Recession Value

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While reading about recessions (am I getting old, or what?), I suddenly got the creepy feeling that our entire lives are unduly influenced by those who think they know what they’re doing.  Financially, that is.  The Great Depression and the Great Recession were both times of economic hardship because the rules capitalism put in place defined us as being in an era of lowered GDP, or gross domestic product.  Why?  Because there were no jobs.  Why?  Those who hold the purse strings (capitalists) had pulled them shut with all their might.  Then, like magic, depression and recession end and everyone tries to get back to business as normal.  To me this seems utterly ridiculous.  They call economics the dismal science for a reason, after all.  The fact is the rules are made by us.

Society is very complex.  This is one reason that people should really think hard about who they’ll vote for.  Leaders who think it’s all simple inevitably lead to disaster.  If I could, I would switch the world economy away from capitalism.  If I were president and were to try this, it would be a very, very slow process.  It would take generations.  Why?  Because this is a complex system.  Sudden changes don’t last.  Of course, to people who believe the universe took only six earth days to create and that a big flood wiped out all the dinosaurs (or maybe some were on the ark), complexity is anathema.  Of the devil.  Well, as they say, the devil’s in the details.

Image credit: I forgot where I found this; if anyone recognizes it please let me know!

And so we suffer through depressions and recessions.  To those of us with feet on planet earth, it doesn’t feel like much has changed.  We still need to sleep and eat and all that, but some “experts” are telling us why we have to pay more at the grocery store or at the fuel pump, and why those at the top of the pyramid seem to be all right, no matter what happens to the rest of us.  And we let it carry on.  Economic systems are simply a reflection of what people value.  The things we value most cost the most (it’s called supply and demand, AKA capitalism).  The most expensive material thing I own is my house, and truth be told, it’s mostly owned by the bank.  But the most valuable actual thing I own is my mind.  It can’t be bought.  And one thing it keeps on telling me is that all of this business about recessions and whatnot is rather silly.

What the Devil

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Apart from being one of the most controversial films of all time, The Devils is also devilishly difficult to locate.  For as influential as it was (you can’t tell me nobody in Monty Python saw this before making Holy Grail) it has largely been buried, at least in the United States.  It doesn’t stream and to get a viewable copy you are limited to a Spanish language import DVD and have to manually select English as the language if you want to hear it as produced.  The question is if you do want to see/hear it.  Written and directed by Ken Russell, it is over-the-top.  Chaotic and cacophonous, it’s almost distracting and somewhat boring for about half its run time.  Then it turns incredibly violent and grotesque.  So why did I watch it?  Well, for one thing, it was something I knew I could’ve included in Holy Horror, had I been able to access it then.  For another thing, I’d read about it many times and was determined to find it.

Based on historical events (but stylized to the point of abstraction), the film is about the Loudun possessions of 1634.  Nuns in an Ursuline convent began displaying the kinds of tics that girls would display in Salem some 58 years later.  A local, unconventional priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching them and was burned at the stake.  The film makes much of the political machinations taking place, and revels a little too much in the behavior of the nuns.  It also enjoys portraying medieval torture methods and has an almost Clockwork Orangesque feel to it.  Released in 1971, it was given restrictive ratings where it was permitted to be shown, and although some horror has surpassed the excesses in recent years.

Religion’s relationship to horror is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog.  This movie is a textbook example of that.  After my nerves stopped jangling so much, I recollected that Ken Russell was also responsible for Lair of the White Worm.  Another story of debauched nuns and religion gone awry, it made me wonder what Russell’s personal interaction with religion might have been.  He apparently converted to Catholicism and then converted away again.  It certainly doesn’t get much sympathy in his movies.   Father Grandier is somewhat heroic in The Devils, but the overall institution is clearly corrupt.  In some cases religion is the means of fighting horror.  In other cases it is the cause of the horror.  Here the latter is clearly on display, and even that is, unfortunately, over the top.

Remembering Holidays

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Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.

Friendly Fear

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I opened my book Holy Horror with an epigraph taken from Apocalypse Now, a movie I recently watched again.  That quote was from Col. Kurtz: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how you can make any progress in a discussion with anyone who’s already made up his or her mind (i.e., no matter what you say to them they will not take it seriously.  Think your favorite Trump supporter).  People far smarter than I have noted that the only way to combat this unthinking adherence is to get people to think critically.  That may be correct, but to preserve democracy we need a more assured method in the short term.  That of Col. Kurtz.

Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  Both contain a vital truth—fear motivates people.  Democrats have been forward-looking in recent decades, but Republicans run on that fear playbook and it’s very difficult to defeat.  That’s because people are afraid.  It’s important to face fears, but to win elections, you need to seed them.  I know whereof I speak when it comes to phobias.  I was so riddled with fear as a young person that at times I could not leave the house.  At other times even the house didn’t feel safe to me.  I had multiple phobias and difficulty talking to other people.  I’ve grown out of many of these fears, but if I’m honest, I know they’re still with me.  I suspect many other people are also afraid.

Strong men (even if personally weak) appeal to the afraid.  They want someone who can protect them.  I tend to think Democrats think many Americans are better adjusted than they actually are.  You want their votes?  Make them afraid.  I’ve been writing books on fear and its many cinematic manifestations for several years now.  I grew up being afraid of everything.  I don’t advocate creating fear, but when a nation decides Hitler would be better than letting young people read, it’s reached a crisis point.  I do wish progressive political leaders would consider my humble observations.  When afraid people herd together and become the mob with torches.  And just such a mob became the mindless followers of Col. Kurtz.  Just saying.

University Death

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This is an important and thoroughly depressing book.  Despite globalization, I fear that a book from down under might fail to be readily found in the United States, where it’s also needed.  Peter Fleming’s thesis is spelled out in the subtitle.  Dark Academia: How Universities Die.  I’ve read a few other books like this, but I was attracted by the title of this one.  Fleming points out much of what I already knew, but with the stats to back it up, as well as compelling personal stories.  Few people worry about professors.  We’re conditioned to think their lives are easy and carefree.  I doubt they ever were, but since the eighties, when universities started to act like business ventures, the cracks showed in the foundations and their lives grew harder.  Capitalism ruins everything.  Fleming discusses the political maneuvering in the UK and Australia, as well as in the US.  We’re all facing the same nemesis.  Greed.

Politicians began attacking universities likely because they realized that educated individuals can see through the shenanigans that people like Trump, and Reagan and Bush before him, pulled.  They didn’t want alternative voices.  Debate is anathema.  The easiest solution was to make education a business because businesses always want more money.  Now, I’m shooting from the hip here, but Fleming pulls such things together with evidence.  I have witnessed firsthand some of what he describes—living as an adjunct instructor, barely making enough to cover the bills.  At the same time learning the university I was working for had been hiring “managers” (hundreds of deans, associate deans, etc.) but couldn’t afford to hire faculty.  That sports (something Fleming doesn’t address) were allocated far more money than teaching.  Yes, things were bad.

Fleming points, rightly, in my opinion, to neoliberalism as the culprit.  That’s the form of liberalism that’s wedded to free market capitalism while spouting the causes that traditional liberals support—care and concern for all people.  The older I get the more I see that neoliberalism is what the Republican Party used to be.  They’ve veered hard right and since, in America, liberals have never really had a chance to hold power since Roosevelt, they’ve become neoliberals.  Thus began the transformation of higher education before I ever started my doctorate, but I didn’t know it.  I’m no political scientist.  I’m a teacher interested in the past.  And religion.  Having grown up poor, I invested all my scant resources into getting qualified to teach, only to discover that the ivory tower was being sold to the highest bidder.  Dark academia indeed.

Eschew Stupidity

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a certified evangelical Christian.  His theology often feels a bit pat to some of us who work in religious studies, but there’s no doubt that Bonhoeffer was a brilliant man.   Bonhoeffer believed in Jesus but resisted Hitler.  In fact, that resistance cost him his life.  My brother recently sent me a Facebook Reels video on Bonhoeffer’s observations about stupidity, which Bonhoeffer believed was far more dangerous than evil.  I shared that video in my feed on Facebook yesterday, and it is well worth listening to.  Stupidity isn’t a badge most people would wear proudly.  We all do wear it from time to time since we’re only human.  The real problem, according to Bonhoeffer, is when crowds start becoming stupid.  We’ve seen it time and again.  We’re living in such a time right now.  The antics coming out of DC right now have thinking people everywhere wondering how this is even possible.  Listen to Bonhoeffer.

Photo source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

I don’t take Bonhoeffer uncritically.  Some of us—generally without tons of friends—think critically by default.  (The women in college all broke up with me because “You’re too intense.”  I credit my wife with sticking with me, although she tells me they were right.)  Anyone can learn critical thinking.  The problem is, keeping the skill is hard work.  And the internet doesn’t help.  Whenever anyone makes a claim, personally, my default response is “How do they know?”  Yes, I do look up references.  With my particular brand of neurodivergence, I seldom trust other people to know something unless they’re experts.  (This is something the current administration is a bit shy on.)  I even question experts if their conclusions look suspect.  “Nullius in verba” is written in my academic notebooks.  Something, however, is obviously clear.  Bonhoeffer was right about stupidity.

I’m not sure what an unfluencer like myself hopes to gain by discussing this.  I do hope that folks will listen to Bonhoeffer if they have concerns about my thought process.  My deeper concern is that the church often encourages stupidity.  Unquestioning adherence to something the facts expose as untrue is often lauded.  It makes some people saints.  Churches require followers and often distrust critical thinkers.  That once cost me my job, sending my career into a tailspin.  This was well pre-Trump, but some in authority didn’t appreciate critical thinking on the part of faculty.  (Ahem, that’s what we’re paid to do).  I’m not anti-belief.  Anyone who really knows me knows that I believe very deeply in the immaterial world.  And I know that Bonhoeffer did too, right up to the gallows.

Peace

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Mother’s Day should be a time for peace.  In these days when misogyny is in style, it’s an especially important holiday.  The one holiday to explicitly honor women, it’s always been an occasion for reflection for me.  We have 364 days of warring and hatred, and one dedicated to the givers of unconditional love.  I can imagine a different world.  One in which women don’t have to become alt-right to gain positions of authority.  Where compassion and humane treatment would be world priorities.  I can imagine.  Although fathers are necessary too, we have no shortage of men pushing forward their personal agendas.  None of them would be where they are without mothers.  And women are the ones who give us care.  I can imagine a world where Mother’s Day wouldn’t have to feel so politicized, almost polemical.

With all eyes on Pope Leo, I can’t help but think how many treat Mother’s Day like an indulgence.  You know you want to get back to your vices, so why not pay for them in advance?  Celebrate mothers today so we can get back to business as usual tomorrow.  I don’t believe that we’ve lost the ability for transformation.  We can make the world a better place.  Think what it would be like if, before undertaking some cruel action, a person stopped to imagine their mother watching them do it.  Would not the world start to improve?  It is a world where we seem to prefer guns to roses, but it’s also a world with an unwritten future.  Pay attention to your mother.  Maybe things will start to get better.

I believe in the transformative potential of holidays.  We have to take their lessons seriously.  I’m sure I’m not the only working stiff who lives life anticipating the next holiday when things might change for the better.  We have to remember, however, what the holidays teach us.  Not treat them as simply facile days of obligation.  Think of Mom and then get back to the grind.  It doesn’t need to be a grind.  We can learn to cooperate and get along, just like Mom told us to.  Instead of isolating such thoughts to a single day, we could repeat them like a mantra.  I don’t know about you, but looking at the headlines, I could do with a bit of peace and love.  And I still believe that things can, and likely will get better.  And I give the credit to our mothers.

Father of Yeti

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“Always steals women.”  So Subra mutters high in the Himalayas.  Perhaps one of the most unintentionally funny bad movies, The Snow Creature does hold a place in history.  It was the first abominable snowman, or yeti, movie made.  It’s also incredibly cheaply made with a costume that most twelve-year-olds could’ve fabricated better.  As the antepenultimate movie in the “Beast Collection,” I felt obligated to watch it one snowy weekend.  Spouting colonialist and sexist values like a Republican, the story is tedious even at eighty minutes.  But funny at times also.  So a botanist travels to the Himalayas to study plants at 10,000 feet.  His fun is interrupted when a yeti kidnaps the head sherpa’s wife, causing the sherpa to take charge and start to hunt the beast.

The American scientist decides to capture the yeti instead so that he’ll have something to give the foundation sponsoring the expedition.  Leaving behind a female and baby yeti, both killed, he drugs the snowman until a special refrigerated container can be built—gee whiz, Americans can do anything!—to bring the beast back.  And they fly west from Bombay to California, where, when they land the beast is held up in customs (I kid you not).  There’s a debate about whether he’s human or animal and while the debate goes on, the creature escapes.  The hapless police can’t find a seven-foot tall yeti wandering around Los Angeles at night, harassing the women.  Finally they figure he’s using the storm sewers.  They trap him but, alas, have to shoot him.  At this point they completely lose interest in the corpse and exchange meaningless banter as they drive off.

This movie seems to be what the Trump administration wants America to revert to.  Bossing around BIPOC people in their own countries, women being helpless without men to rescue them, and corporations buying what is arguably a human being.  Sounds like a playbook to me.  Also, it was extremely cheap.  What amazed me is that United Artists distributed it.  People must’ve been pretty hungry for entertainment back in 1954.  Having said that, it is worth watching for a laugh.  Now that streaming exists, you can find this free on various services.  If you like very wooden acting, and superior Americans having their way in Asia just because they’re, well, Americans, you might find this a passable way to spend a snowy weekend (wait til winter to watch it; it’ll keep).  Only a word of advice: be sure to lock up your women before you do, because the beast always steals women.

For the Camera

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Smile 2 is getting some good critical notice and I hadn’t seen Smile (1) yet.  Psychological horror often bothers me, but I figured I’d grin and bear it.  I’m glad I did.  The ideas in the film, which participates in “the stigma trope,” are disturbing because it’s unclear if Rose (the protagonist) is mentally ill or not.  The stigma trope posits that something has infected someone either by having seen something they shouldn’t (as in Ringu) or by physical contagion (It Follows) and the victim can’t shake it.  Smile may trigger viewers with suicidal phobias since the premise is that an entity feeding on trauma passes from person to person by having the new victim witness the previous victim’s suicide.  Rose is a therapist who hasn’t gotten over the trauma of her mother’s death.  Rose witnesses a patient die by suicide, and who smiles just before she does it.

The patient told Rose that she’d watched one of her professors die by suicide.  Rose subsequently learns that the professor also witnessed a suicide and so on and so on.  Each prior victim had watched someone else die.  Now Rose has to figure out how to break the cycle, otherwise she’ll perpetuate it.  The idea of inadvertently obtaining a “sticky” entity is pretty scary, and a very human concern.  One of the more frightening aspects of possession movies is the belief that now that demons know that you know, they will target you.  Interestingly, what makes this film provocative is that the victim has to have suffered trauma before.  As such, it is a study of trauma and its lasting effects.  I suspect most people don’t intentionally traumatize others (world leaders excepted).  Trauma can be dealt with (or not) in very different ways.

Smile did quite well at the box office.  I suspect there are a lot of us traumatized people around.  Capitalism encourages traumatizing others through slow violence, if not the more obvious quick way.  People don’t easily walk away from events that scarred them, particularly if they happened at an early age.  Such people, if experience is anything to go by, find themselves in vulnerable positions in life and rather thoughtless people, often for religious reasons, end up traumatizing them even further.  I have to admit that there were triggers for me in Smile.  I still struggle with a few of my own traumas that were never resolved.  Like Rose, I sometimes don’t know who can really be trusted with such things.  This is a perceptive movie.  I guess now I can put on a happy face and see Smile 2.  But first I’d better talk to my therapist.

Saint Francis

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With the death of the most saint-like Pope in living memory, it feels a little like fate that I’d seen Conclave just three days before.  Francis was the only Pope I’ve seen, and am likely to see.  He cared for people more than dusty doctrines that still repress.  He laid hands on the sick and genuinely loved human beings.  Given the reactionary world of politics, I suspect his successor will be conservative, but I would be glad to be wrong.  All this seesawing on the way to progress makes me a bit seasick.  And Francis was a man who, from a humble background, understood the necessity of moving forward rather than pretending things always stay the same.  I already miss him.

It was on the rare occasion of being invited to a New York City church to offer a program that I saw him.  Since I’d be staying a couple nights in Manhattan, my wife joined me.  On the way to meet her after work on that Friday, I saw large crowds along 34th Street in Herald Square.  The buzz indicated that the Pope would be going this way on his way out of town.  The police refused to confirm that, but it seemed like a good bet.  I asked Kay, “Do you want to see the Pope?”  We found a place in the crowd (this was pre-pandemic, of course) where we had a good view of the street and eventually the motorcade rolled through, Pope Francis in his trademark Fiat, the window down, waving at the crowd.  And then he was gone.  

In New York City you see motorcades.  I’d seen President Obama’s go by once, on the way to the United Nations, I think it was.  But still, seeing the Pope was incredible.  Not shielded behind bulletproof glass, his care for the nameless crowds felt genuine.  I empathize with those raised in humble circumstances who manage just to survive, let alone become the head of the largest branch of Christianity.  I like to think he was a reluctant Cardinal, and a reluctant Pope.  Conclave is fiction, of course, but the idea of choosing someone who really doesn’t want the job is immensely appealing.  How different from world leaders we’re now burdened with!  Men (almost always) who see themselves as God’s gift to us, clawing at power.  At the same time, Francis, who was a divine gift, actually remembered what Jesus said and did.  The world is poorer for his death but richer for the lessons he taught by example.

Thinking of Home

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The earth, and even life on it, will, I’m confident, outlive our petty desires for money and being the king of the hill.  Scientists are getting tantalizingly close to demonstrating something that many of us already know—life exists elsewhere.  Chemical signatures of life appear as close as Venus and as far as K2-18b.  I suspect our universe is full of life.  And life is more than just rationality.  We’re creatures driven to survive and that level of will appears to be universal.  As Ian Malcolm says, “Life will find a way,” or something similar.  Earth Day should be a celebration but under too many Republican presidents it has become a plea to please stop intentionally harming our planet.  I grew up in that distorted religion known as Fundamentalism.  I learned that the destruction of the world was necessary to force God’s hand with the second coming.  The planet was here to exploit and waste since he’ll be back any day now.

Unlike many of my cohort, I decided to learn more about that perspective.  The more I learned the more shocked I became.  A warped and twisted message had been passed along as Gospel truth, and that the care the creator bestowed upon creation was merely a smokescreen to hide Jesus’ return.  I still believe we are not capable of completely destroying the planet.  Life will continue with or without us.  Life is persistent and hopeful.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care of it.  Earth Day has become a rallying point for those who see the world sensibly.  We have so much wonderful life on this planet.  In our arrogance and in our tendency to take mythology literally, we have assumed the worst.  Why not take care of what we were given?  Jesus may not come back, but perhaps the Lorax will.

There are ways to live sustainably on this planet.  It does mean that some of the richest will need to surrender some of their wealth and power.  We need to learn the habits of requiring less and appreciating more what we have.  Like most people born into the world in this era, I struggle against the desire for new things.  Novelty is natural to such curious creatures as ourselves.  But there are other such curious creatures too.  They have a place here, even as those which seem to have no curiosity do.  It’s a planet big enough for all of us.  We just need to be sensible about it.  And remember the earth today and be thankful for our home every day.

Image credit: NASA/ISS Expedition 28, public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Easter Gathering

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On Easter I’m thinking of Conclave.  My wife had been wanting to see it and we watched it on Good Friday—a work day, of course, in this “Christian” nation.  In any case, it’s fascinating for a couple of reasons.  One is that, as a drama surrounding the election of a new pope, it draws you in.  The politics and intrigue are, I assure you, quite real within in the church.  People are, in seems, incurably political.  Conclave is fiction, of course.  And in reality, very few people are ever admitted to the chambers where a world leader is elected by those priests who’ve risen to the highest levels of church hierarchy.  This fictional reconstruction may give a window into that.  The other reason that I found it so fascinating is that it was quite a box office success for being a movie about a religious subject that isn’t biblical.  Appropriate viewing for Easter weekend.

There were a few striking scenes.  Here’s the outline, though: a pope has died and Cardinal Lawrence is the deacon in charge of the conclave to elect a new one.  Four main candidates exist—one a staunch traditionalist, one a liberal, one an African who is conservative, and the last a moderate American who has a past.  The pope had appointed a new cardinal shortly before his death and some people think he’d make a good pope, despite his relative youth.  One of the striking scenes is Cardinal Lawrence’s homily to open the conclave.  He preaches against certainty.  Not only is this a powerful scene, for some of us watching he is absolutely correct.  Certainty is the death of faith.  That scene alone is worth watching the movie for.  Go ahead, it’s Easter.

The other striking scene is the twist ending, which I won’t reveal here.  Anyone who’s honest and who’s lived long enough to become a pope has secrets.  Not all of them reach to the level of scandal, but the movie also emphasizes that the pope is also a sinner but must be willing to seek forgiveness.  Indeed and amen.  The problem we face today is that, even and perhaps especially in Protestantism, many people look to condemn sinners without realizing their own faults.  The movie points out that even the holiest acknowledged person within Christendom can’t make any claims to perfection.  If we’d all admit that we’re doing the best we can not to offend deity or fellow human being, perhaps there really would be cause to celebrate this Easter.  Even without a conclave.

Horror Adjacent

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We have the basic facts, but still, it takes a good bit of imagination.  We simply don’t know what the life of Mary Shelley was like, as experienced by the woman herself.  The movie Mary Shelley isn’t a horror film but it’s horror adjacent.  How could a movie about the woman who invented Frankenstein be anything but?  The handling of Haifaa al-Mansour’s film is generally as a drama, or a romance.  The story takes the angle that it was her stormy relationship with both Percy Shelley and her own father that led Mary to express her feelings of abandonment in her novel.  And while we have to acknowledge the liberties all movie-makers take, it does seem interested in keeping fairly near the known details of Mary Shelley’s life.  Although other women were also writing then, it was still a “man’s world” she tried to break into.

I confess that one of my reasons for wanting to see this film was that Ken Russell’s Gothic had a powerful impact on my younger mind.  That movie, which is over-the-top, being the first I’d seen telling the tale, had become canonical in my mind.  I know the dangers of literalism, and I wanted to see someone else’s take on the story.  Al-Mansour’s treatment takes a female perspective to the narrative.  It seems that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were both advocates of what might now be termed a playboy lifestyle, and that Mary, daughter of forward thinking Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was fairly liberal herself.  Although Percy Shelley, like Lord Byron, was quite famous in his time, that didn’t always equate to financial solvency.  I could relate to parts of that quite well—full of creative ideas and shy on cash flow.

Mary Shelley didn’t rock the critics, but many felt it was a thoughtful treatment.  It is dark and gothic, but with no real monsters.  It did explain a bit of inside baseball about Ken Russell’s film.  Both movies make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare to explore the famous meeting of Byron and the Shelleys that led to the writing of Frankenstein.  Indeed, Gothic makes a good deal of it.  Mary Shelley explains that Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had an affair with Fuseli.  I was unaware of that connection.  Something was clearly circulating among the Romantics, many of whom knew each other and, in their own ways, became formative of culture centuries down the road.  And although many critics weren’t impressed, I think it’s about time that a woman’s point of view was brought to Mary Shelley’s life in a world not kind to women.  Even if a woman gave the world one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.

O Levels

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Out jogging last week, I was thinking about a harsh interview I once had.  It was in Manhattan.  The woman interviewing me made no attempt to hide her disdain.  I’m not sure if it was for me personally or what I represent.  She did not smile at all, not even for the usual niceties.  She asked me whether I was better at speaking or writing.  I said they were about equal.  “No,” she briskly corrected.  “Which is it, one or the other?”  This came to me while jogging because I was reflecting that public speaking and writing are really the only two things I’m any good at, and I have worked on both for my entire life.  These years later I still can’t say which is stronger.  That was appreciated by my students and fellow scholars in my teaching career, if reviews are anything to go by.  I like to communicate.  (My wife might say too much so.)

Owls are difficult to spot in the wild.  Just last week I’d seen only my second in some sixty years.  This was a screech owl.  It’s not unusual to hear them when jogging at dawn.  This time my right ear picked up on it more than my left as I jogged past a grove of trees.  I looked but saw nothing.  The trees were budding and some had small leaves already.  I reckon I’ve seen my fair share of bald eagles.  They’re large and they’re pretty obvious when they’re in the area.  Owls are more secretive.  Good at hiding.  I reached the end of the path and turned around.  As I reached the stand of trees, now on my left, it screeched again and I saw a blurred flapping of wings as it disappeared in flight.  I couldn’t identify this owl in a line-up, but then again, that’s not something I’m good at. The voice is distinctive, however.

The person hiring is a bald eagle.  Bold, aggressive, and sometimes literally bald.  I’m more like that screech owl.  Their public speaking is distinct and isn’t really a screech at all.  I can’t speak for their writing ability.  Life is our chance to come to know ourselves.  We may think we have it figured out in our twenties, but each score of years makes you question past assumptions.  Two things I always thought would be part of my career—public speaking and compelling writing—have both fallen by the wayside.  At least professionally.  What we say to others has an impact.  Especially if we’re eagles.  All things considered, however, I would rather be an owl.

Photo by James Toose on Unsplash

Going Viral

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Okay, so there are some pretty big plot holes, but Viral is nevertheless an effective horror film.  The “virus” is actually a parasite spread by blood, which carriers cough in your face, if they don’t kill you first in a fit of parasite-induced rage.  The really scary thing is that this movie was produced before Covid-19 and the government response, as presented in the movie, is somewhat believable.  Nevertheless, it retains its ability to be a story about family and loyalty.  There are some missed opportunities in that regard, but overall it’s fairly well done.  It certainly keeps the tension going and I feel some spoilers coming on so I’ll warn you here.  A Blumhouse production, it seems to have had a reasonable budget.  And there’s a solid attempt to have a storyline with characters you care about.

Sisters Stacy and Emma are trying to adjust to a new school system as news reports increasingly focus on a new, and lethal, virus.  Their California community is the site of the first U.S. outbreak and the initial panic isn’t unlike what happened in 2019.  I’m a little surprised that, given that development, the movie didn’t gain more residual watching.  In any case, a quarantine and curfew are set up, but the teens of the housing development decide to have a party.  Kids will be kids, after all.  Of course, an infected guy is there and Stacy, the older sister, gets infected.  Their parents were caught outside the quarantine zone, so they have to try to survive on their own.  Emma has a new boyfriend—the guy next door—and he urges Emma to leave her sister, but she won’t.  Martial law is declared and “nests” of the infected are being bombed by the government.  Emma and boyfriend manage to survive, but the rest of the town’s a wasteland.

As I say, the implications are the really scary part.  Governments have the mandate to protect the greatest number of people—isn’t that utilitarianism, by default?—and decide to cut their losses and destroy infected communities because there’s no stopping the disease.  Even as the gaps in the story kept coming up, I was asking myself would our government do such a thing.  I could find nothing to dissuade me that it would.  Self-preservation is human nature.  As is might makes right.  Our government, for my entire life, has consisted of the wealthy and one thing we know about those with money is that they’ll do whatever they can to protect their interests.  Oh, and there are a number of effective jump startles as well. But they’re not as scary as the government.