Dreamscape

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I remember them but imperfectly, my dreams.   This can be frustrating when, for example, I dream up a story, complete with an ideal ending, then wake up with only fragments left.  I suppose I’m like most people in that I go through phases when I remember dreams and other periods when I don’t.  Lately my sleep patterns have me recollecting much of the strangeness in my sleeping head, but not enough to get it all written down into the story that was playing out so perfectly upstairs.  Dreams are one reason that we don’t understand consciousness.  We’re not 100% rational creatures.  And we know that other animals dream.  Our minds stay active when we’re asleep and they seem to have no limitations.  The stories we tell ourselves when our eyes are closed!

I have some recurring dreams.  The details always differ, but I regularly dream that I’m teaching once again.  The offending institution apologizes for having dismissed me.  Would I please come back?  Of course, one-off dreams are more common.  Sometimes I have the presence of mind to write them down, but I’m at an age when waking up is often in the service of finding the bathroom and that really breaks the mood and sometimes makes me forget.  From my childhood I’ve been told that you don’t die in your dreams, and indeed, usually you wake up before you hit the ground, or whatever.  I have, like Maggie Evans in Dark Shadows, dreamed of myself as dead.  That’s generally not one of the more pleasant of the species, but the mind ranges widely across the dreamscape.  I have a deep sense that we should pay attention to dreams, but being a 9-2-5 worker, getting the morning routine underway has to take precedence.

Lately my dreams seem to be working out fictional stories deliberately.  It’s as if my subconscious is saying, “You have unpublished stories sitting on your hard disc, why aren’t you doing something about it?”  I sometimes wake up feeling guilty that I’ve been writing nonfiction books when I have several weird stories scrawled out that could use a little more attention.  And some other writers I’ve met on social media have been encouraging me to self-publish those stories.  So far I’ve resisted, but the temptation is growing.  I work in publishing and I can say that the industry is quite difficult to navigate and finding an editor who “gets you” is almost impossible.  Maybe I should be basing more of my stories on dreams.  At least in the dream world, they’d find a publisher.

Sinning

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What can I say about Sinners in five hundred words or less?  This movie requires a book.  I’ll try anyway.  First of all, I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon.  But everyone was saying Sinners was one of the best horror movies of 2025 and it racked up enough awards to prove it.  Still I was blown away.  Fronting and centering religion and horror, this film asks viewers to think about good and evil and to think about it closely.  Twin brothers, “Smoke” and “Stack,” served in the army, left Mississippi to make it big as gangsters in Chicago, then return to Mississippi to open a club for the Black community.  They bring their nephew Sammie and hire their supporters to help a grand opening of their blues bar.  Their pasts won’t let them go, however,  and they become entangled with former lovers.  Then the vampires come.

The brothers’ two lovers, Hailee and Wunmi, come to the opening but Hailee falls victim to the vampires.  Wunmi, who’s Smoke’s estranged wife, practices Hoodoo and make him promise that if she is bit he will kill her with a stake.  The vampires can’t come into the club without an invitation, and one of the bartenders, Grace, decides they need to kill the whole crowd of vampires and invites them in.  Only Smoke and Sammie survive.  The vampires die with sunrise, but Smoke stays around to kill the Klan members who planned to murder the brothers after the grand opening was over.  Smoke gets them all but he’s shot and as he dies, he sees Wunmi and their dead child in an earthly heaven and joins them.  Sammie goes on to become a famous blues player and when he’s very aged, Stack and Hailee, still young vampires come in.  They all agree that the day of the grand opening was the best of their lives.

Both Smoke and Stack end up with their loves in an eternal life.  And this is only scratching the surface of the film.  The movie is about freedom and how African Americans never really have it.  Even in Chicago the system is stacked against them.  The vampires try to convince Smoke and Sammie that they will offer them community.  Freedom and belonging.  Both brothers, however, end up in a kind of paradise, one of them as a vampire, the other as a man who earns salvation by killing the Klan.  Wow.  On a more pedestrian note, the movie seemed to blend From Dusk till Dawn with the more serious elements of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Including the close attention to music.  But even that sounds facile.  There’s more to say, lots more.  Sammie is the son of a preacher.  The Bible is used and quoted.  Salvation comes, however, by Hoodoo and vampirism.  No, Sinners requires a book to begin to work it all out.

Booking Time

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Some time back I mentioned that I was compiling a bibliography of this blog.  (It should eventually appear as a separate page on this website.)  I’m in the thick of it and it makes me think that it’s a good exercise to go back over older writings now and again.  For one thing, I’m reminding myself of books I may have forgotten after reading.  And it may actually give me ideas for new writing projects.  One of the problems, however, with blogging about books is that it creates a reluctance to rereading.  I’m guessing that most blog readers are looking for something new, and discussing something you’ve already talked about may not fit the bill.  Besides, my stack of books to read is already rivaling Babel’s tower for height.  I’ve always been a catch as catch can reader, especially since no longer having university libraries to use.

One of the lessons along the way is just how eclectic my reading tends to be.  (And eccentric, as long as we’re using e-words.)  I’ve read some strange stuff, and I’m still only in the first three years or so of this aging blog.  The real issue is the desire to re-read.  The world is full of interesting books.  I’ve read a few thousand of them, and many of them I’d like to read again.  This bibliography exercise underscores just how precious reading time is.  Those I talk to, apart from the retired, never have enough time to read.  I’ve learned to cram it into small spaces in the day, but even as I’m doing so I’m realizing that I’m shortchanging the experience.  And this is from someone who works in the publishing industry.  

I’ve posted about four books in the past week—on those rare days when I don’t have to work and winter prevents outdoor chores (beyond shoveling snow), I read.  It’s always pleasant to finish up books I’ve been dabbling in for a while.  In a couple more days I’ll be doing my annual review of the year in books.  Again, it’s an opportunity to look back and see what I’ve been up to thinking over the past twelve months.  Since this blog has being going for over a decade and a half, there are many books behind it.  I don’t know how many, at least not yet.  As I say elsewhere on this website, I believe the books we read define us, make us who we are.  Making a bibliography is a way to keep them in order.  And I’m one of those people who actually enjoys making them.  Time thinking about books is time well spent.

Death Trip

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My own personal Wisconsin Death Trip resulted in the end of my chosen career.  I’d never heard of Michael Lesy, or his book, while I lived in the state, however.  In fact, I’ve been racking my brain to remember how or where I’d heard of this strange book.  I do know that it was suggested to me, likely by another written source, many years ago.  My impetus to pick it up at this time was watching Return to Oz and learning that the writer/director used this book to find inspiration.  Having gone through it, I suspect the reason was that this most unusual dissertation was addressing the question of rural versus urban living conditions, but in a way out seventies way.  The book is a combination of photographs from about 1890 through the turn of the century from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and snippets from the local newspaper.  But also some bits from the intake records of the state hospital at Mendota.  And also some bits from novels.  And further, some summaries apparently by Lesy.

What I found frustrating is the lack of clear explanations of what the sources were.  Nowhere in the introduction or conclusion is it spelled out that, for example, italic sections are summaries of sources by the author.  Nor is it clear why the parts of novels are used, other than adding flavor; were they written by people familiar with Black River Falls?  And the “word clouds” that begin the separate years—why are some words capitalized and others not?  Is this table of contents only to give a taste or it to spell out in detail what will be covered?  The lack of any narrative, apart from the introduction and conclusion compounds the confusion.  In other words, this is an impressionistic book for a work of history.

At the same time, it is creative and informative.  The final chapter discusses how certain recurring themes—suicide, insanity, arson, for example—demonstrate the hardships among the poor.  As Lesy puts it, they came to realize the lie of hard work (meritocracy) and had to face children dying of disease and their inability to get ahead when those who are wealthy control all the assets, and they snapped.  To me that’s the real value of this book.  I noticed while reading through it that of the notices of admission to the asylum, all but one were described as poor, often desperately so.  And we continue to allow this to happen, not just in Wisconsin, but across the country.  Maybe even more people need to read this odd history and consider its implications.

Scary Christmas

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A few days ago I mentioned the connection between Christmas and Halloween.  I’m apparently not the only one to be interested in this because Tim Rayborn wrote Scary Book of Christmas Lore.  This little, holiday-themed book is a gathering of (mostly) scary creatures associated with the winter holidays.  Each creature, or tradition, is treated in less than two pages and the book is generous with color illustrations.  While not a research book (it’s set out as an impulse buy in some Barnes & Nobles at least), nevertheless Rayborn, like yours truly, holds a doctorate from a university in the UK and spends at least part of his time writing books on spooky topics.  (More successfully than yt.) In the process of researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth I gathered stories of scary Christmas creatures, but didn’t include most of them in the book.

Apart from the obvious Halloween connection, a few things stood out to me about this book.  One is that the majority of these tales come from Germanic cultures.  If these branch up into Scandinavia, almost all of the creatures in the book are covered.  There are a few from other regions as well, but this suggests that winters in Northern Europe used to be seriously scary.  Some of the darker visitors around the winter holidays are clearly local variations of others.  Krampus, for example, is having a day and there are other local versions of a monstrous companion to the “good cop” Santa who comes along to dole out punishment.  Some of the other beings associated with the season are a variety of other monsters—some human, others less so.

The long, dark winter suggests itself as a season for scary stories.  It’s unlikely that this book will send anyone shrieking into the closet or under the bed, but it helpfully brings to the light that people have long found both the fear and entertainment value of telling of frightening creatures.  The Teutonic imagination gave us many of our nighttime fears.  The British, inspired by such tales, tended to codify them into the monster stories that gave the modern horror genre its tentative start.  Although, as I discussed with my daughter on Christmas morning, horror stories began in the pre-biblical era (something I wrote about in an article a couple years back).  And, of course, religion and horror have naturally gone hand in glove for longer than anyone has really traced in any level of detail.  So a little book of monsters around Christmas?  Why not?

Quiet Christmas

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It has been a busy Christmas season this year.  Busy from my perspective, that is.  Introverts like to spend time alone, recharging.  Those with my kind of neurology, though, crave being with others when we crave it.  Even on a budget we’ve been able to anticipate the peace of Christmas Day.  For me, the rush began with attending my usual conference in November.  It always meets the weekend before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving was late this year.  The weekend before the conference we attended the Lehigh Valley Vegan s’MAC Down on Sunday afternoon.  Friday I was on a train to Boston.  I returned and spent Thanksgiving with some good friends in New Jersey and December came with the following Monday.  Since work fills in the interstices between weekends I really didn’t have time to catch my introvert breath.

That first December weekend we attended the Lehigh University Christmas Vespers.  This free concert is a gift to the community and was a quiet way to enter the season.  We used to attend a similar event at Princeton University, but Lehigh’s much closer.  Living near Bethlehem (Christmas City), we like to spend a day in the historic downtown, looking for stocking stuffers mostly.  This was the next weekend.  We followed this up with our annual visit to Christkindlmarkt.  By the time I was done counting on my fingers, there was one weekend left before Christmas.  Friends had invited us to dinner that Sunday night, a day after the Lehigh Valley Vegan cookie exchange.  This level of activity is more than I’m accustomed to, although it did remind me of how socially busy the Christmas season was in Britain, even for post-grads.  My wife and I came home from dinner, lit our Yule log, and quietly acknowledged the winter solstice.

So now it’s Christmas Day.  I’m awake at 3 a.m., like a kid.  It is a day when I don’t have to go anywhere.  And, most of all, it’s quiet.  The only sound is a great horned owl hooting in the woods across the street.  I value this day for the opportunity to be still.  A day for recharging.  Before anybody else is awake, I listen.  There will be music later this morning and it will be fine.  And I’m thankful for all the activities that led up to this point.  Tomorrow, it seems, I’ll be out shoveling as yet another winter weather system makes it way here.  But for now it’s quiet.  And a Christmas owl agrees to cease hooting after letting me know I’m not alone.

Religious Zombies

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Zombies never quite add up in my brain.  I’ve read a few zombie novels, nevertheless.  Joseph Hirsch’s Church of the Last Lamb is one such novel.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers in the note below.  The story begins with zombies already a part of the landscape.  An Army outpost in Ohio is trying to hold out until mortals get the upper hand and reestablish civilization.  The outpost is run by the military and civilians, “softies” have menial jobs as well as other support duties.  One of these civilians, Jon, has dreams of saving enough to be able to settle down and have kids with his girlfriend.  In this world, however, this privilege has to be purchased and generally only those in the military can afford it.  Violating rules about conjugal visits, Jon is brought before the colonel in charge and given the duty to accompany five soldiers on a dangerous mission out among the undead.

Surveillance has shown that a private individual living in the Church or the Lost Lamb has found a way of repelling—killing, actually—zombies.  The squad’s mission is to find the secret and bring it back.  Chances of returning aren’t great.  Zombies respond to the canonical head shooting, but ammunition is in low supply.  Swords and axes play a part in the tale.  The soldiers make it to the church, but one of them dies when zombies swarm their transport.  The others make their way into the church, where a scientist takes on the persona of a priest.  He has, however, come up with a formula to make zombies really dead.  In exchange for it he has a mission of his own that he wants the remaining men to undertake.  Two more die on the adventure.

Jon was a teacher in previous life.  He has to learn how to adapt to this new way of thinking to survive.  Making things more difficult, there are rival groups fighting against the surviving remnants of civilization.  There’s lots of combat and a fair bit of gore.  But then again, this is a zombie novel.  I won’t say more than that.  I enjoyed reading this more than World War Z, but it underscores how much those of us who are softies have trouble understanding military culture.  I found it engaging that religious imagery was drawn into the story as well.  As I’ve often noted on this blog, horror and religion interact well.  The church plays a pretty central role in the narrative, underscoring this winning combination. 

About Books

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I have tried my hand at fiction writing at least since I was ten.  My first attempted novel was at about fourteen.  Fiction has always been a large part of my life.  Now I work in publishing and still struggle to get my fiction published.  I picked up Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin because of another blogger praising his work.  Subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature,  it is an ambitious book.  I learned a lot by reading it but also found myself putting the book down in a huff.  Not because of the author, but because of the subject.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, before conglomeration took over big fiction.  Conglomeration is simply the practice of companies buying out other companies.  Even I know that diversifying your portfolio is considered good business practice.  So companies buy one another out.  Thing is, that makes a difference as to what is available to read for the general public.

I’m old enough to idealize elements of the past.  I’ve worked in the corporate world for nearly a decade and a half now and I miss the time prior.  Still, this is fascinating history to read.  Currently there are five major fiction publishers (all of which also publish nonfiction).  They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.  How did there come to be only five?  Sinykin will answer that question for you.  He also explores the smaller nonprofit publishers and the independents.  There’s one big independent publisher left, Norton.  Reading through this book I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of fiction authors is.  I read a lot, but there were many, many names I didn’t recognize.  Sinykin tells the stories of many people whose individual tastes may very well have decided which authors you’ve read.

Publishing is a vast and sprawling world, but a very small industry.  In these days when self-publishing is widely practiced, and some authors make a living writing, publishing, and promoting their own books, it may seem that big fiction is less relevant.  Still, these publishers stock the shelves of Barnes & Noble as well as your favorite indie bookstore.  A few things stand out for me: all of this development is recent.  Most of it happened during my lifetime.  There are still powerful editors, but they don’t have the power they used to.  And business-speak has become the language of publishers instead of the countercultural impulse that drives many writers.  This book is an education in itself, even for those of us who work in the book business.

About Demons

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Six college kids in a house where twenty years earlier a group of six young people held a seance and all but one ended up dead.  Demonic doesn’t really offer anything groundbreaking on the horror front, but it does give a less church-oriented possession story.  There will be spoilers here, so be warned.  John is Michelle’s boyfriend.  With a group of friends, including Brian, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, they decide to hold a seance in the house where a mass murder-suicide took place.  Once they get there, as tension builds between John and Brian, it is revealed that John is the son of a woman who was in the house the night of the carnage, but had escaped.  Thereafter follows a confused set of jump startles and unexplained phenomena.  All but three of the college kids are killed, and one (John) is found and interrogated by police.

It seems the seance summoned a demon that could only be released if everyone died.  Brian, one of the survivors, is found and shot by police.  Michelle, the other survivor, is found alive but as police unscramble the data on the cameras the kids were using, they realize that John was the guilty party.  Beyond that, he hanged himself before the police got there, so they had been interviewing a demon the whole time.  Although James Wan is one of the producers, the film received theatrical release only abroad, receiving a television release in the United States.  Really, given that it doesn’t give much that’s original, or thought-provoking, or really all that scary, the decision makes sense.

The demon movies that really make an impact tend to have a few things in common.  Usually a young woman possessed (this is something Poe understood).  A body out of control that defies religious efforts to bring it back to conformity.  A believable spiritual world behind the threat.  None of these things fits Demonic.  I guess I was looking for a follow-up to Succubus which, although flawed, wasn’t that bad.  Sometimes the group of young people in a haunted house trope works pretty well, but here the unanswered questions outweigh any real fright, or even mood.  Many low-budget horror films involve ghost-hunter imitators with more devices than thought toward the plot.  Things can jump out at you, of course, but this one fails to reach any kind of existential dread.  I guess I really need to start paying more attention to the ratings viewers give before deciding on a demon movie.  Someday I’ll learn.

Symbolic Light

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I’m a great believer in symbolism.  I have made a number of symbolic gestures in my life, whether anybody notices or not.  Today is the winter solstice, a day of great symbolic importance.  Not only do we light a Yule log at home, accompanied by poetry reading, but I have another, private symbolic act.  This year I will substitute our usual nightlight for the wicker tree.  Not the one from the movie, thank you.  No, many years ago, when my mother was still alive and working at a local department store, she bought us a small wicker and plastic Christmas tree.  When you plug it in, it shines with white Christmas lights.  Every year I set it on the landing at the turning point in our staircase to substitute for our usual night light.  We have an older house and the nightlight is important for going downstairs when it’s still dark.

The symbolism here is that my mother is bringing light on the shortest day of the year.  The solstice has been observed from time immemorial in northern climes.  We may not have a white Christmas this year but we’ve already had a pretty significant snowstorm (all melted by a significant rain and wind storm), but the solstice is about light, not cold.  You may not have noticed it, but the sun is setting just a bit later these days.  It’s also rising later, as it will continue to do until the second week of January.  The solstice is the day when the number of hours of light is the least, when the longer evenings are offset by the later mornings.  Earth-based religions, which gave us Yule, longed for days of greater light.  This was the symbolic reason for Christmas so near the solstice.

My symbolic switching of nightlights isn’t the only symbolism I realized this year.  As I was thinking about the significance of this day for making the change I realized that the nightlight we normally use dates back to the year my mother passed.  We had one emotionally-wrought morning to sort through her belongings.  One of the little things I picked up was a stained glass lamp.  It’s very small, with a candelabra size mount for the lightbulb.  It took the place of our old stair-top nightlight.  And although today I switch to the tree my mother gave us, the light that we normally have through the night comes from a small lamp I inherited from her.  All of us together await the returning of the light.

Speedy Delivery

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“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service.  Like many such traditions, it has an origin story.  The saying was engraved on the James A. Farley Post Office Building in Manhattan.  The building, which is an impressive one from street level, is no longer a post office.  But the architect did not make up the inscription.  It is adapted from the Greek historian Herodotus.  Herodotus is known as both “the father of history” and “the father of lies.”  In other words, his histories aren’t always, strictly speaking, historical.  This is somehow appropriate given the saying’s pseudo-motto status.  Especially when you open up the USPS website and see headers such as in the image below.

So snow and rain will stay these couriers after all.  This is somewhat ironic, given that technology is supposed to make things so much easier.  And this is in no way a negative reflection on actual postal workers.  More than one of my family members has worked for the post office and I’ve even considered it myself.  It’s just the jarring of expectations that’s disturbing.  Around the holiday season, when the weather turns to its wintery mix, people grow anxious about their packages arriving on time.  Cryptic messages often await those who visit the USPS website, tracking number in hand.  A number that they supply to you cannot be found.  Or a parcel that was literally three miles away has been sent to a distribution center seventy miles away for delivery.  I pull old Herodotus from the shelf, looking for ancient wisdom.  It’s not even snowing here.

The Farley Post Office Building is no longer a post office.  Much of it has been converted into an extension of Penn Station, which is just across the street.  I sometimes used to walk from Penn Station to the Port Authority, which is only a matter of a few Midtown blocks away.  I had a glimpse of the new interior, briefly, darkly, from within an Amtrak train on its stop there on my way back from Boston.  I had no letters or packages with me at the time, which is probably a good thing.  You see, it was raining the last time I was there.  Now, I’m no Greek historian, but I did manage to drive home that night, although the rain delayed me by about an hour and a half.  No matter how noble our aspirations, the weather is still in charge.  And I figure I’d better learn to be less anxious about deliveries come the holidays, and read Herodotus instead.

Discussing Demons

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So I was discussing demons with a friend, as you do, and I was looking for a free movie.  One that my streaming service recommended was Succubus.  There are other movies by this title, so this was the 2024 version.  Knowing what a succubus is, traditionally, and having just discussed what demons are with a friend, curiosity overcame me.  First of all, I have to say that for a Neo-Luddite like myself, the first half of the movie was a blurry slurry of texts while video chatting while watching the baby monitor that I wondered how people really into the internet get anything done in real life.  Sorry, IRL.  I’ve had a few people try to initiate chats with me on the few socials I use, but I only respond once a day in the brief window in which I use social media.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.

Still, Succubus held a number of triggers for me.  But first, a summary.  Chris, having a trial separation from his wife, meets Adra, a succubus, on a dating app.  She traps him by having him kiss her through the computer and meanwhile kills his best friend who visits her location physically.  Meanwhile a physicist, a former victim, is heading to Chris’ house to try to bring him back from limbo, and, failing that, to kill him.  The succubus wants a body, of course, and when Chris realizes this, he castrates himself when he and his wife get back together, to prevent the succubus from inhabiting their children.  The triggers for me had nothing to do with the demonic aspect, but with the fact that Chris at first is concerned Adra is a scammer.  Having fallen for a scam myself, that aspect was scarier than the entire rest of the movie.

As a horror film it kind of works.  I’m not really a fan of movies that take place on devices, but about halfway through that part gets dropped.  What was of particular interest was only briefly suggested and was worth thinking about.  As Chris tries to research the physicist online, he discovers that he’s a researcher in dark matter.  The implication, never spelled out, is that dark matter is demonic.  This could make an interesting trope, if it hasn’t already been done.  Dark matter and dark energy make up a large part of the universe, we’re told.  Think about it.  It also kind of addresses the question of how spiritual beings make their way into a physical form.  Of course, that’s what succubi are all about, isn’t it?

P.S. Sometimes I swear I need a handler. This post was queue up on December 15 but I forgot to click “Publish.” If a day goes by without a post, somebody feel free to poke me…

Halloween in December

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The wind was frigid.  We were still in the cold snap that layered the northeast in its gelid blanket for the first part of December.  We had advance tickets for Christkindlmarkt, a Bethlehem tradition.  As we wandered through the tents I was thinking of one of the few Facebook groups I follow, Halloween Madness.  Most of the posts are repurposed from the internet but the last few weeks, since Thanksgiving, the offerings have been blending Halloween and Christmas.  Most people don’t stop to think how closely related the two holidays are.  (I devote a chapter to Halloween in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, where I explore this connection in a preliminary way.)  But in this bleak December—we’ve seldom seen the sun for more than a couple hours at a time since the aforementioned Thanksgiving—my thoughts emigrated towards horror.

For those of you who’ve never been to Christkindlmarkt, it’s a germanic themed market consisting of four (or more) large tents, full of vendors.  Many of them are Christmas themed, but not all.  Those that are Christmas themed tend toward the Currier and Ives version of the holiday, but some consider the more ghostly side of the season.  Although I didn’t see any booths explicitly devoted to horror themes or monsters, a few of them had a bit of this aesthetic to them.  I’m no fan of capitalism, but I have to wonder if this isn’t a missed opportunity.  I think there’d be some fans.  I do enjoy Christmas for its symbolism and optimism and coziness.  I really do.  But when I have a few free moments in the holiday season I sneak in reading a scary book or watching a horror movie.  There is a connection, but you have to study the holidays to see it.

I fear that this year I was trying pretty hard to preserve any bodily warmth between the tents and didn’t really have much time to think about it until the next day.  I’m always mindful that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is set in December.  And that both Charles Dickens and M. R. James associated Christmas time with ghosts.  I suspect most people, however, prefer the cheerful, happy side of the holidays.  I don’t blame them.  Life can indeed be harsh, as harsh as this windchill, for much of the rest of the time.  There are some of us, however, who do find a little lift by peering into the darker corners, even at this festive time of year.  And with natural light in such short supply, there are a lot of shadows about this chilly December.

American Revolution

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In these days when America seems to be a nation purely for purposes of stoking Trump’s ego, and the Supreme Court agrees that’s our purpose, many of us are looking for some sense of balance.  I think that was behind, at least subtly, our family trip to Valley Forge this summer.  It was there that we purchased The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. L’Engel.  Now, I’m no fan of reading about wars; I’ve always believed that “rational” beings could come up with better ways of resolving differences.  Some guys like to fight, I know.  And in the case of American liberty we had a king who only wanted to use America for his personal glory.  Wait.  What?  In any case, I would not likely read a book about war, but I feel I need to find some connection to the country that existed before 2016.

My wife and I read this book together.  It is an edited collection, which means that the chapters are uneven.  Some military historians like to get down to the details whereas I prefer a wider sweep.  Nevertheless, as a whole the book gives a pretty good sweep of what happened during those revolutionary years.  Starting with Lexington and Concord, prior to the Declaration of Independence, and moving through the campaign to take Quebec, the loss of New York City, the battles of Trenton and Princeton, Ticonderoga and Saratoga, Philadelphia, Monmouth, the battles in and around Charleston, and finally, Yorktown, the essays give an idea of the breadth of the fighting.  The authors also make the point that this was a civil war, the first of at least two in this country.

Americans have, until the internet, learned to get along with those who are very different.  Now we hang out in clusters of those like us and hate everyone else.  That’s one of the reasons why, living many years in New Jersey, that we unplugged and got out to see these sites.  I visited Lexington when I lived in Boston, and we visited the scene of the battles at Princeton and Monmouth, as well as Washington’s Crossing, when we were in Jersey.  We’ve been to New York City and Philadelphia, of course, but these cities have changed much, showing what can happen when people cooperate instead of being divided against each other.  The same is true of Charleston, which we visited a couple years back.  Although not my favorite book of this year, strangely this one gave me hope.  Maybe America can overcome this present crisis as well.

Half-Way Through

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Here’s a writing phenomenon.  Maybe it only happens to me (I am self-taught), but when I’m writing a book a strange thing happens.  When I’m doing my rewrites, and there are usually several, about halfway through I’ll have an epiphany.  Something I should’ve been doing from the beginning.  Then you’re left standing at a crossroads: should I go back to the beginning again now?  But still need to address a basic rewrite as well as the new approach in the second half, so should I just carry on and then start rewriting from the beginning, catching up with the second half?  That may sound like a trivial question, but I assure you it’s not.  You see, right now I have two books in a complete stage.  “Complete” here means done in draft form.  When I write a book it gets rewritten several times before I consider finding a publisher, but when an important point comes to you halfway through, you’re between worlds.

Now, I work alone.  I am part of a local writers’ group and I’m only now starting to get to know others who’re willing to talk about writing.  I know several writers who don’t talk about it.  They’re still friends, but for me, there are few topics I’d rather discuss.  That’s how I learn.  You see, I have no idea what’s normal.  Do other writers labor over multiple rewrites?  I know some do, but I suspect some don’t.  I know that when I write a short story sometimes the first version seems best to me, but try to get such a thing published.  No, you need to rewrite.  Polish.  Make it shine.  But what if one half is shinier than the other?  This is starting to be a regular occurrence.

Inspiration is fickle.  That’s something we can all agree on.  But when you’ve been scrawling on a topic for weeks, or months, and then a realization dawns, you’ve just added yourself additional weeks or months of revision.  I’m sure a great deal of it is due to my own psychology.  Another part is due to writing under the constraint of a 9-2-5 job.  There are only so many productive hours in a day, and since mine come early they necessarily end when the work day begins.  I’ve tried writing after work but my brain and body feel like a CPR dummy when work’s through with me.  The next morning I start at it again, but the question is still should I finish this up with my new insight, or should I go back to the beginning?