Self Promotion

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Perhaps I lack ambition, or maybe my inner critic is over-caffeinated, but I’ve never applied for a book prize.  Don’t misunderstand: when I submit the books to publishers I think they’re good—I wouldn’t do so otherwise.  As with any of the woodworking I’ve done, however, I can see the flaws.  These days young scholars are being encouraged to submit their books for prizes.  Many of them want nominations for several awards.  I’ll admit that once in a while I wish one of my publishers would say, “Hey, this is pretty good, maybe we’ll submit it for something.”  After six books this has never happened, and I don’t want to put myself out there.  Some of my fiction has been nominated for prizes by the publishers.  Some I’ve even entered into contests.  I believe in my work.  It just means more if someone else would be willing to take the next step.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

My time in the academy—about 19 years in some kind of professorial role—ended 15 years ago.  Even so, during my time as a grad student and professor, nobody suggested book prizes.  There are very few in religious studies, perhaps because the motivation to study the subject seems to come from a higher plane.  Of course, in those days potential professors didn’t have to be self-promoters, although some were.  All I was seeking was a steady teaching position to do what I do best, and which allowed me to write a book now and again.  Although I taught full-time for 14 years, I never had a sabbatical.  Or any research leave.  I managed to write a second book in any case.  The thought of submitting it for an award never occurred to me.

Slowly I’m beginning to realize that the academy has become a foreign country to me.  A place where scholars have to reassure themselves—book prizes being one such means—that their work is exceptional.  The real factor, it seems to me, is time.  Will any of your books still be referred to or cited years after a scholar becomes old?  Perhaps asked to leave the academy?  There are so many academic books published these days; publish or perish has become a mantra in the dark academy.  It is more difficult to stand out.  My next nonfiction book (half written), if it ever gets finished, will not be published by an academic publisher.  And were it to be nominated for a book prize (unlikely), the initiative will, I assure you, come from someone else.

On October

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October has come quickly this year.  September was quite transitional.  Mostly pleasant, but we shivered through the recent sunless days of the nor-easter around here.  Between work and full weekends, I wish the approach of my favorite month could feel more regal.  I know die-hard horror fans watch movies in that genre every night of this month.  My schedule won’t allow it, and I’ve been so busy that I’ve fallen behind on movie watching.  Most of the time the movies I discuss on this blog are ones I’ve seen the previous month or two.  It seems I have lots of other things to write about.  And I’ve been trying to step up my reading this year.  Goodreads tells me I’ve finished sixty books so far in 2026.  And so October snuck up on me.

For scholars of religion, and those of us who pretend to be such, October starts in earnest the planning for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting.  It will be in Denver this year.  Last time it was there I shivered the whole time.  A colleague recently asked me to contribute to a volume on Ugarit.  I had to decline, being so out of date.  I could’ve said, “My mind is preoccupied with October.”  Horror movies and Halloween.  The changing of the leaves.  Jacket weather and reading gothic novels.  Pumpkins and apples. October is the month when many in this climate feel that they come alive, just in time for the darkness and cold of winter to settle in.

For many years I’ve been pondering the spirituality of the dark.  I don’t mean “dark powers” or Satanism or anything like that.  I mean the restorative, contemplative nature of being in the dark half of the year.  Since the equinox it’s been more dark than light.  We spend half of each year in this way.  Instead of cursing the dark, it seems to make sense to try to find its spiritual benefits.  In the Middle Ages monks used to awake in the night to say their prayers.  Even today spiritual writers occasionally venture into the realm of asking what we might learn to appreciate in the dark.  October’s a good time to think about such things.  Others have also begun to explore the spirituality of horror films.  This began to occur to me, in rudimentary ways, when I was a student in seminary.  So suddenly October is here.  Hopefully it will have some time tucked away for reflection.  Between watching horror movies, of course.

Heavenly Scent

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There’s a disappointing scent to books printed on demand.  Upon first opening them, they release a waft of laser printer.  The friendly smell of offset printing is banished.  I need to qualify that, however.  While teaching at Nashotah House I acquired a book via interlibrary loan that I remember not for its content, but for its unpleasant odor.  I’m not sure if it was the paper used, but the book smelled unpleasing.  Almost too offensive to read.  I’m not referring to the kind of musty, basement bouquet that some used books, long stored, possess.  No, that aroma isn’t offensive.  It suggests both mystery and the human condition.  How books smell is important.  Upon recently opening a POD (print on demand) book, I was transported to office work rather than the musty study of a scholar.

There are companies that sell scented candles intended to suggest libraries.  Libraries smell wonderful.  The small Franklin Public Library in my hometown has a wonderful, evocative aroma.  I remember it well from childhood.  On a visit to my mother before she passed, my wife, daughter, and I took her to that library.  We didn’t check anything out.  I simply had to smell it again.  Olfactory stimulus is very personal.  Indeed, in polite company we tend not to comment on how a person smells unless it is particularly pleasant.  “Nice perfume/aftershave, etc.”  (You have to be very close to a person to comment on less pleasant odors.) Scent has always been an important sense to me.  I like to sniff things.  When I’m out jogging first thing in the morning, I snuff the air like a bloodhound, eager for the first whiffs of fall during the heat of summer.  Like a dog I tend to think there are no bad smells, but there are some I don’t seek out.  Smells will take you back to the past, as the ultimate time travel.

In my mother’s kitchen I used to sit by her spice drawer and pull out each little bottle and jar to sniff them.  She never had anything as pungent as the asafoetida that my wife and I once bought for a recipe, but I recall those moments fondly.  Mom would be cooking nearby, and it seemed to me that I was smelling far away places that I’d never go.  I did make it to Scotland, however.  Edinburgh often smelled of the McEwan’s brewery.  At least the Old Town did on many a foggy morning.  We live not far from a micro-brewery and when its bouquet escapes, it take me straight back to Auld Reekie.  And, of course, Edinburgh was full of books and their distinctive smell.  All of this makes me want to go plant my nose in a book.

Serious Series

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The Carnivorous Carnival continues to reveal more of the Baudelaires’ unanswered questions.  At the Caligari Carnival the orphans disguise themselves to fit into a freak show, and meet Madame Lulu, who reveals important information—the V.F.D. has split into two parties.  The children still don’t learn what the initials stand for, but they discover that some of the influential adults in their lives were part of it.  The story grows quite gripping and more seriously dark than I remembered it being when I read it to our daughter many years ago.  One of Count Olaf’s associates isn’t mentioned after The Hostile Hospital, where presumably they died.  In this volume, another of his associates is thrown to the lions that give the book its title.

I couldn’t help but think of Daniel in the lion’s den as I read this one.  And Olaf’s plan is only too eagerly lapped up by the crowd wanting to see violence (and sloppy eating).  The reference to Daniel here can’t be coincidence.  The story also has the children questioning their own motivations.  Are they villains too?  Madame Lulu was a good member of V.F.D. who’d turned bad.  The children helped her reform, but in the end she betrayed them to Count Olaf.  Were their motives really pure?  For the first time in a Series of Unfortunate Events, the orphans end up separated at the end.  Neither Mr. Poe nor the Quagmire Triplets appear in this part of the tale.  It does seem, as noted, darker than usual.

Daniel Handler continues his subtle talking over the heads of children, though.  When explaining “déjà vu” for children, he gives other examples such as “ennui” and “la petite mort.”  The latter he explains that it’s a feeling that part of you has died, but Handler certainly knows that the common usage for the phrase is a circumlocution for “orgasm.”  Something many adults know as well, I suspect.  And there is humor for younger readers as well.  The “freaks” with whom the orphans share their job at the carnival provide some comic relief.  As an adult reading the books for myself, I get the feeling that, by this far into the series the story—while remaining pure fantasy—is aimed more at older readers.  It’s amazing what you can forget over the course of a couple of decades.  I trusted Lemony Snicket all those years ago, not to write anything that would seriously disturb our child.  I still trust him as an adult as I look forward to book ten.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Making Monks

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Now that I’m an antique, antique stores have a special draw.  They’re kind of like museums with free admission where you can buy the artifacts.  There’s a particularly large one in Allentown that I’ve visited a few times.  It’s the kind of place that, if you want something you see, you buy it right away because it’s not likely to be there next time you go back.  Back in March I saw a pair of bookends that caught my attention.  They were carved in the shape of monks reading books.  The reason I was fascinated by them is that I had bought my wife a very similar figurine (too small to be a bookend) when I first started teaching at Nashotah House.  We didn’t have much money, but I thought it was a whimsical reminder of where I was when I had to be away all week so that we could keep our academic couple dreams alive.

By the time I got back to the antique store the “bookends” were long gone.  What I was really curious about was whether there could be a connection with the Nashotah House curio I purchased nearly 35 years before.  There’s probably something I’m missing.  Was there a Platonic original somewhere?  When I failed to find them at the antique store, I did an online search and discovered a very similar one on Etsy, listed as being made in the 1970s.  I bought the one we have in 1992.  It was clearly handmade; the Nashotah House bookstore had a few of them on display at the time.  They no longer carried them after the inventory sold out.  I’d supposed they were made by a local Nashotah House person—which may be true—but where did they get the idea?

A bit more time on Etsy revealed another exemplar, this one listed as from the 1940s, specifically from Mexico.  One of the Etsy sellers is listed as being in Florida.  I bought mine in Wisconsin.  I found a pair in an antique store in Pennsylvania.  What is the missing link here?  This is the kind of rabbit hole academics are liable to tumble down.  Since I’m a dark academic, it strikes me as a research topic for someone without tenure worries to consider.  Or perhaps a detective who was raised Catholic.  All the five examples (two on Etsy, two in the antique store, and one from Nashotah House) follow the same plan and are stained and painted similarly.  This antique is curious about the origin story of those other antiques.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

In Public

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I’ve written about the virtues of reading in public before.  Book reading, that is.  I was reminded once again how restorative an exercise it can be.  The occasion this time was a book sale at the Bethlehem Public Library.  We didn’t realize this was one of those bi-monthly kinds of events—at least this year there are six such sales.  We met some friends there and I exercised considerable restraint, buying only two books.  One was a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.  I’d had a copy of this, but it was ruined in the flood.  I decided to replace it.  The other book was a collection of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories.  I’d been thinking just the day before that I should read some of her work.  It happened that I finished before other members of our party so I waited in the hall and started reading the story “Geranium,” with which the book starts.

After a few minutes a college-aged guy walked by and said, “Great book.”  I thanked him for affirming my choice.  He said, “I’ve just been reading O’Connor, you’re in for a real treat.”  This brief exchange reminded me of being in Easton on a warm evening a few years back, reading in a public square.  I was there to pick someone up and they weren’t quite ready yet.  A couple of young women, probably Lafayette College students, walked by and asked what I was reading.  It was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  They weren’t familiar with it and asked me what it was about.

Now, I’ve always been quite a shy person.  I don’t mind responding when someone talks to me, but initiating a conversation is something I don’t do very well with strangers.  I’m happy to respond when someone shows an interest in a book I’m reading.  I’ve had dentist hygienists ask about the book I inevitably bring in with me, asking if it’s any good.  The few times when I forget to bring a book and I have to try to entertain myself on my phone (it’s not easy; I quickly grow bored), I’ve never had anybody stop and ask what was interesting on my phone.  It’s the printed book, at least in populations with college students, that seems to bring out a willingness to chat.  I wonder how much of that bookish sociability that we’ve lost now that the electronic revolution has taken place.  How many discussions does a Kindle start?  It’s a virtue to read an actual book in public.

Seasonal Equality

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Despite a few heat spells, around these parts the summer was reasonable.  More rain than lawn care and weeding would prefer, after a somewhat dry June, but really not horrendous.  I had my first snuffs of autumn in the air in late July.  I have a fairly keen sense of smell, and when I’m jogging before the sun is up, sometimes I get a whiff of change.  Of course, we had August yet to go, and temperatures rebounded, as they will in August, but the change had started.  Today we have equal night and day, but from here until the winter solstice, nights will grow longer.  It’s the season of harvest and Halloween, and, increasingly, scary movies.  We’ll need to turn the furnace on for the season before too long.  Energy bills will go up, but October and November tend to be cozy rather than frigid.

My inner pagan appreciates the change in seasons with an enthusiasm that may not often show.  I remember well my first semester at Boston University.  Other students at the School of Theology knew I wasn’t exactly the smiley sort.  One September day the clouds, temperature, and scent in the air were just right.  I couldn’t help beaming.  A woman who knew me from class asked why I was smiling, “That’s not like you,” she said.  It was the coming of autumn.  

I’m not a person who wishes time away.  I like summer.  I like not having to grab a coat before going outside.  I like not having to put on layers indoors to keep warm.  I also like winter.  The bleakness of the season appeals to the joyful melancholy I often feel.  I don’t enjoy being cold all the time, but the feeling of the season buoys me up.  Spring I always greet with relief.  The constant chill begins to loosen its grip and, although I grumble about having to start up yard work again, I love watching the flowers bloom, welcoming back the warmth.  I wish none of this away.  Born in a temperate zone, it all feels so necessary to me.  But autumn is my favorite.  Leaves began changing around here back in July.  The yellows are beginning to grace the walnuts, and sumac is blushing its scarlet.  It will be some weeks before the deep green of later summer disappears, but we are entering the season of melancholy personified.  I think I can understand why the ancients celebrated these changes.  They are the heartbeat of the temperate life.

Class Privilege

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A recent article in the New York Times explores something many of us know from experience: your hopes of getting tenure in higher education plummet if you’re from the working class.  One of the causes the article points out (I think I can gift it, if anyone wants to read it), is that working class folks don’t learn networking from their parents.  That was like a lightbulb being switched on.  Schmoozing is so essential when dealing with anyone in power.  I started to learn this at Nashotah House.  My mother taught me always to be honest and forthright.  Employers have walked all over me ever since.  I never learned to schmooze well.  I still don’t do it.  Until reading this article, in my sixties, I didn’t realize that my academic career was doomed from the start.

It’s like this: neither of my parents finished high school.  I grew up poor and working class.  My grades were great throughout high school and college and I was being groomed to be a minister, not an academic.  But I felt the call of academia as soon as I’d acclimated to Grove City College.  I love reading and learning.  I have innate curiosity.  I question everything.  This seems to fit teaching better than preaching.  Before settling on a doctoral institution, I asked my professors where I should go.  Their advice: Europe.  Bad mistake for pre-internet days and a kid who knew nothing about networking.  Edinburgh is a world-class research university.  Its only real connection (at the time) to US schools was Princeton.  Particularly Princeton Seminary, if your degree was from New College.  Otherwise, the professors didn’t pay much mind to American higher education.  Networking, which I didn’t realize you needed to do, wasn’t emphasized or encouraged.

I was hired by Nashotah House because of two factors: they could find nobody else, and I was Episcopalian.  The chances of networking while at a remote, conservative campus in the woods were nil.  I went to conferences, but Ugaritology was a very small field.  I remained an unknown.  I wondered how my friends, if they ran into unemployment situations, always managed to find other jobs.  They knew, apparently, something I did not.  Networking.  Even getting into publishing was rocky for me.  I had two editorial posts for two years only.  I didn’t network or schmooze.  Authors loved me because I was honest and forthright.  Those are working class values.  And, it seems, they will be deficits to advancing in your career.  Be careful before deciding on a doctorate.  It can backfire unless your parents went to college and taught you what to do.

Beautiful Nature

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When it comes to gardening, my philosophy is to let nature add the beauty where I lack the artifice.  Repeating patterns please the eye and sometimes unplanted “weeds” form a pleasing patchwork of ground cover, as long as they don’t get too high.  I trust nature to be beautiful in its own time.  There are some places, many actually, were the beauty simply shines.  The best we can do as humans is to try to imitate it.  We all know of scenic overlooks, scenic by-ways, scenic attractions.  When I was young I flattered myself at being handy with a pencil.  I still love to draw, but my years of neglect in favor of words has left whatever skill I had depleted.  Or rusty from disuse.  Our artificial lives (9-2-5, 9-2-5, 9-2-5) prevent much time from being spread between various forms of self-expression.  But I appreciate beauty.

The more academic among us with call it aesthetics.  I tend to think of it in Faustian terms.  I remember well learning in high school that should Faust ever say, “verweile doch, du bist so schön” (remain, you are so beautiful) Mephistopheles will have won.  There are many moments in my life when beauty nearly overwhelms.  As humans, however, we know that should we see it every day it will become prosaic.  We’ll feel the need to find something even more sublime.  Such things lead to concepts of Heaven.  That certainly isn’t the case for my front garden.  Time to spend weeding is about as rare as time to spend drawing, particularly, for the former, when it’s not raining, or too hot, or when a weekend is otherwise not too busy.

We’re nearing the end of the growing season.  The melancholy beauty of autumn is the most poignant turning point in the year.  My mind tends to go to extremes, so when I have to bundle up a little to start my morning jog I begin to worry about heating bills and being chilly until next May.  I’m not one to wish away any season, however.  There’s beauty in the abundance of summer, just as there is in the bleakness of winter.  At a recent art show I was once again reminded that I’m most attracted to painting that capture the essence of autumn or winter.  That hint of snow on the ground under clear blue skies, announcing that change is coming—that too is beauty.  I still have to harvest the weeds that got out of control these last few weeks, looking for the beauty in their persistent existence.

Walking Thoughts

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Once, on a rare day off work, I decided to take a long walk.  One of the places to do this in the Lehigh Valley is the Saucon Rail Trail.  At the moment it doesn’t quite reach Bethlehem, so if you start from that end, you go south.  I noticed something on my long walk.  On the northern end of the trail there are informational signs.  One of the favorites that I spotted is this one, on dinosaurs of the Saucon Valley.  Some of the others are town names and commemorations of the rail stations that are no longer there.  There’s one of these in Hellertown and another in Bingen.  Educational signs are one of the simple pleasures in life.  It was a long walk, however, and I was just getting started.  The trail skirts along some wealthy properties.  During the fall, these often display right-leaning signs and banners.  As you head in that direction, the educational signs disappear.

More “private property” signs show up.  If you go far enough, “Residential area: please keep the noise down” (I don’t recall the exact wording) signs appear.  It seems less friendly.  Then “No Loitering” signs.  I was disappointed on my long walk, but not surprised.  My understanding of local politics are that the northern part of the trail leans blue.  Indeed, it too is a residential area, but there were no shushing signs, just educational ones (and the necessary ones about trail rules).  In fact, some property owners put out whimsical, occasionally interactive, diversions to amuse walkers, bikers, and joggers.  The near southern section goes through deep red territory.  The signs are less friendly, at least as far as I went.

I didn’t walk the entire length of the trail; it’s seven-and-a-half miles.  In my post-Nashotah days of shock I used to jog nine miles, but I’ve had a desk job far too many years and my daily jogs are now down to one or two.  I’m curious if the trend continues.  The Saucon Rail Trail used to be part of the North Pennsylvania Rail Road.  There’s a bit of history along the trail.  The Thomas Iron Company used to have a factory on the northern end of the path.  I see from the map that it also skirts DeSales University.  Perhaps, if I ever retire, I’ll be able to work back up to walking the entire distance.  Maybe by then there’ll be more friendly signs than warning ones.  But then again, I could be a dinosaur.

The Death of John Henry

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I don’t recognize America anymore.  Born here, and having spent over six decades on this soil, I look out and see a country that looks nothing like the sixties into which I was born.  Work pressures us to use “artificial intelligence” to be more efficient, even as those who know the industry best sound warning bells against using it.  I can’t help but think of the America that used to recognize John Henry.  John Henry is key American folklore about who we are.  Or at least used to be.  An African American, John Henry was a steel-driver building railways.  Threatened when the foreman introduced a steam-powered rock drill, he challenged the machine to a contest and won.  At the cost of his life.  The America I grew up in recognized the power of the John Henry story, even as jobs were already being lost to robots.  John Henry was the hero of that story.

What’s happened in the intervening years?  People have flocked to ease and comfort over the struggle to be human.  Even the most intimate of human occupations, such as writing, are being handed over to algorithms that have never lived a day in their lives.  Averaging together human experience, making us all generic.  We need John Henry’s hammer to come alive again.  Someone to stand up for what it means to be human.  Someone who knows that money isn’t the only thing that makes the world go round.  

Some of us dreamed that after the pandemic employers might realize that most employees worked conscientiously at home.  That perhaps more time off wouldn’t hurt the bottom line.  That we could trust one another.  Then the next plague, AI, hit the headlines.  Even more efficiency!  Even less need for humans!  To what end?  Why are we doing this?  Yes, AI is faster, but is it better?  The environmental costs are staggering.  We’d already reached a tipping point where enough people realized we were harming our home that behaviors had begun to change.  Even in red states.  Now tech moguls are selling their snake oil and upper management can’t live without it.  Instead of rewarding those who work hard they invite them to find ways to make their own jobs redundant.  John Henry saw it coming.  He became the hero of folksongs and legends.  Celebrated in film, animation, and television, we sent the message loud and clear: human spirit can overcome the cold efficiency of machines.  So we find ourselves in a county that feels it has outlived its need for John Henry.  I’m willing to pick up my hammer and join him on the line.

Public domain; image credit: John Henry illustration by Roy La Grone (1942) via Wikimedia Commons

Love and Jealousy

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Obsession is one of those horror movies that surprised the industry by becoming super-successful last year.  It seems that those who work in movies just can’t accept that horror can be good.  No matter.  Obsession was discussed a lot and I had it on my list for quite some time.  The premise is fairly simple: wishes can come true.  Those who make them, however, often wish they hadn’t.   The idea isn’t new, but it’s the execution here that makes it compelling horror.  The story follows four young adults who work in a music store.  Baron (Bear) is secretly in love with Nikki, while Sarah—the daughter of the store owner—likes Bear.  Ian is Bear’s best friend and he can talk to him without the pressure of sexual tension.  Ian encourages Bear to confess his feelings to Nikki, but he’s too timid to do so.  Instead he buys a One Wish Willow from a New Age shop and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world.

The wish comes true.  The four friends are destabilized.  Nikki, who’d been occasionally going with Ian, suddenly becomes obsessed with Bear.  She spends the night, and then won’t leave.  This might be okay, but she acts in very creepy ways, both when she’s obsessed and when elements of her true self break through.  Their friends soon don’t want Bear to come over because Nikki’s always with him and she’s acting very weird.  One night, when the Nikki under the spell is asleep, actual Nikki asks Bear to kill her.  Bear, in the the meantime, is conflicted.  He finally has the beautiful girlfriend he’s always wanted, but she scares him with her strange behavior and her utter obsession with him.  Her jealousy leads Nikki to kill Sarah.

Since it’s only one wish per customer, Bear buys the last One Wish Willows and asks Ian to undo his wish.  He doesn’t and Nikki shoots him.  Since death is the only thing that can break the wish, Bear is left with an uncomfortable choice.  I’ll leave it at that.  The movie is an intelligent and thoughtful reflection (with some light elements) on relationships.  Human emotions are tricky to navigate and both love and jealousy are quite common in our species.  Many of us experience relationships with uneven levels of love and commitment and, if we’re honest, there’s an element of horror to such situations.  If wishes did come true, we all know, the world would likely not be a happier place at all.  Something to think about.

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I’m aware that I don’t think like other people.  This can lead to a strange kind of loneliness at times.  It might also explain why my books never seem to grow wings.  One specific example prompts this post.  When I get interested in a topic, I read every book I can get ahold of on it.  I guess I always think other people are the same way.  Rationally, I realize that’s largely not true.  Many people will read a book, maybe two, and move on.  A certain kind of brain, however, insists that the information must be tested, and tested again.  I’ve written enough nonfiction books to know that each one is an opinion.  There are those who differ in their outlook.  Who would interpret the same evidence differently.  And unless there’s just one book on a topic (it happens!) I’m always inclined to read another.

That came in handy for writing A Reassessment of Asherah.  That was my dissertation, of course.  I read everything written on the old girl that I could lay my hands on.  (Since this was before the electronics revolution, it was a hands-on experience.)  Of course, a doctoral program is the rare chance to undertake that kind of research without having to work at some kind of menial job, or have class prep and grading to do.  Or working at a 9-2-5.  Now I have to be selective regarding how much I read on a topic.  Not having use of a university library, it often means things I can afford.  Reading may be fundamental, but it doesn’t come cheap.  And I see other books, with perhaps minimal cited sources, selling much better than mine.  Again, I don’t think like other people do.

There’s an invisible line at about $19 over which a book is relegated to rabid fans only.  One of my books was priced at $22 when it came out, and I had people at a speaking event apologize that it was just a bit too much to pay.  The going rate then was $16 for most books (it has crept up a couple dollars since then).  Six dollars can make a difference.  For academic publishers, of course, you need to add an extra hundred to make up for the lack of sales.  I wonder why?  In this respect I think like others who publish with academic presses.  We may realize our books aren’t bestsellers, but we know a few more people would buy them if they were priced down in the range of other books.  I guess other people think about books primarily as money-making products rather than the outpouring of an individual’s thoughts and energy.  Depends how you think about it.