Thoughtful Transformation

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Philosophical horror’s a thing.  A friend introduced me to Moorhead and Benson films—these aren’t major studio productions—and I’ve been watching them as I can find time.  They’re intelligent and tend away from heavy gore, which is fine by me.  And they leave you with plenty to ponder.  I recently sat down with Spring, an unusual movie that sometimes gets classified as science fiction, probably because the lead actress plays a science student.  There will be spoilers here, so if you have plans to watch, please stop and do so now.  Here goes:  The story follows an aimless young man who’d given up college to take care of his dying mother.  To get away, he heads to Italy with no particular destination in mind.  He ends up in Polignano where he meets and is smitten with a young woman.  At least he thinks she’s young.

From the privileged point of view of watchers, voyeurs perhaps, we come to see that Louise isn’t who Evan thinks she is.  She’s a two-millennia-old woman who has to regenerate herself every twenty years to maintain her immortality.  When the twenty years wind down, she transforms into other creatures on the evolutionary scale on the way to humans.  Since she lives on she’s not really seeking a long-term relationship.  This leads to some discussions of religion, which I find intriguing.  Louise is a scientist, however, and even when she transforms into a monster, she refuses to call it supernatural.  Rather, she claims it’s just something that science can’t yet explain.

This perspective really does get at the heart of the debates between science and religion.  Are there things science simply can’t explain?  I.e., are there things beyond science?  Or is science really the panacea for all things?  The problem is that the human mind cannot sense or detect all things.  We don’t even have a clue as to how many things there actually are to detect.  How can one method be used to encompass everything?  Not a bad set of questions to be raised by a somewhat Lovecraftian movie.  Lovecraftian, by the way, due to its focus on the sea and some of Louise’s atavistic transformations.  Spring is an unusual and thoughtful movie.  It’s a love story as well, about willingness to face the unknown for love, and trusting evolution.  The characters are likable and you want them to thrive, which you don’t always get in this genre.  It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to Moorhead and Benson, and always being glad I came.

Driving Complexity

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It should be a pretty straightforward thing, buying a car.  Unless you live in a city like New York you need one, so the process should be simple since it affects many.  But no.  Nothing is simple any more.  We had a two-decades old car that had quite a few health issues in its long life.  Besides, we wanted a hybrid to help with the environment and to cut down on gas costs.  A Toyota Prius seems a good choice so we tried to buy one in February.  We had to wait, however, since dealers can’t keep them in stock.  Initially they estimated three or four months, which turned into eight.  When it arrived unexpectedly we had to drop everything to go get it because they don’t want them sitting around on the lot.  Fortunately the day was Saturday, when schedules are a bit more flexible.

Unlike other stores, where you walk in, hand over your money, and walk out, the car dealership involves immense complications, too great to comprehend.  Insurance is a big part of that.  It turns out that now they want you to go with their insurance.  And since car insurance is bundled with homeowners’ insurance you have to answer questions about when your house was last roofed when you buy a car.  Facts and figures that I don’t keep at my fingertips were necessary.  And you have to download apps because they want you to do everything by phone.  If you’re buying a Prius they want to tether your phone to the car, like a Navi to its beast, and you have to let it monitor where you are at all times and how you’re driving, otherwise your rates will go up.  Driving a Prius is like steering a computer on wheels.

You see, I get overwhelmed.  My mind evolved for a simpler world.  Finally arriving home after several hours in a bustling showroom, I had a dozen emails about this and that related to changing insurance and registering for new systems so the car can take to me, and all I want to do is run to the store to pick up some groceries.  There are no entanglements there.  Pay for your goods and walk out of the store.  No insurance, no requirements to change anything.  Not to mention that Saturday’s the day for mowing the lawn and the hundreds of other chores you can’t get done during the work week.  I’m sure I’ll enjoy my new wheeled computer.  It is much better for the environment.  It may take a few years, however, before I find the time to learn how to drive it.  And to disentangle myself from all the other complications involved.  Pardon me, but I’ve got more car-related emails to read.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Modern Work

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The entertainment industry has proven itself, time and again, resistant to recessions.  It says something about our lives that we need that outlet no matter what.  The New York Times has been looking at the writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood as a piece of what they are calling the “fractured work” puzzle.  Noting how inequality inevitably increases in a capitalistic system, they put the screenwriters into a situation with which I am unfortunately familiar—that of the adjunct professor.  Adjunct professors now make up some three-quarters of the teaching force in higher education.  In case you haven’t had the misfortune yourself, an adjunct gets paid by the course (not very well, by the way) and has no benefits—medical or, often, retirement (some state schools are required to offer the latter, but you’ll never be able to retire on the pittance you receive).  The idea is that work is being broken into smaller chunks so that entrepreneurs can pay less for work done.

Everyone knows such a system isn’t sustainable.  It will crash.  Unless it’s reformed.  Some people have asked me about becoming a copyeditor for a job.  The thing about copyediting is that it’s freelance work.  Publishers generally don’t hire copyeditors full-time.  You can make a living at it, but it’s self-employment.  You need to set aside the money for retirement and health insurance.  As well as taxes.  And you have to work long hours to make it pay off.  I tried it for a year, but I’m a slow reader.  It was clear that I didn’t have the right literary stuff to make such a living, so I had to move into acquisitions instead.  If you know me personally you may find that ironic.

Those of us who’ve always sought a spiritual existence, however defined, often don’t fit into a capitalistic system.  Especially if you question doctrine.  That’s why I became an academic—or at least tried to.  It’s one of the few places where people with my skill set can thrive.  Work often defines who we are.  Usually one of the first questions to arise when you meet someone is “what do you do?”  Specialists often suggest dissociating our selves from our jobs—I suspect that’s more necessary in positions in which a person is unwillingly being taken over by a position that’s not fulfilling on some level.  Wouldn’t it be better, since we’ve opted for fractured work, if we made it something you could do for a career?  The New York Times suggests specializing, but be careful, dear reader, in what you decide to specialize.  The “market” may well dry up on you and striking may not even be an option.

Shopping Trip

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Personal Shopper is one of those movies I’m not sure I understood, but which was nevertheless profound.  It didn’t help that it was one of those “free with commercials” movies that interrupted a dense storyline just when I needed to be concentrating.  How did we ever survive growing up with commercial television as our main vehicle for movies?  This is a subtle, psychological ghost story set mainly in Paris and involving a young woman, Maureen, who is the titular personal shopper, but who stays in Paris to try to contact her fraternal twin brother’s ghost.  Her dead brother’s widow is helping her, but the wealthy woman for whom Maureen’s the personal shopper is demanding and has strict rules about how her expensive clothing and accessories are to be handled.

The film is moody in the way that I find effective, and it’s not fast-paced and full of action.  It’s more contemplative and a couple of plots are woven together so that I suspect I’ll need to see it again to try to fit it all together.  It’s also a movie that intertwines religion with horror.  In this case the religion is primarily Spiritualism.  Maureen, in addition to being a personal shopper, is a medium like her brother was.  Before he died he promised, like Houdini did, that he would try to return and leave a sign so that Maureen would know for sure about the afterlife.  She has glimpses of a spirit entity, but isn’t sure it’s him.  Meanwhile, her boss’s lover scams Maureen into believing he’s a ghost by texting her cryptic messages from an unknown number.

There’s no question, following the straight narrative of the film, that there are ghosts.  What’s uncertain is who they are and whether they can be trusted to reveal the truth.  Mostly shot in autumnal Paris, the gray skies and threat of rain complement the eerie feeling the story generates.  It ends in sun-drenched Oman, however, making for a stark contrast with what has gone before.  If my description here is confusing take that as a sign of the depth of this film.  (Or simply judge me a   poor writer.)  In either case, Personal Shopper, which was recommended to me, is a movie that hangs on after it’s over, leaving you wondering about any number of things.  The acting is compelling and there’s a melancholy about the movie that’s rare but also becoming.  I’ll need to see this again some rainy day, hopefully without commercials this time.

Little Bang

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I’ve always been interested in the sky.  At times it feels like I’m in love with it.  Having attended a Sputnik-era high school—a rural high school with an actual planetarium!—I took the offered astronomy course.  Buoyed up by this, I also enrolled in a college astronomy class only to discover that that career track involved far too much math for my humble abilities.  Still, I learned a lot about the nighttime sky.  I’ve also been a lifelong reader of lay science.  I very much appreciate scientists who write so that nonspecialists can understand them.  So it was that I was glad to see a New York Times letter by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser titled “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.”  I’ve mentioned Gleiser here before because I’ve read a couple of his wonderful books.  But this article was mind-expanding.

Frank and Gleiser suggest that the Big Bang Theory may, eventually, need to be replaced.  They point out that small inconsistencies have crept into it over the years (keep in mind that it was really only “confirmed” within my lifetime, back in the sixties).  Most of these have been patched up with quilt-work astrophysics, but the James Webb Space Telescope is making some of those past patches strain a bit at the seams.  Fully formed galaxies are being spied too far back in time (for stargazing is looking into the deep past) for the standard model.  They shouldn’t be there, but they are.  The letter interestingly raises the point that the scientific study of quantum physics, as well as that of consciousness, also strain the standard models.  Perhaps it’s time for a rethinking of reality?

Image credit: NASA, public domain

Isn’t this breathtakingly exciting?  To be alive when a major leap of understanding the universe we call home may be discovered?  The authors point out that cosmology and philosophy often have to interact.  Our understanding of the universe is a human understanding, not sacred writ.  The scientific method is built to be falsifiable.  If it’s not, it’s not science.  (This often separates it from some religions which declare themselves unfalsifiable, and therefore likely wrong.)  New scientific discoveries are made daily, of course, but new paradigms only tend to come on the scale of lifetimes, or several generations.  We don’t see them all the time.  I guess it’s heartening to see that the system works.  When science becomes orthodoxy, we run into similar problems that we encounter with religions.  A bit of humility and a ship-load of wonder can go a long, long way.

Moving Hope

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We were young and recently engaged.  I had to move from Boston to Ann Arbor, and all my worldly possessions fit into the trunk and back seat of a rental car.  I don’t remember the model, but I know it was white.  It wasn’t a large car.  Details have escaped into the ether, but I was driven by the soul purpose to be with my fiancée, soon to be wife.  In those days sleep and food deprivation of an almost Lindberghian degree seemed negligible.  Google maps tells me it’s a twelve-hour drive, but back then the speed limit in Pennsylvania was still 55 so it had to’ve been more than that.  By myself, with little money (how did I pay for that rental car?  Probably credit card, borrowing against the future) I drove all day—or was it night?  I seem to recall arriving in the afternoon.

People are capable of great endurance feats, but they get a bit trickier as you age.  I like to think they’re compensated for by increased mental powers.  It takes time—many years—to learn how to be in the world.  To learn, as Morpheus indicates, which rules can be bent, and which broken.  If you pay attention you can see that there are events, incidents, not easily explained.  We influence the world as the world influences us.  And our minds influence our bodies just as our bodies influence our minds.  We seem to enjoy drawing sharp distinctions where fuzzy lines are more natural.  As I think back on my move to the Midwest, it seems to me that courage and conviction ran strong, despite the unlikeliness of success.

From Ann Arbor my wife and I moved to Edinburgh with, again, very little money and nothing but hopes to keep us going.  You see, when you grow up in a poor family there are no buffers.  Yet Edinburgh became a reality and after the Ph.D., still with little money, we managed a transAtlantic move to a job that proved as unreliable as the usual support systems for the poor.  Once again we found ourselves making yet another low-budget move across the miles.  We move to find our futures.  Wisconsin became our home for a decade and a half before the search for work brought us back east again.  Moves are filled with hope.  If we were convinced things would always be the way they are, why would we bother to move on?  Moving shows just how optimistic we can be.  Without hope, why would we ever move?

Cabin Stories

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Almost always I come out on the same side of the debate.  The book is better than the movie.  The book allows things to be explained more fully and is the way the story is “supposed to go.”  Maybe it’s because I found the novel open-ended and I like closure, but M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, in my humble opinion, is better than The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.  Now, the author’s title is better, but Shyamalan’s explanation is clearer.  In short, I think the movie works better.  If you’re not familiar with the story, four apocalypticists, responding to visions they’ve had, break into an isolated cabin occupied by a vacationing family of two daddies and an adopted daughter.  Shyamalan characteristically shifts the cabin’s location to Pennsylvania and, yes, before you think it’s all Philadelphia, there are some very isolated places in my home state.

These weaponized apocalypticists subdue the family and inform them that unless they decide which one will be sacrificed, and then carry out the deed, the world will end the next day.  The adult couple tries to explain rationally how crazy this all is.  How could four people be given this hidden knowledge and be tasked with saving the entire world?  It seems more likely that they’ve targeted a gay couple and are trying to break up their family.  One of the things the movie makes explicit that the book doesn’t is that the intruders are correct.  This is the end of the world.  In order to achieve this, Shyamalan had to rewrite the ending to remove the ambiguity.  For some of us, that really helps.

The movie, in a way that a brief blog post can’t replicate, includes quite a bit of dialogue about religion.  Religion and horror are often bedfellows, and this is one of those movies that relies on religion to fuel the fear.  Interestingly, the cabin invaders aren’t stereotypical conservative Christians.  In fact, they appear to be mostly secular everyday people who have come together around a vision that they all had in common.  In the novel there’s always some question whether this is an elaborate hoax whereas the movie makes it clear that the death of each individual apocalypticist unleashes a plague.  Indeed, they are, as the couple finally realizes, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  Since I’m still here to tell you about it, the end of the world has obviously been avoided.  This movie is worth seeing, even if the novel has a better title.

Consider the Ant

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Ants, the Bible suggests, are worth both watching and learning from. I was reminded of this while at the Easton VegFest a couple weeks back. The VegFest is an annual event promoting vegan food in a riverside park. I’d given someone a ride and ended up finishing earlier. I could either walk all the way back to the car or spend the time outdoors. It was a pleasant enough day and there were places to sit (with no back support, however). One such sitting venue is a concrete retaining wall about 12-feet high, that borders a walking trail along the river. Since there’s a lively inner tubing business along the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, you could watch groups float by, looking very relaxed in the way that only being on the water can make you. It was while sitting along the top of this wall that I realized I was on an ant highway.

Image credit: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, under CC BY-NC license, via Wikimedia Commons

While individual ants don’t live very long, colonies (and their lives are very interconnected) can last several years. Some queens even make it to 30, which is impressive for an insect. As I was sitting (more like leaning, since the wall has a rounded top and I have a fear of falling) I’d notice some larger ants approaching with great determination. I would stand to let them pass. They weren’t in a close line or anything, so if I didn’t notice one in time, I became part of the trail. Looking confused—if an ant can look confused—at missing the chemical trail, they’d nevertheless continue in the same general direction unless some microscopic bit of a dropped piece of lunch on my lap caught their attention. Their determination was a lesson. They simply don’t give up.

Although the wall predates any of their individual lives, it has become their highway just as any interstate becomes ours. They didn’t build it, but it has become their recognized and known pathway. This was clear because in the course of my hour there, several members of what I presume was the same hive came by. I suspect the writer of Proverbs wanted readers to notice their busyness, but what I saw was their marked will power. Not even a giant wearily resting on their road deterred them. There was an utter conviction about what they were doing. Obstacles were simply climbed or gone around in the assurance that the trail would resume on the other side. Their sense of hope was admirable and, in its way, contagious.

Closure of a Trilogy

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So the final part of Jessica Verday’s Hollow trilogy really moves into supernatural explanations of life after death.  At least for those destined to become shades.  Since we’re at the end here, I won’t worry about spoilers.  Also, the series has been out for over a decade now, so we’re fairly safe, I think.  (Young adults aren’t my demographic, I don’t imagine.)  To recap, Abbey is in love with Caspian, who is a shade.  Caspian isn’t seen by many people, but he does appear to Abbey.  Throughout the story she mourns the death of her best friend Kristen.  As the action builds, Revenants begin to appear in Sleepy Hollow.  Revenants are beings that assist people who are to become shades as they die.  This indicates to Abbey that she won’t live to graduate from high school.  She will, however, get to be with Caspian—“complete him”—in a form of life where few will see them but they will live on in a limited sense.

The universe here isn’t particularly Christian in background.  Revenants operate in pairs, one tending toward good, the other evil.  They are sent to do a specific job and when it’s over they move on.  As in the movie Dogma, however, one Revenant doesn’t want to move on.  He figures that if he fails to do his assigned task he’ll continue on as an immortal on earth.  At the end he reveals that he killed Kristen in Abbey’s place so a difficult decision’s in order.  To straighten out the mess that’s been made on some cosmic scale, Abbey can die, history will be altered, and Kristen will be the one who survived.  This will involve self-sacrifice, which kinda does bring us back into Christian territory.

This trilogy emerged following the obvious success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga.  Teen paranormal romances were in, and publishers hearkened to the demand.  It does reflect our times that writing for young readers has taken on an impressive quality.  This trilogy is a great example of how someone who recollects well what it was like to be a teen is able to transport many of us back to that stage of life.  The awkwardness.  The constantly making wrong decisions.  The bewilderment of falling in love.  And of course, if you throw in some ghosts and some light violence, you’ve got a winning combination.  I enjoyed getting to know these characters.  I knew, once I put volume one down that I would have to see how the rest of this story unfolded.  I’m glad I did.  I have a sense of closure, for this series at least.

Funny Scares

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Camp has its own aesthetic.  I’m not talking about the kind with tents and sleeping bags, but that has its own aesthetic too.  No, I mean campiness in pop culture.  Creepshow, which was released in 1982, has maintained its value as camp and you pretty much still have to pay to see it (at least it’s free not on any streaming services I use).  For an episodic film it’s not bad, and since it’s comedy horror it won’t keep anyone up at night.  And of course both Stephen King (who wrote the script) and his son Joe (future horror writer as well), appear in the movie.  The elder King in a charmingly overacted segment based on one of his short stories clearly influenced by H. P. Lovecraft.  Put this all together with direction by George Romero and a cast including Leslie Nielsen and you’re in for a fun afternoon or evening.  (Or morning.  I won’t judge.)

It’s definitely a period piece.  The attitudes are those of the late seventies and early eighties.  That fact underscores, for me, how media affects everything.  Cultural outlooks change periodically and the more we know about what other people think, the more quickly they change.  Of course, since this is camp you can’t take it seriously.  And yet you somehow do.  The first vignette is, appropriately, holiday horror.  It has to do with Father’s Day which is, I suspect, a holiday to which most men acquiesce rather than anticipate.  This story is about a dad who takes it too seriously and a daughter who takes it too far.  Until…

The plots of all the stories are comic booky, and they contain many of King’s early themes.  “Something to Tide You over” is probably the most disturbing of the tales, at least by implication.  It reflects some of King’s fears as presented in some of his short stories but the method of execution is particularly distressing.  The comic book ending, however, shows it’s all for fun.  The prologue/epilogue reflects, I expect, the experience of many of us growing up.  I remember having comic books to which my mother objected because they were “too scary” for young boys (in our context).  I even recall her trying, and perhaps succeeding, to take them away and put them in the trash.  This is a situation as old as media for children.  The brothers Grimm knew just as well as King does that kids like scary stories.  Some grow out of that.  And others of us find a couple hours to watch Creepshow as an adult.  At least those of us who enjoy camp.

Reframing

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Theory can be tough to stomach, but once you get through it you can often find all kinds of valuables in an academic book.  I learned quite a lot from Cecilia Sayad’s The Ghost in the Image.  It’s a brief but powerful book.  One of the under-explored areas of life is how our inventions affect reality.  We invent things and they change us.  Photography is one of those inventions and it seems like we should step back for a decade or two and try to figure out just how it’s remade reality.  Sayad explores that specifically in the realm of horror.  Not just movies, but other technology associated with images (and even other senses).  She makes the case that the frame that separates an image from the “reality” outside the frame—think of going to an art museum and how the frame sets a painting off from the “real” wall behind it—has become permeable.  Thus the theoretical part.

Applying that principle to horror, she has fascinating chapters on Amityville and Enfield, the found-footage fictions of Paranormal Activity, and the Slender Man meme.  She also discusses spirit photography, which is really the precursor to the horror film, and what used to be called video games.  I’m not a gamer, I’m afraid, and I’m sure I’m missing out on some culture because of it, but researching and writing books beyond work takes up quite a bit of time.  In any case, the amazing thing is that Sayad does all this without judging.  She doesn’t say that ghosts are “real” but she doesn’t say that they’re not.  Part of the reason for this is that reality is part of the quest here.  We define reality partially (largely) through our technology.  Would politicians become “celebrities” without photographic media?  They’re hardly the cream of the crop anymore (let’s be honest here).

So this book left me thinking.  Imaging technology invents, instigates a new reality for creatures as visually oriented as our species tends to be.  Sayad also explores how other senses are brought into this—sound, most obviously, for movies—and help to confirm that reality.  Theaters have toyed with touch and smells to widen the diegesis of the movie (taste is a bit trickier), each layer brings the image further outside the frame.  The internet has, of course, only accelerated all of this.  The fact that horror is the genre that perhaps best lends itself to this kind of impact on society is, in itself, a telling point.  I need to step back for some time and ponder how this all fits together in what I perceive of as reality.

Self-Correcting

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A comment by a friend regarding Wikipedia recently got me thinking about self-correcting systems.  When I was teaching, I didn’t eschew Wikipedia like many of my colleagues did.  In case you’ve been living in a cave the last two decades, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.  When I had more time than I do now, I used to correct errors I found there.  The thing is Wikipedia shouldn’t be used as the final word.  It’s a good place to start and, if you’re concerned about the truth, you’ll follow up by checking footnotes and looking up the references.  (Standard operating procedure for academics.)  Readers always need to keep in mind that what they’re reading may have been manipulated and distorted, which is why you want to check with established sources—some of us still prefer print, which isn’t so easily altered.  Still, Wikipedia is self-correcting and it works fairly well.

This got me to thinking about other self-correcting systems.  Those who know me know that I take criticism pretty hard.  That’s because I was raised with a crippling fear of Hell that let me to self-correct whenever I discovered an error.  And to scan my thoughts and motivations constantly for mistakes.  Sensitive bosses know that I only need to learn about an error I made, even obliquely, and that I don’t need to be told to fix it.  Of course I don’t!  Hell awaits those who let mistakes fester.  I’m not sure this is a good kind of self-correcting system, but it keeps me on my toes, and at times, even on my toenails.

The human body is often a self-correcting system.  We need the help of physicians when disease or injury occurs, but healing is part of a self-righting system.  (I’m indebted to an episode of Northern Exposure for reminding me of this recently.)  On an even larger scale, life on earth is self-correcting.  We humans have done more than our fair share of damage, and the self-correction (e.g., extreme weather because of global warming) may not be to our liking, but it is a system doing what it does best—righting the ship.  This kind of self-correction is inspiring and inspirational although we often take it for granted.  If healing didn’t occur none of us would be here to notice just how remarkable it is.  I don’t dismiss Wikipedia just because we can’t be sure everything’s written by experts.  Self-correcting systems are often the way of the world.

Life Semesters

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Some people have a school calendar in their blood.  For me, that was one of the great appeals of the teaching profession.  I worked a lot during summers—class prep and research take a lot of time and the two go naturally together.  I didn’t mind the ten hour days, and more, during the semester either.  When you’re doing something you love, you become your job.  It was quite a shock when the job counselor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh told me that I had to separate myself from my job.  The two were one.  I would sit in that Oshkosh office researching for classes I’d never taught before.  My first year at Nashotah House I was writing 90 pages of class notes per week.  Anxious, but loving it.  There was so much to learn!  But that calendar has some natural breaks.

Academic careers involve sprinting that goes on for about four months straight.  Then you get a break of a month or two before sprinting again.  For those of us with my mental condition, that way of living just fits.  The 9-2-5 job is parsimonious second-pinching.  I’ve talked to other professionals in the field and they say the same thing—when your job involves thinking, there are no such things as fixed hours.  When I’m out on my jog before work and my mind comes up with a solution for that intractable problem that awaits me once I fire up the laptop, I’m working.  It’s just not “on the clock.”  It’s gratis.  Part of the problem is I don’t cotton onto sitting in front of a computer all day. Being “in the office” ironically hurts productivity.  In the teaching world you walk around and talk to people.  Summer days are spent with your nose in a book.  What’s not to like?

Not everyone, I know, is stimulated by that kind of lifestyle.  For me, it just works.  Some years I’m able to carve out a week’s vacation in the summer.  I try to save up enough vacation days, however, to get the week between Christmas and New Year’s off—a mini semester break.  When a person’s mind works in a certain way, finding employment that coincides with it is important.  Many people like the structure of a work day.  It tells you when to sign in and when to knock off.  It tells you when to eat lunch and when to take breaks.  Others prefer alternative work arrangements.  The 9-2-5 has never sat well with me.  It’s because the school calendar is in my blood.

How Many Stairs?

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It tries.  It really does. Still, The Girl on the Third Floor is just not that good.  It got quite a few accolades, but I was waiting for something extraordinary.  It seemed to fall down on two counts—the writing isn’t very good and we’re allowed to build very little sympathy for the protagonist.  If you can’t feel for somebody and the dialogue does only light lifting, what’ve you got to go on?  Some critics suggest that if you know the star (Phil Brooks) and his persona you’ll appreciate it more.  That must be a problem for many movies where baked-in personalities are counted on—early Disney used to do this to make cartoons attractive to adults.  If you don’t know them the appeal evaporates.  In any case, a couple buys a house. He (Don) goes to renovate it while she (Liz) works to support them.  The house used to be a brothel and Don has no problem cheating on his wife when a hot ghost shows up.

The reason I watched the movie was the connection between horror and religion.  The first person to check in on Don is Ellie Mueller, the pastor of the church across the street.  She’s simply identified as “Protestant” and she drinks bourbon and swears, so it’s fair to guess she’s not Baptist.  In any case, she warns him about the house but ever confident, Don carries on.  Later, as all the ghosts come out and Liz shows up unexpectedly, Ellie shows up again.  This time she advises Liz to leave but she frames the evil of the house as a matter of choices.  Don (who succumbed to the ghosts) consistently made bad choices in order to get what he wants.  Liz and Ellie, however, think of others.  In that sense there’s a parable here.

The haunted house tropes have mostly been seen before.  Some manage to be a bit freaky, but many of them don’t really shock.  Or maybe I’ve seen too many movies for them to have an impact.  The heavy metal soundtrack is a bit—ahem—heavy-handed.  Using marbles as weapons is a little unexpected and angry ghosts often make for effective monsters.  Still, these seem to succumb to a sledge hammer pretty easily.  One of them keeps coming back, however, and one is more a monster than a ghost.  In any case, there was real effort here.  For my taste, however, good writing can cover a multitude of sins.  And it really helps if you sympathize with the main protagonist, even if just a smidgen.

Whence We Are

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Rootless.  Or perhaps a better word is “wandering.”  Although I was born in Pennsylvania, neither of my parents were and back another generation, few of the grandparents stayed where they were born.  Being an American mutt also means not having terribly strong ties to a parent-land.  But still, I’m surprisingly attached to Pennsylvania.  It’s a fascinating place.  One of only two colonies to actively promote religious freedom, it seems an ideal place for spiritual seekers such as yours truly.  I’m driven by an obsession to find the truth and this takes me to some pretty strange places.  Pennsylvania has an interesting religious heritage.  Founded by Quakers who nevertheless wanted diversity (or at least permitted it), my home state attracted a wide range of—particularly German—religiosities.  Not only were there Lutherans, there were also Moravians (pietists),  Mennonites and mystics.

Rural Germans kept many superstitious practices alive.  Many early Americans did, actually.  Daniel Leeds was a banished Quaker.  Now, without doing a ton of research (for which I don’t have time at the moment) you can’t find out much about Daniel Leeds (i.e. he has no Wikipedia article).  He was a rival printer to Benjamin Franklin, and a bit of a freethinker.  His family was later literally demonized as being the origin of the Jersey Devil.  Leeds was influenced by the mystic Jacob Boehme (who does have a Wikipedia article).  Böhme, as his friends knew him, also influenced Johannes Kelpius, and thereby Johann Conrad Beissel, a couple of good Pennsylvania German mystics.  Leeds began to have ideas too outré for the Quakers, and, I like to think, inspired future Pennsylvania mystics.  Leeds died in 1720 and deserves at least a Wikipedia piece.

Pennsylvania housed some pretty interesting religions over the years.  The Germans with their folk beliefs (Benjamin Franklin didn’t care for Germans) would go on to influence a number of American folk traditions.  I often wonder whether, if Pennsylvania had not displayed religious tolerance, things would’ve developed radically different in the early United States.  It does happen that, although a mutt, much of my heritage is teutonic, and I seem to share the religious curiosity that these folk displayed over time.  Upstate New York also had its fair share of new religions as well—beating out their southern neighbor and longest border sharer.  Of course, I have ancestry in upstate as well.  Perhaps it was inevitable that, being born in Pennsylvania, I would turn out the way I did.  Wandering and all.