Horror Adjacent

Leave a comment

We have the basic facts, but still, it takes a good bit of imagination.  We simply don’t know what the life of Mary Shelley was like, as experienced by the woman herself.  The movie Mary Shelley isn’t a horror film but it’s horror adjacent.  How could a movie about the woman who invented Frankenstein be anything but?  The handling of Haifaa al-Mansour’s film is generally as a drama, or a romance.  The story takes the angle that it was her stormy relationship with both Percy Shelley and her own father that led Mary to express her feelings of abandonment in her novel.  And while we have to acknowledge the liberties all movie-makers take, it does seem interested in keeping fairly near the known details of Mary Shelley’s life.  Although other women were also writing then, it was still a “man’s world” she tried to break into.

I confess that one of my reasons for wanting to see this film was that Ken Russell’s Gothic had a powerful impact on my younger mind.  That movie, which is over-the-top, being the first I’d seen telling the tale, had become canonical in my mind.  I know the dangers of literalism, and I wanted to see someone else’s take on the story.  Al-Mansour’s treatment takes a female perspective to the narrative.  It seems that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were both advocates of what might now be termed a playboy lifestyle, and that Mary, daughter of forward thinking Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was fairly liberal herself.  Although Percy Shelley, like Lord Byron, was quite famous in his time, that didn’t always equate to financial solvency.  I could relate to parts of that quite well—full of creative ideas and shy on cash flow.

Mary Shelley didn’t rock the critics, but many felt it was a thoughtful treatment.  It is dark and gothic, but with no real monsters.  It did explain a bit of inside baseball about Ken Russell’s film.  Both movies make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare to explore the famous meeting of Byron and the Shelleys that led to the writing of Frankenstein.  Indeed, Gothic makes a good deal of it.  Mary Shelley explains that Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had an affair with Fuseli.  I was unaware of that connection.  Something was clearly circulating among the Romantics, many of whom knew each other and, in their own ways, became formative of culture centuries down the road.  And although many critics weren’t impressed, I think it’s about time that a woman’s point of view was brought to Mary Shelley’s life in a world not kind to women.  Even if a woman gave the world one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.

Around Us

Leave a comment

Our Wives Under the Sea is a gentle, but chilling horror story by Julia Armfield.  Two women are married and one of them is a marine biologist being sent on a submarine to explore deep ocean life.  A planned three-week voyage becomes six months and when the sub finally surfaces again, Leah, the biologist, has “come back wrong.”  She’s transforming.  Something happened to her under all that water.  Told alternately by Leah and Miri, the story is one of loss and mourning and lack of any reasonable explanation.  Haunting, in a word.  The writing is exceptional.  And probing.  I quite enjoyed this book.  I can’t recall how I first heard about it—it was published in 2022—but I knew I wanted to read it even then.  The sea is that way.  Moby-Dick, cited in an epigraph, has always been my favorite novel.  One of my early reading memories is Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (also cited here).  The story is a winner.

There’s something about the ocean.  We, in reality, know little about it.  Penetrating the crushing depths requires a well-funded science, something we’ve moved away from in favor of personal greed.  Life takes unexpected forms deep under the surface, even as we deplete the resources we can reach—over-fishing and consuming.  We’re never told what it is Leah and her crew-mate see so far down.  We all know of lantern-fish (lately in the news) and other sub-surface terrors.  We don’t know the potential life we might discover if we only cared to look.  The company that sent Leah down, however, is as shadowy as the government.  Promising help but not answering the phone when you call.  Yes, this is a haunting book.

Mostly, however, at least in my reading, it is about coping.  We attach our lives to others and when something changes them we have to try to adjust, because love is that way.  Caregivers understand.  The novel evokes both the endless draw of the ocean and its mystery.  Even as a child I wanted to live on the stormy east coast, preferably in Maine.  I wanted to be near the water.  As my mother was in her final decline, one of her dearest wishes was to return to the ocean.  She’d spent a fair bit of her childhood in New Jersey and always felt the draw of the sea.  She was no swimmer, but just being near the ocean was something she loved.  And that has passed down, it seems, to my generation.  Fearful yet drawn.  It is the dilemma that can lead to effective horror stories that make you both think and feel.

Mass Market

Leave a comment

The mass market paperback.  This may very well be one of the best symbols of my younger years.  One of the largest distributors of mass market paperbacks (Readerlink) has announced that it will no longer distribute them.  It seems that the writing, instead of in readers’ hands, is on the wall.  Mass market paperbacks are the least expensive formats of books to buy.  Publishers have increasingly been tending to push trade size (about 6-by-9 inches)—they can charge more for them.  They don’t fit easily in your pocket, however, and well, they cost more.  Often, as someone who reads in public, I find myself wishing more literary fiction was still produced in mass market form.  Only the best selling authors ever make it down to that size.  I miss being able to stick a book in my pocket.  

The mass market paperback’s story began with railroad books, once innovated by my erstwhile employer, Routledge.  The form we recognize today only really took off in 1935.  When I was growing up, I considered all other formats somehow too big.  My book collection and reading habits began with mass market size.  When we moved to our house a few years back, I repurposed an old dresser as a bookshelf.  The top drawer slots were just tall enough for mass market books.  I discovered that I really didn’t have enough of them to fill that shelf.  Books have grown bigger.  Now, working in publishing I realize profit margins are thin in this industry.  Many publishers need the big sellers to help make up for disappointing sales of other titles.  (You have to have thick skin to be an author, I know from experience.)  They need to stay solvent.

But still, this feels like the end of an era.  Books in this format have been around really only less than a century.  Literacy—reading for pleasure—among the masses hasn’t been around much longer.  Books were expensive and were afforded by the elite, then cheaper forms and formats became available.  The electronic revolution has made much of life more convenient but some of us miss the challenge of having to fold a road map and never really knowing, for sure, where we are.  We’re also the ones who likely have a book in the car.  On the occasions when I don’t, I often regret it.  And one of the ways to encourage people to take books with them is to make them of a size that would sell thousands.  So many, in fact, that they would be given the title “mass market.”

Seeing the Forster

Leave a comment

The thing about exploring dark academia is that its recognition is fairly new.  It seems that the “concept” emerged only ten years ago and the longer that it’s around the more sources it gathers, like a dust bunny growing under the bed.  I’ve never read E. M. Forster before, although I’ve seen movies based on his novels.  He was an interesting chap, trying out sci-fi (or at least dystopian fiction) as well as his literary novels.  Maurice was not published during his life because it explored homosexuality.  Forster was gay when it was technically illegal, and this novel reveals much of the struggle faced by homosexuals during the early decades of the twentieth century.  The novel has been cited as an example of dark academia, I suspect because much of the early part takes place in Cambridge.  Although it has a happy ending it’s not an easy novel to read.

Quite apart from the hideous paranoia of society at the time towards any kind of homosexuality, Forster’s style was, for me, difficult to decipher.  I know this is my issue, and not his.  His use of British expressions underscored for me how difficult it is to understand idiom in another culture.  At more than one place I was unsure what the speaker meant because the British slang used was so different from what I encountered living in the UK in the early nineties.  Not that the story is difficult to follow.  It is movingly written, demonstrating the torment of those who realized their orientation as they faced in an intolerant society.  Maurice even tries to “cure” his homosexuality, but efforts fail.  There is a darkness here, appropriate for dark academia.

Forster died in 1970, just when homosexuality was beginning to be understood not as a sickness, but a disposition.  It’s not a choice, and as the animal kingdom tells us, it’s certainly not limited to human beings.  The novel makes note of the fact that Greece, the origin of much of western culture, approved and promoted homosexual relationships.  Maurice is told that he could move to France of Italy where such relationships were not illegal.  There’s no question that the societal stance toward homosexuality was based on particular understandings of biblical texts, some now thoroughly discredited by biblical scholars (Sodom was not destroyed for homosexuality as biblical intertexts clearly show).  Generations of people, including Forster, were put through lives of torment in order to keep a prejudice alive.  Academia may be dark indeed.

Dark Smile

Leave a comment

Romance.  It’s not the same thing as Romanticism, but it’s often part of drama.  It can, and often does, feature in horror.  Tender feelings toward someone we really love seem to be a human universal, even if social structures don’t always support such feelings.  Maybe I’m trying to make excuses for why I watched Mona Lisa Smile, but there is an underlying reason.  More than one expert considers it an example of dark academia.  I was curious, and honestly, it’s easier to get my wife to watch dark academia than it is horror (for that I’m on my own).  This was a film I’d heard about many times, but hadn’t watched any trailers for, so I wondered what it was all about.  In short, Wellesley.  One of the seven sisters.  But more than that—women struggling for equality in the 1950s.

A fictional Katherine Ann Watson takes up a post teaching art history at Wellesley, back in the day when a doctorate wasn’t required.  In order to demonstrate her expertise to her very well prepared students (I never, in nearly 20 years teaching, had students show that level of eagerness for any subject) she introduces them to modern art.  Traditional Wellesley isn’t prepared for that.  Moreover, she encourages them to develop careers of their own in a period when the MRS degree was still a main reason for women to attend college.  Watson’s own life isn’t without romance; a boyfriend back home in California and another professor at Wellesley both vie for her affections.  Some powerful students, however, make her life difficult and despite her popularity as a teacher, the administration allows her to remain, but with severely clipped wings.  She decides to fly instead.

Amid all the social commentary, a darkness remains.  A large part of it is patriarchy, but academic politics—driven by money—is the main culprit.  As Watson is essentially forced out, her students see her off with a display of camaraderie, making this, in some ways, quite similar to Dead Poets Society.  There were a few triggers for me.  Years ago I was indeed called into the Dean’s office and handed a letter to read.  While not nearly as dramatic as either Dead Poets Society or Mona Lisa Smile, I had students demonstrate their support for me as I was forced out.  Katherine Ann Watson seems to have had better prospects than John Keating, but both movies remind us that academic politics are dark indeed.  Even if it’s couched in the genre of romance.

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.

Late Shift

Leave a comment

M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet.  She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in.  Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read.  It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise.  The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it.  Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite.  Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.

The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking.  Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest.  Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story.  It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites.  An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community).  Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries.  The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark.  It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.

I like brief books.  I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious.  I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year.  And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way.  Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment.  If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one.  It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.

Think

Leave a comment

Those of us who write books have been victims of theft.  One of the culprits is Meta, owner of Facebook.  The Atlantic recently released a tool that allows authors to check if LibGen, a pirated book site used by Meta and others, has their work in its system.  Considering that I have yet to earn enough on my writing to pay even one month’s rent/mortgage, you get a little touchy about being stolen from by corporate giants.  Three of my books (A Reassessment of Asherah, Weathering the Psalms, and Nightmares with the Bible) are in LibGen’s collection.  To put it plainly, they have been stolen.  Now the first thing I noticed was that my McFarland books weren’t listed (Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, of course, the latter is not yet published).  I also know that McFarland, unlike many other publishers, proactively lets authors know when they are discussing AI use of their content, and informing us that if deals are made we will be compensated.

I dislike nearly everything about AI, but especially its hubris.  Machines can’t think like biological organisms can and biological organisms that they can teach machines to “think” have another think coming.  Is it mere coincidence that this kind of thing happens at the same time reading the classics, with their pointed lessons about hubris, has declined?  I think not.  The humanities education teaches you something you can’t get at your local tech training school—how to think.  And I mean actually think.  Not parrot what you see on the news or social media, but to use your brain to do the hard work of thinking.  Programmers program, they don’t teach thinking.

Meanwhile, programmers have made theft easy but difficult to prosecute.  Companies like Meta feel entitled to use stolen goods so their programmers can make you think your machine can think.  Think about it!  Have we really become this stupid as a society that we can’t see how all of this is simply the rich using their influence to steal from the poor?  LibGen, and similar sites, flaunt copyright laws because they can.  In general, I think knowledge should be freely shared—there’s never been a paywall for this blog, for instance.  But I also know that when I sit down to write a book, and spend years doing so, I hope to be paid something for doing so.  And I don’t appreciate social media companies that have enough money to buy the moon stealing from me.  There’s a reason my social media use is minimal.  I’d rather think.

Cuckoo’s Roost

Leave a comment

John Wyndham is someone I discovered through movies.  Often considered a science-fiction writer, his works cross over into horror, particularly on the silver screen.  Many years ago I read Day of the Triffids and, having seen Village of the Damned, wanted to read The Midwich Cuckoos.  It was a pretty long wait.  I kept thinking I might find a copy in a used bookstore, but it never happened.  When I saw a reprint edition I ordered it with some Christmas money.  There are some horror and sci-fi elements to the story, but there’s also a bit of thriller, as it’s called now, thrown in.  The book is quite philosophical because of the character Gordon Zellaby, a Midwich resident who keeps thinking about what is happening in terms that don’t match the expectations of other, more prosaic thinkers.  In case you’re not familiar:

Midwich becomes unapproachable for a period because an alien ship (the sci-fi part) has covered it.  Everyone in the village is asleep for a couple of days.  When they awake, generally no worse for wear, they soon discover that all the women of childbearing years are pregnant.  They all give birth about the same time to children that look eerily alike and have bright golden eyes.  The officials know this has happened but adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  Meanwhile, the locals get on with things but they discover these new children develop about twice as quickly as humans do and they can control people with their minds.  They also have collective minds so that their brainpower is quite above that of Homo sapiens.  Zellaby makes the connection with cuckoos—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and after they hatch shove the other chicks out of the nest.  Indeed, this is a story about what if cuckoos were humanoid aliens who tried the same thing with people.  Told with a British stiff upper lip.

The story slowly unfolds and gets scary as it grows.  I saw the movie quite a few years ago and the details were lost on me, so I was learning as I read.  I suspect that it differs from the book quite a bit.  Perhaps it’s the Britishisms that make this story less of a horror tale.  There’s a kind of jocularity to the style, at least for a good bit of it.  The serious issues of how governments and individuals interact is raised and discussed to a fair extent.  Even though the book is fairly short, there’s a lot going on here.  But now I need to watch the movie again.

Release Date

Leave a comment

July 16.  That’s the release date for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  If you’re so inclined, preordering helps to earn a book attention.  (I know it’s pricey, but thanks for considering it for a second.)  This book has been, like most books, a long time in the making.  As my wife will attest, reading the proofs nearly sent me into a spiral this time around.  It wasn’t because they were bad (I only found 7 mistakes) but it was because of my own doubt about how well I’d done this one.  I found myself between elation at some parts, and dread at others.  I really like this book but I spent my proofreading journey anticipating what critics would say.  I do take a few chances in this one and it has what I believe to be an important message.

Writing books is like walking into a library naked.  There may not be many people there, but those who are can see more than you want them to.  I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  I learned a lot about Washington Irving doing this research.  I learned a lot about Halloween—that’s one of my favorite chapters.  I also like the conceit I applied to the book itself as a labyrinth.  And I’m already looking forward to reading more renditions of the myth once the dust settles a little.  Reading the proofs took a good portion of the weekend, as well as after-work time the previous week.  I could focus on little else.  Books, you see, are parts of their authors.  I feel a little bit crazy for even writing them in the first place.

That having been said, I’m chuffed with a July publication date.  The best time for Halloween books to be available is the summer.  My last two Halloween titles (Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible) both came out in November or December.  Not that there were angry mobs at Barnes & Noble demanding them at the end of October.  The other deadline I’d set myself was to have this published before Lindsey Beer’s reboot of Sleepy Hollow hit theaters.  I seem to have managed that one by quite a margin; there’s still been no release date announced.  For her, that is.  I just received mine yesterday.  I guess it’s time to start touching base with those good folks in the Hudson Valley who expressed an interest in the project when I first told them about it.  I’m anticipating Halloween already.

Therapy with Books

Leave a comment

I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Cloistered

Leave a comment

Free will.  I’ll go on the record as a proponent.  Any kind of determinism gives me the willies.  At times, however, it does feel as if we’re merely pawns.  Katy Hays deals with the concept of fate, and the occult world of tarot, in The Cloisters.  The writing is quite compelling and the story moves along at a good pace.  It follows Ann, a graduate from eastern Washington who wants to get away from the town where her father was killed.  She accepts the offer of a summer program at the Met in New York City, but because of a mix-up ends up at the Cloisters instead.  I’ve never actually been to the Cloisters, but this novel makes me want to go.  At this museum of Medieval and Renaissance art, Ann works with Rachel, another assistant, Leo, a gardener, and the curator, Patrick.

Rachel has been at the Cloisters for some time and Patrick, her boss, has become enamored of tarot decks and their history.  He’s been seeking perhaps the oldest complete deck known and has come to believe that perhaps the cards do have the ability to tell the future.  Ann befriends Rachel.  The two begin to make discoveries, particularly Ann, but Rachel, who is independently wealthy, manipulates her, taking advantage of the fact that Ann never wants to return home.  Then Patrick is poisoned.  I won’t reveal whodunnit here, but the last half of the book has several twists that make you reassess whatever conclusions you may have drawn.  It’s a fascinating story, well told.

This novel is another example of dark academia.  Much of it takes place in the library of the Cloisters and Patrick holds a Ph.D. while Rachel is a graduate student.  Ann is about to enter a doctoral program.  All of them have some fairly dark secrets in their lives.  And all of them are driven.  The story has elements of social commentary as well, particularly concerning how life in New York City will drive people to extremes when the competition makes this necessary to survive.  Although three of the four commit crimes, they are all likable people.  Three of them are academics as well.  All four are quite intelligent.  I was drawn into this tale from the start and even as the darkness was revealed couldn’t bring myself to dislike any of the characters.  Some novels have antiheroes that you just can’t feel for.  The Cloisters moves in the other direction, and it does make you wonder just how much choice you actually have and how much is left to fate.

Proofing Yourself

Leave a comment

Some publishers give you advance warning.  Many do not.  As a struggling writer, after I submit one manuscript I move on to the next project, knowing proofs will eventually come.  The thing is, I’m obsessive.  When I’m in the middle of a project I can think of little else, thoughts of it leaking into other activities throughout the day.  I’m in the middle of one such project, as I have been for at least three months now.  Then the proofs came.  If you write books you know that proofs always come with deadlines.  You need to drop everything and prioritize them.  I read many academic books with tons of errors, and I think I know why.  If proofs come at an inopportune time, you read them as other required activities (I’m looking at you, 9-2-5) permit.  For me, it’s difficult to let go of my present project.  My current fascination.

The proofs for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived yesterday.  I’m excited for this book.  I have hopes of reaching out to local magazines and pitching stories about the Legend this autumn.  But I’m red hot into a new project.  My mind is of an age where there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember precisely what I was thinking if I lay aside my present project for a week to read the proofs.  Indeed, the last two weekends have been so busy with other things that I haven’t had time to watch any horror movies at all.  Just yesterday I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling hopelessly behind already, a feeling that lasted all day.  Then at 4 p.m. the proofs arrived. ( For context, 4 a.m. is late for me.  I’ve been waking up later due to that pointless ritual of annual time changes which, like everything else, the government can’t seem to get right.  In any case, proofs trump all.)

My time is extremely regimented.  I had to drop all committee work at our local faith community because the meetings were all in the evening, scheduled for after when I’d normally be asleep.  I wake early to write and read before the snowplow of the 9-2-5 throws me off the road for another day.  Everyone who talks to me feels that they don’t have time for what’s important any more.  The proofs are here and I’ll get them back by the deadline.  I’ve never been late once told when they have to be in.  My accountant tells me that anything that leads to royalties, no matter how small, counts as a second job.  I hope this one sells well enough to make it feel like that.  In the meantime, please don’t come knocking because I’ll pretend I’m not at home.

More Than It Seems

Leave a comment

One of the most fascinating mystical concepts is the idea that words and individual letters have some kind of magical power.  This is perhaps illustrated by the way certain words gather an aura of mystery that can be quite unlike their original denotation.  “Kabbalah” is one such word.  The reason I read Joseph Dan’s Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction is that I’d found myself growing increasingly confused by the usage of the word.  Given that this is me writing, it was a horror movie that got me wondering.  In one of the movies discussed on this blog (happy hunting and viewing!) one character tells another something like, “It’s the Kabbalah.”  This is said in reference to an ancient and mysterious book.  There is not ancient and mysterious book called The Kabbalah.  So what is it?

I’m not going to be able to give a satisfactory answer to that here.  Dan has about 30,000 words to describe it and he admits that’s not really sufficient.  Sometimes I think, if one could make a living doing it, I’d have been content to sit at the feet of rabbis to learn the depths of the many ancient books Judaism has given the world.  I first became aware of some of them in college, majoring in religion.  At each step of my education and career I’ve uncovered more and more.  Reading this little book added yet further examples.  Judaism, and its direct descendant Christianity, were full of books.  They still are.  And books are full of words and perhaps these words have some kind of mystical power.  But wait, the point of this brief tome is to suggest the word itself isn’t just about mysticism.

Kabbalah can refer to many different things, some of them hardly mystical at all.  For the modern usage of the word, which includes Christian as well as Jewish Kabbalah, we have to get to, well, modernity.  The concept stretches far back in Judaism and means basically, “what is received.”  The initial reference is to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Then there’s the oral Torah, codified in Mishnah and Talmud.  And books, so very many books!  The rabbi is one of those permitted to, and sometimes expected to, come to know these ancient texts and their modern applications.  That’s not to suggest Judaism is particularly mystical.  It can be, just as Christianity can be, but isn’t necessarily so.  It’s complicated.  If you’re curious, whether because of a horror movie or not, I can recommend this book.  It’ll give you plenty to think about, and even more to read and learn.

Learning Bunnies

Leave a comment

Although it was released during the first Trump administration, Jojo Rabbit was written before he was sharp bit of dust in the GOP’s eye.  Still, in the second debacle, it seemed like a good time to watch it.  Its message is appropriate for any time, but especially now.  Jojo is a ten-year-old boy who’s an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.  So enthusiastic that he has Hitler as his imaginary friend.  He buys the party line without even thinking (he who has ears to hear, let him hear).  Jews are evil, according to the rhetoric.  Monsters even.  Jojo’s mother tries to help her son, missing his father, understand that love is the better way.  Then Jojo discovers something.  A girl his deceased sister’s age has been living in the walls of his sister’s room.  He quickly deduces that she is a Jew.  Were it not for her threats to implicate him and his mother, he would turn her in.

An unusual coming of age story, we see Jojo do something rare—he matures.  Getting to know Elsa he can’t reconcile what he sees with what he was taught.  She’s not evil.  She has no horns.  She’s not rich.  She fell in love with a guy and wants the same thing anyone wants.  The conflict faces Jojo every day as he decides he must learn about Jews to report this intelligence to the authorities.  The authorities, however, know Germany is losing the war.  It’s only a matter of days.  When Hitler dies by suicide, Jojo fully realizes that he has been simply following along instead of following the evidence.  His mother was hanged for not being loyal to the party and his father, he learns, was also helping the Jews.  In a moment of singular hope, Jojo grows up.

Movies can teach lessons.  Some are widely enough viewed to make a major impact on society.  Can any of us imagine a world without Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker?  In this era when sensible people seem to have forgotten that fascism is evil in its nature, films like Jojo Rabbit are important.  Thinking is not a crime.  Learning is not a crime.  Even if they’re being touted that way by the wealthy in order to protect their privilege.  We watched the movie for entertainment on a Friday night, but I received an education instead.  I wonder just when the message of love fell out of Christianity.  But then, I think it becomes clear when you think about particular movies and how we’ve come to be where we are.