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.

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.

Brutal Boys

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Some time back I posted about Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves.  It was a first book in a duology and since I’d been trying to keep up with dark academia, it was a recommended exemplar.  As I mentioned in that post, the book ends with a cliffhanger, so I got to Brutal Boys Cry Blood as quickly as I could.  Holmes is a prolific self-publishing author and I found Pretty Girls much better written than the majority of self-published material I’ve read.  Brutal Boys picks up right where the previous novel left off, freeing George Fisher from her predicament and moving her into new ones.  At Blackfriars University, George is investigating the death of her former roommate.  The Orpheus Society, consisting of old money blue bloods, seems to be involved in more than wanton destruction of property and orgies.

Much of the first half of Brutal Boys sets the scene for a relatively happy period in George’s life.  She establishes a polyamorous relationship with the uberwealthy student William Windsor-Forsyth and Father Sebastian Pearce, a teacher and college chaplain.  The three of them are mutually in love, but even as George is admitted the Orpheus Society, a deeper part of the sect emerges.  This group is even more insidious and has designs on human sacrifice.  But I’ve already said too much.

Reading is, of course, a subjective exercise.  My personal experience of this duology is that the first book is better than the second.  It’s not that I feel Brutal Boys is a bad story—it keeps your interest pretty much the whole way through—it just seems to be far more improbable than the first novel.  It is fiction, of course, and there is nothing speculative here.  There are no ghosts or monsters or divine intervention.  Speaking strictly for me, it might’ve helped with believability if there were a little of this.  I was not one of those swept away by Donna Tartt’s inaugural dark academia novel The Secret History, but she did include just a little of a speculative element that allows for a reader to perhaps convince him or herself that this might just possibly happen.  Some writers and readers prefer not to use that escape hatch.  I’ve read good dark academia both with and without speculative aspects to the story, but to me, such mystery adds a little depth to what might be happening.  And I admire self-publishing authors who write well enough to draw you into a second book, which can be a rare thing.

Discovering Witches

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On a number of best of dark academia novel lists, A Discovery of Witches was a book I knew I had to read.  Frightened by the size of the tome, I put it off.  Although it says it on the cover (by which I don’t buy a book) that it’s part of a trilogy, I was hoping it’d be self-contained.  Of course, it ends without resolving what happens to the main characters, more or less coercing the reader into the remaining two volumes.  Now, this is not unique.  Many authors do it.  Publishers especially like books with series potential—assured sales.  My eight novels (none published) are stand-alone.  One is over 200,000 words, but the rest are reasonably svelte.  Big books take a large commitment of time and, well, at my age you have to make some choices.  This one took me nearly a solid month of daily reading, sometimes multiple hours at a stretch, to finish.  I have some decisions to make.

Set initially in Oxford, this world created by Deborah Harkness contains three kinds of humanoid creatures besides humans: witches, vampires, and daemons.  The daemons aren’t really defined, but they don’t seem to be the kind that possess girls like Regan McNeil.  The witches seem pretty traditional and the protagonist/narrator is one.  The vampires are quite different than the Hollywood version, as well as the traditional sort.  Vampires can be out in the sunlight, they aren’t affected by crucifixes, and, indeed, can be quite religious and Christian.  They can eat things other than than blood.  The protagonist, Diana Bishop, is a witch who doesn’t use her powers.  A professor, she’s doing research at Oxford where she meets, and eventually falls in love with Matthew Clairmont, a vampire.  An ancient pact between witches, vampires, and daemons forbids them from consorting closely, and herein lies the tale.

The dark academia aspect comes in a couple of guises.  One is that much of the first part of the novel takes place at Oxford University, and even in the Bodleian Library.  Also, vampires seem to be quite compatible with dark academia as a whole.  The dark aspect comes not only from the creatures, but their situation.  There is ancient animosity and tension that results in murders.  The novel ends with a war starting and Diana and Matthew taking a risky journey.  I may be content to let this state of affairs stand.  From the look of things, the sequel is also a long book and I am content to let my imagination fill in the blanks.  I’m glad to have read it, but I’m going to look for a novel with a little less time-commitment next.

Dangers of Dark Shadows

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A friend’s recent gift proved dangerous.  I wrote already about the very kind, unexpected present of the Dark Shadows Almanac and the Barnabas Collins game.  This got me curious and I found out that the original series is now streaming on Amazon Prime.  Dangerous knowledge.  Left alone for a couple hours, I decided to watch “Season 1, Episode 1.”  I immediately knew something was wrong.  Willie Loomis is shown staring at a portrait of Barnabas Collins.  Barnabas was introduced into the series in 1967, not 1966, when it began.  Dark Shadows was a gothic soap opera and the idea of writing a vampire into it only came when daily ratings were dismal, after about ten months of airing.  Barnabas Collins saved the series from cancellation and provided those wonderful chills I knew as a child.  But I wanted to see it from the beginning.

I’ve gone on about digital rights management before, but something that equally disturbs me is the re-writing of history.  Dark Shadows did not begin with Barnabas Collins—it started with Victoria Winters.  There were 1,225 episodes.  Some of us have a compulsion about completeness.  The Dark Shadows novels began five volumes before Barnabas arrived.  Once I began collecting them, I couldn’t stop until, many years later, I’d completed the set.  I read each one, starting with Dark Shadows and Victoria Winters.  Now Amazon is telling me the show began with Barnabas Collins.  Don’t get me wrong; this means that I have ten months of daily programming that I can skip, but I am a fan of completeness.

You can buy the entire collection on DVD but it’s about $400.  I can’t commit the number of years it might take to get through all of it.  I’m still only on season four of The Twilight Zone DVD collection that I bought over a decade (closer to two decades) ago.  I really have very little free time.  Outside of work, my writing claims the lion’s share of it.  Even with ten months shaved off, I’m not sure where I’ll find the time to watch what remains of the series.  The question will always be hanging in my mind, though.  Did they cut anything else out?  Digital manipulation allows for playing all kinds of shenanigans with the past.  Ebooks can be altered without warning.  Scenes can silently be dropped from movies.  You can be told that you’ve watched the complete series, but you will have not.  Vampires aren’t the only dangerous things in Dark Shadows.

Dark Romance

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My study of genre leads me to believe that there really may be no such thing.  Or at least many aspects of genre are open to question.  In the case of Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves, there’s no doubt that one genre is dark academia.  Indeed, this is book one of a duology titled “Dark Academia.”  Although self-published it is quite well done.  There’s a lot of backstory, and George (Georgina) Fisher, the protagonist and narrator, is a character from a previous series by Holmes.  Another genre that fits here is romance, although this novel is more than that.  Maybe a bit of the story will help.  George is a new student at Blackfriars University in England.  From California, she has trouble fitting in among the blue bloods that are the usual make-up of the student body.  She soon learns about the Orpheus Society, the secretive organization that pulls the strings on campus.  Then her roommate, the girlfriend of a prominent Orpheus Society member, goes missing.  George decides to investigate. 

Consciously aware of dark academia, Holmes aims directly at the heart of it and offers a compelling story that keeps readers interested from cover to cover.  I was never quite sure what was going to happen, and I do have to add a warning—this first book does end on a cliffhanger, so be ready to commit yourself to book two.  George is so well drawn that it’s not hard to care for her and start rooting for her against the secret society types who can buy themselves out of anything, including murder.  (I have to say, that part is a little too close to reality in the current US of A, so it may be a trigger for some.)

My regular readers (if any) know that I’m on a dark academia kick at the moment.  There’s so much to like in the genre.  Holmes makes clear the close ties between dark academia and horror; they share a common ancestor in the form of gothic literature.  The sheer variety in the novels classified this way means that not all of the books will contain every element associated with the genre, but Pretty Girls Make Graves comes close.  Holmes also effectively writes the ostracism of the outsider into the tale.  Anyone who’s had trouble fitting in (or may still have trouble fitting in) will recognize the scenario and its fallout.  Let’s hope, though, that they don’t end up like George at the end of volume one, even when they enjoy reading the book.

Dark Introduction

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Since I’ve discovered that I live in dark academia, I’ve grown curious.  Kara Muller has put together The Little Book of Dark Academia as a kind of first step in the discussion.  I have learned that some academic articles on dark academia are starting to appear, but this is pitched more toward those who maybe need some tips on how to get started.  By the way, this is a full-color, heavily illustrated book.  In practical terms, that means it doesn’t take too long to read it.  It’s also self-published, so less expensive than many books, but without editorial shaping.  It begins with history and definitions.  The term came into use in 2015 but the concept had been around much longer than that.  Sometimes a label is necessary to bring together thought on something that’s been floating around for a while.  As Muller points out, it tends to revolve around books.

My imagination isn’t so constrained as to believe that ebooks have no place in dark academia; they have their own special kind of darkness.  Still, the setting for these stories often takes place in real life, in studies and libraries full of books.  This is not a Star Wars paperless universe.  Muller gives a list of acclaimed dark academia titles with a brief paragraph or two about them.  In other words, a reading list.  And also a movie viewing list.  She also includes some television series that fit the aesthetic.  If you’re in the mood for dark academia, you’ll find plenty of places to indulge your hunger here.  The lists aren’t comprehensive, of course.  A bit of searching online indicates that many such lists exist, not all of them in full agreement.

Muller then presents a section on style and design.  Dark academia is, in many ways, like cosplay.  There’s a look and feel to it that can be emulated.  And I can’t help but say it’s backward looking.  A longing for classical education, the way that it used to be.  To me, this seems to be behind much of the current fascination with it.  This lifestyle is rapidly disappearing.  Even professors are now using AI instead of getting their hands dirty in the library.  And publishing online rather than in print form.  Showing up to class in tee-shirts and jeans.  Some of us, and I count myself in their midst, miss the feel of armloads of books and professors that wore tweed and could read arcane languages.  And nobody was trying to cut their funds because, well, the world was smarter then.  And everyone knew education was important.

Club Frankenstein

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Reading YA novels once in a while reveals that younger folk have quite a good selection of literature from which to choose.  Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club is a good pick for horror fans as it takes several cues from horror movies and mixes them with the anxieties of high school.  Rachel Chavez is a new student at Manchester Prep in New York City.  Her mother moved her there after a break-in and attack at their old home on Long Island.  With really only one friend at her new school, she finds out about the secretive Mary Shelley Club which meets to watch horror movies—or so she thinks.  Rachel then learns that the club’s real raison d’être is to play a game called Fear Test in which a targeted student is frightened, sometimes to death.  Rachel settles in the the club, being a horror fan, but grows increasingly uncomfortable with the game.

I won’t say much more than that about the plot, but I will say it is compellingly written and a page turner.  I didn’t quite buy the resolution, but that’s often true of horror movies.  It captures well the anxiety of high school, and of moving to a new location.  And Moldavsky certainly knows her horror movies.  I sometimes ponder what makes a novel YA.  I suppose it’s the focus on high school/college kids and a restrained vocabulary, shall we say.  While there’s no explicit sex scenes, there is some making out with intent here (this isn’t a romance), and there are a few f-bombs dropped.  And there is a body count.  Still, for horror, it doesn’t feel as gristly as “adult novels.”  Young people seem to lack the more developed evil of their elders.

My motive for reading it, apart from the horror aspect, was that The Mary Shelley Club is occasionally cited as an example of dark academia.  It’s easy enough to see why.  An exclusive school, wealthy families, and a dark subtext involving a secret society.  These are often hallmarks of the genre.  Dark academia may blend with horror, as it does here, or other genres.  That’s part of its appeal.  In this case the school, Manchester Prep (the name borrowed, it seems, from Cruel Intentions) may not be the center of the story, but it is what brings the main characters together, even if the horror is extra-curricular.  It was a fairly quick read, despite its size, and it bodes well for other good reading while exploring this particular aesthetic.

Cat Tales

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Sometimes I go into an independent bookstore and just look what’s on the shelf.  Often this ends up being an attempt to find a book that isn’t monstrous in length.  Much of what’s currently on offer is long, but I grew up reading 128-page paperbacks (not great literature, granted) that set my expectations.  Now, I do read long books.  Since books and movies are staple topics for discussion on this blog, however, I need to keep things moving in both kinds.  All of which is to say that I picked up Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books because it was short.  This particular bookstore was one where I know and trust the owner’s taste.  I’d bought Haruki Murakami’s works there before.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into this time, though.  I like cats.  I like short books.  I like the Japanese authors I’ve read.  So.

The BISAC code on the back of this one didn’t state that it was fantasy.  I like some fantasy fiction, but my tolerance is limited.  The fault is mine entirely; I own that.  I enjoy speculative fiction and a book with a talking cat felt like it might fit that niche.  I thought the story of The Cat Who Saved Books was good, and the message was sound.  But it felt a bit trite.  The previous Japanese author I’d read was Murakami, and he’s pretty incredible.  I can give you a taste of this book, however, and raise a question about it.  A teenage boy is left taking care of his grandfather’s bookshop after his guardian dies.  A talking cat appears and leads him to four labyrinths where the boy has to rescue books that are being misused.  His arguments to save them don’t seem profound, but something might’ve been lost in translation.

The question is that one of the characters claims to be a book almost two-thousand years old that has had more influence than any other book. Was this the Bible?  Interestingly, nearly every book mentioned in this novel is from the “western canon.”  I have to wonder if this particular book, which is a rather severe character, is the Good Book.  I don’t suspect there’s any way to find out, really.  Still, it seems to fit the sense that Natsukawa uses.  This is an innocent enough fantasy novel.  I guess I prefer my fantasy to have solid rules laid down so that I have an idea what to expect.  But then again, my perspective is that of a primarily western reader, and one who craves short books now and again. I’m open to learn.

Bad Intensions

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What, exactly, defines dark academia?  I ask myself that question a lot.  Looking for movies that might help answer that question sometimes brings about unexpected results.  A film that appears on several dark academia lists is Cruel Intentions.  I’d never seen it before and since it’s generally classified as a teen romantic drama, it isn’t exactly what I tend to go seeking.  Still, that definition is important to pin down, dark academia.  So I tried.  It presents itself, at least up front, as a teen sex comedy.  A rich playboy at a private school, and his scheming step-sister, enjoy destroying the innocence of new coeds.  She uses coke and he appears to be addicted to sex.  There’s not much to really like about either one.  Then the unexpected happens—he falls in love with one of his intended victims.

If the plot sounds a little familiar, it may be because it is a retelling of Dangerous Liaisons, a movie I’ve never seen based on a novel I’ve never read.  What makes it dark academia is that it takes place in a private school.  An exclusive private school (but aren’t they all?).  And it does take a dark turn toward the end.  The cad (Sebastian by name) is eventually caught in his relentless womanizing and although the woman he truly loves is a forgiving sort, it can’t save him in the end.  The movie has the fun of double-double crossing and certainly doesn’t paint a very flattering portrait of the rich.  Indeed, Dorian Gray comes to mind as well.

The movie, qua movie, is enjoyable enough.  The acting is pretty good.  I’d seen it described as a thriller as well, and there may be some junior-level thriller moments.  Dark academia, at its best, has some crossover with thrillers, or even horror.  Since the aesthetic appeals primarily to the young, it is perhaps inevitable that it goes gently into that dark night.  I’m trying to get a handle on it because it has captured my imagination.  In many ways dark academia has helped make sense of what has happened in my life.  I love the gothic aspect of the genre.  The few shots of the gothic architecture of Manchester Prep were appreciated, but the movie as a whole doesn’t have much of a gothic feel, beyond the monied privilege of kids who’ll probably never have to do a day’s work in their lives.  Dark indeed.

Sunday Wednesday

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Being busy people, it took us a couple weeks to watch the eight episodes of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, and I think he’s really outdone himself.  As I mentioned before, I was never a great fan of The Addam’s Family, but I watched it often enough to know the characters and their quirks.   I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the television show.  It had monsters, but nothing really scary.  It was funny but some of the humor seemed beyond me.  I watched it anyway.  I didn’t bother with the movie when it came out.  Then on a rainy weekend afternoon I watched episode 1 of Wednesday and I was hooked.  For one thing, this is dark academia personified.  Exclusive, gothic, school, dark mysteries, secret societies.  It’s all there.  And for another thing, it’s well written and the acting is very good.  And then there’s Poe.

Image credit: Chainwit. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

(On a side note: I recently found another review of Nightmares with the Bible.  It is my most reviewed and least successful book.  The reviewer agreed with other reviewers that the Poe angle didn’t convince them.  As I told one critic, the Poe angle is a personal one.  Poe was a man, a sin of which I’m also guilty.  And men of a particular stripe feel protective of women.  Maybe it’s one of those biological things we should just get over, but Poe felt that it was poetic and, being a far less intelligent experiencer of that same disposition, I feel it too.  I think Tim Burton might also, for Wednesday seems full of that as well.)

At Nevermore Academy, the morbid, anti-social loner Wednesday learns to accept a kind of friendship from other outcasts.  There’s a town vs. gown aspect as the residents of Jericho don’t exactly love the academy, but they appreciate the money it brings in.  The founding pilgrim, Joseph Crackstone, was a hater of those who were different and tried to rid the world of others not like him (this is important).  Over eight episodes this backstory interrupts into the present and threatens the very existence of Nevermore.  What ties it all together, of course, is Wednesday.  Nearly as gothic as Sleepy Hollow, this Netflix series showcases the aspects of Burton’s vision that I find most compelling.  And the first season was nominated for quite a few awards.  A second season has been approved and I’ll be watching that one, down the road.  I can’t get enough dark academia these days, no matter the day of the week.

Contours of Dark Academia

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As I attempt to trace the contours of dark academia, I’m learning that much of my reading has been classified that way by others.  My main engine for discovering this is Goodreads, making me think I should shelve my own books more.  Also, I recently visited a local Barnes and Noble where one of the front tables was dedicated to dark academia.  Looking over the titles gave me fiction reading ideas for months.  In any case, apart from classical dark academia, where the setting is an institution of higher, or specialized learning, the category for many includes books about books.  This would pull in titles such as Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I read before my current conscious interest in the genre.  I think I was looking for gothic books back then.  I include, on my personal list, books about students with dark experiences, such as Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle.

The books about books category does shed some insight.  I love Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it’s not really dark enough to be, well, dark academia.  I understand the critique that dark academia tells stories of privilege, but that dissipates somewhat when including books about books.  Higher education is, and remains, a domain of privilege, but it is possible for those raised poor (such as yours truly) to break in.  I enjoyed higher education throughout the eighties and into the aughties.  After that it began to get far too political and business-oriented.  (Not that I wouldn’t go back if I had half a chance.  Or even a quarter.)  My point is, dark academia can deal with those who lack privilege, but I also believe there’s no point in denying privilege does exist.  And opens doors.

Dark academia is new enough that its parameters are permeable.  To me the real draw is that a fair bit of sculduggery really does exist in higher education.  The reading public seems eager for it.  Thinking of all the odd, somewhat tenebrous things that occurred in the course of my couple of decades in academia, the genre rings true to me as well.  As I think back over the books I’ve read, I think maybe I should build a shelf especially for dark academia.  I’m trying to read in it more intentionally now, but I’ve been unintentionally exploring it for decades.  When you add books about books, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose joins the crowd, and I read that one all the way back in seminary.  I tried to be part of academia, but there’s a darkness about an unrequited love, and so it just makes sense to me.

Imagine Monsters

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Adulthood is where you begin to recognize the folly of growing up.  Like most people, when I “matured” I was ashamed of things I made as a child and, regretfully, threw them away.  This came back to me recently as I was thinking of a sketchbook—actually a scrapbook that I repurposed in my tween years.  I love to draw.  I don’t do it as much now as I’d like (thanks, work!), but I was encouraged in it by art teachers throughout school who thought I had a little talent.  The sketchbook, however, was only ever shown to my brothers, but mostly only looked at by me.  This particular project was where I was making up monsters.  As with my writing, I’d never taken any drawing classes, but I had an active (some say overactive) imagination.  (That’s still true.)  

In any case, a discussion with my daughter brought back memories of this book I’d discarded by the time I went to college.  I still remember some members of the menagerie I’d concocted.  Even now that I’ve seen hundreds of monster movies, most of those I’d fabricated as a child have no peers that I’ve seen.  These weren’t monsters to be incorporated into stories—they were purely visual.  Although, I can say that my first attempted novel (probably around the age of 15) was about a monster.  I got away with being interested in monsters in high school, but college was a wholesale attempt to eradicate them.  Even so my best friend from my freshman year (who left after only a semester) and I made up a monster that lived in the library.

As an academic, until very recent years, monsters were off limits.  If you wanted to be sidelined (and in my case it turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered) you could explore such outré subjects.  Now it turns out that you can get mainstream media attention if you do (as a professor, but not, it seems, as an editor).  I’m sitting here looking back over half-a-century of inventing monsters, with a sizable gap in the middle.  The interest was always there, even as I strove to be a good undergrad, seminarian, and graduate student.  Now I can say openly that monsters make me happy.  I can also say, wistfully, that I’d been mature enough to keep that sketchbook that preserved a part of my young imagination.  It was tossed away along with the superhero cartoons I used to draw.  And the illustrations of favorite songs, before music videos were a thing.  Growing up is overrated. 

A surviving drawing, unfinished

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

Poking Around

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I’ll always prefer indies but ever since James Daunt took over Barnes & Noble it’s become a much better place.  I unfortunately didn’t get to any of Daunt’s stores while living in the UK, but unlike most corporate types, he gets books.  He understands book buyers and, I like to think, he reads.  I happened to need to stop into a local B & N recently on a Saturday morning.  I got there a little early and I saw a line at the door.   Naive as ever, I supposed it was a reading or writing group that’d be meeting there.  The queue had one thing in common: they were all males between thirty and fifty years old.  Who says men don’t read?  I went in and got what I was after, and even browsed a bit.  When I got to the register they were in line.  Hands empty.

Then I noticed that as each one stepped to the register, the sales clerk would step back to a place behind the counter and come with the same thing for each one.  As I got close enough, I saw that they were after Pokémon Prismatic Evolutions.  The Prismatic Evolutions Poster Collection released just the day before when they were probably at work.  The game sells for about a Franklin and the shelf was nearing empty by the time I finally reached the checkout.  I looked back.  At least five more guys had come in and immediately joined the line, no products in hand.  I’ve never seen the appeal of Pokémon but I couldn’t feel smug because I was there because of an obsession as well.  I didn’t buy a game, or cards (one guy bought 14 packs of the same card set, clearing that rack), but I was guilty nevertheless.

I’ve been fascinated by Dark Academia for some time now.  That week, when I had also been at work, I realized that one of the books I had in that genre had been destroyed in what we refer to as “the flood.”  (The story is here on this blog, but the short version is when we moved into our house, the movers stacked our boxes in the garage because they were complaining it was so late.  Before I could move the boxes into the house—the day after the next, in fact—a torrential rain fell and many of the boxes got wet, destroying at least 100 books and some other items that can’t be replaced.)  I was missing that particular book and it was old enough that I was pretty sure the local indies wouldn’t have it in stock.  Daunt’s B & N did.  So the line that morning contained a bunch of obsessive guys, but one of us, I have to confess, was over sixty.