Discarding Neil Gaiman

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If you haven’t read the Vulture exposé on Neil Gaiman, here it is. It ain’t pretty.

I first heard about this in hints from William Morris; I did not immediately seek out more information. Perhaps for the same reason I take issue with this observation:

Don’t people deserve time to grapple with new information? to mourn?

William’s responding to a fellow who said that the only appropriate response to Gaiman’s actions would be life in prison. Which I find even more troubling.

I want to be clear: in no way am I defending Neil Gaiman. But we as Americans are already way too happy sending our fellow citizens to prison. This call for suffering to solve the problem of suffering is never great but in a time where we are battling authoritarianism within our own nation, that impulse could be used against us in a hurry.

But I never would have written this little essay were it not for something another friend posted on Bluesky:

This led to others (including people I like quite a lot) piling on, saying they’d always felt this about him and complimenting the term “cruelty mining” as being just the right critical lens through which to view his work. To the exclusion of all others, I suppose.

Again, I’m not here to defend Gaiman’s actions as described in Vulture. They’re abhorrent and sad. But we’ll get to them.

My first thing, the thing I felt I had to say something about, was this Calvinistic take of Meg’s and how I find it deeply troubling.

The fact that folks from many marginalized groups have found themselves in Gaiman’s work for decades should count for something. His longtime allyship with Tori Amos, including in her role as public rape victim, should count for something. That women in particular have felt seen and accepted through his work should count for something. Discovering his late sins does not retroactively turn him into a monster-since-birth.

Reminds me of a seven-year-old who knew the penny was heads all along—as soon as he sees it is heads (whether he had said heads previously or not).

Anyway.

Enough with knocking the rhetoric of my friends.

I’m on record (many, many times) as saying that Gaiman’s shorter work is better. His comics, short stories, and children’s novels tend toward the excellent. I haven’t read a single novel of his for adults that struck me as all that good.

(A list of reviews [likely incomplete] available over on Thutopia: The Sandman [comics]; “Metamorpho” [comics]; Fragile Things [short stories]; Best American Comics 2010 [as editor]; Chivalry [comics]; Fortunately, the Milk [children’s novel]; Norse Mythology [retellings;] Trigger Warning [short stories]; Black Orchid [comics]; The Graveyard Book [children’s novel]; Neverwhere [novel]. Among the other works I’ve read but are not listed here, probably because I read them before I started keeping track, are Coraline, Smoke and Mirrors, American Gods, Death: The High Cost of Living. Also, little books like picture books generally don’t get reviewed. Yet no matter how you count, I’ve read a good amount of his work.)

I’m struck now by a story that appeared in Smoke and Mirrors, “Tastings.” This is a super-graphic story that takes place entirely during a sex scene. The costly male prostitute is wonderfully successful at his job because his has psychic powers that let him know what women want, nibble by thrust, before they know it themselves. This preternatural skill, as you might imagine, makes him very popular. In the story, however, the woman he’s having sex with is some sort of succubus who sucks away all his psychic powers. And while he will remain skilled at the sex, something is gone that will never return.

It’s easy to see myriad ways this story might apply to the Vulture story, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

What I’m thinking about more than the story itself is the author’s note for that story. And just how embarrassed Gaiman was to have written it. He was as shocked as we were. Even through the words on the page you could see the red in his cheeks. He had fulfilled the assignment he was given but he wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

The first time I was disappointed in Gaiman as a person was 2007 when he divorced his wife of 22 years. This felt like a true celebrity divorce; behold! a man who had found fame and success and fans upon fans upon fans—then suddenly discovered he was too cool for the wife of his youth, for the mother of his children. That decision felt then (and now) portentous. While his art might survive the transition, it seemed probable that his soul was now a different man’s soul.

This, too, is judgmental, I admit. But I want to be clear that my judgment, while also faulty and preferably avoidable, is based on actions and not my “always was” reading of a person’s art. The reason I was saddened-but-not-surprised to hear of this once-good man’s fall is because he had already fallen—when he left his family. Not because I didn’t like American Gods.

The Vulture article reveals a man who has now had decades of experience justifying one thing and then another thing and then another thing until he became a monster.

Now, sure, we might find out next that he was a-raping people in 1992, and that will be a new conversation. But let’s not assume that.

What’s troubling me now, what I need to speak out against today, is how, upon uncovering a crime, voices insist this person was predetermined for hell. I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that. And painting an entire person’s life (and work) with a brush dipped in their current sins is, I think, wrong. We shouldn’t do it.

It is better to mourn than to have been right all along.

Maybe we should just pretend this set begins and ends with Wednesday Addams

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I look over this collection of recently read and . . . I mean the beloved cartoonists and the Novel Prize–winner come close, but I think maybe the best thing here is the pornography? Can that be right?

Egad. I need to read better books.

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007) Chas. Addams Half-Baked Cookbook, finished January 29

It's a lovely little collection off Addams's culinary cartoons, interspersed with peculiar recipes you'd assume he made up but which come from various cookbooks over the last couple centuries.

between bouts of arguing teenagers

008) Monica by Daniel Clowes, finished February 3

I don't really love Clowes, though I appreciate him and wish I liked him more. I often tell myself that I'll read his new thing but, if my brief search is accurate, I haven't, not since 2011.

So when I say I liked this one perhaps the most of all his work, I don't know what I'm talking about. (My favorite thing of his remains the Ghost World movie.)

I like how this one is broken up by time and narrative and takes a moment to settle on Monica as our point-of-view characters. How some of Monica's fiction filters in. I like how he slides through her story, focusing on different parts in different orders. This aspect is similar to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters but it arguably works better and more naturally with an older narrator.

I'm undecided, if I think the final two panels are a copout, simply bad, or appropriate. I'm leaning copout at the moment. It kinda felt like it was just a way to finish this project. Did he have a deadline to meet or something?

But perhaps I am wrong.

three days

 

009) The Unexpurgated French Edition of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, finished February 19

This edition is introduced by Louis Untermeyer who edited one of the most influential books from my childhood. His intro is largely about the history of banning and charges of obscenity and such the book's been subject to over the years and the inevitability of its ultimate redemption leading to this edition. It's not clear to me is that's because we're finally wise enough to see that Fanny's not obscene or simply that, in comparison to what Billy Joel called "British politician sex," the news these days has got nothing on her.

The book took a long time to read because it has minimal plot and minimal characterization. Fanny's really the only character worth noting and she ain't got many notes herself. She comes to the city at fifteen, gets taken in by a madam, and spends the next four years living in a fantasy. If only a life of prostitution was always so cheerful! She really only meets one bad customer in her time (and the more experienced girls teach her how to fool him into receiving nothing at all) and the only truly horrifying thing she witnesses is too dudes in a barn. Sadly she slips and hits her head so they can get away before she turns them in which means that the books can keep its general ethos of consequence-free sex without seeming like it's approving of homosexuality with the same vigor in which it approves of straight sex.

Essentially, it's 250 pages of nonstop Bad Sex in Fiction Award–winners. Although worse in the sense that Cleland clearly has some level of expertise in fifteen-year-old breasts he's eager to share with us and he really, really wants to talk about pensises but he only has so many descriptors available to him.

The gay guys show up when Cleland was getting board as well. That scene is immediately proceeded by Fanny volunteering for a whipping (which she finds interesting but not enough to ever do again) and followed by her friend seducing the local idiot (Fanny herself being to moral than to do more than strip him in order to see if it's true what they say about simpletons).

And then Cleland pretty much stops writing about Fanny's exploits because he's ready to rush through some plot in order to reunite her with her true love.

So is Untermeyer right? Are Fanny Hill's adventure's no longer that dirty in the modern world?

Well, I tried out a lot of definitions for pornography in LDS EROS. Let's consider a couple.

D.H. Lawrence: "Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."

I mean . . . no. Cleland clearly thinks he's exposing sex and beautiful and wondrous and something everyone can get into without moral qualm. Fanny even gives a little (confusing) speech about virtue and vice in the final pages. And it's not entirely clear what her point is but certainly she thinks she has demonstrated the cleanliness of a good romp. That said, her Memoirs are clearly a big fat lie. Teenagers sucked into the oldest trade in 1700s London didn't all live in the kind of carefree luxury, bouncing from one fine appointment to the next, as does Fanny. And if lying isn't doing dirt, I don't know what is. My guess is that Cleland was the sort of well-appointed john who either never saw the awful other side or was skilled enough at lying to hide it even from himself. Or he just had fun writing fantasies about nubile women whilst languishing in prison.

Levi Peterson: "It is gross disproportion that creates pornography. . . . [When things are] amassed, concentrated, enormously emphasized --- if they become the single end and purpose of the writing --- they are pornographic."

Oh, ho! Levi's nailed it here. This is Fanny to a T.

Bruce Jorgensen: "[A pornographic event requires] three elements: a porn author, a porn text, and a porn reader. In fact, it seems to me that the porn event seldom requires all three, though it always requires one: just a porn reader. Porn author and porn text make the event more likely but do not inevitably guarantee it."

It's interesting to not that Cleland claimed he wrote the novel to prove it was possible to write about prostitution without vulgarity. It's not clear to me what he means. The current definition of vulgarity seems quite well met by Fanny Hill, although it's probable Cleland meant "vulgarity" in the sense of "common" or "lower-class." In which . . . I guess so? But I don't really know which me meant. But I do suspect he was certainly a porn author writing a porn text. And even though it took me an insanely long period of time (not sure if I'm counting Octobers accurately), I'm embarrassed I finished it. Even though I do think Untermeyer was correct, at least in that there is something to be said about spending time with our narrator who is cheerful and interesting and good company and, good for her, getting a Dickensian happy ending filled with wealth and happy coincidence.

And if that's not pornography, I don't know what is.

either sixteen or twenty-eight months

 

010) Peach and the Isle of Monsters by Franco Aureliani and Agnes Garbowska, finished February 20

This is...not that good. Franco's trying something new (which is great) but it doesn't work. Instead of characters developing, they just pass through certain cliched story beats with the assumption that'll work for us. Well, it didn't work for me.

lunch

 

011) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished February 28

This book appeared on semester on the dystopian-options list I provide students. It was selected by a group and they loved the book but they said it certainly was not dystopian (possibly even utopian), just the near future and world not that much different from ours. So I removed it from the list.

And I'll leave it off the list but not because I agree with them. In fact, I think Klara and the Sun is deeply dystopian—but in subtle ways that might be difficult for teenagers reading on their own to discover. Largely because this novel takes place as a dystopia is being formed. It's not quite obvious yet. And it's certainly not obvious to Klara who narrates the book.

Klara is a robot—an AF, a term never defined but which to me instantly suggested artificial friend. The first half of the book is dull dull dull. Klara's in the store. Klara's looking out the window. Klara's waiting for something to take her home. It's like if Corduroy never went on his adventure and yet his time in the store was hundreds of pages long. Then she is picked up by a family and nothing continues happening.

But all that stuff is important later on as we come to understand Klara better. She has an alien but rich inner life. She worships the sun, for instance. She's a careful observer. She has a sunny understanding of humanity, even when perhaps she should not.

I don't want to get too deeply into spoilers here although I would love to really dig in and analyze this book and the fascinating decisions it makes. It gets into plenty of fun and sticky topics from the ancient (family, love, growing up) to the contemporary (a.i., climate responsibility, genetic engineering). Ishiguro weaves these together in provocative ways. All through Klara who is about the least provocative character you can imagine. And all the human characters appreciate her purity while never seeing her as a thing particularly human. Which turns into a deep irony when the book's most shocking reveal presents itself.

In the end, as Klara fades away, I'm happy for her. She's lived a good live. She's fulfilled her purpose. She is happy. She has entered into the rest of the Sun.

Yet the world around her, though she cannot see it, is awful and getting worse all the time.

And the people have too many mundane tasks to genuinely appreciate their decent.

Pretty prescient stuff.

perhaps a month

 

012) Comic Poems edited by Peter Washington, finished March 7

Nothing like reading a collection of humor to see how similar you are to a person. I mentioned Louis Untermeyer's collection above. Most of that I liked, some I loved, some I simply did not find funny. Overall, that collection's a win.

I laughed a few times in this one but I was much more often utterly mystified as to why anyone would label this thing "comic." I recommend finding another collection of comic poems, if you're in the market but—and this is important—you are not me.

ten months

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INCIDENTALLY, starting with #12, I think I'm no longer linking to Amazon. I never make that much money off affiliate links anyway and Bezos's final abandonment of seeming principledness with the Washington Post is leading to me stepping away. I'll start here, but as soon as I bite down and drop Prime (will that kill Alexa??) I'll also drop my (once beloved) Washington Post subscription.

(But Bezos is wealthy because his fingers touch even-invisible aspects of our life. I'll never be free of him so long as billionaires are allowed to exist.)

I've already been linking to Bookshop whenever possible. When that's not possibly, I'll now use Alibris as my backup, it being a collective of independent bookstores that sell used. That should work as well as anything can.

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PREVIOUSLY THIS YEAR IN BOOKS

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1
002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1
003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8
004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11
005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12
005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24
006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25

 

PREVIOUS OTHER YEARS IN BOOKS

2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012 = 2013 = 2014 = 2015
2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020 = 2021 = 2022 = 2023 = 2024

 

Ghost! Gorilla! Rat!

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I was just looking through this month's movies and I had already forgotten I watched Ne Zha specifically so I could wawtch Ne Zha 2.

Is it still in theaters?

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THEATER
Cinemark Century Hilltop 16

Presence (2024)

Loved it.

Yes, it's a ghost story, but it plays more like a murder mystery. We don't know what's going to happen, but the clues are being laid out for us. We just have to pick them up. And there are stellar red herrings (SO MANY windows that don't open!), but the revelation arrives just before the revelation, if you know what I mean. And it was a deeply satisfying answer. The more it settles, the more I think it was excellent.

And since I won't get to see Nickel Boys in theaters, glad to see something else from perspective. Even if it's not getting as much chatter.

At least on first viewing, I liked it better than A Ghost Story—although as this one two settles into memory, it'll be a battle.

HOME
my parents' dvd

The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

First, after seeing this movie and how a simple pair of glasses transforms James Stewart into Glenn Miller, I will never listen to another crackpot theory about Clark Kent's insufficient disguise ever again.

I understand this movie is "loosely based" on truth so I have no idea how much I just learned versus how much I am now wrong about, but it's a fun movie. Plus, the crammed SO MUCH music into it. I kept saying, "They've now played all the Glenn Miller songs I know," and I kept being wrong.

History regardless, I liked the performances and I was moved by the ending.

ELSEWHERE
Hoopla

Sylvio (2017)

Showing it to another class. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes it doesn't. I thought this was mostly doesn't but, someone came into class the next day telling me they loved it and they cried when he was among the clouds.

HOME
our dvd

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

We let Sons Two and Three watch and they both loved it and want to read King's original novella. And I think that's great.

HOME
Disney+

Ratatouille (2007)

I haven't really been willing to watch this film since first seeing in in theaters back in 2007 (!). Why? Because I didn't love it. And for so many people, it's a pantheon-level film. Not just a good movie, but a deeply important classic with few if any peers. Many bigshots consider it the finest Pixar film. Lots of people born after it came out consider it the best of all time. I have this one assignment I've been giving for years where each student needs to provide an example from the narrative artform of their choice. I think I've heard "Ratatouille is my favorite movie" more than I've heard something similar about anything else, movie, novel, or otherwise. And I've liked being able to say, "Gee whiz, you know what, believe it or not, I haven't seen it since theaters, so . . . ."

But the littles child's been asking to watch it for a couple weeks now (it's her friends favorite movie, natch) and my pleasure in not being forced to say Ratatouille ain't that great is a terrible excuse not to show it to a child who wants to see it.

(Incidentally, this never happened with the boys because, again, natch, this film appears to be among the most-shown-to-kids-in-school films going. So they'd already seen it.)

And I'm relieved (and delighted?) to tell you I loved it. Every scene worked for me. Every development made sense. The character beats and the plot beats were playing the same melody. The film had the good sense to leave out some of the most important moment because, actually, they weren't necessary. And the complexity of Anton Ego drawn from so few strokes is a masterclass in restraint and clarity. It's astonishing stuff. A really good movie. I'm so happy you were all right.

Though it's still not my favorite Pixar movie.

HOME
Link+ dvd

Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997)

A bright-eyed young housewife gets her radio-drama script picked up and watches and the various egos and lackeys putting it on slowly destroy it on air. The movie starts mildly amusing but gets funnier and funnier as it goes along.

Not a surprise it started life as a stage play. It would be uproarious live theater. I think that's probably its ideal form, but the movie was delightful.

The only actor I recognized was the last one credited—a young Ken Watanabe as a truck driver listening to the show in his truck and always juuuust about to change the station. Only six years from being second banana on The Last Samurai! Amazing.

But I think my favorite character was the young writer. Her journey from humble joy to horror to fighting back and back to innocent joy is fabulous. I'd certainly watch her in something else.

THEATER
Cinemark Century Hilltop 16

Dog Man (2025)

I first became aware of Dav Pilkey circa 2001 when I checked out copies of his 1993 picture books Kat Kong and Dogzilla from the Orem Library. These books are hilarious. I have no idea why Lady Steed and I found them at the library, but we read them many times before we had kids and laughed every time. I am not the least surprised they are still in print. I'm only sad we never bought our own copies. Since our post-Utah local libraries never had them I foolishly assumed they were just out of print until just now. What a fool I've been.

I don't think it should be controversial to say Pilkey is one of the most important American comedic writers of the last thirty years. And if we're measuring by comics of the last thirty years who's influence will be felt for the next sixty, he might be #1. I'm not joking. It's possible all the young Millennial / Gen Z / Gen Alpha / Gen Beta comedy-craftors of the coming decades won't realize it consciously, but on a bone-deep level, they will owe a lot to Pilkey—to Captain Underpants, to Dog Man. You know it's true. His books have been read and reread more than Harry Potter by kids at their most tractable. And the two movies are solid.

All of which is to say this is a very fun movie and dumb as all get out and thus respectful to the source material. Pilkey has the good sense to let the books be the main driver and to keep the movies limited. But I'm sure we'll see more eventually. And rightly so.

He's the best we've got.

HOME
Link+ dvd

eXistenZ (1999)

One month after The Matrix came out, Canada gave us this film, very different and very alike.

People are within the game. Then they go a layer deeper. Then they come out. Or maybe they don't. It's as much like Inception as it is The Matrix.

This is somehow only my second Cronenberg film and it wasn't as gross as I know they get. But I did think it captured '90s gaming very well and it raised the kinds of questions Mark Zuckerberg really thinks are about to be relevant. But in a way, if you get less relevent, they're already hella relevant.

Is this still the game?

HOME
YouTube

Ne Zha (2019)

The sequel is currently making the most money a single movie has ever made in a single market, and it's just become the highest grossing animated film of all time. Scott Mendelson liked it (although his taste is sometimes questionable). And the original's on YouTube and I have some time to kill so why not?

It's good. Dreamworks quality. I did like how different (foreign) it is compared to an American movie. But it's just fine. Can the sequel really be that much better?

It is (was) January. What kind of giant fish do you desire?

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I wanted to crank out four Nosferatus this month. Did not succeed but at least I caught the nost challenging subspecies. Also some truly wonderful flights and at least one piece of crap. Not many movies but a dandy variety.

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HOME
our dvd

Zoolander (2001)

I don't think I've seen this since we moved back to California. So that's been a while. Though Lady Steed and I still speculate that we might be getting the black lung.

The oldest son was here over the break and wanted to watch the movie with us and so we did. And darn it—it's still very funny.

I don't have much else to say except the IMDB should change the top-listed rating to PG-13 since it was only rated R briefly and was pg-13 before it hit theaters and sver since. So it seems off. And I've seen the R in articles (recent example) which I suspect is IMDB's fault.

Anyway. Happy New Year!

HOME
Kanopy

Maniac (1934)

I'm not sure when I've seen a worse-written movie. Yes, it's playing one note from a Poe story and masquerading as an educational film, but egad. I'm glad one of the characters called out another for being a ham because holy smokes but that's all that exists anywhere in this movie. It is truly abysmal.

And that, I take it, is its appeal

HOME
son's dvd

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

I read Crow Killer c. 2001, so it's been a minute. And I suspect the movie's more based on Fisher's take anyway. Regardless. We're talking about the movie.

Which made me want to rewatch Hundreds of Beavers. Or, more precisely, show it to the son we gave this to. We'd forgotten he was at college both times we've seen it. Dang it.

Jeremiah Johnson is wild and impressionistic and mad, confusing in time and space, I think intentionally so. As is the ending. Which is plenty ambiguous.

It could also really use a cleanup. The shots are lovely but they don't look that great on the dvd.

HOME
Kanopy

Dear Frankie (2004)

This film doesn't offer anything that new or any great surprises, but it makes the right choices in its concluding scenes which allows you leave it feeling respected and like you had a good time. As opposed to manipulated and annoyed. We've all had that experience. It also opens the door to a happy ending without cramming one down our throats.

It's hard to say how it pulls it off. Many plot bits, out of context, seem to betray what I said, yet it's true—the film works.

Truly, cinema is a mystery.

Anyway, this one's about a deaf boy whose mother has been hiding his absent father's awfulness from him through a game of penpal. Then things get complicated but never all the way to schlocky. Well done, team.

THEATER
The Lark Theater

Nosferatu X Radiohead (1922/2024)

I kinda wish they'd done a bit more curation on the music. Sometimes the Radiohead worked wonders, other times it was just background noise, and sometimes it didn't seem right. THAT SAID, sometimes it was amazing. And overall, I really liked the combo.

I haven't seen this since 2001 and so even though I know the story, I didn't remember exactly how things played out. They did add a visual element that, had I known about it, would have turned me off—but it was actually really great. Good work, team.

I am disappointed though that they didn't use a tinted version. As part of my plan to watch three Nosferatus before seeing the new one (yes, I am behind schedule), I intended to watch the tinted 1922. And I wish I had. Although I'm very happy I saw this version, it's so hard to tell suntime from nighttime without the tinting. And since I'm pretty sure there were people in my showing who hadn't seen many silents before, what a cool chance to educate people!

For most of the movie, I simply enjoyed it. But the final scenes with Ellen's heroism and some more hella creepy Orlock turned the entire experience into something deeply satisfying.

I loved it.

HOME
YouTube

Clue (1985)

So great. Solid mystery while taking the genre apart. Great comedic acting: face, voice, and body. Fabulous lines and silences. And no dumber than it has to be.

Perfection.

THEATER
Rialto Cerrito

Flow (2025)

I get why people like it to much but having seen it, I no longer view it as a darkhorse for the animated-feature Oscar. Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot will take it.

That said, it's a great little film. The water's amazing. The characters alien but accessible. The setting mysterious but not distracting. I really liked it. And I think it will age well as it turns into memory.

But the comments about small children also liking it are debatable. Most of the kids in our theater seemed fine. Except our 8yrold.

Embarrassing.

HOME
library dvd

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Another insanely wondrous fantasy from Karel Zeman. It's not hard to see his influences or who has been influenced by him, but he is very much his own thing, characters interacting with animations and illustrations and every mad notion a persona can imagine. I loved it so much and I wish someone—anyone!—would be bold enough to do this today. The trailer can give you only the slightest idea of what's in store for you.

Neither can any still image explain the marvelous majesty of the moving images, but here's one. Click it to see more.

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

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It's 2025, friends. A time in which, as Maria Dahvana Headley said of 2020 in the introduction to her Beowulf translation, "everyone, including small children, has the capacity to be as deadly as the spectacular warriors of this poem . . . to slay thirty men in a minute [is] no longer the genius of a select few but a purchasable perk of weapon ownership."

In other words, the modern world is nothing like the ancient and we have solved all our problems and it's happily ever after for humanity.

Ha ha ha.

Anyway, looks like I'm starting the year off, literarily, with the appropriate measure of optimism.

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001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1

I heard of this in a car ride back from a union meeting when two of my colleagues suddenly started quoting it and praising it and recommending it and wishing they could teach it (having read it, I don't see why not) and talking about all the people they'd given copies to.

So I went to the library and got it.

And I had a great time too, though I'm not sure I'll be quoting it or forcing it on people. My time wasn't that great.

Afterwards, I read the acknowledgments and then the intro and those were useful and provocative as well.

My first interaction with Beowulf came through a Childcraft Annual (which I just learned continued publishing through 2022! I wish I'd known!) and, like Headley in her introduction, those early illustrations still define how I see—in my case—Grendel. It's what I always picture, no matter the translation. Even after Headley made me see Grendel and Beowulf as the same size.

This book is awesome, by the way. I also read a translation of Chaucer (don't worry—not the Wife of Bath) and Shakespeare and Dickens in their own words. I learned about etymology and how English both conquered and was conquered. I loved this book and reread it often. I'd argue it might be the seed of me today but I loved Prehistoric Animals and Mathemagic just as much and, well, you don't see me digging in Montana or chalkboarding at Oxford, so who knows.

From reading that excerpt over and over (and forgetting it's just an excerpt?) and reading bits and pieces in various classes over the years, I failed to remember it was not my first time with the entire text when Seamus Heaney narrated his translation to me one long, solo car trip circa 2005—which was an amazing experience. It's a terrific storytelling, he's a terrific storyteller, and I had no idea there was anything after Grendel's mom! Beowulf gets old? And fights a dragon!

Great stuff.

And I haven't really touched Beowulf since then. Until now, with this fresh translation. Which I also loved and enjoyed. And which I now commend to you. Bro—tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

under a week

002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1

We picked this up at Comic-Con in July but didn't get around to giving the kids all the books we picked up until yesterday (Christmas Observed 2024) and this is the one someone left within my reach.

We got this one because Son Three liked the first volume we got on our last San Diego trip (precovid). We was excited to get this one. I hope he likes it.

Me? It was . . . fine. It has the same problems most comics anthos have (and the same promise). This one started strong but it got to the point where two in a row ended with THE END? and that's about it, you know?

two days

003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8

This is a fascinating little book. A lot of the comparisons are made to Henry James, by which I think people mean Turn of the Screw. Because it's a literary ghost story. Sometimes I wonder if Turn of the Screw is the only "genre" work some people have read.

Anyway, the title and cover may be why I bought this book

so I guess I should be annoyed now, after the fact, that the title in Spanish is something more like Rescue Distance which is probably a better title. It's a more precise title, anyway.

Fever Dream sets us up to wonder if that's what we're reading. And we kinda are. But, as David would say, that's not the important part. The ending's a bit confused, so I'm not sure what the important part is, but I'm not sure the book even agrees with itself on that point.

Anyway, it seems like a ghost story, but as we come to understand more of what's happening, we realize that nothing here need be supernatural. Some of the stuff is difficult to explain away with natural events, but the most terrifying aspects of the story not only can be but just are. Real things are the horror here.

But the playing-around-with of language and ideas makes it all the more effective. May trick you into caring in a way that a straight treatment might not have.

It's good. It's short. Support novellas.

(Although, friend publisher, something I can read in the same amount of time I could watch the movie, maybe shouldn't cost as much as a hardback of 500 pages.)

Other things connected to Turn of the Screw: The Other Typist | The Innocents^thub | The Grownup^thub

three days

004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11

I reread this in preparation for reading volume two, now out.

It's still incredible.

maybe two weeks 

005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12

This is a Scholastic comic version of one of the sillier Peanuts specials, the one on Motocross.

It's a fun read but make no mistake: it's very silly.

This is not the reason I say things like "Peanuts is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American art and lit."

under ten minutes

005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24

I really liked this book, even if it did not entirely make sense. What I mean is, it's chockfull of excellent points, moments, pages, paragraphs, ideas. But I'm not sure the book as a whole has a coherent thesis. All the good ideas do add up to something akin to what the title promises, but you can assemble a punch of pieces you found on the battlefield without getting your boyfriend back.

Anyway, as I said, I really liked the book. I could quote stuff off of almost every page with delight. Plus, it's short. So it's overall coherence isn't a deal breaker. If I'd read five hundred pages and ended with a "Wut" or an "And so—?" I might be angry. But not with something as skinny as this.

The book is split into three parts. The first two talk about modern ideas (rationalism, scientism) allegedly in conflict with faith and reveals how they too are rather faith-like; the third is about faith.

Incidentally, although the book is not written in a way to be explicitly LDS, it does cite more LDS folks that you might normally expect from any other book published by a non LDS press for a non-LDS audience. Plus, it references the Book of Mormon a couple times (sans citation).

Let's a have a couple of those quotations, shall we?

Cleaving to the impactful reality of an original experience is not a natural response; it requires an act of will and fortitude. Hence the definition of C.S. Lewis has sound neurological bases: "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."

(and then the Ginvenses immediate disagree with Lewis; which is something they do a lot: use science to show that science is limited, etc etc)

"I had brought him lunch, and as we sat at the table sunlight fell upon a crystal in [his wife] Phyllis's collection, scattering patches of rainbow color over the walls and ceiling. 'There!' said Wayne [Booth], 'don't you feel grateful?' 'It's beautiful,' I said, 'and it makes me happy, but I don't feel grateful. I wish I did. I'm glad that you do.'"

The difference between these two men, between appreciation of beauty and feeling gratitude for that beauty, is the recognition of an agent behind that beauty....

[second brackets mine]

No matter how firm a conviction of genuine faith is, it participates in an essential humility. That is because faith is an expression of our weakness. Faith makes us vulnerable. If you have faith in something you don't fully understand—like God, or his canonized Word—then you cannot say ahead of time where that faith will take you. That can be scary. Presumptuous certainty sheilds us from that risk. The risk is that our faith might be wrong, certainly, but more importantly the risk is that our faith might grow into something difference and take us to unforseen destinations....

Presumptuous certainty is not exaggerated faith in God. It is idolotry. We turn our conception of God—our expectations of who he is, what he is like, and what he would do—into an idol. Idols are inanimate objects, and so they are safe. God is a living being, and so a relationship with him carries risk. When we live by faith, we live precariously.

Ironically, the expert they cite here uses Christopher Hitchens as an example of the dangers of presumptuous certainty. Lol.

Perhaps the most useful takeaway from the book for me personally is not easily quoted. The elephant-and-the-rider metaphor comes from another book, but they put it to great use here. In short, the animal, subconscious mind is the elephant. Our conscious self is the rider. And that's why we can't always control what we do. There's so much going on below the surface.

I think most of us know this, but the Givenses explain this excellently and briefly and honestly the book is worth grabbing just to ingest this summary.

If you need more convincing, you might consider the much finer review that talked me into reading it.

a couple weeks

006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25

Another monster volume, but there are striking differences between the two. Karen seems more grown up—less child, more adolescent. More grown into her wolf body. The book is filled with moments where she says she'll tell us later. It would be an interesting critical experiment to follow up on all those.

Unfortunately for Karen, as secrets get revealed, the explanations are not happy. We never hear the end of Anka's story. But, in a real way, we hear the beginning of Karen's. Even as she leaves all the beginnings she's been making with her friends behind.

It's a truly awful story, but it filled me with empathy for people who find themselves in a series of horrors such that they have no options short of letting the monsters win or becoming a monster themselves.

I hope they find peace.

two weeks

A svithe on friendship

 

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I have a new calling which involves me giving a lot more talks than I have been. Which means I’ll be posting a lot more svithes than I have been.

I'm scheduling this Friday evening so any final edits ain't here. I'm sure the live version will be much, much better.

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JOSEPH!

That’s Jesus talking. He’s addressing Joseph Smith. Joseph had just asked the one annoying question Jesus had been steadfastly refusing to answer since at least the Resurrection: When’s the Second Coming? I mean—maybe—if the Lord weren’t always making it sound so cool—talking about coming “in a cloud with power and great glory”—maybe this wouldn’t happen, but here we are.

“Joseph,” he says, “Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.”

Joseph wasn’t really sure what to make of that answer. But I’ll tell you what I make of it. Our Savior had a friendly relationship with his prophet. He could yank his chain a little. That’s something friends do.

But friends are good for more than laughs. When Joseph was in Liberty Jail, the Lord was there.

Joseph felt alone. He cried out: “Where art thou? Where is…thy hiding place?”

Joseph was afraid and in pain and so he reached out.

And the Lord reached back.

“My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.”

Joseph wasn’t the Savior’s first friend, of course. Remember in John when he said, “love one another, as I have loved you”? He followed that with “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” and “Ye are my friends.”

Jesus emphasized friendship to his modern apostles as well.

In the D&C he says, “As I said unto mine apostles, even so I say unto you, for you are mine apostles…you are my friends.”

And: “Henceforth I shall call you friends.”

And: “I will call you friends, for you are my friends, and you shall have an inheritance with me.”

And: “It is expedient…that you become even as my friends in [the] days when I was with them, traveling to preach the gospel in my power. ”

Ah, the good old days. Traveling around dusty Judea with friends, preaching the gospel.

It’s not often that we are invited, like Peter or James or John, to leave everything behind and preach the gospel. Currently, I am stressed over this new calling. As the high councilor assigned to M****a, I should attend their meetings as often as I can. Haven’t been there yet. But as the Sunday School president, I’m supposed to attend every ward as often as I can. But, at the same time, I should be attending my home ward. How will I, the ward historian, do any history if I don’t know what’s going on! And it’s a busy year in B******y—we’re prepping for the 100^th anniversary of the B******y Branch. I feel like I should be there helping.

But still. No one’s asking me to quit my job, or travel without purse or scrip, or leave behind father or mother, or any of those things that, say, Peter was asked to do.

I guess the closest I’ve come to that was when I was nineteen and called to serve a mission. And I loved my mission. It was hard, but there’s a strong corollary, in the Lord’s service, between working hard and having fun. So I worked hard and I had fun.

But then the last day came. And I left my companion at the airport and I climbed onto an airplane. And as I sat on the tarmac, waiting to fly to my mission president’s office, I realized there was nothing else I could do. My mission was over. Whatever I was sent to do, I had either done it or not done it. There was no doing it tomorrow.

It was a sobering thought. I didn’t expect to die at age 21, but in a real way, this was death. I was done, over, kaput. Elder Thteed? No longer a person. I had entered some sort of purgatory. And when I exited, I would be Theric again, not Elder. It was over.

So I sat there on that airplane and I wondered if I had done what the Lord had sent me to do. Were my two years worth anything? Had I gone where he’d wanted me to go, over mountain and plain and sea? Had I said what he’d wanted me to say? Had I been what he wanted me to be?

I wasn’t sure.

And that was a heavy load. But as I sat there, looking out the window, waiting for the plane to taxi into takeoff, a song came into my head. Maybe not one you would guess. A Frank Sinatra song, actually. One that’s big with the kids these days for some reason. A song I hadn’t heard before but had heard a lot the last couple months, from hanging out with a new member. And it was just the right song. Frank became the voice of the Lord, telling me that he had called me to serve in that place at that time. Me! He had called me. And because he had called me, he had wanted me.

Which meant he knew me.

And that’s what the Lord does. He knows us. Like a friend.

But he’s not our only friend.

To come back to Liberty Jail for a moment, near the end of the comfort the Lord offered, he made this observation:

“Thy friends[, Joseph,] do stand by thee. And they shall hail thee again with warm hearts and friendly hands.”

Joseph had lots of friends.

Much of the Doctrine and Covenants is Joseph asking questions of the Lord for his friends. Making an introduction, you might say.

Joseph was a big believer in friendship. I could spend almost an entire sacrament meeting quoting him on the topic, but here is one:

“Friendship,” he says, “is one of the grand fundamental principles of ‘Mormonism’ to revolutionize and civilize the world—and cause wars and contentions to cease—and [people] to become friends.”

Don’t, ah, tell President Nelson that Joseph Smith said “Mormonism.” I don’t want to cause any…problems….

But I love this. Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of our faith. And it’s a tool we have to civilize the world.

Think about it. We’re here to be friends. And to bring friendship to the world. That’s a pretty good way to think about missionary work!

This is something the world needs right now.

Never mind all the arguing and disagreements, the Surgeon General recently reported that loneliness is an epidemic, that

“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking…15 cigarettes a day….”

I’m an English teacher and I care a lot about language, but to me, our need for friends was most elegantly captured in The Bride of Frankenstein when the creature comes across a blind hermit. Presumably the hermit went into the woods to live alone and worship God, but it ends up that’s not so great. He’s lonely. And when the creature arrives—perhaps because the hermit is blind—or perhaps because his blindness and his loneliness allow him to see a fellow creature more clearly—he gives the creature his first lessons on language and kindness.

— Before you came, [he says,] l was all alone. It is bad to be alone.

— Alone, bad. Friend, good. Friend, good!

It’s so simple.

Alone: bad.

Friend: good.

And if it’s okay with you, let’s just pretend the movie ends there with a happy ending. Cool? Cool.

Section 128 is a letter Joseph Smith sent the Saints that has since been canonized. And Joseph doesn’t end his letter with “Sincerely,” or “Have a nice Tuesday.” He ends it with “I am, as ever, your humble servant and never-deviating friend.”

Joseph Smith believed that a friend never deviates. And that belief of his is right there in our scriptures.

And this, the ward, is an easy chance to be friends, never-deviating friends. Saying hello to the person sitting alone. Doing our ministering. Smiling.

When I was ten, the economy of Bear Lake County, Idaho, totally collapsed. I probably don’t have the numbers right, but I remember being told that when the phosphorus factory closed, unemployment went up to something like 75%. My dad was working any piddling crap job he could trying to keep us fed. And when he found what sounded like a good job in California, he took it. We moved to C****s on Valentine’s Day, 1987. And the job was…not as great as promised. He took extra jobs, midnights at a convenience store—whatever he could find. We were poor. And we didn’t know anybody.

But we had a ward. C****s 2^nd. And they took us in. One family in particular who were also from Bear Lake, but had come to California years earlier and were doing just fine, had us over for dinner regularly. They taught us how to play Spoons. They tried and failed to hook us on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I know now much more than I did when I was a kid about how much the B***es helped my parents socially and emotionally. My mom had never been so far from her parents and siblings. Neither had my dad, if you ignore his mission. They—us—were isolated and alone. Or we would have been. But we had a ward. We had friends.

Elder Richard G. Scott suggested we can read one famous scripture like this:

And friendship suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up. . . . friendship is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with them.

At the last day, we won’t be just with the friends we’re with today, but with our friends who have gone before.

Joseph Smith said:

“I…remember…the faithful of my friends who are dead, for they are many; and many are the acts of kindness…which they…bestowed upon me…. There are many souls whom I have loved stronger than death. To them I have proved faithful—to them I am determined to prove faithful, until God calls me to resign up my breath.”

Joseph Smith welcomed people he had never met as they came off the ferry to Nauvoo. He shook their hands and said hello. He hoped to become their friend.

What would it mean for Joseph Smith to be your friend?

Sure, he’s dead, but death was never a boundary he had much respect for. And his friend, Jesus Christ, obliterated that barrier for us all.

And when we are friends with Joseph—when we are friends with Sidney and Emma and Hyrum—or at least willing to be their friends—how will that change our engagement with the Doctrine & Covenants?

I don’t know, not really, what it means to become the friend of Joseph and Emma in 2025, but as we read the Doctrine and Covenants this year, let’s remember that friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism—we’re all about people becoming friends. Here in this chapel. At our jobs and in our neighborhoods. Across all time and space.

It’s my testimony that Christ’s gospel is a gospel of friendship. And as we study his words, we can become his friend. And that we will become greater friends to each other.

In the name…..

 

previous svithe: thutopia / thubstack

o no its a political post

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I had a realization the other day while driving in Utah. I figured out something that’s been troubling me about Trump’s 2024 vote, particularly how he cleans up with low-information voters. To explain this, I’ll need to return to 2015. But before that, let’s go all the way back to 1987.

I’m a tween and I hear about Trump for the first time. I think he was in some toolonglist of potential presidential candidates published by a for-the-classroom newspaper, but I would have been more aware of him because I always read the bestseller lists and Art of the Deal was all over that baby.

I wasn’t a voter, but I was certainly low-information. This was all I had on him. And yet I developed a deep dislike of him. Nothing I saw or heard or read in the decades that followed changed my initial impression.

In February 2016, I wrote an essay about all the presidential elections of my lifetime. It got locked up in an opaque editorial process and, by the time it emerged unpublished, it was worthless because I had not seriously considered that Trump might be a possibility in the essay’s finale, the upcoming election.

Needless to say, before November 2016 rolled around, Trump was a possibility, hard as it still was for me to believe.

But I was also heavily biased against Hillary Clinton. This wasn’t because of some childhood instinct, however; this was because I spent most of the Clinton years in Tehachapi, California. In the 1992 mock election my high school held, Bill Clinton was a distant third behind Bush and Perot. It was that kind of town. And so you can imagine the Hillary rhetoric I was surrounded by.

But here came 2016 and those were my choices.

(Aside: My 2000 vote for Nader still haunts me ever so slightly. No way I could consider a third party in 2016.)

I was not raised to particular party loyalty. Although I vote mostly Democrat these days, I always hold the door open. So being a twice-Obama voter didn’t guarantee a vote for Hillary Clinton.

Thus, as a high-information voter, I started researching Trump and Clinton. Big time. All summer and fall I read everything. And the more I read, the more I realized how unfairly I had judged Ms Clinton. She was actually a decent human being and a moral politician.

And the more I realized how correctly Lil Tween Me had judged Mr Trump.

The man is a monster.

This summer, in the one political conversation I had with family, I was told Trump isn’t all that bad, not really, because once he pulled over to help someone who had car troubles and without them knowing who he was he paid for—

Hang on. That story’s about Frank Sinatra. Or Sammy Davis, Jr. Or Nat King Cole. Or Elvis Presley. Or Mrs Nat King Cole. I’ve heard this story a dozen times. It is, in a phrase, a folk tale. It never happened. Certainly, if it did happen, it wasn’t one Donald Trump starting the trend.

Anyway, my point is: as a low-information person I knew Trump was bad news. As a child, I knew. Lady Steed made the same decision around the same time thanks to an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I suspect, if kids were the only voters in 2024, Trump would have lost. Kids ain’t fools.

And this is what’s so upsetting. Low-information voters broke for Trump—and in a big way?

Why?

How?

And what does this say about us?

It makes me wonder if Mosiah was talking about low-information voters when he observed,

“It is not common that the voice of the people desires anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.”

Maybe the majority has always been poorly read and easily swayed. If so, bad news for us in 2025, because that means we might get presidents based not on available information but on the American character—and that character, at present, may not be like a child’s.

Which should worry us because of what Mosiah said next:

“And if the time comes that the voice of the people choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.”

I don’t know how to solve the low-information problem.

I don’t know how to solve the character problem.

But if low-information voters represent who we really are—and mightn’t they?—then we are in real trouble.