Not from Nazareth

Leave a comment

The world just doesn’t feel safe any more.  I’d better give a little context as to why.  You see, I just learned that what I thought was the work of carpenter ants is actually that of carpenter bees.  I never knew such things existed!  This still might not give you the thrills you were hoping for, so here goes a true story: when I was maybe six or seven my mother took my older and younger brother and me to a place in the woods where we could run around and holler and not bother anybody.  We had our dog there too, as well as our grandmother.  After a while my brothers started a game—throwing a stick to see who could get to it first, me or our dog.  I was running along, stepped on a stump, closely followed by the dog, when a swarm of angry yellowjackets flew out.  I was wearing shorts at the time and received multiple stings on my bare legs.  We didn’t think our dog would survive; he was completely covered.  So I have a thing about bees.

My phobia isn’t as bad as it used to be.  I’ve been stung many times since, and it always feels like an insult as well as a bad memory.  (I still don’t wear shorts, except on very rare occasions, when the bee quotient is zero.)  Believing in turning the other cheek, I’ve even captured and released bees from the house rather than killing them.  Still, to this day, when I get a haircut if the woman pulls out a set of clippers you have to pry my fingers from the naugahyde when she’s done.  Anything that sounds like buzzing near my ears sends me into spasms of terror.  Please pardon the graphic fear.  It’s heartfelt.

I used to have nightmares about killer bees.  I still worry about them a lot, and wonder that if, instead of a wall, we might put up a massive, small-weave net this side of Texas.  I don’t know how high they fly, but we should try to do something, don’t you agree?  Now I’ve learned that bees can eat you out of house and home, literally.  The carpenter bee, to the untrained eye, looks like a bumblebee.  They’re big, heavy-bodied insects that can crawl through three-eighth-inch holes, perfectly round the insect guy tells me.  They’ll eat and mate, and release their larva, ready to grow stingers, into the world of my back porch.  They appear to enjoy the global warming, judging by their numbers.  Maybe it’s a good thing we settled not far from Nazareth because a friendly carpenter might soon come in handy.

Cool Cash

2 Comments

The seller’s market is the place to be in a capitalist society.  Last year, when we were looking for a house, it was a seller’s market.  Our realtor said he’d never seen inventory so low and staying so low.  We found a domicile we liked, but it was older and had obviously (only after moving in) been neglected.  The previous owners, it was clear, had simply let things go (and they were younger than us, and had no excuse).  When we asked for a new roof they had flat-out refused.  With no other options (our lease was about to expire) we agreed to take it on anyway.  We’ve been having the roof done in installments—and if you’ve been getting the record levels of rain that Pennsylvania has, you know our decision was, in a literal way, short-sighted.  Ah, capitalism!

So, just after I noticed the piles of sawdust that the web tells me are carpenter ants, the refrigerator died.  Of course.  I tried to keep cool.  We don’t have what the overlords call “liquidity.”  Our cashflow is dammed at the source, as it were.  A new major appliance was not a welcome addition to the fixer-ups that appear nearly every day.  The first warning was that my soy milk was room temperature when it splashed on the cereal yesterday.  All of this made me reflect on how much we rely on our appliances, our modern conveniences.  When talking to my mother later in the day, I realized that as recently as her generation not everyone had a refrigerator.  You could live without one.  You could also live without a dishwasher, believe it or not!  

The whole episode of packing the food in ice sent me on a Calvino-esque reverie of what we keep in the refrigerator.  There are foods that must be kept cool or they’ll spoil, foods that are better if they’re kept cool but can be left at room temperature, foods that you prefer to drink cold but can be kept anywhere, and items which are technically not food.  Considering the state of our kitchen, there are also foods that you keep on top of the refrigerator because no amount of cupboard space is ever enough.  As the carpenter ants make their free lunch of our porch, we have to throw away food for which we paid because an appliance has come to the end of its life cycle.  And since it’s a holiday weekend we’ll pay for a more expensive replacement unit because it’s on a holiday sale.  For unlike my soy ice cream, I lack liquidity.

Price of Learning

1 Comment

Holy Horror, as some are painfully aware, is priced at $45.  Even those of us in publishing have lessons we must learn, and one of them is that writing a trade book involves more than just a “friendly narrator” style and non-technical language.  It also involves a subject the public finds engaging (or at least what a literary agent thinks the public will find engaging).  Holy Horror throws two apparently disparate topics together: horror films and the Bible.  The fans of each don’t hang out in the same bars—the fans of the latter, in some circles, don’t go anywhere near bars!  My thinking was that this juxtaposition was odd enough to qualify as trade, but I also knew that you have to work your way up to that kind of readership.  That’s why I’m on Goodreads, Twitter, and Facebook (followers and friends welcome!).  It’s not like I’ve got tons of spare time, but platforms must be built.

Book publishers face a dilemma: they have to sell books, but as I’ve noted before, they must do so profitably.  There are people like yours truly who’ll occasionally pay essentially a dollar a page (or at least a two-page spread) for a book that’s essential to their work.  As the capitalists grin, it’s “what the market will bear.”  I never thought of myself as a market.  To me, knowledge is priceless.  The effort that it takes to write a book is truly unimaginable to those who haven’t done it.  Obstacles exist almost from the inception.  Getting the resources you need, unless your employment comes with a free library pass, involves sacrifice.  I still look at other books I must read priced at about $45 and groan—how can I justify the expense?  It’s a strange club to which to belong.

My mother asked about Weathering the Psalms: “Is it the kind of book you get money for?”  In theory, yes.  I’ve yet to see any kind of profit from it since the tax forms you need to file for royalties cost more than the actual checks contain.  At least it’s not vanity publishing.  And you truly learn what it means to rob Peter to pay Paul.  It has nothing to do with gentiles.  Publishing is the price you pay for following your curiosity.  My books are very different from each other, a fact that comes with an invisible price tag that has little to do with money exchanging hands.  Well, maybe it does.  And maybe it does have something to do with gentiles.  Or maybe it’s an appeal to a higher power.  In a capitalist nation we all know what that is; herein lies holy horror.

Linking In

Leave a comment

Like many in the internet age, I have most of my “connections” online.  It’s somewhat of a rarity to be invited, for example, to connect on LinkedIn by someone I actually know.  I remember the early dissemination of information from that network—it was strictly for people you really did know in real life, because they could help or hurt your career.  I took that seriously for a year or two, but it became clear that this was another Facebook with a more professional cast.  I’ve been told of authors who try to build their online platform by adding thousands of connections on LinkedIn.  The website, however, is not intended as an advertising venue.  It has, however, become one.

I’m not denigrating LinkedIn.  I’ve found two jobs through it and I’ve had recruiters reach out to me because they found my profile there.  For a religionist that can be quite flattering.  Academia and society tend to tell you that such a skillset is okay but basically useless.  Having others who know the wide diversity of human employment these days can be a sign of hope.  Nevertheless, advertising has crept into LinkedIn.  I’m not talking about the frequent invitations to go professional on the site, which will only cost a small fee that will suddenly show up on your credit card bill when you least expect it and thought you were in the clear.  No, I’m talking about connections contacting you to do gratis work for them.  Advertising their book, or their services.  Letting others know, they ask, that they can provide this or that service.  (Just to be clear, I’m not referring to people who contact me personally because we have an actual connection!)

For those of us working stiffs not in a position to hire anyone—professionally or personally—this is another symbol of how any form of communication becomes commodified.  Fully over half of my email is soliciting money in one form or another.  Hearing from an actual person with an actual message for me is so rare that I’m stunned to find one in my inbox.  Capitalism just doesn’t know when to let go.  And it doesn’t have a good read on what little I actually do buy.  Underwear (and just using that word will color the tailored ads I receive for weeks) vendors seem to think I’m concerned about the fashion of garments others don’t see.  The books Amazon suggests, based on a solid track record, are generally far off from my interests.  What hope do those who don’t know me have of selling me their wares through LinkedIn?  The dream of connection without cash changing hands nevertheless remains alive.

Old school connectivity

Dandy Lions

2 Comments

O great—just what I need right now.  I knew lawn care would soon become a necessary avocation after buying a house, but this I did not expect.  Over the weekend I found myself pulling up dandelions that were growing out of cracks in the front steps.  Since we compost, I laid them out on a slab, figuring when they dried out I could make them into more soil.  (From which more dandelions will grow, I know, but still it just feels right.)  I came back a day later to find that the dandelions had returned to the vertical position.  Zombie dandelions!  They apparently couldn’t stay dead.  Now, I’ve been writing about demons for the past several months and I’d forgotten about zombies.  Well, I did post about resurrection on Easter, but my short-lived digression left me unprepared for this.

Really, the persistence of life is a sign of hope.  Perhaps dead zones, such as morality in Washington DC, will someday come back to life.  There’s hope for a tree, Job tells us, even if cut down.  These dandelions were a message for me.  Don’t give up.  Prior to religion being hijacked by theology it was a system intended to make life better for people.  Human beings were more important than heretical thoughts.  You help those who need it, regardless of what they believe.  Or don’t believe.  That was the point behind resurrection, I suspect—we can rise above all this dirt in which we find ourselves.  There’s a nobility to it.  Then again, fear trumps hope just about every time.  The dandelions are rising and we have no hope of outnumbering them.  

The ancients feared the dead coming back.  It’s a primal phobia.  All those things we buried with tears we hoped would stay the way we left them.  Life, as Malcolm says, will find a way.  Politicians, it seems, will find a way around it.  Call it executive privilege or whatever you will, the end result is the same.  The yellow-headed fuzzies will threaten you even when uprooted and left to dry in the sun.  Now, our lawn isn’t pretty.  Grasses of different varieties contend with weeds I’ve never seen before for scarce resources.  I’ve never minded dandelions.  They don’t ask much, only they now seem to be demanding the right to come back from the compost.  And if we let that happen, all hope is lost.

Thoughts While Flying

Leave a comment

Uh-oh!  I seem to be airborne.  All that’s in front of me is concrete.  If I don’t do something, my exposed hands will hit first.  Tuck, and try not to hit your head.  Still, on impact the first thing I do is look around to see if anyone saw that.  It’s embarrassing to trip and fall, especially when you’re old enough to be avoiding that sort of thing.  I jog before it’s fully light out, however, and the sidewalks can be uneven.  Just in case anyone’s watching my Superman impression, I immediately climb to my feet and resume my pace.  I’ll be sore tomorrow.  As a jogger since high school you’d think I’d have this worked out by now, but you’re never too old to learn, I guess.

The amazing thing to me is just how much you can think in those fleet seconds that you’re actually in the air, about to hit the ground like a sack of old man.  That’s exactly what happened, though, from the split second I felt my toe catch in an unseen crack and felt my balance give way.  Taking additional steps while trying to straighten back up sometimes works, but my top-heavy head was too far out of sync and my feet were sure to follow.  Your memory of such things goes out of body and you watch yourself comically flying, without the grace of a bird, toward an unforgiving substrate.  Such is the fate of the early morning runner.  I don’t have time to do it during the day.  What if someone emails and I don’t answer?  They’ll think I’m slacking off.  Remote workers!

Despite the occasional spills, I’ve always enjoyed this form of exercise.  In the post-Nashotah House days while still in Wisconsin I’d sometimes do nine miles at a time.  Whenever I’ve moved to a new place I’ve gotten to know the neighborhood by jogging around.  Even if it’s not fully light you can see plenty.  (Although the cracks in the sidewalk aren’t always obvious.)  I tend to think about these things as life lessons.  Parables, if you will.  One of the deep-seated human dreams is that of flying.  Birds make it look so easy, and fun.  A human body feels so heavy when it impacts the ground.  I suspect that’s why we find gymnasts so fascinating to watch.  As for me, I’m just a middle-aged guy in sweats and wearing glasses.  And even as I head home I’m already thinking how remarkable the number of thoughts are in the few seconds while in flight, somewhere over the concrete.

In Praise of Paper

1 Comment

I’m working on embracing the electronic age.  No doubt it’s convenient.  And fast!  Publishing is, and always has been, a slow industry.  As connoisseurs of anything know, quality takes time.  This brings me to my paean to paper.  I generally write these blog posts on a computer.  That makes sense since they have to go onto the web and to do so they must be keyboarded.  Many of them start, however, on paper.  Sketching and free-flowing lines can become ideas, yet to draw on a computer you have to buy specialized (and expensive) equipment and software (which costs even more) to use it.  You’ll lose months of you life learning how to use said software.  In the end you’ll probably have forgotten, what?  I forget.

The other day I ran into an author who wanted maps.  In an electronic age the easiest way to get maps is to take them from the web.  Google Maps seems innocent enough.  Only it’s covered by copyright, and commercial use requires permission.  As I went through the whole permissions process I was thinking of tracing paper.  Copyright covers the execution of ideas, not the ideas themselves.  Coastlines, rivers, and mountains added through the miracle of tracing paper become the copyright of the maker.  (Don’t try this by rewriting written words through tracing paper—that doesn’t work.)  Tracing paper’s old school.  The illustrations in many older books used a similar technique.  In A Reassessment of Asherah all the illustrations were ones I drew by hand.  You can do that on paper.  The only investment is a single sheet and a pencil.  A scanner can handle the rest.

Technologists like to espouse that there’s no such thing as a page.  Authors, they aver, must learn to write without references to page numbers.  Avoid the words “above” and “below” to refer to something discussed elsewhere in the text.  This “format neutral language” (for it has to have a fancy name) is intended to ease the reading experience for the ebook.  With my Kindle software, however, there are still pages.  Don’t we call them webpages?  Don’t we bookmark both our place in Kindles and on the web?  Why then can’t we have our page numbers?  Have you ever tried to make your laptop into a paper airplane when you’re bored?  It’s often hard for progressive creatures like ourselves to admit that maybe we have had it right the first time.  Maybe reading and paper need each other.  A future without paper will be very sterile indeed.

Six Impossible Things

1 Comment

Solipsism, as a philosophy, has its attractions.  The idea behind it is that since all we can truly know is our self, the self is the only being that really exists.  This outlook is expressed in tragicomic form in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.  Written in Vonnegut’s characteristic style, there’s confusion and continuity, and almost a mockery of the gullibility of readers.  Kilgore Trout, a penurious science fiction writer, wrote a novel where one character was human amid a planet of robots programmed to act like people.  Dwayne Hoover comes to believe this is true and acts on it, with several other characters ending up in the hospital.  The story ends with the narrator realizing, I think, that he’s the only real human being because he made up this entire novel.

As someone who generally works alone, and whose lifestyle includes early rising and early sleeping, solipsism suggests itself from time to time.  Writers tend to spend quite a bit of time in their own heads, either reading or expressing their own thoughts via their craft.  Anyone who’s been a victim of a solipsist (and we all have) knows that such a viewpoint is wrong, but it does address one of consciousness’ deepest fears—how do we know what others know or experience?  We keep secrets.  We hide our weaknesses and insecurities.  We show others, most of the time, only what we want them to see.  Addressing the individualism of the late sixties and early seventies, Vonnegut takes to task a society that still promotes prejudice and wages war.

Vonnegut experienced war and it’s clear that it haunted him for the remainder of his life.  He tried, and often succeeded, in finding some hilarity in life, but it always seems to stop short with a slap of cruelty.  I’ve been reading quite a few of Vonnegut’s novels over the past few years.  He’s a writer that mixes profundity with frivolousness in such an easy way that it’s beguiling.  Breakfast of Champions is, despite being an easy read, a difficult book.  Quickly finished with its goofy doodles and swift pace, it leaves you feeling as if you’ve been poisoned with an idea, somehow.  Or maybe it’s just me.  For this year’s reading challenge I’ve selected two more of Vonnegut’s novels, but I haven’t decided which ones yet.  I think about asking others, but then I remember that if he’s right in this one, there’s really nobody else to ask.

Vapid

1 Comment

The smoke encircled his head like a thief.  And not in a saintly way.  I was going to have to rethink this.  You see, the culture of the early morning commute is one where you stand in line with strangers before dawn.  Having grown up a victim of second-hand smoke at home, I can’t stand it now.  Should I go wait in the line (which was growing) where the last guy was smoking, or sit in my car?  Work anxiety always wins out in such situations, so off I trudged.  I discovered, however, that the man in front of me wasn’t smoking after all.  He was vaping.  What was this chemical stew hanging in the air that had just come from his mouth?

I worry about second-hand vape.  How desperate must a person be to smoke a device?  You see, my trust in technology goes only so far.  People are slowly beginning to understand that electronics don’t solve every problem.  Vinyl records are starting to come back, even at Barnes and Noble.  Independent bookstores are returning, despite the rise of Kindle.  I’m still waiting for it, but film cameras may once again appear.  There’s something about the Ding an sich.  The tech of the stereo was invented for the analogue record.  Yes, the MP3 is faster and cheaper, and you can buy just the song you want with the click of a virtual button, but we still have our favorite LPs around.  This isn’t misplaced nostalgia, like those who long for the 1950s.  No, this is simply the recognition that faster isn’t always better.  Some things were meant to linger.

Vaping is, however, an example of how a bad habit becomes a vice with no point.  Initially meant to come to the succor of smokers who couldn’t do it indoors, vaping was also quickly relegated to the outside.  Many people, it seems, don’t want to breathe someone else’s smoke.  Do you develop artificial cancer from artificial nicotine?  Another commuter comes up to the guy in front of me.  Like a couple of kids on a 1970s schoolyard, they exchange vape flavors.  The first guy doubles up with a coughing fit.  Spits off the curb.  The second guy says, somewhat anticlimactically, that this one’s strong stuff.  I have to wonder what future generations, if there’ll be any, will think of our love affair with devices.  The bus pulls in.  I’m the only one on the whole thing who clicks on the over seat light.  I have a physical book to read.

Aging Tech

1 Comment

When I get an idea my first impulse is to grab an envelope and pencil and start scribbling.  I run around with an older crowd.  Many of my generation don’t appreciate how much a single “share” can do for a blog post, or what a simple link to a page can do.  I have college friends who have no email addresses and who are invisible on the web.  I guess this is a young person’s playing field.  I suppose one of my reasons for writing about horror is that it keeps me in the younger demographic.  I don’t know too many people my age who are fans of “the genre.”  Sci fi is a little more acceptable, I suppose.  Still, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about why I find horror so fascinating.  There’s actually something redemptive about it, at least in my reading of the material.  It’s also a coping mechanism.

One reason that people tell stories (and read stories), according to psychologists, is to learn how to handle situations they might encounter.  This is on a subconscious level most of the time, otherwise speculative fiction simply wouldn’t apply.  I can’t recall having been in a crisis situation and stopping to think what a Stephen King character would have done in such circumstances, but I suppose that might be in the back of my mind somewhere, along with information about all the things I’ve mislaid over the years.  The older you get, in a technologically rapacious society, the more things there seem to be worthy of horror stories.  I haven’t even figured out the last round of devices before the new generation’s introduced.  No wonder so much of horror has to do with being attacked by monsters that look innocent.  Clinically engineered in a clean room.

Image credit: Pattymooney, via Wikimedia Commons

Some of the horror comes from the inherent instability of a constantly upgrading tech.  My laptop’s a few years old.  While a little younger than that, the device that sits on my laptop is also not fresh from the factory.  The last time I tried to back up the contents, the external hard drive (new from the factory) refused to do what I commanded.  While I did eventually figure it out, I wasted a good deal of my scarce free time working out how a device I couldn’t control was in fact controlling me.  Younger folks grew up with this kind of problem solving drilled into them from kindergarten on.  Now I find myself in a world of devices I can’t comprehend and which don’t even react the same way they did last time I bought the exact same one.  I ask my fellow quinquagenarians what to do and I watch as they grab an envelope and pencil.

In the Inn

1 Comment

One of those things that really bothers me is the concept of being forced out of a home.  It’s never happened to me personally, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fear it.  That idea works its way into more theoretical applications as well.  Lately both my phone and my laptop computer have sent me messages saying there’s no more room in the inn.  Now, dear reader, you may understand technology better than I (you almost certainly do), but I wonder just how much these weightless thoughts I store here can possibly tip the scale.  I back up my hard disc weekly—there’s no telling who’s going to get kicked out when all the room is finally gone!—but when I open my space manager I find all kinds of things I can’t identify.  Software that I’m not sure it’s safe to remove.  I have no idea what the function of many apps might be.  So I just start deleting.

No room for your data here!

And I keep deleting.  I won’t touch my writing, however.  It’s backed up on a high-capacity drive, but such drives fail.  I want to keep a copy here on my laptop where I can reach it.  The real problem is that this massive sorting exercise keeps me from doing the things that I’d rather spend my time on—writing blog posts, for example.  How can I relax to do that, though, knowing that there’s no room to store them when I’m done?  Why does iTunes take up so much space anyway?  I feel guilty deleting anything from it because of all those warning dialogue boxes with their dire notes that this action can’t be undone.  Occam’s erasure has its consequences, I guess.

I suppose this is related to my recent observations on how tech demands time.  I’ve got some big projects going.  One is to sort out and file all my browser bookmarks.  They are embarrassingly plentiful.  Then there’s the sorting of thousands and thousands of electronic photos into files.  When I first starting using devices there weren’t enough pictures or bookmarks to worry about.  Now each of these projects has been ongoing for months and neither is nearing the end.  I’m old enough to recall when office supply stores sent catalogues (print catalogues, no less!) to my employers stating things like, “We’re in the  midst of an information explosion.  You should buy folders in bulk.”  They meant manilla folders.  Were we ever so naive?  Now what about these ebooks that I also have in hard copy?  Which should I get rid of?  That choice, at least, is easy.  Even my manger has room for books.

Punch Bug

Leave a comment

There’s no other reason for buying a Volkswagen Beetle than making a statement.  We bought ours in 2003, before they got squashed.  Mechanically it has been a good little car, but, despite the fine engineering, the hood latch is made of plastic.  And we all know what plastic does.  Yesterday was sunny and a Saturday so I spent at least four hours trying to get the hood open.  (Unsuccessfully.)  Now, I’m no gear-head, so I watched a video on YouTube that 23,000 views (some 22,000 of which were me) on how to work around this major design flaw.  After three hours in the sun I had my face pressed to the bumper, trying hard not to think of all the bugs that have met eternity there, so I could see up to where the inaccessible latch smugly sits.  No tool in the history of humankind can reach it. After another hour I gave up, although just one weekend before this trick worked.

YouTube is an alternate universe.  There, latches can be made to work.  Men who appear larger than me can wedge their entire hands in that unforgivingly tight space while my knuckles are going to take days to heal.  They use simple tools that trip well-oiled springs and their engine blocks are revealed to them like the commandments on Mount Horeb.  Clearly I am not counted among the blessed in this mechanical paradise.  I do pretty well at this kind of thing if someone shows me how, but with a broken hood-latch you’re working by faith with car parts unseen.  Kind of like wrestling with an angel at night.

I did notice among the YouTube videos an unexpected sense of tradition.  The new Beetle (although ours is well over a decade old) has the engine in the front.  The original Beetle (one of which I drove until the cost of parking in Boston compelled me to sell it) famously had it in the rear, making the front the trunk of the car.  That nomenclature has persisted despite the passage of time and changing the facts.  In my mind the front of the car, where the engine is located (or so I hear) is called “the hood.”  The rear is “the trunk” (more spacious in the new Beetle, as I know from experience).  Although the design and layout have changed, the old language remains.  It seems to me that all of this conforms to a belief in special revelation.  Once uttered it cannot be changed.  Or opened, apparently.  Please excuse me, but after all this typing I’ve got to get some ice for my knuckles.

The Reboot

1 Comment

It lied to me.  My computer.  Don’t get me wrong; I know all about trying to save face.  I also know my laptop pretty well by now.  It was running slow, taking lots of time to think over fairly simple requests.  A lull in my frantic mental activity led to the opportunity for me to initiate a reboot.  When it winked open its electronic eye my screen told me it had restarted to install an update.  Untrue.  I had told it to restart.  I gave the shutdown order to help with the obvious sluggishness that suggested to this Luddite brain of mine that my silicon friend was working on an update.  There’s no arguing with it, however.  In its mechanical mind, it decide to do the restart itself.  I was merely a bystander.

Technology and I argue often.  Like JC says, though, authority always wins.  I should know my place by now.  I’ve read enough about neuroscience (with thanks to those who write for a general audience) to know that this is incredibly human behavior.  We are creatures of story, and if our brains can’t figure out why we’ve done something they will make up an answer.  We have trouble believing that we just don’t know.  I suppose that will always be a difference between artificial intelligence and the real thing.  Our way of thinking is often pseudo-rational.  We evolved to get by but machines have been designed intelligently.  That often makes me wonder about the “intelligent design” crowd—they admit evolution, but with God driving it.  Why’d our brains, in such circumstances, evolve the capacity for story instead of for fact?

As my regular readers know, I enjoy fiction.  Fiction is the epitome of the story-crafting art.  Some analysts suggest our entire mental process involves construing the story of ourselves.  Those who articulate it well are rewarded with the sobriquet of “author.”  The rest of us, however, aren’t exactly amateurs either.  Our brains are making up reasons for what we do, even when we do irrational things (perhaps like reading this blog sometimes).  Stories give our lives a sense of continuity, of history.  What originally developed as a way of remembering important facts—good food sources, places to avoid because predators lurk there—became histories.  Stories.  And when the facts don’t align, we interpolate.  It seems that my laptop was doing the same thing.  Perhaps it’s time to reboot.

Strange Ending

1 Comment

Perhaps it’s from growing up as a biblical literalist, but I’ll probably always have problems with post-modernism.  You see, when you’re taught as a kid that there is one absolute right and you already know it (it’s Genesis to Revelation, no Apocrypha, please), you kind of get the idea that things are just what they seem.  Po-mo teaches, among other things, that there’s no true objectivity—reality is subjective and there is no neutral ground upon which to stand.  I’m down with that, but the old ways of looking at things remain.  This is a long-winded way of saying I finished Kohta Hirano’s ten-volume manga, Hellsing.  Over the past year I’ve been reading for a friend of mine, but manga has never really been my thing.  I read The Watchmen as a graphic novel, but looking at pictures somehow feels like cheating.  It’s that literalist thing again.

I might be dropping some spoilers here, so if you’re even slower than me be warned.  There’s quite a bit of shape-shifting here and it’s not always easy to tell who’s who.  In a kind of homage to my childhood monsters there’s vampires, werewolves, and even a Frankenstein’s monster in the series.  All of them are engaged in a constant state of combat against which the Protestant Hellsing organization stands for a stable civilization.  The Catholics are associated with Nazis along the way.  It’s a fascinating look at how an eastern culture might view the religious wars of those in the west who all go by the name “Christian.”  I think this is the genius of the series.  The friend who lent me the volumes has no declared faith, but he finds the dynamic fascinating.  Real religious fighting has made it easy for him.

The story, however, falls clearly into the generation of those without absolutes.  For someone my age a plot clearly laid out is a thing of beauty.  In college we used to argue about how absolutes might exist.  Where did they come from, and which is the strongest?  Did God make them or does God have to conform to them?  Even without the answers, the fact that absolutes existed was assumed.  Argument-driven science tells us that a theory is never proven.  Science is the best explanation we have at the moment, based on the evidence amassed.  In its own way, it has become post-modern.  Hellsing is a kind of mind-blowing work.  It will likely be a long time before I attempt another manga series.  Although I accept the po-mo premise, I still find old-fashioned fiction my favorite.

Stranger and Stranger

1 Comment

Like many fans of the X-Files and the early years of Sleepy Hollow, I’ve fallen into the Stranger Things orbit.  While I don’t have a Netflix account, I have friends who do and they got me hooked.  If you’ve watched it you’ll know why, and if you haven’t I’ll try not to give too many spoilers away.  The reason I raise it now, when we’ve gone such a long time without a new season, is that Stranger Things 2 took on shades of The Exorcist, but without any of the attendant religion.  Secular exorcists do exist, and possession is a feature of cultures with all different kinds of belief systems.  Exorcism works based on the belief system of the possessed, it seems, and if there’s no religion there’s no problem—call a secularcist!

Spoiler alert: Will is possessed by the mind flayer.  As the authorities flail around and get eaten by demidogs, his mother figures out how the exorcism has to work.  The thing about possession is that nobody really knows what demons are.  Dungeons and Dragons, which I confess I’ve never played—my life is too complicated already, thank you—gives the analogy for the possessing entity.    No matter what the demon, however, the only way to get it out is through exorcism.  Quite apart from sci-fi and fantasy, this is also the case in real life.  Part of the appeal to Stranger Things, I suspect, is that it indulges in the mysterious without the burden of religion.  While religion makes for good horror, good horror may exist without it.  Or can it?

Contrast this with Sleepy Hollow, now defunct.  Possession was a trope there as well, but the story had obvious elements of religion embedded in it.  As I point out in Holy Horror, religion often drives the fear.  That doesn’t mean it’s the only driver.  People fear being taken over by something else.  Stranger Things knows that if nobody can really figure out what that something else is, it can be scarier still.  We know it comes from the upside down.  We know it can possess people.  And we learn that it can be exorcised.  Although the setting is completely secular, there are elements of religious thinking even here.  It’s simply part of the human psyche.  We can deny it exists.  We can try to describe it only by analogy.  We can try to exorcise it.  It is there nevertheless, even as we eagerly await the advent of the third season.