Locally Speaking

Leave a comment

One of the weird things about moving is that you don’t know many people in your new location.  Ah, but who am I kidding?  As an introvert I knew few people in my last two decade-long locations.  So when I blog my readers tend not to be local.  Those I know locally tend not to read what I write.  This is the way of things.  Nevertheless, I make bold to mention the session I shared with Robert Repino and Andrew Uzendoski at the fourth annual Easton Book Festival yesterday.  The session was recorded and may be found here.  The topic is speculative writing.  While speculative writing may encompass nonfiction, it is generally considered to be fiction about things most people consider not to be real, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

The slippery word there is “real.”  There’s a great deal of philosophy to that word.  How we determine reality is hardly a settled matter.  It involves more than the physical, as much as we might want to deny it.  In the case of future-oriented fiction “it hasn’t happened yet.”  Even if it comes true, such as George Orwell’s 1984.  In the case of the past, such as Game of Thrones, it never really happened.  For horror, itself not easily defined, it may range from gothic ghost tales to bloody accounts of carnage, generally set in the present.  Speculative often involves the supernatural.  The supernatural, however, may be real.  Who’s the final judge of that?

If I had a local readership I would add a plug for the Easton Book Festival.  It started strong in 2019 but was nearly choked by the pandemic.  I’ve had the honor of being involved in some way for all four years although I’m a minor author with perhaps the poorest sales figures of any who participate.  The Lehigh Valley is a major population center of Pennsylvania, but there’s wonderful greenery and woods between Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown.  I live here but work in New York City and there’s no question who gets the lion’s share of time.  Publishing is a mystery to many.  How does it work, and how do you find a publisher?  And once you get published how do you get your books noticed?  And perhaps more relevant to more people, how do you get to know your neighbors?  Apart from the chance encounter across the lawn, we’re hermetically sealed in our houses, living lives on the web.  Unless you happen to venture to your local book festival where you’ll find like-minded individuals.  It goes on through the weekend, so if you’re nearby check it out.

Love for the Sky

Leave a comment

People long for the sky.  We look at birds with envy and we have historically treated the weather, or the sky itself as divine.  To get oneself into the air is an expensive venture, no matter how it’s done.  One of the earliest forms of overcoming gravity was the hot air balloon.  The principle’s pretty simple: hot air rises.  Trap that hot air in a container large enough and it will lift a person, or people, to the sky.  Today ballooning remains popular, although not generally used for long-distance transit.  Still, to be in the sky is a consolation all its own.  Various hot air balloon festivals tour the country, but the Lehigh Valley Spooktacular Hot Air Balloon Festival was the first time I’d ever been close to an actual hot air balloon.  While not asking, I’m sure it is quite pricey to own and operate one.  Given the number of people there, it’s a safe bet that others are fascinated by the sky too.

Apart from one vampire balloon, two things made this “Spooktacular.”  One was the fact that it’s midway through October, the month for scares.  The other was the vendors selling Halloween merchandise.  Options for disguises have come a long way since my childhood.  Blinking LED lights dangling from tentacles and battery-operated masks of black that show patterns in glowing colors on the faces of the wearers were both popular among attendees.  And not just with children.  Although the festival runs all day for Saturday and Sunday there are those of us who came for the evening finale—a mass inflation of balloons followed by a laser show and fireworks.

Such shows as this obviously require a ton of tech and a lot of set-up, but I couldn’t help but think as I watched that the sky, so eerily lit up at times, that in ancient times this would certainly have been considered as a theophany, an appearance of the gods.  Projected onto the sky itself, or penetrating that very sky, the lights could be made at times to dip, creating the impression of something large descending from above.  It was a show worth seeing.  As we drove home—it was past my bedtime and I had the passive role of passenger—I spotted a large bird winging through the night, dark against a low cloud.  Too dark to identify (although probably an owl), I thought how birds have a view that’s still rare among land-dwellers.  Theirs is the realm of the gods.

The Campus Library

Leave a comment

Perhaps it’s an odd kind of nostalgia.  Many people can’t wait to be done with school and get on with “life.” Some of us remain fixated at the learning stage and society used to shuffle us into colleges and universities where we could be safely ignored.  One of the refrains in the very long song that is this blog has been the lack of a university library.  Although I’ve tried to get to know the academics in the Lehigh Valley really only one has made an effort to befriend me and when I was asking him about library access he actually did something about it.  Such acts of kindness are rare and require a kind of thinking that takes into account the circumstances of the academically othered.  I’ll be forever grateful.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a college or university library.  Many are protective and/or restrictive, as if knowledge is only for those academically employed.  I had to look up a couple of references for an article I was writing.  My colleague checked with his institution and yes, I was welcome to come in and use their collection.  The night before going to campus I had a series of nightmares of various librarians barring my attempt to get to the books.  I’d been trying to get there (in real life) for weeks.  Between family work schedules, the occasional weekend blizzard, and the library being closed for spring break, it ended up taking about six weeks to find the time to drive there, negotiate parking, and look up the references.

Everyone has a place they belong.  Mine has unwaveringly been the college campus.  It is home to me, even if it doesn’t recognize me.  I’d almost forgotten the feeling of being let loose in the stacks.  It was a Saturday morning and there was almost nobody else there.  As early as Grove City College I cherished the feeling of spending time in the library.  Few other students were hanging out there, but those of us who belong on campuses know that being surrounded by books is the only place that will ever feel like home.  Having looked up my references I wished that I had more to do.  I’d been to both the Dewey and the Library of Congress sections and, being a weekend, I had much else to do.  Stepping back out onto campus I was filled once again with a poignant nostalgia.  Getting to where you know you belong is a lengthy journey.

Read a Book

Leave a comment

A huge shout-out to Andrew Laties for conceiving and organizing the Easton Book Festival!  Easton may not be the largest city in the state, but the Lehigh Valley is Pennsylvania’s fastest growing area.  As we discovered when we moved here almost a year-and-a-half ago, it is a region that supports bookstores.  Even before the Festival we’d explored some six or seven and after moving from central New Jersey—where keeping a small shop or two open was a struggle.  We’ve become spoiled for choice.  Writers may not be the easiest people to herd—many of us are quiet and tend to live in our own heads quite a bit—but the festival has brought some 200 of us together, and we write on all kinds of things.

Although the panel on which I participated had religion as one of its themes, my wife and I noticed that at each session we attended religion was mentioned.  Either it was in an author’s background, or it figured into their writing, or most embarrassingly, it objected to and tried to silence them through censorship.  Although my book’s subtitled The Bible and Fear in Movies, it was evident that I wasn’t the only person who found the Bible’s effect on people scary.  And the theme continued into the evening as I attended the author’s banquet solo.  Many of the people I met had religion in their background or in their present motivations for writing, and not one of them was judgmental toward a guy like myself who’s trying to find his way.

The Easton Book Festival is in its first year.  Although by late afternoon the weather had deteriorated into the rain we can’t seem to shake around here, it was wonderful to see people walking around with festival booklets (there are enough events to warrant one) and not bothering to conceal and carry.  Books, that is.  For a moment, they were cool.  My second session is this afternoon.  As I learned both last weekend at my book signing and at sessions yesterday, a sell-out crowd is unlikely.  This is a free event and even authors who had more fingers than attendees were gracious and glad for the opportunity to explain what they were trying to do with their writing.  And they unstintingly shared what they’d learned with one another.  This was community, centered around books.  It was a small slice of what Heaven could be like, if we’d all just take an interest in each other.  Even if we’re shy and secretly would rather be home writing.

Book Culturing

Leave a comment

The other day I met one of the organizers of the Easton Book Festival.  Coming in October, this festival is something new.  It took the efforts of a couple with vision—the owners of a small, independent bookstore—to get other people on board, but now it’s going to happen.  A weekend dedicated to books.  I found out about the Festival as I was looking up area bookstores that might let me do a presentation on Holy Horror.  For whatever reason, my last book missed its projected autumnal publication date, and fall is when people are really thinking about horror movies.  Approaching its birthday in late December, it never really had a proper launch.  Priced the way it is, I don’t expect a sales boost, but I would like people to know about it.  When you spend years writing a book you’d like it not to be completely obscure.

In any case, when looking up one of the Easton shops—hey, book lovers, the Lehigh Valley has lots of bookstores!—I noticed that the Festival was still seeking participants.  Since it falls just before Halloween, the timing felt perfect.  I signed up.  Now this is one of the many new tricks for this old dog.  I tell authors all the time that self-promotion is key to book sales, even when a press is fairly widely known.  In fact, the store owner himself writes books and has to pay for his own tours to promote them.  Book culture is worth promoting.

On a personal level, it does me good to see that there are others who appreciate books.  They are a form of collective mind.  A communion.  When I’m feeling down, or uninspired, a trip to a bookstore—or even a library—often helps.  Reading books leads to a sense of accomplishment.  Every year I set a goal on Goodreads.  I don’t set the goal to make me read—I’d do that anyway—but to share with others both what I’ve been reading and what I think about it.  The Easton Book Festival will be a way of doing something similar, hopefully with those many others who feel the draw of books.  Writing, for me, is a labor of love.  I don’t know too many people personally, so meeting them through books is one of my own goals.  Just the other day I met an academic who wanted to read Weathering the Psalms.  Such things happen only in that wonderful land built of books.

The Sound of Musik

Leave a comment

“Why is there so much people here?”  The words aren’t mine, but those of a random stranger I heard in Herald Square.  Not only was it grammatically offensive, I always find “much people” in Manhattan, but this was the occasion of the Pope’s visit a few years ago, so more of us were crowded into that area than normal.  It was a feeling that returned last night as my wife and I wandered around Musikfest.  If you’re not from around here, Musikfest is the largest free music festival in the United States, and it takes place in Bethlehem each summer.  Ten days of free, live music and tents hawking wares and all kinds of comestibles, as well as that strangely satisfying feeling of being lost in a crowd.  We ended up there more or less accidentally.

I was an experimental subject.  Those of you who know me will probably not find this odd, and you may well come up with many reasons to find me in the psychology department, some involving locked doors.  This was, however, a voluntary research project that required participants and it had been literally decades since I’d volunteered to be one of the “much people” who was not not part of the university crowd.  It felt good to be on a campus again.  The Lehigh Valley hosts several colleges and universities, and that draw is perhaps related to why Musikfest is held here.  When we got to town my wife realized we might have trouble parking.  Sections of downtown Bethlehem are closed to traffic and there are people everywhere.  I finished my experiment and we became part of the crowd again.

Music and religion, I’ve noted before, hang out in the same crowd.  They both have the ability to be transcendent and people seek out such experiences.  Since we hadn’t planned on attending—accidental musicologists we—we had no groups as targeted hearing while we wandered.  Mostly we marveled at the size of the event.  The city of steel transformed to the city of music.  And the religious feelings music brings.  As I walked from the college back to downtown, a couple strangers accosted me.  “Hi, brother,” they said.  “Heading to Musikfest?”  This, I realized was a congregation.  I was an unknown brother.  Music brings peace.  Dona nobis pacem, sisters and brothers.  Like those crowds a few years back hoping for a glimpse of the pontiff, an entire city had kicked off its shoes for a Friday night of potential transcendence.  Why is there so much people here?  Simply listen and you’ll have your answer.