In the last installment of The King of Dogwood Street, (a comedy of good, evil, and home improvement), Billy Joe had a day of reckoning when the police showed up to put an end to his drunken property destruction.
In chapter three, he and his dimwitted buddy, Travis, are in the town lockup trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Will they escape? What charges might they face? Will they drive their arresting officer crazy? And will Billy ever overcome his hangover? Read on to find out!
My twelve year old son, who loves Tolkien, said, “It’s like they took one line and made an anime movie about it.” Indeed, my boy. This grim, humorless trek through Middle-earth had a few fun moments, but not nearly enough of them to justify its two plus hour running time. Miranda Otto and Brian Cox are pretty good. This film’s entire raison d’etre appears to be that WB was about to lose the license to make more cash-generating adventures in Tolkien’s world. I give it a B-. For all its flaws, it’s still much better than the awful slop amazon keeps pushing at me. I hope Andy Serkis’ return in 2026 is more fun than this was.
I was at the Morgan Library and Museum this week and wanted to give a brief reflection on their current exhibits, and how much I enjoyed them. We are lucky to have this museum in New York, and I can’t recommend a visit highly enough. Originally, it was J.P. Morgan’s personal library, and later became a public institution. There are always different exhibitions there; over the years, I’ve seen things ranging from Blake engravings, to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, to Tolkien, to Dickens, among others. If you live in or near New York, by all means go for a visit. They also have lectures and concerts regularly, and every Friday evening is free admission from 5-8. Educators and students also receive a discount.
Franz Kafka
I made this recent trip for the Franz Kafka exhibition, which was every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped. There were many of his handwritten manuscripts, journals, letters, photographs, and other personal effects on display. Anyone with an interest in him and his work should definitely go. It gave me a more intimate look into his life and work, and I found something quite haunting about it. Such a tragedy that he died so young, and it made me wonder what else he might have accomplished had he lived longer.
Kafka’s work has meant quite a lot to me, especially when I was a young man, and so I was very pleased to see him celebrated at the library. I still recall the chills I got reading The Metamorphosis as an undergraduate, and the feeling of urgency I had in finding the rest of his stories and books and reading those, too. I was so inspired that at one point I wrote my own little comical story about a superintelligent, powerful cockroach, which won an award from my college’s literary magazine. I am sure it was embarrassingly bad, but I had so much fun writing it.
I particularly enjoyed the handwritten copy of the Metamorphosis that was on display, and which was accompanied by contemporary textbooks of insect larvae and roaches. I had not thought of the Darwinian connection before seeing it laid out in this way, but as the display suggested, these were somewhat new fields of study at the time, with which Kafka would have been acquainted, and may have inspired him to write the story. Kafka is, of course, a towering figure in modern literature and his influence on contemporary fiction and culture is hard to overstate. This exhibit did a lot to help me appreciate him more as a human being and an artist. Photos of him and his fiancee, as well as details of his ill health, lent a very personal touch to a writer who sometimes can seem very remote and cryptic.
Belle da Costa Greene
After having seen the effective, thought provoking Kafka exhibit, I moved back to the first floor to see the other exhibition, about which I knew nothing. But what an experience visitors will have in learning about the life of Belle da Costa Greene, the first director of the Morgan. She was an amazing person who built the Morgan’s collection of rare books and manuscripts, and was a well known authority on these treasures. In the process of creating the library, she traveled the world to make acquisitions, and shaped it into a world class institution.
Belle’s father was the first black graduate of Harvard, and Belle and her family passed as white in segregated America. Much of the exhibit explores this part of her life, and it’s a breathtaking biography. She was a brilliant scholar and a cultural force at the Morgan, but a lot of her life was tinged with tragedy. The details about her her nephew were quite moving; he was a soldier in World War II who committed suicide when his fiancée learned he was not white and broke off their engagement. The exhibit gave other harrowing examples of stories like this, of ‘passing’ blacks in a segregated country.
I appreciated the display of Belle’s own collection of books and cultural treasures. She had exquisite tastes and collected illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculpture, and other artifacts. It was an interesting window into her personal life.
This exhibit also included many examples of illuminated manuscripts, for which Belle had a passion and much expertise. It’s a bit overwhelming seeing all of these ancient books laid out for perusal, and it’s best to take your time and look at the intricate detail of things like the Crusader’s Bible, among other medieval treasures.
I also learned that the NYPL used to have a library school, and at one point there was a course in rare books taught at the Morgan, using their resources. There was a syllabus on display that was a really fascinating look at library education from the 1920s. I’d love to take a course like this, incidentally. (I took a couple of rare books courses while doing my MLS and loved them, but to do it at a library like the Morgan would be a lifelong dream for any bibliophile.)
Belle’s life seems quite ripe for a film or a biography. And her life’s story should cause anyone to reflect on this country’s shameful past. These pernicious evils–racial segregation, passing, and other injustices–were not so long ago, and we have a long way to go to become a world that treats everyone equally. Belle’s remarkable life is a testament to what an exceptional person and scholar she was, and I was happy to see so many people learning about her. I can’t recommend the exhibit highly enough. Everyone should go.
I hope Belle would be pleased by the legacy she left at the Morgan. Her hard work and dedication live on through the collections and the stories they tell us about our culture and history.
Yesterday I saw an ad for a company that promises to publish eight thousand (yes, you read that right) books next year using the power of AI. I won’t link to their page because if you’re reading this, you have probably seen it, or something about it, and if you have not I don’t wish to give the tech bros behind it any more traffic, slight as it may be from this unseen corner of the internet. Even so, I feel I must write something about this, because it enraged me so much to see it.
This company promises to cut down production times for a book from the usual 12-18 months to a few weeks. How? You might ask. I’ll tell you: they will do a horrible job of it and flood the market with unreadable trash. What truly sets these guys apart is the way they’ll steal from aspiring authors and turn out a lousy product, while happily saying they’re ‘tech disruptors’ without a shred of self-awareness or irony. They’re immensely proud of themselves and their predatory business model.
This brings me to the larger problem of AI in general, which we are constantly told is a wondrous new tool, an inevitability, a technology that will transform everything.
Why is this tech inevitable? Well, our tech overlords say so. They are never wrong, of course, and all their innovations have done nothing but improve our lives. Just look around—isn’t everything great? We have access to more information than at any point in human history, and the world is a veritable paradise, with only the wisest, kindest, most learned people in charge everywhere.
In my view, AI writing tools produce junk. If you want to use it to produce your own special brand of garbage, have at it. “But it’s a tool!” you protest. “Same as a wrench or a bicycle! It will make everything better.” Yes, everything will improve, except your ability to write and think clearly, your ability to read and understand information. It will not help this at all. In fact, it will likely do immense harm to these skills. It’s a plagiarism machine, trained unethically to churn out generic awfulness. But hey, it does it very quickly, and with minimal effort. Just dump in a few prompts, and call it a day.
Right now, higher education is in a race to see who can adapt to these AI machines quickest. Never mind the effect it may have on learning, they’ll just use it. We’re about to turn universities over to tech companies. And why shouldn’t we? What does it matter if people are educated and humane, so long as profits are healthy?
And in another generation, some other whiz bang tech developer will come along peddling some other kind of junk, and once again every education administrator in the land will get in the marching band and beat the drum for it, no matter what it may be.
Who cares what students are learning, anyway, except a few oddball humanities people who still actually read books, which are obsolete, dusty artifacts that any machine can produce in just a few minutes.
I’d been hesitant to post anything since election day. What can anyone say about this situation that hasn’t already been said? In my opinion, all you need to do is look at the decline of reading and critical thinking skills to understand the second rise of the sexual assaulting felon. When an entire electorate stares at screens 80 hours a week, don’t or can’t read anything challenging, and believe all kinds of disinformation and nonsense, guess what happens?
During his last term, I read more American history than is usual for me, hoping to see some similarities to our current times in our past. We have seen much worse days than this, and survived as a nation. In some of our most tumultuous eras, it was never certain that we would make it through, but somehow, we did.
I don’t know what the next few years will bring, exactly, but I will be surprised if the great dictator doesn’t try to suspend elections. He’s already talked about doing that, as well as rounding up millions of immigrants. His proposed cabinet members are a farce and a disgrace, unqualified people who hate the government agencies they’ll be running, just like last time. His voters wanted this, and we’re all about to get it.
One thing I heard a lot of from 2016-2020 are variations of ‘this is not who we are—we’re better than this.” No, we aren’t. This is exactly who America is and what we want. We can take a little solace in the millions who voted against him, but that’s cold comfort. A man as mendacious and vile as this should have been thoroughly repudiated.
My job is to just try and make sure my children are safe and happy. There is little else we can do. Locally, you can try and make your community better. You can volunteer and try and make your corner of the world a little more humane. Make your voice heard to your elected representatives. Beyond that, we can just hope for the best.
My wife and I don’t talk politics around our children, since that would be a crazy thing to do, and we want to let them enjoy their childhoods. We did look at an electoral map together, and they are aware who won. My nine-year-old daughter, who is a brilliant artist and incredibly smart and perceptive in ways that I was not at her age, summed things up perfectly afterward. “Bruh—it was a girl’s turn after all this time. And that guy is so dumb, and such a mean bully. Just look at him.”
Children intuitively understand things, no matter what adults might say. She knows a lying creep when she sees one. I have never seen a picture of this man where he is smiling and it looks natural, because he is a deeply miserable human being who hates himself and continues to take it out on the entire world. As soon as he starts talking, this is self-evident.
The religious people who voted for him could be the topic for an entire book. All I can say about them is that they ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves, but I’m sure they are not. He’s an imperfect vessel on a mission from Jesus, after all.
And that’s enough about elections. I refuse to follow news cycles for years on end. I’m turning it all off. It will be hard to miss the worst of what he’ll do, but there is little point in following it week after week with every new outrage.
In other news, I have a few writing projects I’m working on, and a deadline I have to meet in a few weeks. I’ll have plenty to keep me busy through the end of the year and the start of next.
In the past few years, whenever a sci fi, comic book, or fantasy media property comes out with something new, and someone has the incredible nerve to criticize it, whether it’s Martin Scorcese saying they’re not cinema, or some obscure blogger like me saying “hey I thought that was not good,” I’ve heard some version of “Be quiet and let people enjoy things” in defense of such media offerings. To which I say an emphatic, “fair enough!” since everyone is free to enjoy whatever they wish, no matter how vapid.
What’s unusual about some of the superfan accounts that social media algorithms have been pushing at me lately are the accusations of racism, ‘toxic fandom’ or other charges levied at people who have valid criticisms of these movies and shows. The last time I checked, film and media criticism have long provided a valuable service. Nothing is above criticism or interpretation, as any good writer knows.
You can criticize something you’ve grown up with and enjoyed for decades without being ‘toxic’ or racist about it. I understand there are some white nationalists around who hated the new star wars and rings of power simply because they hate the diverse casts. Any normal person disavows this stuff.
But when I see constant fawning praise for fairly lame, mediocre offerings from gigantic, multinational, multibillion-dollar entities, and constant defense of such middling fare, and cries of outrage aimed at anyone who dares to say they don’t like it, I don’t understand. Are we not allowed to say we think Rings of Power is lousy? Because, let me tell you my friends, it is a total slog, a huge disappointment, despite the great cast and expensive effects and everything else. I disliked it and gave up after 3 episodes. I don’t read Tolkien to watch a dwarf scream at Elrond for missing his wedding, an exchange which I found to be unintentionally hilarious. Nor do I read his works to see Steven Seagal type characters beating people senseless, breaking arms and legs and uttering lame, action movie kinds of one-liners in a brutal fistfight. No thanks, amazon. Have fun, those of you who enjoy such things. People can enjoy whatever they wish, it makes no difference to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I like plenty of junk. Bad TV and film have an illustrious history. One of my favorite things to watch is Rifftrax, a hilarious program that takes special delight in poking fun at bad movies and television. However, I don’t make lengthy videos breaking down each Rifftrax episode and telling people how great it is and insisting that people who don’t see the value in it are toxic, because that would be an incredible waste of my time. It’s enough that I enjoy it. But then, I’m not seeking to have millions of fans following me for new Rifftrax content. Nor do I wish to be a Rifftrax influencer or to monetize my enjoyment of Rifftrax. I just want to laugh and have a good time. But that’s just me, and to each their own.
Now, a group of fans riffing Rings of Power? That I would watch and enjoy, along with a big bowl of popcorn.
As promised, here is chapter two of my novel, The King of Dogwood Street, a neighborly comedy of good, evil, and home improvement.
When we last saw our heroes, they were in conflict with a drunken neighbor Billy Joe, who was challenged by Rex, a strange newcomer. Enraged by his defeat, Billy sought vengeance in the form of petty vandalism.
In Chapter two, the police arrive to the scene of the crime, and Billy must fight both his own stupidity and his hangover to avoid charges. The rest of he neighborhood happily watches the drama unfold. Read on!
If you missed the first chapter, it’s also uploaded on the blog for your reading enjoyment– please see the links below. If you enjoy it please share and let me and others know what you think.
The Labor Day holiday invariably reminds me of my father, a shop steward and union rep for many years, who worked many long hours at a job he wasn’t crazy about to support his family. He always told me how important his union was, how lucky he was to have it at New York Telephone for forty years–his job supported us all (six kids) on one salary. This song reminds me a lot of him. He was a tireless man who still had time for kid activities, coaching, volunteering at the church and scouts, and too many other things to name. He was a great guy and I miss him.
Happy labor day to everyone, especially those of us working at jobs where we are perhaps underpaid or unappreciated. Your families understand–you’re what makes our country work.
The end of summer is upon us. Sigh. I had a wonderful time, but it is always too short. I got to see some old friends, and spent plenty of time with my children, which is always endless fun. My oldest and I took a few long hikes in the Catskills, which is something I love to do more than almost anything in the world. We had family camping trips in Watkins Glen and in the Catskills and in Cooperstown, and all of them were memorable times we’ll always recall with fondness.
I got some reading and writing done, but not as much as I’d hoped or planned, and now with the semester beginning again there will be less time to do those things, unfortunately. I’ll be posting some reviews of things I read, including David Lindsay’s unique fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which was odd and engaging in the best ways. Played some great boardgames with my children, too.
I saw a few movies with my children, and also made the decision to cancel every streaming service I have. The only one that survived was PBS, and Amazon Video, which is included with Prime anyway. These things add up so quickly that our streaming bills were as bad as our cable box used to be, once upon a time. With all of the dvds and videos I own, plus all the free content out there, we’ll never lack for something to watch, and anyway I should spend any time I was watching television working on my book.
Speaking of which, there was also a near miss with a couple of publishers, but my new book is still without a home. I’ll keep at it in the querying trenches. One hybrid publisher seemed like a possibility but after my last experience with a small press I got cold feet at some of the contract details, and will just continue looking for representation or a publisher. This is no easy task, as everyone knows, and as authors I know are quick to tell me. But so it goes.
In the meantime, I’ll continue posting chapters of the new book here.
I’ll leave off with two photos of my son, Forest, a thoughtful, curious and all around wonderful lad, who has brought me nothing but pride and happiness. The first photo was ten years ago, and the second was a couple of weeks back. Both are at the same spot on a trail I love to hike as often as possible. It’s one of those magical, gorgeous places in the Catskills where I would live, if it were an option.
Time flies. Forest is a keen observer of nature, and on both hikes, as a one year old and as an eleven year old, he remarked often on all the beauty and natural drama we witnessed, from deer to eagles to bees and flowers. Remarkable boy, and I’m a lucky guy.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour” –Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, 1803
Christopher Tuthill 