Dark House

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Last year I completed an odyssey that began over a decade and a half ago.  I finished reading the Dark Shadows serial novels by Marilyn Ross.  Not because they were great literature, but because they were an important part of my childhood.  Slowly, over the years, I regathered the books and read them until the whole series was done.  One of the used book sellers was offering a collection of the books, and although the collection had some duplicates of what I’d already found, it contained some of the more difficult to locate titles.  When it arrived, I found it also included House of Dark Shadows.  This novelization wasn’t part of the series, and like most things in my life, I can’t claim to know everything about Dark Shadows.  As a child I didn’t know there had been a movie, let alone a novelization.  (I bought the books as I happened to find them, at Goodwill and watched the TV show.)

In the present, I’d just finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and felt that I needed something lighter for my next fictional project.  House of Dark Shadows proved a better read than most of the series books, perhaps because it was based on a movie script written by the screenwriters.  Marilyn Ross was actually William Edward Daniel (W. E. D.) Ross, and he wrote more than 300 novels.  His Dark Shadows oeuvre became repetitious in its dialogue, across the series.  His characters always seem to say “at once” instead of “immediately” or “right now.”  I’m pretty sure the word “mocking” appears in each of them—certainly the latter ones—multiple times.  Having the script must’ve really helped keep those trademarks to a minimum.

Of course, now that I’ve read the novelization I need to go back and watch the movie again.  It’s been almost two years and some of the details escape me.  It’s largely because the movie goes “off script” from the long-running daily show (and the other novels).  I also realized that Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie was really a kind of reboot of House of Dark Shadows, unfortunately screen written by Seth Grahame-Smith as a comedy.  I’m no expert on Dark Shadows, just a reasonably enthusiastic fan in search of a lost childhood.  The movie makes the premise of the series untenable—both can’t exist in the same world, so it’s kind of a Dark Shadows multiverse, rather than a simple universe.  And it’s very complex.  I’d need to start again at childhood to become an expert in it, but at least now I’ve read all the books.

Sequel Pondering

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Of course I’m working on another book.  I can’t say what it is at the moment, but one of the projects I’ve long been contemplating is a kind of sequel to Holy Horror.  The problem is that if the first book didn’t sell very well (the premise is perhaps too academic), a sequel couldn’t be expected to do any better.  I’m still working on sloughing that academy skin.  But I keep watching what we insist on calling “horror” and the more I do, the more I find the Bible in it.  Others have taken up the gauntlet—mostly academics who have jobs that encourage such behavior—of connecting horror and religion.  The Bible’s role, while a subset of the larger field, has its own particular parameters.  In one of my notebooks I have a list of 23 movies to add to my analysis.  I know that there is a twenty-fourth, but it’s only streaming on an exclusive service and still costs a bit too much for something that doesn’t come with a plastic case.

In any case, Holy Horror just scratched the surface.  One of the factors I’ve mentioned before is that there is no database of the Bible’s appearances in film.  It would be an extensive list altogether, and a substantial number of horror films would be on it.  In general, it seems, people really aren’t too interested or intrigued by this fact.  I certainly am.  Our society is a curious mix of sweet and salty.  We want to think we’re too sophisticated for religion, but religion undergirds just about everything we do.  Otherwise it’s pretty difficult to explain how the Bible keeps showing up in horror.  Usually as a mysterious artifact.

I recently saw myself referred to as a biblical scholar.  There’s no doubt that I taught biblical studies for many years.  I even wrote a book interpreting one aspect of the Good Book.  My degree, and my interest, however, has always been historical.  I follow this history of ideas.  Although many people don’t understand my current horror fascination, it’s clear this is another jog down a trail of history.  How did we get to the point that a totemic (the scholarly phrase is “iconic”) Bible became a stand-in for God in movies?  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write Holy Sequel, although, if my profession ever permitted it, I’d certainly have the interest in doing so.  There’s a lot to be learned from such explorations.  That’s true even if the books containing the information only appear on a few dusty library shelves.

Playing Authors

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My family looked at me funnily, but not for the first time.  With a holiday gift card I’d ordered a book on the card game Authors that I’d blogged about recently.  You see, there’s not a ton of information on it on the web, and it was a formative influence in my life and I wanted to know more.  I suppose it’s typical for someone raised as a fundamentalist not to immediately think of evolution, but Authors has evolved over the years.  And quite a lot.  For one thing, you can’t copyright an idea and other game-producing companies made their own versions of the original game.  And what I’d assumed had been the original (since it was the one I had as a child) was only one of many versions.  The book even documents the Bible Authors game I’d mentioned.  My real interests included that age-old question—did it ever include Edgar Allan Poe?

Today is Poe’s birthday.  It’s fair to say that he’s one of the most recognizable authors in the world now.  He also had a tough time being accepted.  This book, which I haven’t read through—it’s more of a reference book, in any case—points out that Poe was indeed included in more than one edition of the game.  He isn’t one of the strongly recurring authors (which include several of whom I’d never heard).  This is the fate of writers.  Reading about Dickens lately, I came to realize that even after several best-selling novels (at numbers that would make any modern publisher gloat), he was effectively living off debt until well into his forties.  And he died at 58.  He was famous, but until his final years not what you could consider wealthy.  

Another realization dawned.  Writing for a wider readership means getting away from academic publishers.  I had an agent interested in my current book project for a couple of months before he decided it wasn’t for him.  I’ve also come to see that several authors I respect, and whose books are priced below $20, have published with presses that aren’t part of the Big Five.  And they earn some profit from their efforts (unlike academic publishing).  In other words, becoming an author of either fiction or non, often involves book sense that I’ve been slow to gain.  At the Easton Book Festival a few years back I met several local writers who were putting additions onto their houses with the royalties they earned.  I’d published three books at that point and was turning my pockets inside out hoping for forgotten spare change.  Authors is a game.  Those who are included are those who figured out how it’s played.

Unusual Places

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I don’t recall how I first learned about Mitch Horowitz’s work.  I read Occult America as soon as I found out about it—it helped as I was transitioning to writing about religious culture (largely through horror films) since there’s a healthy dose of occult in horror.  While still in publishing Mitch agreed to look at Holy Horror before it landed with McFarland.  The thing about my life is that it’s too busy (9-2-5 isn’t a size that fits all) to keep up with writers I find fascinating.  I hadn’t been aware of Horowitz’s continued, and continuing, book writing.  As soon as I saw Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences I ordered a copy.  It brought back to mind the semester break at Nashotah House when I realized that to get anywhere near the truth you need to question and question boldly.  I told my students that if they didn’t challenge their perceptions with reading during semester breaks they were wasting them.

I met Mitch (although we’ve never seen each other in person) through our mutual friend Jeff Kripal.  They both have the courage to question apparent reality and to not stop at the line that the wall of materialism throws up around the pursuit of knowledge.  Uncertain Places is well titled.  Like almost all collections of essays some speak to the reader more than others, but I found myself pausing frequently to consider what I’d just read here.  One thought that keeps recurring is how even someone with a terminal degree can constantly feel like there’s so much more to explore.    Horowitz is a seeker unashamed.  And that also took me back to my past.

Growing up poor, I didn’t have many resources other than my mind to help draw some preliminary conclusions about reality.  Like many red-neck families of the time we had a CB radio and we were each instructed to come up with a “handle.”  I believe it was my mother who suggested “Searcher” to me.  She knew that I would never stop looking.  Uncertain Places is the work of another searcher—one who’s less fearful than I tend to be.  (I’m working on it.)  Reality, it seems clear to me, is far more subtle than most of higher education has taught me that it should be.  We try to make occult scary and demonic but Horowitz is, like yours truly, an historian.  Those of us who explore the history of religion can find ourselves in some pretty unusual, one might say uncertain, places.  And rather than dismiss what we see there, we take a closer look.

Life Learning

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One thing a recovering academic must learn is that the vast majority of people don’t really care what drives the academy.  They aren’t too worried about larger issues as systemic racism, or various groups’ feelings of unequal treatment.  In fact, most people are just looking to get by, keeping depression and hopelessness at bay.  There are few avenues to break out of the middle class, and even fewer to move up from the lower.  And going to school hasn’t been presented to most people as an opportunity, but as a chore that must be done until work can be secured and they can pursue surviving on their own.  This truth comes to me time and again when I’m reminded that deep thinking doesn’t sell books (not unless you’ve already established a reputation) and that if you try to bring the concerns of the academy to the public, they’ll look the other way.

The real trick, it seems to me, is educating people without them knowing they’re being taught.  People don’t like being talked down to.  Understandably.  When I listen to people without college educations, I learn a ton.  This is my matrix as well—it’s where I grew up.  Higher education changes the way you think, but it shouldn’t prevent you from communicating with those who are the vast majority of people in the world.  Anything can seem to be normal when it happens long enough, even living in ivory towers and discussing things almost nobody else cares about.  You see, I’m a realist.  And I still have a lot to learn.

When I write my books, my style is accessible but my topics are academic.  It has taken me years to realize this simple fact.  Anyone can read my books from Holy Horror on and understand them, but why would they want to?  The questions raised are those of the academy, and those in the academy know you by your specialization (ancient West Asian religions, historically declined, thank you).  A glance at how my Academia.edu page is viewed tells the story.  Nobody who visits there is interested in horror films or this blog.  They want the resource that can’t be renewed—my work on ancient history of religions.  I’ve moved to horror because I find lots of very intelligent people here.  Like those with whom I grew up, they are generally ignored by the academy.  They are also very accepting of outsiders.  You have to unlearn being an academic.  And it might just lead somewhere productive.

Truthful Fiction

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Octavia E. Butler is a name I’ve known for some time.  Various people, most of whom I don’t know, had recommended her books, particularly Parable of the Talents.  It turns out to have been one of the scariest novels I’ve ever read.  It’s not horror—it’s science fiction.  It’s scary because it’s just too plausible.  The first inkling I had that something was amiss was when I read how Andrew Steele Jarret ran for president to “make America great again.”  Jarret pretends to be Christian to get the vote and America suffers terribly when he’s elected.  I flipped back to the copyright page.  1998.  I read on anyway.  It’s not too often you find a sci-fi book about someone starting a religion.  And named after a biblical story, as well.  I was doing fine until Jarret’s supporters destroyed Olamina’s peaceful community and enslaved the survivors.

It’s all just too plausible.  Of course, there’s a lot going on here.  Butler was an African-American whose ancestors had been slaves.  The religions presented in the book are a bit too black-and-white, but the followers of Christian America behave like many followers of Trump.  Butler saw this two decades before it happened.  The slavery part of the book was difficult to read.  There was so much pathos here, so much deep memory.  Although Olamina is a flawed character, she is a visionary with the best interest of the human race at heart.  This dystopia is perhaps a little too close to reality.  Those who recommend the book say that it’s hopeful, so I kept on reading.  And yes, there is a hopeful ending.  Getting to it left me floored.

Religion defines us.  In the growing materialism—false, as anyone who feels deeply knows—the idea that a story could be built around religion seems unlikely.  Butler has done that, and done it in spades.  I was surprised to learn that she’d studied at the Clarion Workshop, not far from where I grew up.  Being from an uneducated family I never heard of the Workshop until I was an adult.  And besides, it left Clarion, Pennsylvania for Michigan before I even got to high school.  Still, it gives me a sense of connection with a woman who saw more than many did.  Although Parable of the Sower is earlier, I’m not sure that I have it in me to pick it up.  At least not right away.  I’m still trembling a bit from Butler’s second parable.

No Agency

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I’ve worked in publishing since 2006.  That seems like a goodly time, but the industry is a complex one.  I started trying to publish again around 2010—losing my job at Nashotah House sent me into a tailspin in that regard, although I wrote a novel or two in the meantime.  My first post-dissertation book was published in 2014.  I soon learned that academic publishers each have their strengths and weaknesses.  Most have trouble with marketing—people just don’t know about your books.  (And can’t afford them if they do.)  If the publisher won’t advertise, well, the voice of one ex-academic isn’t very loud.  So I wrote on.  My sixth book has existed in draft form for a few months now.  I know that to get a publisher who knows how to market you often need an agent.  I also know that as an unknown writer it’s difficult to get an agent’s attention.  I finally found one, however.

Agents change books.  Mine asked me to rewrite yet again.  All of my books have been rewritten multiple times, so this was par for the course.  I had to leave out a lot of the stuff I liked.  Then the agent changed his mind.  Hey, I get it.  Agents live off the advances their authors get so if they don’t see enough zeroes they shy away.  That’s just how it works.  I’ve found what looks like a good publisher (not an academic press) but I couldn’t simply go back to the version I really liked—I’d made improvements for the agent—so I had to blend the two versions together.  The problem is, that’s difficult to do on a computer.  I know from working in publishing that side-by-side comparative screens in word processing programs are difficult to find.  Of course, if you just print both versions out all you need is a table and a red pen.

I wasn’t born into the computer era.  Flipping between two screens doesn’t come easily but printing out two three-hundred-page manuscripts is time and resource consuming.  So I’m flipping screens.  I hope to finish this book soon because the next one is already brewing and I really can’t wait to start getting the ideas out.  And I even have a publisher in mind—one that doesn’t require an agent.  I don’t think agents really get me.  Or maybe I’m just not a “commercial” enough thinker.  There are plenty of presses out there, however, and if you do your research you can find a home for this project that’s taken years of your life.  It’s just difficult to do the screen flipping.  But then, I’ve only been doing this for about a decade.  I’ll get the hang of it soon.

Salem Away

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I can’t help but think the term “witch hunt” has been cheapened in recent years as a prominent, wealthy white man has been claiming to be the victim of one.  Nevertheless, America was actually home to an infamous witch hunt some centuries ago.  I’ve read a few books about it and there are many more yet to be read.  The thing Emerson W. Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft has going for it is the broader context he gives the events.  Not only the events but the town of Salem also.  Older than Boston, and a major city in its day, Salem had more history than the trials for which it is famous.  Baker does a nice job of describing the ambivalence that residents have felt, and still feel, towards its past.  Tragic, yes, but fascinating also.

I fell in love with Boston the first time I set foot in it.  I made quite a few trips to Salem during my years there, drawn in by the history.  So much isn’t recoverable.  One of the aspects that comes clearly through Baker’s treatment is just how much of a Puritan problem witches were.   And not just witches.  Puritans didn’t care for those who differed from them.  Quakers could be just as bad as Devil worshippers.  And the tragedy of Salem illustrates that the Puritans didn’t much care for one another either.  Religion gets that way when it’s weaponized.  Baker points out the many pressures of what was essentially a frontier town on the coast.  War with American Indians was still a reality.  And Salem wouldn’t be innocent of the slave trade some decades later.  But it all seems to keep coming back to 1692.  And the death of the innocent.

Baker also points out how Cotton Mather covered his own tracks, justifying what he knew was wrong in order to keep privilege in its place.  We tend to think of that as a modern trait, but clearly clergy were well aware of it back in the early days of this nation.  Religions always do have a difficult time admitting it when they make mistakes.  I think they’d find that people can be pretty forgiving, though, especially since they often advocate forgiveness themselves.  This book is a thought-provoking treatment of Salem.  The events that took place there have shaped this county in unexpected ways.  They made the case, centuries ago, for tolerance of those who are different.  It’s a lesson we still have trouble learning.

Ninth Day of

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I read Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas back in 2017 and learned a lot from it then.  Some of what I read on the bus, however, has faded a bit with time and I was curious to read it again in the light of the reading I’ve done about Washington Irving.  Irving was a bit older than Charles Dickens and had, it seems, given Dickens the idea of writing, first, a sketch book (Sketches by Boz), and second, writing about Christmas.  From what I’ve read about Irving, he had a cautious liking of Dickens but wasn’t terribly impressed.  Standiford does note that it was Irving who suggested an American tour to Dickens (it didn’t turn out well) but he (Standiford) indicates that Irving was a staunch fan of his English colleague.  Were I able to spare the time, I would follow footnotes and read letters to see if I could get to the heart of the matter.  Of course, I’ve become much more interested in the history of modern literature in recent years.

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Dickens in English literature.  As Standiford points out, he helped to invent novel publication as we know it.  Although he took up the gauntlet of international copyright (something Irving had earlier understood as important), he became internationally famous partially through pirated works.  We still use the phrase “What the Dickens” to express surprise. (It turns out that the expression predates Charles—now that’s influence!)  As Standiford notes, however, we’ve passed the era when a single author can have such great influence.  Dickens was a singular talent and read by vast numbers of his compatriots and also grew a respectable readership in the United States.  He also had a great deal of influence on how we celebrate Christmas.  I was this time looking for Irving lurking in the shadows.  And I found him.  Dickens was an enthusiastic fan of Irving.

Standiford brings Irving into the discussion often, but also perpetuates the association of “It was a dark and stormy night” with Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who did use it) without mentioning that the phrase originated with Washington Irving.  One gets the sense that Irving was completely eclipsed by the work of his young fan, Charles Dickens.  Standiford mentions Irving quite a lot in this little book, but it’s about Dickens and not his American colleague, of course.  And Standiford also notes that crediting Dickens with the “invention” of Christmas is overstatement.  The story is nevertheless fascinating.  To me this second reading underscored the importance of Irving for the Christmas holidays, and also how terribly difficult it is to make a living as a writer.  I’m glad I came back to it, even when life otherwise threatens to be too busy for re-readings.

Reading 2023

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

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

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

Self Reflection

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

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

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

Bears Repeating

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

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

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

Movie Ancestors

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

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

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

Sights of Silence

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

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

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

Author! Author!

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It happened in Salem.  In 1861.  The classic American card game, Authors, was published.  G. M. Whipple and A. A. Smith devised the game, which has remained available ever since then.  It’s one of the few games I remember having as a kid.  We, of course, had the Bible Authors game as well, which I’m kind of nostalgic for, but not enough to see if it’s on eBay.  The object of Authors, an early form of “Go Fish,” is to collect sets of four cards for each author.  Each card lists a different work.  Poets are represented by poems, of course, but prose authors mostly by books.  I have to confess to having eBayed this some time back and having beetlebrowed my family into playing it with me.  I noticed, however, a few curious omissions.

Edgar Allan Poe isn’t among their number.  Neither is Herman Melville.  Rather strangely, they included Shakespeare—centuries earlier than the others—and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  The only female is Louisa May Alcott when there were perfectly acceptable Brontës in the room, as well as Jane Austin.  The game reflects its time.  A couple years back I was in Michaels—you know, the arts and crafts supplies store.  In fact, Michaels is one of those places for family outings, for families like mine.  (We tend to be creative types.)  While I’ve never been into scrapbooking, I walked down that aisle and found a set of stickers labeled “Literature.”  Two authors were represented: Shakespeare and Poe.  People smarter than me have argued that worldwide Poe is probably the best recognized American author.  I think it’s safe to say Shakespeare occupies a similar role in Britain.

Poe had fallen afoul of many in America because of an intentionally damning obituary by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whom Poe had named his literary executor.  If it weren’t for Poe nobody would likely know Griswold’s name today.  In 1861, when Whipple and Smith were inventing their game, Poe wasn’t really considered worthy of emulation, largely because of Griswold.  He wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want your kids to be too curious about as you tried to teach them about literature.  Authors has gone through over 300 editions over the years.  I’ve never seen any of them (apart from Bible Authors) other than the Whitman edition from my childhood.  Each time I pick it up, smell the cards (go ahead—try smelling your Kindle), and thumb through the authors I feel like I’m missing something.  Go fish.