Falconry

Leave a comment

Some years back I read Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and the two follow-up volumes.  My interest in them was reignited when I started seeing them being branded as dark academia.  The home is really a kind of school and the images offer a feeling compatible with other dark academia works for children.  Then, reading about Tim Burton, I realized one of the few movies of his I hadn’t seen was the one based on this book.  Now, it has been long enough that the storyline has faded a bit, but I’m pretty sure the movie took some liberties with the original tale.  Even before seeing the movie, it seemed to me that Burton’s distinctive style would be a good match for what I remembered of the tale. I didn’t know it was a Burton movie when I first learned about it.

The best way to be introduced to the story is to read Riggs’ books, but the basic idea is that “peculiar” children—those with strange abilities—are kept in secret locations by Ymbryne, peculiar women that can turn into birds.  Miss Peregrine, for example.  They are kept safe from Hollowgasts, monsters that want to eat their eyes, and Wights, Hollowgasts that eat enough eyes to appear human.  The children are kept safe in time loops created by Ymbryne, where everyone stays the same age and they can hide from Wights and “Hollows.”  Jake’s grandfather was in Miss Peregrine’s home, but he decided to leave to hunt down the Wights and Hollows.  When he’s killed, Jake wants to find out if all the stories he told were true.  His father, thinking his son has mental issues, agrees to go on holiday with him and Jake finds and befriends the peculiars at the school.  They’re stuck in 1943.

When a Wight follows Jake to Miss Peregrine’s loop, the children have to fight the Hollows and Wights to rescue her.  And Jake has to make a decision whether to stay in 1943 or go back to 2016 where things haven’t been so great for him.  You get the picture.  The movie’s not bad.  It threw me a bit not to have the music by Danny Elfman.  Again, the subject matter would seem to have suited his particular style.  I remember hearing about the movie when it came out a decade ago.  It didn’t make a huge splash, and nobody else I know had read the books so I didn’t see the film back then.  Burton is a director that I’ve followed more or less steadily since his second film.  I have a little more catching up to do, however, peculiar as that may seem.

Building Horror

Leave a comment

Christina Henry grew a reputation rewriting fairy tales.  At least that’s how I found her.  I read The Girl in Red and then Horseman (which was after I’d begun work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth).  I thought she’d found her niche as a writer.  Lately, when browsing bookstore shelves in the horror section, I’ve discovered she has a reputation there as well.  The House that Horror Built caught my eye, and I trust certain writers, based on past performance.  (Which is, I suspect, how most agents assess their clients.)   In any case, I wanted to give it a try.  Speaking of trying, I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers here because there’s a twist ending.  The story begins innocently enough.  Harry, a woman down on her luck, has a job cleaning the house of a famous horror director, Javier Castillo.  Barely making ends meet in Chicago, she cleans his horror props three days a week.

Castillo is in Chicago because of the disappearance of his wife and son after the latter was accused of a murder he probably committed.  His family gone, Castillo moves away from Hollywood while trying to work on his next project.  Meanwhile, Harry’s landlord is evicting her and her son Gabriel.  Upon learning that Harry likes horror movies, Castillo invites her and her son to dinner one night.  Things get a bit chummy for Harry’s tastes, but they return once more when a couple of actors are staying with the director.  One of the actors has a tragic accident, falling to her death.  Meanwhile the eviction date is moved up and Harry has no choice but to accept Castillo’s offer of hospitality.  She’s known for some time that his house is haunted.  I think I’ll leave things there.  Hopefully it’ll peak some interest.

I don’t know much about Henry, but she does seem to understand the plight of the poor.  It isn’t easy to survive when you can’t earn enough beyond what covers the necessary expenses.  And when you have a child, the anxiety increases exponentially.  For the most part, this is a slow burn horror tale.  The suspected ghost is introduced not too far into the proceedings, but the explanation is more than the reader expects—at least this reader.  The last couple of chapters are page-turners with some full-on horror.  I don’t mind waiting for some payoff.  To me, however, the darkness in the threat of homelessness is its own form of horror.  And it’s not too difficult to imagine for the majority of us.  I’d say Henry has bridged successfully into the genre.

Exorcising Emily

Leave a comment

Perhaps after The Exorcist, the demonic possession movie cited with the greatest respect is The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  This 2005 movie is based, in part, on the true case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died after undergoing several exorcisms, beginning in 1975.  Sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop, but after reading about The Exorcist the timing of all of this struck me.  Somehow reading about it in Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson’s “The Exorcist” Effect, hadn’t stuck with me.  William Peter Blatty published the eponymous novel in 1971.  This was based, in part, on a case from 1949, over twenty years earlier.  The novel was a bestseller and, of course, adapted into William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973.  That movie was a blockbuster, and is probably the single biggest influence in the current perceptions of demonic possession.  What caught Blatty’s attention in the first place was how rare exorcism was.  And one was held in 1949?

Anneliese Michel had been undergoing psychiatric treatment since 1970.  It was only five years later, after the release of both the novel and movie, that exorcism was suggested as a possible cure.  It may be impossible to know if the priest whom the Michel family approached had read the novel or seen the film.  One thing is certain, however.  The Exorcist brought the topic back into popular consciousness in the western world by then.  Yes, in the United States it was pop culture, but the film was taken with such seriousness that it filtered into everyday consciousness as well.  Although banned in parts of Britain, that consciousness had entered Europe as well.  Was the idea to treat Michel by exorcism part of what Laycock and Harrelson termed “The Exorcist Effect”?

Media is incredibly influential.  Fiction can create reality.  It can cost someone their life.  And not just for being in an accident in the film industry (although such tragedies do occur).  Humans are intrigued by ideas.  We tell stories about them.  Sometimes our own life stories become fictionalized in our recollections.  My memories have been corrected more than once by my siblings.  Culturally, we were shown what demons were and what they could do in The Exorcist.  Even if Michel’s priest hadn’t seen the movie, he lived in a culture already altered by it.  I really need to go back and read Laycock and Harrelson’s book again.  Being invited to a podcast about demons back in August made me think about Emily Rose again, after years of pursing The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow.

Slip Sliding

Leave a comment

The world is quiet here.  The Baudelaire orphans have been reunited by the end of The Slippery Slope, but Quigley Quagmire gets separated from them at the denouement.  As a friend of mine once said regarding movies, it’s difficult to watch people who long to be—and belong—together being separated.  Indeed, it is one of the saddest of plot points.  Count Olaf and his band of villains kidnap Sunny while, they think, sending Violet and Klaus hurtling to their deaths.  The orphans were on their way to the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Draughts. They eventually arrive to discover that the schismatic group of V.F.D. has already burned it down.  And we get a strong inkling that Volunteer Fire Department is what stands behind the mysterious initials.  Reading this again as an adult also reminds me that this is where we caught up with the series since we began buying the hardcovers for my daughter as they came out.

This segment of the Series of Unfortunate Events once again has the orphans wondering if they’re becoming as bad as the villains.  They decide that instead of fighting fire with fire they need to work to make the world a quieter, more peaceful place.  And two of Count Olaf’s associates, the women with white faces, leave his troupe.  A pair of criminals that have even Olaf nervous show up in this episode as well.  Lemony Snicket’s humor remains intact, despite the darkness of the tale.  There are laugh-out-loud parts in the last two chapters.  And some memorable quotes/ideas: “Count Olaf, like any good businessman, has committed a wide variety of crimes.”  The idea that somebody well-read is potentially trustworthy is repeated throughout the story. I mentioned a biblical connection (of course I did!) for The Carnivorous Carnival, but here there’s an explicit one as Snicket categorizes Adam and Eve’s decision to put on clothes “to leave the snake-infested garden” as an impulse passion.  After drying my tears, the cleverness of all this sank in.  Typically the impulse passion in Eden is precisely because the primordial couple is unclothed.  There’s much to chew over in these books ostensibly for children.  The message of what distinguishes good from evil wasn’t lost on me.

I recently discussed with my daughter how some authors are able to bridge from children’s, or young adult, novels into those for adults.  There’s kind of an invisible line there.  Adult life can be serious business, and it often is.  There are some great funny novels as well for the adult crowd.  And sometimes they can even be disguised as books for young readers.

Monster Mash

Leave a comment

You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.

Otherwise

Leave a comment

I’ve read all of Diana Pasulka’s books.  A religion professor with a range, she’s worked in Catholic Studies (and served as a consultant on The Conjuring), UFOs, and, more recently, in entities and consciousness.  The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny is an unusual book.  As a Catholic herself, she doesn’t come out and say that the secret forces are God, traditionally defined.  The book doesn’t answer the question directly as to what these forces are, but makes a good case that they’re there.  For a lifelong liker of the weird and unusual, and also an erstwhile professor of religion, I found this book intriguing as well as a bit of a head-scratcher.  As regular readers know, I’m no fan of AI.  Pasulka gave me a bit of pause here, but not enough to change my mind. She also engages with Catholic thinkers and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

Consciousness is the elephant in the room.  We don’t know what it is, where it comes from, or how far down it reaches.  I’ve read serious philosophers who suggest the planet is conscious.  If so, it stands to reason that the rest of the physical universe is too.  What we do know is that the government has been taking UFOs seriously since at least the forties.  We also find out, from books like this, that tech moguls use what we might well call the paranormal to guide their decisions, including about AI.  Meanwhile, the average person on the street scoffs at anything they’ve been conditioned to think of as “crazy.”  Those in places of power aren’t laughing.  Reagan believed in astrology.  I understand it’s kind of “in” these days among the rich and powerful.

I come away from books like this realizing just how little the average person knows about what goes on behind the walls of power.  Those walls enclose the government (or at least some in the government), the ultra-wealthy, and some research facilities.  While Pasulka doesn’t discuss this, I’ve always been fascinated that the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow makes no bones about his belief in aliens and their presence on earth.  I suppose if you have lots of money it doesn’t matter if people laugh you out of a job.  Meanwhile, such things are still used as measures of “sanity” for ordinary folk.  Who are the others?  We don’t really know.  We do know that there are those among our own kind who take such things very seriously.  And they are, generally, the ones calling the shots.  I still don’t think Al’s a good companion to the human race.

Thorny Path

Leave a comment

Although we’ve all heard “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we all do.  An image, or artfully done cover design, speaks to us.  I admit I bought A. G. Slatter’s The Path of Thorns because of the cover.  I don’t remember exactly where, but it was in an independent bookshop, probably either in New Hope or Lititz, or some town in-between, and it was face out on the shelf.  I noted it was somewhat thick, and I have a penchant for shorter novels, but the thorns, werewolf, and hand of glory on the gothic cover spoke to me.  I have to confess that it took quite some time to get into it.  Asher Todd is an unreliable narrator.  And she keeps secrets.  It took several chapters to be grabbed by the story.  But to be honest, I’m finding lately that stories that take their time building are frequently worth the wait. Trust the author.

Placed in a setting that a couple of the blurbs classify as “fairy tale,” Path of Thorns is told by Asher, a mysterious woman who we know is a witch.  She’s on a shadowy mission not revealed until quite late, to the Morwood estate.  There she uses her magic discreetly to help both members of the family and some people on the grange.  Witches are still hunted and killed.  She introduces the priest, called a “god-hound,” and it turns out that he has a minor, but important part to play in the story.  The Morwood estate is run by a vain, self-centered son Luther, while the matriarch, Leonora, technically in charge, is more or less an invalid.  Until Asher, out of pity, cures her blindness.  From there the story unfolds.

There is a werewolf, and the hand of glory has a role.  It’s not really a horror novel, though.  It does have a gothic, dark fairy tale feel to it.  And once the major turning point in the plot is revealed, it’s difficult to put down.  This is made even easier because the chapters are uniformly short, which means you can pick it up and reach an obvious stopping point without committing half an hour.  In the end it’s quite a well-told story that I’m glad to have read.  Whenever I go to a bookstore, I do so with a list.  Given the nature of my interests, I often have trouble locating anything on said list.  Those of us who prefer not to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed frequently benefit from judging a book by its cover.

Icelandic Magic

Leave a comment

There’s a danger when you get together with friends.  They might lend you a book that you know you’ll have to buy.  Not because you lost theirs, but because it’s so good you want a copy.  This happened when a friend lent me The Galdrabók: Forbidden Icelandic Folk Magic, by Kári Pálsson.  I’ve always been interested in folklore and Iceland has held a fascination for me ever since we lived in Scotland.  My wife and I, for some reason, took to Icelandic sagas from medieval times.  We read several, including the Orkneyinga Saga (so-called by Penguin; the subtitle is The History of the Earls of Orkney).  We’d visited the Orkney Islands after taking an adult education class on the Vikings.  (Norway’s not far from Scotland.)  So I tucked into this little lent book with gusto.  People naturally enough believe in magic.  This book contains the titular Galdrabók and  the Jarðskinna manuscript.  They’re an intriguing blend of Christianity and Norse folk belief.

The book didn’t take long to get through, but when you’re reading a book about magic at 4 a.m., it refocuses you quite a bit.  You almost find yourself believing.  It happened that I was reading another book at the same time, one which has me questioning reality.  Together the two had an impact on the thought process with which I start the day.  Galdrabók is a grimoire.  After the Christianization of Iceland, such things were feared to the point that you could be burnt at the stake if you were found in possession of one.  The political church wants no rivals.  The book itself has prayers—some very Christian—spells, and magic symbols.  An introduction by the translator helpfully places this material in context.  A brief book, I was reading it in the interstices between my regular morning reading and when I was doing my daily exercises.

Another reason I knew I’d have to buy this book was the publisher, Hyldyr.  First of all, Hyldyr is a publisher with the fortitude to reject AI.  Would that all publishers do the same!  Environmentally conscious and aware of the importance of design, they make paperback books that are works of art.  And they care about academic respectability.  The books are on topics that fall beyond what a usual publisher might take on—Icelandic grimoires, for example.  I found this a stunning little book.  Even as I read it I knew I’d want to refer back to it.  Of course, this friend has lent me books before, and I always ended up buying copies for myself.  Such is the danger.

Losing My Head

Leave a comment

It must be the season.  The same day two friends sent me articles about headlessness.  I sometimes feel that way myself; my book on the Headless Horseman has proved my worst-selling title, although some have told me it’s my best book.  No matter.  It’s headless season and I’m glad for the information.  One story came from an image in an Early Modern book from Amsterdam, showing an encounter between a man and a headless person, both on foot.  The article notes how Kabbalistic tradition includes seeking the answer to the question of whether one’s name is written in the Book of Life.  Nachmanides, a rabbi from the 13th century, suggests going outside on the last night of Sukkot and looking at your shadow cast by the moon.  If it’s headless, you’re in trouble.  This tradition is at least medieval in age, and it may have circulated when Washington Irving was traveling around Europe, working on The Sketch Book.  (Curious?  It’s discussed in my book.)

The second story is about the Irish Dullahan, or headless rider.  The piece traces the earliest written version to 1828, too late to have influenced Irving.  The Dullahan, according to the article, is a piece of Irish folklore.  The author, Irish around the World, points out that there’s no evidence that Irving knew of this tradition.  Irving didn’t invent the Headless Horseman, but his story brought it to popular consciousness.  Every year as October nears, I start seeing Headless Horseman on Halloween pages.  I do explore this connection in the book as well.  I still read about the Sleepy Hollow version of headlessness.  In fact, the book next on my pile (the one I just finished will be posted soon; I’m in the middle of another one at the moment) is J. W. Ocker’s new book on Sleepy Hollow.  (We exchanged emails about it last year.)

Being associated with the Headless Horseman, unlike either the Dullahan or the headless person in the Early Modern Jewish book is an honor.  Very few people may have purchased the book, but I’m glad to have had the chance to participate in the discussion.  Lindsey Beer’s novel Hollow is due out next fall and apparently the movie based on it is moving forward.  Perhaps it will reignite some interest in the headless fellow that was my companion for the years I was working on the book.  I don’t have a ton of free time, but I’m always glad for tips on mentions I miss.  Hints that the Headless Horseman is still relevant in a world dominated by those with much louder voices.  After all, October is when he rides.

Self Promotion

Leave a comment

Perhaps I lack ambition, or maybe my inner critic is over-caffeinated, but I’ve never applied for a book prize.  Don’t misunderstand: when I submit the books to publishers I think they’re good—I wouldn’t do so otherwise.  As with any of the woodworking I’ve done, however, I can see the flaws.  These days young scholars are being encouraged to submit their books for prizes.  Many of them want nominations for several awards.  I’ll admit that once in a while I wish one of my publishers would say, “Hey, this is pretty good, maybe we’ll submit it for something.”  After six books this has never happened, and I don’t want to put myself out there.  Some of my fiction has been nominated for prizes by the publishers.  Some I’ve even entered into contests.  I believe in my work.  It just means more if someone else would be willing to take the next step.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

My time in the academy—about 19 years in some kind of professorial role—ended 15 years ago.  Even so, during my time as a grad student and professor, nobody suggested book prizes.  There are very few in religious studies, perhaps because the motivation to study the subject seems to come from a higher plane.  Of course, in those days potential professors didn’t have to be self-promoters, although some were.  All I was seeking was a steady teaching position to do what I do best, and which allowed me to write a book now and again.  Although I taught full-time for 14 years, I never had a sabbatical.  Or any research leave.  I managed to write a second book in any case.  The thought of submitting it for an award never occurred to me.

Slowly I’m beginning to realize that the academy has become a foreign country to me.  A place where scholars have to reassure themselves—book prizes being one such means—that their work is exceptional.  The real factor, it seems to me, is time.  Will any of your books still be referred to or cited years after a scholar becomes old?  Perhaps asked to leave the academy?  There are so many academic books published these days; publish or perish has become a mantra in the dark academy.  It is more difficult to stand out.  My next nonfiction book (half written), if it ever gets finished, will not be published by an academic publisher.  And were it to be nominated for a book prize (unlikely), the initiative will, I assure you, come from someone else.

Heavenly Scent

1 Comment

There’s a disappointing scent to books printed on demand.  Upon first opening them, they release a waft of laser printer.  The friendly smell of offset printing is banished.  I need to qualify that, however.  While teaching at Nashotah House I acquired a book via interlibrary loan that I remember not for its content, but for its unpleasant odor.  I’m not sure if it was the paper used, but the book smelled unpleasing.  Almost too offensive to read.  I’m not referring to the kind of musty, basement bouquet that some used books, long stored, possess.  No, that aroma isn’t offensive.  It suggests both mystery and the human condition.  How books smell is important.  Upon recently opening a POD (print on demand) book, I was transported to office work rather than the musty study of a scholar.

There are companies that sell scented candles intended to suggest libraries.  Libraries smell wonderful.  The small Franklin Public Library in my hometown has a wonderful, evocative aroma.  I remember it well from childhood.  On a visit to my mother before she passed, my wife, daughter, and I took her to that library.  We didn’t check anything out.  I simply had to smell it again.  Olfactory stimulus is very personal.  Indeed, in polite company we tend not to comment on how a person smells unless it is particularly pleasant.  “Nice perfume/aftershave, etc.”  (You have to be very close to a person to comment on less pleasant odors.) Scent has always been an important sense to me.  I like to sniff things.  When I’m out jogging first thing in the morning, I snuff the air like a bloodhound, eager for the first whiffs of fall during the heat of summer.  Like a dog I tend to think there are no bad smells, but there are some I don’t seek out.  Smells will take you back to the past, as the ultimate time travel.

In my mother’s kitchen I used to sit by her spice drawer and pull out each little bottle and jar to sniff them.  She never had anything as pungent as the asafoetida that my wife and I once bought for a recipe, but I recall those moments fondly.  Mom would be cooking nearby, and it seemed to me that I was smelling far away places that I’d never go.  I did make it to Scotland, however.  Edinburgh often smelled of the McEwan’s brewery.  At least the Old Town did on many a foggy morning.  We live not far from a micro-brewery and when its bouquet escapes, it take me straight back to Auld Reekie.  And, of course, Edinburgh was full of books and their distinctive smell.  All of this makes me want to go plant my nose in a book.

Serious Series

Leave a comment

The Carnivorous Carnival continues to reveal more of the Baudelaires’ unanswered questions.  At the Caligari Carnival the orphans disguise themselves to fit into a freak show, and meet Madame Lulu, who reveals important information—the V.F.D. has split into two parties.  The children still don’t learn what the initials stand for, but they discover that some of the influential adults in their lives were part of it.  The story grows quite gripping and more seriously dark than I remembered it being when I read it to our daughter many years ago.  One of Count Olaf’s associates isn’t mentioned after The Hostile Hospital, where presumably they died.  In this volume, another of his associates is thrown to the lions that give the book its title.

I couldn’t help but think of Daniel in the lion’s den as I read this one.  And Olaf’s plan is only too eagerly lapped up by the crowd wanting to see violence (and sloppy eating).  The reference to Daniel here can’t be coincidence.  The story also has the children questioning their own motivations.  Are they villains too?  Madame Lulu was a good member of V.F.D. who’d turned bad.  The children helped her reform, but in the end she betrayed them to Count Olaf.  Were their motives really pure?  For the first time in a Series of Unfortunate Events, the orphans end up separated at the end.  Neither Mr. Poe nor the Quagmire Triplets appear in this part of the tale.  It does seem, as noted, darker than usual.

Daniel Handler continues his subtle talking over the heads of children, though.  When explaining “déjà vu” for children, he gives other examples such as “ennui” and “la petite mort.”  The latter he explains that it’s a feeling that part of you has died, but Handler certainly knows that the common usage for the phrase is a circumlocution for “orgasm.”  Something many adults know as well, I suspect.  And there is humor for younger readers as well.  The “freaks” with whom the orphans share their job at the carnival provide some comic relief.  As an adult reading the books for myself, I get the feeling that, by this far into the series the story—while remaining pure fantasy—is aimed more at older readers.  It’s amazing what you can forget over the course of a couple of decades.  I trusted Lemony Snicket all those years ago, not to write anything that would seriously disturb our child.  I still trust him as an adult as I look forward to book ten.

Making Monks

Leave a comment

Now that I’m an antique, antique stores have a special draw.  They’re kind of like museums with free admission where you can buy the artifacts.  There’s a particularly large one in Allentown that I’ve visited a few times.  It’s the kind of place that, if you want something you see, you buy it right away because it’s not likely to be there next time you go back.  Back in March I saw a pair of bookends that caught my attention.  They were carved in the shape of monks reading books.  The reason I was fascinated by them is that I had bought my wife a very similar figurine (too small to be a bookend) when I first started teaching at Nashotah House.  We didn’t have much money, but I thought it was a whimsical reminder of where I was when I had to be away all week so that we could keep our academic couple dreams alive.

By the time I got back to the antique store the “bookends” were long gone.  What I was really curious about was whether there could be a connection with the Nashotah House curio I purchased nearly 35 years before.  There’s probably something I’m missing.  Was there a Platonic original somewhere?  When I failed to find them at the antique store, I did an online search and discovered a very similar one on Etsy, listed as being made in the 1970s.  I bought the one we have in 1992.  It was clearly handmade; the Nashotah House bookstore had a few of them on display at the time.  They no longer carried them after the inventory sold out.  I’d supposed they were made by a local Nashotah House person—which may be true—but where did they get the idea?

A bit more time on Etsy revealed another exemplar, this one listed as from the 1940s, specifically from Mexico.  One of the Etsy sellers is listed as being in Florida.  I bought mine in Wisconsin.  I found a pair in an antique store in Pennsylvania.  What is the missing link here?  This is the kind of rabbit hole academics are liable to tumble down.  Since I’m a dark academic, it strikes me as a research topic for someone without tenure worries to consider.  Or perhaps a detective who was raised Catholic.  All the five examples (two on Etsy, two in the antique store, and one from Nashotah House) follow the same plan and are stained and painted similarly.  This antique is curious about the origin story of those other antiques.

Early Romance

Leave a comment

One of the more recent fascinations for me has been the fateful meeting of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori that took place in the summer of 1816.  That gathering famously led Mary, later Mary Shelley, to write Frankenstein and Polidori to compose “The Vampyre,” based on an idea of Byron.  Daisy Hay casts her net a bit further in Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives.  Particularly, Hay considers the often unsung role of Leigh Hunt, a young journal publisher, who brought together a coterie of creatives that included Byron and Shelley (although those two met later), but also John Keats and a host of others.  Romanticism pervades this group with Keats, Shelley, and Byron all dying young.  (And Polidori as well, but he’s not really much in Hay’s narrative.)  These three poets threw a very long shadow.  As recently when I was in school, we still learned about them.

In my reading over the past many months Leigh Hunt’s name had naturally come up, but I never considered looking more into him.  He never achieved the fame of his circle, and he fell out of favor by writing an account of Byron that was unkind to the poet, even as his posthumous star was in the ascent.  This account makes for fascinating reading.  Shelley and Hunt shared the scandal of marrying and having the sisters of their wives live with them.  Victorians would, of course, assume something improper was happening.  Byron, it was well known, had many affairs, including one with his half-sister.  People love gossip and even though Hunt’s sister-in-law, Beth Kent, made a name for herself publishing books on plants, both she and Claire—the other women—have largely been ignored.  Claire outlived everyone in the circle apart from the late interloper Edward Trelawny, who cast himself as a fast friend of Shelley and Byron.

Hay does an excellent job of pulling all of this together.  The lives are indeed tangled.  Of course, relationships in general are quite tangled.  This book begins with Hunt and pretty much ends with him.  Hay provides some previously unpublished notes from Claire and has to bring the story to a close with Trelawny.  Historically he was the last survivor.  He was also known in his lifetime for making up incredible stories about himself.  I’ve read his account of Shelley and Byron’s deaths.  That book, with its dark academia vibes, may have been the first I read on this fascination.  It’s been with me, however, at least since 1987.  And it will likely continue.

Eating Sin

Leave a comment

Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!