Heavenly Scent

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There’s a disappointing scent to books printed on demand.  Upon first opening them, they release a waft of laser printer.  The friendly smell of offset printing is banished.  I need to qualify that, however.  While teaching at Nashotah House I acquired a book via interlibrary loan that I remember not for its content, but for its unpleasant odor.  I’m not sure if it was the paper used, but the book smelled unpleasing.  Almost too offensive to read.  I’m not referring to the kind of musty, basement bouquet that some used books, long stored, possess.  No, that aroma isn’t offensive.  It suggests both mystery and the human condition.  How books smell is important.  Upon recently opening a POD (print on demand) book, I was transported to office work rather than the musty study of a scholar.

There are companies that sell scented candles intended to suggest libraries.  Libraries smell wonderful.  The small Franklin Public Library in my hometown has a wonderful, evocative aroma.  I remember it well from childhood.  On a visit to my mother before she passed, my wife, daughter, and I took her to that library.  We didn’t check anything out.  I simply had to smell it again.  Olfactory stimulus is very personal.  Indeed, in polite company we tend not to comment on how a person smells unless it is particularly pleasant.  “Nice perfume/aftershave, etc.”  (You have to be very close to a person to comment on less pleasant odors.) Scent has always been an important sense to me.  I like to sniff things.  When I’m out jogging first thing in the morning, I snuff the air like a bloodhound, eager for the first whiffs of fall during the heat of summer.  Like a dog I tend to think there are no bad smells, but there are some I don’t seek out.  Smells will take you back to the past, as the ultimate time travel.

In my mother’s kitchen I used to sit by her spice drawer and pull out each little bottle and jar to sniff them.  She never had anything as pungent as the asafoetida that my wife and I once bought for a recipe, but I recall those moments fondly.  Mom would be cooking nearby, and it seemed to me that I was smelling far away places that I’d never go.  I did make it to Scotland, however.  Edinburgh often smelled of the McEwan’s brewery.  At least the Old Town did on many a foggy morning.  We live not far from a micro-brewery and when its bouquet escapes, it take me straight back to Auld Reekie.  And, of course, Edinburgh was full of books and their distinctive smell.  All of this makes me want to go plant my nose in a book.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Making Monks

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Now that I’m an antique, antique stores have a special draw.  They’re kind of like museums with free admission where you can buy the artifacts.  There’s a particularly large one in Allentown that I’ve visited a few times.  It’s the kind of place that, if you want something you see, you buy it right away because it’s not likely to be there next time you go back.  Back in March I saw a pair of bookends that caught my attention.  They were carved in the shape of monks reading books.  The reason I was fascinated by them is that I had bought my wife a very similar figurine (too small to be a bookend) when I first started teaching at Nashotah House.  We didn’t have much money, but I thought it was a whimsical reminder of where I was when I had to be away all week so that we could keep our academic couple dreams alive.

By the time I got back to the antique store the “bookends” were long gone.  What I was really curious about was whether there could be a connection with the Nashotah House curio I purchased nearly 35 years before.  There’s probably something I’m missing.  Was there a Platonic original somewhere?  When I failed to find them at the antique store, I did an online search and discovered a very similar one on Etsy, listed as being made in the 1970s.  I bought the one we have in 1992.  It was clearly handmade; the Nashotah House bookstore had a few of them on display at the time.  They no longer carried them after the inventory sold out.  I’d supposed they were made by a local Nashotah House person—which may be true—but where did they get the idea?

A bit more time on Etsy revealed another exemplar, this one listed as from the 1940s, specifically from Mexico.  One of the Etsy sellers is listed as being in Florida.  I bought mine in Wisconsin.  I found a pair in an antique store in Pennsylvania.  What is the missing link here?  This is the kind of rabbit hole academics are liable to tumble down.  Since I’m a dark academic, it strikes me as a research topic for someone without tenure worries to consider.  Or perhaps a detective who was raised Catholic.  All the five examples (two on Etsy, two in the antique store, and one from Nashotah House) follow the same plan and are stained and painted similarly.  This antique is curious about the origin story of those other antiques.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

In Public

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I’ve written about the virtues of reading in public before.  Book reading, that is.  I was reminded once again how restorative an exercise it can be.  The occasion this time was a book sale at the Bethlehem Public Library.  We didn’t realize this was one of those bi-monthly kinds of events—at least this year there are six such sales.  We met some friends there and I exercised considerable restraint, buying only two books.  One was a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.  I’d had a copy of this, but it was ruined in the flood.  I decided to replace it.  The other book was a collection of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories.  I’d been thinking just the day before that I should read some of her work.  It happened that I finished before other members of our party so I waited in the hall and started reading the story “Geranium,” with which the book starts.

After a few minutes a college-aged guy walked by and said, “Great book.”  I thanked him for affirming my choice.  He said, “I’ve just been reading O’Connor, you’re in for a real treat.”  This brief exchange reminded me of being in Easton on a warm evening a few years back, reading in a public square.  I was there to pick someone up and they weren’t quite ready yet.  A couple of young women, probably Lafayette College students, walked by and asked what I was reading.  It was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  They weren’t familiar with it and asked me what it was about.

Now, I’ve always been quite a shy person.  I don’t mind responding when someone talks to me, but initiating a conversation is something I don’t do very well with strangers.  I’m happy to respond when someone shows an interest in a book I’m reading.  I’ve had dentist hygienists ask about the book I inevitably bring in with me, asking if it’s any good.  The few times when I forget to bring a book and I have to try to entertain myself on my phone (it’s not easy; I quickly grow bored), I’ve never had anybody stop and ask what was interesting on my phone.  It’s the printed book, at least in populations with college students, that seems to bring out a willingness to chat.  I wonder how much of that bookish sociability that we’ve lost now that the electronic revolution has taken place.  How many discussions does a Kindle start?  It’s a virtue to read an actual book in public.

Class Privilege

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A recent article in the New York Times explores something many of us know from experience: your hopes of getting tenure in higher education plummet if you’re from the working class.  One of the causes the article points out (I think I can gift it, if anyone wants to read it), is that working class folks don’t learn networking from their parents.  That was like a lightbulb being switched on.  Schmoozing is so essential when dealing with anyone in power.  I started to learn this at Nashotah House.  My mother taught me always to be honest and forthright.  Employers have walked all over me ever since.  I never learned to schmooze well.  I still don’t do it.  Until reading this article, in my sixties, I didn’t realize that my academic career was doomed from the start.

It’s like this: neither of my parents finished high school.  I grew up poor and working class.  My grades were great throughout high school and college and I was being groomed to be a minister, not an academic.  But I felt the call of academia as soon as I’d acclimated to Grove City College.  I love reading and learning.  I have innate curiosity.  I question everything.  This seems to fit teaching better than preaching.  Before settling on a doctoral institution, I asked my professors where I should go.  Their advice: Europe.  Bad mistake for pre-internet days and a kid who knew nothing about networking.  Edinburgh is a world-class research university.  Its only real connection (at the time) to US schools was Princeton.  Particularly Princeton Seminary, if your degree was from New College.  Otherwise, the professors didn’t pay much mind to American higher education.  Networking, which I didn’t realize you needed to do, wasn’t emphasized or encouraged.

I was hired by Nashotah House because of two factors: they could find nobody else, and I was Episcopalian.  The chances of networking while at a remote, conservative campus in the woods were nil.  I went to conferences, but Ugaritology was a very small field.  I remained an unknown.  I wondered how my friends, if they ran into unemployment situations, always managed to find other jobs.  They knew, apparently, something I did not.  Networking.  Even getting into publishing was rocky for me.  I had two editorial posts for two years only.  I didn’t network or schmooze.  Authors loved me because I was honest and forthright.  Those are working class values.  And, it seems, they will be deficits to advancing in your career.  Be careful before deciding on a doctorate.  It can backfire unless your parents went to college and taught you what to do.

The Death of John Henry

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I don’t recognize America anymore.  Born here, and having spent over six decades on this soil, I look out and see a country that looks nothing like the sixties into which I was born.  Work pressures us to use “artificial intelligence” to be more efficient, even as those who know the industry best sound warning bells against using it.  I can’t help but think of the America that used to recognize John Henry.  John Henry is key American folklore about who we are.  Or at least used to be.  An African American, John Henry was a steel-driver building railways.  Threatened when the foreman introduced a steam-powered rock drill, he challenged the machine to a contest and won.  At the cost of his life.  The America I grew up in recognized the power of the John Henry story, even as jobs were already being lost to robots.  John Henry was the hero of that story.

What’s happened in the intervening years?  People have flocked to ease and comfort over the struggle to be human.  Even the most intimate of human occupations, such as writing, are being handed over to algorithms that have never lived a day in their lives.  Averaging together human experience, making us all generic.  We need John Henry’s hammer to come alive again.  Someone to stand up for what it means to be human.  Someone who knows that money isn’t the only thing that makes the world go round.  

Some of us dreamed that after the pandemic employers might realize that most employees worked conscientiously at home.  That perhaps more time off wouldn’t hurt the bottom line.  That we could trust one another.  Then the next plague, AI, hit the headlines.  Even more efficiency!  Even less need for humans!  To what end?  Why are we doing this?  Yes, AI is faster, but is it better?  The environmental costs are staggering.  We’d already reached a tipping point where enough people realized we were harming our home that behaviors had begun to change.  Even in red states.  Now tech moguls are selling their snake oil and upper management can’t live without it.  Instead of rewarding those who work hard they invite them to find ways to make their own jobs redundant.  John Henry saw it coming.  He became the hero of folksongs and legends.  Celebrated in film, animation, and television, we sent the message loud and clear: human spirit can overcome the cold efficiency of machines.  So we find ourselves in a county that feels it has outlived its need for John Henry.  I’m willing to pick up my hammer and join him on the line.

Public domain; image credit: John Henry illustration by Roy La Grone (1942) via Wikimedia Commons

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.