Candid Camera

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Early on in the pandemic, various meeting leaders—whether Zoom or Teams—asked participants to put on their cameras.  The point was that, missing seeing other people at the office, the video feed was psychologically reassuring.  I get that.  I began working remotely before the pandemic broke out and I’m still reeling from being ahead of the curve for once in my life.  Does it always feel this giddy?  In any case, we’ve got to the point where many people simply do not put on their cameras, even in small meetings.  Since we are trained for diversity we know that some people simply don’t want us to know how they look on a certain day (or perhaps how cluttered their background is).  And that’s perfectly fine.  It does make me think how artificial work in the office is.

At least you could see this kind.

You put yourself together a certain way to be seen by other people.  In fact, we sometimes even put “dress codes” together for work.  I even had an employer once say dress was “business casual,” only wrinkles were unacceptable.  I don’t iron my clothes, so I guess that particular employer was warning not to let them sit in the clothes basket too long after taking them from the dryer (or clothes line).  In any case, now that we’ve come to realize we may not always look our best, we have an option to leave the camera off.  How many days commuting into the office did we feel this way but were given no choice?  Since leaving academia I’ve never had an office at work.  I was a midlife cubicle denizen.  I never liked the idea. Who looks their best after getting out of bed at 3:00 a.m.?

Being on view isn’t the same as working productively.  The pandemic has also taught us that going into the office is often not necessary at all.  If they supply the tech, which we’d need anyway, we will do our work without Big Brother watching over us all the time.  We’ve become, it seems to me, more humane.  Turning the camera off is a way of perhaps admitting I didn’t sleep well last night.  Or something’s really bothering me and I don’t feel like smiling falsely.  Or any number of other things that might put us in the place of wanting some space.  For once now we have it.  It is my hope that once things start to get “back to normal” that we will have learned some lessons.  We can treat people more like humans want to be treated and still contribute to the bottom line.  It’s amazing how much people will do if they’re treated like human beings rather than cogs in the capitalist machine.

Whose DNA?

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The name Francis Crick will forever be associated with the discovery of the double helix of the DNA molecule.  Indeed, he co-won a Nobel Prize for that particular insight.  Of course I didn’t learn about Crick when I was growing up—we weren’t an educated family.  I first learned about him in college when his book Of Molecules and Men was required reading for one of our religion classes.  This book is highly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular.  We read it not to assent to his logic, but rather to have it picked apart in class.  (Grove City was a conservative Christian college then, but less so than it is today.)  Although it has been over three decades since I’ve read it (I found my copy again when we moved three years ago) the sharp critique has remained.  Crick was a staunch materialist.

Image credit: brian0918, via Wikimedia Commons

Although I appreciated his contribution to science, I really didn’t have too much cause to think about Crick after that.  I’m not a geneticist and there are certainly a lot of people out there who make sharp criticisms against religion.  What brought Crick back to mind was when I recently read that he had later come to the conclusion that human DNA was too complex to have evolved by chance.  The piece I was reading used the unfortunate term “intelligent design” so I had to follow up.  Francis Crick hadn’t become a Fundamentalist, had he?  No, it turns out.  Crick had come to believe in “directed panspermia.”  Panspermia is the concept that life isn’t isolated on earth—it exists in space and was brought to our planet by space dust, or some such means.  The “directed” part was what caught my attention.

For a vocal critic of religion, Crick had come to believe that extraterrestrial intelligences had engineered at least human DNA.  This is of particular consequence because until recently the idea of extraterrestrial intelligent life was a laughing flashpoint among scientists and skeptics.  In fact, it’s still regularly labelled as “paranormal.”  I was surprised to learn that a scientist of Crick’s stature had come to this conclusion while being so utterly critical of religion.  Of course, views can change over a lifetime.  No one is born with all the correct knowledge.  It is interesting that Crick believed human DNA to require some outside intervention to become what it is.  Some religious believers share this outlook, but with quite a different origin source in mind.  It just seems to me that our collegiate discussion of his work seems to have been woefully incomplete.

Buried Truths

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I owe a lot to fossils.  Growing up just a block from a fossil-laden river in western Pennsylvania, as a kid I’d go fossil hunting with my brothers.  They weren’t difficult to find.  Maybe not museum-quality, but not bad considering that they were free for the taking.  I’d pour over some rock with many shells perfectly impressed in it and wonder.  Of course, my childhood religion taught that the earth was quite a young place because that’s what the Bible seemed to indicate.  Other than Chick tracts and related comic books we didn’t have many books around the house to explain this discrepancy.  One thing was pretty clear—the fossils were quite real.  We had no doubt that there had been dinosaurs.  How they fit into the Bible’s chronology (since the Good Book was written long before dinosaurs had been discovered) was unclear.

Mine was not an educated family.  We simply believed what the preacher told us.  Since Fundamentalist preachers don’t attend seminary, their response was probably something along the lines of, “the Bible says…”  Thinking about how to apply the Bible in a complex world was not their strong suit.  So we’d be taught that evolution was evil, but just literally a stone’s throw from the church hundreds of fossils could be found.  I suppose the evidence of those fossils kept me grounded.  I never could buy the “theory” that God created the world with apparent evidence of great age to test our faith.  A deity like that isn’t worthy of the name.

I still pick up fossils when I find them.  Apart from a brain coral and some crinoids, mostly I just find shells.  Knowing that this particular rock is evidence of the sea floor millions of years ago is thrilling.  It puts me in touch with the great antiquity of our planet, the times when people had not yet evolved to complicate everything.  Just a few days ago I found a rock with a vignette of life under the sea.  Looking at it closely there are crinoids among the shells, and what appear to be a drag mark where some unknown creature disturbed the silty Paleozoic sea bottom on its way someplace long before humans showed up.  Fossils always remind me of the responsibility of reading the Bible with an eye toward rationality and a recognition that a guide isn’t the same thing as a taskmaster asking you to believe the ridiculous.  That, I suppose, is why I can’t pass up a fossil on the ground. 

The Persistence of Forgetfulness

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It has happened twice this past week.  Maybe you’ve noticed, but probably I’m presuming too much.  Last Sunday and Thursday past, there were no posts on this blog.  Both days a post was cued up and ready for me to hit the “publish” button, but other things interfered.  To get a sense of this you need to realize that my blog posts are always ready to go by 6:00 a.m.  By that point I’ve been awake for a minimum of two hours and have already lined up my initial thoughts for the day.  I also realize that many other people are not awake yet.  Since my blog posts feed out to Twitter I worry (rightly) that a tweet so early will be dismissed along with other early morning bird calls.  I load up my post and wait.

In an abundance of caution, I begin my job at 6:30.  The reason is clear enough—I was let go from two jobs after being told I was doing great.  I don’t want that to happen again.  I’m one of those people whose best time is the morning.  I’m aware this is unusual, bordering on the freakish.  I have come to a compromise—I push the publish button just before I start work.  When I began working remotely (I was ahead of the curve, for once), I knew we’d need a house with a dedicated office.  That office is upstairs and is reserved for work.  My creative writing is done downstairs.  Since I go upstairs before actually starting work to settle in, I need to remember to click “publish” before I read the first work email of the day.  If I don’t, Thursday happens.  (It very nearly happened again yesterday!)

What about Sunday, did I hear you ask (in my imagination)?  Fair question.  Weekends I try to hold out until after 7:00 (so late!) or later to post.  But on Sunday I’m in charge of the adult education program in my faith tradition.  I schedule and run the Zoom meeting.  Since that program is early, I need to be ready early.  By 6:00 a.m. on Sunday my post was loaded.  Many Sundays, however, are about as busy as a workday although it’s all volunteer work.  I awoke Monday morning and found Sunday’s post still in the dock.  The world has been spared my musings for a day.  Ironically, WordPress had been sending daily streak messages “You’re on a streak!”  My streak struck out on Sunday, and again on Thursday.  Maybe it’s time for a new routine.

It’s like there are two minds at work here.

Fragility

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Who doesn’t like a play?  Since I’ve been reading many lengthy novels this year I like to intersperse them with some shorter pieces of literature.  Many of us are assigned plays in high school English class.  For those of us from non-literary families, these may be the only plays we’ll encounter in our youth.  Shakespeare and Arthur Miller ran the entire gambit for my high school career, but I’ve done some exploring on my own since then.  I’d heard quite a bit about Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie over the years, but I’d never read it.  I found a used copy at a book sale and so my excuse for not reading it was at an end.  Unlike when I read A Streetcar Named Desire, I really had no idea what to expect.  Dysfunction, it seems, spurs creativity.

I suspect the play is well enough known that my musings about its symbolism and impact wouldn’t add much to the discussion.  (Besides, I suspect few English teachers read this blog.)  My particular edition, however, comes with the essay “The Catastrophe of Success,” written by Williams after he found fame.  It reminded me a bit of a speech Ursula K. Le Guin gave late in her career, after receiving an award.  Both writers note that money drives far too much of what we consider creativity.  Williams notes in his essay that success leads to pampering and pampering is good for no one.  His description of staying in a hotel is a familiar one—poorly paid employees treat paying guests as if they were wealthy, cleaning up after them and tidying other people’s messes.

As many critics have noted, Williams grew up in a dysfunctional family and drew heavily on that for his fiction.  Another aspect, perhaps related to that, was the sense of pressure on his writing.  In his essay he mentions that writing grew more difficult when life was easy.  I often think about this myself.  My fiction suffered a bit when the pressure of the daily commute to New York ceased.  I had to catch an early bus and I was determined to get some writing done every day.  That was the origin of what now seems to be my permanent early wakefulness.  That pressure of knowing I had a very limited amount of time before I had to be showered, dressed, and at the bus stop, led to a tremendously creative output.  I see from my limited experience of reading Williams that I still have much to learn from those whose experience has become a lesson.

Out There

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Do you see them?

While recently re-watching an X-Files episode, I noticed something odd.  A quick online search revealed that I wasn’t the only one to notice this particular quirk, and, in fact, there had been considerable previous discussion on it.  What really struck me wasn’t the resolution of my question, but the fact that so much had already been written on a single episode of a single television program.  It’s one of the problems with trying to keep up with pop culture—there’s so much out there (besides just the truth!).  I’ve been exploring pop culture with the Bible for a number of years.  There’s plenty enough in the X-Files to warrant a larger project, but even without that, there’s just no way to keep up.  You could spend your life trying to unpack what several people wove into a single program.  Each episode took considerable thought, planning, and resources.  Once it was out there, reception history began.

So much of scholarship is analyzing what someone else has done.  Some monographs are more footnote than actual text.  What I’ve been suggesting regarding pop culture is that it is the way people understand religion.  The information people receive often comes from what modern authors and screenwriters compose.  A few X-Files later, during a religiously themed episode, something was implied to be in the Bible that’s not.  Again, I address this directly in Holy Horror, but every time I see an example, it catches me by surprise.  The average viewer doesn’t know to research what they’re being told and if it’s played straight, as it was in this episode, it becomes part of the truth that’s out there.

Those interested in how beliefs develop and change over time have recently begun to ask about the average person instead of “official religion.”  In antiquity this is difficult to gage since the average person was illiterate and poor.  Even in modern times with relatively high amounts of literacy and everyone writing on the internet, trying to understand religion is difficult.  Now it’s a matter of too much information.  Fan sites exist for popular media.  The canons of Harry Potter fandom alone would require a lifetime of study.  Limiting oneself to the X-Files might be a start.  My own publication history with pop culture and religion began with Sleepy Hollow.  It could have just as easily begun with the X-Files.  No matter where you choose to begin understanding religion, you’ve got your work cut out for you. And this post has just added to it.

The Slippery Slope

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Maybe you store your data on an external drive.  Tech companies want you to put everything on the cloud, but I like to know where my data are.  The problem is devices are now slick.  I use a MacBook Air.  I do this because it was the only Mac I could afford at the time and it came with limited storage space.  The solution is to buy an external drive, just like the old days.  My external terabyte drive is a WD Elements drive.  The problem is both of these devices are so sleek they’re slippery.  Since my Mac’s not young any more each morning I connect my Elements drive to let it back up my data.  It takes a while and when I need to move and put the laptop down, the external drive slips across the laptop.  Then one time it fell.

The fall wasn’t far, maybe two inches.  It was enough, however, to lose hundred and hundreds of hours of work.  The disk failed.  Two slippery surfaces that looked so sleek led to the loss of so many hours of work that I want to weep.  There’s no way to get the disk recognized again.  Even the manufacturer seems to indicate that one such temporary slip is fatal to data.  Or at least to disk drives.  I think of all the futuristic shows I’ve watched where nothing has a square edge.  Everything is rounded and smooth.  I bet they store their data in a cloud, or maybe they call it a galaxy.  One thing’s for sure, they don’t try to stick a slippery disk drive on top of a slippery computer.  Otherwise this future would never happen.

Slippery slope?.

The problem here is when my computer began to complain of feeling too full, I transferred much of my data to this now failed drive.  That was the only place it existed since I can’t afford multiple drives.  Now I’m guessing I’ll need to pay a data recovery firm to recover all those files that represent most of my non-work life for the better part of nearly two decades.  Is it square to admit missing angular surfaces that could be stacked with impunity?  Think of that classic design known as a “book.”  Great data storage.  Fairly easy data retrieval.  If one falls off the stack, it doesn’t break.  So at work they wonder why editors don’t get behind ebooks.  I’m happier with my information right where I know I put it.  With right angles, and boxy looks, and data precisely where I left them.

Feeling Bookish

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It does my soul good to attend a used book sale.  I recently attended one while on a visit to Ithaca.  Everyone was wearing a mask.  Even though it was May, it was quite cold and rainy, and due to the limited number of people permitted in the space, there was a line that took about half an hour to endure.  This did not deter people and it was this that most lifted my spirits—these people were devoted to books.  At times when the media gets me down, informing me that book culture is dying and that all people want are their devices and their distractions, seeing proof of the love of books is restorative.  The used book sale is a place of discovery.

Although it’s easy to nip over to Amazon (or better, Bookshop.org) and order your book, especially during a pandemic, there are things you only find by being where the books are.  I keep an extensive reading list with me.  Before I go into a sale venue I promise myself I’ll stick to my list.  But what a facile promise it turns out to be—how can you make such a vow without knowing what you might find?  Books you’ve never seen or imagined before?  That’s the discovery aspect that sweetens the in-person experience.  And although I still find crowds scary, I tend to trust people who like books.  Besides, the books I tend to read aren’t always in the most popular sections.

The Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library book sale has a dedicated building with permanent shelving.  While wandering is fine, maps are also available.  I’m occasionally ribbed for having too many books.  One of the reasons I dread any move is knowing the movers’ inevitable comments about the fact.  People who love books are made to feel somehow inferior for it.  Fans of Kindle or other such readers extol the virtues of having lots of books that take up no space.  Such books, however, are limited to those converted to electronic form.  The many thousands of books published before the invention of the ebook, many of them out of print and mostly forgotten, can only be found in libraries, used bookstores, and sales like this.  (Google books hasn’t found everything yet.)  It was cold and rainy outside.  In here there were silent companions that speak loudly.  Books, as my daughter said, are like snacks for the mind.  And sometimes you just don’t know what you’re in the mood for until you go to the kitchen and browse.  It can warm your soul.

You Have the Right to Remain

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It’s strange sitting in a meeting where you’ve written a book on the topic under discussion and nobody knows about it.  This is one of the problems of publishing with an academic press.  Books get lost and buried.  Maybe the other way around.  A problem we academic editors frequently run into is that authors tend to think a book is a book.  Publishers recognize several different kinds of books, well represented among them those that are destined for the “library market.”  You can tell them by the way they’re priced.  Now I must confess that I’m behind the times in this regard.  I still tend to think twenty dollars is a lot to pay for a book.  I say this even though my job, day after day, includes pouring over book budgets to see how an academic book can be made not to lose money.

It costs a lot of money—most of it overhead—to produce a book.  In order not to run a publisher bankrupt, it needs to sell enough copies to cover its costs.  Library market books are priced that way because they are expected to sell only to libraries.  Certainly, if they were priced lower some academics would buy them, but the truth is not many academics do.  I realize I was an outlier when I was in the academy.  Without a research budget I would spend my own money on a book priced a hundred dollars if I really needed it for my research.  I was aware, even at that time, that others seldom did this.  As an academic colleague once told me, “I like to buy shoes.”  And let’s face it, there are just too many books out there to buy.  “Publish or perish” has more than one meaning.

So I’m sitting in a meeting where the topic of discussion is something on which I’ve written a book.  My opinion is not asked—my book is priced for the library market and I know it—so I don’t really expect it to be.  The question is whether general readers will find the subject compelling.  Speaking strictly for me I’m pretty sure they will.  I signed my contract for Nightmares with the Bible before I knew the series would be priced for the library market.  That designation also indicates minimal marketing.  What publisher is going to try to push a book that costs that much when they know individuals can’t afford it?  So I sit in the meeting and keep my mouth shut.

Looking In

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There’s a real danger to the lifelong study of religion.  Learning to look at any tradition from the point of view of an observer will create a sense of being on the outside looking in.  I’m a member of a religious organization.  I occasionally consider pursuing ordination within it—this was my original sense of my calling in life—but I’m compelled to consider the phenomenon of being outside looking in.  When I was an Episcopalian (before the church showed its true colors in my particular case), I wrote a letter to my rector asking how I could get off of the church steps and be invited inside.  My rector wrote back with some insipid advice and was among those who voted, as a trustee, to oust me from my fourteen-year career at Nashotah House.  Outside again.

Studying the history of religions provides dangerous levels of insight.  Simple, mindless acceptance of teachings becomes impossible.  This isn’t arrogance, as any who know me can attest, but rather a form of hyper-awareness.  You can’t emerge from forty-plus years of reading about, and deeply pondering, religion unscathed.  Many, of course, dismiss any observations by those lacking the denominational seal of approval.  “If you knew what you were talking about,” so the reasoning goes, “you’d be a minister or a professor.”  So you speak from the sidelines at best.  Outside.  Even within my own group I have merely the role of “member,” lacking the official piece of paper from the seminary or other accrediting body that states I might know some things.

Of course, I have much yet to learn.  This religion thing is a tough nut to crack.  Were I younger and better paid I might consider undergoing college again to take a different path.  As it is, I’ve invested more than a half-century trying to get where I am, wherever that is.  I sit outside watching the birds.  They’re back pretty much in full force now.  They seem so certain about where they’re going.  How can you fly without a full level of commitment?  Earthbound, I muddle about with my head somewhere above the clouds I cannot reach.  I read about religious traditions unknown to me.  Often I find nuggets of great value in them.  Of course, I’m not clergy so you need not take my word for it.  I, after all, draw inspiration simply by sitting outside, always outside, and watching the birds. 

Our Stories

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People’s stories are interesting.  The received wisdom is that if you wish to change a politician’s mind, tell her or him a story.  In fact, it seems that we’re hardwired to enjoy stories.  That’s why it’s so unfortunate that we seldom take the time to listen to other people’s stories.  We’re too busy.  For an organization to which I belong, I recently asked that five minutes of each agenda be set aside so that one member could tell her or his story at each meeting.  That way it’s possible to get to know who it is you’re working with, without the tired “one thing nobody knows about you” trope.  The idea was adopted and it seems a worthwhile use of agenda time.  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone’s account and found myself anything less than fascinated.

When we reflect back over our lives, we do it in narrative format.  We tell ourselves a story about our life.  And these stories intersect with other people’s stories.  Some of those people may be famous or wealthy or ordinary, but each is unique.  Considering that there are billions of us on this planet, that’s a lot of tales.  There’s not so much a lesson to be learned from this than there is a simple reminder—it is worthwhile to listen to others.  I’ve run into a few people who are household names in my time.  Some of them are routinely criticized in the media, by people who never met them.  Who don’t know them.  Who don’t know their stories.

Much of our time at “work” is really time trying to earn money for a company.  It may involve dealing with other people, but not closely enough to really know their story.  I think of this every time an author and I could engage in a conversation about our experience of the academic life only to have to keep the discussion to “the business at hand.”  The human element, it seems, is unimportant.  I would read other people’s stories all day, if I could.  We crave a narrative, but getting one’s not a paying position.  How have we come to this place where we have time for only disconnected memes and not the stories behind them?  Bookstore owners know a perennial selling genre is the biography.  We’ll pay to know a famous person’s story.  The fact is each of our lives is also a tale worth telling.  We would all benefit from listening to each other’s experiences.  Tell your story, I’m listening.

Artificial Priorities

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Maybe it has happened to you.  Or perhaps it only affects ultra-early risers.  I’ll be in the middle of typing a blog post when a notice appears on my computer screen that my laptop will be shutting down in a few seconds for an upgrade.  Now, if you’re caught up in the strengthening chain of thinking that develops while you’re writing, you may take a little while to react to this new information.  If you don’t respond quickly enough, your computer simply quits and it will be several minutes—sometimes an hour or more—before you can pick up where you were interrupted, mid-sentence.  Long ago I decided that automatic updates were something I had to do.  Too many websites couldn’t run things properly with old systems.  It’s just that I wish artificial intelligence were a little more, well, intelligent.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I keep odd hours.  I already know that.  I’ve been trying for years to learn to sleep past the long-distance commuting hour of three a.m.  Some days I’m successful, but most days I’m not.  That means that I write these posts when computer programers assume everyone is asleep.  Doesn’t it notice that I’m typing even as it sends its ominous message?  Is there no way for automatic updates—which send you warnings the day before—can do their work at, say, midnight or one a.m., when I’m never using my computer?  Ah, but the rest of the world prefers to stay up late!  I need the uninterrupted time when few of us are stirring to come up with my creative writing, whether fictional or nonal.  So I have to tell my electronic conscience to be patient.  It can restart at ten p.m. when I’m asleep.

Wouldn’t it be easy enough to set active hours for your personal devices?  After all, they pretty much know where we are all the time.  They know the websites we visit and are able to target product advertising to try to get us to buy.  They data-mine constantly.  How is it that my laptop doesn’t know, after many years of this, that I’m always working at the same time every day?  Is there no way to convince it that yes, some people do not follow everyone else’s schedule?  What about individual service?  You know what brands I like.  You sell my information to the highest bidder.  You remember every website onto which I’ve strayed, sometimes by a poorly aimed click.  I could point out more, but I see that my computer has decided now is the time to resta

Welcome the Stranger

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Welcome, sibling! Have you ever contributed to a genealogy online?  I know not everyone’s into their ancestry, but there’s enough of the treasure-hunt to it, and enough mystery to keep you turning the pages.  Some time ago—it was when I was a professor, because I actually had some leisure time—I posted a bit on WikiTree.  WikiTree is a free communal effort to map the world of relationships.  Just about every week there’s a newsletter emailed around, offering how many degrees of separation you are from someone famous.  Often this is tied into the news cycle, so recently Prince Philip was among those measured.  Then Carrie Fisher.  Without fail, over the past several weeks, the family member through whom I’m connected to the famous is a great uncle.  The same great uncle.

I usually lose interest when the relationship starts to get to siblings and spouses.  There are webs everywhere.  Still, this intrigued me.  I’d never knowingly heard of this great uncle (and certainly never met him) but he was under 20 degrees of separation from several famous people.  It made me consider how you never can tell what relationships might lead to connections.  My direct ancestors, as far as I know, were all humble, work-a-day sorts.  One branch of the family had an engineer a couple generations removed, but for the most part they were farmers, laborers, truck drivers, and such.  The web of human relationships includes everyone, of course.  At some point in our family trees, we share a common ancestor, be they Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon (or a blending of the two).  When we harm or hate another person we’re harming or hurting a sibling, distant or close.

Getting along with everyone may be too much for which to hope, but at least tolerating seems worth stretching for.  I once found a long-lost cousin.  This was accompanied by a wonderful feeling of having found a family I didn’t even know.  Genealogy made that particular reunion possible.  Before that I might have passed this cousin as a stranger on the street.  It made me stop and think.  Is that stranger actually someone related?  Traveling back to the areas my ancestors lived I occasionally glimpse a face that could be a distant uncle or aunt.  My mental calculus kicks in, but there’s really no way to know just how close they might be.  Now, if I were my unknown great uncle chances might be somewhat better that I’m only a degree or two removed.  Even so, I should try to treat the stranger as though that were the case.

We’re all interconnected.

He’s Dead, Jim

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So there’s this thing called Spotify.  Like most modern contraptions, I approach it warily.  I’m not sure how it works.  Do the artists get paid?  What’s the catch?  Is it only having to listen to a commercial for Amazon every three or four songs, like the radio?  I don’t have a lot of time to listen to music, but when I do have time I like to discover something new.  Then there’s the oldies.  And I can’t help but feel a deep sense of loss at the death of Jim Steinman.  I discovered Steinman earlier than I realized it when “Total Eclipse of the Heart” came out the year my first romantic relationship ended.  That song can still reduce me to a quivering lump of emotion.  All I knew at the time was that it was a Bonnie Tyler song.

Growing up fundamentalist, even album titles like Bat out of Hell, Meatloaf’s Steinman breakthrough, were enough to scare said toponym right out of me.  I never knowingly listened to any of the songs on that album until after earning my doctorate.  When I did I was hooked.  My research skills had grown by that time to include finding out who the writer of a song was.  I discovered that “Wagnerian rock” really spoke to me.  And the only guy who seemed to know how to write it was Jim Steinman.  Most kids, I suppose, settle into their music tastes much younger, but in my thirties and forties I found Steinman a most compelling artist.  I listened to his older stuff, and his newer stuff.  I found out some surprising things, such as that even Air Supply’s “Making Love out of Nothing at All” was a Steinman song.

I seem to be hopeless at playing musical instruments.  I’ve studied piano and taken guitar lessons, leaving bewildered teachers in my wake.  My wife tried to teach me the recorder.  Despite my failure as a player, music means a lot to me.  I don’t listen to it unless I can pay attention to it.  For me it’s not background noise.  When I learned to identify operatic rock, I soon came to realize that it was the work of a singular genius who was covered by a wide variety of artists.  No one else, it seems, could capture the feeling of being young like Steinman could.  Now he’s gone.  In my noodling around with this thing called Spotify, I wonder if I can discover any more of his songs.  Meanwhile, I’m thankful that I found him when I did.

Learned Ghosts

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For one memorable year of what I call a career, I taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.  One in a series of near misses, this came close to becoming a full-time job.  Apart from a couple of rather humorless colleagues, the department was welcoming and an enjoyable place to be.  I even got to know the dean, now elsewhere, and planned on working on a project with him.  It was a memorable year in many respects.  One was its inherent strangeness.  I was living away from home while teaching there, and saw some odd things on my drives through the Wisconsin countryside.  It also happened to be at Oshkosh that I first discovered H. P. Lovecraft, so the weirdness was, in a word, enhanced.

Students like to tell ghost stories.  A recent article by Jocelyne LeBlanc on Mysterious Universe caught my eye because it tells of students in Oshkosh that live in a haunted dorm.  These kinds of stories are ubiquitous and Oshkosh is in no way singular here.  Students, whose brains haven’t yet ossified, are often open to new experiences.  Most of them, however, don’t possess the research skills to get behind the origins of some such tales.  Sometimes there’s an explanation.  Other times there’s not.  At Grove City College, when I was there, students told of a haunted playing field.  It was the site, it was said, of a former gymnasium.  What made it haunted was the death of a basketball player who’d smashed through a glass gymnasium door during a game and bled out before help could arrive.  It sounds improbable and I never had time to research it.

We all, I suspect, have a longing for the supernatural.  We want to believe that there’s more to this world than physics and earning money.  And strange things do happen.  I never saw any ghosts in Oshkosh, but the things I did see helped to make up for that particular lack.  Edinburgh, where I studied for my doctorate, is widely rumored to be among the most haunted cities in the world.  Although I saw no ghosts there, people flock to the ghost tours.  In fact, one stopped right below our first apartment’s window every night during the tourist season.  By the time we moved out we had every word memorized.  The haunted dorm story is a revered tradition.  Thinking about it makes me wish I could afford to be a student again.