Much of this is played for laughs, and the audience around us laughed a lot during the first two acts. They were clearly surprised (as the West End Whingers were surprised) when a bunch of violence erupted in the third act, even though it was hard to not see this coming. Butterworth’s telegraphing throughout the play is a bit on the heavy side, frankly, but critics and audiences still claim to be surprised. Rylance, who is a fine actor and who is given considerably less to work with here than people think, plays Byron as an irascible rogue who is supposed to reflect some deeply held English values, but it’s a stereotype—he’s incapable of being anything other than an irascible rogue, even though he’s also, you know, deep, because of those long silences in the third act when he’s facing eviction. Sadly, most of the characters in the play are stereotypes as well. And those are just the ones who make some sort of sense. Among those who don’t make sense are the highly implausible former girlfriend and the six year old child who is Byron’s—Byron himself looks to be in his 50s, and we’re supposed to believe he’s irresistible to all women, especially those under the age of 16.

What’s irritating here is that Butterworth seems to have had the right idea in the first place—the marginalized in rural England, who here, as in real life, consist of the unemployed, and the unemployable, and the young (who often overlap), and the old. There is a real play in here somewhere, but Butterworth needed an editor or something. And some focus. He has attempted something major, trying to connect the myths of England with the realities of the marginalization of modern England for much of the population. But he loads it down with entirely too much verbiage, and implausibility, and a bit too much of the “England for the English” mentality that is driving some of the British Right these days. Yes, you can see the violence in the third act coming a mile away—but that doesn’t make it any more plausible in the context of the play itself. Chekhov’s pistol in the first act is supposed to be used, certainly, but it’s also supposed to have a reason to be there in the first place.

We were so surprised at this wreckage of a play, in fact, that we went home and tracked down every review we could think of. Whingers, as I noted above, loved the play, even though they admitted there were parts of it they just didn’t understand. Here’s a sample of some of the thinking going around:

When the comedy stops and the violence begins it’s a bit of a shock and we have to confess that we didn’t really know what it was all about. Butterworth’s teasing juxtaposition of the mystic and the mundane (Stonehenge and custard creams) is all very well but when we were just left with the mystic the Whingers were way out of their depth.

And yet they happily admit they would go sit through all three hours and 20 minutes again. Jeez.

And here’s Charlotte Higgins over at The Guardian:

The English love a rebel, a non-conformist: I began to think about the levellers, the diggers, the wonderful and outre sects thrown up by the English revolution and so beautifully described in Christopher Hill’s classic, The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, Byron – fabulist, chancer, dangerous, oddly tender – seems to have some kind of indefinable connection with the land, with its ancient beating pre-Christian heart, that seems so rooted in the south-west of England. In Butterworth’s play, this stuff is all the more powerful for being so lightly sketched. Personally, I have a soft spot for England’s deep mythology (I read a lot of Susan Cooper books as a child). Overworked, it could all turn a little Wagnerian.

Lightly sketched—that’s an understatement. The fact that the play doesn’t hold together between the hystrionics doesn’t seem to register on Higgins.

I don’t mean to just pick on the Whingers and Higgins—they’re just representative of a theatre-going class that doesn’t seem to mind the fact that what they see on the stage often makes no sense whatsoever, but as long as it makes them laugh, they don’t seem bothered. What does seem to unify all these folks is the appearance that Butterworth is addressing something deeply serious–Englishness. Well, of course he is—that’s why we’re disappointed. Yes, it’s a non-mainstream view of Englishness which is messy and dirty, which is what everyone seems to find so appealing. And yes, rural England is in trouble. The Labour party has been no better than the Tories in their ongoing war against the English countryside, and people who make their living from the countryside—a tradition in England that goes back thousands of years, and which is still a significant economic and social sphere for a sizable percentage of the English population—find themselves adrift, both socially and economically.

We’re way outside of the mainstream here, and it is to Butterworth’s credit that he takes them seriously, or seems to, anyway. But treating everyone as a certain kind of stereotype does not help, nor does enobling Bryon when the reasons for it aren’t clear. Yes, he’s supposed to be an archetype, but it’s awfully vague about what. It’s that very vagueness that most audiences find appealing, I suspect. Any further clarity and Byron probably becomes quite unappealing—he sells drugs to teenagers, makes a public nuisance of himself, seems to have casual sexual relations with minors, and has long given up responsibility for what most of us take responsibility for. But because he sacrificed himself (in one of the weirder backstories of the play), and listens to the birds, and has seen giants, we’re supposed to find him deeply moving and symbolic. Rylance does his best, which is considerable, but Byron’s mythical status escaped us.

Butterworth is addressing something serious here, or seems to think he is, but he’s addressing it in a frightfully lazy, disjointed and possibly racist way (although only Dominick Cavendish of The Telegraph seems to have commented on this latter point). And it’s not much different from the “Englishness” that we’ve seen for decades on English television, ranging from Rab C. Nesbitt way on back to Steptoe and Son. We want this to be a better play, not the condescending one that it is. But maybe we’re just missing something. The fact that much of it is outright blather without an ounce of dramatic tension doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. There’s clearly a hunger out there for plays about this. I expect so see many more of them coming along. All you need, apparently, is some dialogue about ley lines and trailer parks and you’re all set.

What is the nature of love, and how can it transform our lives?

Writers have tackled that question for centuries, but Paulo Coelho makes a worthy contribution to that tradition in his 2006 novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Coelho offers a relatively brief but intensely thoughtful rumination.

“Rarely do we realize we are in the midst of the extraordinary,” Coelho writes. “Miracles occur all around us, signs from God show us the way, angels plead to be heard….” In fact, he says God gives us each one “magic moment” every day to change our lives, but most people don’t notice those moments or they’re too afraid to take advantage of them.

“But that moment exists,” he says—“a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.”

When people recognize those moments, miracles occur. “The hand of destiny changes everything,” Coelho writes.

The first-person narrator of By the River Piedra, Pilar, chooses to take advantage of one of those magic moments when she accepts an invitation from an old friend to get together. He’s a charismatic man who leads a public life, who talks about fairy tale love and taking risks, and he shakes her out of her sheltered world and the plans she had for life.

“How could he possibly be interested in spending time with someone who feared the unknown, who preferred a secure job and a conventional marriage to the life he led?” Pilar asks.

The man, who goes unnamed throughout the novel, has his own baggage to deal with, which Pilar sees as insurmountable. “I don’t need new fears—my own are enough,” she says. “This is not the way I had pictured the man in my life.”

The man feels the weight of his own baggage, the tug of his old life, and the ensuing—and very literal—crisis of faith that ensues makes up the compelling struggle of the book. Yet Coelho gives the struggle a lyrical quality in the tradition of his fellow Latin American magic realists, so the novel reads much like a fable or even a bedtime story.

“To love is to lose control,” Pilar says, firmly resisting that loss. Like most of us, she’s been burned. “Because many time in my life I have tried to love with all my heart, and my love has been wound up being trampled or betrayed,” she says. “If God is love, he should have cared more about my feelings.”

As a defense mechanism, she says, self-discipline is key: “Anyone who can conquer her heart can conquer the world.”

But as Coelho writes in his author’s notes, the novel’s central premise is that “with love, there are no rules.”

“Some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior…but this is all folly,” Coelho writes, admonishing the sillyness of trying to deny love. “The heart decides, and what it decides is all that really matters.”

Resistance and denial only lead to struggle—a struggle that drives Pilar through the first third of the book. “I admire you,” the man tells Pilar. “And I admire the battle you’re waging in your heart.” He understands the redemptive power of the struggle along with the strength that hope offers.

“In real life, love has to be possible,” Pilar admits. “Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.”

Pilar eventually surrenders. “We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence,” she admits. “If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branch of the tree of life.”

Even as Pilar comes to her realization about love, the man must come to realizations about what’s important in his own life. Herein lies the second great conflict of the book: the relationship between love and suffering. Coelho argues that they are two sides of the same coin. “I think that God, in Her infinite wisdom, conceals hell in the midst of paradise—so that we will always be alert, so that we won’t forget the pain as we experience the joy of compassion,” he writes.

Beyond matters of love and struggle and suffering, the book wrestles with significant matters of faith. It also explores the purpose of happiness in our lives. Ultimately, it bills itself as “a novel of forgiveness.” Really, it’s a novel about the redemptive power of love.

“Love doesn’t need to be discussed; it has its own voice and speaks for itself,” Pilar says. “Love doesn’t ask many questions, because if we stop to think we become fearful. It’s an inexplicable fear; it’s difficult even to describe it. Maybe it’s the fear of being scorned, of not being accepted, or of breaking the spell. It’s ridiculous, but that’s the way it is. That’s why you don’t ask—you act.”

“You have to take risks,” Coelho writes. “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.”

For a book that advocates risk and action, By the River Piedra probes deep questions and stimulates profound thought—challenging readers to think boldly and love with abandon. It’s a beautiful reflection on the most complex of human complexities, yet he makes it all seem so simple.

On December 2, 2007, I held my second ever book signing at the library in my hometown. This was six months after my first book signing, when I actually sold seven books. Maybe I should have made some commemorative t-shirts, I thought. I had 30 books this time and arrived at the library an hour early. Some of my fans might have driven a long way and brought shopping lists, so I wanted to be prepared.

But from the beginning, I had a bad feeling about that event. I walked up to the main desk and introduced myself. There were two librarians up to their elbows in returns.

“Oh, Mr. Hargrove,” said one. “We weren’t sure you were coming. You see, there is nothing listed on the main calendar about your appearance.”

“Nothing at all,” added the second librarian.

“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “I spoke to the Director several weeks ago…”

“Oh, yes! Yes, the Director,” said the first librarian. “She has been sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“And, she’s been moving!” added the second librarian.

“Well, then I’m truly sorry,” I said. “Nothing is more stressful than moving. But I’m here now, and I have my books, so just tell me where to go and I’ll get everything ready.”

“We can open up the Grand Hall, I think,” said the first librarian. The Grand Hall! I liked the sound of that. “But, umm, what exactly do you mean when you say you will get everything ready? What are you planning to do to our Grand Hall, Mr. Hargrove?”

“I was just going to put out a few chairs,” I said. “And maybe a table. Some refreshments. Cookies?”

“We keep four chairs out in the Grand Hall at all times,” was her reply. “There’s already a table there. Do you think you’ll need more than four chairs and one table?”

“Well, I hope I will,” I stammered.

“Hope, Mr. Hargrove?” she said, and she cast a curious stare over me. The Librarian’s Stare. It was the closest I’d ever come to being attacked by someone with super powers. I was mesmerized, and could neither move nor speak. I felt an overwhelming desire to give her all my loose change for overdue book fines. “This is a library, Mr. Hargrove. It is a place that was built to contain hope and dreams and the real with the unreal. Every book we keep was written by someone who hoped it might sell a million copies. Do you know how hard it is to write a book that sells a million copies, Mr. Hargrove?”

“Umm. Pretty hard?”

“And when a book sells a million copies, what then, Mr. Hargrove? Does the writer churn out an eternal list of sequels, each more base than the one that came before it? Or does the writer put down quill and pen, and leave the world’s readers to forever dwell upon the great works that he or she could have written? Harper Lee wrote one book. Margaret Mitchell wrote one book. Joseph Heller wrote one book.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Joseph Heller wrote more than one book.”

“He should have stopped at one,” she said. “Here is the Grand Hall. Here are the four chairs we’ve placed for everyone. Here is a rack to hang your hope on, Mr. Hargrove. Best of luck to you. And remember, if you sell only one book, that is a great thing. A grand thing. Almost a miracle. There isn’t any real difference between selling one book and waving a magic wand to make money appear. Your stories came from nowhere, yet people give you money for them. If you sell ten books then you will be filled with a desire to write something better the next time. If you sell a hundred books, think of the effect you will have on the world. A voice that speaks for all time, an echo on the electronic web, singing forever.”

“I hope I sell a mill… I mean, a hundred!” I said.

“Hope and it might be so,” she said. “Of course you’ll find hope in here, along with many other things. But people seldom waste hope on what they need. Rather they expend hope on what they want. There is a difference. So I ask again, do you think you’ll need more than four chairs and one table?“

“No, ma’am.”

“And when you leave, would you mind taking a few letters to the post office for me? They won’t let me out, you know.”

“No problem.”

Over the next two and a half hours, I met hundreds of folks who braved frigid temperatures and holiday traffic to come to Old Saybrook and buy a copy of my book. I’m lying. Only three people came. I did meet Gary and Charlene who drove all the way from Wallingford. They already had a book, having purchased it from Amazon.com, which I signed. They asked to have their picture taken with me, and that was the greatest compliment anyone has paid me in a long time.

At 4:00, I packed up my books and walked to the exit. The librarian who had spoken to me about hope was nowhere to be seen, but I had her letters. They sat on top of the unsold copies that were going into the trunk of my car. When I walked into our home, my wife asked if my second book signing had been successful.

“It was great. It was grand,” I said, and I meant it. “Almost a miracle.”

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford
Makers, by Cory Doctorow

Years ago, when we lived in the middle of New Jersey, I managed to get myself elected to the local school board, mostly by accident. This wasn’t exactly the plan—it was the incumbents, and me, and I just did it so that there would be a contested election. To my surprise, I got elected. And one of the first things I got to do, after dealing with the budget that got voted down that year for the first time in living memory, and the proposal to get rid of the German teacher (which passed), was deal with the proposal to get rid of the shop program and replace it with something that had “technology” in whatever the rubric was, presumably because everyone in the shop classes was now going to become a “knowledge worker.” I spoke against the plan, but I think I lost the argument, which was not unusual. I voted to keep the German teacher, and that didn’t work out either.

It turns out that this was part of an emerging national trend that I was unaware of at the time. But Matthew Crawford points out in his stimulating but frustrating Shop Class as Soulcraft, you can trawl eBay and pick up all sorts of used shop equipment being sold off by school districts around the country. This may be a good thing for the hobbyist woodworker looking to upgrade his band saw, but as a national trend, it leaves much to be desired. Crawford has written an extended rant against this trend—one where not only does anyone know how to do anything anymore, but no one is bothering to teach anyone how to do anything either. To a large extent it’s a successful rant—he has some good thoughts on why this is a bad trend. Like all rants, it leaves something to be desired, but it successfully captures a certain truth as well.

Coincidentally, I had just finished Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman when I picked up the Crawford book, and I thought they might complement each other nicely. The fact that they don’t, really, has more to do with the aims of each book, which are somewhat different, as we’ll see. But both Sennett and Crawford have written important books that require our attention. Sennett’s volume is the first of a planned trilogy dealing with the whole notion of craft, and it use (and abuse) in the tapestry of human history and development. As such, it is a more philosophic and historical work than is Crawford’s, and is a volume of intellectual history in a way that Crawford’s book is not. On the other hand, Crawford’s book is likely to resonate more with current American and European readers, because his subject has an immediacy and obvious contemporary context that Sennett’s appears to not have.

Sennett is concerned with craftsmanship as an end itself, but it’s more than that. He is concerned with craftsmanship in its broadest context, that of mastery of a set of skills, and includes not only what we would expect him to include, but other areas as well, such as cooking and music-making. Because mastery of skills can cover a broad range of activities, Sennett does as well. And Sennett makes it clear early on that he is concerned not only with the impact of this mastery of skills on society (and we’ll get more of that in the next two volumes), but he is also concerned with what one needs to do in order to achieve this state of mastery. And what sort of community facilitates all of this, and what sort of community does not. And it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than we would think. Sennett takes us through the physiology of the level of hand/eye coordination that needs to be developed by someone operating something manually. Sennett also takes us through the history of crafting things, at least in the where the medieval guilds are generally used as an exemplar of the craft system, with its hierarchy of skills, its period of apprenticeship, its quest for perfection. Sennett also spends considerable time discussing the British—or, more precisely, English—Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular the influence of John Ruskin, for whom the medieval craftsman was the ideal for what work should be, and what was being lost in the mass industrialization of the Victorian era.

Sennett is so broad ranging—cooking, Ruskin, Diderot’s Encyclopedia, music-making, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s architectural adventures, the physiology and musculature of the hand, the role of community in the creation of the craftsman—that at times the going does get a bit heavy. As exhilarating as this journey is, it sometimes gives the feeling of being perhaps a bit too broad. But that is exactly Sennett’s point—the ability and willingness to simply do good work is indispensable to being human, and in order to understand what we’re losing as a culture and society when we make it impossible for a substantial number of fellow citizens to do just that, Sennett recognizes that we need to understand the complexity of what goes into creating craftsmen and craftswomen. It’s not just the creation and appreciation of good work—it’s having a society that inculcates the processes that are necessary to learn to do good work, and to support the work once it’s done.

There is a philosophical theme running through here as well, which is Sennett’s response to his old teacher Hannah Arendt. Arendt made a distinction between activities that fulfilled what she referred to as animal needs, and other work that reflected “higher” activities of art and culture. Sennett finds this a false and dangerous distinction, one that ultimately betrays the goals of the Enlightenment. Sennett has a long discussion of Diderot’s Encyclopedia (the full title of which is actually “Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts.”) As Sennett points out, this was essentially a 35-volume collection of Arts and Crafts instructions—how to blow glass, how to repair furniture and so on. And this was produced with painstaking attention to the skills of the craftsmen represented by the Arts and Crafts surveyed by Diderot. This was Diderot’s attempt to repair the bridge that had grown us as a result of the eclipse of he medieval guild system during the Renaissance, when work and craft began to be separated. For Sennett, the task of the craftsman is to integrate the hand and the mind so that each informs the other—and much of the book is a discussion of attempts to do just that by individuals in history, and of the explication of the need to do this by thinkers such as Diderot and Ruskin.

Sennett has written a book of history, philosophy and psychology, and his discussions only rarely touch on the fact that so few people in modern America or Britain (where Sennett lives much of the year) actually have this sort of work to do these days—work that actually engages the mind and the hand, work that is the type of work where one can strive to a certain form of perfection. But this is in there anyway through Sennett’s ongoing consideration of the role of community in the creation and sustenance of craftsmanship—one does not become skilled at anything, really, without a social support system of some kind. Which is one reason why getting rid of shop classes is a really bad idea—learning anything, really, involves an apprenticeship, and if we remove the structured support group of the class, where else will these skills be developed? One reason why the conservative onslaught on the union movement over the past several decades has been baffling is the fact that most unions are premised on the apprenticeship system—and this is a deeply conservative method of not only passing skills on, but ensuring that those skills are used in the pursuit of good work. Of course, it may very well be that conservatives aren’t interested in good work, but I doubt it—the folks over at Front Porch Republic certainly are, and this is a strain of conservative thought that has not yet disappeared from cultural discourse.

Crawford, who refers to Sennett more than once, presents a similar argument ultimately, but we get there a different way. For what Crawford delights in telling us (endlessly, it seems at times) is how much he enjoys working with his hands, as opposed to sitting around thinking like he did when he was in graduate school at Chicago and in his subsequent think-tank employment. Crawford constantly seems to be a little too enthusiastic about presenting his academic credentials—really, he shouldn’t, because it does end up distracting from his central argument. And it’s a powerful argument, similar to Sennett’s—we risk devaluation as individuals by our lack of knowing how to do anything. And Crawford clearly does enjoy making things—in his case, motorcycles that run, since he runs his own motorcycle shop. And he is clearly upset by our devaluation of this sort of skillset in modern American culture. Crawford delights in a job well done in the shop—but he has broader concerns as well, mainly the fact that no one knows how to do anything, which means no has any appreciation of the work that people actually do.

This is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to appeal to the crunchycons over at Front Porch Republic, and sure enough it has—there have already been a number of posts on Crawford and his book (although these never gets as embarrassing as the fawning series Crooked Timber had on China Mievelle a few years back). And book reviews have generally been enthusiastic as well, as if Crawford wasn’t mining the same vein Wendell Berry has been mining for the past forty years or so. Clearly, it has to be said, Crawford’s academic background is a factor here. If some motorcycle shop owner in rural Tennessee without Crawford’s academic background (which is impressive, it should be pointed out) were to approach a publisher with a manuscript extolling the virtues of skilled physical labor, how far would he get? To ask the question is to already know the answer. So what we have is that old Eric Hoffer feeling—hey, look, a philosopher telling us that philosophy isn’t as fun as a valve job.

What detracts from the book is that Crawford seems a bit too mindful of this—he just knows how cute this all is, and it gets a bit wearying. As do the throwaway comments that not only don’t seem to fit, they don’t even seem to make sense. For example, we get this (as a number of other reviewers have noted as well):

Wood was for hippies. The wood whisperer with his hand planes, his curly maple, and his workshop on Walden Pond is a stock alter ego of gentlefolk everywhere, and I wanted none of it.

This sounds an awful lot like my own kids used to sound when they talked about hippies—as if it was someone else who rediscovered William Morris, Art Nouveau, and living off the land. This does not sound like someone who has exactly absorbed Sennett’s message, frankly. My kids grew out of it, and maybe Crawford will too, at some point, and hopefully then we’ll no longer get pointless but snide comments on “the 1968 generation,” whoever they are, and multiculturalism. I had a similar response to Crawford’s vaguely anti-feminist comments in the context of the joys of male camaraderie in the shop. Crawford is too smart to really take this seriously—there are joys to be had in male companionship, just as there are joys to be had in female companionship. How any of this relates to Crawford’s main theme, particularly the devaluation of work in modern America, is a little vague, and eventually seems like little more than an attempt to establish some sort of street cred.

Which is a shame, actually, since there is a very important book buried in here bursting to get out if only Crawford would let it. Because what Crawford is really concerned about, like Sennett, is what kind of society we get when we no longer take the notion of craftsmanship seriously. In fact, a society that looks pretty much like the society we’re getting, with permanently high unemployment, little appreciation of craftsmanship, and the inability to properly write an instruction manual. Crawford’s description of the current state of writing instruction manuals is one of the funniest in the book, a book actually chock full of funny and instructive anecdotes. Who will not appreciate Crawford’s discussion of those ridiculous little screws that hold modern gadgets together for which no known screwdriver actually exists in one’s own workshop? Or his discussion of what we all find under the hood of a car, pretty much any car, these days. (Ironically, one of the ideals of the hippies that Crawford is so dismissive of was to be able to fix your own car.) For Crawford, it’s all of one piece, though—our collective disregard as a society for actual work, and the consequences we reap as a society for our inattention to the joys of work properly done. It’s the artificial distinction between ”knowing” and ”doing” that has brought us so much grief. And Crawford makes an elegant argument that this whole approach is specious—and in this regard comes close to Sennett’s principal argument as well. And, of course, Berry. Like Berry and Sennett, Crawford is deeply appreciative of the kind of knowledge that manual and physical workers need to develop, and deeply distrustful of a culture that does not perceive the value of work.

Here Crawford and Sennett converge, and at times Crawford the bike shop owner often sounds a bit more radical that that old lefty Sennett. Crawford spends quite a lot of time laying out how work actually reflects our engagement in the world, and gives a good discussion of Heidegger to boot, specifically Heidegger’s attempts to get at the whole notion of engagement with the world. For Crawford, as for Aristotle and Heidegger, it’s through what we do. And at its best Shop Craft as Soulcraft is a plea to appreciate the work that people do, to move past the sort of divide that has emerged the past several decades. Both Crawford and Sennett want us to have the tools to live well—and this means a certain self-reliance that comes from knowing how to do things well. For Crawfod, like Sennett, believes that everyone is capable of good work, and deserves the opportunity to do good work. And he is as unhappy as Sennett that society continues its surge away from the sustaining of communities where people can do just that.

And that is exactly the kind of society that we’ve got now, particularly in the Anglosphere—the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Canada. Because the economic model we’ve been living with the past three decades has in fact been attacking this sort of work. But for all his rants at ”managerialism,” Crawford has little interest in discussing the wider economic and political system that has allowed this estrangement between work and the rest of society to develop, other than to note that that’s the way it is. In Europe, with which I am vaguely familiar, living right next door, it is different to a considerable extent—Germany has extensively build on its apprenticeship system, as has France. Which may in part explain why Germany, until very recently, was the world’s largest exporter in spite of the high value of the Euro relative to other currencies (China has recently caught up). France, which as everyone in the US knows is deeply “socialist,” (and we know this because Republican senators from southern states keep telling us), has managed to maintain an agricultural system where it is still possible for small farmers to make a living, and for the kind of local knowledge underlying Sennett’s notion of craftsmanship is still surviving, if not actually thriving.

In fact, one of the disappointments of both books is their non-attention to the political and economic trends that dominate modern American life to the detriment of the kind of self-reliance and craftsmanship that both authors discuss. Now, I’ll admit that this is a bit unfair, since certainly in Sennett’s case this is clearly beyond the scope of the current book (although not necessarily of his project.) But it is a bit of a surprise that Crawford doesn’t take the next step—a discussion of the social, economic and institutional impediments to doing good work, other than that there are a lot of crappy jobs out there. For all his exhortations that we should, if not become motorcycle mechanics, at least give due respect to the kind of work he (and millions of others) actually do, it is a surprise that he doesn’t give a more thorough discussion to the impediments that not only exist, but which keep growing. These have certainly been dealt with successfully in the past—David Noble’s Forces of Production, and George Anders’ Merchants of Debt, both have discussed extensively the gutting of the kinds of institutional knowledge in machine tool manufacturers for the sake of corporatism and profitability that Crawford and Sennett want to place at the center of our notion of work. There was a time in the history of the American machine tool industry when good work meant a certain kind of interaction between designer and machine—that went by the wayside a long time ago. In both Noble’s and Anders’ books, we see the kind of craftsmanship sought by Sennett and Crawford deliberately undermined and abandoned by management, for a variety of reasons—in these cases, union busting and margins, respectively.

In fact, it’s not hard to envision the remains of economies in which good work is abandoned. We see the detritus all around us, in the Midwest manufacturing corridor in the US, in the abandoned industrial cities of Northern England, and the constant movement of manufacturing around the world as capital relentlessly seeks out cheaper labor—today it’s China, tomorrow it’s Cambodia, all so that Wal-Mart can undercut local merchants. For all of Sennett’s diligence to the evolution of craftsmanship, and Crawford’s impassioned defense of the value of skilled physical work, we still inhabit a society where such work continues to be devalued, and where the institutional barriers to doing real work continue to get higher. The consequences are all around us, and there’s no reason to think this situation will get any better any time soon. We live in an economy where, according economist Samuel Bowles, about one in four jobs exists to protect the riches of the wealthy. Localism is partly the answer, as Wendell Berry and the Front Porch Republic crew keep telling us, but true localism requires the maintenance, development and sharing of a variety of knowledge and skillsets that are rapidly disappearing.

But one can always hope. One who does is Cory Doctorow, speculative fiction writer and erstwhile proprietor of Boing Boing, one of the more interesting blogs out there. Doctorow has a particular interest in technology, about which he is deeply knowledgeable and deeply concerned. His new novel, Makers, is a hoot, a serious romp, if such a thing were possible. The title—Makers—tells it all. It’s about the human compulsion for making things, even that even when denied the opportunity to do so, people will still try. A whole bunch of attractive geeks make interesting things, and then other people do as well, and so on until crises emerge, etc. This is the really hard kind of speculative fiction to write—the kind that’s about the world in 20 years. And America is a deeply unhappy place at this point—millions living in abandoned malls, eating crap food, and then suddenly getting the opportunity to do something in a culture that is, if anything, more corporatist than the one Americans inhabit now. Thank heaven for small, stupid robots. I won’t bother telling you what the New Work is all about—you’ll just have to read it for yourself, but Sennett and Crawford would approve. Highly recommended.

Here’s one they didn’t do last night.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s more here. Happy Saturday.

J.D. Salinger is dead.

If you want to know about his lousy life or how he treated his kids or his ex-wives and girlfriends, or any of that other People Magazine crap, look somewhere else. I just don’t feel like going into it. Too many jerks spend all their time reading that shit anyway, and it’s just not worth recounting it when you could read it all at TMZ or some place like that and besides Salinger himself was pretty touchy about people talking about him and he’d probably sue from the grave. I mean, the guy sued every goddamn body who ever said boo to him for the last 50 years or so.

Some stuff just isn’t worth the trouble.

So I’ll just talk about driving to town last night….See, I was driving into town tonight after I’d read about Salinger dying and listening to satellite radio and the station played Johnny Winter’s cover of “Let It Bleed” which  somehow tied into hearing about Salinger’s death: we all need someone we can lean on. And thinking about Salinger being dead started me thinking about how Salinger would write about it. I wondered then if maybe he’d had a ball glove that he’d written snatches of poetry on so he’d have something to read during the lulls in a ball game. But then I was listening again to Winter’s cover of the song by The Rolling Stones, so that made me think of that snatch of poetry attributed to Brian Jones (and to Gertrude Stein and to many an 18th century girl’s sampler) that’s on one of the early greatest hits collections, Through the Past Darkly:

When this you see, remember me/And bear me in your mind/Let all the world say as they will/Speak of me as you find….

I like to think Salinger would like that, but I can’t say. You can’t speak for other people.

R.E.M. came on the radio next – “Driver 8″:

And the train conductor says/Take a break, Driver 8/Driver 8, take a break/We can reach our destination – but we’re still a ways away….

I wrote a letter to Salinger back in the early ’80’s when he was appearing in the news with some regularity for suing people for talking/writing/thinking about him – or so it seemed. Reconstructing the letter took my mind off R.E.M. momentarily:

Dear Mr. Salinger,

I know you won’t answer this letter but I thought I’d write anyway. I don’t blame you for suing people who try to drag you (or at least your life) out into the public eye when you want to be left alone.  I’m a novelist myself (as yet unpublished) and I have some ambivalence about success myself. I thought you explained your position on this pretty well at the end of  Catcher in the Rye. Maybe people should be satisfied with that….

That isn’t the entire letter, but it’s the gist of it. I got a terse reply in return from a literary agency in New York that acknowledged that I’d written their client. I like to think Salinger told them to write me because he felt a kindred spirit.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

Maybe all Salinger needed was to take a break. Then, when he got through with his break, he didn’t know how to come back.  Maybe he didn’t know how to explain that he needed to take a break, and maybe he didn’t know how to explain that he wanted to come back. Telling people what you really feel is hard.

Overcoat weather again, you know?

So I did my errand in town and headed for home – and what should come out of the radio but David Bowie’s “Fame”?

…bully for you/chilly for me/ Got to get a rain check on…pain….

I thought of Salinger – and of how lonely his life must have been – alienated from not just all the people he loved but from the public, too, simply because he didn’t want fame. His fame brought him in the end – pain and little else….

And I remembered that famous line I referred to in my letter, that line from his magnum opus. I wondered if he took the advice of his most famous character, Holden Caulfield:

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody….

I have been thinking a lot about Byron in the last week, partly because it used to be a ritual of my misspent youth to celebrate his birthday each year by engaging in as much debauchery as my financial and physical health could stand, partly because I wasted four hours of my life last week watching the mini series Byron on Ovation Television even after I’d realized that the narrative construct focused almost entirely on Byron’s scandalous love life. (There were passing references to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and I think The Corsair was mentioned, too, in relation to Edward Trelawny who makes a cameo near the end of the program, but perhaps I mis-remember).

This Byron – Byron the scandalous celebrity – is the Byron the media believes the public wants.So influential has his lordship been on popular culture that the term “Byronic” is a common term used among educated persons to refer to males who adopt a pose of mysterious (and often manipulative) aloofness. And a new and celebrated biography ascribes Byron’s lasting importance as much to his creation as a celebrity as to his poetic canon.

But the other Byron – the progressive who spoke against the death penalty for Luddites for breaking factory equipment and the admirer of the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire who died at Missolonghi while training freedom fighters – is largely forgotten – or ignored – today.

But what we should remember, especially today on his 222nd birthday – is that Lord Byron used his wealth and position and celebrity to speak – and act – for the displaced, downtrodden, and despairing.

Perhaps Arthur Dixon, my undergraduate Romantic poetry professor, put it best in response to my complaint that we read too much Wordsworth and not enough Byron: “This is a literature class, more specifically a poetry class” he said. “And Wordsworth is a great poet. A greater poet than Byron.”

“But Byron is a great poet,” I protested.

“You misunderstand,” said Professor Dixon. “I did not say Byron was not a great poet.”

He paused.

“Think of it this way,” he continued.  ”We remember Wordsworth because he was a great poet. We remember Byron because he was a great man.”

Happy Birthday, your lordship….

“Why do you want to be a storyteller?” I asked my freshmen.

It was the second time I had asked. The first time had been on the second day of class, an eternity earlier, during the last week of August.

Then, most of them looked at me quizzically. A couple of them looked downright bored. They weren’t here to be storytellers, they told me; they were here to be journalists and public relations executives and television reporters and magazine writers.

“That’s not storytelling?” I asked.

Storytellers come from an ancient tradition—and when I say ancient, I mean really ancient. Prehistoric. Picture two cavemen, Oog and Loog, sitting around the fire at the end of the day. They didn’t have language yet, but Loog still wanted to know where Oog had come up with the delicious mastodon steak they were chewing on for dinner. Oog had to act out the story of the day’s hunt.

Theater sprang from this storytelling tradition. Believe it or not, so did journalism. After all, as Oog acted out his tale of the hunt, wasn’t he providing a recap of the day’s big event? There’s a reason we refer to pieces of news as news “stories.”

When my freshmen heard the word “stories,” though, most of them, of course, thought of fiction—made-up stories by novelists or short-story writers.

As it happens, I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately, which is something I’ve not really done since graduate school fifteen years ago. But as a kid, I got my start as a writer writing stories. I wrote creepy tales of goblins and aliens, and I tried to give everything a Twilight Zone-like twist at the end. None of it was any good, I don’t think, but it was thrilling. Writing stories invigorated me, energized me, excited me!

And it kept me writing.

I gave up fiction for journalism and playwriting and, most recently, history writing. With history, the story has already happened, and the challenge rests in finding a new way to tell it. But good stories never grow old, no matter how long ago they took place. It just becomes a matter of finding the right words to tell them.

Telling stories is a gift—and it’s not just the gift storytellers have for spinning their tales. Telling a story is giving a gift. It’s a way of sharing ideas, information, emotions, perspectives. Good storytellers put a piece of themselves into their stories, so that’s something they share, too.

Such effort can be hard and, frequently, thankless. I think about my colleagues still working in the news business who have to crank out thousands of words a day under deadline. They have to conduct interviews and do research. They have to search for information and dig and follow dead-ends. They have to make sense from chaos—and not only make it readable but also relevant to their readers.

Newspaper reporters have one set of tools they get to use; television reporters have another set of tools; radio reporters have another set of tools. You choose your field depending on how you like to tell your stories.

People who write for the internet have yet a different set of tools—and a different set of rules. The “objective” journalism of newspapers doesn’t exist for many online news sources. That doesn’t make the stories online any less important or valid. They just follow different conventions.

The same is true with, say, advertising or public relations, where the story focuses on a product or a company or a client. It’s still all storytelling.

Playwriting may be the most interesting form of storytelling I’ve done. Writing a script is an individual act of intense privacy, yet a playwright has to collaborate with a director and a cast and crew to make those words truly come to life, and it ultimately has to happen in front of an audience. So much for the privacy of the playwright’s writing den!

From August until December, I spent the semester showing my students how all these forms of writing were, in fact, forms of storytelling. On the last day, I posed to them the same question I’d posed on day two: “Why do you want to be a storyteller?”

“[B]eing a storyteller is not limited to one specific job title,” one of them wrote. “If you know how to write—that is, write well—then you can do almost anything.”

Indeed, that focus on strong writing is one of the key foundations of our entire program (the other being ethics). The world is full of lousy writers, which is why it’s important to be one of the good ones.

Another student evoked a quote I’d given them from the novelist Laurence Stern: “What a large volume of adventures my be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

“The particular quote changed my perspective on life,” the student wrote, “because it makes me consider that we can have many adventures in our life if we experience things with an open mind. Life is too short to not take advantage of every opportunity offered. I want my storytelling to have that type of effect on others’ lives.”

I want their storytelling to have that kind of effect, too.

A good storyteller can make a difference by teaching us things, by showing us the world in ways we’d never dreamed, by prompting us to think and feel. For those reasons, a good storyteller will always be in demand.

And there will never be a shortage of stories—past, present, and imagined. Those stories deserve to be shared. They deserve to be told.

For lack of anything verbal or written to contribute immediately to public eDiscourse due to gross information burnout, I submit, instead:

Scrawlings!

(Click to enlarge)

Song of the Soused, 12 Jan 2010

Zucchini Love, 03 Jan 2010

Sachs of Shit, 24 Dec 2009

This has been your Art Break for the evening. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Haiti, already in progress.

Much love,
Mr. Cargo

He’s as Amer-iconic as Uncle Sam and the Lincoln Memorial. He’s bigger than life while still as down-home as hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball.

And for the past two years, he’s been dead.

As everyone knows, though, in the superhero world nobody stays dead forever. This month, Marvel Comics is bringing back the red-white-and-blue Avenger in a storyline called “Captain America Reborn.”

But that’s perhaps the best part about Captain America: He’s been reborn and reborn again, as the times dictate, ever since his creation back in 1941.

“The appeal of the character is that he stands for something. He stands for something bigger and greater,” says Marvel senior editor Tom Brevoort, who, among other titles, oversees Captain America. “He represents American values rather than the particular dogma of the day.

“Most people in the abstract agree with what he represents even if, in their own lives, they have shades of gray. Cap is black and white. He’s red, white, and blue.”

But, Brevoort says, Cap has also been a reflection of the times. “He can have meanings layered on to him as far as what he represents and what he can be made to represent,” Brevoort says. “Different people at different times do different things. Creators have wanted and needed to express different things over the years. Much of that was dealt with overtly.”

Take a look, for example, at the circumstances surrounding Cap’s birth. The world was ravaged by war. Writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby cooked up a hero who personified America in the fight against Fascism: Government scientists injected a scrawny, stereotypical weakling, Steve Rogers, with their top-secret Super Soldier serum, miraculously transforming him into the perfect human fighting machine.

The character quickly became Timely Comics’ most popular because readers could live vicariously through his exploits. After all, while Ordinary Joe might not be able to do much about the Nazis, Captain America could punch Hitler right in the friggin’ chopper. “It was less about his individual struggle than what was going on on the world stage, Brevoort says.

Cap vanished from the scene during the 1950s, but as Timely evolved into Marvel, and the so-called “Silver Age” of comics began, Cap made a comeback, resurrected from suspended animation by a group of heroes known as the Avengers. Cap joined the group and remained one of the company’s most stalwart characters right through the seventies.

By October of 1980, in issue #250, Captain America was nominated to run for president.

As the eighties wore on, though, Cap’s fortunes dipped a bit and sales began to flag. “Cap has not been as center-stage or as well-known during the last twenty years,” Brevoort says. “In many respects, that’s no different from the rise and fall of other Marvel mainstays. There will always be a flavor of the day.”

But, says Brevoort, “Cap has had long-term staying power.”

“Cap is wrapped in the flag,” Brevoort says. “His name is Captain America. He’s not Captain Freedom or Captain Liberty or anything like that. That makes him iconic.”

That status as an icon makes Captain America dramatically different than other Marvel characters, too. “Most characters are about who is in the suit, the person, not the costume or the powers,” Brevoort explains. “That was the great innovation of Marvel—it was about the characters. Cap is the one who kind of defies that. He’s more Cap than Steve Rogers. He gets his symbolic power from the suit.”

That symbolic power made Captain America wildly popular following the events of 9/11. “There was an immediate longing for Captain America in the world,” Brevoort says. “People were hungry for patriotic symbols. They wanted to be reassured that American could still kick ass.”

Since then, Cap’s presence has loomed large in the Marvel Universe. “The things Cap symbolizes are more in the forefront of the psychology of the world,” Brevoort says. It helps, too, that comics today are better written, more immediate, more worthwhile, than they used to be back when they were merely “funny books.”

“They have a relevance to the lives of our readership,” Brevoort says.

That was demonstrated perhaps most effectively in Marvel’s 2006-2007 crossover event, Civil War, which explored very real questions about personal liberty versus communal security.

In a move that shocked many fans, Captain America, the ever-faithful soldier, went rogue by disobeying government orders that required all superhumans to register their secret identities or face criminal prosecution. The leader of the pro-registration side of the argument was Cap’s close friend and colleague, Iron Man.

But perhaps that’s not so surprising to long-term fans, who can look back to the post-Watergate era and see a Captain America who gave up his identity to become “The Nomad” because he was disillusioned by the government—or, similarly, in the post-Iran-Contra era, when a disillusioned Cap gave up his identity to become “The Captain.” In both instances, he resumed his role as Captain America because, in the end, he realized that he represented the American Dream, not the American government.

In the Civil War, Cap eventually surrendered in an attempt to mitigate collateral damage. Before his subsequent trial began, he was assassinated on the steps of the courthouse. The issue, Captain America #25, was the best-selling comic of the month, and the event was reported widely in mainstream media.

“That stirred up such a visceral reaction,” Brevoort says. “Reaction was so strong nobody anticipated it. We had no idea it was going to be as big as it turned out to be. It was terrifying, confounding, exciting.”

Brevoort says the editorial team had considered many different ways to end the Civil War storyline—“Have Cap get on his motorcycle and ride off to ‘rediscover America,’” for instance—but the assassination provided the freshest ideas and boldest possibilities for good stories.

And that, says Brevoort, is the key: “When you think about things in different ways, the boundaries are limitless. Anything can happen.”

The challenge then became, “How do we run a Captain America book with no Captain America?”

In the most recent storyline, Cap’s former junior partner, Bucky Barnes, now adult, has assumed his mentor’s mantle. “Bucky is classic Marvel-style. He has a more Marvel-centric flavor, is more grounded in the Marvel tradition,” Brevoort says. “His story over the past two years has been more about the person in the suit than the suit itself. His struggle is that he’s striving to live up to the ideal. He has to put aside all this horrible stuff from his past and keep the legacy alive. He’s just gone about that in a different way. It has added a lot of dimension and character to the icon.”

In August of 2009, Marvel launched a storyline to bring Captain America back from the dead. Turns out, Cap wasn’t just shot on the courthouse steps—he was somehow forced to become “unstuck in time” by his arch-nemesis, the former Nazi villain the Red Skull. Originally slated to last five issues, “Captain America Reborn” extended to a sixth issue so that creators could “tell the story to its fullest.”

Was Cap’s resurrection ever in doubt? Most experienced comic fans would undoubtedly say “No.” After all, when D.C. killed off Superman in 1992, they only kept him dead for less than a year. At Marvel, comic book deaths and resurrections had become so cliché that the company had even instituted a rule during the last ten years that basically said, “No deaths unless they actually mean something.”

Brevoort is convinced, however, that Cap’s death was appropriately poignant and that his rebirth does mean something. And he believes there are many more Captain America stories worth telling.

“People can take him unto themselves,” Brevoort says. “They can say, ‘Cap is one of ours.’”

After all, he’s been “one of ours” for seventy years now.

Here’s to seventy more: Long live Cap!

But that’s only if the dim bulbs still running the music industry haven’t killed the industry dead at that point. Really, the major surprise in doing this series was discovering how many of my favorite albums are, as Amazon delicately puts it, “no longer available from the manufacturer.” This isn’t necessarily surprising for an album I bought fifteen years ago—but for this to occur for an album issued by Sony that I bought three years ago, and was new then, is astonishing. Here is a product with a built-in and enthusiastic audience that keeps coming back for the same product year after year—and like everything else in the music industry these days, it’s being trashed. We ought to get Bill O’Reilly on this. That would fix it.

Or not. Watching the management of the music industry, and the rest of the media industry, grapple with the internet over the past decade has been an exercise in…well, I don’t exactly know what to call it. Has there ever been a group of people who so thoroughly misunderstood, mischaracterized, misjudged and mishandled what was going on around them in the annals of American business? If there is, it’s hard to think of who that might be. And they’re still trying to figure it out. Here’s a tip. Stop running the industry as if 14 year olds are the only ones who matter. The rest of us buy music too. It’s not as if you can’t actually make money selling CDs of early or just plain classical music—there are a number of small labels who seem to be able to do that. So what’s the problem?

For example, they could start be reissuing some of the albums I’ve discussed—none of these should be unavailable. And let’s go one step further—there are some wonderful Christmas albums that, so far as I can tell, have never been issued on CD in the first place. What’s up with that? For example, one of my favorite Christmas albums is A Nonesuch Christmas. Those of you who like to check out the record–sorry, vinyl–bins at flea markets and such, searching for that one Cowsills album that you need to fill out your collection, keep an eye out for this one. Nonesuch was a small classical and folk label that got absorbed into the Warner empire at some point, and of course it’s been worthless ever since. I still play the album (on vinyl!), but it would sure be nice to have a CD. That way I could get it on my iPod as well. I’ve even written to Warner asking for this–but no response. No wonder record companies are collapsing. It’s a lovely album, mostly German, and mostly medieval and early Renaissance, of course.

Another Nonesuch goodie to keep an eye out for is Christesmas in Anglia, from the Ensemble for Early Music ensemble conducted by Frederick Renz. Again, this is exactly what it says it is—Christmas songs from early England, mainly the 13th to the 16th century. It’s good to keep being reminded that many of he songs we’re familiar with now, Christmas or otherwise, actually go back hundreds and hundreds, of years. The great chain of music, or something.

Then there’s the Robert Shaw Chorale’s older version of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. We’ve already discussed this. This is the one with Rejoice in the Lamb and festival Te Deum as well. I still think this one’s the best version of this stunning piece.

And then there’s the Elly Ameling/Thijs van Leer Christmas double album, simply called Christmas. Ameling was, and still is, a lovely Dutch soprano, and van Leer was, and still is, a founding member of the Dutch rock group Focus—one of the best rock groups ever. A darn good flautist, too. They collaborated on this effort of classical Christmas songs, with a lot of Bach thrown in for good measure, and it would be nice to be able to load this one up on my ipod too.

The Roger Wagner Choral did a number of Christmas albums, many of which are still available—but not A Christmas Festival, although I notice that there are some available on Amazon at amazing prices. This is a solid effort, with lots of Renaissance stuff, and the wonderful Pinkham concerto. But what sets this album apart are two songs by Flor Peters. Peters was a 20th century Belgian composer, mainly known for his prodigious organ output. But he also composed a number of choral pieces, including something called A Flemish Christmas—four songs based on medieval Flemish folk songs. And this album has two of them. So far as I know, in fact, this is the only recorded version of these pieces, and I’ve been looking for the whole work for years. Which makes this album a rarity indeed.

So what I want for Christmas eleven and a half months from now are these albums, on CD. That way I can push them again, and you’ll actually be able to get them. As opposed to checking out the vinyl bins at the flea market.

Oh, and peace on earth, too.

But what we have is enough. One of the great things about the music of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries (which arguably is Renaissance, but distinctions get fuzzy during this period) is the broad range of music that has been uncovered, and in fact is still being discovered. One finds chants, of course, and songs based on very chant-like song structures. But there is a broader range as well, ranging from the placid to the raucous. Medieval music is like modern music—it’s all over the place. Yes, polyphony was just beginning, but we still find a range of musical styles. And we find them all expressed in the Christmas music of the time.

On the quieter side, we find the Orlando Consort’s Medieval Christmas, which actually spans about 500 years of medieval and early Renaissance songs and carols from England, France and Spain. Like many such albums, it’s arranged in the narrative of the Christmas story. Among other things, Christmas is a story. Whether or not the life of Christ is the greatest story ever told, there is a long tradition in the Christian church of recounting the story of the prophecy, the annunciation, the flight to Egypt, the virgin birth, the angels, the shepherds…and so on. For Christians, the story has a deep religious significance. For non-Christians, it is still one of the compelling narratives that shaped western civilization. And for singers and musicians, it’s a wonderful way to shape the form of a Christmas concert, or a Christmas album. In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, it was the most powerful of stories, and a number of albums of medieval Christmas music adhere to this order. (A number of modern collections, too—check out John Eliot Gardner’s Once as I Remember.) The Boston Camerata’s A Mediterranean Christmas also follows this sequence, in the form of songs around the themes of The Sign of Judgment, The Dawn Approaching, Star of the Day, The Birth of Jesus, and Mother and Child. These are songs from southern Europe, including Spain and Italy, of the 12th and 13th centuries. Again, these will sound completely unlike Christmas songs you’ve heard before. And given the part of Europe these songs come from, the Moorish influence shines through.

It’s not unusual to find medieval Christmas albums that span countries, in fact. There are a number of excellent ones that do exactly that, particularly the Folger Corsort’s Medieval Christmas, with works ranging from Aquitanian chants to 13th century Italy to 15th century England, and Thys Yool, from the Martin Best Ensemble, with songs from, well, all over the place. But we can also concentrate on individual countries, and it comes as no surprise that there are a number of excellent English and French medieval carol albums. We can take our pick, or mix and match. From here, we have the always excellent The Sixteen bringing us Chrisus Natus Est: An Early English Christmas, with a range of traditional Latin and early English carols, many based on dances. Also included are some marvelous pieces by the 16th century English composer John Sheppard. Two other English albums are worth noting—the Oxford Camerata’s Medieval Carols, which are all from the 15th century, and Medieval Christmas from Pro Cantione Antiqua, from the same period. These are both a bit livelier than The Sixteen’s contribution. From France we have the always dependable Boston Camerata bringing us Noel, Noel!, a collection of French Christmas music from 1200 to 1600 that bounces right along. From even earlier times we have La Nuit Saint Nicholas form the French/Italian group La Reverdie, a collection of chants associated with an early 11th century mass dedicated to Saint Nicholas (which appears in a collection of 14th century masses). Very pure and chanty, and lovely. Finally, and again from the Orlando Consort, is Alleluia Nativitas, music for Christmas composed by a range of medieval composers, including Pérotin. Actually, this album contains both French and English medieval music, but since it’s all in Latin, you wouldn’t necessarily know that anyway.

At the more raucous end, we’ve got a trove of wonderful albums. And raucous they are. This is Christmas music as a festival, which often it was, particularly during 12th night, the feast before epiphany. Joglares’s Stella Nova: Celebratory Music from Medieval Italy is a case in point. It’s a live album, and captures Joglaresa’s usual mix of improvisation and manic style. This is Christmas music to dance to—full of drum and percussion, improvisations on bagpipes, and whatever comes to mind. Joglaresa is one of several medieval music groups that specializes in improvisational styles of southern Europe, particularly the Moorish music of Spain and Italy—and this album captures their style perfectly. Since it’s all in some earlier version of Italian, or late medieval Latin, you can play it any time of the year. This is Christmas music that doesn’t sound like Christmas music. And it’s great. Joglaresa just released several new albums, all of which are terrific—one of Shepardic songs (Dancing in Tetuán), one of music from Moorish Andalusia (Dreams of Andalusia), and a new Christmas one—songs from medieval Ireland and England (In Hoary Winter’s Night) that we actually saw them do last year. They cover a lot of ground. Which is one reason why they’re one of my favorite groups.

While we’re in Italy, let’s give a mention to Altramar, who have brought us Nova Stella: A Medieval Italian Christmas. This is another lively album, although a bit more moderate than Joglaresa’s, but with many of the same songs—so you can compare and contrast. Altramar is that rare thing—like the Boston Camerata and Pomerium, it’s an American early music group. This is actually a collection of what are called lauda songs associated with St Francis of Assisi, who, among other things, brought us the first crèche. The song selection is perfect, and the arrangements, both vocal and instrumental, are just fine.

Also in this group would be Zefiro Torna, an early music group from Holland and Belgium, with El Noi de la Mare. This is a collection of medieval songs about the Nativity, but the style is raucous as can be—this is about as aggressive as you can get in this genre. Starting with the remarkable Miri it is, from the early 13th century, the group presents a collection of songs spanning the 13th through the 15th centuries, many of which you want to dance to. This music is full of cognitive dissonance—you’re not supposed to want to dance to Christmas music, but for hundreds of years medieval and early Renaissance songwriters and musicians created music the intent of which was exactly that.

From a wonderful Italian early music group with a German name, Ensemble Weltgesang, comes Personent Hodie, another album of medieval songs surrounding the Nativity. Personent hodie is one of those great medieval songs that has persisted, more or less unaltered, although there is a version that shows up in some Protestant Hymnbooks. This one will be hard to track down, but it’s worth it.

Finally, let’s note that Joglaresa, or more specifically the marvelous Belinda Sykes, often collaborates with two other similar groups—One Wytars, and Ensemble Unicorn. And while neither has produced a Christmas music exactly, they have collaborated on the marvelous On the Way to Bethlehem: Music of the Medieval Pilgrim, which does happen to have on it a number of songs associated with Christmas. This is a collection of music, vocal and instrumental, that the medieval pilgrim would have encountered as he or she traveled from England through France, German, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and what is now Turkey and Syria, to the holy land–something medieval folk did for hundreds of years. Again, a joyous, hectic and invigorating album—Christmas music from 700 or 800 years ago that you can dance to, or be enthralled by. Or both.

Tomorrow–Wait till next year.

Happy New Year from the staff of Scholars & Rogues.

As soon as I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I wanted to call a “time out” from life and put everything on pause so I could do nothing but read, read, read this unrelenting book.

McCarthy pens a powerful tale of devotion and love set in a post-apocalyptic world of despair and hopelessness, as stripped down and bare as McCarthy’s spare, elegiac prose. I mean, he’s writing bare-bones, devoid of commas and apostrophes and, frequently, even complete sentences. But oh, does he capture images and emotions! It’s almost stream-of-despondent-consciousness from characters who wish they were unconscious.

The story follows a father and young son as they make their way across the barren landscape toward the sea. They’re ostensibly traveling there in the hope of finding better living conditions, but this is, after all, a world without hope.
Look, for instance, at the world through the father’s eyes as he wakes up one morning on their journey. “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment of the world,” McCarthy writes. “The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

And the world only gets more bleak from there.

This is an ash-covered world scraped clean by some man-made catastrophe that annihilated all life. The few humans left a decade later are mostly lone animals, hunted by roving bands of cannibalistic thugs; others hole up in bunker-like communes. No travelers are safe. Anywhere.

And yet father and son move on, finally driven from the relatively safety of their home in the north by unknown forces. The novel begins some time after they’ve begun their migration. McCarthy immediately puts readers on the road with the two of them, and with no spectacle or theatrics, begins to ratchet up the tension. It doesn’t take long for a reader’s nerves to get as edgy as father’s and son’s. And with each page, each section, the novel’s iron fist slowly keeps squeezing the reader’s heart.

The plot never lets up, not once, never rests–after all, the characters themselves must be ever-moving, ever-vigilant–but The Road proves that the best characterization comes through action. This is a love story between father and son. The pain and fear and love they share is fearfully palpable and true.

The Road is one of those rare masterpieces that made me read it. I suspect it will continue to haunt me for a long, long time.

(I originally wrote this review in October 2006, when the novel first came out, and I just finished my fifth re-read. Since its release, The Road has since won accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction to selection in the Oprah Book Club. I thought it worthwhile to dig out my original review in light of the new movie adaptation now playing in theaters. See the movie, but absolutely read the book.)

There’s redemption, of a sort, at the end of the movie The Road. You can tell because it feels like the fist that has been squeezing your heart against your spine has finally let go.

Most of the credit goes to Viggo Mortensen, who plays a father trying to guide his son through the post-Apocalyptic world heaving its last dying breaths. Mortensen comes across simultaneously as desperate yet resolved, with vulnerability hanging about him in the air the way a man’s breath hangs in front of him on a frigid rainy day. He’s raw all the way through. If he doesn’t get an Oscar for this one, then the voting was rigged.

Overall, John Hillcoat’s film adaptation stays faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel. The film version lacks the “long, continuous journey” feel that McCarthy’s book had; instead, the movie, because of the visual nature of the medium itself, accentuates the episodic nature of the journey. That works to disengage viewers a little, who end up observing the story rather than walking the road with the characters. It’s hard not to watch, though, and think “Thank God that’s not me out there.”

The Road smartly steers clear of any Mad Max view of the world. Instead, it’s a love story between a father and son. As a dad myself, I know a little bit about relationships like that, and McCarthy—and Hillcoat—nail it. It doesn’t matter that the world has gone to hell—so long as Mortensen has his son, he has everything he needs. He has purpose and he has love and that’s pretty much all that matters. “The child is my warrant,” Mortensen says during a voiceover. “If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.”

On screen, the relationship lacks the quiet but intense intimacy it has in the book, but Hillcoat captures it in other ways. Father and son watch an entire forest of dead trees burn in the middle of the night. They just stand, side by side, and watch.

Later, in a mall, Mortensen plies a forgotten can of Coke from a vending machine and gives it to his son, who’s never had a carbonated beverage before. The son, realizing the rarity of the gift, insists his father share it with him. Hillcoat offers a number of such moments that give the film real resonance.

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Mortensen’s son with attentive eyes. They lack the profound, haunted sadness Mortensen wears in his, but that speaks volumes about the father-son relationship. Father has helped son retain at least some sense of wonder and humanity in a world were little of either still exists.

Hillcoat also pulls an inspired performance from Charlize Theron, whose character has a slightly expanded role in the film compared to the book. Robert Duval makes an excellent cameo, as does Michael K. Williams.

Hillcoat’s vision of the world is appropriately cinematic, which is one of the great strengths and great weaknesses of the adaptation. McCarthy’s spare prose leaves much to the reader’s imagination, which is always a treat for me as a reader, whereas Hillcoat has to splash the grime and decay big and bold. I suspect he’d be really great working with lush, beautiful, sweeping panoramas, but for The Road, the wide shot of the world is gray and brown and drizzly.

Hillcoat used authentic locations (most of them around Pittsburgh but some in post-Katrina New Orleans) to create his eerie, blasted-out landscape. As a result, the movie always feels real. You want to brush the grit out of your hair and wring the wet out of your sopping jacket halfway through the film.

A few critics have complained that the movie moves too slowly, that nothing really happens. I actually think there were spots where Hillcoat could have slowed down even more to provide more opportunity for introspection.

The films flaws, though, are minor compared to the harrowing impact of Hillcoat’s final product: a series of little gut punches, one right after the other. You’ll be glad to find relief at the end of The Road—but don’t be surprised if you want to start the journey over again, too.

(P.S.: I probably don’t need to say this, but if you’ve not read The Road, go. Now. Log off and pick up the novel and read it. It’s profound stuff and ferocious writing.)

We have some out of control Christmas light freaks in my general neighborhood – I suspect the same is true for you, as well. A few days ago we heard about an absolutely epic display, although the description didn’t come with actual directions. “Somewhere off of 136th near the big water towers.” Given the sheer number of streets, subdivisions and rampant cul-de-saccery within a mile of those towers, well, directions would have helped.

But we drove around for awhile and eventually came upon a minor traffic jam clotting a cul. A retirement home bus was trying to escape without driving down a legion of pedestrians. “This must be it,” we concluded.

And so we found ourselves in front of the home at 13941 Tincup Circle. I apologize in advance – all I had was my Blackberry (good biz phone, underwhelming camera) – and even if I’d had the greatest camera ever made I couldn’t have done justice to the excruciating detail of this spectacle. If you search your Google on that address you’ll probably find better than this. But hey, I’ll post what I have. Enjoy.

I wish I could have gotten some better shots through the window, because the inside of the house is probably more elaborately decked than the outside.

As we were leaving a stretch Hummer limo was trying to maneuver in, so please understand that, my lame photos aside, this is a destination event around here.