That Was Quick

4 Comments

It happened when I wasn’t looking.  If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’ve been in Boston since Friday for the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting.  This is a work event for me and I’m pretty much in meetings from 8:30 (or earlier) to 5:30 (or later) each day.  I always come home with “conference voice”—I can barely speak until Thanksgiving.  In any case, while I was distracted in Boston this blog slipped past a milestone.  At some point over the weekend I surpassed a million hits.  Given how rare large numbers are in my life, this is kind of a big deal for me.  I know websites that get attention and critical acclaim hit the million mark within months, or even weeks.  Still, at the ripe old age of sixteen, I’ll take it.  And I’m very grateful to any and all of you who’ve taken a moment to read my musings over the years.

During the conference I was talking to a friend who’s become a celebrity on TikTok.  I also spoke to another friend who’s become a more traditional media darling.  They both outshine me by orders of magnitude.  Attending events like this is always an humbling experience.  I’ve managed to hang around since 1991, with a few gaps, and although it’s always a grind to get ready and get myself out the door, I always walk away amazed at how much so many people have achieved.  Mine is not the only story of a first-generation college student finding a place in the professional world, even if it may not be exactly the place I’d hoped for.  I’m in good company.  I do suspect that most of my readers are not people from this venue.  If I’m wrong, please feel free to comment to let me know.

Mostly since being here I’ve been musing over Edgar Allan Poe and worrying about the traffic I’m sure to encounter once I get off the train and have to drive home during rush hour in New Jersey.  But I’ve also been listening to the stories of friends and colleagues.  They may think they’re pitching me their latest book, but what I’m hearing is their story.  That’s perhaps the most wonderful thing about conferences.  Being distracted enough not to notice when good news creeps upon you.  I know blogs are old fashioned and generally considered outdated.  That describes me as well.  But it warms my heart that so many viewers have stopped by.  My profound thanks to you all!

Secrets

Leave a comment

It’s a mystery.  All parents do it and even when you’re a parent yourself you’re surprised to find your parents doing it to you.  Keeping secrets, that is.  Parents have their secret lives that they don’t tell their children, and when we’re given a glimpse into that life sometimes we’re shocked.  My mother kept a diary.  Not religiously, and not for much of her life.  I inherited one volume, and I’m afraid to read it.  I tend to be an honest guy.  I try to answer my daughter’s questions with complete openness.  There are, however, some things I won’t talk about.  My secrets.  And despite the fact that I reveal something of myself daily on this blog, I do have many parts of my life that remain unrevealed.  Those of us who write sometimes don’t want everything we put down to be read.  Or maybe we do.

I used to keep a diary.  It was partially to remind me but also, in part, to explain myself.  It’s quite personal and I lost maybe two or three volumes of it years ago.  I stopped keeping it after I got married.  I guess I figured a Ph.D. and publication record would do the job for me.  Probably those missing volumes were with stuff left at home that Mom unwittingly threw away, like our old baseball cards from the early seventies.  Some of my stuff got damaged by water, foreshadowing what’d happen when we moved.  Perhaps they were thrown away then.  They had secrets, I’m sure.  Our private lives are a mystery to others.  That’s one reason that I try to be kind whenever possible.  We don’t know the burdens that others carry.  Why add to them by a sharp reply?  Even typing this, I’m not sure it will end up on the blog or not.  Other pieces haven’t.  Secrets.

Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar on Unsplash

Some intelligent animals try to hide things.  Corvids, for example, look around to see who else is there before hiding food.  I once saw a doe giving birth.  She was in a secluded glen in the early morning and I just happened to be jogging quietly by.  I’ve started multiple autobiographies.  I’m not sure anyone has an interest in reading them, but I have hope.  Despite my secrets, most of which I keep out of the autobiographical musings, I know I have a story to tell.  That’s why I keep at this blog, day after day, year after year.  It brings no money and has only a few followers, but it’s a chance to tell my story.  Even if I keep the secrets closely guarded.

Craving Enchantment

Leave a comment

I really want to know, but just can’t figure out, how to write like Katherine May.  My wife and I read her book Wintering and now have added Enchantment.  In many ways I seem to be like May; we may be different shades of neurodivergent, but I understand what she says.  Indeed, at one point in Enchantment she talked me down from a writer’s dilemma that had me worked up for days.  But I can’t write like her.  I have times when my rhetoric for a blog post or two might come close, but I have tried to sustain it for an entire book, so far without success.  My background was perhaps too sullied by academic writing, although May is also an academic, so I may simply be making excuses for lack of talent.

That’s too bad because Enchantment is meant to improve your outlook.  Subtitled Awaking Wonder in an Anxious Age, it consists of life lessons the author learned during the pandemic.  I often, if I allow myself in this constant struggle for my time, experience the sense of wonder May describes.  I enjoy walking in the woods, watching heavenly bodies, staring into a river or pond, and trying to draw lessons from such things.  Lately, however, I find myself rushing through them because I have something else I have to do.  Daily, it’s the 9-2-5, of course.  That schedule overloads my weekends with things that have to be done even if I want to spend time appreciating the enchantment I can find, if I have the time.  Sorry, I’m letting the anxious part take center stage.

This is a wonderful book.  I admire the way that May is able to face down her own struggles with grace and remain open to possibilities.  I found such things much more readily when I was at Nashotah House.  There were moments between classes and there were semester breaks.  We lived in the woods.  By a lake.  There was wonder there, for the taking.  Having a young child to introduce to the wonders of nature definitely helped as well.  Children force you to see through new eyes (it’s not a surprise that May has a young son when writing).  Too quickly we grow up and let capitalism tell us what to do.  It takes so much from us and gives so little.  I’m looking out my window at nature, as I write this.  I know it has enchantment to offer.  I also know that work begins in fifteen minutes.

Dictionary Dreams

Leave a comment

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”  Thus begins the venerated Nunc dimittis, familiar from so many years of chanting evensong at Nashotah House.  It comes to mind when I’ve reached a milestone I never dreamed of attaining.  One that makes me feel as if I’ve accomplished my life’s work.  Strangely, it didn’t occur when my name ended up in a study Bible’s front matter.  But a friend recently sent me a note that immediately brought old Simeon’s words to mind.  I have been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.  My book Weathering the Psalms is quoted (in the web version) under “simile.”  I have no idea how examples are selected for the OED.  It used to be scraps of paper sent in by astute readers, but I suspect things have changed.  How my obscure book ended up there, I haven’t a clue.

There’s an irony here as well.  Like most academics clueless about publication, I initially proposed Weathering the Psalms to Oxford University Press, assuming they published such things.  It was turned down on the basis of a reviewer—one or two I know not—that I later met at a social function, where he was clearly embarrassed.  I really just wonder how the OED found the book to cite in the first place.  In terms of copies sold, it has been my most successful book, but that’s not saying much.  As far as I can tell, it’s only sold less than 400 copies (the royalty statements don’t have the total and I haven’t received a check in years).  I guess all things in the world are connected, whether we notice it or not.

Those who know me personally are aware that validation is a huge thing for me.  I suspect that is true of most people who grew up in difficult circumstances and who managed—and this is never a certain thing—to pull themselves out.  Having been fired from my long-term teaching post (where I was working on this book) only made me want to prove myself more, I guess.  Insignificant things like getting a Choice review for one of my books (which continues to sell poorly) and having that behemoth of a dictionary notice that I used a fairly common word in a fairly common way do tend to release the endorphins.  It’s like maybe someone noticed that I’ve passed this way.  Maybe there was a reason for trying to capture the Wisconsin thunderstorms in a book about the Psalms.  Maybe there’s a reason each working day there concluded with the Nunc dimittis.

Politics As Usual

Leave a comment

What J. D. Vance does on, or to, his couch is his own business.  Sexual preferences between consenting adults, and furniture, is a private matter.  (Vance isn’t the first writer whose publications have come back to bite him.)   Forgive and forget.  And maybe reupholster.  What Vance has done that’s unforgivable is betray the poor.  I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago and was taken by his enumerating the harms visited on the poor by our capitalistic system.  Having grown up poor myself, I found many of those damages in my own self-inventory.  But even just after I read the book I heard whisperings that Vance really didn’t care for the poor, but for himself.  That puts him in the same category as Trump, I suppose.  A team that would only push what makes them personally look good, if elected.  It’s a mockery of democracy that a convicted felon is even permitted to run for president.

Betrayal of the poor is perhaps the most unconscionable of sins.  To have grown up knowing how difficult life is for many Americans and then to throw them to the wolves for personal aggrandizement is a move worthy of Satan himself.  Indeed, his running mate was born excessively wealthy.  I recently saw a quote from J. P. Morgan: “I owe the public nothing.”  Morgan,  one of the wealthiest men of his era, apparently believed using others to get yourself to the top is fine.  Trump, who sees people as disposable (ask his wives) never had to struggle.  Neither did Morgan.  But Vance, if his book is to be believed, did.  Knowing what it means to grow up that way and then to hitch yourself to the Trump-wagon is, in my opinion, about as low as you can go.  It’s a lack of honesty.

If we’re honest we’ll admit that all people lie.  True, Trump has made eiling (actually telling the truth) a thing.  He basically never eils, so we can assume anything he says is false.  Biden told lies.  Harris told lies.  Vance told lies.  Even though I’m an honest guy, I’ve told lies in my long time on this planet.  Not many, I hope, but I’m human.  Show me a politician who never lies and I’ll show you a liar.  I never thought I’d live to see a major party ticket pair felons, sex criminals, and betrayers together and tell Americans they’ll make the country great again.  The question that won’t let me go, however, is what of the poor?  We know that the rich, left to their own devices, tend toward Morgan’s quip.  Honestly, who will make safety nets for those who are victims of business as usual?

History Lesson

1 Comment

This blog, which has come to define me in many ways, wasn’t my idea.  A niece started it for me when Neal Stephenson suggested I should have a place for podcasting.  I still have ideas for podcasts, but finding the time to put them together (and a place to host them) has proven quite challenging.  In any case, the title, “Sects and Violence in the Ancient World,” reflected where I was at the time.  I started posting when I was 46, and now I’m over 60.  Things are bound to change a little.  From the start, I wrote about books.  Indeed, for things I’ve read since summer of 2009, I check the blog to find out when.  I also noted significant movies.  In the early days I tried to limit the posts to religion-themed topics since, well, I have three degrees in the field.

As I gradually grew comfortable discussing pop culture (generally horror), I gradually addressed movies and books without a religious bent.  It could be that I didn’t record everything I read or watched here, and that makes things before 2009 kind of a muddle.  While the muddle really began before 2005—my last year at Nashotah House.  That period was a kind of maelstrom of desperation to find a job, teaching classes, pretending to be an editor, making my way in a world unfamiliar to me and certainly unchosen.  Eventually this blog came to focus on horror movies more than religion.  Now, like my life, it’s a jumble of conflicting impulses trying to make sense of the world as an existentialist with a bit of faith.  I’m still aspiring to that mustard seed.

I’m not sure when it was that I began commenting on most movies I watched.  I’ve used movies as therapy since 2005—for some reason horror made me feel better.  Even now, when I want to remember when I saw a movie I check this blog.  Or if I want to know when I read a book.  My wife pointed Goodreads out to me in 2013, and that became another place to post on books, even if they didn’t qualify for “Sects and Violence.”  But that slushy period between 2005 and 2013 was full of books, I know.  In addition to movies, I read incessantly.  If I want to remember when I read what, however, I’ve only got the last decade really covered.  Goodreads says I’ve read about a thousand books since 2013.  For movies, I have no way of knowing how many I’ve seen.  Or where, for the most part.  Maybe I need to start keeping a proper diary.  Maybe one with a lock and a key.

Strangers

Leave a comment

Okay, so I like to think that I’m a reasonably intelligent person.  I can drive a car.  I’ve read over two thousand books.  I have been blogging for nearly a decade and a half.  Why can’t I figure out this password thing?  My brother has a blog on WordPress too.  His posts are quite different than mine, but I always like to read them since we think a lot alike.  Anyway, I wanted to leave a comment on a recent post he wrote.  You’d think that’d be easy since this blog is also hosted on WordPress.  (I’m the one who suggested WordPress to him.)  When I went to post the comment I received a dialogue box basically asking “and who might you be?”  When I gave my web credentials it wanted a password, but it wasn’t clear which password it wanted.

An actual word press; image credit: DANIEL CHODOWIECKI 62 bisher unveröffentlichte Handzeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk von Johann Bernhard Basedow. Mit einem Vorworte von Max von Boehn. Voigtländer-Tetzner, Frankfurt am Main 1922, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Like most human beings alive today I have more passwords than atoms in a typical tardigrade.  With a brain over sixty, trying to recollect them all in an instant, well, let’s just say that ain’t happenin’.  As I laboriously lumber through all relevant passwords (I’m pretty sure they don’t want all the unique ones I use at work, in addition to my private accounts), it rejects each and every one.  You see, WordPress is funny.  My own account, now 14 years old—maybe that’s the problem—those teenage years!—doesn’t recognize me at times.  Indeed, on my own blog (and I have a paying account) it sometimes blinks its virtual eyes and says, “and who might you be?”  I try not to take this personally.  I mean, we’ve only known each other for years.  And all I want to do is put a supportive comment on my brother’s blog—we share the same surname, and even the same web host.  What could be so difficult about that?

I’m pretty much logged into my WordPress account constantly.  I post every day.  There’s over 5,300 mini-essays of about 400 words.  That’s over 2 million words.  Is this relationship really so one-sided?  I’m trying hard not to let my aporripsophobia get the best of me here.  Just tell me which password you want!  And, if I can use it to log into my own WordPress account, why won’t it work for the WordPress accounts of family and friends when I want to make a comment?  We’ve been together for so long, do you really not know me any better than this?  Hey, I think I need a private moment with WordPress—you can check out my brother’s blog while you wait…

Size Does Matter

14 Comments

While not exactly a Luddite, my grasp on technology is tenuous. I grew up in what may be the last generation where computer use was considered optional—I made it through a master’s degree without ever using one, and could have managed my doctorate without. Like many of 1960s vintage, I resisted computers at first, somehow believing that the status quo ante would ante up and resist the technobabble that was already beginning to bubble just beneath the surface. I never really had a clear idea what a byte was, or how a simple 0 or 1 could be used to convey complex information. I heard about “blogs” but had no idea what they were. Next thing I know I found myself writing one. To my way of thinking any kind of log is essentially a “once a day” thing, although I know bloggers who post remorselessly all day long. At the beginning I was confused until a friend gave me some advice: don’t write too much in any one post. Keep entries down to about three to five paragraphs, and between 300 and 500 words. That way, he intimated, people will look at it.

Recently, wondering why amid the millions and millions of pages available on the web, mine gets so few hits, I read something by an “industry analyst.” (That phrase makes me shudder, but this is no place to be squeamish.) Want more hits? he provocatively asked, followed by—here are the tips. One of his first bits of advice was write longer. At least three times longer than I do (1,500 word minimum). I don’t know about you, but I often think of such things in holistic terms. That’s a lot of words to ask someone to read. If you’re going to put that much together, you’d better have something really profound to say. You’re asking for an investment.

Those of you who know me will understand that multiplying words is not an issue. In addition to this blog I write both fiction and non-fiction books and stories (the vast majority of which have never been published). I answer a simple question with a 50-minute lecture. In other words I have other words. I just tend not to think that you necessarily want to read them all at once (or at all). It’s obvious that size does matter. I can’t help being disappointed when I open a post and find I haven’t the time to read it because it’s just too long. Life’s not fair in its allotment of time. As usual, I err on the side of caution. I value your time to take up too much of it here.

Image by Scarlet23, Wikimedia commons

Image by Scarlet23, Wikimedia commons

Anything Free

Leave a comment

“Anything free is worth saving up for.” That’s a bit of wisdom I picked up some time ago. There’s another side to free, however. That other side is called the hook. So, I started this blog with the help of my niece, back in 2009. Word Press offered free web hosting and, at first, support. Nearly every single day for about six years I’ve been posting here. Well over half-a-million words offered, rent free, to the world. Lately Word Press is giving me trouble. Somebody’s system isn’t working well with somebody else’s (I’m having trouble loading pictures, for instance) and I have to login and post about three times per blog entry. It takes up most of my free time before the bus comes. Finally I decided to call for help. Scanning the website I learned that help is indeed available! Only for premium customer, however. If you want to pay, your free website will be available to the world. The hook.

I can’t remember exactly when things got cloudy. It was a laptop ago, in any case. Suddenly I was receiving emails about starting up my iCloud account. In fact, now your devices can’t communicate with each other unless you have an iCloud account. The benefits: it’s free. You can access your pictures, music, and documents on any device with the correct app. So I click “okay.” Anything free… Then I receive the dreaded red-colored alarm. My iCloud storage is full. Any attempted transaction will lead to the modern equivalent of Hell—data loss. There is a solution, however. If I pay for an upgrade I get lots more space an my files will be secure. Let the music play on. It will only cost you a song.

Examples could be multiplied. Since internet fame is the only kind of fame attainable to most of us—only if something goes viral—we buy our lottery tickets and stoke our social networks and write our blogs. Then the bill comes. Call me a curmudgeon, but I remember when you could lease a phone without having to take out a mortgage to afford the monthly bills. Bakelite was the old silicon. I remember when if you wanted to write someone a letter you knew up front it would cost you 13 cents. I remember when Blog was a radio station on the Twilight Zone. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to quit the blogging just yet. I do have to warn you though; it’s free.

IMG_2591