Under Construction

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It’s fascinating, watching a book taking shape.  Just yesterday I noticed Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is now up on McFarland’s website.   And yes, it’s on Amazon too.  Go ahead and preorder!  (It hasn’t made it to Bookshop.org yet, though.)  I have to say the feed to Amazon was much quicker this time than it was with The Wicker Man.  That book took several weeks to appear, probably because it was with a UK publisher.  Yes, it does make a difference.  Now the trick is to try to get people interested in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow again.  I’m thinking I ought to join Historic Hudson Valley.  They might be interested in such a book.  It is, in a sense, right in their back yard.

The thing about writing a book is that you come to suppose other people are interested in your obsession.  I know that Sleepy Hollow is deeply embedded in American culture.  I also know that some of the fandom began to die down when Fox’s Sleepy Hollow went off the rails.  Most analysts suggest, with good reason, that the show failed when it began foregrounding white characters and writing Americans of color into the background.  A great part of the appeal was the melting-pot aspect of the cast, no doubt.  In the book, however, I suggest a somewhat different reason for the decline.  It’s one I’ve seen no one else suggest.  I’m hoping that we can both be right.  In any case, that was the fandom that got this book started.

You see, I had written my first popular culture article on the role of the Bible in Sleepy Hollow.  That article, published in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, led to the book Holy Horror.  I was already thinking about a project around Sleepy Hollow then, but I had a couple more books to finish first.  I’m excited about this one because it marks a move away from publishing primarily about religion to publishing primarily about a story.  There’s still religion there, of course.  We have the Old Dutch Church to pay mind to, but there’s even more about the Headless Horseman, and Ichabod Crane.  And so much more!  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was a lot of fun to write.  I’m not sure when the book will be out, but I’m hoping next year.  Maybe if I can generate a little excitement around this Halloween—it is closely connected with the story, as I explore—there’ll be some interest next time.  Until then there are still plenty of steps to be taken. 

Finding Poe

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A gift a friend gave me started me on an adventure.  The gift was a nice edition of Poe stories.  It’s divided up according to different collections, one being Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  This was originally the title of a collection of 25 stories selected by Poe himself in 1840.  I realized that much of my exposure to Poe was through collections selected by others such as Tales of Mystery and Terror, never published by Poe in that form.  I was curious to see what Poe himself saw as belonging together.  I write short stories and I’ve sent collections off several times, but with no success at getting them published.  I know, however, what it feels like to compile my own work and the impact that I hope it might have (if it ever gets published).  Now finding a complete edition of  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Amazon has copies, of course.  They are apparently all printed from a master PDF somewhere since they’re all missing one of the stories.  The second-to-last tale, “The Visionary,” is missing.  I searched many editions, using the “read sample” feature on Amazon.  They all default to the Kindle edition with the missing tale.  I even looked elsewhere (gasp!) and found that an edition published in 1980 contained all the stories.  I put its ISBN in Amazon’s system and the “read sample” button pulled up the same faulty PDF.  Considerable searching led me to a website that actually listed the full contents of the 1980 edition I’d searched out, and I discovered that, contrary to Amazon, the missing piece was there.  I tried to use ratiocination to figure it out.

I suspect that someone, back when ebooks became easy to make, hurried put together a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  They missed a piece, never stopping to count because Poe’s preface says “25” tales are included, but there were only 24.  Other hawkers (anyone may print and sell material in the public domain, and even AI can do it) simply made copies of the original faulty file and sold their own editions.  Amazon, assuming that the same title by the same author will have the same contents, and wishing to drive everyone to ebooks (specifically Kindle), offers its own version of what it thinks is the full content of the book.  This is more than buyer beware.  This is a snapshot of what our future looks like when AI takes over.  I ordered a used print copy of the original edition with the missing story.  At least when the AI apocalypse takes place I’ll have something to read.

Free Word

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“Anything free is worth saving up for.”  That’s a line from one of my favorite movies of all time.   Free, though, can mean many things.  The “free cookie” is something good to entice you to buy more.  It often works.  Free, for a person, indicates the ability to do what we want (within the constraints of capitalism, of course).  But “free” can often mean cheap, overly abundant.  I like to decorate our lawn with rocks, which are often free, but if you want decorative rocks you’ve got to pay for even the ground beneath your feet.  So it is that when I attend book sales I marvel about the fact that Bibles are nearly always free.  It occurred to me again when I attended a spring book sale a few months back.  I always look through what’s on offer—call it an occupational hazard.

I used to attend the Friends of the Hunterdon County Library book sale in New Jersey.  I believe it is the largest I ever visited.  I used to get there early opening day to stand in line.  One year, one of the volunteer friends came out and announced that they had a really old Bible (only 1800s) that would be $100.  People do, however, tend to donate Bibles to book sales in great numbers.  I suspect organizers are reluctant to put Bibles in the trash.  They also know that people aren’t going to shell out money for them, so they try to give them away.  What does this say about being free?  Is it desirable to be so abundant that you’re left on that table in the back while everyone else is leaning over the more exciting items on offer?  There’s perhaps a message here.

Of course, Trump is selling Bibles for $60.  That’s a bit steep, even for an academic Bible (which his is not).  It might be suggested that this $60 is cheaper than free.  Now, I work with Bibles that are sold at a profit.  One thing I’ve learned is that Bibles sold are always for profit. Those who are honest admit what they do with the lucre.  Although he’s tried to keep it under cover, the Trump Bible does funnel profits to the GOP hopeful.  Yes, he is making money off the Bible and wants to be elected.  If that happens, freedom will disappear.  He’s said as much at his rallies.  Looks like stormy weather to me.  There are organizations that give away Bibles.  Somebody, however, pays for them.  In this strange experiment of a country, anything free is worth pondering.  Nothing, it seems, comes with no strings attached.

Gothic Folk

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I smelled autumn on the air during yesterday morning’s jog.  Pseudo-non sequitur: Cambridge Elements are one of the many series of short books that academic publishers are promoting these days.  Elements is divided into different categories, one of which is “The Gothic.”  (Thus the pseudo.)  When I saw that Dawn Keetley had written a volume on Folk Gothic I knew I had to read it.  In some ways it reminded me of my own short book, The Wicker Man.  Although I analyze that movie as holiday horror, it is widely known as a textbook example of folk horror.  Just as many people haven’t heard of holiday horror as a category, I hadn’t heard of folk gothic.  Autumn is a gothic time of year, and I enjoy folk horror, so I wanted to find out what this genre is all about.

Keetley is an able guide through all things horror.  She co-runs Horror Homeroom, a wonderful website that sometimes publishes my own musings on horror and religion.  There’s a lot packed in this brief book.  One of the draws to these fascicle-like series is that you can learn a lot in a relatively short time.  As a weary scholar, I do appreciate the monograph—I read plenty of those as well—but something that distills is also appreciated.  So what is folk gothic?  Well, if you want a good, short introduction, read this book.  If I were haltingly to try to put it into a sentence, I would suggest that it is a form of horror with no obvious monsters; one that draws on folklore to set up a melancholy scenario that often involves violence.  If you want a better definition, I would recommend reading what an expert has to say about it.

One of the films discussed in this Element is The Wicker Man.  One of the early folk horror movies, it has no obvious monster.  Folk horror often relies on the very landscape to create a sense of unease.  This is something I always feel as autumn approaches.  I still have a ton of summertime chores to do outside—the too hot summer weekends aren’t conducive to physical labor for a guy my age—but I enjoy the melancholy of that first whiff of autumn.  It brings gothic sensitivities to the fore.  I picked a good time to read Folk Gothic.  I’ve seen nearly all of the movies discussed in the book, but some of the fiction I have yet to read.  There’s so much to do to get ready for autumn’s chill.

Not Kid’s Stuff

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Sometimes when I go into a bookstore I don’t find anything on my list.  (My list is pretty strange, and it includes many older titles.)  I feel strongly about supporting bookstores, however, and I search for something I would like to read.  So I found Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible.  I hadn’t previously heard of it but it was in the speculative section and it wasn’t 400 pages or more.  It turns out that it’s set at an indefinite time but it seems to be not too far in the future, when global warming has really kicked in.  A group of kids whose parents are affluent, but not ultra-wealthy, are spending the summer at a large house on the coast.  You get the sense that this house is a lot further inland than the present east coast.  The parents are childlike in their hedonism, whereas the kids really despise their constant drinking, drug use, and general lack of care.  The kids are independent and try to make their own way, but then a massive hurricane hits.

In the aftermath, the kids run away.  Society has broken down, however, with bands of roving armed men breaking in and taking whatever supplies they want.  They find the compound the children are using, setting this almost as a horror story.  I won’t say anything more about the plot because that might give too much away.  Astute readers know that it isn’t possible to say definitively what a book is about, but I would say this is almost a parable about global warming—it has “parable” written all over it.  Irresponsible adults have let this happen and the children have to figure out solutions.  And yes, there is a Children’s Bible in the story and it plays a part in the plot.  I have to admit the the title is what first caught my attention.

I don’t know Lydia Millet’s other work, but this was not exactly an enjoyable novel, it seems like an important one.  I’m glad to have read it.  The kids in the novel, the older ones, are skeptical of the Children’s Bible when it’s introduced.  Two of the younger kids, see it as providing direction on how to survive in science-versus-nature world.  All of the kids here are incredibly prescient and precocious.  The adults are unable to adjust to the changing world and although the Bible remains with the children it leaves the reader with the haunting question of what comes after Revelation.  This is a book that would benefit from serious pondering.

Book Stages

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There are stages to it.  Writing a book, I mean.  One stage, for me, is realizing that you’re writing one.  I started work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth years ago, without realizing it.  That was followed by the stage of comprehending that I had a book idea and intentionally writing it.  I suspect that, in the throes of The Wicker Man, I thought “I should do a similar book on Sleepy Hollow.”  Devils Advocates, which is an excellent series, however, feeling the strain on academic presses, was moving to hardcover-first releases (the kiss of death).  I started writing the book anyway, hoping that maybe it might find trade interest.  It is still possible that an agent is out there who would’ve moved it in that direction, but I wanted the book out before Lindsey Beer’s movie gets released.  After the book is drafted, the next stage: find a publisher. (Unless you have an agent.)

Since this is my sixth book, I felt confident (a strange, foreign feeling for me) that I could locate a publisher.  I’d done it five times before.  McFarland did a nice job with Holy Horror, but what sold me is that they dropped the price on it.  Many academic publishers continue to raise prices each year, so if you don’t buy a book right away you’ll end up paying a lot for this muffler.  The next stage is waiting to see what the cover will look like.  That wait is over.  Here it is, the cover of Sleepy Hollow as American Myth:

(Feel free to share widely, get everyone all excited!)  I’m currently in the waiting stage.  Waiting for proofs.  Of course, I’ve been working on my next couple of books as well.  You can’t just sit around, otherwise these tomes will never get written.  I haven’t decided which one will cross the finish line first.  If I had an agent they’d be able to tell me which might be more marketable, but since I work alone I’m left to my own devices.  I am bound and determined that the next book will go to a trade press.  I’m trying hard to scrub any whiff of academia from it.  In the meantime, however, I’m enjoying looking at the cover for my current book.  There aren’t a ton of nonfiction books out there on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  In fact, as nonfiction I know of only one other.  This isn’t what we in the biz call “a crowded bookshelf.”  I’m doing all the pre-publication promo that I can.  I’d be grateful for any shares or likes at this stage.

Local Gothic

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One of the most valuable aspects of the humanities is the range they give the imagination.  As an undergrad from a small town, I was astonished at the range of courses available in a liberal arts college.  Even so, I took only two in the literature department.  I wish I’d taken more.  You see, as someone who grew up poor, my reading has often been budget reading.  Used books found by chance and cheap editions in department stores of a town lacking bookshops.  I soon found that Gothic literature met my needs.  Alan Lloyd-Smith’s American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction is, as you might guess, a series book.  One of those books by an outsider analyzing a different culture’s literature, it is nevertheless quite good for the most part.  Until it decides, as many literary studies do, to go all theoretical.  Prior to that it’s very engaging.

For me it’s less the ideas than the mood of Gothic literature that I find engaging.  It creates a cozy feel, and when I read about Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, I feel a sense of belonging.  Gothic transformed when it emigrated to America.  Lloyd-Smith does a great job of demonstrating how castles and cathedrals gave way to a landscape built by Native Americans, and an unexplored frontier.  How literature in America tended toward the Gothic from the beginning and even up to the point this book was written, hadn’t really effaced much at all.  Such things are inspiring to me.  It jumpstarted my own fiction writing again.  One curious feature, however, is that the book doesn’t discuss “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at all, other than a passing reference to Burton’s film.  There’s quite a lot on Poe and company, Charles Brockden Brown, and some of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Even Toni Morrison makes an appearance or two.  (He does cover Southern Gothic also.)

While this is clearly intended as a classroom book—wide, wide margins for note-taking, introductory level until chapter six—it is worthwhile reading for any curious adult interested in American literature.  My life has been a search for my tribe.  For many years it was a very religious search, that, unfortunately led to rejection that left me searching for a new home.  The horror community has been somewhat welcoming, and there’s something Gothic about that in its own right.  In any case, reading about Gothic brings its own melancholy joy.  I mostly enjoyed this book and learned quite a lot from it.  And, of course I bought it used.

Good Timing?

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Timing is important.  I hope I have a sense of it, but it doesn’t always work out the way you hope.  My last book, The Wicker Man, was released on the fiftieth anniversary of that cult film.  A bigger publisher with better reach published their own Wicker Man book that year, and mine garnered no attention.  I decided to turn to Sleepy Hollow instead.  This is a story that has been quite well known since 1820.  Although the Fox television series ran out of steam in 2017, I wrote the book when I did because Lindsey Beer has been tapped to direct a reboot of the Tim Burton film of 1999.  Looking for books on the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” I found very little.  This is what is known of in the biz as “a gap.”  I decided to try to fill it.  Fandom helps in situations like this.

I’ve been trying to find the Sleepy Hollow fandom and engage with it before Sleepy Hollow as American Myth comes out.  I am confident that there are fans out there.  The tragic collapse of the Fox series didn’t lead to lack of love for the tale.  Indeed, further renditions have continued to appear.  Some have gained considerable attention.  The online fan base, however, seems to be, ah, sleeping.  I’m not sure when the Beer movie is slated for release.  It was announced in several media outlets but now we’ve come to the lull where updates have ceased to surface.  I’m certainly no Hollywood insider and I generally don’t even find out about movies until after they’ve left theaters (unless they’re very big).  I hope the timing is right this time.

It takes a couple years, at least, for me to write a book.  I’ve been working on this Sleepy Hollow project, in some way or other, since before Holy Horror came out in 2018.  I sure hope I got the timing right on this one.  The many trade publishers and agents I approached didn’t think so.  Maybe it’s just that people aren’t curious enough to read a book about Washington Irving’s story.  I try to make the case in my book that it has risen to the level of an American myth.  The story’s known world-wide, but its largest fan base is here in the States.  Had the Fox series been handled a bit better, keeping both people of color and the apocalypse in the foreground, it might’ve run a couple more seasons.  The underlying story’s not quite dead in the grave yet, I hope.  But then, timing hasn’t always been my strong suit.

F.O.C. Darley, from Le Magasin pittoresque, public domain

In Public

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Mere days after my dentist appointment I had occasion to be back in the waiting room.  Of course I had a book with me.  Then my attention was caught by either a patient or someone waiting for a patient.  This man had not one, but two books with him.  He was poring over one of them, which was an older hardcover, like an academic.  Since I’d just posted about seeing nobody reading books, I felt I needed to publish a kind of, well, not exactly retraction, but reflection.  The sight of this man, about my age, was profoundly hopeful.  I have no idea who he was and waiting rooms are not generally where I choose to introduce myself.  I do sometimes weigh, however, the demerits of interrupting someone reading with the merits of meeting another reader.  We reading sorts can be private people, although reading in public marks us.

The book I happened to have had a bright, trade cover.  His were more somber and academic.  How could I, whose reading looked facile (it was not, but it looked like it might be) approach someone perhaps awaiting a root canal, who had some serious reading to do?  Two hardcovers bespeak serious business.  This made me reflect on another occasion in Easton.  Again, I was waiting for someone and it was summer so I sat outside on a curb, at the traffic circle, reading a book.  It was actually Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  Evening was falling.  A couple of coeds, or they seemed to eyes from my age, stopped and asked what I was reading.  I explained, and, unaccountably, they seemed never to have heard of Morrison, but were interested.  It was a teaching moment.

Back to the dentist office.  Had I missed out on the opportunity for a free lecture?  If this man were a professor, he’d likely have talked gladly about his work.  One thing I learned from being a professor myself is that people rarely ask about your work.  Yes, colleagues in the same field do, but even at Nashotah House with its small faculty, nobody seemed interested in the research of their colleagues.  As academic dean I even tried to institute a faculty seminar where we could read a paper and discuss it.  I was the only one who ever volunteered to do it.  In retrospect, it might’ve been a lost opportunity, that waiting room visit.  I’ve attended many medical appointments in my life, and finding a fellow reader at one of them was a bit of a silent gift.  I was glad to have been proven wrong.

Gothic Illumination

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A mere month ago I had never heard of Sally Sayward Wood.  She has seldom received much attention, and it may be in part because her literary finesse wasn’t quite that of her compatriots.  Wood, however, was the earliest American woman to write a gothic novel.  She was also Maine’s first novelist.  I learned of Julia and the Illuminated Baron from a rather unexpected source, but my interest in the history of horror meant that I knew I would have to read it.  Original printings are extremely rare, but the University of Maine has brought them back into circulation.  Julia was published in 1800 and it is old-style gothic.  Set in France, among the aristocracy, it has gloomy castles, dastardly villains, and damsels in distress.  The story also involves an extremely complex set of titled gentry that end up being fairly closely related by the end of the novel.  Well into the story (after about 150 pages) it grows somewhat exciting, but the denouement is something you can see coming, though.

What is really striking about this gothic romance is the extreme vitriol served up to the Illuminati.  In particular, Wood seems quite affronted by their atheistic outlook, stating rather boldly that without Christian sensibilities that morals can’t be preserved.  This wasn’t an uncommon view around the turn of the nineteenth century, of course.  The Enlightenment had begun to take hold and not a few people were very concerned about the implications.  Social change must be slow, if it is to have lasting impact.  Quick change leads to reactionary backlashes, as anyone who looks at history knows.  Still, this makes Wood’s villain particularly nasty.  Perhaps even more surprising is that such biases continue today.

Gothic was an important part of early American literature.  It owes quite a bit to its European forebears, but it developed into its own form in the New World.  When she does mention America, Wood ladles praise on George Washington.  She was born, of course, before the Revolutionary War, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts.  All of this makes me feel somewhat less of a pariah, knowing that the early American tradition was part of the family tree for horror.  In today’s parlance gothic might seem far from the slasher, but without gothic we’d never have had our classic ghost stories that first gave people the frisson that begged for further expression.  Julia and the Illuminated Baron is a bit too satisfied with the wealthy overlords of the second estate.  It is a work of fantasy, however, of one of the earliest American women to try her hand at fiction.

In Praise of Paper

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There’s an old saying that the tech industry might consider.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I’m thinking books.  I work in an industry that’s running after ebooks, sometimes at the expense of actual books.  You know what I mean—the kind printed on paper.  With a cover.  An object.  What techies don’t seem to understand is that something happens to you when you’re reading a book.  It changes you.  Curled up in a chair with a half-pound of bound paper in front of you, you become absorbed.  Chair, person, paper.  All one.  And you’re taken somewhere else.  I’m not saying that reading online isn’t valuable.  Clearly it is.  The experience, however, isn’t the same.  Industry moguls express surprise at vinyl’s return.  They shouldn’t.  It wasn’t broke either.

After reading a meaningful book I’ll carry it around with me for days like Linus’ security blanket.  Its mere presence reminds me that something profound happened to me while I was spending time with that tome.  Especially meaningful books I hesitate to shelve away with the others.  No, I want them to hand to remind me.  To bring back, at a glance, the fascination they engendered.  Let’s call it enchantment.  Capitalism removed enchantment from the world.  In the heat of materialism’s fervor, it made all alternatives irrelevant.  That’s what’s driving the ebook craze.  Hey, I’m fine if you like to read on a piece of plastic, but please leave the option of paper for those who prefer to truly get lost.

I spend most of my waking hours (and all of my sleeping ones) surrounded by books.  When my eye falls on one that I really enjoyed, I take a nanosecond pause to appreciate it.  We all have to decide how we’ll spend our time on this weary old planet.  A good deal of it will be work, and if we’re lucky it will be doing something we enjoy.  Otherwise we have roughly five hours of waking time five days a week to squeeze in the necessary and the enjoyable.  Some will go out and party with friends, others will stay home and read a book.  Many will use devices to fill the time outside the office, whether alone or with friends.  I tend to be in the book crowd.  I’m not embarrassed by that.  Books have been good to me.  Very good.  They say reading is fundamental.  I would add that reading a real book is life itself.

Toothsome Books

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A visit to the dentist always entails a certain amount of anxiety.  Will the sins of my mouth have caught up with me?  Are my sleepy nights’ brushings thorough enough?  Is that spot where I declined to have a false molar replace the missing one causing any problems for the teeth above?  That kind of thing.  In any case, I like our dentist.  The town we live in, which is small, has four dentist offices.  The one I selected is run by three women and instead of always getting the same mouth doctor, on a standard visit you meet with the one who has an opening in her schedule.  I like to support women-owned businesses.  But still, the anxiousness.  Something happened on my last visit that may help.  I’ll try to remember it.

Unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen, I always take a book with me for those minutes in the waiting room.  I have so much that I want to read and so little time, so as long as I’m cashing in a sick day, I might as well get some extra reading done.  Since it’s summer, I didn’t have a coat in which to leave my book, so I took it back to the room with me.  They’ve never said anything about me taking up a little of their medical counter with a book, so I figured it was okay.  The hygienist did the x-rays and cleaning, then the dentist stopped in.  I had never seen this particular doctor before, and she began the conversation by asking what the book was about.  Now, as strange as it may sound, I have wondered why nobody ever asks about the book I inevitably have.  I take books to every medical appointment—I’m not a magazine reader—and in all these years no one has asked me.  Until now.

This wasn’t just a polite query either.  She asked whether I thought it was good, and even suggested some similar things I might want to read.  It was, in fact, a literary conversation.  As I walked home (teeth are fine) I pondered how rare this is.  I’ve told people that I write books and the conversation usually dies when I say what they’re about.  Of course, I don’t go around reading copies of my own books.  I already know what they say.  I guess I miss a literate society where people discuss the books they read.  I do it on this blog, and on Goodreads, but engagement is low.  At least next time I won’t be afraid to go to the dentist.

Expectations

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Our minds are our most powerful tools.  Some of us wonder what reality is, and David Robson has written a very important book that the title explains: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World.  Now, before your woo-woo meter goes off, Robson is a science writer and everything in his book is backed by evidence.  The basic idea is this: what we expect to happen often becomes our reality due to the “expectation effect.”  The brain, as Robson describes it, is a prediction machine.  And what it expects often takes place.  In other words, belief matters.  Probably the most famous example of this is the placebo.  We all know that patients treated with placebos often recover just as well as patients given the active ingredient.  That pill the doctor gives will heal them, and so it does.  The brain expects it, and it happens.  Belief.

This book also explores the nocebo response.  This is where you expect something bad, and it happens.  The most extreme examples of this, well documented, are when people are convinced an imaginary threat will kill them and they die of it.  In fact, the book opens with consideration of such an occurrence where a cultural expectation led to otherwise unexplainable deaths among healthy Hmong populations fearing a night demon.  Hysteria grew and so did the deaths.  Robson also explores how hysteria leads to expectations that our brains carry out.  He shows how training our expectations can help good self-fulfilling prophecies take place.  Athletes, for example, can seem to do the impossible.  Why?  Partially training, yes.  But also because of their mindsets.  Their expectations.  Their beliefs.

The implications of this are very broad.  Everything from our health, to how we handle stress, to how food benefits our bodies, to how we age as we expect to.  Robson is quick to point out that this isn’t a book to solve all our problems, but it is a book that demonstrates our minds do make things real.  Or at least they can.  It is filled with fascinating examples, backed with science, showing that even how a doctor or nurse introduces a shot “you’ll feel a bit of a sting” versus “you won’t feel a thing” can make a difference to how our body perceives it.  And our brains can make our worries, or our hopeful expectations, real.  Personally, I believe that there may be even more to this than Robson explores.  But then again, I enjoy a bit of mystery.  I believe in belief.  Regardless, this is a life-changing book and I hope, for your own sake, that you’ll read it.

Not Content

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I write books.  When I want to “create content” I do it on this blog.  (And a few other internet sites.)  These aren’t the same thing.  I find it distressing that publishers are trying to drive us to ebooks where content can easily be changed, as opposed to print books.  The shelves of this room are lined with books and the technology doesn’t exist to come in and change “data” without my knowing it.  Facts are secure in print, right Ilimilku?  I’m not looking forward to a Star Wars future where there’s no paper.  I was born in the last century and, perhaps, I’ll die there too.   You see, when you write a book you have a project in mind that has an endpoint.   It may change and shift as you write, but you know what a book is and that’s what you produce.  It gets shelved and you move on to other things.  (At least I do.)

Content is something different and the creative process behind it also differs.  If I find something wrong after the fact, I go into my past posts and change it.  I’m not afraid of admitting I’m wrong.  The point of this blog is to share ideas with the world, not to write a book.  (Although, I confess that I would not say “no” if someone in publishing wanted a selection of worthwhile posts for a book… just saying.)  It amazes me how publishers have pretty much gone after the money and have forgotten what the creative process is like.  Of course, they’re having to figure out how this whole internet with free content plays into it too.  But still, my book writing uses a different fold in my gray matter than my blog writing does.  All of it feels pretty different from writing fiction too.

These things together adds up to a writing life.  I have a ton of “not for publication” writing.  This is something different again.  I suspect it will never be read by anybody, moldering away on some old hard drive after some AI-induced apocalypse.  I write it for of the same reason, I suspect, that people used to spray-paint “Kilroy was here” on things.  The book of Job, it seems to me, was the preservation of words that someone simply had to write.  We know the framing story is folklore.  But those who have words to carve with iron on lead, or engrave on a stone to last forever.  It’s more, I hope, than just “creating content.”

Powerful Belief

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Even someone who’s spent a lifetime studying religion can’t know every single sect.  People are far too creative in that regard, and some belief groups are fairly small.  I had never heard of Unarius, for example, before reading this book.  If I had, it simply washed over me, getting lost in the noise.  Part of the trouble with defining Unarius is that it calls itself a science.  Words can be slippery, and Christian Scientists also use that designation in a similar way.  The word “science,” etymologically speaking, denotes “knowledge.”  In our materialist culture we often suppose that means the physical sciences, grudgingly allowing it to be borrowed by the “social sciences.”  There is a science of religion, but this leads to its own set of discussion points.  Let’s look at Diana Tumminia’s title: When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group.  That give you an idea. 

The “prophecy” part concerns a “failed” prediction, or two, of when the spaceships would land.  Being a sociologist, Tumminia’s real interest is what happens then.  And here’s where things get interesting.  Failed predictions generally don’t lead to true believers giving up their convictions.  History has played and replayed this for us—it’s happening around us this very second—and yet “rationality” supposes that when the ships don’t land, people simply move on.  The Millerites outlived “the Great Disappointment,” after all, when the world didn’t end as predicted.  Their heirs include a sizable Christian denomination.  All this talk of AI has muddled our thinking about what it means to be human.  We are emotional.  More than that, we are believing creatures.  Our society is living proof.

Perhaps the most important, and ill-studied facet of being human, is belief.  Belief (no matter what in) is a religious phenomenon.  This study of a fairly small group shows that convinced people cannot be dissuaded, no matter how many facts are presented to them.  One need not look far to find the same phenomenon surrounding Trump.  (I do not condone violence, but history can inform us if we allow it.)  Make no mistake—he is the center of a new religion.  Unarians have absolute belief that their system is right.  Mistaken predictions—even very public ones—will not convince true believers otherwise.  It seems to me that our society, our democracy, cannot survive without intensive study of belief and how it affects the way otherwise completely rational people think.  My study is full of books exploring various aspects of belief, but we are still no closer to any kind of definitive answer.  And voters, at least a great many of them, follow their beliefs.