Nextdoor

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Eight years we’ve been in this house.  In that time the only neighbor’s name we knew was the guy who owned the house immediately next door.  He bought the house only a couple of months before we bought ours.  We were sad to see him move out over the winter, but when I saw new folks milling about in the spring I went over and introduced myself.  Thankfully, they’re nice folks.  While I was talking to them a neighbor across the street who’d seen me hundreds of times without a word called out and introduced herself to them as well.  She didn’t ask my name and apparently didn’t feel the need to know it.  She did say that she grew up in the house on the other side of ours.

That is the house we see from all our south-facing windows.  Four different sets of people have lived there in eight years.  Only the second set ever told us their names and talked with us.  To be fair, it is a rental property, owned by the real estate agent who sold us this house.  All day long at work I can see the tenants coming and going.  A married couple maybe a decade younger than us was there first.  Then a couple in their twenties/thirties—the friendly ones.  Then another couple with a couple of kids.  From overheard observations I gathered he worked in recruitment for Binghamton University (where my daughter went) and Rutgers (the last school at which I taught).  We have both Binghamton and Rutgers swag, but that never spurred any interest on their part.  Now I can’t figure out the renters.  They look like students to me, maybe from nearby Lehigh University.  There’s two men and two women (I think) but they never act like couples.  Who knows?

The other day I was out fighting the weeds when another neighbor across the street was outside.  She asked my name and this led to a conversation and learning, after all these years, hers and her husband’s names.  All of this brought to mind something I learned as a candidate for the ministry in the United Methodist Church.  Methodists practice itineracy—bishops move ministers every few years so that a “permanent” minister doesn’t become too settled.  It was then that I learned most congregations (neighborhoods?) don’t really feel comfortable with a minister until after about seven years, I think it was.  Seems like our timing is about right.  For the first time in eight years we know the names of two sets of homeowners in our immediate vicinity.  Welcome to the neighborhood.  

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Not a Flower

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There are occasional benefits from my attempts not to learn about movies before I watch them.  I approached Bugonia unaware of what it was about, or about its twist ending.  That ending makes it a difficult film to discuss in any detail, but I’ll start with the question of how to classify it.  Different websites use different designations: horror, sci-fi, dark comedy, thriller, satire, crime, and so forth.  In some ways it’s genre-defying, like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Parasite, and Poor Things.  A movie that will get you thinking and one that’s exceptionally good at misdirecting you.  While not a financial success, it received critical acclaim.  It does follow a storyline, and there are hints of what’s “really” going on as the story unfolds.  Here’s the basic idea, without spoilers (I hope).

Teddy Gatz is a conspiracy theorist and mentally unbalanced.  His mother is hospitalized in a coma, having been a drug addict, and he was abused as a small boy by his babysitter.  His autistic cousin Don goes along with what he says.  Teddy is planning to kidnap an alien, the CEO of the company for which he works.  He’s convinced she (Michelle) is from Andromeda and that her mothership will be in range during the upcoming lunar eclipse.  He believes the Andromedans are killing all the bees.  He and his cousin pull off the kidnapping and imprison Michelle in their basement.  He interrogates and tortures her.  She tries to convince them that this is all a mistake, but Teddy is very certain of his convictions.  Michelle finds her way into a secret room long enough to use Teddy’s conspiracy theories against him.  He takes her back to her office so they can meet the mothership.  I’ll leave it at that.

There are definitely some funny bits to it all.  It’s also a poignant movie.  At times it felt like it was making light of mental illness, but in context it really doesn’t.  The film has a strong ecological message and a somewhat disturbing final melange of images.  Is it horror?  It definitely has some elements of the genre.  I wouldn’t say that it’s the best overall classification, though.  I’m not really sure what that might be.  The thriller elements are clearly there.  It’s the kind of story for when you’re in the mood for something disorienting and a bit threatening.  I haven’t figured out the title yet, but it is the kind of movie I’m glad to have watched.  With no warnings.

Inspiring Ideas

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Human minds are strange.  For instance, they often experience their best ideas when it’s difficult to write them down.  Or consider that our best work often comes just as time is running out, as if the added pressure is what produces these diamonds of thought.  Or yet again, the problem that resolved  itself just as your body’s dropping off to sleep and you’re too tired to write it down.  These kinds of things aren’t isolated incidents.  They happen all the time.  I was thinking about this because I found a broken shower memo board in the attic.  My wife gave this to me as a gift at Nashotah House.  I used to complain about having my best ideas while in the shower.  The internet and easy electronics may have existed, but they weren’t part of everyday life yet.  Besides, I prefer to write things down.  This plastic board could be mounted in the shower and had a waterproof “pen” that could work while wet.

Since minds are strange, after a while the best ideas stopped coming in the shower.  There was a way of recording them, so they shifted to other times.  These days they’re likely to come while I’m jogging.  I’m not inclined to stop and try to find some voice recording app on my phone, if I remember to take it, and I don’t jog with my pen and notebook that I otherwise keep at hand.  Since the idea is endangered, it shows up.  Sometimes it gets written down when I get home—I do keep a small notebook just inside the door—other times I see a fox or an owl and ideas vanish.  With my strange sleep schedule, I’m not inclined to arouse myself while a great idea dawns just as the theta waves start.  Generally it’s gone by morning.

For those of us who write, losing ideas is more like losing teeth than losing a hair.  It’s something substantial with fewer replacements available.  For whatever reason, ideas seem to have learned to avoid the time I’m in the shower.  At Nashotah that was generally after my morning writing session and jog, while getting ready to go to morning chapel.  These days showers tend to come after a long day at work, relaxing me before sleep.  My mind is already tired by then.  These rare ideas are almost playful at being inopportune.  If they are captured, they can be written down.  But they have to be trapped first.  As if they have minds of their own.

Fearing Childhood

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There is a list.  It has the movies that I want to watch on it.  Most of the time said movies aren’t available freely (i.e., you need to pay separately to stream them, they’re only available on disc, etc.) and most of the time I’m watching my pennies.  If a movie on my list comes to a streaming service I use, I try to watch it before it disappears.  To get on the list there has to be a recommendation from someone.  The Boogeyman was actually recommended some time back on a New York Times list of scary movies.  It then came to a streaming service.  I can say that it is scary.  You have to accept the world of the story (i.e., the boogeyman does actually exist) but once you do there is a lot of tension built into the film and plenty of edge-of-your-seat moments.

So the boogeyman is real.  And it feeds on sorrows and fears.  (And people.)  It makes its way into the Harper household when a man whose children were killed by it visits Dr. Harper (a psychologist).  Harper’s wife recently died and when the man dies by “suicide” in a dark closet of the Harper’s house, the boogeyman moves in.  It can imitate the voices of people and it likes to scare you before eating you.  Harper’s two daughters see it, but since the death of their mother, family relationships have been strained.  The film is as much about coping with loss as it is about a monster, but it does build up to the monster attacks with a deft hand.  And it deals with that perennial human fear of the dark.  And closet doors that open on their own.  And things that might be under the bed.

Fear of nighttime dangers may well be universal, and it can be spurred along by dreams.  (My own dreams of late have been quite intense.)  And The Boogeyman plays on Edgar Allan Poe’s observation that women in danger is a poetic theme.  In the movie the boogeyman does seem to prefer girls.  I wasn’t aware until after watching the movie that it’s based on a Stephen King short story.  In retrospect that’s not surprising because King has a way of asking, “What if” that leads to scary consequences.  While not a great movie, it is a horror film with heart and a message.  And it’s fairly easy to see why even someone at the New York Times might recommend it as a scary film.  Horror fans can safely add it to their lists.

Sleepy Hollow Returns

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Timing has never been my strong suit.  Regular readers may know that the reason I tried to get Sleepy Hollow as American Myth out when I did was that Lindsey Anderson Beer had been announced as the director for a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  I prioritized getting the book done and settled with a publisher.  Still, even in the time it takes to write a book and get it through the production process, the movie was no closer to being seen.  Yesterday while reading a trade news article I learned that Lindsey Anderson Beer has just signed a publisher for her first novel.  Its title?  Hollow.  One guess as to what it’s about.  Beer, of course, is known as the writer/director of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the Stephen King story.  An up-and-coming horror director. I was anticipating that her Sleepy Hollow venture would make a big splash.  And my book would be just out.

Sleepy Hollow is one of those stories that keeps reappearing in American culture.  That’s the point of my book.  Indeed, even as I was attempting, in vain, to get it noticed, I learned that J. W. Ocker was finishing his own book on Sleepy Hollow, due out in September.  And now I learn that the putative director of a new film is writing her own novel.  The story bears repeated retellings.  The way that I characterize it in my book is as a labyrinth.  I have also started my own fictional retelling of the story.  I’ve got a couple novels that I’d like to get out the door before turning back to it, but I certainly understand the draw.  Sleepy Hollow is America’s founding ghost story.  I do hope Beer continues with the movie.  My guess is that it will be based on her own novel, which, naturally, I will read.

We keep coming back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even now, with August awaiting at the end of this week, autumn is swiftly approaching.  And with it rides the Headless Horseman.  As a figure, he’s ubiquitous around Halloween.  I’m already looking forward to next summer when, I hope, McFarland will be willing to drop the price of my book a bit.  I recently had a friend say they were interested in reading it but it was priced a bit too high.  I get that.  I do hope to be part of the conversation as Ocker’s book comes out and then, a year later, Beer’s.  Even if I’m not, this is precisely what my book is about.

Dogs, etc.

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From Wikipedia

An incidental mention of jackals in a book made me curious.  Where did they come on the canine family tree?  I looked it up and was surprised at the results.  Based on DNA studies, they are further removed from the dog than the gray wolf is.  The lineage is quite ancient.  Quite clearly, this is a successful form of predator.  They’re actually omnivores, but they do hunt.  Just a few days ago I saw a red fox while out on my early morning jog.  As I watched it, and it watched me, I was thinking how like a dog it is.  Foxes are, however, still further from dogs on the family tree of life, falling into a separate phylum.  (I use that word advisedly, since since high school it seems that cladistics have become so complex—not that they were ever easy—that you need an electron microscope to tease similar creatures apart.)  When I see coyotes on the jog (quite rare), it seems they are a step further from dogs than wolves.

I grew up with dogs.  Our first lasting one was a good part beagle, and, in my opinion the best dog ever.  We don’t have pets now.  My wife tends to be allergic and pet care complicates travel (when we can afford it), but I often marvel at how well dogs have adapted to us.  And vice versa.  People now take their dogs into grocery stores and other shops.  While in an outdoor goods store recently, I was surprised to see a dog and its human pet stroll by.  The dog was as high as my chest.  (Or at least rib cage.)  And yet, in the wild, a jackal could well attack you.  And they’re biblical.  So biblical that they got picked up as the “father” of the Antichrist in The Omen.  Dogs, in the biblical world, were considered unclean.  I suspect people kept them as working pets anyway.  That’s why our species domesticated them.  The jackal, on the other hand, is a wild animal.

If I saw a jackal while jogging I’d probably mistake it for a dog.  Depending.  Only long hours of studying have taught me to distinguish coyotes (which I very rarely see) from dogs.  Since jackals aren’t native to the Americas, the coyote fills much the same ecological niche.  Since about 2016 they can be found in any area of the continental United States.  They even adapt to city life.  I guess the jackal is the country cousin.  Coyotes attack humans more than gray wolves do, probably because there are many more coyotes.  And they are just about everywhere.  And the reference to the jackal I was was, I assure you, truly only incidental.

It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Scary Painting?

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The Painted tries.  It really does.  The premise is good but the execution makes it all look rather silly.  The failure comes from the writing, the acting, and the directing.  The idea of the plot is that paintings in a house inherited by Evelyn and Adam come to life because a jilted ancestor became a succubus and her painting controls the others in the house.  There are several points at which the logic of the premise breaks down and even more points where the family (Evelyn and Adam have three children) act in a way no sane person would act in such circumstances.   Plot points are raised and dropped.  Some of the special effects are pretty good, however.  Overall, though, this horror film doesn’t scare and it inadvertently becomes funny.  It’s really too bad because there is potential here.

The Elster family has inherited a gothic house from a cousin who died in a murder-suicide with her new husband.  This is because, using a grimoire, he summoned a painted demon who’s actually a succubus.  The Elsters move in and quickly determine that the paintings are attacking them.  Adam, who likes pornography because his business is failing (!), has a fling with the succubus but doesn’t tell anyone.  The family flees the house in the middle of the night, but the succubus has come home with them.  The parents, discovering this, leave the kids alone so they can go back to the inherited house to take care of things.  When they get there the paintings attack, but they end up burning them on the lawn and going home.  At home, naturally, things have gone wrong.

Their college-age son has locked himself in the basement with their youngest daughter to sacrifice her.  The parents arrive home and get the key (which the high school-aged daughter apparently couldn’t do), free their youngest, and lock their son in said basement.  He’s very nearly broken out by the time they begin the ritual, but it doesn’t work.  Adam finally confesses to his affair with the succubus and decides his suicide is what’s needed to take care of the issue.  It helps, but only when the image of the succubus is burned out of the painting does the danger really pass.   There is a sincerity to the movie—as I say, it clearly tries.  It’s not intentionally bad nor is it completely mishandled. It’s just altogether it doesn’t fill the frame.  Spirit painting is a wonderful idea for a horror film.  The Painting, it seems, was released just a bit before it was fully dried.

Forgotten

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As most horror fans know, on a stormy night in 1816 a group of Romantics gathered and a scary story “contest” was suggested.  The best known result of this contest was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  More devoted horror fans will also know that John William Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” also had its origins on that night.  It was built on a very slim skeleton suggested by Lord Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts are lost to history.  As are those of the most overlooked of the group, Claire Clairmont; her story was finished some time later, unpublished.  Claire’s birth name was actually Jane, and she was Mary Shelley’s step-sister.  (Mary was Godwin at the time.)  Percy, Mary, and Claire had traveled to Geneva at Claire’s suggestion.  She was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child.  Shelley and Byron became fast friends and the three young men present on that night would all die within eight years.

Claire is unjustly forgotten.  Of the five gathered in Villa Diodati she lived the longest, making it to eighty.  She had a difficult but occasionally warm relationship with her step-sister.  This book by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton is the first real biography of Claire.  She lived a fascinating life.  Drawn from diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends, as well as the other sources of the historian’s art, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is quite readable.  And moving.  Claire was young and infatuated with Byron when she set out to seduce him.  He never returned the love she felt for him, and took responsibility for their daughter on the condition that Claire never see him again.  Her inability to see her own child was the great sorrow of her long life.

Claire went on to live in Italy, France, Russia, and Austria.  She was fluent in French, Italian, and German.  By all accounts she was a gifted musician.  She hobnobbed with high society, often by being a governess in aristocratic households.  She lived near poverty at times, but inherited a living from Percy when his father died.  It’s the sad fate of many who don’t get published that they are forgotten to history.  (Being published is, I hasten to add, no guarantee either!)  Claire’s personality comes through in this account as that of a strong, vivacious woman who defied the conventions of her era.  She made her own way in the world, never marrying, yet being sought out by those who latterly wanted accounts of Shelley’s life.  She’d lived with Percy and Mary for several years.  This is a story of a different but fascinating time.  I hope that future treatments of that famous night in 1816 might take a bit more notice of this deserving, if forgotten, woman.

Nightmare Talk

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For those inclined to podcasts, and who plan in advance, I wanted to pass along the information on this poster.  James Annitto and Victoria Jaye have kindly invited me to be a guest on their Nine Gates Podcast.  The topic will be Demons in Media.  This is a subject that has interested me for some time since it seems that our current ideas of what demons are owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Exorcist.  Yes, exorcism did exist long before the novel and blockbuster film.  And yes, many of the reported behaviors portrayed therein had been proclaimed by witnesses to said exorcisms—this is what gave William Peter Blatty the idea in the first place.  What had also happened, however, is that public interest in the topic had waned to the point that the novel and movie were so shocking as to jolt the interest back to life.

After The Exorcist, we had a new old monster to add to the horror lexicon.  The Exorcist-styled demon.  It has only grown from there.  A ritual that the Roman Catholic Church had mostly buried became frequently requested.  Protestants, never willing to let Catholics get the upper hand for long, joined in with their own methods of expelling demons.  Popularizers such as Malachi Martin and Ed and Lorraine Warren joined in, asserting demons were not all that uncommon after all.  Those who distrust science now had a new potential source to cure ailments that may have, ironically, been spawned by movies that convinced people that demons did exist.  I dealt with this in my book Nightmares with the Bible.  

I’ve occasionally been invited to various podcasts (a list is here) and I always enjoy it.  It reminds me of being back in the classroom, where I belong.  I realize blogs are outdated, but writing is what I do.  Also, putting together a single podcast can eat up a weekend while a blog post claims much less time.  I like to think I pay back the publicity of my kind hosts by advertising books here.  I have no idea if such notice ever leads anyone to add to any author’s coffers, but I can hope.  Living by the word has never been an easy prospect.  Certainly book royalties (in my experience) don’t come near reimbursing the expenses.  I suppose they’re more legacy building than anything else.  My “Kilroy was here” spray painted on the internet.  In any case, if you’re interested, on a forthcoming Tuesday night, look for me on the Nine Gates Podcast.

Lemony Reptiles

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Having embarked on A Series of Unfortunate Events again, and having just finished The Reptile Room again, I might reflect on Lemony Snicket’s contribution to dark academia.  I mentioned to a friend recently that some dark academia aficionados consider the series to fall into that genre.  Having had the books read to her at a young age, she asked “Why?”  That got me thinking again about this wide, wonderful, amorphous category of books.  In my personal calculus, dark academia involves education—and this may be book learning undertaken independently—something going seriously wrong, and, in the best of it, a gothic atmosphere.  While A Series of Unfortunate Events is generally quite funny and fun to read, it clearly has the main elements I seek in classifying dark academia.  The Baudelaire orphans are pursued relentlessly by Count Olaf in a setting which, although difficult to place time wise, has Victorian aesthetics.

Of course, The Reptile Room is the second book utilized by the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events to get it up to feature length.  Reading it again revealed just how distorted my memory of the story had become by the movie.  The resolution of the scam by Stephano in the film is merely a distraction by the children to come to the real reveal in the book.  I’m not one to diss the movie.  It is quite gothic and it has many quotable moments, but it isn’t the same as the books.  I still remember when we first learned about these books from a niece, very young at the time, who enthused about them.  We were just a little cautious about reading scary stories to our daughter because one Roald Dahl book we read really was too gruesome for a child of tender years.  We immediately loved this series, however.

A quarter century or so is plenty of time to forget details.  Rereading these books also reminds me how influential they were on some of my own writing, although I read them as what passes for an adult at the time.  (I was old enough to be, and indeed was, a father.)  It occurs to me, as it likely did back then, just how clueless adults are.  Some of the descriptions of Count Olaf in this book could easily be substituted for a particular denizen of the Oval Office these days.  And, I suspect, children are able to see through those who constantly make up excuses to cover their own incompetence.  I’m looking forward to The Wide Window.

In Hollywood

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Serial killers, depending on how they’re portrayed, often get a movie a horror rating.  But not always.  And not even when Quentin Tarantino writes and directs it.  My wife had been wanting to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood while, I must confess, I’d heard nothing about it.  I find the movies I watch through websites that tend to favor horror, or sometimes sci-fi.  After I realized she wanted to see it, the next trick was finding an evening that would allow for an almost three-hour movie.  (This is, I confess, entirely my fault.  I wake up very early and can’t stay up too late watching movies without completely trashing the next day.)  We finally found a weekend with enough wiggle room to fit it in.  Random murders, like those of the Charles Manson family, always bother me.  Still, this film makes it seem not so threatening.

The story is somewhat complex, but basically a fading actor and his stuntman buddy are trying to survive in, well, Hollywood.  The actor lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1969.  Much of the plot follows his efforts to stay relevant and his, in reality, scene-stealing stuntman’s antics.  Brad Pitt’s acting in this role definitely earned him that best supporting actor Oscar.  While the actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) struggles, unable to get over himself and his alcoholism, the stuntman meets some members of the Manson Family and visits Spahn Ranch.  I got uneasy at this part.  I’ve never been a fan of true crime and I’ve only had a passing idea of what took place with the tragic Tate murders.  Also, I didn’t know if the movie was depicting things as they might’ve actually happened or not.  (It isn’t, in case you’re as clueless as me.)

Overall, there is a comic resolution as the murderous plot gets turned back on the Manson kids.  Curiosity drove me to read about what had happened in California when I was six years old and I found myself getting dragged down a true crime rabbit hole I wanted to avoid.  Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it was because the movie was still lingering in my head, but the facts didn’t bother me as much as I thought they would.  There aren’t too many auteurs whose work I follow (Robert Eggers and Damian McCarthy are ones I do), so before Once Upon a Time, the only Tarantino film I’d previously seen was Pulp Fiction.  But then again, I’m more at home amid straightforward horror.  Preferably without serial killers.

More Rocks

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Another thing about rocks—I warned you!—is the matter of scale.  When I go out jogging, it’s on pea gravel.  Some of these tiny stones are interesting.  Or, if you’re the romantic type and gave or received an engagement ring, that diamond is likely not to be massive.  I’m always reminded of this when I go to a mall, say, which has a floor full of fossiliferous limestone.  I think of the hours I’ve spent poking around creek beds and cliff faces for fossils, and here, laid out for thousands of square feet, is polished flooring floating with fossils.  Or when I walk into a bank, say, and see a counter made of labradorite.  I carry a small labradorite piece in my pocket that my brother once gave me.  I love the way it catches the light and reflects a beautiful blue color back to me.  Here it is in massive form where I’m trying to make a modest withdrawal.

Once in Wisconsin we went to Devil’s Lake for the purple quartzite of the region.  If you look among the tumbles you can sometimes find clear quartz crystals.  I’ve noticed that on rockhound YouTube channels that collectors are chuffed to find nice, if small quartz crystals.  They’re collectable.  But they’re also small.  Size is one of the reasons for not letting rock collections grow too much.  I’ve tried my hand at making small sculptures out of significant rocks.  I can see some of them on the landing window ledge from where I’m sitting at the moment.  They’re small, but heavy, and if we ever move, will require careful wrapping.  I’m not even sure what kind of rock they’re made of.

Wisconsin quartzite with quartz crystals

Rock identification is hard work.  I have a Moh’s scale set.  A streak plate.  A hand loupe.  It’s hard to use the acid test (vinegar will do) because the pieces are so small.  Identification is often destructive.  This might not be an issue if I had a ton of similar rocks to dispose of.  No, but when you have just a handful, and these had to fit in your luggage along with your clothes, making TSA agents scratch their heads, you’re reluctant to damage them just to figure out what they are.  So identifying the small rocks I have is difficult.  Online forums tend to be unhelpful in this regard.  Not even the color can give you certain answers.  Once I collected some jasper in a creek.  I could identify it because a large boulder clearly had jasper intrusions and I could compare.  The piece I took home, of course, was quite small.  Small, however, does not mean insignificant.

Dark Academese

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I thought I was having a stroke.  The words on the page just didn’t make sense.  Nouns were being used as verbs.  Gerunds were mugging nouns.  A subject for the sentence was impossible to be found.  Was this a brain seizure?  No, it was a piece of academic writing.  In a field in which I hold a terminal degree.  This made me feel plain terminal.  I wonder what has happened to academia.  My wife and I were going to be an academic couple.  We started out when there were defined academic disciplines and with a little bit of discipline-specific training you could read just about any journal article in said discipline.  Now hires are being made in what seem like completely made up fields.  People can’t explain their appointments, so they opt for addressing their current research project.  And I confirm with Toto that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

Fearing for my sanity, I asked my wife for a reality check.  She opined (probably correctly) that in the 1980s universities were issuing lots and lots of business degrees.  More and more people were thinking college was the same as job training, not teaching young people to think for themselves.  That could explain how the rules of grammar have been abandoned so that a humanities professor can make him/herself sound like a nuclear physicist.  And those of us with degrees from the early nineties are unemployable because the standard disciplines just aren’t on offer any more.  I scratched my head when the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh couldn’t get a position in religious studies approved but was launching a marina management major.  (No joke.)

I’m a fan of dark academia.  I think maybe it makes sense given the weirdness into which I’ve stumbled.  I like to think I have a reasonable education, but I often come across documents in my own field that I can’t hope to understand.  Perhaps I’m just a slave to S-V-O (subject-verb-object, to eschew obfuscation).  All I want is to be able to understand what I’m reading from my peers.  They’ve come to believe, however, that if you write so that people understand what you’re trying to express, they’ve somehow failed in erudition.  I love higher education.  I’d go back to the professorate in a wink.  I’d be considered somewhat more ancient than protoplasm, I expect.  I went to school to learn how to communicate effectively and to express my findings so that they could be understood.  Today I’m wiping my brow, glad to learn that this isn’t a stroke after all.

Life Underground

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Having really enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was looking forward to The Starless Sea, despite its nearly 600 pages.  I don’t mind getting lost in a book; in fact it’s one of life’s true and simple joys.  The Starless Sea came to my attention as a dark academia book.  The story is a good one, but in my uninformed opinion, a bit too long.  The fault is my own, I’m sure.  My sensitivity to high fantasy has reached a point where swords tend to put me off.  And some bits, particularly in book V were a bit confusing.  Still, Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful, and at some points sublime.  If it’d been a bit shorter I’d probably be gushing.  Instead I’m reflectively admiring.  As a sometime writer myself, I know that you write what you write and others may not get it.  That’s life.

The story generally follows grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins as he finds a book from a library of a world that’s beneath the ground.  A world that includes a harbor on the Starless Sea.  That world is inhabited by the surviving members of a decaying society made up of stories.  Most members of this world (and it’s difficult not to see this as an allegory) have left for the world above (this world).  Access between the two worlds is through doors.  Sometimes real doors, other times doors painted on a wall.  Zachary finally goes through one, having not tried one outside his house when he was just a boy.  He’s not sure if he wants to stay in the Starless Sea world or not, but he gets roped into the story.

Many other characters, at varying levels of the story within a story get involved, of course.  He meets his true love, and one of the undergrads he taught gets interested in his fate, and the denizens of the world below are intriguing characters in their own right.  Despite the length of the book, there are still plenty of gaps left for the readers to fill in for themselves.  Again, my own limitations prefer to have not too many gaps because I get confused.  The story tips a hat to several of its influences explicitly, and in many ways reminded me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  With its grad school protagonist, lots of libraries, and even a secret society, this fantasy is a card-carrying dark academia novel.  The genre encompasses may differing books and styles.  And I’m glad to have read this one as part of my own quest in that genre.  It was a sustained escape from life in the upper world.