Horror Time

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In case anyone’s wondering (ha!), I haven’t lost interest in horror.  I’ve been discussing quite a few dark academia movies lately since that’s where I seem to be, but what’s really lost is time.  I’m no great consumer of social media.  I spend literally five minutes on Facebook daily.  Less than that on Bluesky and Twitter.  I don’t have time.  I love watching movies, but they take time.  I often discuss this with family—I’m not sure where the time goes.  In my case it’s not social media.  Much of it—the lion’s share—is work.  When a three-day weekend starts to feel like just enough time to get everything done before starting it all over again, I think there’s an elephant in the room.  If I can just squeeze past your trunk (pardon me) I would note that I spend as much time as I can writing and reading, but even that drains too quickly.

I read a lot.  And I read about writing.  Those who do it best have time to put into their craft.  If they’re working long hours, have a family, and weeds that love all the rain we get around here, they’re better than I am.  Home ownership (if you can’t afford to hire groundskeepers) is itself a full-time occupation.  As is writing.  And, of course, work.  What’s been suffering lately has been my time for watching horror.  Part of that’s money too.  I’m not sure if anybody else has noticed, but prices haven’t exactly gone down since January, and movies aren’t always free.  I have a long list of horror films I want to see (quite a long list), but tide, time, and money wait for no-one.  I even had a four-day weekend not long ago during which I had no time to watch horror.  Horrific, isn’t it?

I’m at a stage of life where the shortness of it all stares me in the face.  I was a late bloomer and my career never really took off.  It ended up taking time and not rewarding that time at the usual exchange rate.  I’m watching friends and family retire and some finding too much time on their hands.  Hey, brother, can you spare an hour?  I think of my farming ancestors where every minute was filled trying to stay alive in a world where leisure time really is a luxury.  I have no right to complain, but I do wonder where the time goes.  I suppose if I didn’t blog I’d have a little more time for horror, but I just can’t face giving up all this fame.

Unverified

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Dear Google Scholar and ResearchGate,

Thank you for listing me as a scholar on your website.  I am pleased that my academic publications interest you.  I am writing to you today, however, about your verification process.  Neither of your sites will verify me since I do not have an email with a .edu domain.  Now, I fully realize that even adjunct instructors are often given a university or college email address.  This is so students and administrators can reach them.  Speaking as a former adjunct instructor at both Rutgers University and Montclair State University, I can verify that such an email address does not verify your scholarship.  It is a means of communication only.  It does not verify anyone (although it may come in handy if you need to contact someone internally).

For large companies with a great deal of resources, I am surprised at your narrow view of both “scholar” and “verification.”  I earned a doctorate at Edinburgh University before email was widely used.  I taught, full-time, for over a decade at a seminary that did not request any .edu emails until well into my years there.  I taught for a full academic year at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.  Had you requested “verification” earlier (pardon me, you may not have existed then), I would have been able to contact you from nashotah.edu, uwosh.edu, rutgers.edu, or montclair.edu.  Your choice.  However, since you only decided to begin your online resources after I had moved into publishing, where the emails end in a .com domain, you were simply too late.  The thing about technology is that it has to keep up.

I hardly blame you.  My doctoral university was opened in 1583, long before today’s giants were twinkles in the eyes of the likes of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.  Scholars used to write these artifacts, called “books” on paper.  They sent them through a service called “the mail” to publishers.  I know all of that has changed.  The fact is, however, that I have published six scholarly books, and several articles.  I am still writing books.  I am simply wondering if you can answer the question of when I became unverifiable because of my email address?  I have a website that details my educational and professional history.  Academia.edu has not asked me to verify myself and my profile there gets a reasonable number of hits.  My question is when are you going to catch up with the times?  Many, many scholars do not work at .edu-domain institutions.  Of course, nobody knows who we are.  Thank you for your kind attention.

Unverified  

Friendly Fear

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

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

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

Gothic Novelties

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

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

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

Little Things

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Those on anti-clutter campaigns (whose lives I can’t imagine) claim that we have too much stuff.  That may be true, but when you reach a certain age these realia can serve to remind us where we’ve been.  How we’ve become who we are.  We moved to our house in a whirl.  Neither my wife nor I had enough vacation days to take any time off and we had to move 55+ years of stuff over a weekend.  Lately I’ve been going through some of the boxes of little things you keep.  They were generally mixed in with papers I didn’t have time to file, bits of hardware, and a few things I’m not sure why I kept.  In the archaeology of my life, the layer labeled Nashotah House retains a prominent place.  It took many years before I could look at my little Nashotah House things without being overwhelmed by emotion.  Nearly twenty years on, I hope I’m beginning to get over it.

One of the little things I unearthed was a pepper shaker.  One of my students (now sadly departed) had made a label to express her frustration and humor at trying to learn Hebrew as a mature woman.  I’m probably now the age she was then.  This little artifact has been with me through a great number of momentous changes in my life.  It can still bring a little smile, however.  I see it and I remember Judy giving it to me with a laugh.  I probably shared it with the class.  Even now it has two-decade-old pepper in it.  The declutter experts would say it belongs in the dumpster.  They’re wrong.

Nashotah House was the only job on offer following those intense Edinburgh years.  As all of these things recede further and further into the past, they become more valuable.  No matter how small, these objects played a part in what I remember and rubbed me in a way that influenced my shape.  I don’t know what that final shape will be, but I jealously guard my little things, these boxes of years.  They are points of contact between my life and those of others.  I found many other pieces of myself in these miscellaneous boxes.  I know that someday, all things being equal, this stuff will probably end up in some landfill somewhere, waiting for some future archaeologist wondering what realia we kept back in the years when the world went insane.  And if s/he is really brave, they might even try some of the pepper on their future lunch.

Decide

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Decisions we make when we’re young influence our entire lives.  It’s not that you can’t change course—I’ve seen it happen and it can be a thing of true beauty—but the fact is our young lives become our old lives, if we survive.  I’m now in my sixties.  I reflect a lot about my youth and the fact that I grew up in an uneducated, blue-collar family.  I had no idea what college was, and had not a minister convinced me that I might have the right stuff, I would probably never have gone.  It was foolish in a way.  My family contributed nothing financially—they couldn’t afford to.  I started with optimistic scholarships that eventually became less sanguine and I had to borrow more and more.  Once I’d begun on that path, however, turning back looked to be nothing but disastrous.

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

The internet allows us glimpses, only glimpses, into the lives of those we knew in our younger years.  Many of my surviving high school friends (and that number decreases every year now) have followed paths to their current situations.  I didn’t know them well, perhaps, but they too seemed set to follow in the courses of their lives.  I really hope they’re happy.  I hate to see anyone sad.  Still, there’s a melancholy captured well by a rabbi, who it is I can’t remember, who once said “You can either be wise or be happy.”  There’s an almost kabbalistic truth nestled in that sentiment, it seems.  Your rudder is small and the ocean is very, very big.  As a penurious boy living in an economically depressed refinery town, I never dreamed I’d have the privilege of living in Edinburgh for three years, with a wonderful wife, no less.  And yet, and yet.

The course of my life is not over yet (I hope).  Every day I make hundreds of decisions but none of them seem as momentous as the ones I made before I had seen much beyond rural western Pennsylvania.  I know this is true of others as well, reacting to the pain and angst of the moment, they turn to whatever gives them comfort.  For me it was books.  And church.  The course of a life.  And in a way that will only make sense of those who knew me in high school (none, or very few of whom ever read this blog), when I do my daily exercises, they always include twenty-two push-ups.  A number that, mystically, corresponds to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  Way stations along a curriculum vita.

Telling Vision

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My wife and I don’t watch much television.  In fact, we had very poor television reception from about 1988 (when we married), until we moved into this house in 2018.  That’s three decades without really watching the tube.  As we’ve been streaming/DVDing some of the series that have made a splash in those three decades, I’ve discovered (I can’t speak for her) that there were some great strides made in quality.  We began with The X-Files, then moved on to Lost.  We viewed Twin Peaks and started to watch Picket Fences, but the digital rights have expired so we never did finish out that series.  (Don’t get me started on digital rights management—the air will quickly turn blue, I assure you.)  Of course, we did manage to see Northern Exposure when it aired, but it should be mentioned for the sake of completion.  These were all exceptional programs.

Netflix (in particular) upped the game.  We watched the first three seasons of Stranger Things (and I’d still like to go back and pick up the more recent ones we’ve missed), and I watched the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher (I didn’t realize until writing this up that it was only one season, so maybe I should go back and finish that one out too) and was very impressed.  Since we couldn’t finish Picket Fences, we turned to Wednesday.  Now, I was only ever a middling fan of The Addams Family.  I watched it as a kid because it had monsters, as I did The Munsters, but neither one really appealed to me.  Wednesday’s cut from a different cloth.  In these days when escapism is necessary, this can be a good thing.

Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

Like most late boomers, I grew up watching television.  In my early memories, it’s pretty much ubiquitous.  We were poor, and our sets were black-and-white, but remembering my childhood without TV is impossible.  It was simply there.  The shows I watched formed me.  Now that I’m perhaps beyond excessive reforming (although I’m not opposed to the idea), I’m looking for brief snippets of something intelligent to wind up the day before I reboot to start this all over again.  We save movies for weekends, but an entire workweek without a break in nonfictional reality seems overwhelming on a Sunday evening.  It seems that I may be warming up to my childhood chum again.  This time, without network schedules, and limited time to spend doing it, we just may be in a golden age for the tube.

First Visit

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

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

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

Belting Beltane

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Things have been so busy that I forgot that today is Beltane.  That’s all the more ironic because yesterday I’d been on a panel to address the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies special interest group on Horror Studies, about The Wicker Man.  Lest you get the wrong idea, BAFTSS did not approach me to talk about my book (which has largely disappeared, as far as I can tell), but another recent Devil’s Advocate author approached them about having a panel featuring recent titles.  This special interest group has a program called Weekday Night Bites where they gather virtually to have speakers talk about horror.  Yesterday there were seven of us, discussing five books, one of which was The Wicker Man.

The theme of the panel was No Safe Space, about place and space in horror.  This meant I spoke briefly about The Wicker Man as folk horror.  As I told the assembled group, I actually interpret Wicker Man as holiday horror—it’s based on May Day, and I didn’t even think to mention that it was today—instead of folk horror.  One of the the hallmarks of the Devil’s Advocates series is that it tries to approach horror films from unexpected angles.  When I first contacted the editor who started the series at Auteur (who has, unfortunately left), he told me that they didn’t have a Wicker Man volume because everyone was pitching it as folk horror.  He wanted to see a different interpretation.  I’d been writing a book about folk horror and decided to give that a try.  The critics liked it, and thus my book was born.  And here it is, May Day, and I’d forgotten all about it.

There was a reasonably sized group present for the discussion and it was a lot of fun.  It reminded me of my Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies course on Sleepy Hollow two years ago.  Both of these were efforts to stir some interest in my books.  Horror and religion is a new avenue of approach and there are a handful of us working in this area.  The others, it seems, have a knack for getting their books published in places where you don’t have to take out a mortgage to afford them.  I’m more in the group whose books are relegated to the Summerisle of sales.  Either that, or I’m actually Sergeant Howie, unwittingly flying there to help someone I think is in trouble. Who knows?  Anything’s possible on Beltane. 

Space Rocks

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The thing from another world.  No, not the movie, but an artifact.  My recent post about the asteroid sent me looking for something.  When we lived in Wisconsin, we purchased a small piece of a meteorite while on a visit to the Yerkes Observatory.  It is, quite literally, a thing from another world.  The problem is, I can’t find it.  Our house isn’t that big but the fragment is quite small.  I’ve been told our house is like a museum—there are curios pretty much everywhere, and they each have some significance.  But the meteorite: where could it be?  I find that moving is one of the most disruptive activities known to those of us in the “developed” world.  As much as I wanted an organized move, the fact is that you can’t have such a move without taking at least a month off work in advance.

There are things (from this world) that I haven’t found in the six-plus years in this house.  Most often they’re like the meteorite in that I don’t think of them often, and when I do I wonder where I might’ve packed them.  Knowing where they might’ve been packed gives a clue to where they might’ve been unpacked.  And no matter what, some things get lost on every move.  There’s a book I had in New Jersey that is simply not here in Pennsylvania.  I’m sure I packed all our books.  One, at least, did not make it over the Delaware.   The fragment of meteorite, which is unique, is only about the size of a small ladybug.  Where might I have put it?  

That small fragment of rock traveled through the solar system.  It likely came from distances no human has ever gone.  Unimaginable distances.  Only to get lost in a house in Pennsylvania.  If it’s here at all.  Back when it was legal to pick up petrified wood, a family friend gave us two chunks from the petrified forest (for now, a National Park in Arizona).  One of them came to me and I treasured it for years.  I haven’t seen it since we moved to Pennsylvania.  There are boxes that haven’t been fully unpacked.  The squirrels make a mess of the garage every winter and I can’t go in there without feeling I should clean things up first, before emptying out the remaining boxes.  To a squirrel the thing from another world is just one more thing to ignore.  It has no value except for to an aging guy who remembers buying it at the very spot where Edwin Hubble worked and Albert Einstein visited.  Only to mislay it when moving fifty miles from state to state.

Not my meteorite. Image credit: Meteoritekid under the GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons

O Levels

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Out jogging last week, I was thinking about a harsh interview I once had.  It was in Manhattan.  The woman interviewing me made no attempt to hide her disdain.  I’m not sure if it was for me personally or what I represent.  She did not smile at all, not even for the usual niceties.  She asked me whether I was better at speaking or writing.  I said they were about equal.  “No,” she briskly corrected.  “Which is it, one or the other?”  This came to me while jogging because I was reflecting that public speaking and writing are really the only two things I’m any good at, and I have worked on both for my entire life.  These years later I still can’t say which is stronger.  That was appreciated by my students and fellow scholars in my teaching career, if reviews are anything to go by.  I like to communicate.  (My wife might say too much so.)

Owls are difficult to spot in the wild.  Just last week I’d seen only my second in some sixty years.  This was a screech owl.  It’s not unusual to hear them when jogging at dawn.  This time my right ear picked up on it more than my left as I jogged past a grove of trees.  I looked but saw nothing.  The trees were budding and some had small leaves already.  I reckon I’ve seen my fair share of bald eagles.  They’re large and they’re pretty obvious when they’re in the area.  Owls are more secretive.  Good at hiding.  I reached the end of the path and turned around.  As I reached the stand of trees, now on my left, it screeched again and I saw a blurred flapping of wings as it disappeared in flight.  I couldn’t identify this owl in a line-up, but then again, that’s not something I’m good at. The voice is distinctive, however.

The person hiring is a bald eagle.  Bold, aggressive, and sometimes literally bald.  I’m more like that screech owl.  Their public speaking is distinct and isn’t really a screech at all.  I can’t speak for their writing ability.  Life is our chance to come to know ourselves.  We may think we have it figured out in our twenties, but each score of years makes you question past assumptions.  Two things I always thought would be part of my career—public speaking and compelling writing—have both fallen by the wayside.  At least professionally.  What we say to others has an impact.  Especially if we’re eagles.  All things considered, however, I would rather be an owl.

Photo by James Toose on Unsplash

Mass Market

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The mass market paperback.  This may very well be one of the best symbols of my younger years.  One of the largest distributors of mass market paperbacks (Readerlink) has announced that it will no longer distribute them.  It seems that the writing, instead of in readers’ hands, is on the wall.  Mass market paperbacks are the least expensive formats of books to buy.  Publishers have increasingly been tending to push trade size (about 6-by-9 inches)—they can charge more for them.  They don’t fit easily in your pocket, however, and well, they cost more.  Often, as someone who reads in public, I find myself wishing more literary fiction was still produced in mass market form.  Only the best selling authors ever make it down to that size.  I miss being able to stick a book in my pocket.  

The mass market paperback’s story began with railroad books, once innovated by my erstwhile employer, Routledge.  The form we recognize today only really took off in 1935.  When I was growing up, I considered all other formats somehow too big.  My book collection and reading habits began with mass market size.  When we moved to our house a few years back, I repurposed an old dresser as a bookshelf.  The top drawer slots were just tall enough for mass market books.  I discovered that I really didn’t have enough of them to fill that shelf.  Books have grown bigger.  Now, working in publishing I realize profit margins are thin in this industry.  Many publishers need the big sellers to help make up for disappointing sales of other titles.  (You have to have thick skin to be an author, I know from experience.)  They need to stay solvent.

But still, this feels like the end of an era.  Books in this format have been around really only less than a century.  Literacy—reading for pleasure—among the masses hasn’t been around much longer.  Books were expensive and were afforded by the elite, then cheaper forms and formats became available.  The electronic revolution has made much of life more convenient but some of us miss the challenge of having to fold a road map and never really knowing, for sure, where we are.  We’re also the ones who likely have a book in the car.  On the occasions when I don’t, I often regret it.  And one of the ways to encourage people to take books with them is to make them of a size that would sell thousands.  So many, in fact, that they would be given the title “mass market.”

Four-leaf Clover

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It was recently my late mother’s birthday.  I didn’t post about it on that that day since it might become a security question some day.  In any case, it was a somber day for me.  It’d been raining on and off for several days straight and I was wanting a picture of her for my bulletin board.  I remembered that I had inherited one of her photo albums.  This was the old kind with black paper onto which you had to lick and stick corners to hold the pictures.  Many of the photos had fallen out even back when she asked me to hold onto it, but there were some still there of her as a young woman.  As I was looking through them, something inside the front cover caught my attention—the crumbly brown remains of three four-leaf clovers that she’d glued there.

Since this isn’t likely to be a security question, I can say that her home life wasn’t ideal.  The page with the young photos of her were obviously from a day that she and my father were taking pictures of each other as young lovers.  They were outside a house on a summery-looking day.  Smiling and looking for a better future.  Four-leaf clovers.  My father was an alcoholic, and my mother knew that, but hoped that she might change him.  I don’t know the dates of the photos so I’m not sure if they yet knew they’d be parents.  One of the oddities of life is that about the time the questions occur to you, your parents might already be gone.  I wanted to ask about that happy day.  Those clover leaves.  The sunshine.

Rain and gray clouds persisted.  That particular day I had little human interaction, and I felt her presence with me.  I’m not a minister, as she always hoped I would be.  I could never find a job closer to home, as she wished time and again.  I didn’t even get to see her before she died.  Instead I had a photo album on my lap and rain falling.  And work for the day looming.  Her birthday is an engrained date in my mind.  Those last years we tried to find appropriate gifts for a woman who always said, “I don’t need anything.”  A few of those gifts are scattered around our house now.  One that gives me hope is a vase with flowers made from colorful paper that we purchased at a craft show for her.  I look at it and think of crumbled four-leaf clovers.

Craving Enchantment

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I really want to know, but just can’t figure out, how to write like Katherine May.  My wife and I read her book Wintering and now have added Enchantment.  In many ways I seem to be like May; we may be different shades of neurodivergent, but I understand what she says.  Indeed, at one point in Enchantment she talked me down from a writer’s dilemma that had me worked up for days.  But I can’t write like her.  I have times when my rhetoric for a blog post or two might come close, but I have tried to sustain it for an entire book, so far without success.  My background was perhaps too sullied by academic writing, although May is also an academic, so I may simply be making excuses for lack of talent.

That’s too bad because Enchantment is meant to improve your outlook.  Subtitled Awaking Wonder in an Anxious Age, it consists of life lessons the author learned during the pandemic.  I often, if I allow myself in this constant struggle for my time, experience the sense of wonder May describes.  I enjoy walking in the woods, watching heavenly bodies, staring into a river or pond, and trying to draw lessons from such things.  Lately, however, I find myself rushing through them because I have something else I have to do.  Daily, it’s the 9-2-5, of course.  That schedule overloads my weekends with things that have to be done even if I want to spend time appreciating the enchantment I can find, if I have the time.  Sorry, I’m letting the anxious part take center stage.

This is a wonderful book.  I admire the way that May is able to face down her own struggles with grace and remain open to possibilities.  I found such things much more readily when I was at Nashotah House.  There were moments between classes and there were semester breaks.  We lived in the woods.  By a lake.  There was wonder there, for the taking.  Having a young child to introduce to the wonders of nature definitely helped as well.  Children force you to see through new eyes (it’s not a surprise that May has a young son when writing).  Too quickly we grow up and let capitalism tell us what to do.  It takes so much from us and gives so little.  I’m looking out my window at nature, as I write this.  I know it has enchantment to offer.  I also know that work begins in fifteen minutes.

Think

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Those of us who write books have been victims of theft.  One of the culprits is Meta, owner of Facebook.  The Atlantic recently released a tool that allows authors to check if LibGen, a pirated book site used by Meta and others, has their work in its system.  Considering that I have yet to earn enough on my writing to pay even one month’s rent/mortgage, you get a little touchy about being stolen from by corporate giants.  Three of my books (A Reassessment of Asherah, Weathering the Psalms, and Nightmares with the Bible) are in LibGen’s collection.  To put it plainly, they have been stolen.  Now the first thing I noticed was that my McFarland books weren’t listed (Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, of course, the latter is not yet published).  I also know that McFarland, unlike many other publishers, proactively lets authors know when they are discussing AI use of their content, and informing us that if deals are made we will be compensated.

I dislike nearly everything about AI, but especially its hubris.  Machines can’t think like biological organisms can and biological organisms that they can teach machines to “think” have another think coming.  Is it mere coincidence that this kind of thing happens at the same time reading the classics, with their pointed lessons about hubris, has declined?  I think not.  The humanities education teaches you something you can’t get at your local tech training school—how to think.  And I mean actually think.  Not parrot what you see on the news or social media, but to use your brain to do the hard work of thinking.  Programmers program, they don’t teach thinking.

Meanwhile, programmers have made theft easy but difficult to prosecute.  Companies like Meta feel entitled to use stolen goods so their programmers can make you think your machine can think.  Think about it!  Have we really become this stupid as a society that we can’t see how all of this is simply the rich using their influence to steal from the poor?  LibGen, and similar sites, flaunt copyright laws because they can.  In general, I think knowledge should be freely shared—there’s never been a paywall for this blog, for instance.  But I also know that when I sit down to write a book, and spend years doing so, I hope to be paid something for doing so.  And I don’t appreciate social media companies that have enough money to buy the moon stealing from me.  There’s a reason my social media use is minimal.  I’d rather think.