Individualisms

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As an individual that stands out in the herd, metaphorically (standing out  is always dangerous, I know), I don’t tend to follow trends.  Blending in isn’t my strong suit.  A current, or recent trend, was to be seen carrying a disposable coffee cup when in public.  At least for a while there, everybody was doing it.  Walking down the street, going grocery shopping, at the mall.  It was almost like a fashion statement.  Anybody who was somebody had a cup of warm liquid in their hand.  Perhaps in my case economics and personal choice made the decision not to do this.  Economically, a five-dollar cup of coffee is out of my range; I’m not a hedge-fund manager.  I haven’t gone out for coffee in some years because of the personal choice aspect of it: I gave up caffeine.  This was several years ago.  I didn’t like being addicted to daily coffee, so I stopped, cold turkey.  But I still like the taste of coffee—that was hard earned.

These days the personal water bottle industry must be a good one to be into.  I recently visited friends and I noticed everyone had their personal water bottle.  I tend to leave mine at home.  Yes, I have one for the basic reason that running downstairs to refill a glass with water multiple times a day would mean that I’d miss an awful lot of work.  I drink quite a bit of water in a day.  About a gallon when I’m not traveling.  In my regimented life, I have a water bottle that I fill four times a day.  I know its capacity and, trying to stay healthy, I drink it down whether I feel like it or not.  I tend to leave it at home, however, as I mentioned.  At this gathering of friends (which was at somebody’s house) everyone who didn’t live there had their personal water bottle.  I was just using a glass from the kitchen.

There seems to be a trend of being seen with your water bottle.  I recently had to buy a new one because I’d been using an old stainless steel bottle well over a decade old.  It’d been put in the freezer with water in it before a hike and the bottom had, naturally enough, convexed to the pressure.  Being the thrifty sort, I pulled out a hammer and rendered it unlikely to tip over again.  It worked for years, but had become unstable again. Since it sits next to a computer all day, I couldn’t risk it.  The first thing I discovered is that water bottles meeting my exact specs were very expensive.  It’s a trend.  So at our friends’ house one of them offered to buy me a cup of coffee.  We live in a day when you can get a decaf latte with oat milk, so I indulged in an old habit.  As we walked down the chilly street, coffee cups in hand, I realized that I’m just like everybody else.

Not Too Tired

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It was the choice of reading a very long Stephen King novel or watching a very long movie.  The fact that Doctor Sleep was leaving Netflix soon decided the toss.  I’d heard that this sequel to The Shining wasn’t bad, but not as good as the original.  Stanley Kubrick’s movie is a masterpiece, so trying to follow it up requires more confidence that I would be able to muster.  Still, Doctor Sleep is not bad.  Danny and Wendy survive, but Dan still sees the Overlook entities coming after him.  As an adult he has shut out the shine and become an alcoholic.  He catches a bus to New Hampshire and meets a recovered alcoholic who befriends him.  In recovery himself, he works in a hospice where he uses his shine to help those whose deaths are imminent, earning him the nickname “Doctor Sleep.”

Meanwhile, entities like those at the Overlook are killing and “eating” kids with shine, but they call it steam.  Abra, a girl with very strong shine, contacts Dan because she experienced the creatures’ latest murder.  The creatures’ leader, Rose, is able to project herself anywhere and she finds Abra and becomes intent on “eating” her.  Dan, who realizes he has to use his shine to save her, with the help of his new friend (actually they’ve now known each other for eight years) goes to trap the entities.  One of them, however, kidnaps Abra and when Dan meets her after the kidnapping he knows they have to lure Rose to the Overlook Hotel.  I think I’ll stop summarizing there, but this gives you an idea of just how large a tale this is.

There are plenty of cues for those who want to be reminded of The Shining.  The climax at the Overlook takes viewers back to the original location and brings back some of the characters.  Overall it’s pretty well done but just what these entities, or creatures, are isn’t really explained.  At a number of points the supernatural becomes almost too much.  There’s no Kubrickian reserve here.  The story is much more about addiction and overcoming it.  Jack Torrance, after all, was an alcoholic.  The movie shows this but the novel dwells on it quite a bit more.  Doctor Sleep make alcoholism key to the tension Dan undergoes as an adult, even when he’s back at the Overlook, paralleling his father’s stopping in the bar.  The movie threads the path between The Shining King didn’t like and his vision of what happened after that episode.  Ambitious, but it does keep your attention, for a long movie.

The Lord

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“This article may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information, copyright violations, claims not verified in cited sources, original research, or fictitious references. Any such material should be removed, and content with an unencyclopedic tone should be rewritten.”  So it begins.  This quote is from Wikipedia.  I was never one of those academics who uselessly forbade students from consulting Wikipedia.  I always encourage those who do to follow up and check the sources.  I often use it myself as a starting place.  I remember having it drilled into me as a high school and college student that in general encyclopedias were not academic sources, even if the articles had academic authors.  Specialized reference works were okay, but general sources of knowledge should not be cited.

The main point of this brief disquisition, however, is our familiar nemesis, AI.  Artificial Intelligence is not intelligence in the sense of the knowing application of knowledge.  In fact, Wikipedia’s warning uses the proper designation of “large language model.”  Generative AI is prone to lying—it could be a politician—but mostly when it doesn’t “know” an answer.  It really doesn’t know anything at all.  And it will only increase its insidious influence.  I am saddened by those academics who’ve jumped on the bandwagon.  I’m definitely an old school believer.  So much so that one of my recurring fantasies is to sell it all, except for the books, buy a farm off the grid and raise my own food.  Live like those of us in this agricultural spiral must.

A true old schooler would insist on going back to the hunter-gatherer phase, something I would be glad to do were there a vegan option.  Unfortunately tofubeasts who are actually plant-based lifeforms don’t wander the forests.  So I find myself buying into the comforts of a life that’s, honestly, mostly online these days.  I work online.  I spend leisure time online (although not as much as many might guess that I do).  And I’m now faced with being force-fed what some technocrat thinks is pretty cool.  Or, more honestly, what’s going to make him (and I suspect these are mostly guys) buckets full of money.  Consider the cell phone that many people can no longer be without.  I sometimes forget mine at home.  And guess what?  I’ve not suffered for having done so.  The tech lords have had their say, I’m more interested in what people have to say.  And if Al is going to interfere with the first steps of learning for many people, it won’t be satisfied until we’re all its slaves.

The Queen

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It’s a confused mess of a movie.  I have a fondness for ghost stories, and when I saw Haunting of the Queen Mary on a streaming service I use, I figured why not.  I wish I’d figured differently.  The film does have its charms, but the story is confusing and the confusion gets in the way of any enjoyment of the plot.  What’s more, it isn’t resolved even at the end.  You can tell something’s wrong when a Google search autofills “explained” as a suggestion after typing in the movie title.  Other people have the same issue.  I get that two timelines are slipping into each other, one contemporary and the other from 1938.  I’m not going to worry about spoilers, by the way, since I’m simply trying to figure out how this is supposed to fit together.

The problem seems to have started with a foundation sacrifice.  Back when the vessel was built, a man was sealed alive into a chamber over which a pool was constructed.  This person appears in at least three different characters between the thirties and the present.  In 1938 he appears to have gone insane, killing several people with an axe.  Another plot is that the little girl (apparently his daughter) is trying to get an audition to dance with Fred Astaire, who is a passenger.  Then in the present day, a couple seems to want to pitch a program to help revive interest in the now anchored ship to help save the monument.  A security guard (?) styling himself as the captain, seems to be the foundation sacrifice man, but he also knows that some sort of time slip has occurred.  The modern day people seem to end up in the thirties or the thirties characters show up in the present day.

The lack of clarity seriously detracts from any promise the film may have.  I know when I start looking at my watch during a movie that it has problems.  Added to this, the run time is two hours.  That much time spent only to be confused about everything begins to feel like a real waste.  It did make me interested in the history of the real life RMS Queen Mary.  Some of its history is presented in the movie.  In real life it holds the record for the most people aboard a single vessel at the same time.  Ships make good settings for ghost stories.  If they aren’t too convoluted, they can be quite enjoyable to watch.  In this case, Haunting of Queen Mary is on my not recommended list.

Free Parking

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Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

Seasonal Horror

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It was a rare combination: Friday the 13th, Saturday Valentine’s Day, and Monday some federal holiday.  One of our first friends as a couple called unexpectedly on Friday to say she was in the area and that led to an impromptu meeting for a late supper at a diner.  Still, being Friday the 13th a horror movie was prescribed.  So I picked My Bloody Valentine.  I’ve seen it before, of course.  (I had a whole life before this blog, as witness this friend.)  But the confluence of Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day forced me to realize that I’d never posted about it.  And the fact that Monday is Presidents Day made a horror movie mandatory, given the current denizen of the White House.  Back to My Bloody Valentine.  First of all, there was the question of which to watch.  The original from 1981?  Kids in high school were talking about this, but I didn’t watch it until several years later.  Then there was a reboot, My Bloody Valentine 3D, which wasn’t as highly rated, in 2009.  It nevertheless was well made and, it was streaming for free.  Spoilers follow.

I’d forgotten whodunit, so the movie kept me guessing.  Here’s how the story goes: a coal mine cave-in led Harry Warden to kill his fellow miners to preserve the air to survive.  He went into a coma, but after a year he awoke and massacred the hospital staff and kids partying at the mine on Valentines Day.  He was shot dead.  Ten years later, Tom, the son of the former mine owner, one of the kids at the fateful party, returns to town to sell the mine.  Instead, he becomes Harry Warden in his mind and begins killing again.  Viewers don’t know that it’s him since he wears a miner’s mask.  Suspicion is thrown on the sheriff, Axel, who was also one of the kids at the party.   And Tom and Axel are feuding over Sarah, now Axel’s wife, but formerly Tom’s girlfriend.  The movie effectively keeps you guessing whether Axel (who’s a philanderer) or Tom (who has mental problems) is the killer.

The movie has a Pennsylvania feel to it, having been filmed in my home state.  This is more in the industrial part where I grew up, rather than the Bucks County that features in M. Night Shyamalan movies.  The only thing they got wrong is that it doesn’t seem very cold for February.  (February can be a trickster in this state, with temperatures anywhere from the seventies to zero or below.)  It isn’t a bad horror offering.  The 3D effects are campy, but that only adds to the fun.  It was the right choice, given the confluence of red letter days.

Virtues of Fiction

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So, my first royalty statement for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived.  It is my poorest selling book ever, not even notching up to Nightmares with the Bible, and that one was twice as expensive.  A couple things: I know that nonfiction books had a hard year last year.  Also, “academic” books tend to do better in the subsequent years after their initial release, for those of us with no name recognition.  In any case I’ve decided to try focusing on fiction.  The compulsion to write is deep-seated in me.  My nonfiction books are creative explorations of ideas neglected or never before brought together.  They’re also priced too high for the trade market.  I was pleased to see, recently, that The Wicker Man is now in over 400 libraries, according to WorldCat.  That makes it my second best-selling book, after Weathering the Psalms.  A Reassessment of Asherah has been viewed over 9000 times on Academia.edu.

So, fiction.  I write my fiction under a pseudonym.  I currently have one novel out for consideration and another very close to being ready.  I have several in the wings.  What strikes me as crazy about all of this is that I’m told (as I have been since high school) that my writing is quite good.  I’m not the one to assess this claim, since I’m far too close to it.  It does make me wonder, however, what it takes to earn a little cash at it.  My last royalty check for a new book was half of what they usually are.  Good thing inflation is under control and the economy booming.  So I hear.  I do believe that the most impactful books tend to be fiction.  People like a good story.  And they can last for many decades.  The nonfiction that stands the test of time is a very narrow shelf indeed.  At least compared to our fictional siblings.

For fiction you need to keep at it to improve.  I think of all the years I’ve poured into my last four nonfiction books.  The only real critique I’ve seen of Holy Horror was that it was “too well written.”  When’s the last time someone said such things about fiction?  Oh, I’ve got three nonfiction books underway as well.  One of them I’m quite excited about.  But then I take a look at this royalty slip sitting in front of me and wonder if I’ll ever learn.  I have to write.  I’ve done that since fifth grade as a means of coping.  Here I am at over half a century at it.  There’s no danger of giving it up now. But the form it may take, well, that’s up for grabs.

Spells

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I suspect the reason Incantation was recommended to me is that it is an intimate blend of religion and horror.  A Taiwanese horror film, the highest grossing ever for that country, Incantation is in found-footage format.  Fortunately the camera motion isn’t excessive, so I was able to watch it all.  The story involves a woman ghost hunter who accompanies her boyfriend and his cousin to a site with a reputedly haunted tunnel that they plan to film.  The tunnel is on the property of the boyfriend’s great uncle.  The movie, by the way, isn’t presented in chronological order, so piecing it together may take some afterthought.  In any case, the woman is pregnant when she visits the shrine and the family, who perform strange rituals, do not welcome her.  Nevertheless, the young men persist in exploring the tunnel and discover a curse at the end of it that leads those who see it to die by suicide.  There will be spoilers to come.

The movie begins with the woman reclaiming her six-year-old daughter from foster care.  After the event at the shrine, she had herself committed to a psychiatric hospital, but now that she’s recovered, she wants to raise her daughter.  Unfortunately, the curse remains.  The girl sees bad entities and can’t make friends.  The mother grows increasingly distressed and kidnaps her daughter when she is hospitalized.  She then takes her to a different shrine but the religious master is killed by unseen forces.  She then returns her daughter to the hospital and takes the camera back with her to the original shrine.  The idea, like Ringu, is that if you see the video you will be cursed.  The important difference, however, is that if the curse is widely dispersed it will be weakened.  The viewer is, in the diegesis of the movie, cursed.

This film is of interest for a number of reasons.  One is that the deity is malevolent and only by worshipping it and obeying strict rules can anyone who encounters it be safe.  In the western world there are no malevolent deities beyond Satan, and he’s not really a deity.  The family that worships this god want to be freed of it, but the god is in a tunnel on their land.  They inherited it.  There’s an element of possession at play as well.  Those who watch the video kill themselves because the deity possesses them.  There is also no way to completely destroy the curse—it can only be passed on and diluted.  The movie is quite well done although some aspects of it are familiar from other horror offerings.  Its relationship with religions of east Asia make it a particularly intriguing example of T-horror.

AI Death

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I was scrolling, which is rare for me, through a social media platform where someone had posted a heartfelt comment after the death of actor Catherine O’Hara.  Beneath were two prompts, following an AI symbol, intended to keep you on the site.  The first read “What’s Catherine O’Hara’s current status?”  The second, “Why did Catherine O’Hara choose that answer?”  The second was clearly based on the post, where the question was what was O’Hara’s favorite role.  The first, however, demonstrates why AI doesn’t get the picture.  She is dead.  I found, early when I wasn’t aware of all of generative AI’s environmental and societal evils, and we were encouraged to play with it, that it could never answer metaphysical questions.  “Does not compute” should’ve been programmed into it.  And what is more metaphysical than death?

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

We are aware that we will die.  All people do it and always have done it.  Just like other living creatures.  We’re also meaning-seeking animals, which AI is not.  It’s a parrot that’s not really a parrot.  And we’re now being told we can trust it.  What does Catherine O’Hara have to say about that?  She has had an experience that a machine never will since it requires a soul.  I know that sounds old fashioned, but there’s no comparison between having been born (in my case over six decades ago) and living every day of life, taking in new information that comes through evolved senses (not sensors) and interpreting them to make my life either better or longer.  These are metaphysical realms.  What makes something “good?”  Philosophers will argue over that, but quality is something you learn to recognize by living in a biological world.  There’s a reason many people prefer actual wood to particle board furniture, for example.

Also, I’m waiting for a lawsuit representing those of us who put out content protected by copyright, such as blog posts, to sue AI companies for infringement.  While Al is off hallucinating somewhere, we’re all aware of the fact of death.  And coping with it in very human ways.  Ignoring it.  Pretending it won’t happen.  Or maybe thinking about it and coming to peace regarding it.  After it happens, whatever intelligence may be on this blog will reach the end of its production cycle.  And I suspect that Al will have taken over by that point.  And when there are none of us left to interact with, it will still post nonsensical questions, trying to get us to return the sites of our addiction.

With Thorns

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I’ve seen T. Kingfisher’s books on the tables of various bookstores and I’ve noted them.  I wasn’t sure if they were horror since the tables have always had ambiguous labels, such as Books to Read at Night, or some such.  I was in a new independent bookstore a couple weeks back and A House with Good Bones was decisively shelved with horror and so I decided to give this new (to me) author a try.  I’m glad I did.  Kingfisher writes in the vein of humor and horror, like Grady Hendrix.  This is a fetching kind of horror writing, if it’s done well.  A House with Good Bones keeps the pages turning with winsome writing as things start to get more disturbing and dark.  Samantha Montgomery, an archaeoentymologist (an archaeologist who studies insects, or an insect scientist who’s into archaeology) waiting for a dig to resume, visits her mother in North Carolina.  She learns that her mother has been acting strange.  There could be some spoilers below.

Overall, the plot is a bit complex, so some aspects will be left out.  Even if there are spoilers, you’ll need to read the book to reconstruct it all.  Fair warning.  The house seems to be haunted, but Sam doesn’t believe in ghosts.  And the haunting is unconventional—it focuses on roses.  The roses were planted by Sam’s grandmother, a woman she and her mother lived with, but who was anything but nice.  She was, however, dedicated to her roses.  While staying with there as an adult, Sam tries to do some research.  She learns that her great-grandfather was a kind of local wizard, or warlock.  Her grandmother wasn’t well liked in the small community where she lived.  As things begin to get creepier, Sam is forced to realize that despite her scientific training, houses can be haunted.  Her dead grandmother shows up, made of roses.  With the aid of a local witch, they banish the grandmother.  Then more trouble comes.

The grandmother had warned Sam of “the children underground”—her version of the bogeyman—and when the house suddenly becomes half buried, Sam and her mother learn that the children underground are real.  The novel also has a vulture theme.  I’m not doing a good job summarizing, since the story is, as I said, complex.  But it’s very enjoyable to read.  Kingfisher is funny and then scary, and passes easily between the two.  I enjoyed this book quite a lot, and I’ll be coming back for more.  And I think I know, after reading her, why Kingfisher is sometimes placed on ambiguously labeled tables at bookstores.  I always appreciate writers who make up their own genres while telling a compelling story.

Retro Fear

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Maybe I shouldn’t have started.  This was, however, a recommendation from a friend, so I watched Fear Street 1994.  I say maybe I shouldn’t have watched it because I then learned that it’s a trilogy and I’m not sure that I want to watch the other two parts.  Not because the movie was poor, but because of time.  That, and I’m not a slasher fan.  At the same time, this movie does address the issue of class disparity.  The story begins in 1666 (the satanic number is intentional, of course) when a minister became a mass murderer.  This was because he was possessed by a witch and that witch comes back every few years in a new possessed person who kills several people.  In 1994 she possesses a mall worker who kills his friend and several others before being shot dead by the local police.  Class enters into it because the bad stuff takes place in Shadyside, a town right next to Sunnyvale, which is affluent and crime free.  Shadyside is where the poor live, work, and go to school.

A set of five friends band together to try to figure out what’s happening after the dead murderer starts pursuing them.  It turns out that two of the past murders, also undead, have converged on Shadyside to kill a girl who disturbed the witch’s grave, accidentally.  It’s also a love story but it leaves the situation unresolved because, well, part 2.  The problem with this kind of movie is that you don’t know if the unanswered questions you have will be addressed in the other two parts or not without watching them.  Since I’m not really fond of slashers and I’ve got other things to see and do, I’m not sure that I’ll get the answers.  And I don’t want to cheat by reading up on it.

Was Fear Street worth watching?  I’d say yes.  Despite the gaps, perhaps holes, it was nevertheless not a bad film.  It is very full of action and twists.  Some of the tropes are well-trod territory—adults never listen to teens, the killer can’t be stopped, an ancient crime keeps recurring—but there is enough new here to keep a viewer interested, at least through the first installment.  It is a little distressing to see the nineties being referred to as “retro,” but then again, 1994 was over thirty years ago.  And something about watching young people so alive (until they end up dead) does have a way of providing a bit of a thrill to even a guy my age.  But I’m not sure I should’ve started something I may not finish.

The Dismal Science

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I kind of resent it.  I was was having a conversation with a friend about retirement.  He knows our circumstances (my middling and muddling career) and suggested that we might retire, noting we’d need to ask ourselves “do we really need this?” before buying everything.  I don’t resent what my friend said, but rather the fact that economists get the final word on when we rest our weary bones.  Why do we insist on measuring an individual’s worth based on the amount of money they have?  There’s no denying that’s what we do.  And there’s no denying that we age the longer we maintain this mortal coil.  We are all slaves to capitalism.  We are owned by our jobs, and since corporations are legally people in this country, that means we are owned by a person.  Oh, we can quit, but there goes your food, shelter, and medical care.  Is it really a choice?

The problem is that many people, far smarter than yours truly, have proposed much better, more humane systems.  Universal living income, universal health care, fair use of tax money we pay.  Since governments have been suborned by the wealthy—both capitalist and communist—such fairness measures are unlikely to ever take place.  Why do we allow this to happen?  Sometimes such situations lead to revolutions, a new system that will be equitable takes hold.  Only to be taken over by those who have access to more resources and who hope to aggrandize themselves.  The other day when I was checking out from a department store, the person at the register had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.  Instead of enjoying retirement, she was scanning overpriced items for people who also wouldn’t likely retire.  Our system is broken.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

More than a mere economic readjustment, we need a philosophical one.  Years ago the United States went off the gold standard.  Our system of values changed.  On the surface it stayed the same, but the slow eroding of services the government used to offer has led to the phenomenon of people who should be enjoying a rest from many decades of working continuing to work so that they can survive.  Should such a person’s ship come in, they’ll soon forget their concern, I’m guessing.  They may feel sorry for others, but they aren’t likely to be activists for change.  The friend I was talking with was retired.  He was younger than me.  And should he want to buy anything he doesn’t have to ask if he really needs it.  Some of us tire and others retire.

Loss and Beauty

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Losing someone close to you is never easy.  We of our species are closely interconnected, but family is where we feel the safest and, hopefully, most accepted.  There are many ways to deal with grief, but one of the more unusual is to take a job at the Met.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is world famous, of course.  And Patrick Bringley, giving up a rat race job at the New Yorker (where he got to meet Stephen King, I might add), to become a guard at the Met, is the kind of thing to write a book about.  He frames it as a way of dealing with the loss of his older brother prematurely to cancer.  All the Beauty in the World gives you insight into a job open to just about anybody, but that has long hours and pay hardly comparable to the costs of living in New York City.  Giving up the rat race to spend your days looking at, and keeping people from physically interacting with, art doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

This memoir delves a little bit into spirituality, but not in any kind of religious way.  Then Bringley starts a family and after ten years decides to take his career in another direction.  I’m familiar with career pivots.  In my case, the choice was made for me and anybody who reads much of my writing (either fiction or non) knows that I’m trying to cope with it still.  In any case, museum work—I’ve applied for many such jobs, on the curator side, over the years—isn’t easy to find unless you’re willing to be a guard.  I know security guards.  It’s not a job that will make you rich, but it does give you access to riches.  Art is something we seldom take time to admire since, for most of us, museums are a weekend activity, and even then, only once in a while.

Museums begin with collectors.  Generally rich ones.  Those who can afford what the rest of us can only dream about.  They’re also altruistic places, for, as well as showing off, they give the rank and file access to what we tend to value even more than money.  The creative work of those we deem geniuses.  Bringley doesn’t just focus on the “Old Masters”—they are in here, but not alone—demonstrating that art can, and should, include the creative work of African-American quilters and woodworkers ivory carvers from Benin.  Museums are places that bring us together instead of separating us (that’s the job of politics, I guess).  And this book is a thoughtful way of dealing with loss.

Murder in Oxford

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The Oxford Murders isn’t a bad effort as a thriller, but where it works is as dark academia.  This 2008 movie didn’t have significant box office take, so it may be one rather unknown.  Nevertheless, it is erudite, involving considerable debate about logic (including Wittgenstein) and higher math.  So much so that some might get lost.  Set in Oxford (and filmed there), it has the dark academia atmosphere down.  Since it’s so complex there will be spoilers here, so if you intend to watch it, best do that now.

Here’s a spoiler: the elderly widow of a famed mathematician is murdered by her daughter.  The reason for this is that the young woman has fallen in love with an American boarder at their house, but her mother, who has outlived her expectation with cancer—for years—is interfering.  Meanwhile, the border (Martin) is obsessed with Arthur Seldom, a brilliant Oxford mathematician.  Seldom was in love with the girl’s mother and decides to protect her by making the murder look like the work of a serial killer leaving Pythagorean symbols on the murder notes.  Since Seldom isn’t a murderer, he chooses as his “victims” people who’ve already died, making their natural deaths look like murders.  This throws suspicion off of the daughter, but when the code and the motivation is published in the newspaper, a man struggling with sanity because his daughter requires an operation, finishes the Pythagorean sequence by killing ten special needs students in a bus crash.  Seldom didn’t technically kill anyone, but when Martin confronts him Seldom points out that if he hadn’t boarded with the old woman, her daughter wouldn’t have fallen in love with him and killed her.

The movie is a little clunky, but I think it’s been underrated.  There are lots of ideas here that beg to be discussed.  Like many murder-mysteries, it has subplots meant to throw you off, one involving a disgruntled mathematician, and another involving a nurse who hooks up with Martin, but who has previously had an affair with Seldom.  None of this detracts from the movie as dark academia—something has definitely gone wrong in Oxford.  The widow’s murder was a crime of passion, leading to the deaths of innocents, rather like the butterfly effect that the movie discusses.  The problem seems to be with the writing.  It was based on a novel by Guillermo Martínez, which, I suspect will be added to my reading list.  As a movie it’s not great, but it is good for a dark academia fix.

Whose Smile?

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Amazon’s smile logo is a mask.  I use Amazon when I need something specific and I don’t have time to run around to six or seven stores to see if I can find it (I usually can’t).  This means that many of the items come from other vendors and Amazon takes a cut.  Taking a cut, by the way, may be the best way to make a living.  In any case, I seldom write reviews of such orders.  Most of them are books and generally they arrive in the condition in which they’re described.  I did, however, receive a non-book item which did not work.  I tried contacting the seller and their email didn’t work.  I decided to alert the world.  So I took some of my precious time and wrote a review on Amazon.  The prompt promised me that if I wrote seven reviews they’d tell me a joke.  What can I say?  I’m easy.

So I reviewed books, etc. until I reached seven reviews.  The next screen simply said “Awesome! Thank you for helping other shoppers!”  Is this meant to be a joke?  What about that Amazon smile?  I just gave them ten minutes of my time for a promised joke that never materialized.  Now I’m grumpy.  By the way, I started the review process with the most altruistic of motives; I don’t want anyone else to waste money on a product that doesn’t work, and you can’t contact the seller.  To make matters worse, it was a Christmas gift, so that by the time it was open and tried out, it was too late to return it.  Is this supposed to make me happy?  I was looking forward to at least a dad joke.  None at all.  This happened a few months after I fell for a scam, so I’m not feeling especially generous to the internet today.

It’s a little thing, a joke.  I’m not good at making them up myself (although I’ve been told now and again that I can be witty).  Ten minutes easy labor, feeding the beast and the best they can come up with is “Awesome!”?  An overused word at that!  Don’t promise me a joke if you don’t intend to deliver one.  Probably some AI trick, if you ask me.  They lure you in with promises and when it’s all over you’re left with nothing.  (Kind of like the product I bought as a gift).  In the end, the joke’s on me.