Christmas Silence

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Christmas seems to have come too fast and not fast enough this year.  Like Halloween, it’s one of those long anticipation holidays.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the silence about it.  Not in a Grinch-like way, I hope.  More along the lines of “Silent Night.”  We spend so much of the year—so much of our lives—hustling about, barely having time to think.  Speaking personally, it takes about a week off work just to begin to get to that phase.  I need time to let the daily onslaught of work and capitalism and angst tune down.  There’s a quietness about Christmas that’s profound.  I suppose that’s why I like to spend it with my small family and not feeling obligated to go anywhere.  It’s like those precious moments before sunrise that I experience daily, only all day long.  That’s truly a gift.

The newspapers and internet sites have been summarizing the year for the last couple of weeks.  That always seems premature to me.  I understand why they do it, but Christmas and the days following are some of the very best of the year, and it makes sense to include those along with the stress, darkness, and ugliness that are the daily headlines.  I can’t help but think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.”  Especially this year.  Christmas is for everyone, and the insistence that we make it exclusive (putting Christ back into it) makes it divisive.  Why some people have to be right all the time I don’t know.  I prefer Hamilton Wright Mabie’s take: “Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”  Simon and Garfunkel are both Jewish and I think they understood “Silent Night” better than many Christians did back in 1966.

I’ve been writing quite a lot about horror movies this year.  The months and days leading up to Christmas have often been difficult ones.  Such movies are therapy.  They can even fit into the beautiful silence of this day.  That’s my hope, anyway.  May this day include enough silence for you.  The rest of the year has no difficulty filling itself with trouble.  We need holidays.  Christmas has always struck me as the most peaceful of them all.  Ministers, and even those of us who never made the cut, tend to be holiday experts.  Those who don’t get caught up in the dogmatism of it all are the most blessed.  Christmas is for everyone.  And may it be peaceful this year.

Morning Reflections

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Morning thoughts are different from evening thoughts.  As we spin recklessly through the blackness of space on this globe, we really have no idea how consciousness works.  We assume, unless some “pathology” is present, that personalities are stable.  But we also think differently at differing times of the day.  I’ve long observed this as the work day progresses.  Anxiety tends to ratchet up during the afternoon, sometimes getting a head start in the morning.  Of course, all of it will depend on whether I slept well and have rebooted properly.  So the person you encounter when you see me will depend on when it is you come calling.  Many people prefer to know someone is coming.  Not only does it give you time to groom for the role you’re going to play, but it also allows you to prepare mentally.

I don’t see many people in the course of a day.  My job is such that I do not regularly have lots of meetings—sometimes going days without any.  During those times the only person I regularly see is my wife.  She’s more aware than most that my morning thoughts are different than my latter-day thoughts.  Those who think of me as a pessimist mostly know the me that’s been awake for several hours.  The morning me is generally optimistic.  And productive.  That cycle for me may begin a few hours before others awake, but it’s characterized by, in a word, inspiration.  The whetstone of a day grinds you down without always making you any sharper.  The problems of work are generally other people’s problems, but without the benefit of seeing them.  And I wonder, at what stage of morning to evening thinking are they?  That changes things.

Thinking is something that is constant.  It doesn’t slow down much, until the afternoon drowsies (with all that that implies—think carefully), but when it picks up again it’s quite different than morning thinking.  I tend to do my writing in the morning.  The freshness is important.  I realize others are on different timetables and at different points in their thinking day.  I wonder how much this has been studied by experts.  Me, I’m an amateur thinker.  I have some formal training in philosophy, but not as much as the professionals do.  I’m more of an experiencer.  An experiencer trying to make sense of life—or to assign it some meaning to help me get through the changes the day inevitably imposes on my thought process.  There’s a reason we appreciate sunrises on this wildly spinning planet, and it has something to do with the way we think in the morning.

Bears Repeating

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I read Robert C. Wilson’s Crooked Tree before I began this blog, I guess.  I remembered it being better than it seemed this time around, but it works as a horror novel.  In fact, the first third or so was quite unnerving, although I’d read it before.  After that the plot tends to require greater suspension of belief.  But then again, American Indian horror has come a long way since then.  Wilson, according to the limited information about him online, isn’t an Indian.  These days publishers are very concerned with appropriation—something that wasn’t an issue back in 1980.  And these days the work of Stephen Graham Jones, who is both a Blackfoot and an excellent horror writer, raises the bar considerably.  But Wilson is honest about the situation in his laying out of the novel.

Axel Michelson is a lawyer and he’s working to preserve the fictional Crooked Tree State Forest and prevent development.  Many of his colleagues and neighbors in Michigan are Indians, and so is his wife.  Axel’s efforts are hampered by a sudden onslaught of black bear attacks.  The description of the first three or four are scary enough to dissuade you from ever going camping again.  Axel’s assistant is an Ottawa and and he and his family suspect a bearwalk is involved.  This is the reason I read the novel the first time.  As a Native American folkloric monster, the bearwalk is difficult to uncover.  There are a couple more novels—one of them hard to find—that feature the tales, and there’s a university press book on folklore that has some accounts.  Not much more is out there that I can locate.

A bearwalk is a kind of shape-shifter.  A spirit that can control bears, in this case.  Axel becomes the white savior who uncovers the ancient ritual to stop the bearwalk, which has taken control of his wife—his main motivation for stopping it—while the Indians can’t figure out what to do about it.  They do tell him about the ritual, but mourning the loss of their culture, they fear it’s gone forever.  Meanwhile the bear attacks continue but once the shock of the first few attacks has worn off, they don’t scare so much.  There’s also a lot of supernatural involved, mostly drawn from native traditions.  It seems clear that, like Axel, Wilson did quite a bit of research on American Indian folklore.  He treats the Ottawa culture with respect and wrote a novel that might’ve had more influence than it seems. It’s well worth the read the first time around.

Movie Ancestors

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I’ve read quite a few Very Short Introductions, but this one struck me as particularly good.  Donna Kornhaber knows how to write for non-specialists, and she knows how to single out what’s interesting in the vast collective known as Silent Film.  As is the series trademark, this book is very brief, but it covers the essentials.  Kornhaber divides the silent film era, roughly 1895 to 1927, into three periods: early cinema, the transitional period, and the classic era.  During each of these, new developments demonstrated the sophistication of the industry and groundwork was laid for cinema as we know it today.  I learned quite a lot from this short treatment—so much that it’s difficult to know how to summarize it here.  Of course, it’s short so you can read it for yourself if you’d like to learn more. 

Perhaps what stood out to me the most was the correction of a misperception that, I hope, is not unique to me alone.  I’ve always thought of silent films as being grainy, poorly exposed, and choppy when showing people’s movements.  Kornhaber explains that most movies were of sound quality in their day, when projected properly.  Early film stock deteriorates, however, and not all stock was properly preserved.  This accounts for the graininess and the sometimes “overexposed” look of such films.  Even modern projectionists don’t use the proper speed and that leads to choppy motion.  In their own day, and with film handled by people who knew their business, early movie goers would have experienced realistic, well-rendered images.   These issues are our issues, not those of the original footage.

Another feature of the book is its focus on diversity in filmmaking.  Early silent film was dominated by France and the United States, but several other nations contributed to what we now think of as standard elements of cinema.  And the fact is that until sound was introduced many women played important roles in the development of what we expect from films.  Women directed.  Became business-savvy.  Ran their own studios.  Once the industry established itself as particularly lucrative, men began to edge women out.  The majority of early films—Kornhaber suggests around 80%—were lost as studios saw no reason to preserve them once “talkies” were the way to make money.  Consequently we’ve lost a good part of that early history.  We pretty much take movies for granted.  We can stream them any time, and we know what to expect (roughly, anyway).  What we don’t often consider is how much we owe to those who established what the movie-going experience should be, and did so before sound was added to the mix.

Running out of Time

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How can you let a solstice slip past without noticing it?  Admittedly, it’s sometimes easy to do in summer, but for the winter solstice it’s more serious.  Ironically for me, the issue is that I’m still a jogger.  When you start your work day early, and you try to jog before work, the shortness of the day works against you.  Even if you prefer the after-work jog, December and January give you that perpetual feeling that you’re running out of time.  Each year around about now I look at charts.  Some organizations helpfully publish sunrise and sunset charts free on the internet.  I trace them to see when there will be enough light to jog in the morning.  Because of the offset between latest sunrise and earliest sunset, the evenings have been getting microscopically longer for a couple weeks now.  Sunrises, however, are still coming later.  They’ll continue to do so until about mid-January.

For those of us who parse out our days into minutes, trying to feed the beast that requires our utter devotion, finding time to jog can be difficult.  It’s dark after work, and besides, I’m exhausted and hungry by then and need to start on supper.  Morning’s an easier thing to control.  With pagan fervor I await the lengthening days.  Particularly the early mornings, which I crave to be earlier again.  So we light a Yule log and pray for the best.  Not that it ever changes sunrise times.  Around here there’ve been a couple of epic December rainstorms and cloudy days push available light back even further.  With the sun technically risen, it can still be dark.  There’s a metaphor here, dear reader.

Winters are for reflection.  Unless we’re busy cramming each day full of seasonal festivities, we spend a lot of time indoors with our thoughts.  That’s one of the reasons I jog.  It clears my head.  It’s the reboot that comes after the reboot of a night’s rest.  I’ve generally been awake for hours before sunrise.  These little thoughts I share with you daily are courtesy of those quiet moments in the dark.  A winter is wasted if we don’t use it for reflection.  Employers should be more generous with their December holidays.  It’s in sync with nature, which is more in keeping with being human than “business,” or “busyness” is.  Today is the winter solstice.  Around sunset we will light some candles of hope.  And we know that even if we can’t really tell, tomorrow will have a bit more light than today.

Which Love

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Perhaps some content creators use genre as a guide when writing, or when filming a movie.  Some categories are pretty well defined—the western, the romance, or in writing specifically, the literary.  Others are less easily settled.  Horror is particularly slippery.  Although The Love Witch was an interesting story with a feminist message, the horror trappings weren’t entirely obvious.  In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of The Wicker Man.  (Not in any literal way, of course.)  Afterward I read that it is also a comedy and that helped make sense of it.  It gets generally high marks although, to me, the acting seemed pretty wooden.  The Love Witch follows Elaine, a young, present-day witch, who’s moving to a small town in California that tolerates witches.  Her husband has recently died and flashbacks imply that Elaine may not have been entirely innocent in the matter.

Once she settles in Arcata, she starts looking for her “prince charming” as she continues to practice the craft.  She finds an emotionally unstable professor who take her home readily enough, but he quickly proves to be too needy.  Part of this is because he took a love potion she gave him.  He dies that very weekend.  Elaine seems less than distraught as she buries him and begins seeking the next possibility.  The husband of a friend comes over when the friend is out of town and he too proves emotionally immature.  After their affair he dies by suicide.  A policeman investigating the missing professor comes to suspect Elaine, but he too feels drawn to her.  The locals, meanwhile, aren’t as witch-friendly as they seem.  They riot in a burlesque club, chanting, “Burn the witch, burn the witch!”  I won’t spoil the ending.

I was watching all of this with the genre “horror” in my mind.  I’d not seen it labeled as “comedy,” and, as an art film there’s nothing so crude as a laughter track or cheesy and obvious comic music.  Instead, the film is an example of “the female gaze.”  Film analysts, and even religion scholars, have long written about “the male gaze,” which looks at women a certain way.  This movie’s writer, director, and producer, Anna Biller, experiments with the female gaze instead.  The results for some men, I suspect, are disturbing.  They certainly aren’t in control in this film.  Retro in execution, it’s unlike most other horror I’ve watched.  Unusual for the genre, the critics responded well to it.  It was a fun flick, but I’m still not sure how wide “horror” stretches, but I do sense that it’s quite inclusive.  And I applaud the female empowerment on display, even if I’m confused.

Modern Gnostics

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It’s not exactly a standard church.  At least I don’t think it is, but I’m just learning.  (That’s my life’s motto—I’m just learning.)  A convoluted path brought me to the Gnostic Catholic Union’s website.  I’m quite curious about this group.  I’m kind of busy, however, and I’ll hope to come back to it later.  You see, Gnosticism and Catholicism don’t sit easily together in my mind.  There’s a standard myth, accepted by many, that Christianity grew in linear fashion from Jesus through today’s weaponized Evangelical.  Or today’s Roman Catholic.  Or today’s—you fill in the blank—denomination.  Those of us who study the history or religions know the story is much more complicated than that.  It’s more like cladistics than theology.

It wasn’t so simple as a baby born in a manger.  Christianities were a variety of thought pools (not quite think tanks) in the first century.  There was a mix of Jewish ideas and messianic fervor.  One of those pools developed into a type of Christianity known as Gnosticism.  Gnosticism also had branches but one of the main ideas was that only initiates know a hidden knowledge necessary to make it work.  We still see this at play in both religious and secular organizations.  You need to know the secret handshake to be on the winning team.  Meanwhile different Christianities grew different ideas.  We rather simplistically think that Constantine unified them at the Council of Nicaea but you can bet that the guys leaving the council room did so with different ideas on the way home.

Roman Catholicism today is a very diverse religion.  You see, religious identity is something you tend to be born into.  Many people never question it because they’ve got other things to do with their lives.  Still, if you look you can see just how different “Catholics” can be.  It’s perhaps ironic because “catholic” means “universal.”  What’s really universal, however, is that people think differently about religion.  It’s the human condition.  There’s no reason a person can’t be both Gnostic and Catholic, just like there’s no reason you can’t be, say, a Unitarian-Universalist and a Hindu.  Religion is perhaps the most misunderstood of human enterprises.  Since most of us are too busy with other things we hire experts to tell us what to believe.  When enough of these experts are close enough in thought a denomination is born.  And it has many, many siblings.  I ran across the Gnostic Catholic Union quite by accident, but even those of us who are religionists by profession have limited time for everything.  I’m just learning.

Sights of Silence

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To an historian who cut his teeth on deep antiquity (if circumstances were different I would’ve ended up a Sumerologist), my current fascination with film feels manageable.  The form of communication we call “movies” really only began around 1895.  For those of us who find 1000 BCE a bit too modern, the nineteenth century seems strangely contemporary.  Simon Popple and Joe Kember offer a service, therefore, by giving us a Short Cuts on Early Cinema.  I’ve never formally studied cinematography, of course.  I have watched movies my entire life—grew up with them—and have learned to write about them (with some degree of intelligence, I hope!).  The history of the industry itself is fascinating.  Short Cuts are written for students, and this one covers the first twenty years of cinema, 1895–1914.  The cutoff coincides with the start of World War One, although not the introduction of sound, but it works nevertheless.

Although I learned a lot from this little book, the writing was sometimes verging on the technical.  Also, and this is a personal pet peeve, many of the paragraphs were too long.  This is an academic epidemic, not applying to this book only.  Look, I know the whole topic sentence and development thing, but paragraphs may be divided in different places, hopefully compelling the reader on.  When I see books intended for “general readers” with a wall of unbroken left margin, I shudder.  Give the eye a break.  This little digression shouldn’t be taken to imply that this book does it a lot, but there are some long paragraphs and they can make you lose your way.  In any case, there’s lots of good info here to balance out the occasional academic framing.

I especially found useful the year-by-year breakdown of major development in the early film industry.  Movies required quite a few breakthroughs, not the least of which was photography itself and also film stock that could be measured in hundreds of feet.  The machines to both film movement and project film.  Although not by 1914, syncing sound.  Color photography.  Movies are technical marvels.  And my approach to anything that is so gripping is to research its history.  In the case of cinema, it’s not a terribly long history.  Although 1895 is getting further away each passing second, it wasn’t even a century before I was born.  For those of us who look backwards, length does make a difference.  A lot was going on behind the scenes as movies went from one-minute side-show attractions to feature length productions where people went to specially designed theaters to view them.  This little book gives a walk through that world and what helped make cinema what it’s become.

Could Have Understood Differently

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A lesson many authors need to learn (and I include myself here) is that titles matter.  Cutesy, clever titles may work for well-known writers, but something that describes your book, or movie, is essential.  And avoid acronyms.  I avoided watching C.H.U.D. for years, put off by the title.  I’d read a few books where it was discussed, but finally decided it was something I should see.  If you’re as put off by acronyms as I am, C.H.U.D. has a double meaning.  Initially Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but more importantly, Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal.  I suppose that’s a bit of a spoiler, but since the movie’s been out since 1984 I’ll let it stand.  Although largely panned, I think C.H.U.D.’s a perfectly serviceable monster movie and despite what the critics say, it has a larger message.

Set in a gritty New York City, the film focuses on the homeless who live underground.  Although it’s not preachy about it, the underlying message is that these are people too.  Until, of course, the contamination hazard mutates some of them into C.H.U.D.  Then they start looking for human victims.  In a city the size of New York, they don’t have much trouble finding them either.  A government cover-up is behind all the mayhem.  Nuclear and other hazardous waste is a very real problem, and none of us really knows what happens to it.  With much of government boiling down to political theater, I’ll take my chances watching movies and wondering.  The good guys in this movie are those who actually care about the homeless.  They are a rather unsympathetic photographer and his wife, a police captain with a missing wife, and a guy who runs a soup kitchen.  They learn something isn’t right beneath the streets but can’t get the authorities to admit it.

This isn’t a great movie—there are gaps in the plot all over the place—but it’s not a horrible movie either.  Sympathetic portrayals of the poor are, in my experience, rare.  These are people who’ve organized themselves into a society that’s come under threat because of those who dwell in the light.  Some classify C.H.U.D. as science fiction,  but that’s a very loose use of the term.  It’s actually a low-budget horror film with a bit of heart.  Unfortunately the title obscures that this is a little gem of a monster movie.  I really had little idea of what it was about when I started streaming, but ninety minutes later I was glad I’d done so.  And I went down to the basement afterwards, you know, just to check.

Author! Author!

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It happened in Salem.  In 1861.  The classic American card game, Authors, was published.  G. M. Whipple and A. A. Smith devised the game, which has remained available ever since then.  It’s one of the few games I remember having as a kid.  We, of course, had the Bible Authors game as well, which I’m kind of nostalgic for, but not enough to see if it’s on eBay.  The object of Authors, an early form of “Go Fish,” is to collect sets of four cards for each author.  Each card lists a different work.  Poets are represented by poems, of course, but prose authors mostly by books.  I have to confess to having eBayed this some time back and having beetlebrowed my family into playing it with me.  I noticed, however, a few curious omissions.

Edgar Allan Poe isn’t among their number.  Neither is Herman Melville.  Rather strangely, they included Shakespeare—centuries earlier than the others—and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  The only female is Louisa May Alcott when there were perfectly acceptable Brontës in the room, as well as Jane Austin.  The game reflects its time.  A couple years back I was in Michaels—you know, the arts and crafts supplies store.  In fact, Michaels is one of those places for family outings, for families like mine.  (We tend to be creative types.)  While I’ve never been into scrapbooking, I walked down that aisle and found a set of stickers labeled “Literature.”  Two authors were represented: Shakespeare and Poe.  People smarter than me have argued that worldwide Poe is probably the best recognized American author.  I think it’s safe to say Shakespeare occupies a similar role in Britain.

Poe had fallen afoul of many in America because of an intentionally damning obituary by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whom Poe had named his literary executor.  If it weren’t for Poe nobody would likely know Griswold’s name today.  In 1861, when Whipple and Smith were inventing their game, Poe wasn’t really considered worthy of emulation, largely because of Griswold.  He wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want your kids to be too curious about as you tried to teach them about literature.  Authors has gone through over 300 editions over the years.  I’ve never seen any of them (apart from Bible Authors) other than the Whitman edition from my childhood.  Each time I pick it up, smell the cards (go ahead—try smelling your Kindle), and thumb through the authors I feel like I’m missing something.  Go fish.

Beyond Reason

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Emotions are tricky.  They’re an essential part of being human, but they don’t function rationally.  At least they don’t do so reliably.  And nobody is emotionally pristine.  People have anger issues (quite a lot of that, I know), insecurities, esteem problems (either too much or too little), abandonment concerns, and the list could go on and on.  The thing about emotions is that they’re difficult to fit with logic.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe that logic is an artificial construct and that emotions are just as important to survival as reason is.  Evolution gave us emotions.  Fight, flight, or freeze still operates in most human beings—I’ve seen all three responses when a threat arises.  Feeling sad when unfortunate events take place is normal and natural.  Dogs and other higher mammals feel it too, as has been amply demonstrated.

It’s easy to let our emotions speak for us, even when doing so causes damage we would never rationally seek to impose.  You push me and I push you back.  Something I realized long ago, and this is just to do with my own situation, is that I can’t easily let go of negative emotions.  I recently learned that a relative I never knew very well had a similar trait.  Such people have invisible scars that they bear their entire lives.  The logical mind says, “Let’s use chemicals to erase them.”  The artistic mind says, “Erase my emotions and you erase me.”  It’s important—vital even—that we don’t question a sincere person’s reasons for their emotional responses.  Most people are just trying to do the best that they can.

Religion is generally based on emotional need.  That’s not to say it’s bad or for “the weak.”  It seems that evolution has deemed it a valuable asset for human beings.  As someone who’s studied religion for many, many years, this aspect has become quite clear to me.  Religion is a coping technique and, in the best of circumstances, it contains some of the truth.  As I used to tell my students, nobody intentionally believes a false religion.  The stakes are far too high.  And we have no rational standards by which to measure which religion is right.  It’s a matter of belief.  Religions have to meet us emotionally where we stand.  During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a shift took place where religions were supposed to be logically, literally true.  This was believed with intense emotion and it led to a situation we still face.  Emotion and rationality must work together, but some ways seem much more productive than others.

What Poe Saw

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It must be quite a draw, making a film based on Edgar Allan Poe.  The psychology of his tales of terror is compelling and modern filmmaking offers endless possibilities.  I wasn’t looking for anything too heavy, so I watched Requiem for the Damned.  Vignette movies are like a box of chocolates (I’m sure you know how the rest of it goes).  This particular feature doesn’t seem to have had a theatrical release, perhaps because it is an independent film made by students and faculty at the Douglas Education Center.  The opening credits cite the Allegheny Image Factory, and when I think of Pittsburgh and horror my mind eventually wanders to George Romero.  The Douglas Education Center began as a business school south of Pittsburgh and it offers training in filmmaking.  And that seems to explain this particular film.

Five vignettes are taken from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”  Only “The Black Cat” is set in Poe’s period and it is heavily CGI.  The rest are modernized versions of ideas inspired by Poe rather than following his plots.  “Usher” uses Poe’s characters and an introduced illegitimate son, to present the Usher curse—the unfeeling business practices that brought the Ushers wealth have made theirs a haunted estate. “Tell-Tale” has a modern urban legend feel as a guy starts seeing his ex-girlfriend’s broken heart everywhere he goes.  “Rue Morgue” is a lesbian revenge story involving an improvised gorilla suit.  “Pit” is a post-apocalyptic vision with almost no dialogue and a somewhat confusing resolution.

Horror anthologies seldom work.  Like edited volumes in the book world, they lack coherence.  Poe insisted that short stories should be single-sitting forms so that mood could be maintained.  Putting five together, each with different directors, writers, and styles, makes for a disjointed viewing experience.  A couple of the segments, “Black Cat,” and “Pit,” seemed to drag a bit.  The former because you already know the story and the CGI was so abstract that it interfered with the telling and the latter because you really don’t know what’s going on.  The visuals are impressive, but story seems to have been sacrificed.  I was looking for something not too heavy and I did find that.  I also learned about a place where filmmaking is taught and you don’t have to have connections to get in.  Who knows?  Perhaps in another life I might’ve gone that direction.  I tend to follow Poe.

Call Me AI

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Let’s call them Large Language Models instead of gracing them with the exalted title “artificial intelligence.”  Apparently, they have great potential.  They can also be very annoying.  For example, during a recent computer operating system upgrade, Macs incorporated LLM (large language model) technology into various word processing programs.  Some people probably like it.  It might save some wear and tear on your keyboard, I suppose.  Here’s what happens: you’re innocently typing along and your LLM anticipates and autocompletes your words.  I have to admit that, on the rare occasions that I text I find this helpful.  I don’t text because I despise brief communiqués that are inevitably misunderstood. When I’m writing long form (my preference), I don’t like my computer guessing what I’m trying to say.  Besides, I type faster than its suggestions most of the time.

We have gone after convenience over careful thought.  How many times have I been made to feel bad because I’ve misunderstood a message thumbed in haste, or even an email sent as if it were a text?  More than I care to count.  LLMs have no feelings.  They don’t understand what it is to be human, to be creative.  Algorithms are only a small part of life.  They have no place on a creative’s desktop.  I even thought that I should choose a different word every single time just to see what this feisty algorithm might do.  Even now I find that sometimes it has no idea where my thoughts are going.  Creative people experience that themselves from time to time.

Certain sequences of words suggest the following word.  I get that.  The object of creative writing, however, is to subvert that in some way.  If we knew just which way a novelist would go every time, why would we bother reading their books?  LLMs thrive on predictability.  They have no human experience of family tensions or heavy disappointments or unexpected elations.  We, as a species tend to express ourselves in similar ways when such things happen, and certain words suggest themselves when a sequence of letters falls from our fingers.  LLMs diminish us.  They imply that our creative wordplay is but some kind of sequence of 0s and 1s that can be tamed and stored in a box.  I suppose that for someone who has to write—say a work or school report—such thing might be a boon.  It’s not, however, the intelligence that it claims to be.

Black Bird

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Although we prefer typecasting—it’s so much easier!—Edgar Allan Poe had both depth and width as a writer.  He penned funny as well as scary, love poems and detective stories, even something like a scientific treatise.  One thing I’m sure he didn’t anticipate was his name being suborned for cheap horror movies.  Roger Corman is a Hollywood legend—a good example of a guy making it in the film industry on his own terms.  He paired Vincent Price with a number of Poe titles that had little to do with the actual works of the writer.  One that oddly stayed with me since childhood is The Raven.  This was well before I’d read the poem.  It’s funny how very specific things will stick in your mind.  I remembered the strange hat Price wore.  And I remembered—misremembered, actually—Price using a spinning magical device with sparklers.  Misremembered because that was Peter Lorre’s character, not Price.

That was it.  I didn’t remember that Boris Karloff was also in the film.  I was too young (as was he) to recognize Jack Nicholson as well.  Although I watched The Twilight Zone, I didn’t realize the script was by Richard Matheson.  This film was loaded with talent, but it really was goofy.  I recollected Price was a magician, but I didn’t know this was a rather silly battle to become chief magician.  Lorre’s ad libbed lines were surprisingly funny, even after all these years (I was about one when the film came out).  Surprisingly, the movie did well at the box office, despite its taking a sophomoric approach to perhaps Poe’s most serious poem.  

I’d avoided watching it again for all these years because of that sparkler scene.  I’m not sure why that particular moment wedged itself so firmly in my young brain.  It seemed so not Poe that I couldn’t get back to the movie, apparently.  With Price and Lorre camping it up—Karloff was, by all accounts, most professional as an actor—and Nicholson uncharacteristically timid, the cheap special effects, it’s obvious that viewers enjoyed a good laugh at this one.  It’s not true to Poe, of course.  It’s true to Roger Corman, however, a filmmaker who knew how to deliver cheaply and quickly and still earn some money at it.  I’d last seen The Raven about half a century ago.  I may be tempted to watch it again, after having seen it as an adult, but if I wait too long I’ll need to leave that duty to someone who’s read this and who isn’t afraid of sparklers. 

Intimate Thoughts

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Although I haven’t had much time to devote to my fiction writing—I’m finishing yet another nonfiction title—I do have a Twitter account for my pseudonym.  I’ve always found it ironic that that Twitter account, which gets very little attention from me, has gained well over twice as many followers as the account in my real name.  On both accounts I follow back, but few notice the account where I post more often.  Strange.  Lately I’ve noticed that my pseudonym account has been getting attention from what seem to be cyber-prostitutes.  I’m not sure if that’s the proper name, but these users purport to be young women and they direct message you with solicitous intent (at least online).  Needless to say, I don’t respond.  It does make me wonder if that’s why Twitter is now known as X.

Social media has given new license to strangers, of course.  For a while there I accepted any invites I received on Facebook (publishers look at how many “followers” or “friends” you have on social media).  Many of these people I don’t know.  One, in particular, happens to be online quite early in the morning and has tried to video call me a few times on Facebook.  Those who do actually know me are aware that I spend less than five minutes a day on Facebook.  I post my post, check my notifications, and move on to other things.  In other words, anyone who knows me would never try to video call me through Facebook.  There are other ways to reach me.  I do have a blog, you know.  Social media has mediated a level of intimacy that I’m not ready to engage.

What am I doing here?

For all my daily shooting off at the fingers, I’m a pretty private person, really.  I’m shy—who knows? Maybe even on the spectrum—but also social.  Working in publishing I know that those who have the power to promote your book (and price it so mere mortals can afford it) want you to have internet exposure.  I guess that means some people will take it as an invitation to try to get sexy with you, or to call you at what is, in reality, the middle of the night.  I want people to get to know me first.  As much time as I spend writing, it’s a mere fraction of how I spend my days.  Intimacy should be reserved for friends.  At least I believe so.  Those who know me well know my pseudonym and its real-life counterpart.  For when I have time for that sort of thing.