Book Sale and Signing!

         This past Saturday I had the great honor to be part of a local author event at the Lebanon, Indiana bookstore Between The Pages. I got to meet seven other local authors, talk about the publishing business, and have conversations about my books with customers. It was a very nice event and several people even decided to take home copies of my books Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Malleable Mara: Transformations of a Buddhist Symbol of Evil. Here's a picture of me and my set up:

        My family even stopped in to say hello. (We're all masked up, but I'm pretty sure everyone's smiling.)

        Two former students from Saint Joe's stopped by as well! It was great to see them.

        All in all, it was a very enjoyable event. It's true that big book sellers are able to offer more inventory and buying online enables you to order practically anything from anywhere (making it easier to acquire rarer and harder to find books). Admittedly, currently online sites like Amazon are still the best way to get copies of my books. However, events like Saturday's really bring home the importance of local, independent book shops. We were able to meet members of the public we otherwise wouldn't have met, spend time talking about local issues we otherwise might not have thought to commiserate about, and just generally create more social bonds than the average trip online or to a big book store would ever foster. Years ago, when I taught Core 1 at Saint Joe's, we read the book Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. McKibben argues, in part, that our capitalistic economy has proven very adept at providing us with "more stuff" but "more stuff" is not better stuff. Ultimately, he says that we need to reinvest in those things that create human relationships, and the best way to do that is to go into your local community. This past Saturday was a sterling example.

        So, next time you have a chance, go visit your local independent bookstore!

Smith Cemetery

    How will we be remembered after we're gone? What will be left of our lives and our legacy once we're dead? Are there really any more quintessential questions to face? As you get older, you start to think about these things and there seem to be more and more occasions to dwell upon them.

        Behind our house is a farmer's field, at least for the time being. During the fallow season it's a place we sometimes go walking down, at least on the edge, to get some exercise and look at the huge retaining pond put in as a barrier between one of the large shipping warehouses in the area and our subdivision. There are at least four such warehouses clustered together, with docking bays to load up semis to hit the nearby interstate on-ramp.

        When it was very snowy a few months ago, we went on one of these walks and I spotted some odd stones in the distance under a few lone, skeletal trees. Recently, when I had the time and the weather was better, I took a trip back and discovered, to my surprise, that the stones belonged to a small nineteenth century family grave. Here is a picture of the cemetery, where its proximity to the warehouse is apparent.

        In this image, from further away, you can make out the warehouses bounding the cemetery on the south and east. You can just make out the monument stones in between the trees.

        Here is a close-up of the foreboding tree nearest the graves. It's rather a spooky place to be - even with another warehouse lurking in the background.

        I began to wonder who the people buried in these plots were and I took photos of the stones where the inscriptions were still legible and had not yet been worn down by time and the elements.

        Though I am a neophyte at this sort of research, after doing some internet sleuthing and delving into sources available through the kind help of the county historical society, I've been able to garner some information about those interred at this site. As the name on the stone in the picture above suggests, this very small site is usually known as "Smith Cemetery," but alternately as "Thornley Cemetery" based on the name of a small village that used to exist nearby. Twelve individuals (half from the Smith family) are buried there with the only information available pertaining to members of the Smith family, primarily the patriarch, William Warren Smith. It seems that Smith was originally born near Baltimore in November 1814. (For history buffs, that's just a couple of months after the Battle of Baltimore, the event during the War of 1812 that inspired the composition of the "Star Spangled Banner.") After living in Virginia for a time, Smith and his brother moved to Ohio, where he met and married Catharine Weaver - the Catharine Smith whose marker is pictured above. William and Catharine had two daughters in Ohio, with the oldest dying shortly after birth. In 1842, William and Catharine moved west to Boone County, Indiana, presumably to search out better prospects for land. According to the old record book Early Life and Times in Boone County (1887):

                [William and Catharine Smith] landed in the dismal swamps of Boone, where
                frogs croaked, owls hooted, and wolves howled. In the midst of all this they 

                bought forty acres for a consideration of two hundred and twenty-five dollars.

                The next thing in order was to build a cabin and at this station pioneer life 

                began. In the midst of the forest, without money, without roads, and a long

                way to market through mud and mire -- what was to be done? They had come

                to stay and had brought their iron will with them (364-365).

        Among other tidbits, William Smith was a "Predestinarian," a believer in the Calvinist Christian theology that everything is predetermined, including one's salvation or damnation. He was also a Democrat, which meant something quite different in the nineteenth century. Nothing remains of the cabin the Smiths built, but according to other records they went on to have five more children. Two of those children (Martha and Margaret) along with a daughter-in-law (Nancy) are buried with William and Catharine in the little cemetery. Interestingly, Basil Smith, the son who married Nancy, is not buried there. According to A Portrait and Biographical Record of Boone County (1895), another son, Warren J. Smith, born in 1849, took over the farm after William Smith died in 1884. Catharine lived with him until she died in 1898. Like his brother Basil, Warren Smith is not recorded as being buried in the family cemetery, but in the same book I was able to find a picture of him from 1895, when he would have been roughly my age:

                Though there are still many gaps, not least of which being the history of the other six individuals buried in the cemetery, it is a thrilling and strangely humbling experience to discover these facts and even look upon a picture of a person related to the people who lived in that space.

                My feelings are tempered, though, by the future of the area. With the proximity and quantity of warehouses going in, the site will become increasingly closed off and inaccessible, even to the point of vanishing as so-called development encroaches on the cemetery. Right now, the north and west (shown below) is the only area of the cemetery not closed off by buildings.

        This will all change in a few months when the area pictured above will become the site of -- you guessed it -- yet another shipping warehouse, meaning the Smith Cemetery will have such structures surrounding it from all four directions. This small piece of history, the legacy of these individuals, will be ground under the wheels of the industrialized consumerist complex, sacrificed on the altar of capitalistic shipping efficiency, with nothing in sight but acres and acres of concrete. Is that how any of us would want to be remembered?

        Iron wills or not, in the great gulf of space and time, we will all be forgotten. However, there's something about the way this cemetery is being symbolically erased that profoundly bothers me. Without being remembered, did we ever really live at all? If we can at least remember these people, in a way it's a kind of resistance, like the plant that persists to burrow its way up through layers of asphalt and concrete. In a way, soon enough, that's rather like what this cemetery will be: a tiny oasis of human culture and memory attempting to persist amid the arid desert of commercialism.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

         Around my house, our Saturday night routine is currently dominated by MeTV, starting with the weekly sci-fi horror film on Svengoolie, followed by an episode of Star Trek (the original series), and sometimes Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (though thank heavens the boys' interest in that has begun to wane - I can endure some pretty crappy stuff, but Buck is an atrocity). Usually the Svengoolie movie is something simply entertaining and diverting, which is what I expected with last Saturday's entry:

        To my surprise, there were some profound elements and examples of really incisive social commentary in the film. Based on a novel and released in 1957, the film tells the sad tale of Scott Carey, a man hit with a combination of insecticide and radioactive fallout that makes him begin to gradually shrink, with his entire body growing smaller and shorter. Carey's first symptoms are baggy clothes and being lighter at the scale, then he notices his wife no longer needs to stretch to kiss him. As time goes on, he becomes ever smaller and shorter, his shrinking briefly arrested by an antidote researchers develop. Even this only temporarily halts the process and Carey eventually shrinks to only inches in size, living in a dollhouse. When his wife leaves for an errand, he is pursued by the couple's cat and falls into the basement to face even greater challenges and terrors.

        In its themes of alienation and degradation, The Incredible Shrinking Man arguably treads some of the same territory as Kafka's The Metamorphosis: transformed into a medical and scientific curiosity, Carey is reduced (no pun intended) to an object of observation and is robbed of everything that once gave his life meaning. In reaction, he becomes taciturn and sullen, avoids going out, and is increasingly churlish and demanding with his wife. Writing on the novel and the book, Mark Jancovich has argued that the character's plight expresses the anxieties lurking beneath middle class white masculinity in the 1950s: without a job and physical superiority over his wife, Carey is no longer a "real man" (Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s 158-163). In fact, later in the film when Carey's height has temporarily stabilized in response to experimental treatment, he begins a relationship (presumably without his wife's knowledge) with another woman who works at a local carnival for little people. He enjoys the fact that, even though he's only fifty-two inches tall at that point, she's still shorter than him. Soon though, his shrinking begins anew and when he notices this woman is also now taller than him, he angrily stalks off and abandons her, unwilling to be the diminutive partner. There's much to be said for this interpretation and I would only amend it to say that these cultural norms about masculinity are not necessarily limited to the 1950s and are still prevalent among many in the 2020s.

        With Carey's descent into the basement, the film projects this theme of the entwinement of masculinity and power into an almost mythic dimension. As everyone assumes him dead, Carey is utterly marooned in the basement and left to his own miniscule devices. He proves resourceful, however, using a matchbox for shelter, pin needles and thread for climbing, and drops from a water heater for drinking. The greatest challenge comes in the form of a spider, which to Carey's continually lessening size, assumes enormous proportions. 

        The spider begins to absorb Carey's attention, assuming in his mind the role of the classic quest-monster that must be slain to capture the treasure. In Carey's case, this is not gold or jewels, but a block of old cheese that is the only source of food in the basement and is quite inconveniently placed near the spider's web. He determines to kill the spider, climbing with great effort up to its web and slashing at it with his hooks and pins.

        He succeeds in killing the spider, which is the culmination of a kind of catharsis: forced to survive on his own in the wild (to him) perils of the basement, Carey reasserts his masculinity through feats of strength and power available to him in his new, miniature world. 

        Honestly, I thought the movie would conclude shortly thereafter with someone discovering Carey in the basement, telling him a cure had been found, and the audience would see him restored to his original size, his manliness saved to live happily ever after. Evidently, this was also the ending the studio at the time wanted, but the filmmakers had something else in mind. Instead, shortly after killing the spider, Carey wanders to a grate on the wall of the basement and, since he has steadily grown smaller, he is able to walk out onto the lawn. As he further lessens in size, he stares up at the stars and moon, realizing that the infinity of micro-space might be just as wondrous as the infinity of outer space. No matter how small he gets and no matter who knows it or not, Carey declares, "I still exist," before vanishing into the microscopic world.

        This bolder, much less conventional ending seemed to move past the cultural critical elements of the rest of the film and even be a way to suggest a transcendence of infirmity or disability, a way to defy, reject, or redefine the limiting elements of one's altered life. Perhaps, after tyrannically raving against his loss of typical white male prestige, the trials in the basement have led to an imagination of a broader, more complicated self. From that view, the entire film would be a kind of hero's journey into the realization of inner self.

        Or maybe I'm reading too much into it all. Paradoxically, sometimes it takes looking at the fantastic to better appreciate the mundane. That's why Science Fiction has always been such a great cultural lens.

        And, as a reminder, if you like this kind of cultural analysis of movies, maybe you'll like my book.