slippery.  Although The Love Witch was an interesting story with a feminist message, the horror trappings weren’t entirely obvious.  In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of The Wicker Man.  (Not in any literal way, of course.)  Afterward I read that it is also a comedy and that helped make sense of it.  It gets generally high marks although, to me, the acting seemed pretty wooden.  The Love Witch follows Elaine, a young, present-day witch, who’s moving to a small town in California that tolerates witches.  Her husband has recently died and flashbacks imply that Elaine may not have been entirely innocent in the matter.

Once she settles in Arcata, she starts looking for her “prince charming” as she continues to practice the craft.  She finds an emotionally unstable professor who take her home readily enough, but he quickly proves to be too needy.  Part of this is because he took a love potion she gave him.  He dies that very weekend.  Elaine seems less than distraught as she buries him and begins seeking the next possibility.  The husband of a friend comes over when the friend is out of town and he too proves emotionally immature.  After their affair he dies by suicide.  A policeman investigating the missing professor comes to suspect Elaine, but he too feels drawn to her.  The locals, meanwhile, aren’t as witch-friendly as they seem.  They riot in a burlesque club, chanting, “Burn the witch, burn the witch!”  I won’t spoil the ending.

I was watching all of this with the genre “horror” in my mind.  I’d not seen it labeled as “comedy,” and, as an art film there’s nothing so crude as a laughter track or cheesy and obvious comic music.  Instead, the film is an example of “the female gaze.”  Film analysts, and even religion scholars, have long written about “the male gaze,” which looks at women a certain way.  This movie’s writer, director, and producer, Anna Biller, experiments with the female gaze instead.  The results for some men, I suspect, are disturbing.  They certainly aren’t in control in this film.  Retro in execution, it’s unlike most other horror I’ve watched.  Unusual for the genre, the critics responded well to it.  It was a fun flick, but I’m still not sure how wide “horror” stretches, but I do sense that it’s quite inclusive.  And I applaud the female empowerment on display, even if I’m confused.

Modern Gnostics

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It’s not exactly a standard church.  At least I don’t think it is, but I’m just learning.  (That’s my life’s motto—I’m just learning.)  A convoluted path brought me to the Gnostic Catholic Union’s website.  I’m quite curious about this group.  I’m kind of busy, however, and I’ll hope to come back to it later.  You see, Gnosticism and Catholicism don’t sit easily together in my mind.  There’s a standard myth, accepted by many, that Christianity grew in linear fashion from Jesus through today’s weaponized Evangelical.  Or today’s Roman Catholic.  Or today’s—you fill in the blank—denomination.  Those of us who study the history or religions know the story is much more complicated than that.  It’s more like cladistics than theology.

It wasn’t so simple as a baby born in a manger.  Christianities were a variety of thought pools (not quite think tanks) in the first century.  There was a mix of Jewish ideas and messianic fervor.  One of those pools developed into a type of Christianity known as Gnosticism.  Gnosticism also had branches but one of the main ideas was that only initiates know a hidden knowledge necessary to make it work.  We still see this at play in both religious and secular organizations.  You need to know the secret handshake to be on the winning team.  Meanwhile different Christianities grew different ideas.  We rather simplistically think that Constantine unified them at the Council of Nicaea but you can bet that the guys leaving the council room did so with different ideas on the way home.

Roman Catholicism today is a very diverse religion.  You see, religious identity is something you tend to be born into.  Many people never question it because they’ve got other things to do with their lives.  Still, if you look you can see just how different “Catholics” can be.  It’s perhaps ironic because “catholic” means “universal.”  What’s really universal, however, is that people think differently about religion.  It’s the human condition.  There’s no reason a person can’t be both Gnostic and Catholic, just like there’s no reason you can’t be, say, a Unitarian-Universalist and a Hindu.  Religion is perhaps the most misunderstood of human enterprises.  Since most of us are too busy with other things we hire experts to tell us what to believe.  When enough of these experts are close enough in thought a denomination is born.  And it has many, many siblings.  I ran across the Gnostic Catholic Union quite by accident, but even those of us who are religionists by profession have limited time for everything.  I’m just learning.

Sights of Silence

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To an historian who cut his teeth on deep antiquity (if circumstances were different I would’ve ended up a Sumerologist), my current fascination with film feels manageable.  The form of communication we call “movies” really only began around 1895.  For those of us who find 1000 BCE a bit too modern, the nineteenth century seems strangely contemporary.  Simon Popple and Joe Kember offer a service, therefore, by giving us a Short Cuts on Early Cinema.  I’ve never formally studied cinematography, of course.  I have watched movies my entire life—grew up with them—and have learned to write about them (with some degree of intelligence, I hope!).  The history of the industry itself is fascinating.  Short Cuts are written for students, and this one covers the first twenty years of cinema, 1895–1914.  The cutoff coincides with the start of World War One, although not the introduction of sound, but it works nevertheless.

Although I learned a lot from this little book, the writing was sometimes verging on the technical.  Also, and this is a personal pet peeve, many of the paragraphs were too long.  This is an academic epidemic, not applying to this book only.  Look, I know the whole topic sentence and development thing, but paragraphs may be divided in different places, hopefully compelling the reader on.  When I see books intended for “general readers” with a wall of unbroken left margin, I shudder.  Give the eye a break.  This little digression shouldn’t be taken to imply that this book does it a lot, but there are some long paragraphs and they can make you lose your way.  In any case, there’s lots of good info here to balance out the occasional academic framing.

I especially found useful the year-by-year breakdown of major development in the early film industry.  Movies required quite a few breakthroughs, not the least of which was photography itself and also film stock that could be measured in hundreds of feet.  The machines to both film movement and project film.  Although not by 1914, syncing sound.  Color photography.  Movies are technical marvels.  And my approach to anything that is so gripping is to research its history.  In the case of cinema, it’s not a terribly long history.  Although 1895 is getting further away each passing second, it wasn’t even a century before I was born.  For those of us who look backwards, length does make a difference.  A lot was going on behind the scenes as movies went from one-minute side-show attractions to feature length productions where people went to specially designed theaters to view them.  This little book gives a walk through that world and what helped make cinema what it’s become.

Could Have Understood Differently

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A lesson many authors need to learn (and I include myself here) is that titles matter.  Cutesy, clever titles may work for well-known writers, but something that describes your book, or movie, is essential.  And avoid acronyms.  I avoided watching C.H.U.D. for years, put off by the title.  I’d read a few books where it was discussed, but finally decided it was something I should see.  If you’re as put off by acronyms as I am, C.H.U.D. has a double meaning.  Initially Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but more importantly, Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal.  I suppose that’s a bit of a spoiler, but since the movie’s been out since 1984 I’ll let it stand.  Although largely panned, I think C.H.U.D.’s a perfectly serviceable monster movie and despite what the critics say, it has a larger message.

Set in a gritty New York City, the film focuses on the homeless who live underground.  Although it’s not preachy about it, the underlying message is that these are people too.  Until, of course, the contamination hazard mutates some of them into C.H.U.D.  Then they start looking for human victims.  In a city the size of New York, they don’t have much trouble finding them either.  A government cover-up is behind all the mayhem.  Nuclear and other hazardous waste is a very real problem, and none of us really knows what happens to it.  With much of government boiling down to political theater, I’ll take my chances watching movies and wondering.  The good guys in this movie are those who actually care about the homeless.  They are a rather unsympathetic photographer and his wife, a police captain with a missing wife, and a guy who runs a soup kitchen.  They learn something isn’t right beneath the streets but can’t get the authorities to admit it.

This isn’t a great movie—there are gaps in the plot all over the place—but it’s not a horrible movie either.  Sympathetic portrayals of the poor are, in my experience, rare.  These are people who’ve organized themselves into a society that’s come under threat because of those who dwell in the light.  Some classify C.H.U.D. as science fiction,  but that’s a very loose use of the term.  It’s actually a low-budget horror film with a bit of heart.  Unfortunately the title obscures that this is a little gem of a monster movie.  I really had little idea of what it was about when I started streaming, but ninety minutes later I was glad I’d done so.  And I went down to the basement afterwards, you know, just to check.