Jennifer deBie's Blog, page 2

Old Stories, New Tales

I saw a movie trailer recently.

I know, I know, it seems like I start a lot of these posts that way, but bear with me a minute here.

Because this is the trailer I saw:

Cool, right? I mean, you had me at Idris Elba and Zazie Beetz, but then there’s Regina King, Jonathan Majors, Deon Cole, and LaKeith Stanfield too?

Some of you will recognize the names, some of you might not, but between these six actors they’ve been in several of my favorite movies or TV series in the past few years: Deadpool 2 (2018), Lovecraft Country (2020), Da 5 Bloods (2020), Watchmen (2019), Get Out (2017), Sorry To Bother You (2018), Black-Ish (2017-2022), and The Suicide Squad (2021), to name just a few of those.

Notice something else?

If you break it down by parts, this movie sounds like a classic Western. An outlaw and a bounty hunter, a posse and a gang, a vendetta and a small town caught in the crossfire. Heck, there’s even a prison break on a train.

We’ve seen all of these elements before.

Left: Eastwood, The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966), Right: Majors, The Harder They Fall (2021)

They were pioneered decades ago in the heyday of the Spaghetti Westerns a half century gone. You could fit a young Clint Eastwood into the costumes any of our male leads are wearing, toss him onto the set of A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and he wouldn’t look out of place.

So why am I excited for a western that’s using old costumes and older tropes?

Because even when using old tropes, it’s almost impossible for this to be same the old story.

With a writer/director who’s young, black, and British in Jeymes Samuel, and a cast this impressive? Are you kidding me?

And the rest of the crew has pedigree to spare, whether it’s the costume designer from Superfly (2018), the cinematographer for Jojo Rabbit (2019), a set decorator from Black Panther (2018) or an art director from Logan (2017), these people have worked on some of the most unique projects in recent memory. From the music to the camera work (did your stomach swoop with that shot where the camera’s strapped to Beetz’ shotgun? Mine did), my money has it that this western is going to be an all new animal.

So yes, I’m excited.

I’m a firm believer that there are no sacred texts. That no movie, song, book, or TV show is so impeccable that it couldn’t be re-worked into something new by the right person or team.

And director Jeymes Samuel and the The Harder They Fall team aren’t the only ones breathing new life into old stories these days.

A couple of years ago Yûko Takeuchi starred in the Japanese series Miss Sherlock (2018) and absolutely inhabited Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. For those left feeling a little empty after the disappointing end to Cumberbatch’s run at the character in 2017, I’d encourage giving Takeuchi’s Sherlock and her faithful sidekick Wato-san (played by Shihori Kanjiya) a try.

Or out of France, these past few months we’ve had Lupin (2021). A series starring the impeccable Omar Sy that is both inspired by, and lovingly sending up, Maurice LeBlanc’s early 20th century gentleman thief, Arséne Lupin.

Just last week, the first season of Star Wars: Visions was released on Disney+.  Built as an anthology, each episode was created by a different anime studio in Japan and for anyone out there who is still unaware of this, that island currently produces the most beautiful and interesting animation on the planet.

For anyone who doesn’t believe me, and wasn’t convinced by the Visions trailer, I encourage you to give this trailer from a 2021 re-telling of Beauty and the Beast for the cyber age a spin and get back to me.

Rather read than watch? Check out Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014). Edited by Ellen Datlow, it’s an anthology of Lovecraftian tales, featuring all the best beasties, but retold by a new generation of authors with unique cultural spins on each take. Notable contributors include perennial favorite Neil Gaiman, two time Bram Stoker Award winner Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Hugo Award Nominee Nick Mamatas, among many others.

Or if you’re a novel, not a short story, person, there’s Mimi Matthews’ John Eyre: A Tale of Darkness and Shadow (2021). In it, Matthews gender-bends Jane Eyre and dials the ghostly elements in Bronte’s tale up to 11.

A fan of comics and graphic novels? Batman: The World was released by DC Comics last month. In this monster of a project, artists and writers the world over set Batman, his team, and new characters all their own, in the creators’ home countries for each entry in this collection of stories. I haven’t yet made it into my local shop to pick up a copy of this 160 page behemoth of a graphic novel (graphic anthology?), but I plan to soon.

So, to circle back, yes. I’m excited about a movie with the bones of a classic western and the makings to be so much more.

There are purists out there who will take (and have taken) umbrage with a lady Sherlock, or anime Star Wars, or a black western, but they can take themselves elsewhere. Diversity and evolution is what’s going to save the classics, not trying to trap them in amber.

We’ve already told those old stories, now it’s time for new tales.

Chase thunder,

JdB

The Harder They Fall hits Netflix on November 3, 2021. Rated R for violence and strong language.

Talkin’ Funny

When I was about sixteen, I was part of a delegation of students from my high school chosen to attend the State Convention of the Texas Future Farmers of America in Fort Worth. For my American readers, many of you will have some idea of what that means, for my internationals- the FFA is the largest student led organization in the US, and the respective State Conventions throw together farming-ly inclined teens from all across the state for a few days’ worth of motivational speakers.

Anyway, on about the third morning of this little shindig, while taking the downtown tram to the convention center, one of the boys from my school looked me dead in the eye and said “Jenni, people say we tawlk funny.”

Sitting there in a rattling tram car, staring across at me, his face was about as earnest as I’d ever seen it and all I could do was giggle and agree. Because yes, we do tawlk funny.

We also spell things funny, and name things funny—both of which were pointed out to me recently by some Irish friends while they perused a map of Texas on Google.

Now I know Texas doesn’t have the monopoly on funny names, Ireland has the delightfully dubbed Dingle Peninsula, and I once spent a summer interning with the Ute Tribe in Towaoc (pronounced Toy-ock) Colorado, but I like to think Texas has more funny names than most.

The historic Texarkana Post Office, half in Texas, half in Arkansas

So here we go:

I was born and raised outside the city of Texarkana (drop the R and say it fast, Tex-ah-kana), a railroad town named after the two states it sits in (Texas and Arkansas) and a third they thought was closer than it is (Louisiana).

If you spend much time in east or south Texas, you’ll run across something named Sabine. The Sabine River runs the Texas/Louisiana border, taking its name from a bastardization of the Spanish word for cypress (Sabinas), and more than one town, street, park, public building, etc. got its name from this waterway. Because of this ubiquity, I thought Sabine was a fairly straightforward name… and then my Google Maps told me to turn on Sah-bye-een street one day.

For those wondering, its Sah-bee-n.

Then, on the other side of the state there’s Quitaque, which is apparently the Official Bison Capital of Texas. They also, apparently, got tired of passers-by mispronouncing their name, because before you even get into town the welcome sign tells you how to say it.

For those of you who see quay and say “key”, we’re talking bastardized Spanish again- it’s Kitty-kway.

My Aunt enjoys telling a story about a teacher she once worked with who chronically mispronounced Bexar (Bear) County.

Then there’s fun letter jumbles like Waxahachie (Wox-ah-hatch-ee), Wichita Falls (Witch-a-tah), or Nacogdoches (Nak-ah-doe-chez), the oldest town in Texas and sister-city to the equally jumbled Natchitoches (Nak-ah-tich) in Louisiana.

As I started writing this, my Dad informed me of Reklaw (Wreck-law) and Sacul (Sack-el), two tiny communities outside Nacogdoches who got their names from the families that donated the land these communities sit on. I don’t know if the Walker and Lucas families got a kick out of seeing their surnames flipped, but I sure did.

Then there are the random German towns: Umbarger, Boerne (Bern-ee), Pflugerville (Flue-ger-vil), Muenster (Mun-ster), New Braunfels (Bran-fells), and Gruene (Green).

Or we name our towns after people: Quanah (Kwan-ah), was named after Quanah Parker, sometimes called the last chief of the Comanche, and a man whose Wikipedia page is frankly awesome. On the other end of the spectrum you have Captain Daingerfield (awful man, awesome name) and the town of Daingerfield (Danger-field) with their improbably good high school football team.

I once shared a cab with a New Yorker who spent most of the ride telling me how much she enjoyed swimming at Bale-mo-ree-ah, and it took me almost as long to realize she was talking about Balmorhea (Bahal-mo-ray) State Park, which has a the world’s largest spring-fed pool built over the freshwater springs there.

Coincidentally, Balmorhea is another place named after people, an awkward conjunction the surnames of Ernest Balcom, H.R. Borrow, and the Rhea brothers, John and Joe. But you already knew we liked to play around with funny conjunctions and people’s names.

Balmorhea State Park

That’s how we got Iraan (Ira-ann) too, named for the founding couple Ira and Ann Yates.

We have the giggle-names like Dimmit (Dim-it) and Dumas (Due-mass). We have the mispronounced-real-place names like Palestine (Palace-teen) and the obviously-derived-from-real-place names, like Arlington, New Boston, or Dublin.

Though I was once told Dublin took its name from wagon trains and the way they would “double in” to concentric circles for safety when they camped at night.

We have the banal description names like the Red River (which is, indeed, a rusty red in many places), West (which is west of some things, and east of others), and Prairieland (three guesses what the terrain out that way looks like), the state pride names like Lonestar, the people names like Jefferson, Austin, and Houston, or the Spanish names like Amarillo, San Angelo, San Antonio, and El Paso.

So many, many names.

All pronounced just a little bit funny.

Names that tell me that we came from all over. That we had a sense of humor when it came to making up new words, and that we had a sense of history when claiming old ones.

Our state takes its name from an old Caddo Indian word, táyshaʼ, adjusted by the Spanish to tejas, which means friendly. That’s why when you cross our state borders, the welcome signs remind you to Drive Friendly, that’s why our State Motto is Friendship.

I like that.

I like that we put diversity on our maps for future generations and all the world to see. I like that we built friendship, common humanity, into our very name. I like that we’ve got a town named Happy. I like that the Rio Grande sits on our southern border because at some point a few centuries back, Spanish explorers were wandering north and someone in that expedition said to someone else:

“Hey guys, what are we going to call this big river we have to cross?”

“How ‘bout big river?”

“Sounds good to me.”

It sounds good to me too.

Chase thunder,

JdB

Vin Diesel Told Me To

Soooooo….

Back in April Vin Diesel and Universal Studios released the following video, telling me to go back to the theatres and get emotional about fast cars and a ridiculous film franchise.

I’ve gotta say, it’s probably going to work on me.

If you are reading this on the day it posts, then there’s a 50/50 chance that I am either currently in the air or an airport right now, flying my freshly vaccinated behind back to Texas for some sunshine and family time. At some point during my month home I plan to avail myself of America’s re-opened theatres. Like Vin said, there’s a certain magic to the moment when the house lights go down and the screen lights go up and for those two hours you get to exist outside and apart from the rest of the world.

And because it was Vinny (can I call him Vinny? I’m gonna call him Vinny) who put the effort into releasing a trailer trying to get people emotional about cars that go fast and then frequently go boom, I decided to do my homework.

To see if this was a film experience worth the cost of a Thursday afternoon matinee ticket, I decided to watch all 1,094 minutes (just over 18 hours) of the Fast and the Furious franchise and it’s spin-offs.

Logical or practical use of a postgraduate’s time? Probably not, but I’ve got a higher degree in Romantic literature and a novelist dream—don’t talk to me about logic and practicality.

Anyway, did it work? Am I now emotionally invested in fast cars and the actors who drive them?

Yeah.

A little.

A lot.

Unapologetically.

Yes, the movie that started the whole franchise is based on a Vibe Magazine article and was essentially Point Break with cars, and there are a literal ass-load of shots like this.

But there’s so much more if you look.

There’s a lot of hot women as window-dressing, but that’s Hollywood. In this case I can largely shrug that off because those aren’t actual characters, they’re props on set. The female protagonists, the ones we care about, are doing stunts, driving cars, and wearing clothes like this the whole time:

Click on the pictures to enlarge

Look at those flat shoes, jeans, and jackets. Yes, they look good—they’re all stunning, obviously—but they also look comfortable. Finding leading ladies in an action franchise who are actually dressed like they might be ready to do some action-y things, or at least dressed like real people, is rarer than you might think. Dressing the women like this most of the time, it’s kind of a sneaky feminist power move.

And look at the cast writ large:

Cast of the Fast and Furious franchise (Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic) Not included are notable one-off character actors like Thai martial artist Tony Jaa, or Beninese-American actor Djimon Hounsou, both of whom play minor villains in this film. Also not included is South African actress Charlize Theron, who plays the major villain in F8 of the Furious, Israeli actress Gal Gadot, whose character died in Fast & Furious 6, and Samoan American actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

Is there a more diverse cast on the action franchise market right now? One that is majority minority, and spans a range of minorities like this? Latinx, Israeli, African American, Korean American,, Samoan, and British bi-racial? With nods to all of these cultures sprinkled across the many, many hours of movies?

Okay, they’re not winning any awards for nuanced portrayals of cultures, but pretty much everyone casually speaks Spanish, if not more languages, and The Rock got team of twelve year old girls to perform a haka, or Maori war dance, in the F8 of the Furious.

Remember, it’s still a franchise about cars that go fast and then explode. If you want subtlety and nuance, look elsewhere.

But, if you stack these leads against any other major action franchise: Bond, Mission Impossible, Marvel, there’s no real comparison. The Fast franchise wins the diversity race by a mile.

Then there’s the Paul Walker thing.

Backstory Time:

Way back in 2001 Paul Walker played Brian O’Connor, an undercover cop trying to infiltrate Vin Diesel’s racing and heist ring in the very first Fast film (The Fast and the Furious). Over the course of that movie he came to understand Vin’s outlaws, became conflicted over taking them down, and at the end of the film lets them get away. Across the series, Walker’s O’Connor played lead or co-lead in every movie except for Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift, joining Diesel’s ragtag gang of found family and marrying Jordana Brewster’s character, Mia, younger sister to Diesel’s Dominic Toretto.

In late 2013, in the middle of filming F7, Walker died suddenly. After some debate among the cast and studio executives, the script was re-written in places and the decision was made to finish the film using a combination of body doubles (including Walker’s brothers) and CGI to film his scenes.

Movies aren’t shot sequentially, the first day of shooting may be on a scene at the end of the film and so on. So I don’t know when the funeral scene I’m about to describe was written and shot—I don’t know if it’s Walker or one of the body doubles involved, but there’s this moment at a funeral early in F7.

Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson as Brian O’Connor and Roman

The entire gang has gathered back in LA for the funeral of one of their own and Tyrese Gibson’s Roman, who was introduced in the second movie (2 Fast 2 Furious, 2003) as Brian O’Connor’s oldest friend, looks at Walker and says “Promise me, no more funerals.”

So there isn’t one.

Where another franchise might have heroically killed off Walker’s character in the finale of F7, maybe sacrificing himself to save his wife and kids and conveniently writing his character out of all future film installments, O’Connor lives.

O’Connor  lives and retires from “the life” with Jordana Brewster and their kids to some tropical paradise, saying goodbye to Vin Diesel and we the audience, the man who brought him into the high octane world of the Fast franchise and us the people who have watched them for over a decade by that point, with one last race.

And it’s beautiful.

So, for Paul Walker and the love that went into retiring his character, for that alone I would feel affection for the Fast and the Furious movies—but there’s also badass women and good action and a diverse cast and fast cars that sometimes go boom.

After two decades of having no strong opinions about this ridiculous series, I’m in. I’ll see you in the theatre, Vinny boy. There’s a movie ticket with my name on it somewhere in Texas.

Chase thunder,

JdB

F9: The Fast Saga is rated PG13 and out now.

Roses from the Universe

Cover image by Hope “Silver” Bobb

There’s this play I’ve helped teach for a couple of years now—Chekov’s The Seagull.

It’s… well, it’s Chekov, so it’s a bit weird and the characters behave simultaneously too realistically and too dramatically to be totally comfortable, but for purposes of this blog post all you really need to know is that The Seagull does indeed contain seagulls.

A seagull is shot. A seagull is taxidermied. The strangeness of seagulls on a lake is commented on. Seagulls are envied for their ability to fly away. At the end of the play a character who has been suicidal since the first act successfully kills himself.

Chekov intended and marketed this play as a comedy, by the way, and then was confused by its poor reception.

The conceit of this is that seagulls in The Seagull can have as much or as little meaning as the audience wants.

The futility of art, the struggle for meaning, the meaninglessness of freedom, or of life, it’s all in there for those who want to make those arguments.

Conversely, a really meta-reader might say that the point of the seagulls in the play is their arbitrariness.

That we, the audience watching the world on Chekov’s stage unfold, can see what the characters in that world can’t: that the seagulls have no meaning.

That they are random and the characters in the play are trying to impose meaning on the inherently meaningless, the same way we in the real world have trained ourselves endow meaning on shooting stars or coins found in the street.

Events like finding a dropped penny in a parking lot or seeing a comet at night only have meaning on our lives because we, as a culture, decided that they do. Not because the object or event itself carries that meaning inherently.

Like I said, a very meta way of reading The Seagull, and a very cold way of looking at the world.

I tell you this, because I have my own, happier, seagulls.

Because roses are my seagulls.

I have a rose in my name, inherited from a great grandmother I never met, and my Mom once told me that the Sunday I was baptized, one of the alter flowers was the biggest rose she’d ever seen.

True to Texas cliché, yellow roses are my favorites.

I spent the summer I turned 20 working with the Ute Tribe and the cliff dwellings out in Colorado. When a group of students from the University of Denver working an archeological site in the area found out I was from Texas, they started belting out “Deep in the Heart of Texas” every time they saw me at the campground where we all stayed.

I in turn belted back “The Yellow Rose of Texas”, mostly because I couldn’t think of any songs about Colorado besides John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” and I don’t know all the words to that one.

The fact that the image of a compass down in the corner of a map is called a compass rose appeals to my traveler’s heart, just like Poison’s “Every Rose Has its Thorns” appeals to the part of me that wishes I was just a little more dangerous.

Roses are what drew me to the book blog I write for, to Katherine Paterson’s Bread and Roses, Too as a child, and to this poem by Barbara Guest.

It’s why I hum “Coming Up Roses” when I’m happy, why I tear up every time to this scene from the movie Pride(2014), and why I performed Bette Midler’s mildly maudlin “The Rose” at a concert with my piano teacher as a child.

It’s why I bought (rescued!) a reduced-price miniature yellow rose bush at the grocery store a year ago and have nursed it along ever since. This was not my first attempt with miniature roses, but this is definitely the longest lived.

Typically I “rescue” them and then prolong their suffering in all my well-intentioned ignorance.

The only bloom on my rosebush this year

Anyway…

Objectively, academically, I know that roses only hold meaning in my life because I’ve given them that power. I’ve spent a lifetime training myself to see them, and thus I notice them everywhere.

My arbitrary sign from the uncaring universe.

Any yet, they’re still my lucky charm.

My history, my namesake, and the thing that will always lead me home.

Chase thunder lovelies,

JdB

Something New Every Day

My Dad has this thing he says.

It’s not a terribly original thing, and frankly I’m not sure where it came from—if it’s an ethos he developed on his own or one that my grandparents instilled in him, something from further up the family line or from a friend or what, but he tells me to learn something new every day.

Has told me all my life, still tells me to this day:

Learn something new every day.

It’s a nice way to live, to be reminded of one’s constant student-ness.

It’s something I’ve taken to heart, seeing as I turned 28 last week and have spent 23 of those years in school.

But I’m also at a place in my life where I have kind of a set expectation of the kinds of new things I learn.

I study language and literature, I write creatively, and I devour a very specific section of pop culture, ergo most of my library of new things can be traced back to these categories on some level. For example:

Bathetic, from bathos, means something along the lines of amusingly overwrought. Soap operas frequently display bathos or are bathetic.Spanish language soap operas are called telenovelas.A novella is typically classified as a work of fiction between 30,000 and 60,000 words.Authors and academics use word counts rather than page numbers to gauge output because when you’re quoting poetry or writing dialogue, page numbers become deceptive.Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on First”, widely considered some of the best comedic dialogue ever performed, was first recorded for national radio in 1938, but is descended from the vaudevillian tradition of bathetic characterizations and tricky wordplay with names.

This is the type of thing I learn these days: language, literature, writing, pop culture, some combination therein.

Which is why it’s maybe a little surprising that about this time last year I started learning sound editing.

Not professionally, by any means, but enough to chop out some Um’s, trim a false start or three, layer in some theme music, and add in a credits clip.  

You know, enough for a podcast.

June 30, 2020 saw the first episode of PhD Pending, a podcast that was the brainchild of several of the women in my PhD program and finally officially launched by myself and two other brilliant ladies:

Left to right: Anne Mahler, yours truly, Éadaoin Regan

Together, Anne, Éadaoin, and I have talked about life as PhDs.

The nitty gritty bits like our imposter syndrome, moving away from home to study, teaching experiences, conference wine receptions (we love conference wine), our virtual classrooms, and a whole host of other stuff.

Sometimes it’s a little raw, sometimes we’re a little raunchy, or silly, or a little over enthusiastic about our research, but we’re always honest.

And learning to do all of that, to script, stage, and record a three-person interview, all while locked down in different houses and sometimes different countries, learning to edit those interviews into digestible episodes and add all of the flourishes like the intro and the outro music, learning how to interact with listeners, because of course there’s Instagram and Twitter and an email where you can reach out to us and people have been reaching out—

I never dreamed any of this would end up in my new things library.  

But it’s cool.

That someone like me, a complete novice, can still learn these things.

Not that I’m terribly good.

Arguably I was the weakest of the team, but Anne and Éadaoin are incredibly patient and getting to build something like PhD Pending was fun. Fun, and cooperative in a year when lockdown shrank my lonely little existence to the size of my bedroom.

Getting to be included in this, learning these new skills, and watching the PhD Pending community grow, has been an incredible honor.

And now, after a year, I’m leaving it.

Two of us have decided that our lives are moving in different directions and the third has a vision for our podcast’s future, which is it’s own, different kind of seriously cool

Together, the three of us built something strong enough to stand, and adapt, and grow in new and interesting directions. Directions that will, hopefully, keep helping other PhDs with their nitty gritty bits, like finances and dating and learning to take a second and breathe in the middle of all the research madness.

Because at the end of the day, that’s all we wanted to do with PhD Pending. Help ourselves, help others, maybe learn a little something along the way.

You know, something new every day.

Chase thunder lovelies,

JdB

PhD Pending Stats and Links:

4,100+ listens in over 70 countries. Our audience is mostly women in their mid-20s to mid-30s (funny how we, the hosts, fit that demo too) and we’re hosted on all major podcast platforms including Apple, Google, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram at @PhDPendingPod, listen on your preferred podcast app or here, get in touch at phdpendingpod@gmail.com and support us financially here.

The Problem with WordPress

Or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace formatted chaos.

What follows is an unapologetic rant about WordPress site formatting, content presentation, and how it affects what is likely a tiny percentage of their overall user base. Namely, me.

Eagle eyed readers will notice that a new “Book Reviews” tab has appeared at the top of my website. What appears when you click on that tab is a brief explanation of how I got into the more “formal” book review game and an alphabetized list of links to the book reviews that I’ve been writing for another blogger for about six months now.

Writing these reviews has given me a small library of what we in the biz call “content”, content that most of you have never seen because the overlap between my small audience and Rosie’s precipitously larger audience is miniscule and primarily flows from her to me, rather than from me to her.

Now, because I am notoriously bad at putting out new blog posts with any kind of regularity, the idea of re-posting these book reviews on my own website as another form of new material that will hopefully draw new eyes, new subscribers, new potential book buyers, etc. to me, appeals to yours truly. At the moment I have 10 reviews done and posting one every other week has me in “new” content until October.

Brilliant Jen. I say to myself. You clever rascal you.

Now all you have to do is go into your WordPress site manager and set up a second blog page and we’ll be golden.

And here’s where things get technical.

On a WordPress website there are two kinds of webpages: “blog posts” and “pages”. Pages are mostly static, the Welcome page, my bio page, and the like. Other than a few small things, pages only change when I go behind the scenes and manually update them.

.wp-duotone-filter-60bdce7379702 img { filter: url( #wp-duotone-filter-60bdce7379702 ); }

Posts are what you’re reading right now. They do not appear in the menu at the top of every page and they automatically update to the “Posts Page” (named the Miscellaneous Drawer in my menu). The Posts Page looks like this, and requires no maintenance from me. I write something in a draft, hit “Publish”, and it appears here without any other work on my part.

All fine and dandy.

But you see, for book reviews I wanted to create a second Posts Page. Essentially, I envisioned that there would be a second, unrelated, running ‘blog’ alongside this one. This blog has bad allusions to Stanly Kubrick movies, zombie musings, Frankenstein talk, and other passing notions, and the second would be solely devoted to book reviews.

Book reviews that would appear in a nifty, dated list like the one above, but that wouldn’t necessarily spam the inboxes of subscribers who are just here for the zombie talk.

The problem is, WordPress doesn’t allow for that.

One blog per website and that’s that.

.wp-duotone-filter-60bdce7379770 img { filter: url( #wp-duotone-filter-60bdce7379770 ); }

Heaven forbid a website owner have multiple interests that call for separate, running blogs.

After much fretting and some consulting with Google just to make sure I wasn’t missing an obvious solution, a messy workaround was decided on.

Messy behind the scenes. At the front of the house, you, dear reader, should be treated to this tidy image:

With links to the appropriately alphabetized review appearing every other Wednesday as long as I keep heeding the alarm programed into my phone and manually add the links to the page on the day they go live.

Notice the indent showing the subsidiary page

Meanwhile, at the back of the house, instead of a second, self-organized and neatly separated Posts Page, each new review is going to be it’s own subsidiary page, and my lovely, organized “page manager” bar will expand exponentially. This is what it looks like right now, but every other week a new subsidiary page will be added below Book Reviews (à la the Chapter One sub page below The Adventures of Dogg Girl and Sidekick). One or two of these subsidiary pages won’t make much difference, but when there are five posted? Ten? More?

I can keep them from appearing directly on the menu, but behind the scenes there will be some mildly organized chaos.

At least, as chaotic as my life gets these days.

The other downside to this setup is that readers cannot subscribe to the reviews. The advantage to setting up a second Posts Page would have been that those here for just the book reviews could subscribe to them without dealing with the rest, and vice versa.

I’m not looking to turn this into an exclusive book blog and the first step down that path is mixing reviews with the other stuff.

Or… not an other people book blog. This is a website meant to sell my book, obviously. And the reviews will talk about other people’s books, that’s obvious too. But we talk about other interesting things here too, don’t we? I think? Fairly sure? Like life, and travel, and lockdown and movies and teaching, right?

Right.

What was I talking about?

So here we are. I’ve figured out a messy workaround to posting book reviews that may or may not work in the long run. And I only had to spend most of a Wednesday figuring it out.

But in other news, my first review, for Ailish Sinclair’s The Mermaid and the Bear will go live Wednesday morning. This is the review that got me into semi-professional book reviewing when it impressed the lovely Rosie Amber of Rosie Amber Reviews enough to offer me a spot on her team.

The pay is nothing but PDFs, but there are worse rackets to be in.

Chase thunder, lovelies

JdB

See all the light blue in the bar? Light blue = me, dark blue = everyone else. I spent far too much time on this problem this week.

Zombie Girl

Zombies weren’t always an epidemic; did you know that?

And I don’t mean ‘epidemic’ in that pop culture is and has been glutted with zombie stories for decades now. I mean literally epidemic, as in an easily spread disease—that’s not what zombies originally were.

If you go back to the mythology (Haitian, and West African before that), they were mindless slaves created through black magic and bloody rites. They were difficult to create and tied to the corrupt priests who rose them, not the hungry, spreading hordes we know today.

We have George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) to thank for many of our current ideas about zombies, the hunger, bites causing infections, kill the brain = kill the monster. Before him, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) was about the only zombie game in town, and it largely conformed to the monsters’ Haitian roots.

There are lots of reasons that Romero decided to rework the zombie mythology the way he did, social commentary, various European folklore surrounding the undead, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) all likely played key roles in his inspiration. I’ll leave that for film scholars to dissect, debate, and decide on.

 For whatever reason, zombies—zombies that are perpetually hungry and boundlessly spreading—are here to stay.

I’ve got a bit of a vested interest in keeping an eye on the current state of the zombie mythos. For two years now I’ve taught a class grounded in 18th and 19th century plague and apocalypse literature, but with an eye towards modern apocalypse texts and what they say about our society.

One of the great joys of teaching my own class is that, within the confines of my classroom, I get to define “text” however I want, and for apocalyptic purposes I throw those doors wide open:

A comparison between Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Bethesda Studio’s Fallout video game series (1997-2018)? I am here for it.

A reading of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) in the light of Lord Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816)? Yes please.

The Malthusian implications of Thanos’ snap in Avengers: Infinity War (2018)? You didn’t even have to ask.

You believe the narrator of Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006) can be contrasted with Defoe’s narrator in Journal of the Plague Year (1722)? Make your case and know that I’m rooting for you.

Being able to make these connections for my students means staying abreast with games, comics, movies, TV shows, and literature. If I haven’t read it, watched it, or played it, I’ve watched a YouTube video about it, scanned the Wikipedia page, the IMDB page, or the fan message boards because if my students are excited about something, then I want to be excited about it to so we can all talk about it in class together.

And that means getting to continue my appreciation for zombies even as I move towards “outgrowing” that kind of thing. It means that I cheerfully watched Zac Snyder’s new zombie flick, Army of the Dead (2021) on a Friday afternoon, and called it two and a half hours of “research”.

Yours truly, looking a little dead, post zombie chase at a 5k circ. 2013

And it was. Besides the opening title sequence alone being one of the best zombie movies I’ve seen in a while, there are some comparisons to Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (1842) that I would love to crack into with an unsuspecting bunch of teenagers.

Because there’s nothing better than catching them unawares; than asking them about their favorite disaster movies, video games, TV shows, books, comics, or whatever, and proving that the texts they’re assigned in class aren’t dead and locked in centuries past. They live and breathe and expand through all their myriad textual descendants, and the astute observer can see that lineage.  

They are, in that sense, zombies. Creating new images of themselves in every era and speaking new truths for each generation.

Cue Music Montage

Sometime in high school, shortly after getting my first laptop, I learned how to pirate movies online. Now, at almost 28, I’m looking back at over a decade of my favorite little felony and the accidental film buff I’ve become along the way.

Give me a night with Fred and Ginger and a glass of wine when I’m feeling classy. Give me a lazy afternoon watching Oceans Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen and Eight (2001, 2004, 2007, 2018) or The Gentlemen (2019), or Inception (2010) when I feel like revisiting cinematic puzzle boxes of varying difficulties. Give me fast cars exploding in every cheesy action movie ever and give me passionate speeches in a courtroom drama. Give me subtext: a mahjong match that’s so much more than a game, a cocky comeback that speaks volumes, a dying man’s last word, or the movie made about the man who wrote that last word. Give me apocalypse by fire, freeze, zombie or disease—it’s all fodder for the class I teach and getting my students to debate the health of the body politic in Greenland (2020) and how that compares to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is an absolute delight.

But above and beyond all of these, I’ve figured out that a lot of my favorite films involve mentors.

Not just any mentor movies—yes, I love sports films and some of those fit here, but more than that I like industry mentor movies. Denzel Washington is fabulous with his team in Remember the Titans (2000), but he’s not making professional ball players, he’s not setting them up for careers, he’s trying to turn kids into good men. A fine occupation, and I’ve a long line of coaches and teachers that I’m grateful to, they deserve all the movies and recognition and properly allocated school funding they can get.

But beyond that: I love seeing someone in an industry mentor a newcomer, for good or ill.

Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is an atrocious person, but I’ll be damned if Anne Hathaway doesn’t learn a thing or three from her. Or, take Mark Ruffalo in Begin Again (2013), a washed up music producer with his life on the rails find a young songwriter, the impeccable Kiera Knightly, and together they make an album. An album, incidentally, full of really good original songs like Coming Up Roses, which I have been humming at odd moments since I caught Begin Again on a flight years ago. More recently, Tracee Ellis Ross and Dakota Johnson did an utterly charming reversal of Ruffalo and Knightly’s story in The High Note (2020), where a passionate young wannabe music producer works to get a pop icon who has settled into a comfortable, if unexciting, routine to record a new album. Not unrelated, like Begin Again, The High Note is full of excellent original music, including the infinitely hummable Like I Do which is used to end the film in a truly heartwarming way.

All of these movies involve, on some level, someone taking a newcomer to a job and breaking them in. Introducing them to the contacts they’ll need, giving them entry into industries that are notoriously difficult to join.

There’s no deep psychology here.

If the recommended corrections are made and the creek don’t rise, I will graduate as Dr. deBie before 2021.

Technically I’m Dr. deBie now, I think, but it won’t feel real until there’s a paper saying that, even if that paper has to be mailed to me because in person graduations are a thing of the far future for Ireland.

Anyway, the long and the short is, I’ve lived my own mentor movie and I’m about to be kicked out of the nest. The mentored part of my story is ending, the contacts have been made, the industry skills have been honed, and I’m going to be expected to fly, not fall, and mentor my own fledgling academics in a few years.

Somewhere.

If I can get hired.

And then it’ll be the same song, but the second verse.

I just hope that whoever’s writing this script knows what she’s doing.

Chase thunder,

JdB

Dwelling in Dark Places

I read a lot of books about dead things.

It’s an occupational hazard for a Frankenstein scholar with a penchant for medical history. Doubly so for one who teaches a course on plague and apocalypse fiction.

Because of this both my real and virtual bookshelves are stacked with titles like Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (2001), Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic (2010), and The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic (2006).

It means that I can discuss John Snow’s revolutionary deduction that cholera is a waterborne disease (not carried on foul smelling air called miasma) ad nauseum, and that I can describe the stages of decomposition with vivid detail, if not completely accurate medical terminology. I can tell you about the ghoulish transi tombs of the Middle Ages and the remarkable courage of the people of Eyam.

I can recount the origins of the 1665 plague in London (likely actually started in late 1664), as described by Defoe, and explain why Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816) was so unique compared to other so-called Day of Judgement poems.

I dwell in dark places, maybe even thrive in them, but I am not alone.

Far from it, death hasn’t just gone mainstream in the past few years, it’s become a legitimate and growing portion of the entertainment industry.

Not so much the histories that I favor, but there can be no doubt that True Crime, and a fascination with the bizarre and terrible, once relegated to salacious books with generally small print runs and late-night Dateline special investigations, has blown into a phenomenon the world over.

Delightfully parodied in a recent Saturday Night Live song titled Murder Show, entertainment for the morbidly curious is no longer a shameful secret. Prestige documentaries are made about particularly salacious crimes, Peabody award winning podcasts on the subject have literally millions of listeners.

Listeners who engage in active communities, who even further investigations, exonerate innocents, and have helped get justice for victims. It’s a two-sided coin, with an audience this large victims’ families and suspects alike run the risk of being hounded. Juries and judges can be tainted by preconceptions.

Despite this, I can’t help but seeing this shift in cultural perception as a largely good thing.

It’s sparked curiosity, not only morbid fascination in gruesome details, but real and tangible engagement with an overwhelmed justice system that has never served all parties equally, and empathy for victims and their families.

Coming up on the year anniversary of the first lockdown, it’s easy to dwell in dark places. Isolation, fear, and distrust can bring out the worst in people, but curiosity can bring out the best.

Curiosity shines light in the dark spaces.

It can give power to the powerless and solve mysteries that some thought would never be solved. It can force monolithic institutions to change for the better. From shifting staid 19th century views on disease transmission and thus shaping public sanitation practices for the better, to the exoneration of an innocent man and investigation of the corrupt DA who kept him behind bars for over twenty years—new light can only be a good thing.

Humanity trends relentlessly upwards. On the ground, progress feels altogether slow, and then sudden, and then it slides back to slow again, but I have read enough history to know this: we always do better. Sometimes through a confluence of events, sometimes dragged forward by a few leaders, frequently through a combination of the two, but always upwards.

Always closer to the sun.

A few favorites for the morbidly curious and those who look for the light:

Books:

Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic

The Ghost Map

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Podcasts:

Culpable

In the Dark

Bear Brook

You Must Remember This: Charlie Manson’s Hollywood

Documentaries/Youtube Channels:

Ask a Mortician

I Love You, Now Die

The Vow

The Acknowledgements

On Friday the 4th of December I sent a PhD thesis off into the void. Four years of work, and many sleepless nights in recent weeks, uploaded through a deceptively simple internet portal for other people to judge. I like to think it’s worth their time. Worth my time too, for that matter, but that judgement will not be rendered until next year.

In the meantime, below are the acknowledgements included with my thesis. My adviser informed me that a single typed page was more than enough space to acknowledge everyone who needs thanking. My thank yous come out to exactly two typed pages.

We’ll call it an act of rebellion.

To everyone mentioned, and everyone not, thank you again. Thank you for your patience, for putting up with whatever Frankenstein facts I forced on you, and for your friendship.

Chase thunder,

JdB

…

…

Neither books nor barns can be written or raised alone and this thesis is no different.

Graham Allen, friend, mentor, tireless corrector of syntax, and connoisseur of every Mary Shelley book known to man, thank you. I walked into your office in 2016 with a very bad joke about wanting to stay in Ireland and you didn’t throw me out immediately. For that alone, I will always be grateful. In years to come, when a nervous masters’ student walks into my office with bad jokes and a vague desire to research early science fiction, I hope to be a tithe as understanding as you were that day. Thank you for your generosity, your patience, and for setting an example of the kind of professor and academic I hope to be.

To the English Department at UCC writ large, thank you for providing a welcoming community and open doors to a strange little American with her Frankenstein project. Particular thanks to Anne Fitzgerald, for being the manager of all crises and fixer of all things, to Claire Connolly for wise council and friendly words, Edel Semple for jokey Shakespeare comics, and to Ken Rooney for showing me the Disputation Between the Body and Worms just in time for it to become one of my chapter quotes.

Rosin Crowley, my grandfather used to say that when all else fails, read the funny book—his term for an instruction manual. I would amend that to add that when all else fails, call an expert. Thank you for being my French expert, providing a beautiful translation of Le Mirior, and being on hand to answer questions after the translation was completed. There was a heady moment when I thought Google translate and I could manage on our own, and that was wrong notion indeed. In years to come, I will always remember to call an expert.

To my PhD cohort en masse, thank you. Together we have groaned while grading essays, laughed over pints, and encouraged each across Zoom and Facebook. This has been the longest year on earth and there is no lie when I say that without all of you my project would be a weaker, paler, pile of papers. Thank you especially to Anne Mahler and Éadaoin Regan, co-conspirators in podcasting and friends who are always willing to put up with my bullshit, academic and otherwise. If you judged me for some of my crazier hypothetical questions, you never made me feel lesser for that judgement, and have always made me laugh on the low days.

To the Butchers, online and in person—thank you for poetry. And for putting up with more than one poem about dead things. You forced me to reassess my poetry and get out of my own head for a few hours on Thursday evenings when I needed it most. Thank you for line breaks and grammar talk and for helping me remember how many cents some words are worth.

Michelle, my green card fiancé, and your incredibly patient partner Leo, thank you both—for providing a Dublin escape and beyond when I needed it. Someday this pandemic will end and we’ll pack ourselves off on holiday together, somewhere sunny and inexpensive, where we can drink wine by the gallon and dance late into the night, and it will be glorious. Until then, thank you both for your kindness, your love, and your offer of a felonious way to keep me in Ireland should it ever be needed.

Finally, ever and always, thank you to my family: Parentals, sister figure and her husband, assorted mad aunts and patient uncles, endless, scattered cousins, and Grandy and Grandmommie; thank you. Thank for love and for support. For understanding that the youngest of the brood needed to read and write and talk about her reading and writing ad nauseum. Thank you for teaching me number games for teamwork and strategy, and word games for adaptability and quick thinking. Thank you for never letting me feel like my curiosity was a burden. Thank you for teaching me to look for my own answers in history, in art, in literature, and in myself. Because of all of you, I know who I am.

And most especially, the deBies and Beils. Every summer and Christmas for four years now, I have come home to you. To Friday night takeaways and fresh tea in the mornings. To endless walks with the dogs and eternally impatient cats. You have borne the brunt of my insecurities about myself, my work, and my future. Without your comfort, your support, your love: Dad’s quiet nightcaps on the patio, Mary and Steve’s clinic stories, and Mom’s tireless attention to my commas, I would not have finished. Without all of you, I might not have even begun.

There are no words big enough, no phrases elegant enough to encompass all that I would say, so I will simply repeat myself one more time: Thank you.