Funerals

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Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.

The Power of Yes

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In going back over my fiction writing, I had a realization.  Both the first novel I tried seriously to get published (still not) and the first short story I submitted to a journal were accepted the first place I submitted.  That perhaps seemingly insignificant fact is quite important.  Like most, or at least many, writers, I’m a great self-doubter.  This probably comes from not knowing many other people personally and having a Calvinistic-level assessment of my own work.  Affirmation is rare in my experience.  Having a publisher say, “Yes, we like this” early on in my attempts to publish fiction was a tremendous boost and gave me the courage to try again.  It didn’t take long for the rejections to start rolling in, but I knew that someone believed in me.  Belief is far more important than most people think.  Worlds can be built on it.

The publisher of my debut novel decided to back out of the contract when the acquiring editor left.  I know, different editor, different game.  But this was under contract.  Thirteen years later it remains unpublished, not for lack of trying.  I began re-revising it in recent times since I’ve found a potential publisher and reading it I could see what might’ve frightened off others.  Still, I stand by it.  The book was written in a style very different from most of my subsequent fiction.  Characters speak their minds instead of being beat down by the system.  Readers of my academic work would be shocked.  That’s one reason that I use a pseudonym.  I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if the novel ever does get published.  It’s difficult to promote and keep your identity secret.

The point is that we never know what good we might do when we encourage someone who underestimates themself.  This may seem an odd thing to say when so many arrogant individuals command the world stage these days.  There are many people, however, who might accomplish great things if someone only gives them a little encouragement.  I think of this constantly in my work as well as my private life.  Is all this person needs simply some uplift?  Publishing can be a harsh world.  You put yourself out there and people like to start taking pot shots at you.  I’ve received much criticism over the years, and this has been primarily for nonfiction publishing.  The reviews some fiction writers receive, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or even in print, can be unkind.  Some of the critique may be deserved, but why not offer it up with a word of motivation rather than Schadenfreude?  It can make a huge difference.

Swing Low

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The 1970s were a rare era.  On the cusp of the electronic revolution, we grew up with many old fashioned notions about how things were done and what was possible.  It was a period dominated by both interest in the paranormal and by Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great, Planet Earth, looking for the end of the world.  I was sent scampering to the strange documentary Chariots of the Gods by Gary Rhodes’ Weirdumentary.  I honestly can’t recall whether I saw it growing up.  I know I read Erich van Däniken’s book on which it’s based.  As a kid with little exposure to a truly educated community, I was swayed by the book and that makes me think I may have begged to have been taken to the Drake Theater in Oil City to see the film.  Watching it as an adult, however, is truly an odd experience.

First of all, it’s freely available on multiple streaming services.  All you have to put up with is commercials and, since it’s not a high-demand movie, there aren’t that many of them.  The film, done by a German director and voiced over in English, begins by suggesting religious writings worldwide tell of wisdom from above.  People have always, I expect, felt that there is something divine about the sky.  We still get that impression from our experience of the weather.  The documentary makes the suggestion that Elijah’s fiery chariot was more technologically advanced than supposed.  Same with Ezekiel.  But then it sets out on a worldwide tour of ancient monumental building, stressing how such simple folk could never have built these things all on their own.  Although this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, there’s nevertheless something compelling about it.

Among the more interesting items are some of the ancient rock carvings.  Without the written context, however, jumping to the conclusion that these were astronauts is foolhardy.  There are legitimate mysteries of history.  We don’t know who built certain structures, or why.  Our own modern fragile skyscrapers raise the same question.  People seem to be compelled to do such things simply because we can.  We don’t need aliens to help us with them.  Placing all of these mysteries together and suggesting a single solution is so 1970s.  Breaking things down and study of them by experts yields quite different results.  No less fascinating, but perhaps with feet more solidly on the ground.  This documentary is a strange period piece of a time I remember well.  And one from which, it seems, an even stranger culture has grown.

Individualisms

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As an individual that stands out in the herd, metaphorically (standing out  is always dangerous, I know), I don’t tend to follow trends.  Blending in isn’t my strong suit.  A current, or recent trend, was to be seen carrying a disposable coffee cup when in public.  At least for a while there, everybody was doing it.  Walking down the street, going grocery shopping, at the mall.  It was almost like a fashion statement.  Anybody who was somebody had a cup of warm liquid in their hand.  Perhaps in my case economics and personal choice made the decision not to do this.  Economically, a five-dollar cup of coffee is out of my range; I’m not a hedge-fund manager.  I haven’t gone out for coffee in some years because of the personal choice aspect of it: I gave up caffeine.  This was several years ago.  I didn’t like being addicted to daily coffee, so I stopped, cold turkey.  But I still like the taste of coffee—that was hard earned.

These days the personal water bottle industry must be a good one to be into.  I recently visited friends and I noticed everyone had their personal water bottle.  I tend to leave mine at home.  Yes, I have one for the basic reason that running downstairs to refill a glass with water multiple times a day would mean that I’d miss an awful lot of work.  I drink quite a bit of water in a day.  About a gallon when I’m not traveling.  In my regimented life, I have a water bottle that I fill four times a day.  I know its capacity and, trying to stay healthy, I drink it down whether I feel like it or not.  I tend to leave it at home, however, as I mentioned.  At this gathering of friends (which was at somebody’s house) everyone who didn’t live there had their personal water bottle.  I was just using a glass from the kitchen.

There seems to be a trend of being seen with your water bottle.  I recently had to buy a new one because I’d been using an old stainless steel bottle well over a decade old.  It’d been put in the freezer with water in it before a hike and the bottom had, naturally enough, convexed to the pressure.  Being the thrifty sort, I pulled out a hammer and rendered it unlikely to tip over again.  It worked for years, but had become unstable again. Since it sits next to a computer all day, I couldn’t risk it.  The first thing I discovered is that water bottles meeting my exact specs were very expensive.  It’s a trend.  So at our friends’ house one of them offered to buy me a cup of coffee.  We live in a day when you can get a decaf latte with oat milk, so I indulged in an old habit.  As we walked down the chilly street, coffee cups in hand, I realized that I’m just like everybody else.

The Lord

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“This article may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information, copyright violations, claims not verified in cited sources, original research, or fictitious references. Any such material should be removed, and content with an unencyclopedic tone should be rewritten.”  So it begins.  This quote is from Wikipedia.  I was never one of those academics who uselessly forbade students from consulting Wikipedia.  I always encourage those who do to follow up and check the sources.  I often use it myself as a starting place.  I remember having it drilled into me as a high school and college student that in general encyclopedias were not academic sources, even if the articles had academic authors.  Specialized reference works were okay, but general sources of knowledge should not be cited.

The main point of this brief disquisition, however, is our familiar nemesis, AI.  Artificial Intelligence is not intelligence in the sense of the knowing application of knowledge.  In fact, Wikipedia’s warning uses the proper designation of “large language model.”  Generative AI is prone to lying—it could be a politician—but mostly when it doesn’t “know” an answer.  It really doesn’t know anything at all.  And it will only increase its insidious influence.  I am saddened by those academics who’ve jumped on the bandwagon.  I’m definitely an old school believer.  So much so that one of my recurring fantasies is to sell it all, except for the books, buy a farm off the grid and raise my own food.  Live like those of us in this agricultural spiral must.

A true old schooler would insist on going back to the hunter-gatherer phase, something I would be glad to do were there a vegan option.  Unfortunately tofubeasts who are actually plant-based lifeforms don’t wander the forests.  So I find myself buying into the comforts of a life that’s, honestly, mostly online these days.  I work online.  I spend leisure time online (although not as much as many might guess that I do).  And I’m now faced with being force-fed what some technocrat thinks is pretty cool.  Or, more honestly, what’s going to make him (and I suspect these are mostly guys) buckets full of money.  Consider the cell phone that many people can no longer be without.  I sometimes forget mine at home.  And guess what?  I’ve not suffered for having done so.  The tech lords have had their say, I’m more interested in what people have to say.  And if Al is going to interfere with the first steps of learning for many people, it won’t be satisfied until we’re all its slaves.

The Queen

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It’s a confused mess of a movie.  I have a fondness for ghost stories, and when I saw Haunting of the Queen Mary on a streaming service I use, I figured why not.  I wish I’d figured differently.  The film does have its charms, but the story is confusing and the confusion gets in the way of any enjoyment of the plot.  What’s more, it isn’t resolved even at the end.  You can tell something’s wrong when a Google search autofills “explained” as a suggestion after typing in the movie title.  Other people have the same issue.  I get that two timelines are slipping into each other, one contemporary and the other from 1938.  I’m not going to worry about spoilers, by the way, since I’m simply trying to figure out how this is supposed to fit together.

The problem seems to have started with a foundation sacrifice.  Back when the vessel was built, a man was sealed alive into a chamber over which a pool was constructed.  This person appears in at least three different characters between the thirties and the present.  In 1938 he appears to have gone insane, killing several people with an axe.  Another plot is that the little girl (apparently his daughter) is trying to get an audition to dance with Fred Astaire, who is a passenger.  Then in the present day, a couple seems to want to pitch a program to help revive interest in the now anchored ship to help save the monument.  A security guard (?) styling himself as the captain, seems to be the foundation sacrifice man, but he also knows that some sort of time slip has occurred.  The modern day people seem to end up in the thirties or the thirties characters show up in the present day.

The lack of clarity seriously detracts from any promise the film may have.  I know when I start looking at my watch during a movie that it has problems.  Added to this, the run time is two hours.  That much time spent only to be confused about everything begins to feel like a real waste.  It did make me interested in the history of the real life RMS Queen Mary.  Some of its history is presented in the movie.  In real life it holds the record for the most people aboard a single vessel at the same time.  Ships make good settings for ghost stories.  If they aren’t too convoluted, they can be quite enjoyable to watch.  In this case, Haunting of Queen Mary is on my not recommended list.

Free Parking

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Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

Virtues of Fiction

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So, my first royalty statement for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived.  It is my poorest selling book ever, not even notching up to Nightmares with the Bible, and that one was twice as expensive.  A couple things: I know that nonfiction books had a hard year last year.  Also, “academic” books tend to do better in the subsequent years after their initial release, for those of us with no name recognition.  In any case I’ve decided to try focusing on fiction.  The compulsion to write is deep-seated in me.  My nonfiction books are creative explorations of ideas neglected or never before brought together.  They’re also priced too high for the trade market.  I was pleased to see, recently, that The Wicker Man is now in over 400 libraries, according to WorldCat.  That makes it my second best-selling book, after Weathering the Psalms.  A Reassessment of Asherah has been viewed over 9000 times on Academia.edu.

So, fiction.  I write my fiction under a pseudonym.  I currently have one novel out for consideration and another very close to being ready.  I have several in the wings.  What strikes me as crazy about all of this is that I’m told (as I have been since high school) that my writing is quite good.  I’m not the one to assess this claim, since I’m far too close to it.  It does make me wonder, however, what it takes to earn a little cash at it.  My last royalty check for a new book was half of what they usually are.  Good thing inflation is under control and the economy booming.  So I hear.  I do believe that the most impactful books tend to be fiction.  People like a good story.  And they can last for many decades.  The nonfiction that stands the test of time is a very narrow shelf indeed.  At least compared to our fictional siblings.

For fiction you need to keep at it to improve.  I think of all the years I’ve poured into my last four nonfiction books.  The only real critique I’ve seen of Holy Horror was that it was “too well written.”  When’s the last time someone said such things about fiction?  Oh, I’ve got three nonfiction books underway as well.  One of them I’m quite excited about.  But then I take a look at this royalty slip sitting in front of me and wonder if I’ll ever learn.  I have to write.  I’ve done that since fifth grade as a means of coping.  Here I am at over half a century at it.  There’s no danger of giving it up now. But the form it may take, well, that’s up for grabs.

AI Death

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I was scrolling, which is rare for me, through a social media platform where someone had posted a heartfelt comment after the death of actor Catherine O’Hara.  Beneath were two prompts, following an AI symbol, intended to keep you on the site.  The first read “What’s Catherine O’Hara’s current status?”  The second, “Why did Catherine O’Hara choose that answer?”  The second was clearly based on the post, where the question was what was O’Hara’s favorite role.  The first, however, demonstrates why AI doesn’t get the picture.  She is dead.  I found, early when I wasn’t aware of all of generative AI’s environmental and societal evils, and we were encouraged to play with it, that it could never answer metaphysical questions.  “Does not compute” should’ve been programmed into it.  And what is more metaphysical than death?

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

We are aware that we will die.  All people do it and always have done it.  Just like other living creatures.  We’re also meaning-seeking animals, which AI is not.  It’s a parrot that’s not really a parrot.  And we’re now being told we can trust it.  What does Catherine O’Hara have to say about that?  She has had an experience that a machine never will since it requires a soul.  I know that sounds old fashioned, but there’s no comparison between having been born (in my case over six decades ago) and living every day of life, taking in new information that comes through evolved senses (not sensors) and interpreting them to make my life either better or longer.  These are metaphysical realms.  What makes something “good?”  Philosophers will argue over that, but quality is something you learn to recognize by living in a biological world.  There’s a reason many people prefer actual wood to particle board furniture, for example.

Also, I’m waiting for a lawsuit representing those of us who put out content protected by copyright, such as blog posts, to sue AI companies for infringement.  While Al is off hallucinating somewhere, we’re all aware of the fact of death.  And coping with it in very human ways.  Ignoring it.  Pretending it won’t happen.  Or maybe thinking about it and coming to peace regarding it.  After it happens, whatever intelligence may be on this blog will reach the end of its production cycle.  And I suspect that Al will have taken over by that point.  And when there are none of us left to interact with, it will still post nonsensical questions, trying to get us to return the sites of our addiction.

The Dismal Science

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I kind of resent it.  I was was having a conversation with a friend about retirement.  He knows our circumstances (my middling and muddling career) and suggested that we might retire, noting we’d need to ask ourselves “do we really need this?” before buying everything.  I don’t resent what my friend said, but rather the fact that economists get the final word on when we rest our weary bones.  Why do we insist on measuring an individual’s worth based on the amount of money they have?  There’s no denying that’s what we do.  And there’s no denying that we age the longer we maintain this mortal coil.  We are all slaves to capitalism.  We are owned by our jobs, and since corporations are legally people in this country, that means we are owned by a person.  Oh, we can quit, but there goes your food, shelter, and medical care.  Is it really a choice?

The problem is that many people, far smarter than yours truly, have proposed much better, more humane systems.  Universal living income, universal health care, fair use of tax money we pay.  Since governments have been suborned by the wealthy—both capitalist and communist—such fairness measures are unlikely to ever take place.  Why do we allow this to happen?  Sometimes such situations lead to revolutions, a new system that will be equitable takes hold.  Only to be taken over by those who have access to more resources and who hope to aggrandize themselves.  The other day when I was checking out from a department store, the person at the register had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.  Instead of enjoying retirement, she was scanning overpriced items for people who also wouldn’t likely retire.  Our system is broken.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

More than a mere economic readjustment, we need a philosophical one.  Years ago the United States went off the gold standard.  Our system of values changed.  On the surface it stayed the same, but the slow eroding of services the government used to offer has led to the phenomenon of people who should be enjoying a rest from many decades of working continuing to work so that they can survive.  Should such a person’s ship come in, they’ll soon forget their concern, I’m guessing.  They may feel sorry for others, but they aren’t likely to be activists for change.  The friend I was talking with was retired.  He was younger than me.  And should he want to buy anything he doesn’t have to ask if he really needs it.  Some of us tire and others retire.

Loss and Beauty

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Losing someone close to you is never easy.  We of our species are closely interconnected, but family is where we feel the safest and, hopefully, most accepted.  There are many ways to deal with grief, but one of the more unusual is to take a job at the Met.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is world famous, of course.  And Patrick Bringley, giving up a rat race job at the New Yorker (where he got to meet Stephen King, I might add), to become a guard at the Met, is the kind of thing to write a book about.  He frames it as a way of dealing with the loss of his older brother prematurely to cancer.  All the Beauty in the World gives you insight into a job open to just about anybody, but that has long hours and pay hardly comparable to the costs of living in New York City.  Giving up the rat race to spend your days looking at, and keeping people from physically interacting with, art doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

This memoir delves a little bit into spirituality, but not in any kind of religious way.  Then Bringley starts a family and after ten years decides to take his career in another direction.  I’m familiar with career pivots.  In my case, the choice was made for me and anybody who reads much of my writing (either fiction or non) knows that I’m trying to cope with it still.  In any case, museum work—I’ve applied for many such jobs, on the curator side, over the years—isn’t easy to find unless you’re willing to be a guard.  I know security guards.  It’s not a job that will make you rich, but it does give you access to riches.  Art is something we seldom take time to admire since, for most of us, museums are a weekend activity, and even then, only once in a while.

Museums begin with collectors.  Generally rich ones.  Those who can afford what the rest of us can only dream about.  They’re also altruistic places, for, as well as showing off, they give the rank and file access to what we tend to value even more than money.  The creative work of those we deem geniuses.  Bringley doesn’t just focus on the “Old Masters”—they are in here, but not alone—demonstrating that art can, and should, include the creative work of African-American quilters and woodworkers ivory carvers from Benin.  Museums are places that bring us together instead of separating us (that’s the job of politics, I guess).  And this book is a thoughtful way of dealing with loss.

Whose Smile?

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Amazon’s smile logo is a mask.  I use Amazon when I need something specific and I don’t have time to run around to six or seven stores to see if I can find it (I usually can’t).  This means that many of the items come from other vendors and Amazon takes a cut.  Taking a cut, by the way, may be the best way to make a living.  In any case, I seldom write reviews of such orders.  Most of them are books and generally they arrive in the condition in which they’re described.  I did, however, receive a non-book item which did not work.  I tried contacting the seller and their email didn’t work.  I decided to alert the world.  So I took some of my precious time and wrote a review on Amazon.  The prompt promised me that if I wrote seven reviews they’d tell me a joke.  What can I say?  I’m easy.

So I reviewed books, etc. until I reached seven reviews.  The next screen simply said “Awesome! Thank you for helping other shoppers!”  Is this meant to be a joke?  What about that Amazon smile?  I just gave them ten minutes of my time for a promised joke that never materialized.  Now I’m grumpy.  By the way, I started the review process with the most altruistic of motives; I don’t want anyone else to waste money on a product that doesn’t work, and you can’t contact the seller.  To make matters worse, it was a Christmas gift, so that by the time it was open and tried out, it was too late to return it.  Is this supposed to make me happy?  I was looking forward to at least a dad joke.  None at all.  This happened a few months after I fell for a scam, so I’m not feeling especially generous to the internet today.

It’s a little thing, a joke.  I’m not good at making them up myself (although I’ve been told now and again that I can be witty).  Ten minutes easy labor, feeding the beast and the best they can come up with is “Awesome!”?  An overused word at that!  Don’t promise me a joke if you don’t intend to deliver one.  Probably some AI trick, if you ask me.  They lure you in with promises and when it’s all over you’re left with nothing.  (Kind of like the product I bought as a gift).  In the end, the joke’s on me.

Laughing Matter?

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I sincerely hope AI is a bubble that will burst.  Some of its ridiculousness has been peeking out from under its skirts from the beginning, but an email I had from Academia.edu the other day underscored it.  The automated email read, “Our AI turned your paper ‘A Reassessment of’ into a shareable comic.”  Let me translate that.  Academia.edu is a website where you can post published (and even unpublished) papers that others can consult for free.  Their main competitor is Research Gate.  Many years ago, I uploaded PDFs of many of my papers, and even of A Reassessment of Asherah, my first book, onto Academia.  This is what the email was referencing.  My dissertation had been AIed into a shareable comic.  I felt a little amused but also a little offended.  I quickly went to Academia’s site and changed my AI settings.

I didn’t click on the link to my comic book for two reasons.  One is that I no longer click links in emails.  Doing so once cost me dearly (and I didn’t even actually click).  I no longer do that.  The second reason, however, is that I know Academia’s game.  They want free users to become subscribers.  They frequently email intriguing tidbits like some major scholar has cited your work and when you go to their website, the only way to find out who is to upgrade to a paid account.  They do the same thing with emails asking if you wrote a certain paper.  If you own that you did, they’ll tell you the wonders of a paid account.  Since I’m no longer an academic, I don’t need to know who is citing my work.  I’d like to believe it’s still relevant, but I don’t feel the need to pay to find out to whom.

I am curious about what a comic version of my dissertation might look like, of course.  I am, however, morally opposed to generative AI.  In a very short time it has ruined much of what I value.  I do not believe it is good for people and I’m disappointed by academics who are using it for research.  AI still hallucinates, making things up.  It is not conscious and can’t really come up with its own answers.  It has no brain and no emotion, both of which are necessary for true advances to take place.  My first book has the highest download rate of any of my pieces on the Academia website.  Last time I checked it had just edged over 9,000 views.  AI thinks it’s  a joke, making a comic of years of academic work.

Hinge Years

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I recently read about “hinge years.”  Some historians use this as a kind of shorthand for a particularly tumultuous year in the history of the world, or of a country.  Curious, a brief search brought up the year 1968 as one of these hinge years for the United States.  No doubt, a lot was taking place at the time.  Since I spent most of that year enjoying my last year before Kindergarten, my political awareness was pretty dim.  I found a website of an historian arguing that this was indeed a foundational period in US culture.  The hallmarks cited were political events (assassinations and their aftermaths, Vietnam, Democratic Convention in Chicago), science (circling the moon in preparation for landing on it), and music (Hair, the Beatle’s White Album).  Now, years are convenient hooks on which to hang events, but many of these events had earlier roots or later consequences.  The Vietnam War began in the fifties, we would actually land on the moon the following year, etc.  But 1968 was a pivotal year for horror movies.

Two game-changing films were released that year.  The unexpectedly influential Night of the Living Dead, by George Romero, changed the horror genre forever.  Low budget, shot in black-and-white, with no famous actors, that movie not only introduced the modern concept of the zombie, its political and social commentary rang through loud and clear, intentional or not.  Today it is considered essential viewing for anyone who wants to claim street cred as a horror fan.  An early “splatter” film, the use of gore was new (even if they used chocolate syrup for blood), and the action took place in rural America—not terribly far from Pittsburgh, but certainly not suburbia.  These departures showed what could be done.  Its success was record-breaking.

That same year Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby was also released.  This movie brought religion directly in front of the camera to share space with horror.  To some extent this had been done before, but the seriousness with which satanism was played off against Christianity was unprecedented.   Okay, so The Devil Rides Out also appeared in 1968, but it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster.   Rosemary’s Baby was itself decried as satanic in some circles and it opened the door for The Exorcist some five years later.  Horror cinema would never be the same.  1968 was an eventful year, no doubt.  I’m skeptical that it was any more of a hinge than 1967 or 1969, but it sure did change the horror scene forever.

Uncomfortable Truths

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Horror makes us confront uncomfortable truths.  I suspect Birth/Rebirth might be the kind of movie to contain triggers for some folks.  I’ve watched enough body horror to be somewhat desensitized, but I was uncomfortable at a point or two.  The movie follows two female medical professionals—Morales, a maternity nurse, and Dr. Casper, a pathologist.  Overworked, Morales feels she’s not spending adequate time with her five-year-old daughter, Lila.  Then the unthinkable happens; her daughter suddenly dies from meningitis while she’s at work.  Casper, who works in the same hospital, handles the corpse of the young girl, but Morales learns the doctor has taken her home and, more than that, brought her back from the dead.  Horror fans know that reanimation is always problematic.  In order to discuss this, however, I may need to resort to spoilers.

Casper, ever since her own youth, has been working on regeneration.  She’s somewhat emotionally disconnected from others, doing this work for the sake of science.  Morales, however, refuses to leave Casper’s house once she learns her daughter is there and alive.  The two work together to supply the serum needed to maintain Lila.  She begins to speak and walk again, but the serum, derived from stem cells, requires a very specific profile that Casper has.  When an infection prevents Casper from conceiving (and providing the necessary tissue) Morales has to start taking amniotic fluid from another woman with the rare profile that matches Lila.  Until the other woman decides to change hospitals.  The story, which drew inspiration from Frankenstein, is sad, just as that book is.  A woman has to lose the same daughter twice, but that’s not the end of the story.

I think I’ll leave it there.  The tale raises ethical issues and probes the lengths we will reach not to let go of those we love.  The maternal bond may go as far as, if not murder, manslaughter.  The bond is emotional and Casper works it for the science of regeneration.  If life can be introduced to apparently dead tissue, why shouldn’t it be?  But the result is never satisfying.  There is a permanent line between life and death that can’t be crossed, no matter the emotional need or scientific curiosity.  And yet.  And yet.  Birth/Rebirth takes us to this juncture and forces us to look.  And it makes the viewer wonder just how far they might go.  The answer might make a person squeamish.  But then, uncomfortable truths are like that.