And this was before AI took over

/ Alex Good / 18 Comments

From World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) by Franklin Foer:

But reading through the papers [of Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic during the worst of the Great Depression], I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site. I stared at the page. Eighty years of inflation . . . and stagnation. Writers are still paid precisely the same sum they received at the lowest moments in the economic history of the modern world.

Over my time as a journalist, I’ve seen the proprietors of journalistic outfits come to the conclusion that writers don’t really need to get paid very much. My career began at Slate, one of the first of the magazines created to live exclusively on the Internet. In those golden years, back in the midnineties, we paid one thousand dollars for each book review, and a few of our stars made even more than that. Today, Slate pays about three hundred dollars for a review.

We don’t need to rely on anecdote. There are studies to be examined. In 1981, the Authors Guild surveyed its members. It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year — if we adjusted that sum for inflation, it would now be about $35,000. That doesn’t sound like much at all, until we compare it with the Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000. Sadly, the number rolls further down the deflationary spiral. In 2015, the median income dropped to $17,500. Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water. The value of knowledge has been deflated and depressed, just as the tech companies intended.

From “The Lost Art of Not Pitching” by David Macfarlane, Canadian Notes & Queries 115, Spring 2026:

Two dollars and fifty cents (USD) per word was as high as I ever got (GQ) before the tide receded. And kept receding. The water’s out way past the lighthouse by now. It’s more a beach of stranded Substacks and gasping podcasts than an ocean. Magazine writing was a slightly odd career choice when there were lots of publications in the sea. (One dollar to one dollar and fifty cents was about my average.) It would be downright eccentric now. I recently read (online, don’t ask me where, and who knows if it’s true) that seven cents a word is the going North American freelance rate.

Holmes: The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

I thought a bit about whether I should include this Jeffery Deaver story in my list of Sherlock Holmes stories, as it doesn’t have Sherlock Holmes in it. But since it’s an ironic homage, and is collected in the anthology In the Company of Sherlock Holmes edited by King and Klinger, I decided to give it a place. There are “Sherlock Holmes” stories out there that are less Holmesian.

What we have here is the story of a young Manhattanite named Paul Winslow who decides, in the course of therapy, that becoming a consulting detective to the NYPD would be a dream job, especially given how he’s such a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and has the same gift for analyzing evidence and inductive reasoning (making inferences based on observation of details). Given that there’s a serial killer currently terrorizing New York, dubbed the “East Side Slasher” by the media, ingratiating himself with the police turns out to be easy to do, and soon he’s partnering up with an overwhelmed and relatively dim police detective (Lestrade by another name) to crack the case.

This he does in an unanticipated way, leading to my description of this as an ironic homage. Not so ironic though as to put Holmes fans off, even if it does present a darkly humorous take on Holmes’s abiding influence.

Holmes index

TCF: Blazing Eye Sees All

/ Alex Good / 24 Comments

Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
By Leah Sottile

The crime:

In the 2000s Amy Carlson, then a McDonald’s manager, left her family (she’d had three children, with three different fathers) and started up a New Age religious group that later became known as Love Has Won. Carlson took the title of Mother God, claiming to be a 19-billion-year old entity who had been reincarnated thousands of time, including as Jesus (now revealed to have been female). An alcoholic anorexic who took massive amounts of colloidal silver as a cure-all, Carlson died in 2021 at the age of 45. Her followers kept her mummified body for weeks wrapped in a sleeping bag covered in Christmas lights.

The book:

I suppose the first point I should address is whether this belongs in the True Crime Files. I think Love Has Won (LHW) was a cult that operated various scams, but was there a crime involved in all this? There were charges against six LHW members for “tampering with a deceased person’s body” (Carlson’s) and abuse of children (as there were a couple of kids living at the LHW compound), but these were subsequently dropped without explanation. I think they probably figured that with Carlson dead there was no point taking things any further, and given how the group immediately dissolved that may have been the right call.

As it is, cults occupy a gray area when it comes to legality, and this is a point that’s actually quite important to the historical survey of various New Age groups that Leah Sottile conducts. The test case is the U. S. Supreme Court 1944 decision of United States v. Ballard. This was an action for fraud brought against the “I AM” movement and it was decided that the First Amendment protection of religious freedom meant that you couldn’t challenge beliefs on the basis of whether or not they were true. This basically nullified any chance of going after such groups on the basis of fraud, as the justices could only shrug their shoulders at the question of truth in such a context. As the majority opinion put it: “The religious views espoused by respondents might seem incredible, if not preposterous, to most people. But if those doctrines are subject to trial before a jury charged with finding their truth or falsity, then the same can be done with the religious beliefs of any sect.”

With Ballard the door was opened for spiritual entrepreneurs, and in America these have always been thick on the ground. The most successful would go on to be legally recognized as religions and become huge international franchises worth billions of dollars. Others would fade from memory with the death of their charismatic founder, or more tragically with group suicide. But, free from charges of fraud, unless they were breaking the law in some way they were in the clear, no matter how ridiculous or even damaging their beliefs might be. As Sottile summarizes where things came to rest: “People can believe in just about anything with their entire being. And if they believe it completely, it’s protected.”

Love Has Won didn’t have a coherent message or theology. Sottile traces a through line connecting LHW to various earlier spiritual movements loosely camped under the label New Age, but these struck me as only a random set of borrowings that added up to nothing. LHW theology begins in the legendary continent of Lemuria, for which Sottile provides a helpful backgrounder. And it ends in some kind of Holy Mountain (filled with Lemurians) in northern California. In between there’s a cosmic battle going on between Galactics from the fifth dimension (they’re the good guys) and a reptile Cabal of Illuminati, descendants of the evil Anunnaki. In an early credo Carlson wrote how she was “choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and step into my Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be.” “From this day forth, I release the darkness that society and the status quo have placed on me and choose my Heart, my Truth, my Divine Birthright of Abundance and accept my Royal heritage.”

As with any cult we can roll our eyes or laugh or get angry at just how ridiculous all of this sounds. Personally, I’m always put in mind when I read this stuff of the Carl Sandburg poem “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter.” “I like to watch a good four-flusher work,” Sandburg writes, but not the trashy sort of performance that he sees hustling today. This resonates with me even outside of the realm of cult leaders. It never ceases to amaze me how many successful artists (or “creators”), businesspeople, and politicians aren’t even any good at what is supposed to be their job. Usually their success is attributed to some special charismatic gift that I can never see.

If you try to explain the LHW world view in so many words of course nobody would buy it. But add Carlson’s presentation of it – the sparkly lights, the purple robes, the healing crystals – and you have a cult. I’m more than willing to accept that a charismatic individual can sell anything if their pitch is good enough. I like to watch a good four-flusher work too. But when Carlson passed herself off as God incarnate or when Donald Trump does his “weave” (and don’t worry, more on him shortly) I’m just confused. As we know from studies of the MAGA movement and cult memberships, the followers of such leaders aren’t, at least in general, stupid or poorly educated. So who is fooled by any of this? I mean, even the cult’s name was garbage. Love Has Won? That’s just poor branding.

As you will have picked up from my Trump reference, there was also a political angle to LHW that isn’t forced by Sottile but is a part of the cultural matrix that gave birth to Carlson and fashioned her message. That matrix of madness was made up of various general as well as more specific ingredients: end-times religion, Christian nationalism, the Tea Party and QAnon, anti-vaccine activists, the militia movement, populist rage against experts and elites, all amplified by social media and exacerbated by growing inequality. Two books published in 2017 tried to explain and describe what was going on. First up was Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire:

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy. . . . In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

And this is from David Niewert’s Alt-America:

Alt-America is an alternative universe that has a powerful resemblance to our own, except that it’s a completely different America, the nation its residents have concocted and reconfigured in their imaginations. It is not the America where the rest of us live. In this other America, suppositions take the place of facts, and conspiracy theories become concrete realties. Its citizens live alongside us in our universe, but their perception of that universe places them in a different world altogether, one scarcely recognizable to those outside it.

I am not shoehorning a political argument into Sottile’s book. The political valence of the “fever dream of the American New Age” during these years became inextricably tied up with right-wing political messaging. In bookstores, the books on natural healing, crystals, and tarot cards were shelved alongside those debunking the COVID hoax, the perils of socialism, and the latest from Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson:

This felt like the aisle of lost hope – that even New Ageism, with all its promise of being something different, was in fact just as red-pilled as the rest of the country. This was the aisle where believers became radicals. A series of books called the Rise of the New World Order was on display; one yelled from its cover that “the next election could be the last.”

A book called Nazi UFO Time Travelers asked, “Do we owe the future to the fuhrer?” Books about Hitler and “the Nazi’s incredible secret technology” were mixed along books on the “5 Love Languages.”

Tucker and Amy Carlson (no relation) were not strange bedfellows. Focusing on female New Age leaders Sottile also tells the story of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who started something called The Church Universal and Triumphant. This was a millenarian movement that posited a final battle between Ascended Masters and the Fallen Ones. What this morphed into in the real world was a survivalist ideology that took its lead from the Patriot movement. Church members began building compounds and stockpiling weapons while railing against a Zionist-Communist takeover. In much the same way, Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE), headed by J. Z. Knight (who was possessed by the spirit of an eternal spiritual being, also from Lemuria, named Ramtha), identified the forces of darkness in contemporary political terms with a nefarious New World Order, its doctrine sharing common talking points with “far-right militias and members of the antigovernment Patriot movement.” Though a long-time supporter of the Democratic Party, Knight flipped for Trump in a turn that many were making at the time. The RSE publicly came out in support for Trump and endorsed the QAnon movement wholeheartedly, even hanging a giant Q on the front gate of their compound and selling Q hats and shirts. COVID was decried as a hoax and vaccines as poison.

Carlson (Amy, not Tucker) rode this same wave. She inveighed against then President Biden while encouraging her followers to watch Trump’s speeches on TV. Tearing pages from the QAnon songbook, she thought Trump was going to disclose government secrets about aliens and elitist cabals (with the elites, naturally, being all of the left: “the Rothschilds, Hollywood, Obama, Hillary, all of the elite are the cabal”). It seemed everything flowed together in Fantasyland or Alt-America, from Love Has Won’s “labyrinthine beliefs about UFOs, conspiracy theories, the cabal and Illuminati, Atlantis and Lemuria, to their ever-growing love for Donald Trump.” Eventually Carlson would even claim Trump was her father in Lemuria, and begin to sound like Trump in her social media posts. As one such “divine decree” put it: “The Entire [9/11] truth, as well as The UFO Conspiracy Cover-Up, Must Be Revealed immediately. . . .If these are Not Revealed immediately, WE the people, Will Abolish that illusionary Government.”

On the face of it, it’s hard to square Mother God (a.k.a., Mother Earth, Divine Mother, Universal Mother, White Buffalo Calf Woman) making a “divine decree” that appeals to the authority of WE the people. But the whole tone of the post sounds exactly like a Trump Truth Social tweet: the random capitalizations, the commanding tone, and the sheer craziness.

So not strange bedfellows at all. Nor were there any strange bedfellows among the 144,000 “saved” in post-Carlson LHW theology, a group that included Prince, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Trump, Putin, and Hitler. This was the great American political-theological right-wing melting pot. “While the aesthetics and dialects of the Patriot movement, QAnon, and conspirituality influencers couldn’t have been more different, the ideas were essentially the same. One researcher dubbed this New Age influencer/vaccine denial space ‘pastel QAnon,’ for the ways the Q aesthetic was softened and feminized for a whole new audience.” Not the manosphere then but something just as toxic in its own way.

Given that Sottile’s focus is on a female-led New Age, from the spirit-rapping Fox sisters through figures like Edna Ballard (Lotus Ray King), Elizabeth Prophet (Guru), and J. Z. Knight (Ramtha) leading up to Carlson (Mother God) she also has some thoughts on how this plays out in gender terms. Among male cult leaders there is often a need to establish a dominance hierarchy where sexual behaviour is controlled and only the leader is given procreative opportunities. Among the pastel QAnon leaders there seems to be little of this kind of sexual dominance or maternal feeling. Knight took on a male identity in Ramtha. Carlson rejected her own children entirely, and despite having a series of Father God associates doesn’t appear to have been sexually driven. What these figures mainly wanted was attention. “Even as a kid, Amy wanted to be onstage. Maybe, in the end, that was what this was all about. She was admired and revered; not an actress, or a singer, but a goddess.” “Amy wanted to be worshipped. She found believers willing to do that.”

In sum, the essential ingredients for a Fourth Great Awakening were all in place at this time. There was a populace primed to believe anything. Sottile references a 2023 survey that found roughly half of those polled believed houses can be haunted by spiritual entities, 20 percent believed in Bigfoot, and a third believed we are being observed by aliens. There was the growth of the Internet and social media, which vastly expanded the reach and the profitability of fringe theories while also promoting the most narcissistic elements in society. And finally there was a breakdown in traditional social orders, leading to the rise of charismatic cult leaders as new icons of hope and authority. Carlson responded to “a brutal society – a society that discards anything and anyone that is broken, that prizes beauty and fame and God and money and little else.” That Carlson was broken just made her need for beauty and fame and God and money more essential. With the law largely sidelined, her path was clear.

Noted in passing:

As various commentators have noticed, people who say they existed in previous lives nearly always find themselves upwardly mobile. They weren’t a peasant on the eve of the French Revolution, but Marie Antoinette. They weren’t a slave building the pyramids but the Pharaoh himself. Carlson was no slouch in this department, claiming that among her 534 previous lives she pre-existed as a who’s who of historical biggies: the Queen of Lemuria, Cleopatra, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few. I guess this was part of accepting her “Divine Birthright” and “Royal heritage.”

There’s a reason we speak of celebrity “worship.” In our culture to be a celebrity is to be a god, so it’s no surprise Carlson couldn’t, or didn’t feel the need, to distinguish between them. Did she want to be God, or did she just want to be famous, loved, and adored? It’s a silly question. She thought they were the same thing.

Takeaways:

People will believe anything. Not almost anything, anything.

Just because new spiritual movements can’t be charged with fraud doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of frauds out there. To be safe, I think you should assume they all are.

Also: colloidal silver has no proven health benefits. If you take enough of it though it will turn your skin blue.

True Crime Files

Wolverine: Call of the Adamantine

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Wolverine: Call of the Adamantine

Most of the comic volumes I review here collect five or six issues in a particular run following a single story arc, which is what I was expecting here with issues #6 through #12 of author Saladin Ahmed’s Wolverine. I thought this was going to continue the story of the mission of the Adamantine, “a buried power older than men, older even than the gods . . . the primordial spirit of metal itself,” to rid the world of the bastard adamantium (an alloy which the Adamantine “considers to be something between blasphemy and identity theft”). But that story actually ends (somewhat abruptly, I felt) halfway through issue #8, after Wolverine plugs Romulus’s pie-hole with his claws. Which leaves the Adamantine to skulk off with a muttered threat to Wolverine (“Our contest will come soon enough. But not this day.”). From there we’re whisked away to one of Arcade’s deadly game shows, which at least cures the Wendigo of his curse. Then there’s a standalone episode with a different writer of what I guess is one of Wolverine’s ancestors in samurai-era Japan. And from there someone (spoiler alert: it’s Jason Wyngarde/Mastermind) gets inside Wolverine’s head and lures him back to his old family estate where he is tormented by the spirit of his dead mother and gets into a fight with Sabretooth. Yeah, they’re both dead (Wolverine’s mom and Sabretooth) but they’re not really here so whatever. I actually thought there was some potential with this Wolverine-in-a-haunted-house business, but again it falls back on the idea of Wolverine just having to dig deep until he can get the upper hand. And to be honest, I’m tired of explorations of the tortured psyches of superheroes. Wolverine can dish out the punishment, but this is always followed by a downer: “the doubt and the loss and pain come callin’ again like old drinkin’ buddies you just can’t shake.”

I’m not going to be too negative on this one. I thought Ahmed had some good ideas even if they did sort of peter out or got cut short. And the art, especially in the later issues, didn’t let things down. But there’s not much of a payoff. The Adamantine will be back, someday. Arcade escapes. And even Mastermind can throw a final taunt at Wolverine, asking him if he knows if any of this is real. All of this is par for the course for most comics, which are always running to stand still, but I thought it seemed a little more obvious here, the conflict a little too familiar. And I really don’t find the inside of Wolverine’s head all that interesting a place. I get it: dark places, man. Find a therapist and don’t bore me with the rest of it.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Norwood Builder

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” doesn’t make a lot of favourite lists among Holmes fans, and just checking the editions I have it clearly hasn’t attracted the attention of the same armies of annotators that have feasted on much of the rest of the canon. And I find this a bit puzzling as it’s quite a sensational story, even in a macabre and modern sort of way, and has most of the popular elements that I think readers would have been looking for.

We begin with a young lawyer named John Hector McFarlane arriving at 221B Baker Street to beg Holmes to clear his name, as he has been accused of murdering a prominent Norwood builder named Jonas Oldacre. It turns out Lestrade is right on McFarlane’s tail and I think this inspires Holmes to take the case even more than his having fallen into a depressive lethargy after the recent loss of Moriarty (an event that has led to London becoming “a singularly uninteresting city,” at least from “the point of view of the criminal expert”). Holmes of course loves a good challenge, and the challenge here is to best Lestrade. Getting McFarlane out of a murder rap is just a bonus.

There would be no doubt in any reader’s mind that McFarlane is innocent once we learn the facts of the case: that McFarlane had been approached by Oldacre the day before to draw up Oldacre’s will, which would leave all of Oldacre’s property to McFarlane. This came as a surprise to McFarlane, as he had never met Oldacre before.

We will quickly identify McFarlane as one of Doyle’s recurring “stooge” characters, being cut from the same cloth as Jabez Wilson in “The Red-Headed League,” Violet Hunter in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” and Hall Pycroft in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk.” I don’t know why Doyle found these figures so intriguing. Perhaps he just felt they were useful for narrative purposes, but they show up quite a lot and no other mystery writer I can think of has ever employed the type as often.

Anyway, Lestrade is sure that he’s got his man just as we can be sure that he hasn’t. Holmes immediately upbraids Lestrade for not having any “imagination,” and this takes us into one of the more interesting points about the story. As Holmes admits to Watson, “All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other.” It seems to be an open-and-shut case, but Holmes exclaims (emphasis in the original) “I know it’s all wrong. I feel it in my bones.” This isn’t to say that Holmes is giving up on his deductive method, going over crime scenes with a magnifying glass, looking for footprints in the carpet, and pacing out distances. He’ll need to do all that, and more, including the first use of fingerprint evidence in the canon (a bit of work the idea for which Doyle bought off a friend). But it’s Holmes’s imagination and gut instincts that are in the driver’s seat. And it’s proving that these instincts are superior to Lestrade’s plodding police work that gives Holmes his greatest satisfaction. More even than the dramatic way he smokes Oldacre out.

So I don’t think there’s any big mystery about what’s going on. What sets the story apart is the sheer nastiness of Oldacre and the shape of his long, bitter revenge. This guy can really hold a grudge, and his final turn as Malvolio pledging revenge on Holmes is perhaps not quite as empty a threat as Holmes takes it be. Finally, while the backyard bonfire has an obvious purpose, I love the way the story leaves it open just how wicked Oldacre may have been in all his planning. A couple of rabbits? Not likely. But then what? Or who?

Holmes index

Darkness at (just before) noon

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

Do not adjust your monitor. There were no filters used on this picture I took at 11 am while out for a walk on an otherwise sunny day. This is what the sky looks like. In fact, I think it’s even oranger now.

There are wildfires now raging through northern Ontario and apparently Toronto has the worst air quality in the world today, which I find kind of hard to believe but somebody professional-sounding said it.

These conditions are supposed to last through tomorrow. Then the worst of the smoke will have been sent to our good neighbours to the south.

Binstagrammed Volume VI: Bins Alive

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Binstagrammed post. Almost two years. But I was walking through the blissfully deserted university campus last week and saw all these troopers lined up behind the University Centre building and couldn’t resist taking their picture.

Then, right after I put my phone away, I was walking past and I heard thumping noises coming from inside a couple of them. It actually scared the heck out of me. It sounded like somebody was locked in there! Then squirrels came popping out. It’s not that the lids weren’t fastened, but several of the bins had holes chewed right through them. It’s amazing what animals will do to get to the good stuff. And green bins, for organic waste, definitely have the good stuff.

Wolverine: In the Bones

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Wolverine: In the Bones

So our hero Wolverine is off taking another one of his breaks from the X-Men, pondering what he’s done and what he’s going to do with his life in that usual “superhero having a reflective personal crisis” sort of way. He’s even running with a pack of wolves somewhere in Canada’s Northwest Territories. But then trouble, as it always does, comes knocking, in the form of his old enemy Cyber. And here’s where things start to get interesting. After Wolverine kicks Cyber’s ass (when they butt heads it makes a great CLONG sound) Cyber skulks away and gets possessed by a recently awakened primordial force called the Adamantine. Now you’ll probably know that Cyber’s skin and Wolverine’s skeleton and claws are made of (or, to be precise in the latter case, bonded with) adamantium, which is a virtually indestructible man-made alloy. Adamantine, by way of contrast, is a naturally occurring metal that is more the stuff of legend. Both are fictional substances, by the way.

The Adamantine doesn’t like adamantium, seeing it as a kind of blasphemy, so it has a mission to destroy it wherever it finds it. To do so it takes over Cyber and then goes around hunting other supervillains with adamantium in their body and possessing them. Names like Lady Deathstrike, Constrictor, and Romulus. Of course it also wants to possess and destroy Wolverine. To stop them, Wolverine has to team up with his daughter (X-23), Nightcrawler, and a teenage Wendigo that he is helping fight the cannibal curse.

I thought it was a good storyline from Saladin Ahmed, though in the end it falls back on the cliché about our hero just being made of stronger stuff and having personal reserves too great for the evil force to overcome. I get tired of that, and was actually hoping the Wendigo, as the anti-adamantium force in play, might have had a larger role. But I was still hooked enough to want to see what would happen next.

Graphicalex