Boston’s Poe

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Among my parasocial relationships, the strangest are those with people long dead.  Poe is among them, and, I suspect, this is probably a common thing.  As I age and find it difficult to muster the energy to attend large meetings with lots of people, the one factor that excited me about this year’s AAR/SBL, apart from being in New England again, was meeting Poe.  Now, I know that “Poe Returning to Boston” isn’t actually Poe himself.  But I do believe that places retain something of the essence of what happens in them.  Poe was born in Boston, on Carver Street.  The building itself was demolished some time ago.  I set out to see the site yesterday morning before the conference began, only to find that it is now fenced off, having been acquired by MassDOT.  As I stood there, wondering, fearing, it occurred to me just how much of a role pilgrimages play in our lives.

I’ve written about my SBL experiences before on this blog—look at my November posts for many of the years I’ve been doing this—but Boston is by far the most personal.  Part of it is certainly the fact that I lived here for about three years, but Poe is definitely part of it too.  As I went to do an uncrowded photo essay of Stefanie Rocknak’s statue, although it was quite early on a Sunday morning, and also quite chilly, I wasn’t the only one there.  A couple came along to pose with Poe.  When I took my initial photo (on my Saturday morning post) I had to await a different couple consorting with Poe.  I know this isn’t Poe, but it has come to represent his presence is my favorite city.  The mingling of emotions was strong.  

The sign designating this as Edgar Allan Poe Square is faded and weather-beaten.  I can imagine that local politicians have headier issues with which to wrestle, beyond replacing an aging sign for aging tourists.  And having read J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land, I know there’s a bust of Poe in the Public Library now.  I walk by it each morning and evening, but the conference schedule keeps me out.  Poe himself was no great fan of Boston but this is where the world first met him.  I know that I should get my head in the game of academic conferencing, but I’m a little distracted by the presence of a friend I never met.  And breathing the rarified air of New England.

Revisiting

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It’s funny returning to a city you once felt you knew well.  Cities are constantly evolving creatures and even though I got around Boston as a student and then as an employee of Ritz Camera, there were places I simply never found.  There was no internet in those days so we relied a lot on word of mouth.  If others weren’t talking about it, I’d never hear.  I first realized Boston had a Chinatown when attending my first AAR/SBL here.  That was in the day when you had to mail or fax hotel registrations in, if I recall, and I do remember staying up to midnight to try to get first choice after that.  Ironically, this year I again ended up in that neighborhood, south of the modestly-sized Chinatown.  I really didn’t mind, though, since the hotel isn’t too far from Edgar Allan Poe.

I first learned about “Poe Returning to Boston” from my daughter.  She saw it while visiting Boston with a friend.  I learned more about it by reading J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  When I lived here, from 1985 through 1988, I knew of no public markers of Poe’s presence.  None of the more prominent ones were here then.  On a trip to Boston for Routledge I sought out the Poe birthplace plaque—the actual house had been torn down—and found it.  It’s still here as I saw last night.  But the place that was formerly marked only by a painted electrical box now has a statue.  Poe, preceded by his raven, walks across the area named for him with a suitcase in hand.  Behind him, pages from his manuscripts lie on the ground.

It’s long been known that Boston and Poe had an ambivalent relationship.  Poe was born here and lived here for a time, but never felt that the city accepted him.  He lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for some time, but mostly considered Richmond, Virginia home.  That’s where the Allans lived and where his mother is buried.  Poe himself famously and mysteriously died in Baltimore.  He had some measure of fame at the time but still lived in poverty.  The feeling seems to be that Poe would’ve liked to have liked Boston—it has been my favorite major US city ever since I first moved here four decades ago.  Now, of course, I only get back on occasion, mostly when AAR/SBL comes to town.  Although Poe wasn’t here the last time I was, I always find something new when I return.

Sleeping Below

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I’m not sure how I missed What Sleeps Beneath.  I suppose it’s a matter of being time-starved in a world with so many websites.  That, and I’m only now starting to get integrated into the horror community.  A comment on this blog brought What Sleeps Beneath to my awareness.  A horror review site—they feature both books and movies—it’s based in that epicenter of weird (at least in my experience) of Pittsburgh.  I lived in the city for a couple of summers and grew up between it and Erie.  And, of course, Pittsburgh is George Romero territory, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  I often reflect on it.  Growing up in a small town north of there, I was fascinated by large cities.  When I was in high school, Pittsburgh was the 16th largest city in the country, now it’s down in the 200s somewhere.  That’s what happens when a big industry packs its bags.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

In any case, I haven’t been able to keep up with all the horror websites.  Again, it’s a matter of time. One reason is reasonable precaution.  I believe in vaccines.  I hate being sick in any way, and I’m of an age that I’d probably have been long dead without the many sticks I’ve had in my life.  However, time is precious and I’ve lost two weekends this year just to vaccine recovery.  Keenly aware that I no longer have all the time in the world—this dawns on you with a kind of horror fierceness as you read obituaries of friends who seemed so much better adjusted than you—the loss of a weekend is a kind of major deficit.  It’s sort of a sloppy reboot.  You enter a weekend with anticipation of how much you can get accomplished without the 9-2-5, but instead you have a day or two as groggy as your computer is when you first turn it on.

I say all this because I’d been planning to explore What Sleeps Beneath then I lost this past weekend to recovery.  Pittsburgh, like most places, has an identity to it.  And like most places that identity evolves over time.  Tomorrow I head to Boston, a city I used to know, for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature conference.  I’ll also be visiting, I hope, the Poe Returning to Boston statue in Edgar Allan Poe Square.  What with Boston making a belated overture to Poe and Pittsburgh embracing its zombies, maybe horror is starting to become mainstream after all.  Now I just need to get the time to explore What Sleeps Beneath.

Not Personal

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I’ve read that horror and dark academia go together.  You might almost say like peanut butter and chocolate.  One example of this is Confessions, a novel by Kanae Minato.  There are no monsters in it, but two people driven by revenge.  The difficulty with such a book would be to describe it without giving too much away.  So I’ll start by placing it in the category of dark academia.  It is a middle-school story with a distinct darkness and dread to it.  As a kind of epistolary novel, it’s told in several voices, beginning with a teacher in Japan and her final lecture to her students.  The lecture is final because her four-year-old daughter had died on the school grounds.  More than that, she was murdered by a couple of the students.  The novel explores the motivations and actions of the students involved, and sometimes their parents.  The school setting makes it dark academia.

The horror part comes through the slow building of the ruined lives that follow in the wake of the murder.  Believing that one form of revenge is at play, the reader finds subtle shifts as characters become monstrous.  One is clearly a sociopath.  Another is becoming one.  The idea of people harming one another because of their grievances is real enough.  We are emotional beings and sometimes our pain for those we love reaches a point of striking out.  Most of us learn to refrain, accepting that suffering comes into every life.  A minority insist on bringing others into their personal hell.  This novel explores people like that.  This makes it a horror story.

Originally written in Japanese, it has a kind of gentleness to it.  A decorum.  Underneath, however, trouble is brewing.  It accumulates over the novel as additional perspectives join the narrative of what happened.  Stories like this take a bit of rethinking for those of us who like to believe our narrators.  Most events have more than one outlook and Confessions ably guides us through several, reaching a conclusion that is both satisfying and chilling.  This is one of those novels that underscores what a fraught time middle school is.  Powerful emotions are at play and even though they may be sublimated for adults in society, they still exist.  We learn when we can and can’t act upon them, and how we may do so.  That’s a large part of education, beyond simply learning from books.  As reading becomes more and more electronic, I do wonder if we’re ushering in a new darkness that hasn’t been fully considered.

Bibliography

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For serial readers, my Horror Homeroom piece is now live, here.  Speaking of websites and blogs, you never know where a project might go when you start it.  This blog has a search function, as well as category options, but I know I have a few readers on Facebook and Goodreads who might never set foot here.  The other day someone asked me about a book and I had to do a search myself to see if I’d ever blogged about it.  This project has been going for more than a decade and a half and it’s nearing 6,000 posts.  I can’t remember everything.  Then it occurred to me: I could put together a bibliography for this blog.  This has to be a long-term process, though.  As a test, I scrolled through the first year, writing down the books.  There were about sixty of them.  Since there are over 170 months to go through, well, it’ll be a big bibliography when it’s done.

I’ll need to find a way to note the books I haven’t read.  Sometimes I’ll post on a book, or mention it, without having read the whole thing.  I don’t want to misrepresent myself here.  Other times I mention a book obliquely without actually citing it.  I need to include those as well.  Only, however, if I’ve actually read them.  Then there’s the problem of not remembering if I read a book or not.  After 2013 I can check on Goodreads, but between 2009 and then, I rely on memory.  Those were tumultuous years.  In 2009, just before I started this blog, Gorgias Press let me go.  I made a living for a couple of years as an adjunct professor at both Rutgers and Montclair State Universities, feeling like I was driving at night without the headlights on.  I was reading a lot, but job security was a mere myth.

Then in 2011 Routledge recruited me and my commuting life began.  I started reading about 100 books a year as I commuted my life away.  Most of those got discussed on this blog.  I was still at Routledge when I began my Goodreads account, not aware that there was employer writing on the wall.  I started my current job that same year and commuted to Manhattan for five more years, reading all the while.  It’s going to be a big bibliography when it’s done.  The nice thing is I don’t have to annotate it since that’s what this blog does.  Since I’ve got about a thousand other projects going, and a 9-2-5 job, don’t hold your breath for it.  But the bibliography’s been started and, God willing and the crick don’t rise, it’ll eventually appear here.  That’s the way of ongoing projects.

Visiting Poe

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J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land is a book I read too late.  That’s not to denigrate its status as the best book I’ve read this year—no, not at all.  It’s just that, unaware of Ocker’s book, I’d visited many of the Poe sites in America without the advantage of the full story.  Since my daughter also appreciates Poe, we’d gone to the Poe house in Philadelphia and the Free Library where Dickens’ stuff raven lives (sort of).  We’d gone to see Poe’s grave in Baltimore and his reputed dorm room at the University of Virginia while she was on college campus tours.  We attended the Poe exhibit at the Morgan Library in Manhattan.  We’d even gone to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, stopping at the Poe Tavern on a family reunion trip to Charleston.  On my own, I’d sought out Poe’s birthplace on a business trip to Boston.  (The plaque was not there when I lived in the city.). Poe-Land is Ocker’s travel log of an intentional visit to all of these places.  (I should mention that we also went to Richmond to see the southern family but I arrived with a migraine and we had to put off the tourist stuff for another trip.  And I was distracted by Lovecraft on my two trips to Providence.)

To a Poe fan, and I can count myself as no other, this book is itself a treasure trove.  Ocker took a year to visit the Poe sites, north to south and even to England.  He writes about what he found and the people he met.  These people are likely my tribe, but I tend to work alone and know people primarily virtually.  I’ve tried to get museum people to let me behind locked doors, but I don’t have the clout.  (When I was a professor I had a bit more pull.)  I enjoyed every page of Poe-Land.  It was a book I didn’t want to rush through since it made me smile knowing that for reading time the next day I’d still have more to go.  And I learned a ton about Poe.

I’ve read several books about Poe, of course.  As an ignorant kid, I bought a used copy, in five volumes, of his collected works and biography.  I bought it at Goodwill and treasured it.  Until as an ignorant (and poor) college student, I resold it along with many of my childhood reading treasures.  I read biographies in the school library.  And I’ve read (and bought for good) some as an adult.  I even mention Poe in most of my books, including Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, because he’s part of my story too.  Poe-Land was easily my favorite book of 2025.  Now I want to read more about Poe.  But in the end I face a dilemma.  Do I read more about Poe, or do I go back for another of J. W. Ocker’s books?

Dreaming

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To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of NightBorn.  It’s not a bad novel but some of the action isn’t explained enough, leading to a little confusion as to what’s going on.  This is pretty minor, however.  I was enjoying Theresa Cheung’s debut novel but I kept thinking of Dream Scenario and how the premise, at least at first, is so similar.  I was very impressed by the movie Dream Scenario, and wondered if this was going to play out in the same way.  The basic idea is that Alice Sinclair, a professor of psychology, begins appearing in people’s dreams.  The dreams of people who don’t know her.  Then the dreams start to become scary.  If you’ve seen Dream Scenario you’ll recognize the many touchpoints: professor, appearing in strangers’ dreams, dreams becoming nightmares.  Back in the novel, Alice joins forces with her psychic boyfriend, two psychic friends of his, and her dog, to explore why this is happening.

Alice discovers that her absentee father, whom she’s never met, is also a psychology professor and he’s been experimenting with a technology that makes a person go viral in other people’s dreams.  He randomly chose her, not ever knowing Alice as his daughter, or knowing her at all.  The novel deals with synchronicities, and this is one of them.  Her father, who is rather a slime-bag, is working for the government where an unpopular president (this is a novel of its time) is paying to have himself interjected into people’s dreams to get reelected.  Alice was simply a test case to see if it was possible to, well, do a Dream Scenario.  In the movie, of course, a company has been developing the technology for profit, so that advertising can be interjected into dreams.  Another synchronicity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the story.  The ethical concerns of the author come through clearly.  In many ways this is a Trump book—that category of books that, had this particular individual not been elected (or reelected) would likely never have been written.  It’s more, however, about the power of dreams than it is about the power of potentates.  The publisher, 6th Books, prefers paranormal plots, so expect a bit of that when you pick this one up.  Dreams not only feature Alice, they also guide the plot.  In the end, the scenario isn’t the same as that in Dream Scenario, but the vehicle is quite similar.  It may, if viewed from a certain angle, be considered dark academia.

Writing Ghost

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Despite AI, one of my great regrets is not having learned additional languages in high school.  I took four years of German and the one classmate I knew who was able to convince the administration took two languages, both Spanish and French (gasp!) to become a translator.  In any case, I regret being able to read French only haltingly, with a dictionary.  I watched Colette because it is the biopic of a writer, but I’ve never read any of her books.  I also watched it because it’s considered dark academia, but you already knew that, didn’t you?  Colette lived from the last quarter of the nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.  Her first husband published a successful series of books she wrote under his name.  The two separated and Colette went on to become a reasonably successful writer in her own regard.

As with most biopics, the details are exaggerated, but still, this is the world of books where fiction and fact aren’t always so far apart as might be supposed.  Interestingly, articles on her husband (Henry Gauthier-Villars), known by the pen name Willy, state that he is best known as the first husband of Colette.  A self-promoter, he had other people do his writing for him.  The movie focuses on what happens when he tried to bring his wife, not yet established in her own right, into his band of ghostwriters.  Not having French, I have never really studied French literature.  If life allowed a bit more time, that is something I’d like to have done.  In any case, Willy was a libertine as well as a self-promoter, the sort that occasionally enters high government position.  And since he was involved in many affairs, Colette explored relationships with other women.  In other words, this is a story that is still very relevant.

Dark academia sometimes involves a literary life rather than a strictly academic one.  I applaud its love of books and book culture.  Some of us miss the days when it was possible to have publishers eager for new material, when books were generally respected instead of widely banned.  The darkness here is clearly the manipulative relationship Willy has with Colette.  He uses her lack of experience in the publishing world to his own advantage, and habitually making poor financial decisions, puts their living situation and security at risk time and again.  I sometimes wonder about my high school friend.  Did she become a translator?  And, if so, is her job, nearing retirement age, under threat from AI?  And this, in the span of a human working life.  A life of books.

Groan

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Authors are a peculiar but definite taste.  Some noteworthy voices have vociferated regarding the wonders of Mervyn Peake.  Mine has not been among them, but then, I’m not noteworthy.  Having read somewhere that the famous Gormenghast universe was one of the most gothic in mid-twentieth century literature, I read Titus Groan many years ago.  I understand the linkage between grotesques and the gothic, but this simply didn’t appeal to me.  I never felt interested in moving on to the second book of the trilogy.  At the same time, I held onto it.  Just in case.  Recently, I thought my younger self might’ve been prematurely harsh on the book and so I gave it a second try.  This time through, I appreciated some of Peake’s famous wordplay, but the novel, to me, dragged. The victim, perhaps, of the foreshortening of time, I just couldn’t get into it.

J. R. R. Tolkien once explained that he wrote The Lord of the Rings cycle to see if a really long story could be made interesting.  He succeeded.  I read the trilogy, after The Hobbit, when I was in college.  I really enjoyed it.  Titus Groan isn’t cut from the same fabric.  Peake’s thick description is sometimes a thing of wonder.  It is also very ponderous, to the point of being tedious at times.  The action is interesting enough, what there is of it.  The characters are well drawn, even if overdrawn.  And it’s clear by the end of Titus Groan that to make any sense of any of this you will need to commit yourself to two-plus volumes more.   Peake died before he could finish the fourth volume.  The first three are now solidly referred to as a trilogy, but I fear that if I were to force my way through the other two I’d still be left hanging.  I really do appreciate resolution.

It’s a personal failure, in my opinion.  I mean, Peake was obviously a talented writer.  The question is whether you can stretch a story out for too long.  Part of me wants to know the resolution, but not enough of me to get me through at least two more books like this.  I’m not sure that I’d declare this terribly gothic.  I can see why some would: castle, skulduggery, and one very well drawn villain.  Again, some of the characters are too comical to be effective gothic.  To me it felt like a mismatch between style and vehicle.  I realize that should any of his fans perchance read this, I’ll be declared a Peake imbecile.  I’ll admit that the fault is mine.  It’s a matter of taste.

Naming the Dead

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It probably just goes with the territory, but I’ve noticed something.  A big part of my job is searching for people on the internet.  (Academics, of course.)  Mostly these are folks I don’t know, some of them with very common names.  This presents special challenges, of course.  Every once in a while, though, you search for a name and pretty much every entry you find is an obituary.  I’m not talking about someone prominent who has died, but rather several people with the same name who’ve passed away.  The other day, after four or five pages of Google I found nobody alive.  That particular name wasn’t an “old fashioned” name either.  It could be (perhaps is) still a very common name.  It does get me pondering whether some names are “safer” than others.  Is anyone by this name still alive?

We place a lot of stock in our names.  Being the way that others get our attention, and identify us, they do have importance.  And many names are common—parents aren’t always the creative sort.  And the internet is a source of frustration when trying to narrow down a common name and attach it to someone you don’t already know.  Growing up, kids want to be like everyone else—no standing out in the herd.  “Wiggins,” where I grew up, was an unusual name.  We got teased for it quite a lot.  When my mother remarried, my brothers and I went by our stepfather’s common last name for a few years.  In seminary I decided to revert to my birth name—Wiggins.  I was wanting to do two things: reclaim my heritage, and stand out a little.  Even so, a web-search for Steve Wiggins will bring up at least four or five individuals not me, including an obituary or two.

Before the web, when trying to find a scholar you had to use letters.  (Or maybe the phone, but cold calls weren’t really professional). You’d send them a letter.  In a way, the web is a great equalizer.  But it favors those with names that are somewhat less common.  Some people change their names—performers and some authors do this to make their persona more to their liking—but this is a fraught activity.  I know from switching back to my birth name that the process is complex and if you try it after you’ve started to publish things it adds whole new layers of complications.  So I spend quite a bit of time searching for people who aren’t easily found.  Not infrequently I seem to be naming the dead.

Author Pages

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It takes me awhile, sometimes.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  I’ve been blogging for sixteen years now (my blog is a teenager!) and it only just occurred to me that I should be putting links to authors’ pages when I post about their books.  I know links are what makes the web go round but I assumed that anyone whose book I’ve read is already better known than yours truly.  Why would they need my humble help?  Well, I’ve been trying to carve out the time to go back and edit my old posts about books, linking to authors’ pages—there are so many!  In any case, this has led to some observations about writers.  And at least this reader.  Most commercial authors have a website.  Not all, of course.  People my age who had earlier success with writing tend not to have a site since they already have a fan base (I’m guessing).  Most fiction writers in the cohort younger than me have pages, and I’m linking to those.

I’ve noticed, during this exercise, that my reading falls into two main categories: novels and academic books.  I suppose that’s no surprise, although I do read intelligent nonfiction from non-professors as well.  In the nonfiction category, it’s fairly rare to find academics with their own websites.  They probably get the validation they require from work, and being featured on the school webpages.  Or some will use Academia.edu to make a website.  As an editor I know that promoting yourself is important, even for academic authors.  Few do it.  Then I took a look around here and realized, as always, that I fall between categories.  No longer an academic, neither have I had any commercial success with my books.  I’ve fallen between two stools with this here website.  I do pay for it, of course.  Nothing’s free. 

Almost nobody links to my website.  This isn’t self-pity; WordPress informs you when someone links to your site and that hasn’t happened in years.  Links help with discoverability on the web, so my little website sits in a very tiny nook in a low-rent apartment in the part of town where you don’t want to be after dark.  And I thought to myself, maybe other authors feel the same.  Maybe they too need links.  So I’m adding them.  As I do so I hope that I’ll also learn a thing or two.  I’m trying to learn how to be a writer.  It just takes me some time before things dawn.  Maybe it’s just my generation.

Hallowed Halls

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Every time I read a short story collection I tell myself I should do so more often.  Knowing that you’re only committing yourself for maybe thirty or forty minutes at a time is one way to incorporate more reading into a life that’s incredibly busy.  I read In These Hallowed Halls, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, because, as its subtitle declares, it’s A Dark Academia Anthology.  As with nonfiction anthologies, it is a mixed bag.  The stories are all well written and all were enjoyable to read.  They also display some of the breadth of dark academia.  Most of the stories are literary (as a genre), others dip into science fiction and horror.  Dark academia doesn’t specify whether a book (or story) will be speculative or not.  As someone who writes short fiction, it seems that some of my tales might wag that way.

In any case, discussing a collection is tricky because there is such variety.  Some of the stories stayed with me beyond reading the next, which could be quite different.  Others I have to go back to remind myself what happened.  These days it can take several weeks to finish a book and a lot can happen in real life in that time span.  The stories that stay with me the most have obsessive narrators, or characters who are obsessed.  This kind of story, I know from experience, is difficult to get published.  Many of us who write, I suspect, do get obsessed.  An idea latches on and won’t let go.  Of course, most of us also have jobs that force the jaws open and drop us down in the world of the ordinary again.

Another thread that runs through many of these stories is how students struggle for money.  That’s true to life.  Thinking back to both college and seminary, there were times in both settings that I was working two part-time jobs as well as being a full-time student.  And living like, well, a student.  That experience, except for the truly privileged, is fairly common and our writers here recognize, and perhaps remember, that.  The other unavoidable theme when writing about young people in college is, shall we say, hooking up.  For many of us, college is that period in life when, thinking of our futures, and following our hormones, we start looking for love.  (I know, high schoolers do that too, but college has a way of focusing your energies.)  All of that swirling around the darkness that sometimes falls over our tender years makes this dark academia collection worth reading cover to cover.

Colorful Space

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Lovecraftian horror translates to film unevenly.  Even when it’s successful, as in Color Out of Space, it really isn’t that close to reading Lovecraft.  “The Colour Out of Space” is among my favorite Lovecraft stories.  To me, it feels perhaps his closest to Poe, and Poe is my personal muse.  I knew that it couldn’t be made cinematic without changing things a bit, and that it would be pretty gnarly.  I was correct on both counts.  In very broad brush strokes, the movie follows the story: a colorful meteorite on an isolated farm begins changing the crops and the people who live there.  Instead of crumbling, however, they are struck by the color and become other.  The mother and her youngest son, for example, are fused together creating one of the most cringe-worthy scenes I’ve watched in a long while.  The movie emphasizes family, even when things go horribly awry.

Defying Lovecraft’s well-known avoidance of focus on female characters, the movie’s focal point in Lavinia accords with Poe’s concern for threats against beautiful women.  She’s the teenage daughter of the family and the film opens with a scene where she uses Wicca to try to heal her mother of cancer.  The love between Nathan (Nicolas Cage) and his wife is movingly shown.  The movie was recommended to me during a conversation about Nicolas Cage in horror.  Maybe it’s because he’s in so many movies in total, I’d never really considered him a scream king, but he’s nailed the role quite capably, with the notable exception of The Wicker Man.  Color Out of Space is pretty extreme body horror but the movie is artistically done.  You almost don’t mind feeling violated in that way because of the visual appeal of the non-horror focused parts.

The acting is uniformly strong.  In a nod to Lovecraftian fans, Lavinia uses the Necronomicon as the basis for her Wiccan rites.  Some of the scenes seem to reference Evolution and others eXistenZ.  Transforming the action from Lovecraft’s setting in the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first is done pretty well.  The family is isolated when the meteorite prevents electronics, including cars, from working.  The movie does offer some alien creatures, unlike Lovecraft’s basic story.  And these creatures point to a planet with tentacly beings that naturally tie this story into the Cthulhu mythos.  Lovecraft’s own story doesn’t make this move, but of course, the Cthulhu mythos only really developed among his fans.  In all, Color Out of Space exceeded my expectations, even though it was a box office flop. 

Unwritten

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It has been clear to me for some time now that I won’t live long enough to finish all the books I’m writing in my head.  A good number of them have a head start on my hard disc, but as Morpheus says, “Time is always against us.”  The largest culprit in the 9-2-5 job.  Eight hours is a huge amount of time to devote each day, no matter how you slice it.  Since eight hours are required for sleep, or trying to sleep, that means work is half of each day’s waking hours.  The other half includes things like making meals, washing clothes, family time, paying bills, running the vacuum, exercising because you sit in front of a screen all day, and, of course, yard work.  Plants don’t have the same constraints that humans do and can get to the business of growing larger 24/7, as long as the weather cooperates.

Some days I grow reflective about this.  My daughter often asks why I don’t draw or paint more.  I love doing both.  The answer is time.  Even weekends are eaten up with shopping for the food you need to get through the week, and yes, the yard was bigger than I realized, and the house needed more repair work than anticipated.  You see, writing well requires a lot of practice.  And even more reading.  Any successful writer (which I am not yet) will tell you that reading is essential.  I do read a lot.  A friend recently sent me an article about a writer whose heirs calculated he’d read at least 4,000 books.  I know that I’ve read about 1,200 since 2013.  I also know that I can’t count them all before that time.  I went through our living room shelves and counted 500 I’d read there, and that’s only one room.  

Ironically, as a professor reading time is limited.  Unless you have a research only post.  I read a lot as a kid and a ton as a student.  When I started teaching I had less time, except on semester breaks and I tried to read as many books as possible during those interludes.  Then the 9-2-5 began.  My current pace of reading began when trying to live as an adjunct between Rutgers and Montclair State.  Montclair was a 70-mile drive, so between classes I started reading voraciously.  Ironically, the commute to my 9-2-5 spurred me to start writing books again.  By then I was practically fifty.  Since my nonfiction books take about five years to write, well, the math’s not in my favor.  Time to stop my musing, because the 9-2-5 begins shortly.

Booking Halloween

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I’ve met several people who say that Halloween is their favorite holiday.  One of the (likely commercially-driven) realities, however, is that not many nonfiction books on Halloween exist.  I mean the kind with a known publisher behind them, the sort that have been vetted.  My recent book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has a chapter on Halloween in it, and I’ve often considered writing a book on the topic.  Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life is an edited collection brought together by Jack Santino.  It is one of the (few) academic books on Halloween that I hadn’t read.  Although I learned a lot from it, it suffers that inevitable trait of books that are assemblages of essays: they are uneven in focus, scope, and execution.  Santino is known for a couple of influential articles on Halloween, so editing such a book seems a natural development.

Some of the essays in this book were quite helpful to me.  The problem with drawing together anthropologists, however, is that they have discrete regional as well as thematic interests.  In some ways this is very appropriate for Halloween.  The holiday, as most holidays, has regional variations.  Reading about how it’s celebrated elsewhere, or elsewhen, gives you an idea just how lacking it is of any kind of “top-down” authority.  For all of its variations, Christmas has a somewhat “canonical” narrative (although this isn’t the full story).  Halloween grew from folk traditions and when the church got ahold of them it tried to focus them on All Saints Day, and later, All Souls Day.  But Halloween and it adjutants comes the day before All Saints, thus allowing the varied influences of the day to come to light, if they can be found.

The part of this tradition that I’ve always found disturbing, highlighted in this book, is the pranking.  I suppose that growing up poor, the idea that someone could damage your stuff when it’s really what you feel you need to survive, is quite distressing.  A light-hearted prank feels less insidious, but reading what some regional celebrations in North America included made me realize why many local authorities have tried to contain and control celebrations.  Nobody wants to lose everything due to a thoughtless prank.  Trick or treat was sometimes trick and treat.  I recall being in a crowd in England celebrating New Year’s.  Some partiers threw lit firecrackers into the crowd.  My only thought was to the damage or injury this might cause.  Halloween is that way, however.  And it is likely impossible to write a book that captures it in its fullness.