Letting Go

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I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough that it is sometimes classed as science fiction.  It’s appropriate that a twentieth anniversary edition was released because it is an extended consideration of the price of technology as well as dehumanization.  I’ll need to put in some spoilers, so here’s the usual caveat.  I read this novel because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia and it certainly fits that aesthetic.  It starts out at a private school called Hailsham, in England.  The students are given some privileges but their lives aren’t exactly posh.  Most of their possessions are purchased on days when a truck sells them things they can buy with money they earn by creating art.  They aren’t allowed to leave the school.  Spoilers follow.

The special circumstances of the children are because they’re clones being grown for replacement organs.  The public doesn’t want to know about them or interact with them.  In fact, most people believe they don’t have souls, or aren’t really human.  They’ve been created to be used and exploited until they die, always prematurely.  While this may sound grim, the story is thoughtfully told through the eyes of one of these children, Kathy.  She becomes best friends with Ruth and Tommy, who later become a couple.  Ruth is a difficult personality, but likable.  As they grow they’re slowly given the facts about what their life will be.  They’re raised to comply, never to rebel or question their role.  Most simply accept it.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, in a submissive way, try to get a deferral regarding their “donations.”

I suppose it’s presumptuous to say of a Nobel Prize winner that it’s well written, but I’ll say it anyway.  Ishiguro manages to capture the exploratory friendships of youth and reveals what you need to know in slow doses, all told with a compelling, if sad and accepting voice.  Although the genre could be sci-fi, it’s set in the present, or, more accurately, about twenty years ago.  The technology, apart from the cloning, is about what it was at the turn of the century, or maybe a decade or two before that.  With what we see happening in the world right now, people should be reading books like this that help them understand that people are people, not things to be exploited.  And that Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those that are actually deserving for their contributions to humanity. 

Sad Joy

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I sometimes make the mistake of thinking a short book will be a quick read.  Melancholic Joy is a case in point.  Every time I indulge in a book of philosophy I wonder if I missed my true calling.  As my wife is well aware, I’m prone to philosophical musings about the meaning of life although I tend to place myself among the existentialists.  As soon as I saw the title of Brian Treanor’s book it went on my reading list.  It’s short and I thought maybe a week would be enough.  But it wasn’t.  I do hope I can remember much of it.  A word to the wary, the first chapter is very depressing.  Treanor doesn’t sugarcoat the world in his quest on a Life Worth Living.  Those of us who ponder things deeply tend toward melancholy, in my experience.  But stick with it.  There is gold in this book.  Starting with chapter two I was reminded why I took so much philosophy in college.

The world is full of depressing facts.  By the time I was born we’d already devised ways to wipe out the entire human race.  Many, far too many, people live lives of suffering, much of which could be prevented if we didn’t have people like Donald Trump running things.  The political situation is so bad that I’ve disengaged.  Yet still, amid my melancholy, I do feel joy.  You need to parse words carefully here.  Treanor knows that joy and happiness aren’t the same thing.  For those of us predisposed toward melancholy, joy is probably much more common in our lives than happiness.  This book is one that led me to start underlining again.  I do hope to come back to it when my outlook becomes too bleak.  Treanor interacts with both other philosophers and other writers, even some who aren’t always classified as philosophical.  It is a nepenthe.

Some of us think incessantly and can’t help doing so.  It’s a bit difficult to be cheerful if that’s the case.  Melancholic Joy, if I can keep it in mind, may help with that.  There are sections where I had to go back and re-read because my attention had wandered (it happens to us all), but to do so was rewarding.  For anyone who finds many aspects of the world oppressive, and depressing, and who has a philosophical bent, this book is for you.  Just be careful with that first chapter.  Whatever you do, don’t stop there.

Nanowrimo Night

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Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month—November—has been run by an organization that is now shutting down.  Financial troubles and, of course, AI (which seems to be involved in many poor choices these days), have led to the decision, according to Publisher’s Weekly.  Apparently several new authors were found by publishers, basing their work on Nanowrimo projects.  I participated one year and had no trouble finishing something, but it was not really publishable.  Still, it’s sad to see this inspiration for other writers calling it quits.  I’m not into politics but when the Nanowrimo executives didn’t take a solid stand against AI “written” novels, purists were rightfully offended.  Writing is the expression of the human experience.  0s and 1s are not humans, no matter how much tech moguls may think they are.  Materialism has spawned some wicked children.

Can AI wordsmith?  Certainly.  Can it think?  No.  And what we need in this world is more thinking, not less.  Is there maybe a hidden reason tech giants have cozied up to the current White House where thinking is undervalued?  Sorry, politics.  We have known for many generations that human brains serve a biological purpose.  We keep claiming animals (most of which have brains) can’t think, but we suppose electrical surges across transistors can?  I watch the birds outside my window, competing, chittering, chasing each other off.  They’re conscious and they can learn.  They have the biological basis to do so.  Being enfleshed entitles them.  Too bad they can’t write it down.

Now I’m the first to admit that consciousness may well exist outside biology.  To tap into it, however, requires the consciousness “plug-in”—aka, a brain.  Would AI “read” novels for the pleasure of it?  Would it understand falling in love, or the fear of a monster prowling the night?  Or the thrill of solving a mystery?  These emotional aspects, which neurologists note are a crucial part of thinking, can’t be replicated without life.  Actually living.  Believe me, I mourn when machines I care for die.  I seriously doubt the feeling is reciprocated.  Materialism has been the reigning paradigm for quite a few decades now, while consciousness remains a quandary.  I’ve read novels that struggle with deep issues of being human.  I fear that we could be fooled with an AI novel where the “writer” is merely borrowing how humans communicate to pretend how it feels.  And I feel a little sad, knowing that Nanowrimo is hanging up the “closed” sign.  But humans, being what they are, will still likely try to complete novels in the month of November.

Quarter Day

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Some years it sneaks up on you.  The solstice, that is.  The weather remains an area of fascination for me, and not one of infrequent complaint.  The late spring (pretty much all of May and June up until Juneteenth) around here has been rainy and chilly.  Oh, we’ve had hot days sprinkled in, but even this week I had to wear a thermal shirt and fingerless gloves in the morning since there was no sun and the furnace has been off since last month.  The last couple of days, starting, ironically, at Valley Forge, have been getting hot.  And today begins astronomical summer.  I write about the seasons quite a lot.  Having been born and raised in a rainy, temperate zone climate, I grew up accustomed to four distinct seasons.  And we’re now at the longest day of the year.

The quarter days always make me reflective.  Culturally, there’s no real celebration associated with solstices or equinoxes.  The winter solstice falls relatively near Christmas and other winter holidays.  The spring equinox is close to Easter.  The start of summer, which should be ebulliently hopeful with its abundant sunshine, tends to get overlooked.  Some like to say summer is when life is easy.  It does mean mowing the lawn quite a bit.  The grass loves all the rain we’ve had this year.  Waypoints, however, are important.  We divide the year so we might anticipate.  Our agricultural roots focus on planting and harvest.  Even our hunter-gatherer forebears had to follow the food that changed location depending on the prevailing weather.  The seasons are deep within us.

The summer solstice always makes me think of Ari Aster’s Midsommar.  The underlying fear of too much light.  Even here there is a profound message for those able to excavate it.  If things are going well we tend to sabotage them.  Still, I prefer to think of this as a season of hope.  Summer illuminates.  I write this noting the sun’s chasing of twilight outside my window, even before five a.m.  There are still some clouds in the sky because old patterns are difficult to break.  But it is a season of light.  The next quarter day, when we start to realize that the darkness will be increasing until the sister solstice comes to our rescue in winter, is likewise passed over in silence.  By then many will be ready for a respite from the heat that comes with too much light.  Others of us will be thinking of cycles and how they are full of hope and anticipation.

The Valley

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Juneteenth seemed a good day to get to Valley Forge.  With all the nonsense going on in the White House, we need to be reminded what this country was founded on and for.  I like to think that we weren’t the only ones there yesterday for that reason.  In fact, in the gift shop I found a book titled America’s Last King.  By the time we left it was sold out.  Like many Americans, I suppose, I only had a vague idea why Valley Forge was important for our young country.  We took a tour that helped explain it.  A tour that some in Washington ought be be required to take.  Valley Forge was a winter encampment—the third in the War of Independence.  George Washington had just suffered two defeats and the British had taken Philadelphia.  His poorly provisioned army set up winter headquarters in this strategically secure hill country.  Inadequately clothed, barely fed, many dying, they planned how to keep their efforts to survive alive.

What happened that winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge that kept the United States alive depended on two things, both brought by immigrants.  Let me say that again, in case ICE is having trouble hearing—immigrants saved America.  The young country was in very real danger of defeat.  What turned the tide was an alliance with France (the name Lafayette still looms large here in the east) and the help of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian.  Without these foreigners, America would never have survived to become great.  Oh, and Mr. Kennedy, Washington ordered vaccinations at Valley Forge to prevent so many of his troops from dying from small pox, an inconvenient truth.  What emerged from Valley Forge that winter was a more organized, healthier United States Army that would go on to defeat the British so that we could be free two and a half centuries later.

I needed Valley Forge.  Although it was a hot day and the roads are paved, I needed to be reminded what it felt like to be proud to be an American.  Juneteenth is to commemorate the end of slavery.  History shows that many in Washington’s army were of African descent.  It seems that DC has forgotten what America is and what we were fighting for all those many years ago.  It wasn’t to exclude those who were different.  No, it was to pull together to survive.  Our would-be king spends his idle days planning military parades in his honor.  The US Army was born in Valley Forge.  And as an American with ancestors here from Washington’s day on, I really needed that visit to remind me of how America became great.

World History

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I don’t doomscroll, but I occasionally fall down a virtual rabbit hole.  One of the truly interesting things about being an editor is reading proposals from other editors.  China’s been a hot topic for the past several years and so I hopped on over to Wikipedia to find out who this Chiang Kai-shek was, after reading a proposal.  I’d heard his name from childhood on, but I’d never read any history of China.  For my entire life it has been a communist country, often with frosty relations to the United States.  One thing led to another and I landed on the page titled Warlord Era.  This sounded like something out of a fantasy novel, so I thought I’d see what that was all about.  When you scroll down to the Warlord profiles section, you find some really interesting stuff.  One of these warlords was a real eclectic guy known as the “model governor.”  Another was a strict Methodist who banned alcohol and dressed like a common infantryman.  Yet another was known as the “most well endowed man in China,” in the southern regions, that is.

Beiyang Army; image credit—unknown photographer. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Now, I’ve never read any Chinese history, but these guys sound a lot less threatening than anyone you’d find in a Mario Puzo novel.  They may have been terrifying in real life; Fidel Castro wore a common soldier’s uniform, but I’d have been frightened had I found him lurking under the bed.  Of course, I’ve never read any histories of Cuba either.  There’s a lot to learn in this world.  I enjoy reading history, but my writing projects tend to direct my non-work reading these days.  I’ve been acutely aware that my time on this fascinating planet is limited and that none of us can learn everything.  It saddens me that world leaders show so little interest in the planet they “govern.”  Even a little reading on Wikipedia should be enough to grease those wheels.

One of the strange ideas that occurred to me once while reading a different proposal was that China conducts business deals with, for example, nations in Africa, in which the United States is not involved at all.  When this thought launched I realized just how parochial the outlook of many of us is.  I lived overseas for three years, but still, the United States, in better and in worse, is my home.  It’s the place I know (or thought I knew).  Where some of my ancestors lived for over two-and-a-half centuries.  As appealing as Canada often seems, my fate appears to be here, along with my heart.  So I don’t doomscroll.  But I do read about China and realize how little I know.

Recession Value

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While reading about recessions (am I getting old, or what?), I suddenly got the creepy feeling that our entire lives are unduly influenced by those who think they know what they’re doing.  Financially, that is.  The Great Depression and the Great Recession were both times of economic hardship because the rules capitalism put in place defined us as being in an era of lowered GDP, or gross domestic product.  Why?  Because there were no jobs.  Why?  Those who hold the purse strings (capitalists) had pulled them shut with all their might.  Then, like magic, depression and recession end and everyone tries to get back to business as normal.  To me this seems utterly ridiculous.  They call economics the dismal science for a reason, after all.  The fact is the rules are made by us.

Society is very complex.  This is one reason that people should really think hard about who they’ll vote for.  Leaders who think it’s all simple inevitably lead to disaster.  If I could, I would switch the world economy away from capitalism.  If I were president and were to try this, it would be a very, very slow process.  It would take generations.  Why?  Because this is a complex system.  Sudden changes don’t last.  Of course, to people who believe the universe took only six earth days to create and that a big flood wiped out all the dinosaurs (or maybe some were on the ark), complexity is anathema.  Of the devil.  Well, as they say, the devil’s in the details.

Image credit: I forgot where I found this; if anyone recognizes it please let me know!

And so we suffer through depressions and recessions.  To those of us with feet on planet earth, it doesn’t feel like much has changed.  We still need to sleep and eat and all that, but some “experts” are telling us why we have to pay more at the grocery store or at the fuel pump, and why those at the top of the pyramid seem to be all right, no matter what happens to the rest of us.  And we let it carry on.  Economic systems are simply a reflection of what people value.  The things we value most cost the most (it’s called supply and demand, AKA capitalism).  The most expensive material thing I own is my house, and truth be told, it’s mostly owned by the bank.  But the most valuable actual thing I own is my mind.  It can’t be bought.  And one thing it keeps on telling me is that all of this business about recessions and whatnot is rather silly.

Remembering Holidays

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Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.

Friendly Fear

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I opened my book Holy Horror with an epigraph taken from Apocalypse Now, a movie I recently watched again.  That quote was from Col. Kurtz: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how you can make any progress in a discussion with anyone who’s already made up his or her mind (i.e., no matter what you say to them they will not take it seriously.  Think your favorite Trump supporter).  People far smarter than I have noted that the only way to combat this unthinking adherence is to get people to think critically.  That may be correct, but to preserve democracy we need a more assured method in the short term.  That of Col. Kurtz.

Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  Both contain a vital truth—fear motivates people.  Democrats have been forward-looking in recent decades, but Republicans run on that fear playbook and it’s very difficult to defeat.  That’s because people are afraid.  It’s important to face fears, but to win elections, you need to seed them.  I know whereof I speak when it comes to phobias.  I was so riddled with fear as a young person that at times I could not leave the house.  At other times even the house didn’t feel safe to me.  I had multiple phobias and difficulty talking to other people.  I’ve grown out of many of these fears, but if I’m honest, I know they’re still with me.  I suspect many other people are also afraid.

Strong men (even if personally weak) appeal to the afraid.  They want someone who can protect them.  I tend to think Democrats think many Americans are better adjusted than they actually are.  You want their votes?  Make them afraid.  I’ve been writing books on fear and its many cinematic manifestations for several years now.  I grew up being afraid of everything.  I don’t advocate creating fear, but when a nation decides Hitler would be better than letting young people read, it’s reached a crisis point.  I do wish progressive political leaders would consider my humble observations.  When afraid people herd together and become the mob with torches.  And just such a mob became the mindless followers of Col. Kurtz.  Just saying.

Eschew Stupidity

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a certified evangelical Christian.  His theology often feels a bit pat to some of us who work in religious studies, but there’s no doubt that Bonhoeffer was a brilliant man.   Bonhoeffer believed in Jesus but resisted Hitler.  In fact, that resistance cost him his life.  My brother recently sent me a Facebook Reels video on Bonhoeffer’s observations about stupidity, which Bonhoeffer believed was far more dangerous than evil.  I shared that video in my feed on Facebook yesterday, and it is well worth listening to.  Stupidity isn’t a badge most people would wear proudly.  We all do wear it from time to time since we’re only human.  The real problem, according to Bonhoeffer, is when crowds start becoming stupid.  We’ve seen it time and again.  We’re living in such a time right now.  The antics coming out of DC right now have thinking people everywhere wondering how this is even possible.  Listen to Bonhoeffer.

Photo source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

I don’t take Bonhoeffer uncritically.  Some of us—generally without tons of friends—think critically by default.  (The women in college all broke up with me because “You’re too intense.”  I credit my wife with sticking with me, although she tells me they were right.)  Anyone can learn critical thinking.  The problem is, keeping the skill is hard work.  And the internet doesn’t help.  Whenever anyone makes a claim, personally, my default response is “How do they know?”  Yes, I do look up references.  With my particular brand of neurodivergence, I seldom trust other people to know something unless they’re experts.  (This is something the current administration is a bit shy on.)  I even question experts if their conclusions look suspect.  “Nullius in verba” is written in my academic notebooks.  Something, however, is obviously clear.  Bonhoeffer was right about stupidity.

I’m not sure what an unfluencer like myself hopes to gain by discussing this.  I do hope that folks will listen to Bonhoeffer if they have concerns about my thought process.  My deeper concern is that the church often encourages stupidity.  Unquestioning adherence to something the facts expose as untrue is often lauded.  It makes some people saints.  Churches require followers and often distrust critical thinkers.  That once cost me my job, sending my career into a tailspin.  This was well pre-Trump, but some in authority didn’t appreciate critical thinking on the part of faculty.  (Ahem, that’s what we’re paid to do).  I’m not anti-belief.  Anyone who really knows me knows that I believe very deeply in the immaterial world.  And I know that Bonhoeffer did too, right up to the gallows.

Peace

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Mother’s Day should be a time for peace.  In these days when misogyny is in style, it’s an especially important holiday.  The one holiday to explicitly honor women, it’s always been an occasion for reflection for me.  We have 364 days of warring and hatred, and one dedicated to the givers of unconditional love.  I can imagine a different world.  One in which women don’t have to become alt-right to gain positions of authority.  Where compassion and humane treatment would be world priorities.  I can imagine.  Although fathers are necessary too, we have no shortage of men pushing forward their personal agendas.  None of them would be where they are without mothers.  And women are the ones who give us care.  I can imagine a world where Mother’s Day wouldn’t have to feel so politicized, almost polemical.

With all eyes on Pope Leo, I can’t help but think how many treat Mother’s Day like an indulgence.  You know you want to get back to your vices, so why not pay for them in advance?  Celebrate mothers today so we can get back to business as usual tomorrow.  I don’t believe that we’ve lost the ability for transformation.  We can make the world a better place.  Think what it would be like if, before undertaking some cruel action, a person stopped to imagine their mother watching them do it.  Would not the world start to improve?  It is a world where we seem to prefer guns to roses, but it’s also a world with an unwritten future.  Pay attention to your mother.  Maybe things will start to get better.

I believe in the transformative potential of holidays.  We have to take their lessons seriously.  I’m sure I’m not the only working stiff who lives life anticipating the next holiday when things might change for the better.  We have to remember, however, what the holidays teach us.  Not treat them as simply facile days of obligation.  Think of Mom and then get back to the grind.  It doesn’t need to be a grind.  We can learn to cooperate and get along, just like Mom told us to.  Instead of isolating such thoughts to a single day, we could repeat them like a mantra.  I don’t know about you, but looking at the headlines, I could do with a bit of peace and love.  And I still believe that things can, and likely will get better.  And I give the credit to our mothers.

Father of Yeti

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“Always steals women.”  So Subra mutters high in the Himalayas.  Perhaps one of the most unintentionally funny bad movies, The Snow Creature does hold a place in history.  It was the first abominable snowman, or yeti, movie made.  It’s also incredibly cheaply made with a costume that most twelve-year-olds could’ve fabricated better.  As the antepenultimate movie in the “Beast Collection,” I felt obligated to watch it one snowy weekend.  Spouting colonialist and sexist values like a Republican, the story is tedious even at eighty minutes.  But funny at times also.  So a botanist travels to the Himalayas to study plants at 10,000 feet.  His fun is interrupted when a yeti kidnaps the head sherpa’s wife, causing the sherpa to take charge and start to hunt the beast.

The American scientist decides to capture the yeti instead so that he’ll have something to give the foundation sponsoring the expedition.  Leaving behind a female and baby yeti, both killed, he drugs the snowman until a special refrigerated container can be built—gee whiz, Americans can do anything!—to bring the beast back.  And they fly west from Bombay to California, where, when they land the beast is held up in customs (I kid you not).  There’s a debate about whether he’s human or animal and while the debate goes on, the creature escapes.  The hapless police can’t find a seven-foot tall yeti wandering around Los Angeles at night, harassing the women.  Finally they figure he’s using the storm sewers.  They trap him but, alas, have to shoot him.  At this point they completely lose interest in the corpse and exchange meaningless banter as they drive off.

This movie seems to be what the Trump administration wants America to revert to.  Bossing around BIPOC people in their own countries, women being helpless without men to rescue them, and corporations buying what is arguably a human being.  Sounds like a playbook to me.  Also, it was extremely cheap.  What amazed me is that United Artists distributed it.  People must’ve been pretty hungry for entertainment back in 1954.  Having said that, it is worth watching for a laugh.  Now that streaming exists, you can find this free on various services.  If you like very wooden acting, and superior Americans having their way in Asia just because they’re, well, Americans, you might find this a passable way to spend a snowy weekend (wait til winter to watch it; it’ll keep).  Only a word of advice: be sure to lock up your women before you do, because the beast always steals women.

Making More Monsters

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It’s endlessly frustrating, being a big picture thinker.  This runs in families, so there may be something genetic about it.  Those who say, “Let’s step back a minute and think about this” are considered drags on progress (from both left and right), but would, perhaps, help avoid disaster.  In my working life of nearly half-a-century I’ve never had an employer who appreciated this.  That’s because small-picture thinkers often control the wealth and therefore have greater influence.  They can do what they want, consequences be damned.  These thoughts came to me reading Martin Tropp’s Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein.  I picked this up at a book sale once upon a time and reading it, have discovered that he was doing what I’m trying with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in my most recent book.  Tropp traces some of the history and characters, but then the afterlives of Frankenstein’s monster.  (He had a publisher with more influence, so his book will be more widely known.)

This book, although dated, has a great deal of insight into the story of Frankenstein and his creature.  But also, insight into Mary Shelley.  Her tale has an organic connection to its creator as well.  Tropp quite frequently points out the warning of those who have more confidence than real intelligence, and how they forge ahead even when they know failure can have catastrophic consequences for all.  I couldn’t help but to think how the current development of AI is the telling of a story we’ve all heard before.  And how those who insist on running for office to stoke their egos also play into this same sad tale.  Perhaps a bit too Freudian for some, Tropp nevertheless anticipates much of what I’ve read in other books about Frankenstein, written in more recent days.

Some scientists are now at last admitting that there are limits to human knowledge.  (That should’ve been obvious.)  Meanwhile those with the smaller picture in mind forge ahead with AI, not really caring about the very real dangers it poses to a world happily wedded to its screens.  Cozying up to politicians who think only of themselves, well, we need a big picture thinker like Mary Shelley to guide us.  I can’t help but think big picture thinking has something to do with neurodivergence.  Those who think this way recognize, often from childhood, that other people don’t think like they do.  And that, lest they end up like Frankenstein’s monster, hounded to death by angry mobs, it’s better simply to address the smaller picture.  Or at least pretend to.

Telling Vision

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My wife and I don’t watch much television.  In fact, we had very poor television reception from about 1988 (when we married), until we moved into this house in 2018.  That’s three decades without really watching the tube.  As we’ve been streaming/DVDing some of the series that have made a splash in those three decades, I’ve discovered (I can’t speak for her) that there were some great strides made in quality.  We began with The X-Files, then moved on to Lost.  We viewed Twin Peaks and started to watch Picket Fences, but the digital rights have expired so we never did finish out that series.  (Don’t get me started on digital rights management—the air will quickly turn blue, I assure you.)  Of course, we did manage to see Northern Exposure when it aired, but it should be mentioned for the sake of completion.  These were all exceptional programs.

Netflix (in particular) upped the game.  We watched the first three seasons of Stranger Things (and I’d still like to go back and pick up the more recent ones we’ve missed), and I watched the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher (I didn’t realize until writing this up that it was only one season, so maybe I should go back and finish that one out too) and was very impressed.  Since we couldn’t finish Picket Fences, we turned to Wednesday.  Now, I was only ever a middling fan of The Addams Family.  I watched it as a kid because it had monsters, as I did The Munsters, but neither one really appealed to me.  Wednesday’s cut from a different cloth.  In these days when escapism is necessary, this can be a good thing.

Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

Like most late boomers, I grew up watching television.  In my early memories, it’s pretty much ubiquitous.  We were poor, and our sets were black-and-white, but remembering my childhood without TV is impossible.  It was simply there.  The shows I watched formed me.  Now that I’m perhaps beyond excessive reforming (although I’m not opposed to the idea), I’m looking for brief snippets of something intelligent to wind up the day before I reboot to start this all over again.  We save movies for weekends, but an entire workweek without a break in nonfictional reality seems overwhelming on a Sunday evening.  It seems that I may be warming up to my childhood chum again.  This time, without network schedules, and limited time to spend doing it, we just may be in a golden age for the tube.

Belting Beltane

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Things have been so busy that I forgot that today is Beltane.  That’s all the more ironic because yesterday I’d been on a panel to address the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies special interest group on Horror Studies, about The Wicker Man.  Lest you get the wrong idea, BAFTSS did not approach me to talk about my book (which has largely disappeared, as far as I can tell), but another recent Devil’s Advocate author approached them about having a panel featuring recent titles.  This special interest group has a program called Weekday Night Bites where they gather virtually to have speakers talk about horror.  Yesterday there were seven of us, discussing five books, one of which was The Wicker Man.

The theme of the panel was No Safe Space, about place and space in horror.  This meant I spoke briefly about The Wicker Man as folk horror.  As I told the assembled group, I actually interpret Wicker Man as holiday horror—it’s based on May Day, and I didn’t even think to mention that it was today—instead of folk horror.  One of the the hallmarks of the Devil’s Advocates series is that it tries to approach horror films from unexpected angles.  When I first contacted the editor who started the series at Auteur (who has, unfortunately left), he told me that they didn’t have a Wicker Man volume because everyone was pitching it as folk horror.  He wanted to see a different interpretation.  I’d been writing a book about folk horror and decided to give that a try.  The critics liked it, and thus my book was born.  And here it is, May Day, and I’d forgotten all about it.

There was a reasonably sized group present for the discussion and it was a lot of fun.  It reminded me of my Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies course on Sleepy Hollow two years ago.  Both of these were efforts to stir some interest in my books.  Horror and religion is a new avenue of approach and there are a handful of us working in this area.  The others, it seems, have a knack for getting their books published in places where you don’t have to take out a mortgage to afford them.  I’m more in the group whose books are relegated to the Summerisle of sales.  Either that, or I’m actually Sergeant Howie, unwittingly flying there to help someone I think is in trouble. Who knows?  Anything’s possible on Beltane.