“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971.

That was nearly forty years ago. And I realized, after reading another Berry essay collection a couple of weeks ago (in this case, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays), that Berry has been pounding away at the same themes for at least that long. And nothing that he has expressed concerns, not to mention deep dismay, about—the increasing power of agribusiness, our increased disconnection from the land, the abandonment of local economies and communities, our collective disregard of the concept of stewardship—has gotten better. In fact, one could argue that everything of concern to Berry has gotten worse. And this is tragic, because current trends, particularly in agriculture, but also in the relentless suburbanization of American life, where no one actually really knows how to do anything, are probably unsustainable. The result will be, well, who knows what, but it might not be pleasant. And who will have the kind of wisdom and local knowledge that is central to Berry’s worldview then?

Berry is fond of throwing out nuggets like the following:

Nobody has a right to destroy anything, and everybody has an obligation to defend as much as he or she possibly can. But sooner or later you’ll have to choose. You can’t defend everything, even though everybody has an obligation to be as aware as possible, and as effective as possible, in preserving the things that need to be preserved everywhere. But I’ve argued over and over again that the fullest responsibility has to be exercised at home, where you have some chance to come to a competent and just understanding of what’s involved, and where you have some chance of being really effective.

And:

Rome destroyed itself by undervaluing the country people, too.

And:

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

And:

There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven’t produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I’m talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven’t done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you’re a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can’t operate without it.

Berry is the philosopher of the local and what, specifically, being local entails. America has inflicted a number of wounds on itself the past several decades in the name of “free markets,” still clinging to the myth that there is actually such a thing. Berry isn’t much of a fan of these, actually. What he is a fan of is the dignity of work (remember that?), and the notion that we should take care of ourselves, particularly how we care for the land that supports us. And that we should have local knowledge–about the land, of course, but also about how to do the things we need to do to occupy the land–how to maintain and sustain it in particular. Well, at a time when externalities are catching up with us rapidly in any number of areas (global warming being the most obvious), we really need to pay more attention to what Berry is saying. And that means a return to the local. Berry has a number of mantras—the most recent is “Eat responsibly.” And by this means not just know what your food is, and whether it’s good for you or not—but where it comes from, how it was produced, under what conditions, and subsidized by whom? Sounds easy, but in modern America, and increasingly here in the UK, this is getting harder and harder to do.

I’ve been reading Berry for decades now, and his place in modern American thought is still a bit of a mystery. He’s written one of the best American novels of the century (A Place on Earth) and a number of volumes of pretty good poetry (particularly Farming: A Hand Book). He honed his craft at the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he hung out with Kesey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry. Most importantly, he has produced a series of essays over the years that stand as a testament to sound judgment. In many ways, conservative judgment as well—because Berry wants to conserve things.

This has led to many fun and enlightening exchanges within the conservative and libertarian blogging community. When did Berry, the arch-Luddite opponent of modern agribusiness, militarism and word processors, become a crunchy-conservative icon? Pretty recently, judging by some of the commentary I see occasionally on blogs like the ones cited above. And hardly a week goes by over at Front Porch Republic that someone doesn’t make a specific reference to Berry. I think this is great.

And where are the liberals on Berry? Generally, not to be found, which is a pity. Have liberals become so entwined on the wrong side of the globalization debate that they’ve lost all perspective? I’m way over-generalizing here, of course, but still, I seldom see anyone on the Democratic side speaking up for localism. Instead, we get Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, and Obama, for all his many virtues, still behaving like a farm state senator. But if liberals really want to pursue a more just society, the place to do it as at the local level. The far right understands this better than the left—hence the attacks on ACORN, which is essentially local political action. Look, you want better schools? Run for the school board. You want better food? Get on the planning board and make sure that the last local farmland isn’t being ploughed under for yet another housing development. You want better communities? Run for the city council, or whatever it is you’ve got. That Think Globally, Act Locally bumper sticker that we seldom see any more had it about right.

As Bill Kauffman has noted, “Among the tragedies of contemporary politics is that Wendell Berry, as a man of place, has no place in a national political discussion that is framed by Gannett and Clear Channel.” This may be changing. For one thing, Berry is still writing, and more and more people keep reading. I don’t think there’s a single book in his back catalogue that has ever gone out of print—pretty impressive for a writing career than spans over four decades. For another, Berry, bless his heart, just won’t shut up. Here’s Berry and long time co-author Wes Jackson in The New York Times earlier this year:

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

And then the kicker—we don’t get a bunch of starry-eyed idealism, but a bunch of necessary, practical and achievable measures to take to redress these problems:

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

No wonder most Reagan conservatives can’t stand the guy. A 50-year farm bill? But that may be how long it takes to re-capture the kind of localism that will provide us with a sustainable agricultural system. But Russell Kirk would probably take a look around at the mess we’ve made, and agree.

Did I mention Berry is a poet as well? The Mad Farmer poems in particular are worth a look. Let’s close with “The Farmer and the Sea” (initially published in Farming: A Hand Book):

The sea always arriving,
hissing in pebbles, is breaking
its edge where the landsman
squats on his rock. The dark
of the earth is familiar to him,
close mystery of his source
and end, always flowering
in the light and always
fading. But the dark of the sea
is perfect and strange, the absence of any place, immensity on the loose.
Still, he sees it as another
keeper of he land, caretaker
shaking the earth, breaking it, clicking the pieces, but somewhere
holding deep fields yet to rise,
shedding its richness on them
silently as snow, keeper and maker
of places wholly dark. And in him
Something dark applauds.

To learn more, this is a pretty good place to start.

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too.

For centuries, vampires used to serve that function. Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as the very best example, but vampires existed in folklore long before Stoker immortalized the legends on paper. Fewer things unnerve the living than the dead, which is also why fewer things have been more taboo.

Since Stoker’s 1888 novel, vampires have enjoyed a rich literary tradition (and the web is full of armchair essayists trying to sound erudite by expounding on that long literary tradition). But then along came Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat, a tragic, sultry, sexy fellow who broke nearly every vampire stereotype. Lestat made vampires sympathetic—which was a huge game-changer for the genre. As a result of that impact, Entertainment Weekly recently named Lestat as the greatest vampire ever. (The Bela Lagosi fan in me nearly choked since all vampires have ever been measured against the stereotype Lagosi established.)

Since Lestat, vampires have made a smooth transformation from being terrifying to being sexy. The fact that every teenage girl in America now wants to be Edward Cullen’s undead bride serves as perfect proof. (Guys aren’t immune, either. Check out Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies if you think female vampires aren’t hot.) I applaud Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan for trying to reverse that trend in their new novel, The Strain, which tries to make vampires creepy again—but I fear they’re fighting a losing battle.

And so, zombies have shambled in to take the place vampires once occupied in those dark, irrational corners of our psyches. Zombies now serve as that psychological boogeyman that vampires, through their own sheer attractiveness, can no longer serve as.

There’s one key distinction, though. Vampires represented a certain kind of calculating evil. They made conscious choices about who they preyed on and why, which seemed unnerving and sadistic. It’s evil of the nastiest kind.

Traditionally, we think of zombies as evil, too (Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a perfect example)—but in fact, zombies are mindless engines of hunger-driven carnage. Sure, they’re bloody, gory, disfigured, disheveled messes, and they act with single-mindless purpose to wipe out people. But they do it because that’s what zombies are wired do, not because they make intentional choices about it. There’s no willful violation of moral codes because zombies have no will. They are essentially forces of nature. A zombie basically represents Jack London’s impassive hand of Nature writ large and ugly.

In that sense, then, is the zombie any different than the financial collapse or the random act of violence or climate change? You can’t reason with those things any more than you can reason with a zombie. And when people feel as though they have no control over a situation, it shakes them in ways few things can. A zombie represents that same feeling, amplified to the Nth degree.

That’s a feeling most people can relate to these days. Zombies are tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.

Pop culture has latched onto that the way a zombie latches onto flesh—and fans have been feasting on it, too. It takes something terrifying and makes it fun (even being scared at the movies, even being creeped out by a book, are still basically forms of fun). As the trend continues, zombies actually become “safer” because people become desensitized. Believe it or not, that’s another reason why pop culture latches onto something like zombies: The process serves as a sociological “coping method.”

Eventually, Zombies will lose the primal power they’ve had (the same way vampires have). Their popularity will diminish, too, although it’ll never go away.

Who knows what’s lurking under the bed to eventually take their place.

Edgar Allan Poe is – despite or perhaps because of  his proclivity for writing scary stories – one of our most beloved writers. Chief among Poe’s charms for the reader is his ability to grab us with a riveting opening line. As proof of Poe’s rare talent for the stunning opener, here for your Halloween Arts Week pleasure is a sample of great opening lines from the master of terror….From “The Tell Tale Heart”:

“TRUE! – nervous – very, very nervous I am and had been and am; but why will you say I am mad?”

From “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

From “The Pit and The Pendulum”:

“I WAS sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.”

From “The Black Cat”:

“FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.”

From “The Premature Burial”:

“THERE are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust.”

From “The Masque of the Red Death”:

“THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.”

From “Hop-Frog”:

“I NEVER knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking.”

From “Ligeia”:

“I Cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering.”

From “The Cask of Amontillado”:

“THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could ; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

From “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”:

“‘_CON tal que las costumbres de un autor_,’ says Don Thomas de las Torres, in the preface to his “Amatory Poems” _’sean puras y castas, importo muy poco que no sean igualmente severas sus obras’_ — meaning, in plain English, that, provided the morals of an author are pure personally, it signifies nothing what are the morals of his books. We presume that Don Thomas is now in Purgatory for the assertion.”

I’ve said nothing of Poe’s poetry, at least a line or two of which almost all of us know. The opening of “The Raven” may be the most famous opening lines in American poetry:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘Tis some visiter,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.’”

But here are a couple of others you may not know that also meet E.A.P.’s high standard for opening lines:

From “The City in the Sea”:

“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne/In a strange city lying alone /Far down within the dim West/Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best/Have gone to their eternal rest.”

From “Ulalume”:

“The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere -
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:”

You can read all of these stories and poems plus many more at this excellent Poe site.

I WAS sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.

For a second, let’s set aside any arguments over whether or not Rowling’s work merits such a lofty honor and do something that we simply don’t do enough these days. Let’s dig beneath the surface silliness and examine the deeper implications of what this revelation really means.

Put simply, would you be worried about “encouraging” something you didn’t think was possible? It’s one thing to want to discourage, say, meth use or binge drinking or texting while driving or unprotected sex. Those things are real and they have real, observable consequences. If Rowling’s books were encouraging angel-dust-fueled arson sprees, we’d all be advised to support the former president and his merry band of loco parentis.

But did they see witchcraft as real? (Sure, practitioners of Wicca and other neo-paganisms indulge in the craft, but for a variety of reasons I think we have to assume that’s not what Bush was concerned with. After all, Rowling doesn’t talk about real-world Wicca, and real-world Wiccans don’t fly through the skies of London terrorizing the Mugglery. Whatever the real world’s witches may or may no be up to, it has so far proven very unHollywood-worthy.)

So, do we then conclude that President Bush and his cronies wanted to discourage children from learning how to change each other into rats? From flying around on brooms? From trying to outwit dragons? From teleporting via fireplaces? From sneaking around under invisibility capes?

Certainly these are the sorts of things that we’d want to keep our children away from, I suppose. But while Dubya may have resisted the corrosive effects of education, there are rules of logic and he is not magically immune to them. By definition, one wouldn’t actively discourage children from something that was in fact impossible. Not unless one were absolutely barking, anyway. It might theoretically be dangerous for young children to attack the Xyrxalian Star Fleet on Pegasus-back, for instance, but you don’t recall any Executive admonitions on the subject, do you?

Still, let’s remember, the Bible says that witches are real. Former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin consulted freely with a witchbusting “minister.” The shenanigans at Hogwarts are barely more outlandish than some of what went on in the White House when Nancy Reagan, wife of Bush’s intellectual hero Ronald Reagan, was in residence.

And we’re talking about a man who believes that God commanded him to run for president.

Therefore, I believe we have every reason to believe that our former president did, in fact, view the kinds of powers imagined by Rowling in her best-selling series to be plausible.

Since this is America, we have to respect his faith.

Star Wars doesn’t exactly fit in any film genre. It has action and romance, but it isn’t an action or  a romance film. It isn’t sci-fi either, though for lack of a better classification it often gets put in the genre. Star Wars is a myth. It reveals itself in the opening scroll, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” From the beginning we’re separated from the mundane by a thin line of imagination, but the line is so thin that seeing the fantastic in our own existence is nearly impossible to miss. Campbell was fond of saying that, “Myth is a public dream and dreams are private myths.” Lucas managed to draw the line between them with precision and grace. And in doing so gave Campbell his life-long dream: a modern myth. That is, the psychological motifs present in all mythology dressed in metaphors accessible to modern man.

With the predictive powers of hindsight it’s easy to see Campbell becoming the scholar he was. His middle class childhood in New York state was dominated by an intense fascination with all things Native American. The auto-didactic streak that would characterize his life was evident in a young man reading through whole library collections for pleasure. His early biography is punctuated by profound moments that clearly shape the man he would become. On the return from a European vacation with his family, Campbell befriended Jiddu Krishnamutri. The trans-Atlantic length conversation they shared prompted Campbell to forsake his native Catholicism and ignited his curiosity for the beliefs beyond his personal context.

In 1927, he left for Europe again, this time as a post-graduate student at Columbia University. He was to study Old French, German and Provencal as part of his Medieval Literature studies. He found far more than he expected. He began a life-long love affair with the Cathedral at Chartres; discovered Joyce and Mann; wondered at post-impressionists like Picasso and Klee; and began making sense of the world under the influence of Freud and, especially, Jung. Upon his return to America, he proposed adding Sanskrit and modern art to his course of studies at Columbia. His advisers felt that neither was appropriate to the study of Medieval Literature, and so Campbell left formal, higher education for good.

But he did not leave education. With little hope for gainful employment – it was 1929 – Campbell commenced five years of self-education and travel. He broke each day into four, four-hour blocks, three of which were spent reading. To his impressive foreign language abilities he added Russian, because he wanted to read War and Peace and assumed that much would be necessarily lost in translation. He traveled the U.S. extensively during those years, befriending John Steinbeck and living next door to Ed Ricketts. He spent a year as the headmaster at The Canterbury School and published a short story. And he spent another year living in a rustic, tourist cabin in Woodstock, NY; he simply asked publishers for books, and since no one was purchasing them, they obliged.

A 1932 journal entry shows a man deep in thought and points the way to his ultimate destination:

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere–but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is–but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. — It isn’t in travel. — It isn’t in California. — It isn’t in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?

Creepy as it may have been, Campbell eventually took a position in the literature department of Sarah Lawrence College. He retired from the same position 38 years later, still without his doctorate. He spent the rest of his life examining, pondering, discussing and sharing the questions he asked himself in 1932.

Some claim that Campbell was not a great scholar of myth and religion, and to some extent this is true. He never claimed to be one. He was, however, a brilliant synthesizer, able to take in the big picture and tease out the similarities in prima facia dissimilar traditions. He saw context where others saw only details. He shared with Jung a vision concerning the common psycho-spiritual context of humankind. Like Jung, he he saw myth as a means for man to describe the context that was simultaneously internal and external, the present and the eternal. But foremost, Campbell was an educator. He had the gift of the story-teller, and it allowed him to share scholarly thoughts in a way that engaged the not-so-scholarly.

The long conversation with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) recorded shortly before his death is a staple of public library AV sections. He’s best known for efforts of that sort because they are so accessible. But his writing is hardly confined to popularizations of myth. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a deep and complex work exploring the hero monomyth as it has been retold countless times around the world and throughout history. The four volumes of The Masks of God are a heavily footnoted history of man’s spiritual journey from the deepest mists of prehistory to expressions of mythology in modern art and culture. They could easily constitute a fine lay education in comparative myth and religion.

Campbell may be one of the handful of people who understood Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, co-authoring an explanatory tome. And he edited the collected works of Heinrich Zimmer and Carl Jung. And all of this was done in the context of a long marriage, a distinguished teaching career, and a host of deeply intellectual friendships that spanned the globe.

Myth, in Campbell’s view, is metaphor. It is a means of accessing truth and wisdom, and it forms a context in which to integrate the boon into life. He liked to point out that “happily ever after” in fairly tales did not mean “without care or worry”, but rather “knowing and integrating wisdom into daily life.” It troubled him that modern man has little connection to myth, and he rightfully wondered if our sorry state of affairs is the result of too little mythic understanding. For Campbell, this situation did not exclude the throngs of devoutly religious people the world over. He often pointed out that these people are regularly guilty of mistaking the metaphor for the truth that it describes.

His work is a testament to the thought and belief of all humanity, and to the idea that knowledge is understanding, rather than power. He was an erudite scholar, but the rogue’s glint in his eye was impossible to hide. And he spent a life time imparting knowledge that came with the roguish and mildly subversive instructions that we should follow our bliss.

Image credit: The Joseph Campbell Foundation (click for further bio, complete works, etc.)

The reading list given for Campbell’s “Introduction to Mythology” course at Sarah Lawrence.

But now it was my time. I believed football could be taught using the Shakespeare method of coaching. I would tell my team what to do, they would look at me with a complete lack of understanding and request another play, one not stated in iambic pentameter.

During our first game, I noticed the right defensive tackle on the opposing team was moving backwards after the snap, creating a natural hole for a quick hitter. I sent in the following play: “Once more unto the breech dear friends, once more. With the fullback!” My quarterback gave me a confused glance and passed instead. It was intercepted and returned for a touchdown.

“Why didn’t you run the fullback like I said?” I asked him.

“Why didn’t you tell me what a breech was?” he replied.

We lost 56-0.

“Sorry, coach,” said my quarterback. “We’ll do better next week.”

I couldn’t be mad. “Hey, boys, the quality of mercy is not strained. It dropeth as the gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath. Like our 8 fumbles tonight. Just dropething everywhere.”

Everything exists for a reason. The junior high football B-team had two functions: A. to get small, slow, gentle players ready to play on the varsity someday, or B. drive these kids back into marching band where they belonged. If an 8th grader had any talent at all, he was promoted to the varsity and replaced by a kid who often had no idea that football involved running, sometimes for your life. There wasn’t a lot of soccer out there in 1981, so if parents wanted their sons to be active in a fall sport, it was football or scouring the backwoods looking for Christmas trees to cut and sell illegally.

We weren’t very good. I know that was mostly my fault, because I didn’t have the type of analytical mind needed to coach successfully. To me, coaching was like watching a game with a really good seat. My team was getting slaughtered every week. I wasn’t making men, I was teaching young guys how to move efficiently on crutches. Wins? We didn’t score until the fourth game, and that was when our opponents fired a snap over their punter’s head and out of the end zone. I actually had two players hurt on that play, so it was a Pyrrhic victory, a phrase I had to define for the team on the long bus ride home.

But gradually, we improved. During our second season, we scored in almost every game. We even had a few intense practice sessions, like the time Crazy Bobby Merrill sacked our quarterback four plays in a row! I’d never seen our defense so fired up. Bobby was beside himself with joy. True, he was lining up as a split end and coming back to tackle his own quarterback, but that did little to diminish his enthusiasm.

We just couldn’t get a win. We got close. Against Lebanon, we were ahead 22-0 in the third quarter, before we crashed like the Hindenburg. That was my fault. After they closed to 22-16, I called a time out and told my team “He that hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart.” I didn’t know my linebackers would take that as an invitation to go home early. They did, and we were beaten 24-22.

After two seasons, my coaching record was 0-8. The school administration rewarded this by adding two more games to our schedule the next year. We lost the first 5 and seemed to be getting worse. Instead of practicing, I spent a lot of afternoons on the blasted heath, screaming things only my team could understand. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” My offensive linemen would nod and weep. That was the strange thing. As my team got worse at football, they were getting better at Shakespeare.

Then we came to our last game. Mt. Pleasant, a small community in our county, decided to form a football team for their 8th graders because they thought they could get in a quick victory against us. Everybody else had, but we took offense at this. The kids were fired up. This was Mt. Pleasant, after all, a town just down the road. Losing to them would be an embarrassment they would live with forever.

If this were ever made into a Hollywood movie, it would all come down to the last play. In reality, there was little drama to it. We scored on our first drive and were never behind. Mt. Pleasant had a decent middle linebacker, but when he looked across the line and said to our quarterback “I know which way you’re going. You look at the place where the ball is going.” Sidney replied calmly, “There is no art to tell the mind’s construction in the face.” Then he glanced right, swept left, and scored without being touched.

I stopped coaching after that year. My overall record was 1-13, but I like to think I had a positive effect on the kids. I guess football isn’t ready for the Shakespeare method of coaching, or maybe Shakespeare and football, like water and gasoline, are beautiful to look at even as they don’t mix. But I still hope that a wiser coach than I am will further investigate the possibilities. I know someone can make it work. True, there is no I in team, but there was a bard in Lombardi.

by JS O’Brien

Today is April 23, the day we celebrate as William Shakespeare’s birthday – though this date is derived by counting backwards from his known christening date, so his actual date of birth is uncertain. Every year at this time, periodicals across the country feel compelled to revisit the issue of whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poetry attributed to him, and they do this for good reason: everyone loves conspiracy theories, no matter how absurd they may be.

It is this very absurdity and the accompanying cloudy thought that make the question extremely important to all of us, because the “debate,” itself, is rooted in a very dangerous and destructive human trait: the tendency to decide what is true based on little or no evidence, and then to seek only evidence to support one’s ill-conceived position while ignoring evidence – even overwhelming evidence — to the contrary. In other words, the tale of the Shakespeare conspiracy theorists is a tale of the anti-science that lives in all of us, and its ramifications for all of us.

Inevitably, the standard premise underlying all the objections to William Shakespeare’s authorship of his works are that he was a country bumpkin of little or no learning who could not possibly have produced the brilliant poetry, stunning insights into human behavior, and dramatic tension and structure he managed to produce with such genius that many consider him the greatest writer in the English language. Those anti-Stratfordians who insist that someone else must have written Shakespeare’s works present their own candidates, some silly (Elizabeth I, James I, Christopher Marlowe) and some taken more seriously by too many (Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford), but all having one thing in common: there are no extant works known to be written by any of the other candidates that approach Shakespeare’s genius with words or his insights into human nature. Absent this positive evidence (necessary for science), the anti-Stratfordians use logic based on negative evidence (often in error), or even absence of evidence, to “prove” that William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the works attributed to him.

I have no intention of writing a book-length treatise exploding the myths and torturous “logic” of the anti-Stratfordians. Others have done this far better than I could, and if you’ve an interest, this is a great debunking site. Instead, I’m going to use Occam’s Razor to point out the simple absurdity of the anti-Stratfordians’ position.

What we know about William Shakespeare

The common meme that little is known about William Shakespeare from Stratford is entirely untrue. In fact, more is known about him than practically any other writer, or personality, of his time.

He was born in the spring of 1564 at Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town approximately three days ride northwest of London. His father was a prosperous glovemaker who, at one point, held a position equivalent to mayor of Stratford. His mother was from an old and prestigious local family, the Ardens. Recent scholarship suggests that Shakespeare’s parents were pro-Catholic sympathizers in an England rife with Catholic plots against Elizabeth and her kingdom.

Young Will would have grown up going to the local grammar school, as would have been expected of the mayor’s son and most of the other sons of Stratford families. There, he would have learned more Latin than modern university classics majors, and a bit of Greek, as well. He would have read all the great Latin authors at a very early age, including the bloody and overwrought Seneca, whose influence figures heavily in Titus Andronicus, one of Will’s early works. He married Anne Hathaway, a woman of 26, when he was 18 years old. Anne gave birth six months later.

There is an eight-to-ten-year gap in the record before Shakespeare again appears in London in 1592, when playwright Robert Greene, making reference to a line of Will’s from Henry VI, part III, calls him an “upstart crow.” We know that he became a sharer (owner) in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (a theater company), later renamed The King’s Men when James I became their patron. We have written references from the time to some acting roles, authorship of plays, business transactions, etc. We know that he became prosperous enough to buy a very large house in Stratford and to successfully pursue a coat of arms and gentle status for his family. Ben Jonson, another leading playwright, commented on his quick writing method, saying that “he never blotted out line.” He also composed two poems praising Shakespeare.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616 and is buried in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. The first collection of his works, the famous First Folio, was published in 1623. The first question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays did not occur until approximately 150 years after his death.

The conspiracy theorists

Since no contemporary of William Shakespeare’s seems to have voiced the slightest doubt that he wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, we must assume that the cover-up of the real author’s identity was a vast conspiracy. Nothing other than a closely guarded conspiracy among a number of people could possibly explain what had to have happened to keep such a thing secret.

First, one must understand how theater works, especially when new plays are being presented. New scripts are not written on tablets and delivered from Mt. Sinai. They are put on their feet in rehearsal and then revised to patch weaknesses. Doubtless, the rehearsal process for any new Elizabethan play would have featured the close cooperation of the playwright, explaining what was meant by certain passages, what human interactions should be taking place, striking lines that didn’t work, and rewriting lines and scenes, or adding scenes, on the spot to improve the plot and/or the character interactions.

William Shakespeare, as a sharer in his company and the playwright, would have been seen at work by all the members of his company as well as those jobbers brought in to do roles the permanent company couldn’t cover with its own members. Backers and other interested people would, undoubtedly, have observed rehearsals, and everything from orange-sellers to box-office cashiers to stagehands to fencing masters and tailors would have passed by rehearsals frequently in the normal course of their duties – all without letting the secret spill that William Shakespeare had no idea why a certain thing was written the way it was, had no insights into characterization, and could not rewrite on the spot as every other playwright doubtlessly did.

The sharers helped cover up this conspiracy in another way: they paid this actor of relatively minor roles well enough, as a partner in their company, to make him a very prosperous man at a relatively early age. One can imagine how Shakespeare would have been made a sharer as a playwright, but it’s much more difficult to imagine his skill as an actor alone affording him that privilege.

Given the positive evidence that Shakespeare existed and wrote plays in London as a sharer in the most famous of the theater companies there, and the unlikely event of a leak-proof cover-up that had to have occurred to keep someone else’s authorship a secret, by far the most probable answer to the question “Who wrote Shakespeare’s works?” is that William Shakespeare wrote them. This application of Occam’s Razor doesn’t mean that Shakespeare’s or any other writer’s authorship is an absolute certainty. Maybe all the works of William Faulkner were written by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but it seems highly unlikely, and there’s no positive evidence that this is so. It seems most likely, by far, that William Faulkner wrote the works attributed to him and that Will Shakespeare also wrote his own works.

So, why does the “controversy” exist?

People have a tendency to believe what they want to believe, finding evidence to support that belief and twisting it however they need to make it fit into unlikely shapes, while disregarding any evidence that contradicts what they want to believe. The belief in alternate authorship for Shakespeare’s works is closely akin to belief in religious texts, even when facts clearly suggest that such beliefs have a very, very low probability of being correct. It is this very human tendency that the process of science, when practiced properly, defeats. So, in its essence, the belief in alternate Shakespearean authorship is an anti-science stance, discarding Occam’s Razor for cherished belief. In this case, the belief seems relatively harmless, but what about beliefs like this in the US Supreme Court? What if we have justices who have a legal premise they want to believe, then bend the legal issues in their minds to find a way to validate that premise, even when the facts speak strongly against their conclusions?

At least two Supreme Court justices, John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia, believe in the Edward de Vere conspiracy theory, with Justice Stevens going so far as to speak to the Wall Street Journal about it. I suppose it makes sense that the two most ideologically opposed members of the Court are the ones to take the Shakespearean conspiracy theory most seriously, since it stands to reason that adopting any ideology generally requires a leap of faith coupled with intellectual, internal suppression of inconvenient, contrary facts. They’re clearly very good at doing that, to the point that Stevens is quoted as saying, “I think the evidence that he (Shakespeare) was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Beyond a reasonable doubt? He would send a man to death row based on the evidence at hand? Even when real experts, like Brown University English professor Coppelia Kahn, president of the Shakespeare Association of America, have this to say about that opinion: “Oh my. Nobody gives any credence to these arguments.”

I assume Professor Kahn meant that no one who is an actual scholar and reasonable human being gives any credence to anti-Stratfordian arguments, because it’s quite clear that some people, including Supreme Court justices, do. Perhaps many attorneys do, since their training is in taking a proposition, no matter how indefensible, and defending it. Scientists, who believe in testing hypotheses to see if they stand up to rigorous inquiry are quite unlikely to elevate Edward de Vere’s authorship of Hamlet anywhere near “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Stevens’ and Scalia’s insistence that they are nearly sure that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s works is immensely troubling. What sort of ill-trained, anti-science minds do we tolerate on the US Supreme Court? And if these are our best justices, what sorts of minds inhabit benches in our lesser courts?

Let’s hope the good justices never have to hear a case on Holocaust denial.

It’s  been suggested before that Jon Stewart is perhaps America’s most trustworthy journalist. Which is nice for him, but not so good for the rest of us, because he’s not a journalist. He’s a comedian. He’s David Letterman. He’s Larry the Cable Guy. He’s Phyllis Diller. He makes his living by making people laugh.

But here he is, once again stepping up and telling truth to power in ways that seem spectacular to us. (And make no mistake – money is power in America, and media conglomerates are among power’s most critical brokers. So stomping the balls off of Jim Cramer does, in fact, constitute speaking truth to power.)

The relevant part of that last paragraph occurs toward the end of the first sentence. What Stewart did has been the talk of the entire fucking world in the last 48 hours. He, a guy with a TV show, hauled a man out into the town square who has done, by omission or commission – your choice – grave damage to countless Americans. Whether Cramer contributed to the insanity that has led us to our current economic apocalypse directly or whether his worst sin is that he did not use his platform to call out the guilty in advance, he and his employers played a noteworthy role in facilitating our financial crash. And we, the citizenry of the information-logged society in the history of the solar system, stand agog: motherfucking WOW! Did you SEE that?!

This is the tragedy. We’re as staggered at the occurrence of actual journalism as we would be by the sight of Rosie O’Donnell clubbing Donald Trump to death with her boobs. The fact that the only journalism in recent memory has emanated from Comedy Central is … well, it’s like shooting novocaine into the leg of a quadriplegic, really.

Cap and Bells

It’s never been easy – or profitable, or even safe – to speak truth to power. America circa 2009 isn’t the first place when the ordained channels have failed to convey to the people an accurate accounting of the events shaping their lives. In fact, what we’re dealing with now is more reflective of the historical rule than it is the exception.

Throughout most of history you’ve had to search for the truth about power in indirect commentaries: literature, and especially speculative genre fiction, for instance. Comedy. Art. The forms allow a person with a point of view to express it while maintaining a sheen of plausible deniability. “Oh, no, your majesty, I wasn’t writing about your munificent presence! The malevolent criminal monarch in my story is something I imagined might exist in a less just society on a planet in another galaxy.” It’s good to remember that science fiction and fantasy are never about the future or other worlds – they’re always about here and now.

And there’s the very old tradition of the fool. The jester, in his classical incarnation, was the only one in the court who could get away with telling the truth. The fact that he was a certified nutball removed enough credibility from his words that he could say serious things without being taken seriously. He was fine so long as he didn’t slip into lucidity.

Put another way, the truth has always been there if you knew where to look and understood the code. 2009 isn’t a lot different from 1009 in that respect, I imagine. There can be a price to be paid if the wrong person says the wrong thing in the wrong way. Once upon a time the price might be that your loved ones would get to watch your head being paraded around on a pike. Now the price might be something as pedestrian as losing a job opportunity or having your reputation perma-slandered by a vicious partisan noise machine. But there’s always risk, so the citizen bent on telling the truth needs to understand the context.

Clowning America

Throughout the Bush years any journalist with the temerity to act like an actual reporter paid a price. The default was loss of “access,” and that was pretty terrifying to most on the best because your ability to survive was going to be hindered if you couldn’t get anywhere near the newsmakers. This wasn’t the worst that could happen, of course. Ask Joe Wilson or that mealy-mouthed cocksucker Scott McClellan (not a journalist by any means, but a good illustration of the point) what happened when you hit the Bush/Cheney mob a little too close to home. At best, it took courage and hopefully enough cash-on-hand to sustain you through some hard times.

Clearly that wasn’t the only place where the institutions of the Fourth Estate lacked, and continue to lack, courage. As Stewart makes brutally clear in his 20 minute-plus dismemberment of Jim Cramer – a man not heretofore known for being short on words or self-confidence – finding malpractice in the field of financial journalism (my new favorite oxymoron, by the way) is about as tough as finding loose morals in a whorehouse. Think about it. You have CNBC, FOX’s biz news, the Wall Street Journal, the financial sections of hundreds of newspapers, and how many more business “news” outlets. How many of them were warning you of the things that we’re now told were more or less inevitable? (Told by some, I should say – others are still trying to say there was no way we could have predicted this. Which is bullshit – I know some very sharp people who predicted it, but they don’t have TV shows, in large part because they’re the sorts willing to tell the truth about rigged games. Maybe they should have put together an irreverent ventriloquist act or written a fantasy novel.

Media as far as they eye can see, so much media, so much “analysis,” and not a drop of journalism in sight.

It’s true that Jon Stewart isn’t the first funny guy in history to be the best available source of reliable reporting on the social, political and economic condition. But most of those places didn’t have democracies. Most didn’t have a free press. And none of them had more access to information or channels of distribution than we do.

“Journalism is no worse off now than it was during the reign of Caligula” is a true statement, but it’s not the sort of thing an advanced society should have to settle for, either.

Let’s get Jon Stewart the Peabody. Then a Pulitzer for The Onion. And why not a Nobel for the karma-obsessed lead in My Name is Earl?

If that’s the world we’re willing to accept, it’s the best we deserve.

I’ve never been an early adopter of technology. I, like most people, come in at wave two or three, but well before grandmas finally get that machine everyone else had for a decade. So ordering a Kindle 2 the day it was announced by Bezo goes against the grain. I’ve had it for a day, and let me tell you it’s going to change the world.

I’m not talking about the sleek design, the high price tag, or the status symbol of carting around the next hot gadget. This, as has been said before, is the iPod of the book world, and its effect will be just as profound.

E-ink is a new technology that is best described, for non-tech-heads, as the digital etch-a-sketch. It’s opaque, works in shades of gray, and only uses power when it changes the image on the screen. The level of contrast and lack of any backlighting allows people to read in bright sunlight to shadow with no adjust of anything like a computer monitors contrast settings. Today I read my K2 in both the bright sun of noon and walking across a parking lot after dark with only the lot lights to illuminate the page. This is the technology that will make reading on a screen enjoyable without the petty problems of eye strain, power consumption, or lugging around a device either too large or too small for comfort. E Ink CEO Russ Wilcox was recently quoting as saying that if The New York Times (available for subscription on the Kindle) bought each of its subscribers a Kindle and signed them up for digital delivery, it would save the newspaper giant $300 million a year. The potential savings could save $80 billion a year if all newspapers, magazines, and other print media switched to digital delivery.

The second technology is the Amazon store. Yep we all know and love Amazon, order a book, video game, or even breakfast cereal without leaving your house and in five to seven days it shows up free of charge. Well with the Kindle storefront, a person can download a sample chapter using the Sprint 3G network, give it a whirl, and purchase and download the full book. All without finding a WiFi hotspot, plugging into a computer, or even finding your credit card. Each Kindle is assigned to an Amazon account where either gift card balances or credit card numbers are on file. What grandma couldn’t love the low tech aspect of getting the latest mystery novel without actually needing to own a computer? The number of titles available for download keeps growing, and any book available on Amazon not yet in Kindle format has a dandy “request a kindle version” button to let the publisher know you want it.

So what does this mean to the world?

The first answer is environmental. If the New York Times suddenly did start shipping out Kindles the demand for paper, oil, and water would drastically drop. No more creating huge rolls of paper, shipping them around the world to be print, cut, and bound. No more additional fuel costs to deliver them to newsstands and homes scattered across the United States. A tremendous amount of waste is generated creating magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and other short life media.

Second, the world job market would shift again. Why go to Barnes & Noble when the digital download will always be pristine and Kindles on the same account can read the same book at the same time? Households of multiple Harry Potter fans, sorry, those are still not available in digital format. There would be less mail through our postal service, fewer delivery drivers of many flavors, the people who run the giant printing presses and sawmills will find themselves out of jobs. The demands for water, wood pulp, and oil would drop and a great deal of our quasi-recyclable trash would disappear. An argument for smaller home footprints could even be made, for as the iPod decimated the need for a home CD collection, the home library would also disappear.

Third, the people who’ve lost reading just gained something back. Some of the most devoted Kindle fans have problems with the standard book. The elderly and vision challenged who have problems getting large print editions can just simply adjust the font. The small light form is great for those who have problems holding a book steady or turning pages. The wireless digital downloads are wonderful for the housebound. One Kindle fan I met online loves his Kindle – before it came along his MS made it impossible to read. Another Kindle fan’s 99 year-old aunt can’t imagine life without it.

Fourth, the world just got a little flatter and the publishing giants are quaking in their boots. RIAA lawyers, you have some new fearful clients. The old days of publishing involved finishing a manuscript, shopping an agent, who then shopped one’s book. Then if one was lucky enough to have an agent with actual connections, an offer might be made for a small sum of money. A pathetic advance check would arrive and it would be split with the agent. The terms of the contract were poor for all but the name brand authors. The author had to go to the publishers; they had the presses, the publicists, and the access to the public via television appearances, contacts with wholesalers, etc. The new digital stores, a relatively unknown author can get his/her work before the audience quickly. They can self-publish on a Web site or contract directly with a store and be instantly available to e-readers around the world. Now the publishing houses own some very expensive scrap metal and logos.

The Authors Guild and publishing houses are quaking in their boots right now, not because author’s rights are being threatened, but because their existence as the membrane between authors and the public is being threatened. The author is suddenly meeting with the public in a way that hasn’t existed since Charles Dickens was publishing his novels in serial format. The day of the one-man printing press and the self-promoted author is back. The author, like the musician, is figuring out that the leeches getting fat on his/her back can be removed. If publishing houses want to keep their jobs, the pot is going to get a lot sweeter. They are also discovering the public is very aware of the cost savings of e-books over the traditional model and won’t stand for inflated costs and minuscule author percentages.

The Kindle is here to stay. I’ve only had mine one day, and already I’ve had multiple people planning to purchase their own after a simple demonstration. The Kindle community has its own online book groups, sharing of tips (where to get the best covers, new free downloads, and which authors are finally making the plunge), and connecting with authors and works in a way that is just staggering. People who have converted have reported dramatic increases in the amount they read and in the breadth of subject matter. Kindles are soon purchased for spouses and children. Parents are clamoring for textbooks to make the switch, tired of paying huge semester bills and seeing their public school age children complain of back problems, and with the new 16 shades of gray, we are closer than ever.

We once wondered if the book was going to die out, forever replaced by television and the internet. The Kindle, just brought it back to life.

______

Lara Amber received her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Colorado.  Her interests are in the sociological impact of technological innovation, environmental change and economic behavior of developed and developing countries.

I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to be The Church, Echo & the Bunnymen, or maybe something along the Joy Division/New Order continuum.

And The Flaws:

In a nutshell, The Flaws are [Joy Division] meets The Killers with a smattering of Johnny Marr. Achieving Vagueness isn’t achieving anything terribly innovative, but the songs are compelling and the execution is more than accomplished. Great CD for the indie crowd, and I suspect a lot of people who grew up in the ’80s are going to like it, too.

And the recently noted M83:

The result is wonderfully atmospheric and melodic, like OMD meets early Verve or Kate Bush meets My Bloody Valentine (or Echo & the Bunnymen meet Brian Eno, maybe).

And The Killers and Franz Ferdinand and She Wants Revenge and The Gaslight Anthem and, I imagine, a couple dozen others I’ve written about over the past two or three years.

Part of what drives this is necessity. Since most people haven’t heard the bands I’m talking about – radio and the recording industry have made certain of that – there’s a need to triangulate, to relate the music back to something the reader might know. It’s kind of like giving directions: “you go up the road until you get to Velvet Underground. Take a left, go about a half a mile and you’ll see Genesis off to your right. Just past that you’ll come to where Bob Dylan and Kraftwerk fork. Stay with Dylan, and about two miles down the road you’ll hit Britney Spears…”

Still, it’s like Billy Joel famously sang: “There’s a new band in town / but you can’t get the sound / from a story in a magazine / aimed at your average teen.”

The Sincerest Form of Flattery…

That’s not the whole story, though. To put it bluntly, many of today’s bands actually do sound like bands from the past. In some cases, they sound almost exactly like bands from the past. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more, as I’ve found myself saying the same things over and over, about what this means.

Being a writer myself, I obviously care about influence, and as Russ’ series over the past week makes clear, most of my colleagues here at S&R are keenly aware of who they’re riffiing on, as well. It’s important to know a bit about the history of whatever genre and form you’re mining because the path to greatness often begins with us walking in the footsteps of those who came before.

Just about every artist, early on in his or her career, goes through a period of sincere imitation. For me it was mostly Eliot, and for the masters of British Blues Rock it was old American Blues artists like Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. (Eliot himself wrote about “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” although what he’d think about its application to followers of Joy Division is hard to say.)

But, as I’ve noted from time to time, there’s a line between influence and imitation, and no matter how much we may like a band that’s captive to the influence of its heroes, we have a hard time respecting them critically. Yeats had a word or two on the subject, writing from the perspective of the artist being imitated, and it wasn’t flattering:

You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another’s said or sung,
‘Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

The greats in rock history, as in every other art form since cave paintings, have been bands and artists with identifiable influences that they transcended in some way. Not that they always surpassed the bands that preceded them in quality, necessarily, but they internalized and overcame the influence. They took those sounds and made them their own. In VAST (a great band that most of our readers probably don’t know) you can hear U2, but you’d never accuse them (him, actually – VAST = Jon Crosby) of imitating. In U2 you can hear The Beatles, but that influence is hardly the defining essence of the band. In The Beatles you can hear echoes of Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry and Elvis and so many more, but no one in their right mind would argue that The Fabs weren’t truly “original,” whatever that means.

Walking in Your Footsteps

Which brings me back to today, where I think I hear more and more bands settling in and making a permanent camp in the aforementioned footsteps. I’m not talking about all bands, of course. Some of those I like and respect the most have, like the greatest artists in past generations, learned from the masters and established themselves as emerging stars in their own right. The Killers, about whom I’ve written multiple times, and Franz Ferdinand and Interpol. Rob Dickinson, who gave us my pick for 2008’s CD of the Year. Jets Overhead, who are ready to release what I expect to be one of the best of 2009. Death Cab for Cutie, and maybe after another CD or two a guy who born into a very long shadow, Dhani Harrison of thenewno2.

It just seems to me that there are fewer of these and more of those, the ones who don’t transcend, who don’t outgrow the imitation stage, than there once were. But maybe this is a faulty perception on my part? Since I hear so many more bands now than I did back in the days when radio dominated our consciousness, maybe I’m being misled by the basic nature of the industry. Maybe it’s as it always was, but the old structure filtered out more of the noise?

Could be. Hard to say.

In any case, what does this mean for our relationship to acts like Duffy, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, The Chevelles and The Bellrays, bands that aren’t terribly worried about doing anything new, but which are instead committed to doing the hell out of things that have been done? From a critical perspective, will it ever be possible for me to say that a band like The Dap-Kings has given us the CD of the Year? A lot of criteria have to be considered, and innovation is one of them, right? If that doesn’t matter, then there are Holiday Inn bands out there who have to be taken seriously, right?

How Many Southerners Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on music over the past 20 years. I own 1500 CDs or more – I lost count a long time ago – and have gotten rid of at least a couple hundred more. In a given year I at least sample 100-200 CDs, maybe more. And one of the things I’m always listening for is the next big thing. What will be the new sound, the modern-day analogue to “Good Golly Miss Molly” or “Help” or “New Year’s Day” or “So Lonely”?

For years I’ve sort of worshipped at the altar of New Wave because that was a moment of such explosive freshness (I’m talking mainly of 1978-1979 here, and more on the English side of the pond), but in truth a lot of what was best about that period owed its soul to everything from The Who to Buddy Holly, didn’t it?

When push comes to shove, then, the truth is that there probably isn’t anything new out there, nor will there ever be. The sounds have all been made, and what we have come to think of as new is really nothing more than a novel way of combining things – sort of like the musical equivalent of a peanut butter-and-elephant snout daiquiri.

So maybe the answer is that I have become as a geezer, or maybe I’m just the proverbial Southerner sitting around talking about how great the old bulb was. I don’t know. I’m aware of what Howe and Strauss say about creativity in their books on generations, which is that the youth cycle we have now – the Millennials, who are the reincarnation of the GI Generation – are the least innovative of the four. Thus, they suggest, we’re probably entering a period where there’s a greater focus on convention than there is rampant inventiveness. This is an exceedingly broad generalization, of course, but they make the case with compelling evidence. If they’re right, I’m probably going to have to wait another 20 years for the kind of uprising I yearn for.

In the end, I’ll go on liking what I like and listening to everything that strikes my fancy, and of course my quest for the next big thing will continue, probably until the day I die. But my critical faculty, the part of me that wants my mind to love it as much as my ears do, will insist on thinking about things … until the day I die.

When that day arrives, I hope something spectacular, something fresh and unprecedented, is playing…

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Wendy Redal

Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: Here, too, I found myself immersed in the struggle between what is conventional and proper versus passion and yearning. Maybe this book fostered my lifelong anglophilism, which has always been drawn more toward the wild moors of the North than the sedate farmland of Sussex.

C.S. Lewis: For his masterful use of argument, love of myth and its power, and rich insight into the heights and depths of human character. The Great Divorce in particular, where Hell is a tired, gray suburb peopled with self-absorbed denizens consumed with their own pettiness, has provided a context within which I think about much human weakness and failings.

T.S. Eliot: Postmodernists will have a hey-day with me for putting Eliot right after Lewis, won’t they? (I could throw Matthew Arnold in, too, and really get in trouble!) Tackling “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in my 11th grade honors English class brought me face to face with existentialism, and fomented perhaps my first crisis of meaning. “The Wasteland,” which I read subsequently, didn’t help matters any. But the “Four Quartets” later came to frame a view of the world and our perplexing place within it that still holds for me today. My hope when I pass on from this material life is that I will indeed come to where I started from and know the place for the first time.

Speaking of poets, and here thinking very much of the sheer beauty of language when adeptly wielded, I have to add Gerard Manley Hopkins to my list. “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty” remain for me a gorgeous study in rhythm, alliteration and what I find to be truth, that the sacred is revealed in the material. Rather than being at odds, I find them paradoxically of a piece.

That last thought is a segueway to Terry Tempest Williams, whose “Refuge” was a deeply moving story in that vein. Her simultaneous telling of the flooding of a bird refuge on the Great Salt Lake, and her mother’s gradual demise from cancer, frames the way I think about loss and responsibility, and the possibility of redemption on some plane. I love her voice of poetry and moral passion, enlisted in the service of environmental preservation — and in the latter, our self-preservation as well.

I should add a few lines about Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi but I have 33 papers to grade and the mundane is going to get the better of me today. But that’s a start.

Oh, and I would be remiss — seriously — if I didn’t extend a nod to fellow Scrogue Denny Wilkins here. His post on this subject made note of many of his own professional mentors, whose names would not be known to the wider public, and I will add him to my own list. My writing sadly does not reflect Denny’s marvelous ability to say a lot with less, but he is the editing conscience on my shoulder when I struggle with how to cut, trim, omit, condense and otherwise tighten up my overweight prose. Imagine what I’d produce if it weren’t for Denny’s subtle voice! I so admire his talent in saying only what’s essential, and not losing anything in the process (see, that’s redundant right there: if it’s “only what’s essential,” then you can’t lose anything when you eliminate anything else. Sheesh, Wendy, you’re wordy.).

Russ Wellen

I used to operate under the assumption that my writing style was influenced by the books I’d read in my youth. It was as if their authors convened in a faceless phantasm that hovered over me as I wrote. A couple of years ago, though, it occurred to me that I couldn’t pick out any faces. I was unable to zero in on writers who had influenced my style.

My writing had long been marked by a commitment to just the right word (I’ve since become slack) and, when I finally switched from fiction to nonfiction, a veneration for the essay form. But not only couldn’t I remember any special writers, I could recall no essays that had inspired me.

Nothing by Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or George Orwell. Why the amnesia? Oh, maybe because I never read them. Consisting of only two years of indifferent college, my education, like that of many auto-didacts, is full of gaps.

I can only conclude that I must have read great essays in a previous life (belief in reincarnation is second nature to a Buddhist, however secular, like me). Apparently, my bias toward the form was teleported to this life. As for my quest for the perfect word, though, I was finally able to identify not one, but two sources.

Many have sung the praises of William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. But, as I learned over the years, much of that was lip service. It’s almost impossible to find a writer who adheres to the principles of the style section of the book — which have been summed up as, “Do not overwrite, avoid qualifiers, don’t over-explain, and avoid adverbs.”

But at the time I wasn’t aware that, to most, Strunk and White’s principles were as unrealistic as a mystic’s asceticism. In fact it was probably for just that reason — I was soon to become a Zen student — that I swallowed Strunk and White whole. Clearing your mind of clutter and stilling your internal noise were prerequisites for not only realization (as the American Buddhist community now calls enlightenment), but good prose.

A style book may seem like an unimaginative choice for an influence on style. I was, however, able to identify an author who shaped, if not my style or consciousness, the form of my writing: Norman Mailer. Not the novelist (though he produced some fine fiction), but the author of Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. Though Mailer wrote other books as a pioneer of New Journalism, Miami and the Siege of Chicago was the equivalent of what Hunter Thompson and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 were to some of the other Scholars & Rogues.

It wasn’t New Journalism’s intrusion of the author onto the scene of reportage that appealed to me. It was re-assigning the creativity and less-constrained language of fiction to journalism –- none were better at it than Mailer. (Actually his influence on the my writing form lay dormant for over three decades until I finally undertook commentary and then journalism itself.)

Unlike Thompson, Mailer didn’t use the facts as a starting point for the action, just for his discursiveness. No disrespect intended to Thompson (one of my favorite writers — all the way to the end at ESPN.com). But, to me, no viler words exist in the English language than “creative nonfiction.”

Oh, and thanks Norman, wherever you are, for that infernal litote tic with which you bequeathed me — “not unlike.”

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Denny Wilkins

I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers.

My first editor, John Haywood, taught me to shorten my sentences. (Sadly, after I left the news biz, that wisdom languished.) My old editor, Bob Dolan, showed me how to tell what needs telling and nothing more. My dissertation chair, Bob Trager, remains the best editor I ever had. He made me incredibly finicky about errors of any kind. Carrie Andrews, a young woman I worked with as a tutor in grad school, introduced me to “free writing” and not-so-gently helped me shed my “just the facts, ma’am” approach to writing.

Now I teach writing for a living. Again, it’s the engagement with others — particularly my students — about the craft of writing that continues to shape my approaches to putting words on a page. Some of these students — Carri Gregorski, Pete Kendron, Mike Trask, Rebecca Campana, Maddy Fitzpatrick, Leah Goodman and many others — never knew how much I had to reinvigorate my own writing skills to teach them. My faculty colleagues, too, have been wonderful teammates in the writing game.

Forgive the dropping of names you probably don’t know or care about. But they are meaningful to me — as your mentors are to you.

There are many others in my writing life. For me, developing as a writer comes from being a member of a writing community, one that’s personal and involves the people I live and work with. Many writers may find that haven in a community blog such as S&R. Here we try to collectively grow, we hope, by taking more steps forward than backward.

For the record, I have read all that John McPhee has written. I interviewed him once, about 20 years ago. I asked him the secret to his success. “Take lots of notes,” he said. McPhee teaches a course called “The Literature of Fact.” No one uses detail as well as he. So I am always prepared to take lots of notes.

From William Zinsser, who wrote On Writing Well, I took to heart his lessons of brevity, clarity, economy and humanity. From Robert B. Parker I took a sensibility for compelling dialogue. From Robert Heinlein, Rex Stout and Louis L’Amour, I learned that behind every fantasy, mystery and moral tale lies a human story.

Writers are shaped in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For me, who has been writing for a living in one way or another for more than 40 years, the passage of time and the long journey through the lives of other writers have been my wisest teachers.

Now we’d like to hear from our readers about writers who influenced you. (We’ll ask again tomorrow when the last installment of this series runs.)

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

J.S. O’Brien

The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective.

Mike Sheehan

Tolkien, Twain, Thompson. That is all.

Sam Smith

This is a tough one for me. As a prose writer I’ve read and absorbed so much that I’d be hard put to name influences, although I could give you a list as long as my arm of those I admire (Twain, for instance, who I revere for his relentless verve, and Hawthorne for way he manages the rivers of torment surging through his soul).

On the poetry side it’s a little easier. We could talk about any number of writers, but when it boils down to influence there a mainly four names to consider: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright.

Each works in different ways. Wright is the only contemporary in the pack, and I was mightily influenced by how powerfully his poetry works at an intuitive level. Even when I’m not able to follow the overt narratives, it’s exactly as one of my former classmates put it: “I don’t know what it means, but I feel something.” Of course, meaning isn’t limited to the bounds of the rational. We live in an anti-intellectual culture where unenlightened emotion is routinely allowed to substitute for thought, but when pursued properly — as with Wright — the intuitive takes you beyond the rational, adding dimension upon dimension to how we can perceive our world.

His formal style was also very important for me — the way he breaks lines halfway, and allows his words to cascade down the center of the page, for instance, opens up my verse and gives it room to breathe.

Next, Dylan Thomas. I have, unless my grandmother lied to me, a smattering of Welsh in me, so maybe that’s why the music in Thomas’s words seems to affect me in ways I can’t quite grasp. For him, words were nothing short of the components of magic, and with them he transformed what looked mundane to most into something transcendent. I have tried desperately to emulate this style, and regret that I’ve had not much success.

Then there’s Yeats, who’s certainly the greatest poet in the history of the English language and quite possibly in any language. (Of course, I’m not fluent in most languages, so I can’t really say for sure, can I?) Words bow down before Yeats and worship him. They accede to his will. They do the most remarkable things, but the most remarkable thing of all is that it is all accomplished so effortlessly. Yeats shapes language in ways I have tried to mimic, and I’ve decided that it’s like watching Tiger Woods play golf: he makes the impossible, the sublime, look so easy that it’s maddening when we can’t do it ourselves.

As a result of this, I’ve come to view Yeats as someone I admire instead of someone who has influenced me. After all, if I can’t do it, if I can’t point to moments where that inspiration shines through in my own work, how have I really been influenced?

But something odd happens occasionally, as it did when I was seeking feedback on my last book. A couple people remarked at the obvious Yeats influence. I have no idea what they saw or where, but in my entire life as a writer I’ve never heard greater praise.

Finally, Eliot, who I think has had a very obvious and lasting influence on my writing. I began imitating his style the first time I read “The Waste Land,” I think, and while I’m hardly the master he was, my own work has been well served by lessons he taught me about voice. With Eliot, sometimes it’s like walking through a crowded market and recording the words you hear, regardless of who’s speaking them. Voices trail off and are replaced by others, entirely disconnected, in mid-thought, and the result is a cultural melange, a pastiche that somehow crafts a penetrating picture of the whole out of a few disconnected individual snippets.

I think Eliot also taught me that it’s okay to loosen the reins and let the darkness and despair have its head. As a result of his influence I’m comfortable abandoning preconceptions and letting the poem lead me where it wants to go. Few lessons in my life have been more valuable than that one.

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Lex

As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.

Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor.

Joseph Campbell has probably influenced me the most. A good part of that is the subject matter on which he wrote: myth and religion. But if I could be someone, it would be the type who thought, “I should read War and Peace, but I’m sure the translation doesn’t do it justice. I’ll learn Russian in order to read War and Peace.” Campbell was the kind of man who actually carried out that sort of threat. It gave his writing a depth that I admire and would love to possess. He could tell a story. But more than anything it was his style of comparing, rather than contrasting. He was one who could see and explain connections amid apparent disparity. And as the man who gave Star Wars its structure I kind of owe him at least part of my childhood.

In 12th grade I took Ron Quick’s AP English course at Livonia Stevenson High School. The pastel shirts, striped Yves Saint Laurent ties, and his love for Danielle Steele novels were apt to make you underestimate him. He was an English language slave driver. He taught me to write, and he expected first drafts with no mistakes. He was a big fan of William Zinsser (author of On Writing Well). He gave us an assignment that entailed reading X number of pieces by a journalist of our choosing. I bitched and moaned about it at home because I wanted Literature.

My stepfather handed me a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, Vol. 1 and it was all over. Hunter had me from the first incoherently perfect paragraph. Here was someone who broke every rule of writing that I’d been taught, and it came out sounding like it was how writing was supposed to sound. Not many people can write like they talk; or maybe it’s talk like they write. When I’m at my best it’s because I can almost hear Hunter slurring, “go on, just fucking say it…quit being a pussy and let it roll.” Quick’s on the other shoulder, but Hunter’s cooler.

Chris Mackowski

I first read Harold Pinter early in my playwriting career as one of about a dozen diverse playwrights I really studied closely. As someone with a radio background, I had an ear that was particularly attuned to voices and rhythms, and so Pinter strongly resonated with me because he was SO intentional about the rhythms in his writing: the rhythms of dialogue, rhythms between characters, rhythms in scenes, and the overall rhythm of a play.

But the more I read his work, the more I found things that translated beyond playwriting to other genres, as well (certainly rhythm is something that all writers should be conscious of). He taught me a lot about subtext, about what’s NOT said, about why people don’t say the things they want/need to. He wrote a lot about the fallibility of memory, which is something I’ve become really interested in, particularly from an historical angle.

Much of his work is hard to fathom but it’s thought-provoking and challenging — and much of it is political, too. He’s definitely a writer worth reading if you’ve never had the chance. The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter are probably considered his best-known works, but I would suggest starting with Betrayal, Old Times, or The Hothouse.

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Jim Booth

F. Scott Fitzgerald for his prose style –  Ernest Hemingway for his prose style — Thomas Wolfe for his prose style

Jane Austen for her prose style — Doris Lessing for her prose style — Shirley Barker for her prose style

John Lennon for his prose style — Richard Brautigan for his prose style — Thomas Pynchon for his prose style

Norman Maclean for his prose style — Peter Handke for his prose style — Albert Camus for his prose style

More than anything else, I’m attracted to great prose style…

A. Nicholas Cargo

While I’ve done a lot more writing than reading in my time, of the few I could read cover-to-cover are Vonnegut, Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson. I thrive on chlorophyll wrought from literary photosynthesis, if you will — blinding light shone down on tyranny, idiosyncrasy, hypocrisy and stupidity.

Ann Ivins

Charlotte Bronte, speaking through Jane Eyre, who was immune to the coercion of situation and history. Not immune to passion or pity or the call of duty, but instinctively resistant and thoughtfully opposed to the imposition of external ideas onto her own judgment. She examined systems of thought, accepted those parts that seemed just to her and granted others the right to make those same decisions for themselves.

P.G. Wodehouse, whose humor always began with his own foibles. He was clear-eyed and gentle at the same time, even with aunts, and funnier than anyone before or since.

Vladimir Nabokov, for sheer delirious delight in the possibilities of language and the seductive power of words.

And Toni Morrison, because she approaches her prose like poetry, ruthlessly cutting away the unnecessary until what remains is exactly and only what needs to be.

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times?

The subtitle of Hardy’s novel is a simple phrase: A Pure Woman.

What the novel (and this fine production) attempts to examine is what Hardy’s (or any) culture means when it uses such a phrase.  As I mentioned above, maybe what makes even a thoughtful presentation of Tess seem irrelevant, perhaps even fatuous, in these same days of this our life is that we’re now two generations removed from the rise of the Women’s Movement (for lack of a better term).  And as we have been wont to do with racism, environmentalism, and class warfare, we have spent so much time wonking about these issues that we have come to think we have addressed them with more than words.

This relegates, in ways we don’t always consciously grasp, Hardy’s powerful depiction of the duplicity of our treatment of male and female sexuality to a sort of Antiques Roadshow valuation – its historical significance carries more weight than its artistic/social value.

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The last generation with significant experience of a pre “Women’s Liberation” culture are The Boomers, those aging self admirers. For us (and I’m as Boomer as it gets) Tess of the dUrbervilles presents a world we know well – a world where a woman was either a “good girl” or “damaged goods” -  a world  that we sought to redefine through our embracing of Free Love.

But as with most Boomer efforts, what we did was glom those cultural sensibilities we claimed so hard to reject onto our practice of the rejection of those sensibilities – guys “knew” that “hippie chicks” were “easy,” for example – useful for getting laid, but not women we’d seriously consider marrying. Even the free and easy sexuality of our college days often wound up as a series of monogamous relationships that “allowed” us to engage in “pre-marital intercourse” which we thought of as leading to a serious end (marriage, family) even when subconsciously we knew otherwise.

What we wrought with such a convoluted mindset, which books like Tess (and the Polanski (!) adaptation) allowed us to talk about without talking about our true selves, was a weird, confused and confusing melange of ideas and beliefs about male/female relations that has given our generation a divorce rate unlikely to be equalled in human history.

Boomer women may, then,  occasionally harbor notions of themselves as  Tess Durbeyfields. They’ve spent their lives since puberty arguing Hardy’s assertion that purity comes from somewhere besides an unbroken hymen. But if so, most Boomer men, at least in their rare moments of honesty,  would have to admit to being afflicted with a kind of gender relations MPD – they are both Angel Clares and Alec d’Urbervilles. They want their good girls bad and their bad girls made somehow pure again at the same time.

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Whether Xers or Millenials experience Tess of the d’Urbervilles with a similar troubled ambivalence about gender relations seems unlikely. For them, Tess will seem more like historical fiction than a key for coded discussions of their gender relationship confusions. Their insights will likely be deeper in some ways, shallower in others as a result of their Post-Sexual Revolution orientation. They will certainly be different.

But Tess speaks in a striking way to the Boomer generation – and thus this new PBS rendering of Hardy’s opus might be called “Tess of the Boomervilles.”

When we created the new WordsDay graphic above a few weeks back we challenged everybody to name all the authors. Some of you took a shot, and I think the best set of guesses got about 10 of 15 right.

So, for those of you who have been dying of curiosity, here are the answers. Left to right:

1. William Butler Yeats
2. Audre Lorde
3. Bill Shakespeare
4. William Gibson
5. Alice Walker
6. Ernest Hemingway
7. Gabriel García Márquez
8. Chinua Achebe
9. JK Rowling
10. Neal Stephenson
11. Doris Lessing
12. Charles Wright
13. William Styron
14. Isabel Allende
15. Mary Shelley

Thanks for playing. And just for being here you get a copy of our deluxe home edition…

I got home from running a few errands today and the numeral “1″ was flashing red on the answering machine. The message was for me — and it was from Caroline Kennedy.

“Hey, Pat,” said a cheery voice. My heart stuttered. “It’s me: CK!” As if I hadn’t known instantly.

CK. That’s what I used to call her 30 years ago, when she and I used to perch on stools at our favorite bar every night but Sunday, down doubles of tequila, and feed quarters into the jukebox to listen to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Marvin Gaye. Ah, the clink of the shot glasses, the splashes of tequila on the bar, the salt on the back of the hand, the lemon wedges, the neon beer signs in the window reflecting in her bloodshot eyes as I stared into them while the whole room spun — it all comes back to me now through a mescal haze.

We were closer than the sun and the sky for almost a year, when she attended a state college in New York, incognito and under an assumed name. It all started when I asked her to dance at a downtown bar and some goon in a bad suit muscled in and said, “She doesn’t dance,” and I’d had a few too many shots of Jack so I cold-cocked him, a one-punch knockout. The ambulance crew was rifling through his wallet for some ID when a card fluttered to the floor. No one noticed it, so I picked it up. “Paul Caruso,” it read. “Secret Service.” From there, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots between him and that girl who had looked so familiar, but in a way I couldn’t quite place. Sure, her hair was dyed copper-wire red and she wore John Lennon-style glasses with a rose tint to them. Even so, I’d pulled back the veil on the most famous presidential daughter of my generation. But when I looked for her, she was gone.

So when I saw her in the dining hall a week later, perusing the menu board and trying to decide between cheeseburgers or breaded haddock, I slipped behind her and murmured, “So, what was it like to grow up in Camelot?”

She didn’t even turn around.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said sarcastically.

“C’mon,” I said. “That creep you were with the other night wasn’t there just to keep your glass full of strawberry daiquiris. He was Secret Service — Caroline.”

She blanched.

“How did you find out?” she asked in an urgent whisper, whirling around, eyes darting. I had to lean close to hear her follow-up question: “Who else knows?”

“No one,” I said. “Everyt’ing is irie.”

She caught the Jamaican slang right away.

“You like Marley?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Wanna go smoke a spliff?”

“Sure!” she said, eyes brightening. So we stepped out of the dining hall into the early evening darkness and fired one up behind the fence that hid the dumpsters. It was magic — and I’m not talking about the weed.

It was the start of a beautiful but unlikely friendship: Me, from a middle-class neighborhood in a small city midway between the Rust Belt and Appalachia; her, a glamorous, high-profile but mysterious descendant of a political dynasty with some of the bluest blood in America. God knows what she saw in me, but we clicked. We belonged together like bubbles and champagne. We were inseparable, especially on those Tuesday nights when our favorite bar sold Miller, Molson or Michelob for 50 cents a bottle and we’d get there at 7:30 and drink ’til closing time at 2. We took the same classes, spent every free moment together — a classic college couple. I used to dream we’d be married, and when my imagination took further flight, I saw myself calling on her Uncle Ted, asking him for advice about how I could run for a U.S. Senate seat representing New York.

It was all so long ago, so many whispers and kisses ago, so many dreams ago, and one big heartbreak ago. We’d had too much to drink and got into a silly argument about Jimmy Carter’s sweaters. I said he looked like a dork. She said I didn’t understand presidential politics. We looked into each other’s eyes and realized it was over. The next day, she was gone. I thought I’d heard the last of her. That was 30 years ago. But then I came home today to hear her voice on the answering machine.

“I’m in Syracuse,” she said. “I thought we could get together at Dinosaur for some barbecue and a couple of shots of Jose Cuervo, just for old times’ sake. And besides, I need somebody to show me around upstate New York. Syracuse is upstate, isn’t it?

“Talk to you later,” the message continued. And then there was a pause before she said, “You know, I’ve always missed our —”

And then the message’s 30 seconds were up.

And she hadn’t left a call-back number.

It’s probably just as well. What we had between us occurred so long ago, and we’ve both changed so much since then. If people were to see us together, they would question the would-be senator’s judgment — her judgment from 30 years ago, and her judgment today. And I certainly wouldn’t want to hinder her political ambitions, even though she’d broken my heart.

As I pressed the “delete” button on the answering machine, though, it seemed the whole world stopped spinning for a moment. I swallowed hard and wondered what my life would be like today if only Jimmy Carter hadn’t worn sweaters.

I’m reading Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy (Disinformation, 2008). Beckerman, who proudly boasts that Hunter Thompson called him a “morbid little bastard,” is an engaging, sharp, equal-opportunity ballbuster who revels in taking to task extremists of the “loony left” and ”rabid right” infecting American sociopolitics. Armed with factoids, anecdotes and amusing personal experiences (such as his brief encounter with Rev. Jerry Falwell), he gleefully skewers self-righteous ignoramuses on both sides from his perch in the middle.  While his distracting sexual braggadocio and gratuitous profanities betray his age (he’s in his mid-20’s), he’s clearly on his way to becoming a top satirist.  One to watch.  His official site: Marty Beckerman.

Sam Smith:
I’m about halfway through Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC Comics, 1995), the groundbreaking graphic novel that some fairly reputable sorts call one of the greatest works of fiction in history. It’s certainly an interesting story, although the hype gives it credit for a great deal more maturity of narrative craft than I’ve seen so far. Can’t wait to see how they’re going to handle the movie.

Chris Mackowski:
The Shack by William Paul Young (Windblown Media, 2008) — A grief-stricken man gets a note from God inviting him back to the abandoned shack where his ten-year-old daughter had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I haven’t gotten to the “life-affirming” part of the book yet, but it’s supposed to be in there somewhere. The novel is a theology lesson of some sort, but so far, the theology is pretty well hidden by the story. The prose, while pedestrian, reads cleanly and clearly in a no-nonsense kind of way. A priest friend of mine recommended the book to me and said, “THAT’s the God I believe in” — while also admitting that some Church officials have suggested the book is full of heresies. Sounded too intriguing to pass up.

[The Shack has received over 1,400 five-star reviews at Amazon. –- Ed.]

Brisingr (Inheritance, Book 3) by Christopher Paolini (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2008) — This is the third book in a series that began with Eragon and continued with Eldest. Total pap. Total popcorn — but like popcorn, it’s hard to stop eating, even after the salt has scorched your tongue and the butter has clogged your veins.

The series, about a young dragonrider who must save his world from an evil lord, tries SO hard not to be a Lord of the Rings derivative, but every time Paolini comes up with something original, he also makes up a bunch of lame crap that lacks any of Tolkien’s richness (and frequently sounds like a Tolkien knock off even though it’s painfully obvious that he’s trying not to knock off Tolkien).

There’s also a bit of teenage-dork wish-fulfillment in the book: Loner teenage boy becomes savior-like hero who has the coolest pet in the world and beautiful, strong women swooning over him. Paolini thinks he has talent writing about political intrigue (he doesn’t) or lessons of great wisdom (he doesn’t), but his action writing is credible and the thin plot is just interesting enough to keep the popcorn edible.

Russ Wellen:
Upon first learning about its existence as a young man, I was intrigued by the idea of the “hard-boiled detective novel.” Thus began my search for a series that lived up to my hopes. No police detectives, thank you, since I grew up in the sixties when the police were one of them. I needed the kind where the protagonist was a private eye, invariably one, as I learned during my search, who had been a former cop who chafed at or broke the regulations.

I’d read and admired some of Raymond Chandler’s work, as well as James M. Cain’s classic Double Indemnity. But my search failed to yield a detective series I could warm to.

About ten years ago, I read that, to succeed critically and commercially, the modern crime writer needed to transcend the genre and write not just a potboiler, but an actual novel. To someone like myself whose background was literary, that was encouraging news. But upon sampling that period of crime novels — in part, through lots that my cousin, who was an occasional judge for mystery awards, passed on to me — I found that by literary they meant sophomoric self-consciousness.

Then my wife turned me on to James Lee Burke, but the protagonist of his main series, Dave Robicheaux, is a police detective. Besides, he’s more of a literary writer — one of the best in America on any given year, in fact — who seems to have just fallen into crime writing.

As for a certified hard-boiled detective writer, it wasn’t until May of this year that I finally discovered — 60 novels into his career, which began in 1976 — Loren Estleman. He too is a top-ranking American novelist, whose insights into human nature astonish. Meanwhile, with an eye for detail stemming perhaps from his artistic background, his descriptions dazzle. But he’s a crime writer first. I’ve read seven of his novels, am about to start the eighth, and during that time have yet to evince an interest in reading a novel by anyone else.

His detective, Amos Walker, is the first I’ve come across whose dialogue is “hard-boiled” in a way that isn’t camp. In fact, without drawing attention to itself, it’s cleverness often flies right by you. You can expect to pause on a regular basis to re-read his ironic lines before they detonate in your brain. I’m reluctant to excerpt them because they’re context-dependent.

The Amos Walker series is not exactly noir — Estleman doesn’t do mood. Nor is there anything glamorous about its setting, Detroit, its suburbs, and exurban Michigan, all of which he knows like a historian. (Presumably, like Hurricane Katrina did for Louisiana-based James Lee Burke, the car companies’ troubles will provide further fodder for future novels.)

Nor is there much sex. In an interview once, when asked why his character seldom, if ever, seemed to score, Estleman replied, “I’m not his pimp.” Integrity like that on the part of the character’s creator only adds to Walker’s charm.

Estleman writes other series, including, like Elmore Leonard used to, Westerns. Another revolves around Peter Macklin, a hit man who’s retired, but who keeps finding himself in situations that call for him to revive his old trade. I’ve just finished my second in that series, Something Borrowed, Something Black (Forge Books, 2002).

Written in the third person, unlike the first-person Walker series, it’s rife with authorial observations that reveal the depth and breadth of Estleman’s knowledge of crime. Here he writes about a retired policeman:

He’d been happy to have gotten out just as DNA testing was coming in. It was such a delirious success it made the cops giddy, dumping decades-old homicide cases back onto the table like Halloween candy and gorging themselves on dried blood and old semen and bits of hair and epiderm, closing files right and left that had lain open since Jimmy Carter.

Estleman is a crime writer for the reader who isn’t attracted to genre novels because he or she thinks they don’t give your sensibility much to chew on. Much as I’ve tried to resist calling Estleman the thinking man’s — or perhaps, since he’s averse to plot legerdemain, the thoughtful man or woman’s — crime writer, it’s inescapable. A good place to start is his most recent Amos Walker book, American Detective (Forge Books, 2007).

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R?

One response might argue that tout est politique. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with totalizing positions like this, though, because they tend to trivialize – if everything is politics, then nothing is. However, there’s no denying the fundamental truth that many things we don’t commonly associate with politics are powerfully political in their implications.

Take popular music, for instance. It’s impossible to consider the sweeping cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s without the soundtrack – Dylan, The Beatles, Woodstock…the list goes on and on. Some of those artists were quite explicitly agitating for political reform while others wove themselves into the social tapestry in less obvious ways, but the sum total of the music of that decade was inherently political.

Contrast that with the music of the Bush administration. Where was the protest, the outcry? Who was the Dylan of the 2000s? What record will we be comparing, come 2024, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

The absence of such a voice was not an accident. Part of the grand conservative plan, the blitzkrieg that was launched upon Reagan’s inauguration, was the neutering of music’s political possibility. When Ronnie’s FCC hacks, Fowler and Brenner, decreed that “the public interest is what the public is interested in,” it did so in order to subvert, once and for all, the power of the creative social mind to the will of corporate logic. It dismantled radio ownership limits that assured a massive diversity of options for artists and audiences alike, and found its ultimate expression in Clear Channel’s pro-war, pro-Bush rallies and the banishment of those who chose to give voice to their dissent (the most notable case being the attempted silencing of The Dixie Chicks).

So when our generation needed to be marching in the streets and demanding an end to the outrage in Iraq, where was the soundtrack? Who ultimately benefited from those policies way back in the early ’80s? We’re fighting an unjust invasion and occupation and the rallies in the streets are for the war?! Corporate-sponsored pro-war rallies?!

When I’m writing a TunesDay piece on some band or another, providing a video link or encouraging you to check it out at eMusic, part of what’s going on is purely and simply about the music as art. But it’s also about the bigger picture, about the need for our culture to build a strong platform whereby artists can be heard. If they use this platform to sing silly love songs, that’s fine, so long as the platform is there when they need to sing about injustice. I recently did a piece promoting The Well Wishers, Maximo Park and The Dandy Warhols, and none of these bands may ever contribute a note to the cause of world peace. On the other hand, if I flash back to 1997 and Green Day’s Nimrod, I’m not sure I could have predicted American Idiot, a manifesto so powerful that not even the soul-deadening corporate might of Clear Channel could contain it.

What political blogs do is important, especially in a society where the legacy press has largely abdicated its responsibility to watchdog our institutions of power. Who Obama selects to run the State Department matters. His choices for Treasury and Defense and our various intelligence and military leadership posts matter tremendously.

But empires rarely rise and fall as a result of a couple close-in political knife fights. In my view, a great deal of what even the best poliblogs do is tactical, street-level and near-term. This isn’t true across the board, of course. There are outstanding thinkers and writers who are looking at the big picture and the long term. And this is where I think S&R has done and will continue to do its best work. Not in the political battle, but the culture war.

We may debate some of the nuances and specifics amongst ourselves, but in general it’s safe to say that those of us here at Scholars & Rogues have a shared vision of a more progressive society. I don’t use that word in any sort of conventional, partisan sense. By “progressive” I mean more enlightened; better educated; more appreciative of the cultural arts; better informed about the forces shaping our world; more productively spiritual (and less dogmatically sectarian) in our approach to life; more generous and charitable; more tolerant and more willing to understand the value of diversity; more committed to community and the common good; more literate; more intellectually curious and prone to critical thought; more responsive to the well-reasoned than to the passionately felt; and above all, more insistent that those we choose to represent us, to lead us and to govern us be the best America has to offer, not the worst.

Some of the solutions that get us to our destination may be “liberal” by our current reckoning, some “conservative.” The best ideas may be “idealistic” or they may be “pragmatic.” But in the end, I think most of us believe that a society that reads – in an environment uncluttered by censorship, either active or passive, governmental or cultural or corporate – is in better shape than one that doesn’t read or won’t. A society whose citizens not only have knowledge in their heads, but who have been trained to use it in innovative ways is more likely to solve more problems faster and more effectively. A country that thinks and thinks relentlessly is nearly immune to the machinations of despotism. A nation whose mythologies make clear that war is the last resort, not the first, is more likely to achieve greatness both at home and abroad. A nation whose media structures are designed to foster the best that is thought and created is one whose streets are less likely to flow with the blood of aggrieved citizens. A culture where competition aims to help people up the ladder instead of keeping them in their place is one that maximizes its collective genius. A political economy where genuine opportunity arises from a level playing field is certainly more likely to produce spectacular successes than one where the reality is that of a rigged game played beneath a banner of cynical egalitarian rhetoric.

And the most actualized of all possible societies is one where happiness and satisfaction have nothing at all to do with purchasing power.

This is what I think Scholars & Rogues is. We’ve covered a lot of ground since we launched less than two years ago, and at that point I deliberately chose not to compose a mission statement. Our philosophy was simple: invite the smartest people we could find to share their thoughts and trust the power of that intellect to start great conversations, attract more great minds and build the foundation of a thriving community. With that in place, I wanted to learn what we were rather than dictating what we would be.

Some of what we write may look trivial at first, and the occasional item may even prove trivial in the final analysis. But I think we now have a good sense of what we are and why our readers keep stopping by. We hope our political writings are worthy in the coming months and (if we’re lucky) years, and we expect that our audience will grasp the deeper political mission embedded in our far-flung musings.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work toward a better culture, and in doing so will trust that if you enlighten the people and establish social structures that exalt the best they have to offer, the merely political will take care of itself.