Hello September

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Labor Day is as early as it can possibly be this year and as late as it can possibly be next year.  We live in a time of extremes. In any case, it’s our hello to September and our goodbye to summer.  Since I still think of weather quite a bit, I’m reflecting on how most of the month of August around here has felt like autumn.  A month that I normally think of as consisting of hot dog days as summer reinforces its grip has been one of chilly mornings requiring long-sleeved jogging togs, and even fingerless gloves indoors for a morning or two.  July was hot and rainy.  The kind of hot that saps your strength and energy.  August felt like relief after that, but now we greet September, wondering what might lie ahead.  Many of the trees around here have already started to change, which looked a little odd when it was only August.

A couple weeks ago

Autumn has always been my favorite season, as it is for many people.  It is poignant, however.  Summer has its endless lawn mowing, but trades that off with not requiring a jacket to be outdoors and plenty of sunshine.  More than that, even traditional capitalistic businesses tend to slow down a bit in the summer, if for no other reason, because many employees take vacation time and everything has to put on the brakes a little.  Because we work at breakneck pace for the remainder of the year, this more relaxed season is a welcome respite.  We know, as nights grow cooler and longer, that it is time to put that away for another year.  It’s a season of transitions which is what makes it so melancholy.  Work starts to feel more serious after Labor Day, but the holidays are at least within grasp.  Halloween is really the next on the list.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to retire, and if I do, if these day off holidays will be so important to me.  I’ve been interested in studying holidays pretty much all of my professional life.  Never really a fan of the capitalistic ethos, after being thrown into that world I quickly learned to look at holidays as stepping stones to get me through the year.  The first four months are rough.  They do have holidays sprinkled here and there, but March and April and most of May are holiday free zones.  That’s one reason the more relaxed fit summer is welcome.  The pace picks up again tomorrow, but for today, at least, we have one last ounce of summer to live.

Missing the Rose

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It was Edinburgh, my wife and I concluded.  That’s where we’d seen The Name of the Rose.  Edinburgh was over three decades ago now, and since the movie is sometimes called dark academia we decided to give it another go.  A rather prominent scene that we both remembered, however, had been cut.  If you read the novel (I had for Medieval Church History in seminary), you knew that scene was not only crucial to the plot, but the very reason for the title.  In case you’re unfamiliar, the story is of a detective-like monk, William of Baskerville, solving a suicide and murders at an abbey even as the inquisition arrives and takes over.  It isn’t the greatest movie, but it does have a kind of dark academic feel to it.  But that missing scene.

Of course, it’s the sex scene between Adso, the novice, and the unnamed “rose.”  Sex scenes are fairly common in R-rated films, often gratuitous.  But since this one is what makes sense of the plot, why was it cut in its entirety?  Now the internet only gives half truths, so any research is only ever partial.  According to IMDb (owned by Amazon; and we’d watched it on Amazon Prime) the scene was cut to comply with local laws.  More to the point, can we trust movies that we stream haven’t been altered?  I watch quite a few on Tubi or Pluto and I sometimes have the sneaking suspicion that I’m missing something.  How would I know, unless I’d seen it before, or if I had a disc against which to compare it?  There was no indication on Amazon that the movie wasn’t the full version before we rented it.

The movie business is complex.  Digital formats, with their rights management, mean it’s quite simple to change the version of record.  Presumably, those who’ve pointed out the editing (quite clumsy, I’d say) in reviews had likely seen the movie before.  Curious, I glanced at the DVDs and Blu-ray discs on offer.  The playing time indicated they were the edited version.  Still, none of the advertising copy on the “hard copy” discs indicates that it is not the original.  Perhaps I’m paranoid, but Amazon does run IMDb, and the original version is now listed as “alternate.”  Now that I’ve refreshed my memory from over three decades ago, it’s unlikely that I’ll be watching the film again.  I’ll leave it to William of Baskerville to figure out why a crucial scene was silently cut and is now being touted as the way the story was originally released.

The Printed Word

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I miss them, newspapers.  Now, I’ve never been a great newspaper reader—I tend to live in my own little world, I guess, and I really have no taste for politics.  I still glance over the New York Times headlines daily (mostly) but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about physical newspapers.  The other day we had a family creativity session.  This generally involves painting in some form or other and I realized with chagrin that we had no newspapers to lay down.  Nothing to protect the table top.  The same is true when we carve pumpkins, or do other activities that make you think that you want to protect your furniture.  Newspapers were always there.  We used to line our birdcage with them.  Made papier-mâché out of them.  They were handy to have around.

Josef Danhauser, Newspaper Readers, public domain. Image credit: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, via Wikimedia Commons

We live fairly close to our means, so we don’t have lots of drop cloths lying about.  (Plastic is so much less feeling than paper.)  We don’t have rolls of butcher paper in our kitchen.  We even use cloth bags for groceries, so grocery bags are at a premium.  Our electronic mania has meant that physical creativity suffers.  I do applaud the saving of trees, but you sometimes just need the disposable broadsheet to catch the drips.  (And when I paint, believe me, there are drips.)  But perhaps this is a symptom of this insipid internet life into which we’ve slipped.  The other day I was searching for an electronic services store.  I’m not even sure what to call them anymore.  I had to go to the physical store (yes, they still make them) to have something looked at.

The website kept telling me a store with a different name was what I was looking for.  All I wanted to know was whether this was an actual store or some knockoff.  If you’ve purchased what are being called “dups” now you know that companies blatantly use other companies ads to sell cheap knockoffs that don’t resemble the product you wanted at all.  This all seems to be perfectly legal.  I guess I’m just nostalgic for the days when you had to have patience and doing things slowly was a sign of good quality.  The 24-hour news cycle has hardly been a benefit, and Trump could’ve never been elected without it.  And if you wanted to paint something, you’d just go to the stack of newspapers that every house seemed to have, and paint over any headlines you wished you hadn’t seen.

Book Stories

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I’m a headline browser.  Sometimes a story will make me sit up straight and click.  I was browsing the headlines in Publisher’s Weekly’s daily updates earlier this week.  One of their regular sections is on independent bookstore news.  When I saw “Oil City” and “Pennsylvania” in the same headline, well, I sat up straight.  I grew up very near Oil City, and attended Oil City High School.  One thing I noticed, even as a child, is that the nearest bookstore we knew of was over in Meadville.  (Eventually a B. Dalton’s, or Waldens, I can’t remember which, opened in the local mall that is now a very sad superstructure to visit.)  I would work the summers and after buying my school clothes would beg mom to take me to Meadville so that I could visit the bookstore.  It was a place that made me happy.

I don’t remember a bookstore ever being in Oil City (or Franklin, except a Christian bookstore).  I wish Raven’s End very well.  If it weren’t six hours away I’d drive there this weekend just to support them.  In these times of challenging human intelligence, we need more bookstores.  We need more readers.  That’s one of the reasons, I suspect, that Publisher’s Weekly informs readers of new bookstores opening.  As a young person you tend to accept things the way that they are.  In one of my philosophy classes I learned that this was called “naive realism.”  I also learned along the way that our brains evolved to help us survive, not to discover reality.  We have to work at the latter, and that means reading.

I live in the Lehigh Valley, a community that has had to remake itself after the closing of Bethlehem Steel.  I grew up in the Oil City and Franklin area which would eventually have to remake itself after the closing of Pennzoil and other large, heavy industries.  As I was growing up there I found books, but in department stores like Woolworths, or more commonly, secondhand at Goodwill.  People are changed by the books they read and, given their own devices, most won’t go online looking for books.  After work I tend to shut the computer down and pick up a book to read.  I also try to carve out reading time each morning.  I grew up without easy access to bookstores.  It gladdens me to see one opening in the small town where I began to realize the importance of picking up a book and learning about this ever-changing world.

Zoning In

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Born Jewish, and Unitarian by choice, Rod Serling believed in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings.  Like many people, even Serling believed that season four of The Twilight Zone, which went to an hour format from the usual half, didn’t really work.  Nevertheless, the fourth episode of that season,“He’s Alive,” really should be required watching of every person in the United States.  This episode was written by Serling and it focuses on a young American fascist who’s having trouble gaining a following.  A shadowy figure then reads to him from what sounds exactly like Trump’s playbook, and soon decent people are raging along with him about foreigners and those who are different.  When the shadowy figure is finally revealed, we’re not surprised to learn it is Hitler.

The young man obeys without question, and soon it looks like he could be elected.  He has one of his best friends killed as a martyr to the cause.  He murders an old Jewish man who has cared for him since his youth.  He declares himself made of steel, with no feelings.  And when he ends up dead (everyone knows how Hitler’s career culminated), the spirit of Hitler rises from his body as Serling warns that wherever hatred exists, Hitler still lives.  Now this episode aired in 1963 but it could’ve been 2016, or 2024.  Prescient people, like Rod Serling, knew that mob thinking could be easily exploited.  Even in the first segment after the introduction the instructions are laid out.  Play on people’s fear of those who are different.  No matter how good things may be, people will be unsatisfied.  Add any power-hungry individual and you’ve got the recipe for a fascist overtaking.

The episode made me wonder if we could ever become a just society.  Ironically, that which calls itself “Christianity” these days stands in the way.  In its day, The Twilight Zone was amazingly influential.  It had a great impact on what was to follow and it’s still regularly referred to, even by those who’ve never seen an episode.  If only we’d pay attention to its message.  I’ve been making my way through the entire series, slowly, over the years.  Now and again an episode will really hit home.  I have to admit that I was physically squirming during “He’s Alive.”  It’s not that it is the greatest episode of the series, but its message is extremely timely.  The requirement for a better world is simple, but seemingly impossible to reach.  Treat others as you wish to be treated.

Double-Dipping

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Double-dipping takes many forms.  The kind I’m talking about is trying to get more than your fair share by either taking twice, or by fooling others into buying the same thing two times.  I’ve fallen victim myself.  Some publishers will sell a hardcover book and then release the paperback with a different title a couple years later.  If you’re a fan of the subject, you’ll buy the same book twice because they won’t easily tell you that it is the same one.  On paper the strategy is to get libraries to buy the hardcover (which costs more) instead of waiting for the paperback.  Why change the title if not to fool someone?  Maybe I’m just embarrassed by the vegan egg on my own face because I realize that I’ve bought the same book more than once.  Maybe more than once.  With a limited budget, I don’t appreciate being deceived.

The egg is even older and more obvious when I realize that those of us of a certain age can’t keep our memories as sharp as they used to be.  I read a lot.  I try to get through 60 or 70 books a year.  Have done for over a decade now.  If a book doesn’t create a strong impact, it may go into that category of enjoyable but not really memorable.  So when I recently learned that a publisher had double-dipped with a book I’d bought and read—twice—I felt violated and embarrassed.  Even more troubling was the fact that I wrote blog posts about each of the books (about three years apart) without recognizing I’d already read it.  To be fair, buried on the copyright page (who reads that?) the paperback confessed that it was the same as the differently titled hardcover.  Of course, I’d already bought the book, read it, and blogged about it (twice) before someone pointed out to me that it was the same book.  Gotcha!

I hold myself to high ethical standards.  I hope that I’m an honest person; I tell the truth whenever possible.  I’d certainly not try to sell someone two of the same thing without telling them that they weren’t buying something new, but simply giving more money for something they already had.  Even Amazon says, “Purchased on,” and gives you the date if you call up a book you’ve already bought.  Publishers, I know, have a difficult time.  Publishing is a “low margin” business, which means that you have to sell lots in order to stay solvent, and each sale brings in only a small profit.  Temptation to double-dip must be very strong.  Still, I feel a bit silly to have fallen for it, even when it’s what I do for a living.

Letting Go

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I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough that it is sometimes classed as science fiction.  It’s appropriate that a twentieth anniversary edition was released because it is an extended consideration of the price of technology as well as dehumanization.  I’ll need to put in some spoilers, so here’s the usual caveat.  I read this novel because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia and it certainly fits that aesthetic.  It starts out at a private school called Hailsham, in England.  The students are given some privileges but their lives aren’t exactly posh.  Most of their possessions are purchased on days when a truck sells them things they can buy with money they earn by creating art.  They aren’t allowed to leave the school.  Spoilers follow.

The special circumstances of the children are because they’re clones being grown for replacement organs.  The public doesn’t want to know about them or interact with them.  In fact, most people believe they don’t have souls, or aren’t really human.  They’ve been created to be used and exploited until they die, always prematurely.  While this may sound grim, the story is thoughtfully told through the eyes of one of these children, Kathy.  She becomes best friends with Ruth and Tommy, who later become a couple.  Ruth is a difficult personality, but likable.  As they grow they’re slowly given the facts about what their life will be.  They’re raised to comply, never to rebel or question their role.  Most simply accept it.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, in a submissive way, try to get a deferral regarding their “donations.”

I suppose it’s presumptuous to say of a Nobel Prize winner that it’s well written, but I’ll say it anyway.  Ishiguro manages to capture the exploratory friendships of youth and reveals what you need to know in slow doses, all told with a compelling, if sad and accepting voice.  Although the genre could be sci-fi, it’s set in the present, or, more accurately, about twenty years ago.  The technology, apart from the cloning, is about what it was at the turn of the century, or maybe a decade or two before that.  With what we see happening in the world right now, people should be reading books like this that help them understand that people are people, not things to be exploited.  And that Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those that are actually deserving for their contributions to humanity. 

Non-Saints

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It was an epiphany.  My wife has, on more than one occasion, accused me of playing the martyr.  I know very well that I let other people step all over me.  The epiphany came when I was reading about Stephen’s martyrdom in the Acts of the Apostles (in the New Testament).  Unbidden by me, a memory—more of a distinct impression, a deeply planted feeling—arose.  I started reading the Bible at a young age.  The story of Stephen is disturbing to a child.  The thought of being stoned to death for saying what you believe is a species of horror.  The memory, or impression, was of my mother pointing out how good it would be to be like Stephen.  He is not technically my namesake, but since there were no male role models in my family, I subconsciously made the connection: Stephen the martyr, Steve the martyr.

Giovanni Battista Lucini – Martyrdom of St. Stephen, public domain. Source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/martyrdom-of-st-stephen/twGNCf3waLKDvA via Wikimedia Commons

It’s strange to realize this suddenly after half a century of not consciously recollecting it.  What we teach our children stays with them.  If we tell them that it’s good to die for your beliefs, well, we shouldn’t be surprised when they grow up with strong convictions.  (My brother tells me that Virgos think they’re always right and that’s why we’re stubborn; is it the stars or is it the Good Book?)  The Bible puts a positive spin on Stephen’s death.  Formal sainthood isn’t a biblical concept, but he dies forgiving his murderers.  It struck me there in the middle of a working day.  Some of my subconscious personality traits floated to the surface.

My deep desire to avoid Hell also formed my young outlook.  Although my beliefs have to be held accountable to what I’ve learned over decades of study, that fear never departs.  This too was planted in me before I had any real concept to absorb it.  When I grew old enough, the horror became academic, but nonetheless real for it.  I’d studied the history of Hell and I knew New Testament secrets.  To avoid the bad place, be like Stephen.  The dilemma is that as life goes on, we continue to learn.  Young parents don’t know as much as old ones do.  And since we have to teach our children not to run out into the street, or not eat that thing they found, we cast ourselves as The authority.  And that includes things religious.  If we live an examined life, we see shades of nuance where once there was only certainty.  And sometimes we have epiphanies.

End of the Story

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You know that feeling?  Like when you’re driving in thick fog and you know you should stop but you’re late and you have to keep going?  There comes a moment as you’re driving when you know that it’s going to end, and probably badly.  Yet you keep on going.  Trump has me thinking of the end of the world quite a bit.  I know there are many evangelicals out there praying for it fervently while the rest of us would like a little more time on this beautiful planet.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand this outlook, because I do.  I grew up with it and I’ve never forgotten the sensation it caused.  And then I pondered that we are story-telling, and story-thinking creatures.  Perhaps other animals don’t think this way, but we constantly tell ourselves stories.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and well, eventually, an end.  We all know, at some level, that we’re mortal.  Life will end, and every completed story has an end.  Why not the world?  It’s a strangely haunting idea, the world continuing on without us here to make it interesting.  Plants will grow in any soil they can find, even microscopic cracks in the pavement.  Every year it’s like one day everything is suddenly green where only the day before we could see the sky through the branches.  And animals continue their quests for food, mates, and shelter.  Some live to hide while others strut.  Each has a role to play and if you watch them closely you’ll find yourself narrating their stories.  That rabbit.  That bluejay.  That fox.  They have a beginning, middle, and end.  If they can’t tell it, we can do it for them.  It comes naturally to us.

Long ago I learned how one version of Bible interpretation came up with the end of the world as we know it.  I also learned that this was contrived, just as all interpretations are.  This particular one has landed, like a seed, in the cracks of our mind.  It grows, just like that weed in the pavement.  This story must have an end.  We can imagine it no other way.  Even when we grow up and realize that the story was only one we told to children—children old enough to handle it, of course—we still have this certainty that an end is coming.  Like driving in the fog, we just know it.  Even when we realize that in reality we should be putting on the brakes.

Sad Joy

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I sometimes make the mistake of thinking a short book will be a quick read.  Melancholic Joy is a case in point.  Every time I indulge in a book of philosophy I wonder if I missed my true calling.  As my wife is well aware, I’m prone to philosophical musings about the meaning of life although I tend to place myself among the existentialists.  As soon as I saw the title of Brian Treanor’s book it went on my reading list.  It’s short and I thought maybe a week would be enough.  But it wasn’t.  I do hope I can remember much of it.  A word to the wary, the first chapter is very depressing.  Treanor doesn’t sugarcoat the world in his quest on a Life Worth Living.  Those of us who ponder things deeply tend toward melancholy, in my experience.  But stick with it.  There is gold in this book.  Starting with chapter two I was reminded why I took so much philosophy in college.

The world is full of depressing facts.  By the time I was born we’d already devised ways to wipe out the entire human race.  Many, far too many, people live lives of suffering, much of which could be prevented if we didn’t have people like Donald Trump running things.  The political situation is so bad that I’ve disengaged.  Yet still, amid my melancholy, I do feel joy.  You need to parse words carefully here.  Treanor knows that joy and happiness aren’t the same thing.  For those of us predisposed toward melancholy, joy is probably much more common in our lives than happiness.  This book is one that led me to start underlining again.  I do hope to come back to it when my outlook becomes too bleak.  Treanor interacts with both other philosophers and other writers, even some who aren’t always classified as philosophical.  It is a nepenthe.

Some of us think incessantly and can’t help doing so.  It’s a bit difficult to be cheerful if that’s the case.  Melancholic Joy, if I can keep it in mind, may help with that.  There are sections where I had to go back and re-read because my attention had wandered (it happens to us all), but to do so was rewarding.  For anyone who finds many aspects of the world oppressive, and depressing, and who has a philosophical bent, this book is for you.  Just be careful with that first chapter.  Whatever you do, don’t stop there.

Just Trust Me

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When I google something I try to ignore the AI suggestions.  I was reminded why the other day.  I was searching for a scholar at an eastern European university.  I couldn’t find him at first since he shares the name of a locally famous musician.  I added the university to the search and AI merged the two.  It claimed that the scholar I was seeking was also a famous musician.  This despite the difference in their ages and the fact that they looked nothing alike.  Al decided that since the musician had studied music at that university he must also have been a professor of religion there.  A human being might also be tempted to make such a leap, but would likely want to get some confirmation first.  Al has only text and pirated books to learn by.  No wonder he’s confused.

I was talking to a scholar (not a musician) the other day.  He said to me, “Google has gotten much worse since they added AI.”  I agree.  Since the tech giants control all our devices, however, we can’t stop it.  Every time a system upgrade takes place, more and more AI is put into it.  There is no opt-out clause.  No wonder Meta believes it owns all world literature.  Those who don’t believe in souls see nothing but gain in letting algorithms make all the decisions for them.  As long as they have suckers (writers) willing to produce what they see as training material for their Large Language Models.  And yet, Al can’t admit that he’s wrong.  No, a musician and a religion professor are not the same person.  People often share names.  There are far more prominent “Steve Wigginses” than me.  Am I a combination of all of us?

Technology is unavoidable but the question unanswered is whether it is good.  Governments can regulate but with hopelessly corrupt governments, well, say hi to Al.  He will give you wrong information and pretend that it’s correct.  He’ll promise to make your life better, until he decides differently.  And he’ll decide not on the basis of reason, because human beings haven’t figured that out yet (try taking a class in advanced logic and see if I’m wrong).  Tech giants with more money than brains are making decisions that affect all of us.  It’s like driving down a highway when heavy rain makes seeing anything clearly impossible.  I’d never heard of this musician before.  I like to think he might be Romani.  And that he’s a fiddler.  And we all know what happens when emperors start to see their cities burning.

Al thinks this is food

Hitchcock’s Freud

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When you can’t have horror, Hitchcock will sometimes do.  Having seen most of the big classics, Marnie came to the top of our list, and I found it had some triggers.  I suspect that’s true for those who have experienced childhood trauma and who sometimes do things as an adult without knowing why.  At least that’s what I took away from it.  To discuss this will require spoilers, so if you’re behind on your Hitchcock you might want to catch up first.  Here goes.  Marnie’s mother was a prostitute who turned to religion.  The reason is that one night during a storm young Marnie was frightened and one of her mother’s clients tried to comfort her.  Supposing he was molesting her daughter, she attacked him and when he hurt her, young Marie killed him.  All of this was repressed in her memory and now, as an adult, Marnie is a kleptomaniac who has the many phobias that that night impressed upon her.

Then along comes Mark.  Although he knows Marnie is a thief, he falls in love with her.  From a wealthy family, he’s influential enough to get charges against her dismissed, which he does once they marry.  He tries to unravel why Marnie won’t sleep with him, why she can’t stand red, why thunderstorms terrify her.  In a very Freudian move, he recognizes that her relationship with her mother is the key.  Hiring a private investigator, he discovers what happened to Marnie as a child and then takes her to confront her mother.  Marnie has never felt her mother’s love, but she didn’t remember the incident and didn’t know that her mother took the murder rap for her and subsequently distanced herself from her daughter.

I have to admit that I found this more disturbing than most Hitchcock films I’ve seen.  The ending, which I revealed in the first paragraph, brought quite a few of my own childhood issues to the surface.  Parents try to do the best they can, at least most of the time, but we damage our children psychologically, generally unintentionally.  And trauma in your youngest years never leaves you.  I can mask and pretend—that’s the way you survive in this world—but a number of my experiences as a pre-teen affect me every day, whether I realize it or not.  Where I choose to sit in a room.  How I respond to unexpected events or sudden changes.  Why I immediately have to know what that noise is and where it came from.  These are all part of the legacy my childhood left me.  I think Marnie would understand.

The Valley

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Juneteenth seemed a good day to get to Valley Forge.  With all the nonsense going on in the White House, we need to be reminded what this country was founded on and for.  I like to think that we weren’t the only ones there yesterday for that reason.  In fact, in the gift shop I found a book titled America’s Last King.  By the time we left it was sold out.  Like many Americans, I suppose, I only had a vague idea why Valley Forge was important for our young country.  We took a tour that helped explain it.  A tour that some in Washington ought be be required to take.  Valley Forge was a winter encampment—the third in the War of Independence.  George Washington had just suffered two defeats and the British had taken Philadelphia.  His poorly provisioned army set up winter headquarters in this strategically secure hill country.  Inadequately clothed, barely fed, many dying, they planned how to keep their efforts to survive alive.

What happened that winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge that kept the United States alive depended on two things, both brought by immigrants.  Let me say that again, in case ICE is having trouble hearing—immigrants saved America.  The young country was in very real danger of defeat.  What turned the tide was an alliance with France (the name Lafayette still looms large here in the east) and the help of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian.  Without these foreigners, America would never have survived to become great.  Oh, and Mr. Kennedy, Washington ordered vaccinations at Valley Forge to prevent so many of his troops from dying from small pox, an inconvenient truth.  What emerged from Valley Forge that winter was a more organized, healthier United States Army that would go on to defeat the British so that we could be free two and a half centuries later.

I needed Valley Forge.  Although it was a hot day and the roads are paved, I needed to be reminded what it felt like to be proud to be an American.  Juneteenth is to commemorate the end of slavery.  History shows that many in Washington’s army were of African descent.  It seems that DC has forgotten what America is and what we were fighting for all those many years ago.  It wasn’t to exclude those who were different.  No, it was to pull together to survive.  Our would-be king spends his idle days planning military parades in his honor.  The US Army was born in Valley Forge.  And as an American with ancestors here from Washington’s day on, I really needed that visit to remind me of how America became great.

Deadly Seven

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Seven, styled Se7en, shades more toward the thriller end of the stick than horror.  The two are very closely related, of course, but as a gritty cop drama, the main horror element is the gore.  And the serial killer.  Indeed, it’s often compared to The Silence of the Lambs, a card-carrying horror club member.  My main complaint is that much of the movie is shot so dark that you can’t see what’s going on.  The unnamed city is about as cheerless as Bladerunner, and even when people aren’t being stalked by the serial killer they’re being murdered anyway.  So this dark setting brings together two detectives, one retiring (played by Morgan Freeman) and one with anger issues (Brad Pitt) set to take over.  The two are only supposed to overlap seven days, but the seven in the title refers also to the seven deadly sins.  

A literate cop drama—Freeman knows his literature (Milton, Chaucer, Dante, and even Thomas Aquinas)—it is a step above the standard crime drama.  The fact that Freeman spends his nights in the library may be the reason some people consider this dark academia.  The academic part is otherwise absent.  In any case, it is Freeman who recognizes that victims are being killed for their embrace of one of the seven deadly sins.  An obese man is fed to death, a greedy lawyer has to cut off a pound of his own flesh (in a hat-tip to Shakespeare).  When Freeman’s character tells Pitt’s that it’s from the Merchant of Venice, the later says “I’ve never seen it.”  Not read it, but watched it.  It’s Freeman who recognizes the endgame that the serial killer is playing and tries to warn Pitt.  But Pitt’s wrath is also a deadly sin.

The seven deadly sins aren’t biblical.  They emerge in early Christianity, taking shape through such writers as Tertullian, Evagrius, and Pope Gregory I.  They have remained in Catholicism as  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth (which sounds like the profile of some narcissists in the news).  They’ve been used in proper horror films as well as in thrillers, giving a convenient number of infractions to pursue.  Seven is one of those films that has become more highly regarded over time.  One might say that a prophet is without honor in their own time.  In any case, the movie is gripping and sad and a bit bloody.  It doesn’t unfold exactly as you might expect.  And no matter its genre, it can leave you thinking.

Finding Fossils

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Mary Anning was a real woman.  She made valuable contributions to paleontology in the first half of the nineteenth century, although she wasn’t always credited for her work.  The movie Ammonite is a fictionalized account of her life at Lyme Regis, where she lived and discovered dinosaur fossils.  Being fiction, the movie focuses on how Mary “came out of her shell” by entering into a relationship with Charlotte Murchison (also an historical person, wife of the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison) who was left in her care when she came down with a fever after trying to recover from melancholy by taking the sea air.  Mary had established a life of independence and wasn’t really seeking relationships; her mother still lived with her and, according to the movie, they had a distant but loving regard for each other.

I was anxious to see the film because it is sometimes classified as dark academia.  Since I’m trying to sharpen my sense of what that might mean, it’s helpful to watch what others think fits.  The academia part here comes from the intellectual pursuits of Anning and the academic nature of museum life (one of her fossils was displayed at the British Museum).  Anning, who had no formal academic training, tried to make a living in a “man’s world,” and in real life she did contribute significantly to paleontology.  The dark part seems to come in from her exclusion from the scientific community, and perhaps in her love for Charlotte, a forbidden relationship in that benighted time.  Of course, this relationship is entirely speculative.

Fictional movies made about factual people make me curious about the lives of those deemed movie-worthy.  Ammonite is a gentle movie and one which raises the question of why women were excluded from science for so long.  No records exist that address her sexuality—not surprisingly, since she lived during a period when such things weren’t discussed.  Indeed, she didn’t receive the acclaim that she might have, had she lived in the period of Jurassic Park.  She was noticed by Charles Dickens, who included a piece on her in his magazine All the Year Round, in 1865, several years after her death.  These days she is acknowledged and commemorated.  This movie is one such commemoration, although much of it likely never happened.  As with art house movies such as this, nonfiction isn’t to be assumed.  Nevertheless, it might still be dark academia.