More About ‘Dark Academia’

I mentioned in last week’s post that “Dark Academia” is having a cultural moment; I decided a while back to plunge into the genre and see what it was all about. You may have noticed a lot of storylines about kids going to magical schools in books, television series, and movies, but in my opinion it takes more than that to qualify as Dark Academia. The Bureau of Magical Things, an Australian program on Netflix, features students at a select (and secret) school of magic hidden behind a bookshop, but the kids are wholesome, and the mood is generally upbeat and sunny. You might call it “Magical Academia,” and its audience is young children.

A truer example of Dark Academia is Legacies, (a CW Network series now on Netflix) about a K-12 school for kids who happen to be vampires, werewolves, and witches, with other magical beings occasionally thrown in (one kid is actually a phoenix, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him). They all attend the Salvatore School, a private institution in Mystic Falls, Virginia, which greatly resembles many a private or prep school that regular mortals may have attended. There are the plaid skirts, the school crest, the gated grounds, the polished wooden floors, and all the other accoutrements of a well-heeled and decorous institution. Some of the characters are so likable that you almost forget they’re dangerous, until the fangs and claws come out or someone casts an especially evil spell.

The school has been established to create a safe haven, protecting the students from the world and the world from them. Attempts are made to school them into controlling their proclivities, although it’s a little unclear how successful Salvatore is in doing this. Every effort is made to present the school to outsiders as simply a private academy; there is an annual football match with the local public high school that Salvatore students are encouraged to lose, the more to cement their reputation as a bunch of harmless preps. While this sounds dark enough, the real kicker is that the magical powers the kids have at the tips of their fingers attract all kinds of monsters, so that not only are they constantly contending with themselves, each other, and the world at large but also with a variety of evil beings that inevitably come calling. One week it might be a Golem; the next week, it’s an evil Cupid.

Another series that I quite enjoyed was The Magicians, a program originally shown on SYFY and based on Lev Grossman’s Magicians novels. At the beginning of this series, a young man who thinks he’s bound for the Ivy League finds that he’s been invited instead to interview at Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York that can be reached by various hidden portals, though no one outside the school seems to know it’s there. While Legacies is aimed at a younger audience, The Magicians has adult content; there’s the occasional wild party, some truly terrifying supernatural beings, regular trips to the Underworld (usually one-way), and unforeseen consequences of the use of magic. Unlike the Salvatore kids, who seem to wield their powers with total panache, as if they were in a music video, the students at Brakebills often seem to be spitting into the wind, achieving everything except what they set out to do and breaking things more than they end up fixing them.

What I liked about this series was its total unpredictability; you can never tell where the characters are going to go or what will happen next. The mix of quirky personalities is occasionally grating, but all the characters are memorable, often funny, and sometimes tragic: imagine a group of hip, smart young urbanites with a lot of competitive qualities and neuroses trying to learn how to be magicians while grappling with the usual problems of college life. A magical world called Fillory looms large in the plot, though I found it tedious, as it seems more a child’s fantasy world in which Brakebills students get stuck than the Utopia it first appears to be. That’s probably somehow the point. This fantasy world is more a trap, or perhaps an extended test, than it is an escape; growing into their abilities often means the characters have to figure out how to transcend Fillory. It turns out being a magician is much more than just being able to do cool things all the time.

Perhaps the best exemplar of Dark Academia that I’ve yet come across (this list is not exhaustive) is Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. When I first heard of Dark Academia, I was imagining something like this and wasn’t much interested in exploring the genre. After the first chapter or two I wasn’t sure I’d finish the book, but if you can get past a fairly stomach-turning beginning, the novel rewards you with a gruesome but fascinating fictional take on Yale’s secret societies. Ms. Bardugo, who was a member of a society at Yale, has said that she was attempting to “hyper-mystify” the societies rather than write a tell-all. I think she means by that that the fascination anything secret has for outsiders simply provided too golden an opportunity for fictional fodder to be passed up, and she’s right.

The Ninth House, in this novel, is the society with the job of keeping the others within bounds and making sure that their rituals and magic are used “responsibly.”  When it appears to the newest initiate of Lethe House that its protocols mainly lean toward covering up wrongdoing rather than policing it, she discovers that the job means more to her than just an escape from an extremely troubled past. As she learns more about the activities of the societies and Yale’s relationship to the town at large, she begins to see the disconnect between what she’s been led to expect and the way things actually are and decides to investigate further.

The book would have been too morbid for me if it were not for the characters, who only reveal themselves slowly; they, too, are keeping a lot of things under wraps. It’s almost as difficult to believe in the beginning that a street kid like Alex will manage to survive a single semester at Yale as it is to imagine her mentor, Darlington, turning out to be deeper than the stuffed shirt and Yale traditionalist he appears to be. I liked the characters better the more I got to know them, and that includes some of their supporting players, the diffident Dawes, always preoccupied with her dissertation, and the skeptical police detective, Turner. In this world of privilege and power, a strategy of keeping motives and means hidden is simply the way things are done.

While one hopes that the actual doings of Yales’s secret societies don’t include using the most marginalized townies as subjects in such activities as the reading of entrails to predict the stock market, you suspect there is some form of truth in the theme of “might makes right” that runs through the novel. Most of the truly bizarre activities Ms. Bardugo depicts are clearly fictional, but there’s a ring of uncomfortable truth in her portrait of a closed society of wealth and power exerting its will over the town and other institutions, and respectable appearances covering up even the foulest of deeds. This is another novel that includes trips to the Underworld and portals to hell dimensions, though these are even more chilling than those depicted in The Magicians. Sometimes, people in The Magicians break into light-hearted, spontaneous song; it’s difficult to imagine anyone in Bardugo’s oppressive Yale environment doing so, unless it were part of a drunken revel.

So which school would I choose to attend, if I had to make a choice? It would clearly be Brakebills for me. Salvatore School seems too dangerous a proposition for a mere human, as does Yale as Bardugo depicts it. Brakebills is kind of a port in the storm. I could imagine settling in there as a campus librarian and trying to stay out of the way of the more wayward spells and trips to the Neitherlands. Maybe I could even come up with a library circulation system that magically extracts wayward books from the desks of patrons who refuse to return them and gives them an invisible rap on the knuckles that leaves them unable to pinpoint the source. That would be fun.

The Scholomance: A Campus Visit

I know nobody else cares, but if anyone knows who’s causing that pinging sound I’m always hearing in my ears, if you could get them to stop, I’ll be so grateful I’d probably bake you a cake. Once I find the party that’s doing it, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, I guarantee you. I was talking to a customer at the store today when it started up; I mentioned it to him, and we both decided, in lieu of a better idea, that it was coming from a debris field strung somewhere in the Atlantic. OK, that’s off my chest for now. Just remember, though, I warned you: I’m cranky about these sound effects.

I do actually have a topic for this post, and that’s the trilogy I just finished reading that I think some of you would enjoy, Naomi Novik’s “The Scholomance” series. I sometimes use EBSCO’s NoveList database (which you can probably access through your local public library) to find books similar to other books I’ve enjoyed, and I think that’s where I came across the trilogy’s first book, A Deadly Education. I was investigating books in the intriguingly named “Dark Academia” genre, and that led me to this title. Dark Academia is having a definite cultural moment. Some of this interest can be traced back to Harry Potter, but there are a lot of wildly different variations on the theme, as I have found.

In the Scholomance, students attend a school of magic in an alternate universe with the void as its backyard and spend four years of secondary education trying not to get killed. That’s it, in a nutshell. There are no adults around; course schedules appear out of thin air, the cafeteria is self-serve, and monsters (or “mals”) may found at any time in the food, in the shower heads, in the library, or around any random corner at all. Students spend their time learning and perfecting spells and tend to specialize according to their aptitudes. If they survive until the spring of their senior year, they must run a gauntlet of monsters through the gymnasium to escape the Scholomance and find their portals back to the real world.

The survival rate at the school has been pretty poor until Galadriel Higgins (“El” to her friends) and Orion Lake appear on the scene with some superior mal-fighting abilities and new ideas about how to manage monsters. Antagonists at first (as nearly everyone at the school is in this dog-eat-dog environment), they slowly begin to form alliances. One of the joys of the novels is to see how the fiercely independent El gradually comes to see who she can trust and whose talents align best with hers. Alliances in the Scholomance are truly life-and-death decisions, since trusting anyone in an environment in which people are played against one another for survival is a serious thing. While the purported reason for the existence of the Scholomance is to give the young people a fighting chance in the mal-infested world to which, if they’re lucky, they’ll be returning, it usually seems the school itself is rigged against them. When El’s class decides to follow her lead in working cooperatively to kill mals, things take a different turn, though not everyone is sold on the idea.

El, Orion, and their fellow students have the fight of their lives in The Last Graduate, and the build-up to and execution of their graduation exercise is unforgettably exciting and suspenseful. Scholomance students come from all over the world and bring with them the political struggles and rivalries of life as we know it, of New York and London, of Beijing and Dubai. In addition to being mal-fighting warriors, though, the students are also teenagers and experience the normal issues of adolescent angst sandwiched in between the flashy heroics.

Somehow the author maintains a buoyant tone that carries you through the horrors of the Scholomance, and in the final book, The Golden Enclaves, you get to see what a Scholomance education buys you, in case you were thinking of enrolling. I probably wouldn’t agree with my local library on a lot of things, but I do agree with their categorization of this trilogy as science fiction. It’s too much like the real world to come across as fantasy. Although it’s full of magic and spells, it maintains a businesslike approach to realpolitik while also making a daring case for idealism. An uneasy cross between a junior United Nations and a penal colony, the Scholomance may actually succeed in what it sets out to do but at a cost. We can surely say the same about some of our own devil's bargains.

This would make a smashing TV series, so I hope someone gifted ends up bringing this to the screen. (See, just a couple of years of Netflix and I’m already leaning into “Let’s get this streaming so I can watch it from the comfort of my couch. And bring me a bowl of popcorn while you’re at it.”) Yes, I’m all about the hygge these days.

A Poem for Penelope

 Ways of Motion

(A Poem)

Twisting and turning

Odysseus makes his way home.

Adventures, some call them.

I call them tribulations.

Plagues sent by a vengeful god

To throw the man of many turns aside.

While Penelope spun and wove

And undid her work secretly at night.

To fend off the intruders, the desperate,

And the merely curious.

Both masters of craft

One ranging widely, the other

Still as a black lake under starlight.

(Who knew what lay at the bottom?)

Perhaps I have been both, in turn

The one who waited, and one who fought

The one who roamed, and the one who thought

(Who knows what thoughts?)

Sometimes winning by a sword

And sometimes by a loom.  —Mary Hackworth

Wordplay is back. No, you haven’t killed us. We’ve been enjoying the simple pleasures of domesticity for several years, including porch-sitting, baking, and watching TV. Yes, I’ve come to really enjoy television, which is one thing that’s different about me now. The streaming services have created a lot more viewing options, and I quite like seeing what other people are watching as well as finding lesser-known favorites of my own.

No, this hasn’t turned into a poetry blog, but I wrote this poem the first week I was in this apartment, and it seems appropriate to start things back up with it. This is still a blog about mythology and everyday life, and I plan to write about things I’ve been seeing out there in the culture, just as I did before.

One quick reminder: Any opinions expressed here are my own, and they are merely that: opinions. I take full responsibility for them, and my guiding motto is still "Do No Harm."

Social Distancing and “The Tempest”

I did something kind of raw today and made a video in which I talked about my own experiences with “social distancing” and social isolation. As I said before, I do think I have a jump on this in comparison with most other people and that there might be something I could add to the conversation surrounding the psychological impacts of all this coronavirus self-quarantine, which are very real.

It’s one thing to read poems and to talk about one’s writing process; that’s one kind of vulnerability. To talk about a difficult personal experience is yet another level of vulnerable, and I think you can tell from the video that I was searching for words and trying to be honest about my own experience. If that helps you make sense of what’s happening to you, then it was time well spent for me. I decided not to edit it and to just leave it as it is, because it’s just me talking, without a lot of forethought, and once you start editing something to “package” it, it probably loses any of the original virtue it may have had.

I tend not to hold anything back when I talk about my own unusual journey because I don’t want to leave it up to someone else to tell my story for me. No one is more of an expert than you or I on our own experiences. You can visit Wordplay’s Facebook page to see the video.

Our Dickensian Moment

I debuted a video of me reading William Wordsworth on Wordplay’s Facebook page earlier tonight, and I honestly don’t see how you can expect any more of me, but here I am writing my blog post—because it is Wednesday. This is such a time of contrasts, isn’t it? One minute I’m totally frustrated with trying to accomplish a formerly simple task and the next minute I’m almost crying because I’m laughing so hard at something someone else posted re: WFH Fashion or How to Up Your Baking Game Under Self-Quarantine.

It was wild at work this week, with people stampeding through the store, refusing to respect the six-feet rule, and continuing to expect things to function as normal in the midst of a world-wide crisis. Everybody handles things differently, and I understand that, but I have talked to several people who somehow seemed to be in denial that anything unusual was taking place. One very nice woman seemed quite reasonable except for the fact that she just wasn’t accepting the fact that lockdowns in some places mean that some problems can’t be easily solved right now. I had several conversations in which I had the sense that people were hanging on to an everyday reality that no longer exists.

At the same time, I’m charmed by the humor and ingenuity displayed by everyday people trying to make the best of things and cope with challenging circumstances. I’m still wondering what will happen to those of modest means who aren’t really equipped for riding out a tsunami like this one. I’m assuming that good will and understanding from everyone involved will carry the day, and in most cases, this is probably true, but it’s difficult to imagine that all losses will be made good. How could they be? Some things really can’t be undone or redone, and there really are months (and years) of your life that you can never get back, no matter how much you want to. That’s something especially difficult for young people, who haven’t had a lot of experience with life upheavals, to understand.

The surreal is now normal, something I’m sure few of us anticipated could happen almost overnight. You just don’t expect the new normal to radically change from one day to the next. One day, I watched from a quiet corner of the grocery store as at least 20 people descended on the produce department at one time; a couple of days later, I was told I couldn’t stand in the completely empty section of the store that formerly housed the cafe because it was “closed” (though no one was within 25 feet of me or actually even in the section at all). All of the parks in town are closed except for one, which has inexplicably remained open. Last week, they were so packed with people that I was afraid to get out of my car, and now even the parking lots are blocked off, so obviously someone figured out the Petri dish potential of the walking paths—no social distancing with hundreds of people walking at the same time.

I’ve been noticing moments of splendor in the midst of chaos, something I’ve become very adept at doing. I’m often in my car and unable to stop when I notice something springlike and beautiful; if this were not the case, I would take even more pictures. I’ve noticed in the past that photographs often fail to capture the full effect of what I’m seeing, but maybe I’m getting better at gauging whether something is photographable or not. My sense of what’s important has changed since I stopped working full-time years ago. It sometimes seems to me that I accomplish more by taking a photo of a tree than I did by working an entire eight-hour day at my desk job, courtesy of some algorithm of usefulness that I’ve developed on my own.

Not all of the effects of what’s happening will be bad. I am not one to recommend character-building experiences (feeling that I’ve had more than I will probably be able to benefit from no matter how long I live)—but you certainly can learn a lot of things about yourself when you’re thrown out of your comfort zone. Of course, you already know that, so no need to state the obvious—just remember the old chestnut about tough times not lasting. And the glass being half-full, not half-empty. All those old cliches.

The Ghost Trees of Spring

One thing about being without a permanent address over the last couple of years: I’ve gotten to know other parts of town that I didn’t know well before and probably wouldn’t have gotten to know at all in other circumstances. My opinion about which parts of town are desirable and which aren’t has changed several times; I’ve driven through entire neighborhoods I had never explored before; I’ve found out which streets really have the best holiday decorations; and I’ve gotten used to the gigantic Kroger stores that dwarf the smaller neighborhood store I used to frequent, which now seems small and cramped to me.

Driving west one winter morning over a year ago, I experienced a sunrise that turned the trees ahead of me into a molten gold, a particular shade of intense light I’d never seen before. I wasn’t used to traveling in that direction at that time of the morning and had never caught the sun at quite that angle before: a revelation. I discovered suburban neighborhoods that looked much older than they are because of the way in which mature trees had been incorporated into their development; I was surprised at how quickly they had assumed a mature appearance, because I remembered when they were brand-new.

I found out that the crabapple trees on a certain stretch of road look like ghost trees at night, something you would only know if you traveled that particular street after dark during a very brief period in spring when the trees are flowering. I discovered that downtown no longer seems like the center of things. If there is a center, it is one that seems to travel with me, like the Self, whose “center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” I’ve experienced the magic of autumn nights in streets swirling with leaves and rain. I’ve noted how much nocturnal life there is, even within city limits; a fox here, a pair of coyotes there, rabbits dashing across the roads on unknown errands. I passed a house with a horse in the front yard. I craned my neck, just this morning, to see if what appeared to be gigantic birds on a suburban roof were actually real birds or merely chimney pots or something equally mundane.

I’ve looked with longing at cozy windows, lighted at night; imagined what kind of tiny home I would design and where I would put it if I were building my own home; visited the Jot ’Em Down Store twice while driving out in the country; and photographed public art that has popped up in unexpected places all over town. I’ve passed a street sign that brings up a memory of someone who once lived there, long ago, a street that I had never seen until now, the person who lived there long since moved on. I’ve discovered that the achingly beautiful phenomenon that is spring is equally achingly beautiful all over town. I’ve found out what it’s like to have Starbucks as your living room and the public library as your drawing room. Not quite as cozy and private as I’d like, but there you have it.

Little by little, I’ve come across people that I hadn’t seen in a long time and discovered that the past is still present, that there is a sense of continuity between earlier periods of my life and where I am now. I’ve realized just how much living in one particular spot gives you a certain outlook, certain paths to trod, and particular points of view, and how not being tied to one spot expands your outlook. I’m still processing what this has all meant to me and probably will do so for a long time to come, but I will say that I’ve probably gained something from floating free, as it were, through my adopted hometown. I have a perspective on it that could never be matched by someone living settled at home, viewing the world through their front window. Some of it has to do with the strangeness but persistence of life, mixed with a fondness for this corner of the earth and its natural beauty, unfiltered through all the seasons.

Social Distancing for Extroverts

Hand washing and social distancing: the watchwords of the hour. I’ve been practicing both to the best of my ability, but I can’t help thinking that the latter, while probably necessary, is rather a tragic result of the current situation. I’m naturally an introvert, so spending time alone isn’t nearly as difficult for me as it is for the extroverted majority—and yet even I recognize that humans are social creatures and need other people. Most people can’t even seem to make it at home for more than two or three days during the holidays before they’re ready to bust out of the house, so I’m sure the quarantines are going to be very trying psychologically for many folks.

Of course, there also lessons to be learned on the ways in which trying to take care of each other can be accomplished in unfamiliar ways. I was going through the drive-through at Starbucks today when it occurred to me how many germs were probably on my Starbucks card, which I was getting ready to hand to the barista, so I wiped it off front and back with hand sanitizer. Apparently, that does not keep the card from working, though there might be a limit to how many times you could do that. (It’s too bad you can’t do the same thing to money.) Trying to give people extra personal space at the grocery store and not touching any more surfaces than necessary also requires thinking about things in a new way.

Whether it’s good news or bad news, I don’t know, but the fact is I’m so used to surreal conditions that this crisis is mostly just more of the same for me. I won’t be able to frequent cafes for a while, and the libraries are also closed. I had to scramble to find things I didn’t want to run out of once I realized people were starting to buy things up; I’m living with uncertainty and wondering how long current conditions will hold, just like you are. And yet, it’s exactly the type of thing I’m familiar with, how life can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye. I’m not happy about any of it, and yet in some ways I personally feel less isolated than I did when my own surreal adventure, if you can call it that, began 10 years ago. Now I know other people also know what it feels like to be isolated, anxious, and to some degree helpless, to see things spinning beyond your control.

It may be ironic that I, one of the world’s champion introverts, am so transfixed by the prohibitions on getting close to other people, but it’s that aspect of our current reality that’s really captured my imagination. Entire novels will be written about our current predicament; the one I would write would deal with the tragic aspect of not being to touch other people. It seems like a metaphor for so much more, for some kind of malaise that has perhaps been hidden for a long time but takes its visible shape in the form of a virus. Am I saying we made ourselves sick? It’s not that exactly, but more that there’s a kind of symbolic truth in the virus. How strange that it would have made its appearance at a time when we’re already so divided politically.

We will probably learn a lot of things about ourselves by the time this situation is over. One of the most interesting questions to me is how people will handle this unprecedented opportunity to practice introspection. Whether any profound changes come out of it is anyone’s guess, but the chance to get in dialogue with the Self (in Jungian terms) has never been better.