Hope and Reason

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Jane Goodall was a scientist for whom I have a great deal of respect.  She earned her scientific credentials in the field before getting them in the university.  And she had no room for materialism in her world.  Studying our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom taught her that animals think and feel—standard science uses that bugbear of “anthropomorphism” to tell us such things are all in our heads.  Evolution would disagree, n’est-ce pas, Mr. Darwin?  The reason I especially wanted to read Reason for Hope was because here Goodall describes a spiritual, indeed, mystical experience she had that won’t be too unfamiliar to those who’ve allowed themselves to be open to the wonders of the universe, even if found in a church.  Her own experience convinced her that there is something more.  Like any reasonable person she didn’t dismiss science but she realized that it can’t quantify everything.  Biologists should understand that, if they get out of the lab once in a while.

This book also tells, in part, Goodall’s life story.  She explains at the end that this was supposed to be a series of interviews with her, but that didn’t work out and she was essentially compelled to write it out.  It’s just a sense, but I intuited that she was probably not too comfortable describing her spiritual experiences.  I can understand that.  Even in a world that (apart from its leaders, elected or not) is becoming more understanding, discussing religious experiences leaves you vulnerable.  Critics are quick to pick up on this and attack one for not being rational.  The myth of Mr. Spock really has us in a Vulcan neck pinch.  Our emotions are part of our reasoning brain and we ignore them at our peril.

Goodall’s life wasn’t one of a series of pleasant strolls through the forest.  She experienced violence and loss.  She saw how cruel both humans and animals could be.  This book stands as a testament, however, that there remain reasons for hope.  Even if we persist in being as foolish as we have at the polls, and if that leads to the destruction of our species, life will go on.  It will recover.  The more we learn of the universe the more certain it is that life is fairly abundant.  It’s not the rarity it was supposed to be when I was a child.  And in a universe full of life, hope is everywhere.  Parts of her account are difficult to read, but Goodall left us with a hopeful message, if we’ll only do our part.

Djinn Genre

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I really don’t like to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed.  Many of them, however, are quite small and I have a list to which I try hard to stick.  I do end up getting books I hadn’t intended to, to avoid said empty-handedness, and so I found The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.  It crosses various genres with elements of steampunk, horror, and fantasy.  Set in Cairo in 1912, where a system of off-ground trams run, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is responsible for keeping the paranormal under control.  Agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry are called in to handle, well, a haunted tram.  Their department is on a budget and can’t afford a major exorcism—assuming the haunting is a djinn—and they have to find other means.  Their first attempt fails but ultimately reveals that the entity is an al, from Armenian folklore.

Alk are baby-snatchers.  Hamed and Onsi have to learn how to handle this dangerous entity before it can harm any women.  That’s the basic idea.  The novella introduces the reader to some North African/West Asian folklore and builds on both Muslim and Coptic ideas, as well as non-traditional religion.  It’s a somewhat fun story as well.  The agents resort to some unconventional means to deal with the al, and djinn are a regular part of daily life.  As are androids, called eunuchs.  This is, of course, an alternate reality, but one in which Cairo is a major city along the lines of London or New York.  But with a distinctly North African feel.  And a society that accepts all different races equally.  Women, who are rallying for the vote, are the ones who identify and suggest the solution to the problem.  It’s an optimistic story.

Djinn are often thought of as Islamic versions of demons, but “demon” is a slippery word.  Christians adopted a Greek term that referred to entities both good and bad and made them pure evil.  One of the things this story does is to treat each entity appropriately to its realm.  There’s no lumping everything together into the “evil” basket.  In fact, some of the characters have djinn as business partners and others, it is implied, are basically family friends.  This is a worldview completely different from the way such things exist in our current cultural outlook.  The story unfolds fairly quickly since this is a short book.  There are a few horror elements to it, but mainly it is an imaginative vision of a world poised to celebrate equality, and everyone is better for it.

Read Everything

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I’m aware that I don’t think like other people.  This can lead to a strange kind of loneliness at times.  It might also explain why my books never seem to grow wings.  One specific example prompts this post.  When I get interested in a topic, I read every book I can get ahold of on it.  I guess I always think other people are the same way.  Rationally, I realize that’s largely not true.  Many people will read a book, maybe two, and move on.  A certain kind of brain, however, insists that the information must be tested, and tested again.  I’ve written enough nonfiction books to know that each one is an opinion.  There are those who differ in their outlook.  Who would interpret the same evidence differently.  And unless there’s just one book on a topic (it happens!) I’m always inclined to read another.

That came in handy for writing A Reassessment of Asherah.  That was my dissertation, of course.  I read everything written on the old girl that I could lay my hands on.  (Since this was before the electronics revolution, it was a hands-on experience.)  Of course, a doctoral program is the rare chance to undertake that kind of research without having to work at some kind of menial job, or have class prep and grading to do.  Or working at a 9-2-5.  Now I have to be selective regarding how much I read on a topic.  Not having use of a university library, it often means things I can afford.  Reading may be fundamental, but it doesn’t come cheap.  And I see other books, with perhaps minimal cited sources, selling much better than mine.  Again, I don’t think like other people do.

There’s an invisible line at about $19 over which a book is relegated to rabid fans only.  One of my books was priced at $22 when it came out, and I had people at a speaking event apologize that it was just a bit too much to pay.  The going rate then was $16 for most books (it has crept up a couple dollars since then).  Six dollars can make a difference.  For academic publishers, of course, you need to add an extra hundred to make up for the lack of sales.  I wonder why?  In this respect I think like others who publish with academic presses.  We may realize our books aren’t bestsellers, but we know a few more people would buy them if they were priced down in the range of other books.  I guess other people think about books primarily as money-making products rather than the outpouring of an individual’s thoughts and energy.  Depends how you think about it.

Adult Events

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The best children’s material contains winks for adults.  Those of us who grew up with Looney Tunes and then watched them when we were older know that to be true.  I’d forgotten some of the gems in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The Hostile Hospital has the Baudelaire orphans wanted for murder, Count Olaf thought to be dead, and the children volunteering at a hospital.  A hostile one.  When Lemony Snicket describes one of his hiding places, he notes that it’s in “the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin.”  That one elicited a full-blown grin.  Another lemony snicker emerged when two of Count Olaf’s associates get to arguing only to stop and acknowledge that they shouldn’t let their personal issues interfere with their work.  Such an adult scenario indeed.

As far as the story goes, this eighth volume is closely connected with the seventh, The Vile Village, in that the children remain under the suspicion of murder.   This began in book seven and carries on here, adding further tension to the tale.  No Mr. Poe comes to their “rescue.”  As the children hide in the eponymous hospital, they discover a sliver of a clue about their parents as they find a photo of them along with Jacques and Lemony Snicket.  Jacques, of course, had died in the last book.  There’s also a new false lead on V.F.D. with the Volunteers Fighting Disease providing comic relief throughout the tale.  And comic relief is probably necessary for kids, since the story does get darker.  Chapter 11 is hilarious, with Olaf’s associates trying to pretend at being doctors, even as the story takes a serious turn.

The children have their hopes ignited that one of their parents survived the fire.  Lemony Snicket enters a little further into the story.  The Baudelaires are now wanted for both murder and arson.  And they can only escape by hiding in the trunk of Count Olaf’s car.  This is the first book in the series where the children don’t actually see Olaf but only hear his voice.  Of course, he’s still following them.  The Quagmire triplets don’t appear in this volume either, having been whisked away (rescued) at the end of The Vile Village.  Re-reading these books as an adult has been a fascinating exercise.  Daniel Handler is certainly a clever, and entertaining writer.  Of course, the events in the book are silly enough for children, and some of the humor is effective even for adults.  Some of the action is too.  There’s pleasure in re-reading some kid lit, especially as an adult.

Everything Theory

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Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  More recently in time, I’ve become a fan of dark academia in several of its forms.  One of those forms is the biopic of famous, often challenged, academics.  The Theory of Everything is offered as such a biopic.  The darkness is, of course, Hawking’s Motor Neuron Disease.  The movie was critically acclaimed, and watching it made me think it was from before a time when academia fell under sustained fire from various governments.  So much of what we know of the world, indeed, the universe, derives from those rare individuals paid to pursue the life of the mind and take the rest of us the places they discovered.  In the case of Hawking, it seems that without his tragic disease his fame may well have never taken off.  Few people, in my experience, are really interested in physics or cosmology.

The movie, of course, dramatizes the life of Stephen and Jane Hawking.  It deftly focuses on the dynamics and strains of their relationship.  The academic part also plays a role, of course, but this is more of a personal story.   As usual, such films make me miss the academic life I’ve been denied.  I was never good enough at math to manage a career in the sciences.  Some of us have brains that focus much more clearly on the humanities (which, of course, sustain the heaviest fire from critics, despite being the grounds upon which higher education itself was founded).  Many, if not most, dark academia biopics focus on scientists or mathematicians.  Perhaps their lives are naturally more dramatic.  Their discoveries are more often newsworthy.  (Newsworthiness is, however, not the sole measure of importance.)  I’m wandering off topic (how human of me!); this is a very good movie.  It does play off of the fact that Hawking’s atheism was a bit of a difficulty for Jane’s Anglicanism.  Interestingly enough, she was a humanities student and did, in real life, earn her doctorate in literature.  Hers, while not as famous, would also be a life worthy of dark academic exploration.  

The acting in The Theory of Everything is pretty incredible.  And the film does make you interested in learning more about these very human people caught in a tragic, but somewhat heroic, situation.  Ironically, the religion and science fields perhaps come closest in cosmology.  This shows up in the final lines of A Brief History of Time, and continues to be a point of discussion in academia, both dark and light.

Creating Realms

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I have to confess that I’ve never attended a writers’ conference.  I haven’t been to any big fan fic gatherings such as ComicCon either.  I did attend Steampunk City a couple years when we lived in Jersey, and was even a presenter one year.  I met the organizer and chatted about the concept, but it disbanded soon after.  The reason I raise this is that I recently learned about Realm Makers, a conference for Christian speculative fiction writers.  This brought me back to the culture wars and how evangelical Christianity, especially, has a very selective filter for what’s okay and what’s not.  And that got me to thinking about C. S. Lewis and how he’s been coopted by the evangelical camp, although he was a good Anglican who smoked, swore, and enjoyed time down at the pub.  (If you’re unfamiliar with the evangelical movement, any one of those three things could get you thrown out of the club.)  Let’s start with Realm Makers.

The Eagle and Child, Oxford; one of Lewis’ hangouts

Noting the difficulty Christian writers of speculative fiction have fitting in with typical fan conventions and secular writers’ groups, Realm Makers is a place between worlds.  Writers often tend towards a certain earthiness that evangelicals might find off-putting.  And, I imagine, large fan conventions have all kinds of potential hazards.  At the same time, many evangelicals discourage speculative fiction, especially horror.  Realm Makers is a place for fantasy and sci-fi writers to gather with like-minded colleagues.  The website doesn’t foreground horror, however.  That’s one speculative area that many—either evangelical or secular—aren’t comfortable hanging around.  It’s pretty easy to see how Realm Makers appeals to a specific cross-section of writers.  And so on to C. S. Lewis.

Lewis was clearly a believer although he was culturally very British.  He, like Amy Grant, had crossover appeal.  I see him referred to by secular writers and fans quite often.  Narnia is an idea that appeals to many and for those really into speculative fiction, his space trilogy is a kind of Christian sci-fi fantasy that’s well written and even accepted by some who tend to avoid the softer side of the field.  Being a writer of the unusual can be a lonely occupation.  I know other writers, and many of them tend to keep to themselves.  I also know quite a few who enjoy conferences and all they have to offer.  Steampunk City was several years ago now.  I attended while working on my one steampunk novel (unpublished).  It was fun hanging out with people who enjoyed the speculative.  One thing nobody seemed to be asking is who believed what.  It was all about having a good time.

Monster Drink

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The Monster may trigger those who grew up in alcoholic households.  Still, it is effective and moving, and quite scary.  Lizzy is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Kathy.  Kathy is an alcoholic and generally not really fit for motherhood.  Their relationship is explained through flashbacks and also the events of the morning of the fateful trip.  Lizzy, typical for the child of an alcoholic, has to be the parent in the relationship much of the time, but she’s still an emotionally insecure minor.  Kathy is driving her to her ex-husband’s house for his weekend custody and she’s pretty sure Lizzy won’t come back.  Starting to realize that she’s losing her daughter for good, she tries to make up but the relationship is far gone.  Then they get into an accident on an untraveled road.  And a monster is stalking them.  The build-up is quite good.

The car can’t be driven and Kathy’s wrist is injured.  They learn, as the monster kills the tow-truck driver and ambulance crew that eventually make it to the scene, that it fears light.  They’re able to escape in the ambulance but the monster knocks it off the road and continues stalking them.  Kathy realizes she won’t live much longer because of her injuries and the two finally bond.  Kathy plans with Lizzy how the girl will escape.  Instead, when Kathy lures the monster out, Lizzy attacks it.  The monster kills her mother, but Lizzy kills it.  The acting is quite spectacular, even if the story is sad, edging on depressing.  A girl learning to face and overcome her fears, the story is almost a parable.  It’s also not unrealistic regarding life as the child of an alcoholic.  In my interpretation, alcoholism is the real monster here.

The Monster is one of those good movies that just didn’t perform well at the box office.  It may have been ahead of its time in giving actual heart to a horror setting.  It may not’ve helped that the title is somewhat innocuous.  Yes, there is a monster, but the story is bigger than that.  The monster leads to the final reconciliation between mother and daughter, even as it kills the former.  It’s a meaningful monster.  Interestingly, the reviews I read don’t make the connection with alcoholism.  Perhaps the reviewers haven’t experienced life in such a home.  It explains Kathy’s lack of parenting skills to a considerable degree.  This is a thoughtful, scary movie.  And some of the reasons for the fear may not be what you expect.

Artificial Iscariot

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It was only a matter of time.  A recent story on 404 Media confirmed what others had suspected, Amazon is ordering large numbers of rare books and destroying them so they can be scanned for AI “learning.”  Apart from the infuriating aspect—some of us save up our money to afford rare books—is the flawed premise behind the whole AI craze.  Words, as much as I love them, do not embrace the entirety of the the thinking process.  Scientists have argued for years that feeling—emotion—is essential to how we think.  We don’t understand emotions, but we do know they’re an essential part of being both biological and conscious.  Other animals experience them too.  Destroying books so they don’t have to pay to use copyrighted material stirs an emotional as well as a rational response.  All for a fad.

Generative AI is a waste of money and resources.  Sure, it can look things up quicker than I can, but it can also lie and hallucinate and make things up.  It wastes my time by sending me bogus emails.  It’s after my savings.  And yours too.  People don’t want the massive data centers required to process this one part of human experience.  Kids who grew up emulating Mr. Spock, perhaps uncomfortable with their own emotions, are now trying to run the world.  Like all fascists they do so by destroying books.  The end game isn’t to make life easier.  It’s to make a product to sell.  To take over the marketplace.  To take books that can’t be replaced, cut them apart, and scan them.  Other publishers, by the way, also do that but with the intention of republishing the books.  At least there’s some form of resurrection there.

Time and again we’re reminded of the mess that’s made when those who have too much money try to run things.  They don’t know the experience of the vast majority of people who either struggle or get by but who do so by dint of being human.  They have determination—which isn’t always rational, but which is a great motivation—to survive (biologically) and thrive.  Some of us have lived our lives for the cause of books.  In desperate days as a younger person I sold rare books I’d obtained to meet current needs.  Some booksellers are noting large, anonymous orders for rare books.  One put a tracker in the package and learned that they were going to Amazon to be destroyed.  The company that once sold us books is now taking them away for good.

Village People

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Even when reading A Series of Unfortunate Events years ago, many of the Poe references stood out.  Having just re-finished The Vile Village, a noted a few more nods to the master.  This particular number in the series also advances the story, letting the Baudelaire orphans know that the V of V.F.D. is “volunteer.”  They meet, briefly, Jacques Snicket.  He is murdered by Count Olaf.  Meanwhile the orphans have to try to find the Quagmire Triplets while being held in the Village of Fowl Devotees, which has a mania for burning people at the stake.  This one does get pretty dark.  Their actual guardian in the village, Hector, is kindhearted but timid.  He tries to rescue them but in the end, the orphans realize they need to take care of themselves.  Klaus turns thirteen and Sunny learns to walk.  But what of Poe?

From the beginning the guardian of the Baudelaire fortune is Mr. Poe.  A singularly ineffectual individual, he’s dismissive of what the children know, but he’s not a bad person.  The Poe connections begin, however, with the orphans’ surname.  Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was a French writer who was famous as a translator of Poe into French.  Naming the protagonists after him was surely another nod to Poe.  As is the series of unfortunate events themselves.  One of the reasons Edgar Allan Poe is such an intriguing writer is that his life was, from a distant view, a series of unfortunate events.  Losing his mother, being taken in by a hard father, failing to attain fame through his writing, the death of his brother, the death of his wife at a young age, his own struggles with alcohol.  His was a storied, but not fortunate set of circumstances.

The Vile Village is populated by a huge murder of crows—ravens tend to be solitary.  The crows roost each night at Nevermore Tree.  This, of course, is a nod to Poe’s most well-remembered poem, “The Raven.”  The people of the village are extremely protective of the crows, even as they live by a massive set of rules that are enforced with the punishment of being burnt at the stake.  Olaf shows up late in the story by pretending to be Detective Dupin, the name taken from Poe’s famous investigator.  The story naturally ends with the orphans being separated from the Quagmire Triplets and left to find their own way forward.  The author also enters the story as the brother of the murdered Jacques and lover of Beatrice, and the mystery continues into book eight.

Stone Wood

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Each rock has a story.  (If you’re not into rocks, don’t worry.  I’ll only indulge my passion from time to time.)  In this case, I was looking for an artifact that I’ve had since I was a child.  Back in the day when visitors to the Petrified Forest National Park took souvenirs without too many stabs of conscience, a former minister of my childhood church gave my mother two pieces.  Of course, she had three sons at the time and the two elder ended up with the heirlooms.  I’m not certain they were from the National Park, I would add.  I was only about five at the time.  When I got to college I found this ironic because, as I outgrew my fundamentalism I realized the fossil trees are about 225 million years old and the Bible the minister so fervently believed implied that God created everything merely 6,000 years ago.  In any case, this piece of petrified wood became one of my treasures.

At Nashotah House my geology gene awoke.  I recall having had this fossil on display.  Then tragedy.  That job, and my full-time teaching career, ended.  Most of my books and all of my rocks (the collection had grown considerably) were packed in boxes and were in storage.  They moved to New Jersey with us, still boxed up.  They came to Pennsylvania with us as well, still in boxes.  Talking to my older brother one day, the pieces of petrified wood came up.  I realized that I had no idea where mine was.  It’d been packed twenty years before and although I’d opened most of the boxes from our move, that particular tree cum rock now seemed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

While doing weekend chores, one of which involved straightening out things in the garage, I found an unopened box.  Inside the box was a set of smaller boxes.  Most of them had seashells we picked up while living in New Jersey, but the very bottom box, unopened for decades, held my long lost piece of petrified wood.  I picked it up, feeling a piece of my childhood again.  An innocence lost repeatedly and lost especially loudly at Nashotah House.  It was like reaching back to the Triassic Period from whence this tree had originally come.  Dinosaurs roamed Arizona at the time.  This tree was older than the Good Book claimed any artifact had a right to be.  I don’t know that the minister took this from the Petrified Forest itself, or some other location that has fossilized trees.  Of what I’m certain is that this rock has a story.

Strange Publishing

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One of the (many) oddities of the publishing business is that nobody really seems to know the exact number of copies a book has sold.  This may seem strange, but as Michael Castleman’s wonderful book The Untold Story of Books points out, there has always been a kind of antagonism between publishers and authors regarding who has earned what.  In the early days of publishing authors pretty much had to pay to be published.  These days royalties are specified in publishing contracts but tracing them accurately remains a fool’s errand.  Ebooks are very easily pirated and many, if not most, are available for free on pirate websites.  Some publishers themselves, depending on the software they use, may not have a precise number of how many sold.  Trying to get a clear idea of how much reach your book has attained is well-nigh impossible.

Book publishers carefully guard sales figures.  In the biz, we use a vendor known as BookScan to get point-of-sales figures for other publishers which, we all know, aren’t fully accurate.  BookScan is run by Nielsen, the same company that does television ratings.  How many people actually watched a specific television show?  Nobody knows.  Depends on how many people were in the room.  And other factors.  Was the TV on but nobody actually watching?  Was it a public television?  If so, how many people saw it?  You get the idea.  It may seem weird, but the book business also operates with such constraints.  As an author, however, one gets curious. 

I’ve written six books that have been published.  For my first book I have never in my life received a royalties statement.  Ever.  I never even had a contract for it.  For my second book, I get regular royalties statements but they don’t include lifetime totals.  The same is true for my fourth and fifth books.  Statements, sometimes irregular, only grudgingly cite the number of copies sold since the last statement.  If it ever arrived.  The publisher for books three and six does actually say directly how many copies of the book sold on their royalties statements.  Gold star!

This may seem unbelievable, but it is true.  It’s difficult to imagine it, but businesses don’t always know what assets, in physical form, they actually have.  In the case of publishing, ebooks complicated an already tenuous process of counting how many copies of a book have been sold, let alone read.  I do get curious and even occasionally email publishers to try to get a sense of how many copies made it out the door.  Each of my six darlings represents years of work.  It’s only natural to wonder how well they’re doing out there in the world.

Who, Forgotten

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He’s a part of American childhood, Dr. Seuss is.  Kids are still familiar with him.  Even many decades ago, I grew up with him.  (We didn’t have his books at home, but there was a library in town.)  We watched the Grinch at Christmas time—when the networks, chose, of course.  I never knew that Dr. Seuss had done a Grinch Halloween special as well: Halloween is Grinch Night.  I just learned about this from a Halloween fan page I follow.  It was released in 1977 and was subsequently acquired by Disney and shown a few times in the nineties.  Once I heard about it I had to track it down and I did find it.  This was a rare off moment for Dr. Seuss.  Part of the problem is that Boris Karloff had died and another voice had to be found for the Grinch.  The larger problem, however, is that it doesn’t scare.

Partially this is because of the songs.  They don’t have any scary sounds, being more like show tunes.  I don’t have the vocabulary or expertise to say why, but they are not inspired.  And the story is strange: Whoville battens down the hatches when Grinch night approaches.  Eucariah Who has to use the euphemism (this word for outhouse is also in a Seuss book, I don’t recall which), but the wind blows him out of the yard and he apparently gets lost and climbs Mt. Crumpet.  Meanwhile, the Grinch is on his way down with his Paraphernalia Wagon (perhaps a clue).  He subjects Eucariah to the frights inside, which have nothing really spooky about them.  I’m not sure if Theodore Geisel was never really haunted—but his story “What Was I Scared of?” (the pale green pants with nobody inside them)  is spooky until the ending.

The thing that really disappointed me was that the concept is good.  The execution, however, just didn’t work.  The Grinch is far more menacing when stealing Christmas.  And having Sergeant Samuel McPherson giving a play-by-play really seemed to serve no purpose.  Now, I’m no critic of children’s stories.  Like most parents I’ve read many of them (and I’m currently going through one set again, just for fun).  Not all of them work for me.  This half-hour cartoon made me feel bad.  I think it was perhaps the missed opportunity.  I may have felt differently about it if I’d seen it when I was fifteen, but I doubt it.  Sometimes we need haunted people to tell us their stories, even when we’re kids.  (I discuss scary kids’ stories in my Sleepy Hollow book, just sayin’.)

The Shaft

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For those following my musings on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m up to book six of the Baudelaire orphans’ adventures, The Ersatz Elevator.  There’s much to appeal to adults in these stories, as ridiculous as some parts are.  In this installment the Baudelaires are adopted by Esmé and Jerome Squalor, wealthy benefactors who live on Dark Avenue.  Mrs. Squalor, who’s very wealthy, follows whatever’s in at the moment, setting the theme for this part of the saga.  Of course, many “in” things are quite silly and they keep the situation light.  Although they live on the 66th floor (at 667), the Squalors have the elevators decommissioned because elevators aren’t in.  Count Olaf uses an abandoned elevator shaft to help work out his scheme to control the orphans, all the while trapping the Quagmire triplets.  The V.F.D. theme is further emphasized, but not yet explained.

The world-building of this series is impressive.  I remember reading through the first time and being increasingly drawn into the question of what V.F.D. could mean.  Although the 2004 movie picks up on Olaf’s arson activities, it doesn’t include this particular aspect.  The rest of the world Handler devised is also intriguing.  The time-frame is unclear.  The place, although it goes to outer-lying areas, centers on a city unnamed but which clearly has relevance for the overall plot.  People of this world are singularly clueless, including the orphans at times.  The world with its desultory, or even sinister, place names reflects that constant theme of misfortune that somehow isn’t depressing.  And an educational element, particularly in introducing children to new terms, phrases, and concepts, is generally present.

I learned the word “Ersatz” in German class.  A noun denoting “substitute,” it became an English adjective only in the last century.  Once the concept is defined in the way the children devise to climb down the elevator shaft, it’s used in reinforcing ways throughout the rest of the story.  Often in humorous contexts.  Also, the character of Lemony Snicket starts to grow more prominent as Beatrice is brought more explicitly into the plot.  The first mentions here are subtle, but her role takes on some shading as the series moves on.  This use of narrator as character had some influence on me as a writer.  While I’d written a not very good novel before beginning my doctorate, I started on my fiction again, on and off, during the period when I was reading these books to my child.  Coming back to them continues to inspire an adult who loves their gothic flavor, even if as ersatz adult literature.

Ghost Belief

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I haven’t read Plato since I was a college student.  It’s not that I don’t want to read more, but as with most things it comes down to a matter of time.  If I’m honest I’ll confess Plato wasn’t the reason I read Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost.  It was the second word.  And the subtitle: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance.  I’ve always been interested in Spiritualism.  In fact, Lily Dale is on my bucket-list of places to visit.  The idea that ghosts can inform our spirituality is an intriguing concept.  While Gutierrez’s book is an academic one, it contains many stimulating ideas and shows that the Spiritualists were perhaps the truest progressives of their era.  And they had their heyday during the Victorian Period.  I enjoyed learning more about their theology and social views.  And, of course, ghosts.

When academics venture into esoterica, some amazing things can result.  I occasionally discuss Jeff Kripal’s books—he’s on the forefront of this movement—and now and again the books of other academics who engage the unusual.  Ghosts have, of course, been noted and believed in since the earliest humans who wrote.  Probably before.  They are still reported and chasing them has become a business model by which one might make a living.  A religion foregrounding the departed, however, is fascinating.  As Gutierrez demonstrates, Spiritualists were very forward-looking while keeping an eye firmly on the past.  While reading her book I kept stumbling upon astonishing observations that made me stop and wonder.  Spiritualists supported abolition, feminism, fair treatment for all, and, at least some of them, free love.  Numerous historical asides also brought me to a halt.  The idea, for example, that patients with multiple personality disorders might benefit from putting a non-dominant personality in charge.  There are Easter eggs like that throughout the book.

While Plato’s Ghost is academic, and there are parts that require some careful reading, it is the kind of book that laity interested in Spiritualism could benefit from picking up.  There are sections that enlightened me, and I’ve been studying religion for many decades now.  In general I’ve been steering away from reading academic tomes in my time off.  When I go to do my own writing it tends to veer back toward getting published only in academic presses, which I’m also trying to avoid.  I’ll make exceptions for books like this one, however.  I was drawn in by the promise of ghosts, and while they weren’t exactly what I was expecting, they were a rich feast nevertheless.

Paperback Dreams

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Although I’ve been focusing on my fiction writing lately, I still think about my poor, overlooked nonfiction books.  The other day I had an intriguing royalty statement from Bloomsbury.  (It’s not intriguing for the amount, which is negligible, but the implications.)    The name Bloomsbury is a story in itself.  Nightmares with the Bible was published by Fortress Academic and Lexington Books.  Lexington is (was?) an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.  R&L was a fairly successful academic publishing brand, although not a university press.  A couple years back Bloomsbury, a British publisher, bought R&L.  Bloomsbury isn’t part of the “big five” publishers in English, but they did have the foresight, years ago, to sign up an unknown author by the name of J. K. Rowling.  Bloomsbury, cash in hand, began buying up smaller academic publishers.  That’s one way that publishers grow.

For me, that meant that Nightmares now had a new owner.  I have no idea which editor oversees it.  It’s a backlist title now, and I know from my own experience that when you inherit a backlist title, well, let’s just say there are more than enough frontlist and potential frontlist titles to keep you busy.  I was after my R&L editor for a paperback edition since Nightmares is my most expensive book, now that Gorgias Press has released a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah.  This brings me back to my royalty statement.  On it there was a line for a paperback.  It even had an ISBN (9781978703209).  ISBNs cost money and many publisher don’t buy them unless they plan on using them.  Is there a paperback in the works?  I’m not getting my hopes up since ISBNs can be reassigned.

Earlier this summer I visited my local library to donate my books (if they would want them).  The head librarian kindly made time to discuss this and accepted Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow As American Myth.  I left a little sad that I couldn’t offer Nightmares as well.  I only have two copies and I can’t afford to buy more, even with an author’s discount.  (Author discounts are usually between 40 and 60 percent; for a book that’s priced at over $100 that’s still not a bargain.)  I’m mature enough to know that a paperback wouldn’t fly off the shelves, but I consciously wrote Nightmares as a companion volume to Holy Horror—the two go together but were separated at birth.  You’ll pardon me for being excited at seeing a paperback ISBN, then.  I’ve been in publishing long enough now, however, not to read too much into it.