Half-Way Through

Leave a comment

Here’s a writing phenomenon.  Maybe it only happens to me (I am self-taught), but when I’m writing a book a strange thing happens.  When I’m doing my rewrites, and there are usually several, about halfway through I’ll have an epiphany.  Something I should’ve been doing from the beginning.  Then you’re left standing at a crossroads: should I go back to the beginning again now?  But still need to address a basic rewrite as well as the new approach in the second half, so should I just carry on and then start rewriting from the beginning, catching up with the second half?  That may sound like a trivial question, but I assure you it’s not.  You see, right now I have two books in a complete stage.  “Complete” here means done in draft form.  When I write a book it gets rewritten several times before I consider finding a publisher, but when an important point comes to you halfway through, you’re between worlds.

Now, I work alone.  I am part of a local writers’ group and I’m only now starting to get to know others who’re willing to talk about writing.  I know several writers who don’t talk about it.  They’re still friends, but for me, there are few topics I’d rather discuss.  That’s how I learn.  You see, I have no idea what’s normal.  Do other writers labor over multiple rewrites?  I know some do, but I suspect some don’t.  I know that when I write a short story sometimes the first version seems best to me, but try to get such a thing published.  No, you need to rewrite.  Polish.  Make it shine.  But what if one half is shinier than the other?  This is starting to be a regular occurrence.

Inspiration is fickle.  That’s something we can all agree on.  But when you’ve been scrawling on a topic for weeks, or months, and then a realization dawns, you’ve just added yourself additional weeks or months of revision.  I’m sure a great deal of it is due to my own psychology.  Another part is due to writing under the constraint of a 9-2-5 job.  There are only so many productive hours in a day, and since mine come early they necessarily end when the work day begins.  I’ve tried writing after work but my brain and body feel like a CPR dummy when work’s through with me.  The next morning I start at it again, but the question is still should I finish this up with my new insight, or should I go back to the beginning?

No FOMO

Leave a comment

Some fringe websites (of course I do!) present the case for reincarnation via past lives memories, particularly of children.  You see, adults hear/read/see a lot of things as the years weigh down and we might misremember something we encountered somewhere else.  Children have less exposure and therefore make more credible witnesses.  I know perfectly rational adults who believe in past lives as well.  I must confess, however, that this is one of the scariest things I can imagine.  I’m glad to have lived, most of the time, and I’m not in a hurry to end it prematurely, but the thought of doing it all over again is terrifying.  Even if it’s a different and better life.  You see, I entered life with a lot of questions and I have to say, over six decades later, I’m still uncertain about many of the answers.

If reincarnation means starting from scratch all over again, that scares me.  I’ve spent much of my life building walls to protect myself from the things that hurt me.  I avoid overly risky activities.  I handle sharp objects with great care.  I spend quite a bit of time by myself.  I don’t like being hurt.  That may be one reason that I watch horror movies.  They help to desensitize that particular phobia.  Still, I have to think of all the hard lessons I’ve learned in this life and have to think about how I might improve upon it all with another go-round.  In religions of East and Southeast Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common, the idea is often that you want to break out at the end.  Nirvana.  The place were you don’t have to queue up again.  Even Plato thought reincarnation might explain a lot.  But the very thought makes me feel weary.

If you could be rebooted with the knowledge of your previous life intact, that’d be one thing.  The idea of one day finding myself in another mother’s arms, not knowing anything, learning each microsecond, well, it’s frightening.  My parents weren’t educated people.  They taught me the blue-collar hard knocks of life (which I don’t want to have to learn again).  The white-collar hard knocks are sometimes even worse.  I tried to live this life as a clergyman, but that never really panned out.  I sometimes wonder if the Abrahamic religions/monotheistic traditions, didn’t develop Heaven and Hell out of fear of reincarnation.  The idea certainly makes sense, in some contexts.  And it’s one of the scariest things I can imagine.

Reading Habits

2 Comments

I keep track of my reading on both this blog and Goodreads.  It’s a little easier to follow the numbers on Goodreads, so I tend to use their stats.  One thing I’ve noticed in tracking my pacing this year is that academic books slow me down.  I desperately hope this isn’t endumbification, but I feel the need to consult the experts even as I try to write for a wider audience.  Having been trained as a professional researcher, it’s difficult to let go and just read the popular books—those with the style I need to learn to emulate.  But academic books take so long to get through.  Maybe it’s because they’re consciously designed not to be fast reading.  They take time and have concepts that require thought as your eyes consume the words.  They’re also the language I spoke for a good few decades.

My nonfiction reading pile constantly grows taller and I can’t seem to keep up.  Largely it’s because many of them are academic books.  I’m aware that in the real world, where books sell more than a couple hundred copies, that those who can’t claim “Ph.D.” after their names make the most successful writers.  A few of my colleagues have broken through to mainstream publishing, but they generally have university jobs, and tenure.  They don’t have a 9-2-5 schedule that holds their feet to the fire for the lion’s share of every day.  There are writers, I’m learning, who hold down jobs and write more successful books.  They generally aren’t academics, however.  Normal people with intense interests that they express beautifully in words.  Then they go to work.

I’m trying to break into that world.  I know that the publishers I’ve resorted to have been academic publishers.  They don’t really compete with the trade world, nor do they really even try.  Their’s is a business model adjusted for scale.  When you can’t sell in volume, you need to jack up the price.  But to have something intelligent to say about a subject, you have to read books.  I guess I need to learn to read non-academic non-fiction.  Kind of like I have to drink decaf when I have coffee (rarely) and have them add oat milk to make it a latte.  This is difficult for an old ex-academic like me.  I want to know how writers know what they do.  What are their sources and how deeply did they dig?  As I set my shovel aside I realize that I’ve begun to dig that academic hole yet again.

Scary Television

Leave a comment

Since noting some months ago that I’d discovered Dark Shadows on Amazon Prime, it’s no surprise that I’m squeezing in an episode here and there, where I can.  Amazon begins “Season 1, Episode 1” at the point Barnabas Collins appears.  This was actually ten months into the daily, but it saves a few hundred dollars buying the DVDs.  I honestly remember little more than impressions of the soap opera from childhood.  I can’t say which episodes I saw during the initial run, but I do know that they were formative in my appreciation of horror.  It turns out that many famous people in various media were childhood fans of the show.  It certainly wasn’t the slickest production but it manages a mood that’s difficult to match.  It’s what Edgar Allan Poe called “effect,”—he felt that a short story should maintain a single effect, something that he did most notably in his macabre tales.

I recently watched, in Amazon’s numbering (and I realize Amazon didn’t come up with this, it was a rebroadcast release that someone decided should start when the show became popular) episode 22 in season one.  This particular episode surprised me in that it actually had a legitimately scary ending.  Now, soap operas are very slow unfolding of stories, as most television watchers know.  Things don’t change quickly and action-packed content requires a lot of time to set up and film, whereas daily shows simply don’t have the time to do that.  They rely on people being drawn into the story and wanting, needing, to find out what happens next.  By episode 22 the savvy viewer had already figured out that Barnabas Collins was the vampire.  Nobody had explicitly said so yet, however.

Maggie Evans, his favorite victim, has been “ill” in bed from loss of blood.  Under Barnabas’ spell, she sends away her boyfriend and Victoria Winters—the original impetus for the entire series—has come to sit with her through the stormy night.  As the two women argue about the proper care for Maggie’s condition, the storm continues, flashing lightning through the French doors in Maggie’s room.  The wind blows the doors open and a flash of lightning shows the silhouette of Barnabas standing in the garden.  I have to admit, even at my age and with my background of horror movie watching, that moment scared me.  The genius of the show is that Barnabas is such a likable character.  As the narrative develops, as it does beginning in episode 23, we come to see that Barnabas is a sad, reluctant monster.  Perhaps if I’ve time enough, I should write a book about it.  But then, I barely have a moment to squeeze in an episode now and again.

Being Written

Leave a comment

Some books want to be written, no matter what major publishers have to say.  The truth is, being an author is more like being a radio receiver than a transmitter.  Books come to you, begging to be written.  Given our culture, we equate importance with money.  Tomes that earn the most are obviously the most important and erudite.  So the (capitalistic) wisdom goes.  We follow the lucre.  If you read this blog you’ve probably had an experience like this: you find a book that you’ve never heard of that captures your interest.  You read it, transfixed.  When you tell others, nobody seems to have heard of it.  I’d say a number of books I’ve blogged about fall into that category.  The “general reader” follows what the big five publishers suggest they should.  It becomes a feedback loop.

Academic presses—university presses and others that cater to either students or professors as their primary readerships—produce some fascinating books.  Often they’re priced a bit higher than we want to pay.  That’s because they don’t sell at the volume that a big five book does.  The higher the quantity the lower the unit cost, right?  Books that wanted to be written but either price themselves out of sales, or aren’t backed up by a team of marketers and publicists, may be some of the most interesting reading material out there.  You’d never know it, though.  From the point of view of an author, most of my books came begging to me.  I occasionally think of commercial potential because, well, if you’re going to put years of your leisure time into something, you’d like to get at least a little back.  And you’d be glad for feedback, or someone what wanted to ask you about what you’d been begged to write.

Sadly, we have tunnel vision.  It only sees the shining spots crowded with dollar signs.  And since others are willing to pay for it, we have to assume that it’s good.  I’m working on my next set of imploring projects praying to be written.  I can’t handle them all, being gainfully employed helping others who write books that want to be written.  We write them for each other.  I figure that if I’m receiving the signal somebody must be sending it.  And I have a difficult time turning down an idea that pleads with me.  And if someone unexpected picks one of our books up and gives us a like, we show that even receivers can smile.

Posting

Leave a comment

I’ve seen The Post before.  Maybe it took recovering from a vaccine to make me realize, however, just how much we’ve lost with the rise of electronic publication.  Yes, there is now a shot at recognition by the lowliest of us, but publication used to mean something important.  Consider how Watergate, the coda to the film, brought down Nixon.  Now we have a president who could’ve never been elected without the world of the internet, and who is coated with teflon so thick that even molesting children can’t harm him.  I work in publishing these days.  I often reflect on how important it used to be.  Ideas simply couldn’t spread very far without publication.  That’s what makes The Post such an important movie.  It’s the story of how the Washington Post came to publish The Pentagon Papers.  Said papers revealed that the United States was well aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, even as the government sent more and more young men to their deaths.

There are many ways to approach this film, including the doubt that it instills in even free democracy, but what struck me as the vaccine was wearing off is how publication has become a more challenging and endangered as the Wild West of the internet continues to expand.  Newspapers used to be the harbingers of truth.  Early in the history of the broadsheet, however, there were those who’d make things up in order to sell copies.  (Capitalism is always lurking when skulduggery is afoot.)  Over time, however, certain papers gained a hard-earned reputation for reliable reporting and publication with integrity.  A story going out in the early seventies in the Washington Post could influence history.  Now it’s owned by Jeff Bezos.

There was a time when a book might change the world.  Now there’s a little too much competition.  Publishers of print material struggle against the free, easy access of the internet.  All that publishers really have to offer is their reputation.  Those that have been around for a long time have earned, the hard way—you might say “old school”, the right to tell the world the truth.  Now the truth comes through Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called these days and more often than not consists of lies.  Of course I don’t believe the internet is all bad.  I wouldn’t contribute daily content to it if I believed that.  Still, I fear we’ve lost something.  Something important.  And right now we have nothing to replace it.

Do I Know You?

2 Comments

How do you know someone without ever seeing them?  How do you know they are who they say they are?  I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone, much of it trying to establish my identity with people who don’t know me.  This has happened so much that I’m beginning to wonder how many of the people I’m talking to are who they say they are.  I never was a very good dater.  Going out, you’re constantly assessing how much to reveal and how much to conceal.  And your date is doing the same.  We can never fully know another person.  I tend to be quite honest and most of the coeds in college said I was too intense.  I suppose that it’s a good thing my wife and I had only one date in our three-year relationship before deciding to get married.

Electronic life makes it very difficult to know other people for sure.  I don’t really trust the guardrails that have been put up.  Sometimes the entire web-world feels false.  But can we ever go back to the time before?  Printing out manuscripts and sending them by mail to a publisher, waiting weeks to hear that it was even received?  Planning trips with a map and dead reckoning?  Looking telephone numbers up in an unwieldy, cheaply printed book?  You could assess who it is you were talking to, not always accurately, of course, but if you saw the same person again you might well recognize them.  Anthropologists and sociologists tell us the ideal human community has about 150 members.  The problem is, when such communities come into contact with other communities, war is a likely outcome.  So we have to learn to trust those we can’t see.  That we’ll never see.  That will only be voices on a phone or words in an email or text.

I occasionally get people emailing me about my academic work.  Sometimes these turn out to be someone who’s hacked someone else’s account.  I wonder why they could possibly have any interest in emailing an obscure ex-academic unfluencer like me.  What’s their endgame?  Who are they?  There’s something to be said for the in-person gathering where you see the same faces week after week.  You get to know a bit about a person and what their motivations might be.  Ours is an uncertain cyber-world.  I have come to know genuine friends this way.  But I’ve also “met” plenty of people who’re not who they claim to be.  Knowing who they really are is merely a dream.

Eve of Winter

Leave a comment

“You must live like a monk!”  These were the words of one of my bosses.  I really couldn’t deny it.  I try to lead a quiet life of reading and writing and I do try to avoid extravagances.  My contemplative life suits me.  Every now and again, however, busy stretches come and distort my perspective.  Thinking back over this autumn on the eve of December, that season has been one of those times.  So much so that I haven’t been able to watch much horror, which is one of my usual seasonal avocations.  I suppose it started when a scammer emptied out our bank account in early September.  That entire month is a blur of fear, depression, and anxiety.  Those emotions have settled down, but the trauma and financial loss have remained.  

Toward the end of the month, my daughter moved.  Thankfully not too far away, but parents often feel the need to help when their only child is not yet well established in a new area.  October grew so busy that we had no time to decorate for Halloween.  We did manage to carve some pumpkins, but the weekends—the only time anything for real life actually gets done—were all eaten up and I entered November with that crowded head space that accompanies a monk lost in the secular world.  Looking back, I finished fewer books than usual and I’ve already mentioned about the movies.  This year I was pretty sure I’d be attending the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in November.  I had missed the past two years, not really mourning the loss, but preparing for the trip occupied part of October.  Halloween came and went, taking the first weekend of November with it.

In November we had guests come and the second weekend disappeared.  The next weekend I had to get into high gear for my trip to Boston.  That was when I had the flu shot that wiped out a weekend.  I awoke groggily on Monday realizing that Friday I’d be on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional.  I’d never been to Metropark before and the conference itself ate up the fourth weekend in November.  After that, we turned around and spent Thanksgiving with some longtime friends in New Jersey.  Then we learned a Pennsylvania friend had spent the holiday alone and decided to make a celebration for them yesterday.  So here I find myself on the eve of winter with a fall that somehow disappeared.  Busy spells can be refreshing, even for the monkish.  But tomorrow is back to work as usual as December sets in.

Thanksgiving Reentry

Leave a comment

One of the facets of attending AAR/SBL that I’d forgotten is how international attendees marvel at American Thanksgiving.  While it is far too focused on food for my liking, it is nevertheless an oddity among late capitalism’s sops.  I’m slowly becoming acclimated to the 9-2-5 environment I so desperately wanted to avoid in my career, but I’ve noticed that, at least in my case, the three publishers for which I’ve worked have this in common.  What is “this”?  The only four-day weekend in the entire year is Thanksgiving.  Probably that stems back to the fact that it falls on a Thursday and employers probably don’t want bloated, food-comatose employees trying to keep awake on Friday, and failing.  Perhaps there’s also the kinder motivation in realizing that by this point people have been working hard for many months and the US has comparatively few paid holidays.

I’m thankful for being home after the conference.  My trip to Boston underscored how much of a hermit I’ve become.  Afraid of crowds because of Covid, and not having ready cash as a result of being scammed, staying home has become a comfortable idea.  Being with others, I was glad to find, provided stimulation.  There are colleagues, both in publishing and in academia, that I look forward to seeing.  I’ve been slow to admit, I suppose, that my ouster from the latter is indeed permanent.  It’s wonderful to see friends who remember me when.  Looking back, I was very naive, even as a professor.  And I see many who, pardon my saying so, still are.  Unless you’ve been in the business world where a four-day weekend is a big deal, living in the ivory tower shelters you from much.

So I’m still in the “reentry phase” of conference recovery.  Although I was thankful to have been able to travel to Boston by train, getting home on a rainy night with heavy New Jersey traffic was a test of endurance.  In my hermit’s life I drink a lot of water and even rehydrating after shorting myself for five days takes an effort.  I’m thankful for the opportunity to have been in New England again.  And for friends on both ends of the trip who appear to welcome me for what I am.  What I’ve become.  Even though sleeping in a luxury hotel where the thermostat isn’t kept quite as chilly as we can afford to keep it at home, I’m thankful to sleep once again in my own bed knowing that there is a wider world out there and I can still function in it.

That Was Quick

4 Comments

It happened when I wasn’t looking.  If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’ve been in Boston since Friday for the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting.  This is a work event for me and I’m pretty much in meetings from 8:30 (or earlier) to 5:30 (or later) each day.  I always come home with “conference voice”—I can barely speak until Thanksgiving.  In any case, while I was distracted in Boston this blog slipped past a milestone.  At some point over the weekend I surpassed a million hits.  Given how rare large numbers are in my life, this is kind of a big deal for me.  I know websites that get attention and critical acclaim hit the million mark within months, or even weeks.  Still, at the ripe old age of sixteen, I’ll take it.  And I’m very grateful to any and all of you who’ve taken a moment to read my musings over the years.

During the conference I was talking to a friend who’s become a celebrity on TikTok.  I also spoke to another friend who’s become a more traditional media darling.  They both outshine me by orders of magnitude.  Attending events like this is always an humbling experience.  I’ve managed to hang around since 1991, with a few gaps, and although it’s always a grind to get ready and get myself out the door, I always walk away amazed at how much so many people have achieved.  Mine is not the only story of a first-generation college student finding a place in the professional world, even if it may not be exactly the place I’d hoped for.  I’m in good company.  I do suspect that most of my readers are not people from this venue.  If I’m wrong, please feel free to comment to let me know.

Mostly since being here I’ve been musing over Edgar Allan Poe and worrying about the traffic I’m sure to encounter once I get off the train and have to drive home during rush hour in New Jersey.  But I’ve also been listening to the stories of friends and colleagues.  They may think they’re pitching me their latest book, but what I’m hearing is their story.  That’s perhaps the most wonderful thing about conferences.  Being distracted enough not to notice when good news creeps upon you.  I know blogs are old fashioned and generally considered outdated.  That describes me as well.  But it warms my heart that so many viewers have stopped by.  My profound thanks to you all!

Old School

Leave a comment

How often do hotels refurbish or do they all look the same?  I met someone in the lobby of a hotel in which I had stayed, okay, 26 years ago.  Nothing about it looked the slightest bit familiar .  Look, I grew up poor and only remember one hotel from before college (we never stayed in them)—the one I remember was a place we stayed on a family trip to Washington DC.  Ironically, I had a stuffed elephant toy with me on that trip.  With the career upgrade to professional and conference attendance, stays at hotels became more common, although they’re still somewhat infrequent.  Conference organizers entice with luxury hotels in major cities.  Some remain in memory.  Most don’t.

I know hotels pay a lot to decorate and brand, yet the places of the monied seem anodyne.  This hotel could be just about anywhere and will eventually blend into that haze of places somehow very alike that cost many hundreds of dollars to stay.  I might’ve stayed here before.  Maybe not.  This lobby doesn’t look familiar but the street outside does.  When I stayed here in 1999 [check] my wife and daughter were able to come.  Not being an editor, we’d been to the New England Aquarium that day and my daughter wanted a seahorse rubber ball as a souvenir.  On the way to this hotel she dropped it and it bounced into Tremont Street.  In a poor object lesson, I ran after it.  I wasn’t hit by a car, but my doing so traumatized my daughter enough that she still won’t talk about it as an adult.  That’s how I know we stayed here before.

When I visited Boston for work I 2012, I stayed in a hotel I remember but whose name I do not.  It’s never been a conference hotel or I’d choose it.  It was a bit run down, but it had character.  I don’t even know if it’s still there.  Cities change.  Some parts of Boston are unrecognizable since I lived here.  Even the hotel in which I’m staying (which is nice enough, except for the loud music that suddenly starts at 2 a.m.) used to be a school.  I suppose that’s appropriate for a hotel used as an educational conference venue.  Generations of young people were once educated where I’m trying to sleep as the room shakes with someone else’s rock beat.  I may remember this hotel as a place where sleep fled, or I may find it fading into that space where all conference hotels merge even as a poignant thought arises that nothing ever remains the same.

Revisiting

Leave a comment

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.

Boston Bound

Leave a comment

Honestly, I’ve reached a stage where travel seems quite a burden.  I’m a creature of habit and I haven’t had to interrupt that habit for three years now.  I missed the last two years of the AAR/SBL conference due to a variety of issues.  I’m pleased that this meeting is in Boston, a city of which I have fond memories.  Still, getting there from here isn’t as easy as you might think.  It’s simple enough to catch a direct train from New York or Philadelphia, but I don’t live in either.  To be there in time for my meetings later today I have to catch a fairly early train.  That’s not a problem; I’m an early riser.  To get to a station where a car might safely be left for four nights is a bit more difficult.  It involves an hour’s drive no matter where you end up going.  I’ve driven in Philly enough to know that I don’t like driving in Philly.

Although Allentown is the third largest city in the state, there is no train service from it to the Amtrak lines that lead up and down the coast.  So I’ll be driving a while.  Once on the train at least I won’t have to worry about traffic.  At least for a few days.  In Boston I wasn’t able to get into one of the close hotels.  In warmer months that wouldn’t be much of an issue, but November in Massachusetts can be chilly.  I remember that from living there.  There are shuttles from my hotel to the conference center, but I like walking Boston.  It brings back memories.  Beantown is one of those places that many people fall in love with and want to stay after they get there.  Although I lingered three years that didn’t seem enough.

Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

I was a young man when I moved to Boston.  Looking back, I knew so very little.  Almost as little as I know now.  For this conference, I’ve stayed in this same distant hotel in the past.  It’s in a part of town I’d never explored as a student.  It isn’t far, however, from Edgar Allan Poe Square.  I’m hoping the weather allows for some photographic opportunities around there.  The conference itself, in my more familiar Back Bay, is work.  Not much time to relax and see the sights.  Still, I know that once I get there I’ll again feel the old attraction.  It happens every time I go.  Even it means a drive and a train ride into late November.

Sleeping Below

Leave a comment

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.

Visiting Poe

Leave a comment

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?