Artificial Hubris

2 Comments

As much as I love writing, words are not the same as thoughts.  As much as I might strive to describe a vivid dream, I always fall short.  Even in my novels and short stories I’m only expressing a fraction of what’s going on in my head.  Here’s where I critique AI yet again.  Large language models (what we call “generative artificial intelligence”) aren’t thinking.  Anyone who has thought about thinking knows that.  Even this screed is only the merest fragment of a fraction of what’s going on in my brain.  The truth is, nobody can ever know the totality of what’s going on in somebody else’s mind.  And yet we persist in saying we do, illegally using their published words trying to make electrons “think.”  

Science has improved so much of life, but it hasn’t decreased hubris at all.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Enamored of our successes, we believe we’ve figured it all out.  I know that the average white-tail doe has a better chance of surviving a week in the woods than I would.  I know that birds can perceive magnetic fields in ways humans can’t.  That whales sing songs we can’t translate.  I sing the song of consciousness.  It’s amazing and impossible to figure out.  We, the intelligent children of apes, have forgotten that our brains have limitations.  We think it’s cool, rather than an affront, to build electronic libraries so vast that every combination of words possible is already in it.  Me, I’m a human being.  I read, I write, I think.  And I experience.  No computer will ever know what it feels like to finally reach cold water after sweating outside all day under a hot sun.  Or the whispers in our heads, the jangling of our pulses, when we’ve just accomplished something momentous.  Machines, if they can “think” at all, can’t do it like team animal can.

I’m daily told that AI is the way of the future.  Companies exist that are trying to make all white collar employment obsolete.  And yet it still takes my laptop many minutes to wake up in the morning.  Its “knowledge” is limited by how fast I can type.  And when I type I’m using words.  But there are pictures in my brain at the same time that I can’t begin to describe adequately.  As a writer I try.  As a thinking human being, I know that I fail.  I’m willing to admit it.  Anything more than that is hubris.  It’s a word we can only partially define but we can’t help but act out.

Not Trembling

Leave a comment

Tremors is one of those monster movies I just plain missed.  Of course, it was released while I was working on my doctorate in Edinburgh, and although we saw some movies we couldn’t afford many.  We certainly didn’t go to any creature features.  I only found out about it because DVD extras on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds had a little debate as to whether that film was a monster movie.  They interviewed Rob Underwood, the director of Tremors, for his opinion.  A short clip was included, so I knew I’d need to see it eventually.  It took a few years, but now I can stake my claim.  Tremors is one of those quasi-funny horror movies, maybe edging into comedy-horror, but not quite.  Although not recalled as an inspiration, the story has some resemblance to Frank Herbert’s Dune.  At least as far as the monsters go.

In the remote Nevada town of Perfection, two handymen, Val and Earl, are ready to leave the population of 14 for bigger things.  But then strange deaths begin to occur.  A local seismologist has been noting unusual readings as locals find a dead creature that appears to be some kind of snake.  They want to go for help but find themselves trapped.  The seismologist and handymen try to unravel the mystery of this creature, which the handymen kill.  She (the seismologist) informs them that there are three more.  Warning their fellow citizens of the danger, the underground creatures begin attacking.  As in Dune, they “hear” people walking and use that information to hunt them.  A couple of survivalists manage to kill one of the sand worms, but the surviving townies know they have to escape to the mountains.

One of the final two monsters is dispatched with a homemade bomb, but I’ll let you watch to figure out how the last one is handled.  The movie starts out with folksy humor and nothing too serious.  When the monsters begin to attack, however, they prove relentless and give some scare to the affair.  Although the film didn’t perform especially well at the box office, it led to a franchise with sequels and a prequel (the origin of the monsters is never explained).  Filmed in bright desert sunlight, the movie isn’t typical of horror.  At the same time, it’s built around monsters, so there’s no doubt that it fits.  It probably won’t scare anyone these days, but it has become part of the repertoire, and it remains good fun on a rainy afternoon.

Long Tail

Leave a comment

There’s a truism in academic publishing (how many of these are actually falsisms!) that a book reaches its sales potential in three years.  After that, the received wisdom says, a sale here or there may occur, but the book has reached the end of its commercial life.  One of the problems with this is that sometimes a topic will experience a resurgence, or, perhaps, pick up for the first time.  Some publishers raise their back list prices every year, making those late sales nearly impossible.  McFarland, however, seems to understand that if you lower prices after the front list sales, a book may live on.  I received a royalty statement for Holy Horror this week.  I’m used to sales being low but I was surprised to see that the lifetime total is now up to 246 copies. Still no bestseller, but more than it was six months ago.  Many of those sales have been in the past year, six years after publication.  I was chuffed.

Academic publishers who price books at around $100 and keep them at that level are killing those books.  Nightmares with the Bible is so priced (and the publisher has no taste for paperbacks), meaning that it has sold less than 100 copies.  Surprised?  I’m not.  Academic pricing models are terribly outdated but the extra revenue from hardcovers priced beyond the reach of the interested reader is just too enticing to leave behind.  Libraries are the main market, in their mind.  Libraries, however, are in the crosshairs.  The Make America Dumb Again crowd is even slashing our copyright library—the Library of Congress—where a copy of each book published in America is kept.  Who else will be left to buy expensive books?

Speaking of libraries, I have an embarrassing confession to make.  I’ve seen (but not been in) the largest library in the United Kingdom, the Bodleian.  The Bodleian is the main library of Oxford University.  I’ve been to Oxford a few times but I don’t know the city well.  The embarrassing confession is that I realized I’d seen the Bodleian only by reading a novel that stated Blackwells, the bookstore, is just across the street.  I know right where Blackwells is, of course, and have been there a time or two.  There’s a kind of irony in that I learned a truth about the world by reading a novel about a place I’d been.  I spend more time in bookstores than libraries these days, but since I make purchases I like to think I’m supporting the growth of knowledge, in my own small way.  And I write books, which, pleasingly, still sell a few copies in a year even when they’re old.

Q’s and P’s

Leave a comment

I finally had to break down and buy it.  Quatermass and the Pit has been on my “to see” list probably longer than any other single movie.  I managed to stream the first two of this telinema series for free, so I guess it was like getting three movies for the price of one.  Aired in the United States as Five Million Years to Earth, this isn’t the greatest sci-fi-horror movie ever, but it isn’t bad.  The pacing is a bit slow but the story is intriguing.  Rocket scientist Quatermass gets involved in the excavation of what turns out to be a buried rocket ship from Mars.  Surrounding the ship in the five-million-year-old matrix are the remains of apparently intelligent apes.  The scientists discover that the apes were artificially enhanced by insectoid martians that resemble the devil.  It’s pointed out that any time digging has taken place near Hobb’s End, strange phenomena occur.  It’s noted that Hob used to be a nickname for the devil.

This detail leads to a perhaps unexpected connection to religion and horror.  Quatermass and Barbara, a scientist who has the ability to “see” the creatures via collective memory, realize that the hauntings that have taken place around Hobb’s End for centuries may have been the image of demons, or the devil, emanating from the evil of these would-be invaders.  At one point a priest argues that their influence is essentially demonic, but the scientists realize that these modified apes are actually the creatures from which humans evolved.  All the human tampering with the ship eventually frees the spirit of the martian insects, resembling a devil.  The way to destroy it is with iron, relying on folklore which, in this instance, works.

The four Quatermass movies (I don’t plan on seeking out the last) were theatrical reshoots of television serials.  The last movie is essentially the TV series stitched together as a movie.  From at least the seventies on (Quatermass and the Pit was released in 1967) the first and third installments were considered fairly good horror films.  They aren’t always available in the United States, probably due to digital rights management.  It seems ridiculous that in this day and age that companies still restrict access, even to those willing to pay a modest fee, for movies that are essential parts of the canon.  Hammer (all three Quatermass movies are Hammer productions) films are still difficult to access in the United States.  At least, with the willingness to wait half a century, I’ve finally be able to see Quatermass and the Pit.

Writing, as We Know it

Leave a comment

Times New Roman, I believe, is the font of this blog post.  I grew curious about how our fairly long-lasting Roman letters came to be in this form we use today.  The Romans, like the Greeks, tended to write in uncial form—what we call “upper case” because printers literally kept them in a case above the “lower case” or minuscule type.  Apparently the reason all caps faded from popularity wasn’t that people felt they were being shouted at all the time, but they took too long to write.  You’ve probably seen examples of medieval manuscripts where the letters are an odd mix between uncial and minuscule forms.  These eventually settled into what is called Roman half-uncial, a font that eventually favored minuscule to majuscule—a name for uncial that has very small, or no, ascenders (as in lower case b or d) or descenders (like lower case p and q).

As the power of the Roman Empire waned, a variety of scripts developed in different parts of Europe.  One that eventually came to have influence on the nascent Holy Roman Empire was scriptura Germanica, or the German script.  Under Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, the favored, and widespread form of writing Roman letters was carolingian minuscule.  This isn’t too difficult to read for modern people but it’s not the script we use.  Carolingian minuscule was eventually replaced by blackletter.  This heavy, Gothic-looking script isn’t always easy to read.  (It was used for German publications until 1941; I used to have an old German book written in blackletter.)  Keep in mind that during all this time there was no printing press in Europe; manuscripts were handwritten and read by few.  Literacy was rare.  Even so, the difficulty of reading blackletter eventually led writers to go back to carolingian minuscule to develop a new writing style, influenced by blackletter as well.

Blackletter. Image credit: Arpingstone, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The new writing style, called humanist minuscule, also known as “whiteletter,” is basically what we use today.  It comes in several different fonts, of course, but the basic idea of capital letters beginning sentences and proper nouns, but most letters being minuscules, has become the standard for most typefaces based on Latin letter-forms.  This history of writing, let alone individual scripts, is amazingly complex.  Today fonts have to be licensed to be used by publishers of print materials and techies can invent new fonts to license or sell.  I still have a soft spot for the “Roman” style, which is why this blog post, at least on my screen, is in Times New Roman. 

Dyatlov

Leave a comment

Dyatlov Pass is a name well known to paranormal enthusiasts.  With good reason.  In 1959 a group of nine experienced hikers were killed in the region now named for their leader.  Dying in the wilderness is, I suspect, not that unusual, but the circumstances surrounding these deaths were puzzling.  In the wintery mountains of Russia, some were undressed.  Three died from blunt trauma and six from hypothermia.  One victim had a missing tongue and two had missing eyes.  One least one tent had been cut out of from the inside, and one body had evidence of radiation.  While many theories abound, no satisfactory explanation has ever emerged.  Devil’s Pass is a found-footage horror movie based on this incident.  For horror, it’s low-hanging fruit.  This is a scary episode in history, whether an avalanche or wild animals, or a combination, killed the young people.

Devil’s Pass is set up as a documentary with five Americans following the same route to try to determine what really happened.  The majority of the film is the story of how they arrived at the location, anomalously hours ahead of schedule.  Along the way some kind of creature passed close by and sharp-eyed viewers can see them moving in the background of one shot.  At the place of the 1959 incident, the Russian military starts an avalanche that kills one of the women and breaks one of the men’s legs.  A couple of soldiers come, chasing the three mobile youths into a bunker, and killing the one with the broken leg.  In the tunnels in the mountain, they discover evidence of teleportation experiments—citing specifically the Philadelphia experiment—that leave people monstrous and distorted.

A bit over the top.  Still, the incident itself grows more and more bizarre when it’s examined.  I first learned of the Dyatlov Pass incident many years ago.  It would’ve never occurred to me to make a horror movie about it, but those who did made reference to pretty much all of the strange facts associated with the real incident.  As a horror film it partially works.  The last fifteen minutes or so strain any credulity, but they wrap up in such a way that they make sense of factors planted earlier in the film.  Over all, the movie is intriguing enough to retain viewers’ attention.  It was filmed in Russia, which lends it verisimilitude and it rewards those who like to speculate about paranormal explanations for events that just can’t be explained otherwise. 

Talking Sleepy Hollow

Leave a comment

After writing a book comes talking about it.  I very aware that this blog has quite a limited reach, which is why I’m very grateful for friends who are willing to chat about my books.  John Morehead’s TheoFantastique is a blog I’ve known about, and appreciated, since I began this blog sixteen years ago.  John has always been very gracious and generous with his time and has interviewed me about each book since Holy Horror on.  Yesterday we had a chance to talk about Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  The blog post with the recording is located here.  Please give it a watch if you have any interest.  To those of us not inclined to inflate opinions of ourselves, doing self-promotion feels awkward, and so it’s always good to have a friend willing to help us over the hurdle.  John has written and edited many books himself, and we’ve both published with McFarland. You might enjoy some time on his blog.

Writing a book on a subject may not automatically make you and expert, but it does give you a voice in the conversation.  Talking about a book helps you to think of aspects you might’ve missed or things that you really need other eyes to see.  Those fortunate enough to have academic posts sometimes have colleagues willing to read their nascent books and discuss them.  I never had colleagues who wanted to read what I was working on, but then, I was never really in a position where people paid much attention.  As a result, I work on my books alone.  This one had a peer reviewer when an agent took a temporary interest in it, and I received some feedback then, but otherwise it was me wondering what others might think of it once it was available.  The strange thing is, after writing a book you often feel like you could write another on the same subject, looking at different angles.

Since I’m trying to break into that rare sphere of getting a supplemental income from my books (free advice: academic writing really isn’t the way to do this), getting even a little buzz is immensely helpful.  I have contacted bookstore owners and museum shop holders in the Hudson Valley to tell them about my book.  I’m trying to arrange for a local book festival slot to talk about it.  But, of course, I have a 9-2-5 that doesn’t really make an allowance for time off to support your sideline job.  So I’m very grateful for John Morehead’s willingness to talk about my work.  If you’ve got some time, and interest, you can hear a bit more here.

Not Intelligent

Leave a comment

The day AI was released—and I’m looking at you, Chat GPT—research died.  I work with high-level academics and many have jumped on the bandwagon despite the fact that AI cannot think and it’s horrible for the environment.  Let me say that first part again, AI cannot think.  I read a recent article where an author engaged AI about her work.  It is worth reading at length.  In short, AI makes stuff up.  It does not think—I say again, it cannot think—and tries to convince people that it can.  In principle, I do not even look at Google’s AI generated answers when I search.  I’d rather go to a website created by one of my own species.  I even heard from someone recently that AI could be compared to demons.  (Not in a literal way.)  I wonder if there’s some truth to that.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

I would’ve thought that academics, aware of the propensity of AI to give false information, would have shunned it.  Made a stand.  Lots of people are pressured, I know, by brutal schedules and high demands on the part of their managers (ugh!).  AI is a time cutter.  It’s also a corner cutter.  What if that issue you ask it about is one about which it’s lying?  (Here again, the article I mention is instructive.)  We know that it has that tendency rampant among politicians, to avoid the truth.  Yet it is being trusted, more and more.  When first ousted from the academy, I found research online difficult, if not impossible.  Verifying sources was difficult, if it could be done at all.  Since nullius in verba is something to which I aspire, this was a problem.  Now publishers, even academic ones, are talking about little else but AI.

I recently watched a movie that had been altered on Amazon Prime without those who’d “bought” it being told.  A crucial scene was omitted due to someone’s scruples.  I’ve purchased books online and when the supplier goes bust, you lose what you paid for.  Electronic existence isn’t our savior.  Before GPS became necessary, I’d drive through major cities with a paper map and common sense.  Sometimes it even got me there quicker than AI seems to.  And sometimes you just want to take the scenic route.  Ever since consumerism has been pushed by the government, people have allowed their concerns about quality to erode.  Quick and cheap, thank you, then to the landfill.  I’m no longer an academic, but were I, I would not use AI.  I believe in actual research and I believe, with Mulder, that the truth is out there.

Dark Romance

Leave a comment

My study of genre leads me to believe that there really may be no such thing.  Or at least many aspects of genre are open to question.  In the case of Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves, there’s no doubt that one genre is dark academia.  Indeed, this is book one of a duology titled “Dark Academia.”  Although self-published it is quite well done.  There’s a lot of backstory, and George (Georgina) Fisher, the protagonist and narrator, is a character from a previous series by Holmes.  Another genre that fits here is romance, although this novel is more than that.  Maybe a bit of the story will help.  George is a new student at Blackfriars University in England.  From California, she has trouble fitting in among the blue bloods that are the usual make-up of the student body.  She soon learns about the Orpheus Society, the secretive organization that pulls the strings on campus.  Then her roommate, the girlfriend of a prominent Orpheus Society member, goes missing.  George decides to investigate. 

Consciously aware of dark academia, Holmes aims directly at the heart of it and offers a compelling story that keeps readers interested from cover to cover.  I was never quite sure what was going to happen, and I do have to add a warning—this first book does end on a cliffhanger, so be ready to commit yourself to book two.  George is so well drawn that it’s not hard to care for her and start rooting for her against the secret society types who can buy themselves out of anything, including murder.  (I have to say, that part is a little too close to reality in the current US of A, so it may be a trigger for some.)

My regular readers (if any) know that I’m on a dark academia kick at the moment.  There’s so much to like in the genre.  Holmes makes clear the close ties between dark academia and horror; they share a common ancestor in the form of gothic literature.  The sheer variety in the novels classified this way means that not all of the books will contain every element associated with the genre, but Pretty Girls Make Graves comes close.  Holmes also effectively writes the ostracism of the outsider into the tale.  Anyone who’s had trouble fitting in (or may still have trouble fitting in) will recognize the scenario and its fallout.  Let’s hope, though, that they don’t end up like George at the end of volume one, even when they enjoy reading the book.

Quatermass Again

Leave a comment

Quatermass, as I’ve noted before, is a name I knew from boyhood, but with no frame of reference.  Having watched The Quatermass Xperiment, and still seeking Quatermass and the Pit, I found a freebee of Quatermass 2 on a commercial streaming service.  Hammer films are notoriously difficult to find in the United States, unless you’re willing to pay serious money for them.  In any case, Quatermass 2 is a passible bad movie in the sci-fi-horror genre.  Quatermass is supposed to be a likable character, but for the film versions American “tough guy” Brian Donlevy played Quatermass in the first two movies.  But I need to take a step back.  Quatermass was a BBC television serial.  There were four series, each eventually made into movies.  The first three were reshot and the final one (The Quatermass Conclusion) was cobbled together from the serial rather than being refilmed.

Of this set of movies, The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit are considered proper horror.  Brian Donlevy doesn’t garner a ton of sympathy in Quatermass 2.  This is mainly because of poor acting and a small budget.  Reputedly suffering from alcoholism, Donlevy has trouble with his lines and often appears curt and short-tempered (he was replaced in Quatermass and the Pit).  Even so, Quatermass 2 has monsters and some reasonably scary moments.  Here’s the story: alien invaders are taking over a secret government plant preparing for moon colonization.  Quatermass discovers the base and finds that everyone acts odd.  Interestingly, they’ve stolen his plans for the base.  The aliens take over people, body-snatcher style.  Quatermass and an angry mob manage to get into the base where the alien-infected fight them.  Eventually the huge monsters break loose and Quatermass has his own rocket converted to a bomb to destroy the mothership in geosynchronous orbit.  The infected people return to normal.

It’s fairly easy to see why few people comment on Quatermass 2.  I wouldn’t have watched it had I not stumbled across a clip showing some of its horror chops.  I’m glad, in a strange way, that I saw it.  I knew Quatermass was a telinema [link to Fire Walking]  product, but I wasn’t quite sure how the television serial fit together with the movies.  Quatermass 2 was bad enough to make me look it up.  From all my reading about horror movies, Quatermass and the Pit is the scariest of the four.  At least at this historical moment it’s not available on streaming services.  And that, I submit, is why we still need DVDs.  Digital rights management is rather like an alien invader…

Painting Sleepy Hollow

Leave a comment

Not being an art critic, I’m in no place to analyze John Quidor’s The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane.  Having written a book about Sleepy Hollow, however, there are a few things I might point out.  I should begin by noting that this post was spurred by a jigsaw puzzle.  Normally I only work on said puzzles around Christmas time.  Several years ago friends told us about Liberty Puzzles.  They’re made of wood and are heirloom quality.  My wife took the hint and she generally orders one, on behalf of Santa Claus, each year.  We have a few now but since we only do them once a year (and usually only one of them at the time), I had forgotten that we had a Liberty Puzzle of Quidor’s painting.  The original is located in the Smithsonian and I really didn’t discuss it in my book.  The painting is dated 1858, almost forty years after the publication of Irving’s tale, but while Irving was still alive (he died the next year).

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The painting is correct in displaying a pumpkin that isn’t a jack-o-lantern and it presents one of the obvious difficulties of painting a nighttime scene.  The painting is fairly dark.  One of the benefits of working on a puzzle like this is you look closely at the scene.  My first thought was that it seems odd that the lightest part of the painting is Gunpowder’s rump. Next is the path.  The path draws the viewer’s eye back to Gunpowder and an understated Ichabod Crane.  I realized that the lighting is meant to reflect the moon’s rays, as the orb is just peeking through the clouds at the upper left.  And, of course, Quidor was not painting from real life.  On the right lie some small buildings, including the Old Dutch Church.  The Headless Horseman blends into the dark, which is exactly how Irving describes him in the story.  There’s no bridge, however, at least not yet.  All of this matches the wording of the legend.

Quidor painted mostly scenes from Washington Irving’s works.  Having been born in Tappan, during Irving’s lifetime, that makes sense.  He was also painting before the Disney cartoon came out.  One of the cases I make in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that the image most Americans have of the story comes from Disney.  The painting has no sword, and indeed, neither does Irving.  The one dramatic effect Quidor allows is the raising of the pumpkin before the bridge.  That takes place later in the chase.  In a sense this painting is perhaps the most authentic visual interpretation of Irving’s story before it made the transition to celluloid.  It’s puzzling.

Dark Introduction

Leave a comment

Since I’ve discovered that I live in dark academia, I’ve grown curious.  Kara Muller has put together The Little Book of Dark Academia as a kind of first step in the discussion.  I have learned that some academic articles on dark academia are starting to appear, but this is pitched more toward those who maybe need some tips on how to get started.  By the way, this is a full-color, heavily illustrated book.  In practical terms, that means it doesn’t take too long to read it.  It’s also self-published, so less expensive than many books, but without editorial shaping.  It begins with history and definitions.  The term came into use in 2015 but the concept had been around much longer than that.  Sometimes a label is necessary to bring together thought on something that’s been floating around for a while.  As Muller points out, it tends to revolve around books.

My imagination isn’t so constrained as to believe that ebooks have no place in dark academia; they have their own special kind of darkness.  Still, the setting for these stories often takes place in real life, in studies and libraries full of books.  This is not a Star Wars paperless universe.  Muller gives a list of acclaimed dark academia titles with a brief paragraph or two about them.  In other words, a reading list.  And also a movie viewing list.  She also includes some television series that fit the aesthetic.  If you’re in the mood for dark academia, you’ll find plenty of places to indulge your hunger here.  The lists aren’t comprehensive, of course.  A bit of searching online indicates that many such lists exist, not all of them in full agreement.

Muller then presents a section on style and design.  Dark academia is, in many ways, like cosplay.  There’s a look and feel to it that can be emulated.  And I can’t help but say it’s backward looking.  A longing for classical education, the way that it used to be.  To me, this seems to be behind much of the current fascination with it.  This lifestyle is rapidly disappearing.  Even professors are now using AI instead of getting their hands dirty in the library.  And publishing online rather than in print form.  Showing up to class in tee-shirts and jeans.  Some of us, and I count myself in their midst, miss the feel of armloads of books and professors that wore tweed and could read arcane languages.  And nobody was trying to cut their funds because, well, the world was smarter then.  And everyone knew education was important.

Missing the Rose

Leave a comment

It was Edinburgh, my wife and I concluded.  That’s where we’d seen The Name of the Rose.  Edinburgh was over three decades ago now, and since the movie is sometimes called dark academia we decided to give it another go.  A rather prominent scene that we both remembered, however, had been cut.  If you read the novel (I had for Medieval Church History in seminary), you knew that scene was not only crucial to the plot, but the very reason for the title.  In case you’re unfamiliar, the story is of a detective-like monk, William of Baskerville, solving a suicide and murders at an abbey even as the inquisition arrives and takes over.  It isn’t the greatest movie, but it does have a kind of dark academic feel to it.  But that missing scene.

Of course, it’s the sex scene between Adso, the novice, and the unnamed “rose.”  Sex scenes are fairly common in R-rated films, often gratuitous.  But since this one is what makes sense of the plot, why was it cut in its entirety?  Now the internet only gives half truths, so any research is only ever partial.  According to IMDb (owned by Amazon; and we’d watched it on Amazon Prime) the scene was cut to comply with local laws.  More to the point, can we trust movies that we stream haven’t been altered?  I watch quite a few on Tubi or Pluto and I sometimes have the sneaking suspicion that I’m missing something.  How would I know, unless I’d seen it before, or if I had a disc against which to compare it?  There was no indication on Amazon that the movie wasn’t the full version before we rented it.

The movie business is complex.  Digital formats, with their rights management, mean it’s quite simple to change the version of record.  Presumably, those who’ve pointed out the editing (quite clumsy, I’d say) in reviews had likely seen the movie before.  Curious, I glanced at the DVDs and Blu-ray discs on offer.  The playing time indicated they were the edited version.  Still, none of the advertising copy on the “hard copy” discs indicates that it is not the original.  Perhaps I’m paranoid, but Amazon does run IMDb, and the original version is now listed as “alternate.”  Now that I’ve refreshed my memory from over three decades ago, it’s unlikely that I’ll be watching the film again.  I’ll leave it to William of Baskerville to figure out why a crucial scene was silently cut and is now being touted as the way the story was originally released.

The Printed Word

Leave a comment

I miss them, newspapers.  Now, I’ve never been a great newspaper reader—I tend to live in my own little world, I guess, and I really have no taste for politics.  I still glance over the New York Times headlines daily (mostly) but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about physical newspapers.  The other day we had a family creativity session.  This generally involves painting in some form or other and I realized with chagrin that we had no newspapers to lay down.  Nothing to protect the table top.  The same is true when we carve pumpkins, or do other activities that make you think that you want to protect your furniture.  Newspapers were always there.  We used to line our birdcage with them.  Made papier-mâché out of them.  They were handy to have around.

Josef Danhauser, Newspaper Readers, public domain. Image credit: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, via Wikimedia Commons

We live fairly close to our means, so we don’t have lots of drop cloths lying about.  (Plastic is so much less feeling than paper.)  We don’t have rolls of butcher paper in our kitchen.  We even use cloth bags for groceries, so grocery bags are at a premium.  Our electronic mania has meant that physical creativity suffers.  I do applaud the saving of trees, but you sometimes just need the disposable broadsheet to catch the drips.  (And when I paint, believe me, there are drips.)  But perhaps this is a symptom of this insipid internet life into which we’ve slipped.  The other day I was searching for an electronic services store.  I’m not even sure what to call them anymore.  I had to go to the physical store (yes, they still make them) to have something looked at.

The website kept telling me a store with a different name was what I was looking for.  All I wanted to know was whether this was an actual store or some knockoff.  If you’ve purchased what are being called “dups” now you know that companies blatantly use other companies ads to sell cheap knockoffs that don’t resemble the product you wanted at all.  This all seems to be perfectly legal.  I guess I’m just nostalgic for the days when you had to have patience and doing things slowly was a sign of good quality.  The 24-hour news cycle has hardly been a benefit, and Trump could’ve never been elected without it.  And if you wanted to paint something, you’d just go to the stack of newspapers that every house seemed to have, and paint over any headlines you wished you hadn’t seen.

Dark Poetry

Leave a comment

Playful.  Serious. Weird.  Very intelligent.  These are the words that come to mind.  Adrienne Raphel’s Our Dark Academia is a poetry book unlike any other I’ve read.  The poems take many forms from impressionistic reflections on life to a crossword puzzle.  From cutout paper-doll clothes to a faux Wikipedia article on dark academia.  It’s quite difficult to summarize since it’s more of an experience than anything else.  It’s the kind of book that makes you want to get to know the author.  Economy of language and an ability to manipulate words are required for poetry, and although I still dabble in it now and again, my tortured mind finds long-form prose a bit easier to produce.  I do try to keep these blog posts short, but I write a lot of other stuff as well.  In any case, Raphel’s keen intellect is obvious throughout this collection.  And she holds a doctorate from Harvard.

I’ve been exploring what is now being called dark academia pretty much my entire life.  And it has an articulate spokesperson here.  The academic life, although I love it, isn’t always the cushy existence it’s thought to be.  It requires a lot of work and long hours.  Those jealous of the lifestyle probably know it by fantasy.  It has taken a hard turn towards the political since about the seventies, something I didn’t know as I enrolled in a doctoral program in the next decade.  You learn by experience, and it’s clear Raphel has that.  The life of the adjunct instructor, which I tried to live for two years, demonstrates the inhumane things educated people can do to one another.  Of course it’s because of money.  In a late capitalist society, what else really matters?

One thing I know about myself is that I tend to take on the characteristics of authors I read, while I’m reading them, if they have distinctive voices.  Thought processes carry on in the mind even after a book is put down.  I find reading endlessly fascinating and wish I could share this enthusiasm with everyone.  I have to stop and remind myself, however, that our society only works with those who are doers as well as thinkers.  It works best, it seems to me, when those who are thinkers are in charge.  But not all thinkers are good.  My solution, at the moment, would be to have them read Our Dark Academia.