End of the Story

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You know that feeling?  Like when you’re driving in thick fog and you know you should stop but you’re late and you have to keep going?  There comes a moment as you’re driving when you know that it’s going to end, and probably badly.  Yet you keep on going.  Trump has me thinking of the end of the world quite a bit.  I know there are many evangelicals out there praying for it fervently while the rest of us would like a little more time on this beautiful planet.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand this outlook, because I do.  I grew up with it and I’ve never forgotten the sensation it caused.  And then I pondered that we are story-telling, and story-thinking creatures.  Perhaps other animals don’t think this way, but we constantly tell ourselves stories.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and well, eventually, an end.  We all know, at some level, that we’re mortal.  Life will end, and every completed story has an end.  Why not the world?  It’s a strangely haunting idea, the world continuing on without us here to make it interesting.  Plants will grow in any soil they can find, even microscopic cracks in the pavement.  Every year it’s like one day everything is suddenly green where only the day before we could see the sky through the branches.  And animals continue their quests for food, mates, and shelter.  Some live to hide while others strut.  Each has a role to play and if you watch them closely you’ll find yourself narrating their stories.  That rabbit.  That bluejay.  That fox.  They have a beginning, middle, and end.  If they can’t tell it, we can do it for them.  It comes naturally to us.

Long ago I learned how one version of Bible interpretation came up with the end of the world as we know it.  I also learned that this was contrived, just as all interpretations are.  This particular one has landed, like a seed, in the cracks of our mind.  It grows, just like that weed in the pavement.  This story must have an end.  We can imagine it no other way.  Even when we grow up and realize that the story was only one we told to children—children old enough to handle it, of course—we still have this certainty that an end is coming.  Like driving in the fog, we just know it.  Even when we realize that in reality we should be putting on the brakes.

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.

Death in Cambridge

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In an effort not to give too much away, I’ll try to give only the bare bones and some impressions.  The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides, is considered a dark academia novel.  It revolves around a series of murders in Cambridge and the informal investigations by a psychologist (Mariana), whose niece attends St. Christopher’s College.  There is, not surprisingly, a lot of psychological tension.  It’s also a good illustration of the human condition—our psychology can often be disrupted by those closest to us.  We’re a complex lot.  The whole story is also set against the backdrop of classic Greek tragedies.  Mariana is half Greek herself, living in England.  She’s also a widow and, although not a minor, a woman without parents or siblings.  As a psychologist, she tries to help others sort out their lives.

Perhaps some of us are born prone to trauma through some combination of naiveté, innocence, and neurodivergence.  It’s well known that what simply rolls off one person will traumatize another.  People sometimes comment that it’s surprising that I watch horror, but the fact is that it’s generally removed from my personal traumas.  Looking back over some sixty years, I see quite a lot of trauma and I empathize with Michaelides’ characters who experienced such deficits, some of them without even knowing it.  This really stood out to me while reading the novel.  With the exception of some of the maidens, just about everybody is hurting.  Who are these eponymous maidens?  A group of students who have coalesced around an American professor of ancient literature.  And they’re also the ones who tend to get bumped off.

This is a book that moves along.  Part of the reason is that it has short chapters, something I’ve come to appreciate over my life as things get busier and busier.  Long chapters can be a challenge.  A novel I read recently had no chapters at all (but at least there were scattered extra-spaces between collections of paragraphs).  But what really keeps the pages turning is the story.  Michaelides is very good at misdirection, which is why I didn’t describe the plot in any detail.  You have to read it to see how things unfold and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone.  A literary murder-mystery, it has no speculative elements, apart from a few coincidences.  It does, for at least some readers, have quite an impact.  For me, it influenced my thought process for the rest of the day after I finished it.  At that, with all the books I read, is pretty rare.

More Writing

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I keep a list.  It includes everything that I’ve published.  It’s not on my CV since I keep my fiction pretty close to my vest.  The other day I stumbled across another electronic list I’d made some time ago of the unpublished books I’d written.  Most were fiction but at least two were non, and so I decided that I should probably print out copies of those I still had.  As I’ve probably written elsewhere, I started my first novel as a teenager.  I never finished it, but I still remember it pretty well.  Then I started another, also unfinished.  After my wife and I got engaged and before we moved to Scotland, I’d moved to Ann Arbor to be in her city.  Ann Arbor, like most university towns, has many overqualified people looking for work and I ended up doing secretarial support for companies that really had nothing for me to do quite a bit of the time.  I wrote my first full novel during dull times on the job.

My writing was pretty focused in Edinburgh.  My first published book was, naturally, my dissertation.  I started writing fiction again when I was hired by Nashotah House, but that was tempered by academic articles and my second book.  An academic life, it seems, doesn’t leave a ton of time for writing.  What really surprised me about my list was what happened after Nashotah.  In the years since then I’ve completed ten unpublished books.  Since my ouster from academia I’ve published five.  I honestly don’t know how many short stories I’ve finished, but I have published thirty-three.  What really worries me is that some of these only exist in tenuous electronic form.  I guess I trust the internet enough to preserve these blog posts; with over 5,700 of them I’d be running out of space.

I see a trip to buy some paper in my future.  For my peace of mind I need to make sure all of this is printed out.  My organizational scheme (which is perhaps not unusual for those with my condition) is: I know which pile I put it in.  Organizing it for others, assuming anybody else is interested, might not be a bad idea.  I know that if I make my way to the attic and begin looking through my personal slush pile of manuscripts I’ll find even more that I’ve forgotten.  That’s why I started keeping a list.  Someday I’ll have time to finish it, I hope.

Hugo’s Invention

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After watching Hugo, and wishing that the story were history, I found a copy of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  Martin Scorsese’s adaptation is fairly close to the book but there are, of course, additions and omissions.  One key character is left out and some subtleties to the book didn’t find their way obviously into the movie, or at least not until having read the book.  The story of Georges Méliès’ life in the book is largely accurate.  Hugo, however, and Isabelle, are fictional.  As is the automaton around which the story is based.  The lovable train station vendors in the movie are quite a bit less lovable in the book.  And the station inspector isn’t shown until late in the story and he doesn’t have the leg brace that lends a kind of steampunishish vibe to the film.

Apart from being a tale of redemption—in real life Méliès’ rediscovery didn’t lead to an end of his poverty—the story is an exploration in psychology.  Méliès lost his dream job due to competition after the First World War.  The book makes clear that the clicking of heels drives him to rage because his films were reputedly melted down to make shoe heels.  The story in the book goes so far as to say that ghosts follow those who clack their heels loudly.  The ghosts, of course, are those of Méliès’ lost success as a filmmaker.  One of the reasons this story appeals to me is that I too lost a job that gave my life a sense of purpose.  My writing largely does that now, even if it doesn’t sell.  I can relate to a man who is ready to retire but can’t, daily reminded that he once had a satisfying job but now has to sit behind a desk all day.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book for younger readers.  About half of the book’s 500-plus pages are illustrations.  The images include stills from Méliès’ surviving films, but mostly drawings by Selznick.  The focus on the young people makes this a children’s book, but the truths it tells of adults with lost dreams are especially appropriate for those who’ve learned that life isn’t always kind to dreamers.  The book, like the movie, inspires me to seek out the surviving films of Georges Méliès and think of what can indeed happen to those who dare to dream, even when the world has already discarded them as irrelevant.

Storytelling

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Those who know me personally say that I’m a good storyteller.  My own head houses, however, my harshest critic.  Since I tend to work alone this creates an inherent conflict.  This is most evident in my fiction.  I finished a draft of my eighth novel earlier this year, but it still needs work.  (No, really it does—not just harsh critic speaking.)  Part of the problem is obviously time.  My morning writing period is frequently held hostage by my moods.  Some of my past novels are, I think, publishable.  I’ve tried repeatedly with one of them, getting as far as having a signed contract, but things collapsed after that.  It sits brooding on my hard drive.  Another—I think it may be number four or five—seems publishable but it requires reworking with magic pixie dust.  Sometimes my supply of it runs low.  (Moods again.)

I sometimes wonder if I read too much nonfiction.  I’m a curious sort of chap, interested in the world around me.  When that world seems to be falling apart, however, fiction is my friend.  I’ve been reading a lot of novels and I’m often struck by the beauty of the prose.  Head critic says, “why can’t you do that?”  Then I recall the writing advice that I picked up from Stephen King’s nonfiction, On Writing.  Adjectives may be bad for your health.  Just tell the story.  With style.  My current novel (eight) tells an interesting story, I think.  If I’m honest I’ll say that I started working on this before any of the other completed novels (except number one, and that was a throwaway).  It was an idea that just wouldn’t go away.  I knew the beginning and the ending, and part of the middle.  I even found a potential publisher, but it has grown too long for them.

About three chapters from the end I realized that I hadn’t tied things up as well as I’d initially thought.  What I need is time away from work to think about it.  Thinking time is rare, even in the time I manage to wrestle from the 9-2-5.  There’s always more to be done, trying to stay healthy and out of the weather.  And really, maybe I should be reading even more fiction.  But what about the “real world” out there, which requires nonfiction to face it boldly and with informed decisions?  It’s dramatic, isn’t it?  Like a protagonist (hardly a hero) on the edge of a cliff.  How does the story end?  Perhaps an actual storyteller might know.

No Ordinary Picnic

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I will be including spoilers in this review, so please be advised!  Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel that began as speculative but then turned naturalistic.  Mostly, anyway.  Born in 1896, Lindsay published the novel just after she turned 70.  Since she was Australian, it stands to reason that the story is set there.  Hanging Rock is an actual place and, according to multiple sources, Lindsay ended the book with a speculative chapter that explained the mystery.  What is the mystery?  On Valentines Day 1900, the girls at Appleyard College set out for a picnic at, well, Hanging Rock.  While there, three of the girls and one of their chaperones disappear.  Since everyone travels by literal horse power, getting back and forth from the scene of the mystery takes hours.  The head mistress of the college is frantic, mostly because she’ll be losing tuition because of this.

Eventually one of the girls is found, somewhat mystically, by a young Englishman with whom a romance starts and seems to end abruptly.  The found girl remembers nothing of what happened that day.  Further investigations are held, but the mystery is never solved.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard, the mistress of the college, takes a strong dislike to one of the girls who was devoted to one of the missing.  After one of the girls’ governesses, recently dismissed, burns to death, the headmistress appears to have murdered the girl she disliked (or she fell/jumped from a window; the novel isn’t explicit on the point).  Mrs. Appleyard, realizing she is ruined, goes to Hanging Rock where she dies by suicide, throwing herself down the rocky side of the outcropping.  The speculative ending—no longer part of the novel—had the missing girls disappear into a kind of time warp.  Lindsay’s editor had her remove that chapter.

The novel became quite well known in Australia, and to the wider world when a movie was made from it.  The interesting thing is that the novel presents itself as describing factual events, like the Blair Witch Project.  This is so much the case that the rumor grew that the events really did happen.  A book was even written, suggesting a solution regarding what happened to the missing girls.  Had the excised chapter been published with the book, it would’ve been clear that this was a fictional tale.  Lindsay had a savvy editor, however.  Nothing sells like a dramatic story that readers believe to be true.  Witness The Amityville Horror.  Even though naturalistic, a bit of the speculative still hangs about the story, making for a good gothic novel without a firm resolution.

Hop In

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Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.

Night Fears

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Have you ever had one of those dreams?  The kind where your subconscious turns on you brutally?  I’ve often said I’m my own worst critic but this one took it to a whole new level.  In real life I’m working on novel number eight.  One through seven haven’t been published (and at least two don’t deserve to be).  I’ve kind of been thinking that this one might see the light of day.  I finished a very rough draft about a couple months ago and I’ve been working on revisions since.  Meanwhile I keep reading novels and seeing how well they flow compared to my story.  That must’ve been on my mind because in my dream I was in a room with five or six publishing moguls.  In the way of dreams it seems that perhaps an agent had arranged this.  I was in the room with them and when they finished, each took their turn telling me how awful it was.  Their critique was brutal.  So bad I couldn’t get back to sleep.  I found tears on my cheek.

Of course, my writing time is early morning.  Work is uncompromising.  So I had to get up and work on what my subconscious had just told me was, in the words of Paul, skubalon.  (Look up the commentaries on Philippians 3.8, if you dare.)  Like any writer, I have my doubts about my own work.  This particular novel I’ve been working on, off and on, for almost three decades.  It’s an idea I can’t let go.  Just a couple months back I was proud of myself for finally finishing a draft of it, and this morning I’m tempted to delete all the files.  Why does one’s subconscious do this to a person?  My very first attempt at a novel, as a teen, was torn up by my own hands.

The other dream that has been recurring, in various forms, is where I’ve been hired back by Nashotah House.  I taught there for a decade and a half, and I wasn’t very happy toward the end, but I did my job well.  In real life I wouldn’t go back, but in my dreams I’m always overjoyed.  I wake up happy and optimistic.  Some version of that dream comes to me at least once a year, I suppose.  Sometimes several times.  Dreams are mysterious.  They’re telling us something, but they’re coy about exactly what.  That’s what made last night’s dream so bad.  There was no ambiguity.  This was pure, unadulterated self doubt in the room with me and it gave me no quarter.  I got up and continued work on the revisions anyway.  Who’s afraid of omens?

Finding Fossils

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Mary Anning was a real woman.  She made valuable contributions to paleontology in the first half of the nineteenth century, although she wasn’t always credited for her work.  The movie Ammonite is a fictionalized account of her life at Lyme Regis, where she lived and discovered dinosaur fossils.  Being fiction, the movie focuses on how Mary “came out of her shell” by entering into a relationship with Charlotte Murchison (also an historical person, wife of the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison) who was left in her care when she came down with a fever after trying to recover from melancholy by taking the sea air.  Mary had established a life of independence and wasn’t really seeking relationships; her mother still lived with her and, according to the movie, they had a distant but loving regard for each other.

I was anxious to see the film because it is sometimes classified as dark academia.  Since I’m trying to sharpen my sense of what that might mean, it’s helpful to watch what others think fits.  The academia part here comes from the intellectual pursuits of Anning and the academic nature of museum life (one of her fossils was displayed at the British Museum).  Anning, who had no formal academic training, tried to make a living in a “man’s world,” and in real life she did contribute significantly to paleontology.  The dark part seems to come in from her exclusion from the scientific community, and perhaps in her love for Charlotte, a forbidden relationship in that benighted time.  Of course, this relationship is entirely speculative.

Fictional movies made about factual people make me curious about the lives of those deemed movie-worthy.  Ammonite is a gentle movie and one which raises the question of why women were excluded from science for so long.  No records exist that address her sexuality—not surprisingly, since she lived during a period when such things weren’t discussed.  Indeed, she didn’t receive the acclaim that she might have, had she lived in the period of Jurassic Park.  She was noticed by Charles Dickens, who included a piece on her in his magazine All the Year Round, in 1865, several years after her death.  These days she is acknowledged and commemorated.  This movie is one such commemoration, although much of it likely never happened.  As with art house movies such as this, nonfiction isn’t to be assumed.  Nevertheless, it might still be dark academia.

Friendly Fear

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I opened my book Holy Horror with an epigraph taken from Apocalypse Now, a movie I recently watched again.  That quote was from Col. Kurtz: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how you can make any progress in a discussion with anyone who’s already made up his or her mind (i.e., no matter what you say to them they will not take it seriously.  Think your favorite Trump supporter).  People far smarter than I have noted that the only way to combat this unthinking adherence is to get people to think critically.  That may be correct, but to preserve democracy we need a more assured method in the short term.  That of Col. Kurtz.

Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  Both contain a vital truth—fear motivates people.  Democrats have been forward-looking in recent decades, but Republicans run on that fear playbook and it’s very difficult to defeat.  That’s because people are afraid.  It’s important to face fears, but to win elections, you need to seed them.  I know whereof I speak when it comes to phobias.  I was so riddled with fear as a young person that at times I could not leave the house.  At other times even the house didn’t feel safe to me.  I had multiple phobias and difficulty talking to other people.  I’ve grown out of many of these fears, but if I’m honest, I know they’re still with me.  I suspect many other people are also afraid.

Strong men (even if personally weak) appeal to the afraid.  They want someone who can protect them.  I tend to think Democrats think many Americans are better adjusted than they actually are.  You want their votes?  Make them afraid.  I’ve been writing books on fear and its many cinematic manifestations for several years now.  I grew up being afraid of everything.  I don’t advocate creating fear, but when a nation decides Hitler would be better than letting young people read, it’s reached a crisis point.  I do wish progressive political leaders would consider my humble observations.  When afraid people herd together and become the mob with torches.  And just such a mob became the mindless followers of Col. Kurtz.  Just saying.

Gothic Novelties

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I’m a sucker for a good gothic novel.  Dilapidated houses on the moors, suggestions of ghosts, the kind of encompassing darkness that enfolds you.  Women facing a man’s world just as Victoria took to the throne.  Hints of the supernatural.  So when offered a review copy of Kate Cherrell’s Begotten, I jumped at the chance.  Gothic it is, that I’ll give you that.  Perhaps I’m getting more discriminating in my tastes, but the classics are hard to beat.  I’m particularly fond of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  Begotten’s not up to that level, of course, but I found the pacing slow and the narrator difficult to sympathize with. It has the kind of ending that sets me off, as I’ve written about before. (No spoilers here!)   Given that I’ve never succeeded in having a novel published (not for not trying), I am impressed.  

Novel writing is difficult.  Let me qualify that—good novel writing is difficult.  It’s more than simply stringing a story out over two-hundred-plus pages.  There are so many things to keep in mind.  That element you introduced on page 50—was it necessary?  Does it show up again in some significant way?  Secondary or tertiary characters that you introduced; will readers wonder about them after they depart the story?  Have you given them too much emphasis and therefore you need to provide them with a proper send off?  Do the characters sound like they fit in the time-frame you’ve chosen into which to set the story?  The history element is crucial for me.  A book set in the early nineties that has characters using the world-wide-web is suspect.  Or in the case of a gothic story, did Victorians express themselves that way?

I’m struggling writing my current novel.  I’ve completed seven others, some of which have hung together better.  A wise man once told me that to write a novel you should write 100,000 words and throw them away.  Or maybe it was 200,000.  Or five.  In any case, I passed that benchmark decades ago.  The novels I think worth publishing are those I’ve gone over a few times, polishing and editing as I go.  Maybe someday they’ll be ready to face the blue pencil, but until then I keep working at them, making them as worthy of a reader’s time as possible.  Not all writers do this kind of intensive revision.  Tales with unreliable narrators are often very hard to pull off convincingly.  But I know what it’s like to have a story living inside you bursting to be spilled on paper.  And if it’s gothic, that can cover a host of sins.

Scholars and Villains

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Having read M. L. Rio’s novella Graveyard Shift, I turned to her debut novel, If We Were Villains.  It must be a heady feeling having your first novel become a bestseller, but reading it confirms why.  Rio came to my attention because of dark academia.  This novel is written as realism, so there’s really no speculative material.  At least not directly.  It’s the story of seven friends at the Dellecher Classical Conservatory.  They are the fourth-year students majoring in acting and they are essentially a Shakespearean troupe.  Dellecher only puts on Shakespeare plays, so much of the story is built on the Bard.  There may be some plot give-aways below, and I think this is a book you might want to read—so be advised.  I’ve continued to read Shakespeare beyond high school, mostly sticking to his better-known plays, so this was enjoyable to me.

The crisis begins when the largest and strongest member of the troupe—the leading man—becomes offended by not getting assigned the role he feels entitled to.  He begins acting out against his classmates, bullying them onstage so they can’t call out his bad behavior.  To make things more interesting, one of the troupe is his girlfriend and another of the women is his cousin.  Since they all value what they do so much, and it’s their last year, nobody wants to challenge him.  Until it gets out of hand.  Although Dellecher is exclusive, there’s quite a lot of partying that takes place.  Drinking and drugs seem freely available.  One night when the leading man is drunk, he takes out his hostility on his troupe-mates but is found nearly dead in the lake by dawn’s first light.  And then things start to spiral.

Dark academia is a genre that explores the dark part of higher education (and sometimes secondary education).  I think that most people, even if they enjoyed college (as I did) saw there were tenebrous aspects to it.  This particular genre focuses on those negatives, but not to the exclusion of the very real draw of continued learning.  Since college is when many people receive their first taste of independence, and what passes for adulthood, many emotions come to the fore.  Love, jealousy, fear, and passion among them.  These are powerful motivators and much of our lives are spent learning to control them so that we can live together as a productive society.  This novel, like much dark academia, lingers in those places where unresolved emotions and unchecked bullying collide.  All with a Shakespearean touch.  Classic.

First Visit

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Dark academia prompted me to do it.  I have never read an Evelyn Waugh novel, but the title Brideshead Revisited is fairly ubiquitous.  I’d heard it many times but knew nothing about the story.  With tastes that tend toward horror, selecting a Friday-night movie that my wife will watch with me is sometimes tricky.  I’ve been discovering that films listed as dark academia often appeal to her taste, and Brideshead was one of them.  Interestingly, although we’d both heard the title many times, neither of us knew anything about the actual story.  So we found out.  The novel had been adapted into a successful television mini-series, and eventually became a cinematic version.  That’s the one we saw.  At the start it reminded me of E. M. Forster’s Maurice.  Two young men meet at Oxbridge and fall in love.  Only Charles Ryder is middle class, not aristocracy.  Lord Sebastian Flyte is.

Lord Flyte lives at Brideshead, a country house that any gothic dreamer would be glad to own.  While there, Charles meets Lady Julia, Sebastian’s sister.  Like Maurice’s Clive, he eventually prefers her company to his.  She’s already engaged to be married—you get the picture.  What I wasn’t expecting was just how much of this movie was about Catholicism.  The Flytes are Catholic, the mother demandingly so.  Charles is an atheist.  Agog at being welcomed into high society, he is nevertheless firm in his atheism.  This sets up the tension between the mother and Charles, but both Sebastian and Julia are okay with it.  Charles eventually becomes a successful painter with a society wife himself (the movie kind of just drops her), but still in love with Julia.  When her dying, atheist father accepts the last rites and crosses himself at his dying moment, Julia knows her Catholicism means she can’t run off with Charles.

The dark academia part derives from the Oxford part of the story, but also from aristocratic society.  It operates by its own rules and there are secrets and power struggles.  In the end, Brideshead is abandoned during the Second World War and is billeting soldiers.  Charles is now a captain in the army, in charge of the operation at Brideshead.  He has no wife or girlfriend, and Julia has left.  He goes into their private chapel and is about to extinguish the single burning candle, but decides not to.  Apparently Waugh himself converted to Catholicism, but movies adapted after successful mini-series based on the novel might distort things.  Overall, the film is a good reflection of that age-old English struggle with religion.  And dark academia.

Shadow off Campus

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I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences in my life.  Some have been held in neighborhoods declared “unsafe.”  I even had a job interview in a hotel room (such can’t happen now) with a college that didn’t want to pay the fee for using the society’s services.  (A friend who’d also interviewed with the same school said to me afterwards, “I thought they were going to jump me!”)  (Neither one of us got the job.)  I even went to a conference where I had to drive through a crime-ridden neighborhood to get to an off-site hotel.  But I’ve never been to a conference where someone was murdered.  That’s the premise behind Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Damned If She Does.  Reardon’s keenly aware of the kinds of issues women face in the professorate.  There are some unsavory guys in the profession and power is very difficult to wrest from those who hold it (generally white men).  In this follow-up to Shadow Campus, she tells Meg and Shamus Doherty’s experience with murder, and more, at an academic conference.

Academics are so necessary for studying things closely, opening up true understanding.  They are, however, people too.  And people can be petty, vindictive, and selfish.  They’re usually not inclined to murder, however.  I’ve been meaning to read that book about the murder of a religion professor at the University of Chicago several years ago precisely because such things are so unusual.  In dark academia, however, events like that are fairly common.  The thing is, many academics are also quite smart.  If someone were to put their mind to an undetectable murder, hmm.  The old gray matter starts churning.

In Damned If She Does, the apparent motive is publication in prestige journals.  In the end, it turns out that there’s more to it than that, but it’s somehow believable that a matter like publication could lead to homicide in academia.  As an editor, and writer, myself, I know how important publication with specific presses can be.  Even after doing this for over thirty years, an acceptance notice creates a sense of validation like no other.  Dark academia explores such territory.  I suspect that I’ve always been a bit naive when I’ve attended conferences.  I go, present papers, and keep interactions, well, academic.  I’ve heard whispers of them being places of temporary flings and I’ve seen colleagues use them as places to party.  On occasion I’ve seen established scholars very inebriated.  They’re people too, of course.  And as long as nobody is murdered, the code seems to be that what happens at a conference stays at the conference.