Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

Old Passion

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Something I find inherently fascinating revolves around used books.  I buy used books and I always examine the overlooked scraps of paper that get left between the pages.  Mostly it’s random ephemera, but it is the window into a stranger’s life.  They had this bit of paper lying around to mark their place.  Had I the time I’d piece together the puzzle.  Recently, while preparing to donate some books to the local AAUW book sale, I found a scrap of paper in one of my own books.  This was from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on the date in my wife’s handwriting: 3-19-04.  It’s an Associated Press story from Statesboro, Georgia, involving a dust-up between a married couple after watching The Passion of the Christ.  That makes it interesting in its own right, but what’s especially striking is the couple battled, including a pair of scissors, over whether “God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic.”  Things got out of hand.

For context, I was still teaching at Nashotah House at the time.  Theological debates, sometimes heated, took place there on a regular basis.  People get very fired up over what they believe.  This may set our species apart from other thinking animals, or perhaps it’s part of the price we pay for abstract thought.  You almost want to step between the warring spouses and say, “let us handle this, we’re professionals.”  Of course, the species of specialist that has studied theology is dying out.  Universities are cutting religious studies departments.  Churches are losing members.  Better hide the scissors.

“Passion” is the operative word here.  We get quite attached to our views.  So much so that no amount of logic or rational discourse can dislodge them.  We see this with the utter devotion to political leaders and on-screen personalities as well as to religious beliefs.  Some of us were curious enough to study where these ideas came from and how we know that they’re “true.”  This is not for the faint of heart.  Testing your core assumptions can lead you into some very unfamiliar, unmapped territories.  And since religion deals with ultimate concerns, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our couple felt silly after the police had been called and the bail paid.  Passion is very much what drives our species, and perhaps others as well.  We feel we need what we believe to be true, and we’re willing to fight for it.  Even if it means, as the chief sheriff’s deputy remarked, they seem to have missed the point of religion in the first place.

Sleepy Thoughts

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It happens as you age.  Sleep patterns get disrupted.  This is normal and expected by all.  Except work.  That 9-2-5 has no sympathy for the sometimes days in a row when you awake looking forward only to going back to bed.  The day stretches out so long before you, many weary hours through which to slog, where younger employees wonder at your lack of energy.  A good night’s sleep is a gift.  One of the things I’ve observed about this is that poor sleep tends to occur in runs.  Overall, I don’t have much trouble sleeping.  I’m not in control of the quality of it, however.  And that’s what makes all the difference.  The mere handful of sick days won’t cover the inherent ageism of the few days off policy when poor sleep is the culprit.  In the non-profit world early retirement isn’t really an option, so lots of yawns it is.

It’s amazing how much we take youth for granted.  We could pull all-nighters in college and recover quickly.  Eight or nine hours hardly seemed like anything for work.  Then those hours begin to show their weight.  You have a vast gulf of meetings and self-starter projects stretching in front of you even until supper time, let alone the chance to redeem that previous night’s poor slumber.  I stopped caffeinating myself years ago.  I reasoned that I didn’t need chemical assistance to remain awake.  Was that self on coffee the same self as undrugged me?  And besides, you can save a lot of money by not buying coffee (which is now a luxury item).  So we pray to Morpheus and open our laptops.

The demand to be “on” for eight or nine hours a day, pretty much unbroken, for five successive days each week, wears a soul down.  And a body.  How I long to take a walk on a lovely spring day, only to be reminded that my lack of engagement online is noted.  I even receive work emails after 5 p.m. telling me something has to be done that night.  What I plan to do that night is sleep.  Make up for lost time.  Be human in an aging body.  The thirty-something that sent that email will understand.  Some day.  Age used to be equated with wisdom.  Now, it seems, it is considered lack of productivity.  It comes for everyone, if they survive that long.   No, I’m not ready for the ice floe just yet.  A good night’s sleep will set me straight.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

Thorough

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It was a warm summer’s day, sometime in the mid-eighties.  I was living in Boston and some friends asked if I’d like to go to Walden Pond, outside Concord.  I’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, so yes, please.  I knew Thoreau was an early Massachusetts Transcendentalist, mystic, and nature lover.  That particular day we were the only ones at the site where his cabin in the woods once stood.  I suspect that, being there with friends, it wasn’t as contemplative a trip as it would’ve been had I made it alone.  Still, here we were, nearing a century-and-a-half after his death, remembering him.  My wife and I recently watched the PBS three-part documentary on Thoreau, and I learned a lot about him.  He was admirable in a way that few public figures are today.  What’s more, it’s clear that he’s widely appreciated as a visionary and believer in freedom.

Image credit: Benjamin D. Maxham, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

Writing in the nineteenth century, it seems, got you noticed much more than it does now.  Thoreau had profound things to say.  He had strong convictions about abolition and being shuffled into an existence of work, forced from being free.  He was able to live the way he did largely because he didn’t need many things.  He also had famous friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, who gave him a place to stay when he had none of his own.  The documentary makes the point that, despite being a hero to many, we’ve gone ahead and built the world Thoreau most feared.  Few, or at least a few of us, find that work doesn’t define us.  Writing, it seems, still helps with that.  Those of us born to write do so, and long days “in the office” must be endured to come to life when writing is again possible.

If you think deeply about it you start to realize that we’ve allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by economics.  If you have a mortgage you know this to be true.  Or if you have a medical condition—you can’t afford not to have a job without insurance.  Thoreau, it seems, lived with the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him pretty much all of his life.  And he died too young, we feel, because he had so much to say.  So much to say that was worth listening to.  Such writers are rare today because, like everything else, writing has become a business and some readers even prefer things “written” by AI.  And yet I remember that warm summer’s day and think of a placid time still earlier when one might’ve met Henry David Thoreau in the woods.

An Education

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The point of education is to improve life for people.  Reading and studying and listening, we learn.  Travel is often an educational experience.  We gain knowledge, but it does no good if we hoard it.  That’s why some become teachers.  In a society that undervalues education, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in.  Just look around you.  The usual path into becoming a teacher is education in education.  You can major in it.  You don’t have to be wise necessarily, since, like all things capitalistic, choice of career is economic.  You pick something for which you feel suited.  If you’re lucky, you get a job doing it.  For “higher education” it’s a bit different.  First of all, you need not study education at all.  You choose a field in which to become a specialist and, if you’re lucky, get a job teaching it.  And those jobs are dependent on, of course, the dismal science.

This is one of the main reasons I write.  When your intention is to be a lifelong learner, you know that if you don’t share what you’ve picked up over the years, it will simply be lost.  As a society, we really don’t encourage sages.  The motivation is to make money, to look out for yourself.  Education becomes a means for self-promotion rather than for sharing what you’ve learned.  In my case, I sometimes feel guilty for writing about horror.  Is it really helping anyone?  I have to believe that it might be.  A certain segment of the population finds horror therapeutic.  Psychologists are starting to explore how it’s actually good for your mentality.  I can only hope that if it means something to me, it will mean something to some others.  And I want to share it.

Religion, at least among the non-cynical, is meant to improve people’s lives.  There is a reason that I wanted to be a religion professor, as I was for a few short years.  My circumstances steered me toward horror as a form of self-care, and I think there’s something much deeper here that has to be mined.  Writing the books I do is more like speculating or prospecting rather than staking a claim and digging tunnels.  If they were causing more harm than good I wouldn’t publish them (or try to).  Life is an educational opportunity.  And if we learn from those who care for other people we might have a chance of improving the lot of many.  Look around you.  Is that where we are today?

Equal Women

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It’s been so busy this year that Mother’s Day crept up on me.  We have a lot of spring birthdays in our extended family, and what with the weird weather this year and unexpected household expenses, it just kept slipping my mind.  I like to commemorate the day on this blog because I’ve considered myself a feminist for many years.  I’m very distraught that women still aren’t treated as equals to men.  This should’ve been a no-brainer over a century ago.  (Having an historian’s outlook, I realize that in the days when women tended to die young, in childbirth, it was difficult for many to rise to positions of social prominence.  Once we got to the stage that most women survived the experience, and then to the point that economics drove us to two-income families, the male-superiority charade should’ve been dropped.)  The fact is none of us would be here without our mothers.  Father’s day has never been a big deal for me, but Mother’s Day is important.

I did manage to remember to get my wife a card in advance, but this year the day itself kept slipping my mind.  Ironically, my wife and I had watched a biopic of Mother Ann Lee last night—I’ll post on that tomorrow—and it was only as I was preparing to write about it for today’s post that I thought, “Wait.  It’s Mother’s Day.”  (We do have plans for the day; I’m not a complete barbarian.)  My excuse is that we were set off yesterday by an early encounter with a brusque and condescending Verizon employee who would not help set up a new phone purchased elsewhere.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and it rained all day, none of which made for a productive Saturday.  The movie (tomorrow’s post) was longer than anticipated, keeping me up late.  Movies, strangely enough, are now starting to really influence my dreams.

My dream for today, however, is that women’s equality will become a reality rather than something we just keep talking about.  There can be little doubt that we’d be better off with a woman president than with the alternative.  A woman has traveled further from the earth than many billions of men have.  My doctor and dentist are both women.  They can do anything men in their professions can.  They are university presidents and CEOs.  Pilots, both civilian and military.  They are religious leaders.  And many of them do the job on top of being mothers.  I consider it a personal failing that it was only as I was about to post about Mother Ann Lee (tomorrow) that I finally realized today is a very important day.  Let’s make Mother’s Day count!

Eh Aye Jesus

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Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Hopeful Reading

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Although I prefer independent bookstores, I happened to find myself in a Barnes & Noble between other activities on a recent weekend.  This ended up being good for my spirits, although I didn’t buy anything.  The reason was, perhaps, ageist of me, that I was buoyed up by seeing so many young adults there buying books.  Granted, it was a cold, gray Sunday afternoon, but I read so much about the death of reading that this particular trip gave a bit of balance to all the doomsayers.  There is still a reading public.  And many of them are a good bit younger than yours truly.  I do wish more people my age would spend time in bookstores as well, but the future is with those who know to put down their devices and pick up actual books.

I’ve had more than one academic tell me that they do not assign e-reading for their classes.  One of them was a decade or two younger than me.  The reason?  Students don’t retain well what they read on a screen.  I tend to agree with this.  The context of setting aside time to open a book with no interruptions from texts, emails, or social media, is sacred.  You shut out the world and concentrate.  I try to do this for an hour each day (most days more than an hour) and it has to be done with print books.  I have no great love of electronic “books.”  The experience is sterile.  Devoid of true engagement.  And I’ve even been forced to read ebooks with other people’s highlights left behind.  When I buy a used book I try to make certain it’s an unmarked copy (although some sellers don’t look very carefully).  Why would I want an ebook with somebody else’s notes?

The visit to a bookstore is a restorative one.  In the rare instance where I know the proprietor, it becomes a social visit as well as a financial transaction.  Books are a kind of currency among some of us.  Although I know none of the names of the young people that I saw at Barnes & Noble, I do know something about them.  They enjoy books.  That is one of the most hopeful thoughts I can have.  As long as we manage to survive as a species, there is hope for the future if young people are interested in books.  Reading is a mind-expanding exercise.  Our life together is so much more enriching when we invite others in.  And some of them we meet between the covers of books.

A Day for Earth

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Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.

Machen’s Monstrance

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It was a coincidence worthy of a story written by a mystic.  Arthur Machen became famous for his novella The Great God Pan.  Descended from a clergy family, his interests were in supernatural stories, but Pan was considered extreme in his day, which, of course, made it famous.  I have the Oxford World Classics series volume of Machen’s stories and I had only a few minutes, not enough to read Pan.  Flipping through the table of contents, I noticed that the story “Monstrance” was brief.  I decided to read that one.  It’s about a German major-sergeant Karl Heinz, during World War One.  As he is trying, with several others, to set up a machine-gun emplacement unnoticed by the English, a vision he has been seeing leads him to cry out and die.  Through the discovery of his diary, it is learned that he’d committed a war atrocity at a church and the procession with the monstrance became a vision haunting, and ultimately killing him on the battlefield.

The coincidence grew even more appropriate when, reading about Machen, I learned that his probably second most famous story was “The Bowmen,” which also happened to be short, and which in the Oxford World Classics edition, is printed right before “Monstrance.”  Of course I had to read it also.  The reason I chose “Monstrance” in the first place wasn’t because of its famous neighbor, but because of the religious symbol of the monstrance and because it is brief.  Since I still didn’t have time for The Great God Pan, I was led to his second most well-known story by looking for something short and landing on the story immediately following it.

“The Bowmen” is also a war story in which a miracle occurs.  It led to the rumor that the event, which involves angels fighting for the British forces, actually happened.  It is, however, fiction.  As a result, “The Bowmen” became the second most popular Machen story.  I wouldn’t have read it—at least not any time soon—had it not been for its placement before “Monstrance,” even though the two stories are somewhat similar.  It’s easily imagined that God is fighting on your side, and it should be remembered that often the enemy believes the same thing.  That most futile of human activities, war, certainly spawns stories as so many lives are meaninglessly lost.  There is, however, a mystical element to these tales, in keeping with Machen’s outlook on life.  Not bad for having about 20 minutes to fill.

First, Kings

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Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Actual Intelligence

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Horror movies love a good sequel.  A self-referential genre, there’s a lot of give and take and reassessing.  I may have waited a little too long to watch M3GAN 2.0, however.  I remembered the premise of M3GAN: an AI robot companion built to keep a young girl company misreads its protocol and ends up killing people.  I’d forgotten the details of how this came about, but as I watched the sequel, it started coming back.  It might’ve been best if I’d rewatched M3GAN first, but weekends are only so long and I’ve got a lot to do.  In any case, it isn’t bad.  This is sci-fi horror, but the future it foresees doesn’t seem very far off now.  So, M3GAN was destroyed at the end of the first movie.  Her maker, Gemma, has become kind of a Neo-Luddite, such as yours truly, and is advocating for control of AI by the government.  This need is underscored when a military application of M3GAN goes rogue and starts killing people.

Fighting fire with fire, Gemma decides she needs to bring M3GAN back to stop AMELIA.  After the usual chaos and action, it seems that AMELIA is going to merge with the motherboard of the first AI system built, which is now super-smart, and will then wipe out the human race.  M3GAN, however, has “learned” empathy and is able to stop AMELIA by sacrificing herself.  The film doesn’t have a clear message, although overall it seems to advocate caution regarding artificial intelligence.  On that I agree.  (Of course, we’ll need to get some kind of actual intelligence in the White House before we can consider any of this.)  This does seem less horror and more action than the original, but it goes quickly and is fairly fun to watch.

A few months before seeing this, I’d watched Companion, another AI cautionary horror movie.  A few months before that, Ex Machina.  Companion was a bit better, I think, but the original M3GAN was out of the gate first.  Ex Machina, however, was even a decade earlier.  The films are very different.  Companion is about a sex-bot and M3GAN concerns a, well, companion for a lonely young orphan.  Ex Machina is about an AI woman developed just because she can be.  She, however, can’t be controlled either.  All three films represent the zeitgeist of an underlying, lurking fear that we are really going the wrong direction with all the tech we’ve created.  All feature female robots, and none of them end well for humankind.  At least if the implications are followed through.  It might not be a bad idea to pay attention to the human creative side when thinking about Actual Intelligence.

Shopping News

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It’s one of the perils of the online age.  You order something online and the company (which has more money than a mere individual) asks you to pay for their mistake when the send the wrong thing.  This has happened to me a few times.  Once I ordered a used book.  The vendor got the author right but sent the wrong title.  When I explained this they still wanted me to pay to ship their mistake back to them.  I explained the illogic of the situation to them: You said you would send me a certain book and you did not.  In order to refund me I have to pay for the shipping, which sets me back a few bucks without having the right book at all, which I will have to reorder.  They were not happy, claiming it was my responsibility to get the book back to them.  I asked them to pay for the shipping.  They refused.  Eventually they said “Just keep it.  But this time only!”  I do not order from them now.

More recently Amazon, which, for all its issues, is pretty good about getting the right item to you, sent me a defective book.  I noticed as soon as I unpacked it that the cover wasn’t printed correctly.  Words were cut off on the right-hand side, and the spine was printed on the front.  I would’ve accepted it as a fluke, but opening it up I saw that the interior was for a completely different book.  Likely the printer hadn’t properly cleared out the covers from the last printing job before starting the new project.  Amazon didn’t fuss about replacing it.  They did, however, require me to return the defective one.  They’ll pay for the shipping, but I have to pay for the gas and time to drive to one of their preferred vendors.  It’s the same problem on a smaller scale.  Amazon made the mistake (actually the printer did but nobody checked) and I had to pay something to make it right.  This seems off to me.

I worked in retail for a few years and one of the messages management always emphasized is “the customer is always right.”  Sometimes they weren’t, but most of the time we had to resolve any disagreements as if they were.  Online ordering takes the face-to-face out of it.  The person who receives something other than what they ordered, for which they’ve paid the agreed price, has been wronged.  It’s a mistake unlikely to happen in an actual bookstore.  There’s a price to be paid for the convenience of ordering online.  And that price is paid by the customer.

Please Read

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This post is longer than my usual fare, but it is important.  I’m putting the full text in “Full Essays” (the link is above, in the drop-down menu under the “Blog” heading) and I strongly urge you, for your own sake, to read it.  Here goes:

On March 9 I was nearly the victim of an AI scam.  Regular readers will know that I was scammed out of a large amount of money last year.  I’m vigilant now, but I’m also human.  AI exploits humanity.  I had just reported an email on gmail as phishing.  (Phishing is using email to scam someone.)  I had even written a blog post about it.  You can, and should report phishing emails when they occur.  Right now, on gmail, you need to go to the three dots in the upper right after you open the message and use the drop-down menu to report it.  I reported one message then this one arrived, looking all legit:

Let me explain.  Writers in my category (struggling, probably neurodiverse) really want to reach readers.  I want to paste the whole email into this email but before I do let me say that I Googled the “person” it was from and found a legitimate individual in the NYC area, generally.  I also Googled the NYC Philosophy and Psychology Reading Group; it actually exists.  It’s a MeetUp group.  They don’t have a website.  I checked all of this before responding.  Please read on!  I will explain the warning signs and what I realized only later.  Here is the text of the email: (go to Full Essays to read more). If you cannot access Full Essays from another website (e.g. Facebook or Goodreads), please go to steveawiggins.com to get to it (I have no idea how WordPress works!)

Substantial

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Body horror isn’t my favorite, but The Substance was so widely acclaimed that I figured I needed to see it.  It’s easy to see why it was so well received—it is not only well done, it also packs a lot of social commentary into the story.  I hadn’t read about the plot before seeing it, and it occurred to me that the theme wasn’t dissimilar from Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” but from the point of view of a woman who’s been celebrated for her good looks and finds herself aging out.  Elisabeth Sparkle has had a successful television personal fitness series for years.  When she turns fifty, however, studio executives decide she has to be replaced with someone younger.  The men in the movie are portrayed in an unflattering light, unable to curb their appetites, while Elisabeth has to stay in shape, remain “beautiful,” to find any work at all.

Then a doctor furtively informs her about “the substance.”  It comes with few instructions, but it causes a person to create a new version of themselves—younger, more attractive—but they must swap out their existence every week.  One week the younger body is active while the older body is comatose and then they keep on switching weekly.  The younger Elisabeth, named Sue, takes Sparkle’s job and becomes a hit.  Her fitness show, highly sexualized, quickly gains ratings.  Sue has boyfriends and glamour.  Elisabeth awakes to find the apartment a mess and starts to regret the doubling.  The advertising for the substance repeats the message, the two of you are one.  Then Sue starts to “stay out late,” taking a few extra hours before switching.  This causes Elisabeth to age, in pieces, very rapidly.  She takes her revenge on Sue by overeating and leaving the apartment a mess.

Of course this is building to a big finish, which I won’t describe here.  There are a number of themes the film asks us to ponder.  Women are expected to stay young to be valued by the men who control the money.  The divided self comes to hate itself.  And there is little recourse for those whose careers reward them richly for being young but who will live well beyond that with only the memories and regrets of what they no longer have.  Although the movie is deliberately comic in many respects, it is also a sad story.  Expectations are unreasonable and unrealistic, and women have to play by the rules set by men.   The Substance has depth and pathos.  And pointed social commentary.