Le Fanu Fans

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Sheridan Le Fanu is sometimes called “the Irish Poe.”  He was a contemporary of Poe but his name doesn’t bear the same cultural cachet.  He wrote a number of stories that are classified as “horror” in today’s genre settings, and one of the most famous is Carmilla, known as the lesbian vampire story.  Le Fanu didn’t use that terminology himself, that I know of, but Carmilla is a vampire and she does have fondness for other females.  I’ve watched a few lesbian vampire movies (I mentioned Theresa & Allison recently), since they give a distinctive taste to the lore.  I don’t generally research the free movies I watch beforehand, so when I saw The Carmilla Movie, I figured it was likely based on Le Fanu (it is) but I didn’t realize that it was a follow-up to a web series with the same characters.  Nevertheless, it’s a pretty good story.

Set in the modern day, with a cast of young people doing things for a living that weren’t options when I was growing up (internet content provider, starting a paranormal investigation business—I was laughed out of school for admitting I was interested in this stuff before the X-Files made it mainstream), the film updates Le Fanu’s story.   Carmilla has become human and has a girlfriend.  But then Carm starts to revert to vampire status.  (Fortunately there’s soy-based blood for her to drink—did I mention this is comedy horror?)  Although this is comedy horror, it’s not a silly story.  There are plenty of humorous asides, but you still feel for the characters and want them to overcome the evil they face.  Here that evil is a past that has to be rectified.

I found The Carmilla Movie to be intelligent and fun.  There are some genuine horror elements to it, and I suspect that being familiar with the web series might help answer a few head-scratchers for us non-initiated.  In general it seems that such independent films as this serve to raise the bar on movies as a whole.  The flip side is, however, that you can’t easily tell if a movie is a studio release or a television movie, or even a web movie without doing some research ahead of time.  Amazon Prime—my go to service—doesn’t distinguish them.  All I know is that if a movie is one I have on my watch list, I’m going to have to pay for it.  Carmilla was free and worth the time to watch.  And it’s good to see Le Fanu getting some deserved air time.

Upon Further Occlusion

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Admittedly the source is GBN, but the headline is irresistible: “Nasa ‘quietly funding’ theological conferences amid ‘demonic’ UFO fears.”  Essentially an interview with Nick Pope (no relation to “the Pope”), the story posits that NASA has been spending on theology because of fears that UFOs might be demons.  Nick Pope is a recognized ufologist, but the story doesn’t state where he acquired the information on NASA’s spending habits.  Pope did work for Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and has had a long-standing interest in UFOs.  And some US congressional members have stated that they believe said UFOs are demons.  I’d still like to see some documentation, however, before accepting that NASA’s paying for conferences in a discipline that’s on decline in academia.  Seems a little difficult to believe.

It also seems like this would be a more exciting theological conference than the one I attend.  Perhaps even stranger than UFOs is the use of the word “theology.”  In British English the word tends to mean what “religious studies” means in these (still) United States.  American English understands theology to be a distinct part of religious studies—the discipline that is occupied with philosophical questions within a specific tradition.  The one probably most familiar is Christianity, where historical theology and systematic theology are often on seminary curricula.  I’ve noticed more and more Jewish and Islamic theology cropping up in recent years.  I always take pains to say I’m not a theologian (in the American sense).  Maybe it would just be easier to consider UFOs.

Image credit: George Stock, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

There’s no doubt that theology gave us demons.  One of the points I was trying to make in Nightmares with the Bible is that that’s not entirely true.  Demons came first, and theology later.  People have, historically, always believed there were other entities that behaved with intelligence.  Generally they were more powerful than mere humans.  It was really only around the time that Christianity began that such entities were coded as purely evil.  Those who posit that UFOs are demons really aren’t up on their theology, which makes me wonder what kinds of conferences NASA is spending its money on.  If it is.  This seems plausible because the government often spends on things that are unexpected.  I personally would like to see a bit more of it funneled towards education, but I’m just one voter.  In any case, if there are such conferences, and if they’re British style theology, please put me on the mailing list.

Creeping Religion

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In a disappointing email, Amazon Prime has announced that its free movie streaming of select titles for members will now be subject to commercials.  I suppose that’s little difference, actually, from the way I watched most movies growing up.  I watched them on television before cable, and commercials were a necessary evil then.  Speaking of evil, I decided to watch a film that I missed in my childhood.  It was better than expected.  The Creeping Flesh suggested itself by star power.  Although not a Hammer film, it features both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as a pair of mad scientists.  Interestingly enough, it struggles with the question of evil and, appropriately enough, has an ambiguous ending.  There’ll be spoilers below, but since the movie was released over a half-century ago, I’ll use them with a clear conscience.

Cushing’s character, Dr. Emmanuel Hildern, has discovered a skeleton of pure evil personified.  It will become the end of the world once it’s revivified.  Meanwhile his half-brother, Dr. James Hildern (Lee), runs an insane asylum where questionable treatments are performed.  The brothers are rivals and although not quite estranged, they don’t work together.  It’s actually late in the movie that the corpse of evil is resurrected, but in the meanwhile Emmanuel’s daughter goes insane, like her mother had, after being given a vaccine against evil that her father devised.  Her Ms. Hyde-like exploits make her dangerous to Victorian society and she has to be committed to her uncle’s asylum.  The being of evil attacks Emmanuel and we find him at last in his brother’s asylum.  James is explaining to his assistant that this madman thinks he is his brother and that another patient is his daughter.  The film has been a fantasy in an unbalanced mind.  Except for a suggestion in the final close-up that the story of the corpse may indeed have actually happened.

What particularly intrigues me is the discussion of evil in the film.  Emmanuel claims that it is like a virus, an actual physical pathogen.  He believes it can be prevented by a vaccine.  I’ve actually read some academic work in the past few years that suggests that “sin” is an actual, almost physical thing.  A kind of cosmic force.  More sophisticated, of course, but not entirely unlike what this horror film was suggesting fifty years ago.  The Creeping Flesh isn’t a great movie—it suffers from pacing and a somewhat convoluted plot, but still it demonstrates why I keep at this.  Horror often addresses the same questions religion scholars do.  And occasionally it even seems to anticipate more academic ideas, fed to a viewership making the same queries.  It’s worth watching, even with commercials.

Fear of Spiders

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To anticipate, “mygale” is French for “tarantula.”  I learned about Mygale, also published under its English translation, or else Serpent’s Tail, from a Goodreads review.  It’s increasingly difficult to find good, short books.  I knew little about it other than it is a “thriller” by Thierry Jonquet.  The book contains one of the most cleverly drawn plots I’ve encountered in some time.  I also believe it could slip into the horror genre.  I’m reluctant to say much because the pieces are revealed so intricately that to summarize would be to ruin the effect.  I will say that if you’ve seen The Skin I Live in you know the basic idea already.

I will opine that this story demonstrates that a book need not be excessively long to be a good novel.  Some of us appreciate the economy of language that illustrates Pascal’s famous quote, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”  My first relatively descent novel was about 230,000 words, or, in other words, well over 400 pages.  The publishers I half-heartedly queried said it was too long.  When writing short stories I quickly learned that many journals only take them if they’re under 3,000 words, some only under 2,000.  As a result, I began writing short.  That’s not exactly true.  I write the story as I want to tell it, then I cut it down.  Again and again.  Short seems to be the fashion in the internet age.  Ironically, the books on my too read shelf all seem to be quite long.  That’s why I decided to give Mygale a try.

I’m glad I did.  The story may not be for the most squeamish, but it’s certainly not blood and gore.  It’s a little confusing at first, but it comes to make sense.  And the ending is somewhat satisfying.  It’s not happy by any means, but it’s well told.  Some classify it as science fiction, but there’s nothing too impossible about it.  It’s set in France around the 1980s.  No space ships or ray guns to be seen.  Genres can be tricky in the face of creativity, but the final act, if you will, reveals this to have been horror all along.  Well, I hope I’ve been able to give a sense of this book without giving any spoilers.  Talking around a subject comes with years of classroom experience, I guess.  I will say the spider isn’t literal.

Work for Good

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You learn a lot as a primary caregiver.  Since dealing with a family cancer diagnosis last year I joined a local support network for caregivers.  Three things I’ve learned: healthcare is very uneven, we ended up in a good facility, and finding a social worker on your own is very difficult.  I see lots of messages on the support boards from people in poor facilities that can’t find the help they need.  I know what social workers do—I had several friends who majored in social work in college—but in this age of all the information in the world at your fingertips, just try to find a social worker!  I was trying to find a website to suggest to a person on my board who didn’t know where to turn.  Searches bring up links to places trying to sell you their services to find a social worker.  Are we really that callous?  

People tend not to try to find a social worker unless they really need one.  Many people, I suspect, wait until they feel pretty desperate.  This is not when you need some salesperson trying to sell you something.  Medical care can be very expensive—devastatingly so—and there are professionals out there who specialize in helping you get through such things.  Why are they so difficult to find?  I tried government sites that seem more interested in telling you how to become a social worker than how to find one.  If we’re in such a state that we don’t have enough social workers why don’t we pay them more?  Here’s a hint, most politicians could stand a salary cut.  My college friends all said they knew it didn’t pay well, but social work was a way to help people. Saints still walk among us.

Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash

We have the means to help everyone.  What we lack is the will.  We continue to let capitalism and the hope of individual wealth run our economy.  Economy means nothing without people.  And we have many people who are willing to receive less personally to help others get by.  Why do we have to hide them behind a pay wall?  What does that say about us?  We’ve been fortunate.  Our medical facility immediately put us in touch with a social worker.  If, however, you end up where healthcare choices are limited, or don’t know how to find a social worker on your own, the internet’s not a great resource, unless you want to pay someone to help you find help.  What have we become?

Troubled Water

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There’s nothing like a good monster movie.  Of course, your local streaming service will have some considerable say over what you might watch.  Amazon Prime is likely my biggest influencer because I can’t afford the movies on my watch list and there’s a monster-load of “free” content.  Still, I fear something may have been lost in translation.  I wasn’t in the mood for anything too heavy, and The Lake thumbnail had a retro-Godzilla vibe to it.  The fact that it’s a Thai horror film certainly enhanced the appeal.  But I’m not sure I understand what it’s supposed to be saying.  The dialogue translation wasn’t, I suspect, very accurate.  More than that, however, I’m in no position to judge cultural tastes for a culture I know primarily through cuisine.  There’s more than a rampaging monster here, but it doesn’t translate well.

There’s a monster in the lake, shown pretty clearly early on.  It kills several villagers, perhaps for disturbing its egg.  A bunch of characters are thrown at the viewer—a family where the brother psychically bonds with the young monster (there’s a bigger, madder, mother monster), a researcher and his assistant, a detective and, quite late in the movie, his daughter, a police chief and his daughter, and none of them have enough screen time for us to figure out who the story’s about.  The monster doesn’t seem evil, although it killed several people at the start.  The police chief evacuates people to the temple and some Buddhist priests show up.  There’s religion and horror worth exploring here, but the dubbing calls the temple a “church” more than once.

The story largely seems to be about family.  The initial family, after losing a couple of members, reunites.  The detective’s daughter dies after he has reconciled with her in the ambulance.  The female police officer reveals near the end that the chief is her father.  (The researcher doesn’t seem to be related to his assistant, but they drop out of the plot.)  It’s difficult to tell if this is a bad movie or simply a cultural gap that puts real understanding beyond the reach of those in such a different realm.  From my viewpoint it was a movie not unlike the Godzilla films with which I grew up.  In other words, better than sleeping away an afternoon but not worth putting too much brain power behind trying to comprehend.  Technically it was a movie better than I could hope to make.  Some of the cinematography was quite nice.  I’m just not sure if I understood what was being translated or not. 

Castle Dreams

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It’s a real problem.  If you’re a passionate collector you eventually run up against the space issue.  A New York Times piece tells how a couple that collects puzzles had to buy an Italian castle to house their collection.  I appreciate their passion, but I operate on a more modest budget.  We bought our house going on six years ago.  Like many people raised in poverty, I’m a bit of a packrat.  When you’ve experienced a life of not being able to afford things, you tend to keep everything.  That’s an economic reality.  You spent money on this and you don’t want to waste it.  Add to that the passion of a collector and you could have a real problem.  Castle-sized.

When we were searching for houses the market was poor.  It still is.  Although a recent trip to Somerville, where we used to live, revealed massive amounts of new apartments—we were literally stunned—buying a house remains difficult.  (But all those apartments!  When we moved to Somerville in 2006 there were only a few units available, so I guess that was before it became popular.)  And we specifically needed a house where you could keep books.  (I do periodic purges and end up feeling full of regret afterwards.)  Our house has a large garage with storage space.  Not an Italian castle, but the principle is the same.  Only our garage has been taken over by aggressive squirrels.  We can’t yet afford to have the roof rebuilt (with solar panels because we have beautifully unimpeded southern exposure); we can’t lay up books where squirrel and mildew doth corrupt, so I guess we might have to consider a castle down the road.

My escape fantasy would probably be Ireland, however.  They speak English there and they have castles.  And Scotland’s just across the way.  Although I spent my doctoral years in Edinburgh, my ancestry leans more toward Ireland.  And Germany, but although they have castles I’m not sure I can revive my German well enough to get along there.  No, Ireland might be the best choice for my castle-buying dreams.  Of course, those of us who grow up poor do dream of castles.  I read about them in books.  And books beget books—this seems to be an inescapable law of nature.  I do wonder if Irish castles have problems with squirrels, though.  If I’m going to make this work it’s going to require quite a bit more money.  And thought.  It’s a real puzzle.

Photo by Reid Naaykens on Unsplash

Clergy Problems

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I believe Revival is the most recently written Stephen King novel I’ve read.  It was pretty good—it certainly scores high on the religion and horror scale, although it takes quite a while to get to the horror part.  Part of the problem for me is that I liked Charles Daniel Jacobs.  I tended to relate more to him than to Jamie Morton (the narrator/protagonist).  Perhaps this was because, like Jacobs, I studied to be a Methodist minister.  And like him, came to have a rather different view of what is really going on in the world.  He’s clearly King’s villain, however.  Or “fifth business” as he’s termed in the novel.  The secret lightning he seeks turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin.  I was curious to know more about it.  The novel, as is typical, has several subplots but the main one is how Jamie and Charlie face what’s after death in a tragic climax.

Charlie starts out as a Methodist preacher.  When his wife and son are tragically killed, he becomes a huckster who actually has tapped into an electrical power that can heal people.  It often, however, leaves bad aftereffects.  Jamie, who knew him as a kid, is cured by him from a heroin addiction.  Their paths continue to cross over the next fifty years or so—this is a longitudinal story—as Jamie comes more and more to distrust his childhood hero.  Charlie can use electricity to perform wonders and it make him rich.  He wants more, however.  He wants to see beyond death to assure himself that his wife and son are in a better place.  It seems to me that that motivation isn’t a bad one.  The only way he seems a villain is that he doesn’t really care for other people.

The story is well told but it doesn’t have the same “classic” feel as some of King’s earlier novels.  He well understands, however, that horror and religion belong together.  I haven’t read all of his novels—not by a long shot—but clergy aren’t rare and when they’re present they’re implicated in the horrors, or in this case, responsible for them.  These are important insights, as others have also noticed.  Revival is one of those books that requires some reflection.  It certainly feels like something written by a man facing the limitations of the aging process.  And not necessarily at peace with it.  Ministers sometimes do go bad—they’re only human—but they can also lead to real change.  I, for one, am interested to hear what King has to say about it.

Sticky Thoughts

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It’s a common problem.  You need to stick two things together.  Perhaps you don’t have welding or soldering equipment lying around the house so you buy some glue.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve been in an adhesives aisle recently, but the choices are overwhelming.  Not only that, but ephemeral.  I mean the bonding action has improved since I was a kid, but the problem is I can’t use glue fast enough.  Like the old-fashioned White Out, you open a container and use it as quickly as possible because it’s going to dry out.  I was reminded of this when I needed to stick some fabric to plastic (don’t ask).  I tried some Elmer’s left over from when my daughter was in middle school sometime in the second Bush administration.  That didn’t work.

Then I found a bottle of Gorilla glue.  The problem is that it sticks to itself.  So much so that I couldn’t get the bottle open.  I could see there was some liquid life in there, but the top half of the contents seemed to have congealed and clung to itself.  That wouldn’t work.  I eventually found a tube of plastic glue and since one of the pieces for my project was plastic, I figured that’d work.  Still, it made me wonder about the conscience of those who make adhesives.  Surely they must know the mindset of, “oh, I’ve got lots of stuff to fix, so I better buy a reasonable size bottle.”  Only, the fixing comes at widely spaced intervals and the glue can’t last that long.  Various Crazy Glues are the worst.  They’re one-time openers, just like White Out.

My most recent trip to the adhesive aisle brought a moment of clarification.  Although I try to reduce waste, one company (not a sponsor), was selling little, tiny tubes of Crazy Glue.  Single-use units.  And you get six/eight per shot.  That works for quite a few applications.  Still, I’ve got a number of half-full (I’m an optimist) bottles of various glues that can’t seem to get over themselves.  I guess the lesson we’re to take home is buy in small quantities, even though the unit cost is higher.  You can always buy two, no?  Things don’t break at convenient times, unfortunately.  You run to the closet to see what glue you’ve got.  Then you drive to the store to get some that’s not all gummed up in the bottle.  It’s a dilemma.  Just like that nagging question of why someone’s trying to stick cloth on plastic.

Not The Sting

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Why do we make the decisions we do?  Watch the movies we do?  I have to confess that for me a number of strange factors combine to make for some weird choices.  For example, Invasion of the Bee Girls is difficult to explain apart from compounding oddities.  One is that Amazon Prime auto-suggested it too me (for free).  Yes, I have a history of watching bad movies and this definitely fits that bill.  Fuzzy-headedness during my weekend afternoon slump time probably played into it.  Along with the fact that I’d been researching bees and that brought the movie The Wasp Woman back to mind.  Wasp woman, bee girls?  It’s free and I’m not going to be able to stay awake otherwise.  The movie is about what you’d expect from a low-budget 1970s sci-fi horror film.  It did make me think I should read about movies before I watch them rather than after.

Nevertheless, I’m trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I have a fascination with Ed Wood and his films.  I even read a book about him and also read a book on why it’s okay to like movies that we tend to label as bad.  No matter how you parse Invasion of the Bee Girls, it’s bad.  The acting, the writing, the plot.  Still, some of us have a taste for films from the seventies—it’s kind of a nostalgia trip since I was really only becoming aware of the odd world of science fiction about then.  Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the initial screenplay wanted his name removed after he saw the changes that’d been made.  That should be telling you something.

Meyer, while not a household name writer, did pen some good detective stories about Sherlock Holmes, and wrote, uncredited, both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Fatal Attraction.  Invasion of the Bee Girls has a somewhat salacious plot that fits the Zeitgeist of the seventies of which I was unaware, growing up.  The seventies were my sci-fi high point, it was good escapist material for someone living in a situation less than ideal for day-to-day living.  I watched, for example, Killdozer about that time and thought it was great.  Now that streaming is how we watch, the amorphous internet has a record of what we’ve seen and then recommends products for us based on our record.  I really thought we outgrew being tracked all the time.  Little did any of us know that it was only getting started in high school.  And as long as you have a penny to spend, those who track us will try to figure out how to take it.  You could get stung.

A Footnote

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I was recently compelled to use footnotes.  I don’t mean the clever asides that capable writers sometimes utilize to spice up subjects by making points off topic.  No, I mean the kind with author, date, title, city, publisher, page number.  I deal with footnotes daily—it’s an occupational hazard.  As a recovering academic I’m trying to get away from using footnotes on everything from grocery lists to daily meeting reminders.  Cite your sources!  That’s the kind of rhetoric that’s pounded into the heads of bright young people, often preventing them from learning to think for themselves.  At this stage of my life a footnote is more often trying to find someone who agrees with what I’ve observed for myself.  Hmm, did anyone ever say that before?  If so, where?

My concern goes down to the level of cities.  Yes, cities.  Standard format requires you cite the city in which a book was published.  This ridiculous pre-internet artifact had a purpose originally, but I have worked for two international publishers and I can tell you two related, and perhaps contradictory points: employees can tell which office a book is from: New York or London.  And unless you work for said publisher there is almost no way for you to know.  So if a publisher has offices in a dozen cities, you need to write a dozen of them in your footnote.  Does this sound like a rational thing to do?  Don’t get me wrong—it’s important, very important to cite the publisher.  But it’s not like there are a ton of presses around with the exact same name.

There’s a move among some reference experts (refperts, if you like) to do away with the city in footnotes.  It’s a reasonable guess that Cambridge University Press is pretty widely recognized.  And that Cambridge is located in Cambridge.  Or course, there’s a Cambridge in Massachusetts, and I hear there’s a university there as well.  In any case, if you don’t know where a publisher’s located, there’s a remarkable invention called the internet where you can look it up!  Pedanticism comes naturally to academics, I suppose.  Had I not been one I would probably have had no reason to write such an anal post as this.  Still, there’s a larger point: when is one able simply to assert what one knows?  I frankly don’t remember the page on which I read most facts I point out in my writing.  Often I notice them myself and recognize them as facts when there’s good, solid evidence.  Of course, I really should footnote that.  If I can remember in which city the appropriately named Random House is located.

How do you footnote this?

One Demonic Night

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I only discovered after watching Night of the Demons (2009) that it was a remake.  Eventually curiosity got the best of me and I had a spare moment to watch the 1988 original.  It’s still kind of a bad movie, but it is scarier than the remake.  It’s also a horror comedy, but the emphasis is a bit more on the horror here.  A group of ten high schoolers go to Hull House, which used to be a funeral home, for a Halloween party.  When the power goes out they decide to have a séance.  Unbeknownst to them, however, there is a real resident demon.  This demon gets passed on through kissing, and it animates the kids who’ve been killed along the way.  Although the final girl is pretty clear from the beginning, in a usual twist the only surviving guy is African-American, the son of a preacher.

The concept of demons here is explained as entities that were never human.  This is the explanation Ed and Lorraine Warren used, often without making reference to fallen angels.  Since the demons are using the physical bodies of the kids, they can be stopped by locked doors, but killing them doesn’t really help, since they keep coming back.  It seems that there’s really just one actual demon, a dragon-headed entity that lives in the crematorium.  Rodger, the Black man, brings the element of religion to the story.  He objects to the séance in the first place, and suggests that they pray as he and Judy, the final girl, are attempting to escape.

In-between all this is sandwiched the gore and violence that make it pretty typical horror.  The humor involved, however, makes it less intense than a typical slasher.  Although I didn’t walk away thinking this would be a favorite movie, I could see why it’s garnered a cult following.  As is often the case, the original is better than the remake.  For one thing, it understands that religion seasons horror quite well.  Demons are, by definition, religious monsters, at least traditionally.  And the two “good kids” who survive are uncomfortable with messing with spiritual forces to begin with.  Judy just wants to go to the dance, after all.  The movie went on into sequels as its cult fandom grew.  If I ever do a sequel to Nightmares with the Bible I’ll need to include this franchise, I guess.  For a sleepy weekend afternoon, there are worse bad movies to watch.

Love Life

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I suppose that it’s good to keep Valentine’s Day mostly private, but there was some wisdom to how it was practiced in school when I was growing up.  In primary school the rule was that everyone had to give everyone else a valentine card.  You couldn’t just give them to the people you liked.  Valentines Day was a day of equity, and, as children understand it, love.  Love for everyone, not just those of your nation or ethnicity.  Kids of any gender received cards from kids of any other gender.  The point was, love one another.  Looking at the way that hatred has become the new normal with right-wing politicians leading the way, Valentines Day has become a much-needed symbol.  We should be loving those who are different.  Instead we go to the polls and elect extremists who start wars and who brag, even before votes are cast, of the damage they intend to do in their next term.  Where’s the love?

I confess to being an idealist, but I do wonder why love is so difficult to achieve.  Are we so much the victims of tribalism that we can’t see there’s enough to go around?  We live in a world where, were it properly administered, we could see to it that most people, if not all, would have their basic needs met.  Where love could be our highest motivating factor.  Instead, we want the love of only those we love and everyone else can fend for themselves.  And whatever facsimile of love we can muster ends at an artificial line we call a national border.  Those on the other side are our enemies and we want to take what they have.  Is this a sane way to spend Valentines Day?

The irony of all this is that those who perpetuate this divide and conquer mentality were raised in religions founded by leaders who insisted on love.  Love your neighbors.  And, more radically, love your enemies.  What if Valentine’s Day were more than just a time for romantic dinners and little treats, and those things which are best kept private?  What if it were a day when we all tried to love that kid who’s always picking on you?  Or who looks different?  That kid that doesn’t seem to have any friends?  Childhood taught us that everyone’s shoebox got a card today.  We may have been too young to understand some aspects of love, but one thing we got right.  Everyone deserves ours.  Why not try love?

Scholarly Publishing

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So here’s the thing about innocuous names—they don’t work well with the internet.  Search engines throw a rod trying to find something so insipid that it might mean anything.  I’m driven to this topic by the fact that “Scholars Press” or something like it, is used by a number of organizations, some apparently predatory.  If you’re a scholar of religion you know to what I’m referring when I say “Scholars Press.”  You know the neat, trim little monographs that you consumed like popcorn while writing your dissertation.  Try to find a history of the press online.  I’ll wait.

So finally I heaved myself out of my chair and got an actual book (imagine that!) off the shelf.  It is a volume I purchased when the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature met in Orlando.  A conference to remember.  So, along with Woody and Buzz Lightyear, we were gathered to learn about religion and I finally shelled out for Ernest W. Saunders’ Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature 1880–1980.  There I found what Google couldn’t: Scholars Press dates from 1974, a joint venture of the two societies.  Originally it published books from the University of Montana at Missoula, and later moved to Chico, California.  Finally it settled in Atlanta and eventually split into two as AAR and SBL took on the publishing of their own books.  I saved myself several minutes of probably fruitless scrolling.  It seems nobody else is really interested in this.  I am an historian of religion, but an historian none the less.  I wanted to know the sequence of events.

I am curious when the two decided to break up this venture.  There was a divorce, or temporary separation, between the societies some years back—I can’t recall when it was—that seems a logical time for them to think about taking on their individual publishing programs, but then again, they may have started before then.  In other words, I don’t have the date when Scholars Press dissolved.  Religious studies, I realize, is a small discipline.  For many colleagues it’s their entire world.  Some of them write histories about various aspects of it—I saw a book that I want to read about the murder of a religion professor Ioan Culianu back in 1991—but compared to history or English, we’re minuscule.  And we don’t seem very curious about ourselves.  We’re an odd lot, that’s for sure.  And we don’t always pick the best names.

Out of Season

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Culture fascinates me.  And one of my favorite aspects of culture is holidays.  I realize that’s a privileged thing to say but were we living among the hunter-gatherers I’d probably have ended up a shaman.  In any case, I had my eye on Stanley Brandes’ Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond for some time now.  Like most observers of lugubrious culture, I’ve noticed the symbols of el Día de los Muertos creeping into Halloween displays in the United States for many years.  I knew that the Day (properly Days) of the Dead was connected in some way to All Saints and All Souls days.  I wanted to find out more, however.  Now, I know that one source doesn’t give you all the information, but time is limited and Brandes was recommended.

This book contains a lot of information.  I am, however, a worker in the publishing industry and that made me wonder a number of things.  The trim size (dimensions) and cover design suggest this is a textbook.  I suspect Blackwell (the publisher) wanted it so.  It is, however, written for ethnographers.  I’ve read enough anthropology over the years to have an idea of how this works, but inside the book it seemed that this was a toned-down academic monograph.  It doesn’t use a lot of technical terms, but the writing is geared toward other ethnographers, it seemed to me.  There is a bit of a dilemma here.  If you’re wanting an authoritative book you generally go to academic publishers, such as Blackwell.  On the other hand, sometimes you just want an overview that doesn’t get lost in the weeds.

The fault is entirely my own, I realize.  And I don’t mean to criticize since I learned an awful lot from this book.  Nothing is ever simple, not even holidays.  Especially holidays.  These are times we take from the ordinariness of daily living to find meaning, and often joy, in our lives.  A safe space where work can’t reach us and we can concentrate on celebrating the occasional, the unusual.  The Day of the Dead is, in the eyes of many, an unusual take on the late autumn holidays.  (Halloween is also unusual, but the two holidays are distinct.)  This book provides a lot of information on the culture of Mexico—information that derives from its most famous holiday.  You can tell a lot indeed from looking at what people celebrate.  There’s more going on than meets the eye.