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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s one they didn’t do last night.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s more here. Happy Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacy wants to be more than a novelized comic book: Packaged as a hardcover with a spiffy dust jacket and a promising premise, the novel suggests something that transcends stereotypical comic book shoot-em-up.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the book is not the general-audience thriller it appears to be. Instead, Legacy is the pitch-perfect comic book-as-words. There’s no genre-busting, no in-depth character study, no lyrical prose—nothing that would help it transcend the realm of fanboys. Instead, author Thomas E. Sniegoski writes with both knuckles bare, conjuring derring-do and all-out action on page after page.

At just over 200 pages, Legacy makes for a quick read, particularly since the text is light and the paragraphs are short. It’ll be an entertaining two hours, too—for readers who like comics.

The story centers around Lucas Moore, a small-town high school drop-out working as a mechanic at the local garage. His mom works as a short-order cook at the diner across the street. Together, they share a home in the local trailer park.

But Lucas’s world goes wonky when a billionaire shows up, declaring himself Lucas’s long, lost father. Oh, and dad’s a superhero, too: the legendary Raptor, dark guardian of Seraph City. If you’re thinking Bruce Wayne/Batman, you’re pretty much there. The Raptor has come to recruit his son to carry on the superhero legacy. Lucas goes. He gets trained. He starts his new secret life. This is all stuff readers have seen before.

Sniegoski throws in a twist three-quarters of the way through the book that has all the melodramatic angst of Luke Skywalker when he finds out ol’ Darthy is his dad. The resulting father/son confrontation makes no pretense at being a deep psychological study of the rivalries between fathers and sons or being draped in symbolism. It’s just face-smashing action.

Sniegoski has worked for every major comic book company, and it shows. Legacy, while crisply and cleanly written, reads like the boilerplate script for every comic book cliché ever. By all means, if you love comics, dive it—Legacy will offer a fun, entertaining read. Other readers, though, probably won’t find this superhero story especially super.

When we think of art, we don’t generally think about the functional pieces of our lives. I wouldn’t claim that my grubby Levis – torn, covered in dried paint and stained with automobile grease and ground-in grass – are art, for example. But as our “What’s it Wednesday” feature has shown, everyday functional objects can be made into art by the perspective of a photographer or an artist looking to create art, but does that mean that the object itself was art? Perhaps, but probably not.

But sometimes functional objects are art. The most common example is architecture – eminently functional, but created to be beautiful or disturbing or awesome or weird, depending on the desires of the architect and the customer. Still, most people wouldn’t consider something as mundane as an automatic pencil as art. Allow me to broaden your mind.

The automatic pencil at right is mine. It’s a Pentel PD345 QuickerClicker with 0.5 mm diameter lead in blue (originally available in gray as well), and I use it nearly every day I’m at work and I had to repair it recently with SuperGlue. It’s one of three or four that I’ve had since I discovered them during my undergraduate studies between 1991 and 1995, and there’s a decent chance that it’s older than my relationship with my wife. And it is a functional work of art, although of a type of art that most people don’t understand.

At first glance, there’s nothing special about the QuickerClicker. It’s a tube of blue plastic with an eraser and a clip. But as with any art, there is so much more.

First, the pencil body is slightly flared at the bottom, where you grip it. The slight flaring makes it more ergonomic and comfortable to hold, but without requiring a NEAR-G (Nasty Evil Annoying Rubber Grip^TM).

Second, the clip is metal, not plastic, so it lasts through years of being fiddled with instead of snapping off in the middle of meeting, flying across the table, and smacking your customer in the forehead. And the clip fastens to the back of pencil, protecting the pencil’s plastic body from the rigors of erasing and reducing the chance that the pencil will snap or bend.

Third, the eraser is 1/4 inch across, not a mere 1/8 inch like most other automatic pencils. The eraser is therefore big enough not to snap off while erasing large jobs but fine enough to erase a single error in six pages of algebra written on a quadrille engineering tablet. The eraser is held into the body of the pencil with a metal clip that holds the eraser tight but also allows for easy replacement.

Fourth, the pencil’s point is easily unscrewed to allow you to clean out the tip if you’ve got a jam, but it doesn’t come untwisted on its own.

Fifth, the pencil lead is held in a compartment that is large enough hold dozens of leads, not five or six like most automatic pencils hold before jamming. This is because most automatic pencils store their lead in a small cylinder inside the pencil’s body that is roughly the same size as a ballpoint pen. The QuickerClicker’s lead area is the full diameter of the pencil body.

And finally, the advancement mechanism is located in the body of the pencil, nearly underneath where you’d normally rest your thumb, instead of up in the top of the pencil with the eraser. It’s this mechanism that enables the larger eraser and the QuickerClicker’s ability to store so much lead.

Combined, these attributes mean that the QuickerClicker is an object with clean lines, that efficiently performs its functions, and meets the user’s need for a quality writing utensil. It’s a well engineered tool, but that’s only partly what makes it a work of art.

All engineering disciplines that I’m familiar with are roughly equal parts creativity and science. And as with any creative endeavor, there’s an art to engineering a good product. It takes a firm understanding of what the customer wants and needs, the palette of materials and components available, and the tools that make the job possible. In many ways, an electrical engineer “paints” his art with op amps and microprocessors, or he “sculpts” his circuit boards with epoxy, fiberglass, and copper plate. If you work long enough in a large engineering organization, you begin to learn to detect the “brushstrokes” of another engineer’s work in the designs you see. In this case, you can see the artistry that went into creating the QuickerClicker

The most significant problem with calling the QuickerClicker, or any other functional object, “art” is the intent of the object’s creator. I doubt that the engineer or engineers who created the QuickerClicker intended it to be art, unlike a photographer or painter or sculptor. And so, perhaps it is not truly art in the same, intended sense. But if we define art instead as “that which broadens our minds and enables us to better understand and perceive reality,” then my old and worn automatic pencil is art.

I challenge each of you to look into your lives and find the things that you overlook all the time and try to appreciate them with new eyes. You may not conclude, as I have, that they qualify as art. But you’ll have a better appreciation for them.

Image Credit:
Jennifer Angliss

We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars.

Recently there’s been a change in tone. There have been some new people showing up behind the desk, and they’re all chirpy. They ask questions, like “Did you find everything you need?”, stuff like that. They chat up the fact that, oh look, you have this book out, and that one too. Personally, I find this a bit irritating. I like my librarians on the reserved side, and not to be salesmen. Fortunately, this has not been a regular occurrence, but it makes me nervous. And it turns out that it may be part of a general plot to change the character of libraries in the area entirely. Well, maybe not a plot–it may not be nearly as well thought out as a plot would be.

The Heath Library, as it’s called, is part of the Borough of Camden library system. And the Borough of Camden has been trying to figure out how to cut its budget. Just like everyplace else in Britain, and the US, and any number of other places around the world these days. So Camden has decided to make some adjustments to how library services are provided in the borough. As the Camden New Journal reports this week:

CONTROVERSIAL plans to make a £2million cut to the library budget by reducing staff and introducing self-service machines were finally signed off at the Town Hall last night (Wednesday).

I can’t wait to see what self-service machines are all about. Self-service for what? Ah, checking out books. What could possibly go wrong here?

Liberal Democrat culture chief Councillor Flick Rea resisted pressure for a rethink and agreed to proposals mapped out in the council’s library reform programme, known as Growing Your Library and developed by council officials and consultants over several months.

Rea said the only way libraries would survive for future generations in its current £8.2million budget. “Otherwise the service will not survive in the tooth and claw climate of modern local government finance,” she said.

The cuts will be made over four years.

The plan here seems to be Growing Your Library by Cutting Its Funds.

Before making her decision, Councillor Rea heard deputations from library users who criticised the programme, including one from John Richardson of the Camden History Society who accused her of allowing it to be “pushed through without democratic process”.

She said the time saved by putting in self-issuing machines – and thus “freeing up” librarians to help readers – would be cancelled out by the staffing cuts.

“There is no evidence that the library service will improve as a result of the changes,” she added.

In addition to the 15 posts that have already been axed, more cuts, including some compulsory redundancies, are expected.

I hope someone eventually will explain to me why there never actually seems to be any money for saving the things that are worth saving. And why we can’t just hire more librarians “to help readers,” whatever that means. Finding books? Learning how to use the catalog? Finding stuff on the internet? People need help with these things?

How did the Borough of Camden come up with these plans? Well, for all its concern about saving money, the Borough doesn’t appear to mind spending a bit of money itself. As the Camden New Journal reports in a separate article:

CONSULTANTS hired to help redesign Camden’s library service were paid more than £2,000 a day over the summer.

American firm IDEO was paid £47,000 for 23 days work on the Growing Your Library (GYL) project, according to information released following a request by the New Journal under the Freedom of Information Act.

The work was part of a major overhaul of the library service in Camden, which will see some staff jobs cut and machines introduced.

Look, those machines again.

Reports suggested consultants visited a series of businesses, including the glamorous Apple Store in Regent Street, to see what ideas could be transferred to council-run libraries.

Well, I can certainly see how hitting the Apple Store would be useful in trying to redesign library services.

On its website IDEO describes itself as an “innovation and design” company. It lists some of its better known clients, a roll call of American multi-billion-pound organisations, including the Bank of America, food giant Nestlé and the charity set up by billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft owner Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Actually, the Ideo website is a hoot. Where do these people come from? Oh, Palo Alto, as it turns out. It’s like a William Gibson novel, one of the recent ones—everything is symbolic, and of the moment, or something. Someone named Ted Brown seems to be the design guru of the company, and you can hear him drone on in a video the site helpfully provides. And there are lots of references to design—Climate Change and design, how design got small and then big again, that sort of thing. Now, I don’t doubt that design is important, Climate Change being a pretty good example of how better design can help us out quite a lot, but it’s still not obvious to me how this is the group to talk to in order to determine how your library services can be “improved.”

So what did they actually do for Camden for two grand a day? It’s not actually clear, because Camden won’t release the report that they spent £47,000 on.

Freedom of Information officers at the Town Hall refused to reveal what the council got out of the deal and a request to see a draft of the ideas supplied to the leisure department was refused on the grounds that they have not been introduced yet.

Although officers accepted it was in the public interest to reveal what the money was spent on for “accountability and transparency” reasons, they ruled that to “prematurely” disclose the findings would result in “partial or inaccurate information being released” and would not allow Camden time to discuss with staff how the plans might affect them.

Officials insisted it was in the “public interest” not to release any more information.

We certainly wouldn’t want to release anything prematurely, to give the wrong impression. Just as well, because I imagine the discussion of the following probably needs some sharpening up:

Discussions held during a five-day workshop involving IDEO and library staff – described as a “deep-dive” brainstorming event – have been posted on the internal Camden intranet.

Details of some of the suggestions put forward by IDEO consultants have been criticised by staff, who contacted the New Journal to say the public would be “horrified” and “amused” at the “absurdity” of the week-long session and “the way their council tax money has been spent”.

The firm visited six businesses in London, including City Farm in Islington, the Apple Store in Regent Street and Jamie Oliver’s cook shop Recipease in Clapham.

City Farm? Where the cows and chickens are? That should help.

Consultants spent time at three Camden libraries – Regent’s Park, Kentish Town and Swiss Cottage – where they held meetings with library users and observed staff “to find out how they actually provided and used services”, but staff have queried their decision not to visit any celebrated libraries outside the borough.

Or any of the uncelebrated ones within the borough other than those three, for that matter.

The firm’s main specification was to come up with innovative ideas about what libraries and librarians could offer in the future, when Camden launches the second phase of its library reform programme next year.

This must be where the “self-service machines” thing comes from. Funnily enough, try as I might, I can’t find a single reference to anything about libraries on the Ideo website other than a link to an article in American Libraries magazine about “Design Thinking” in Libraries, by Stephen Bell, who may or may not be connected to Ideo. The article and comments are great—about “human-centered” somethingorother, and–here’s the kicker–providing a “memorable library experience.” There’s the Apple connection, all right. So it’s obvious why Camden chose Ideo to come up with some visionary thinking on how libraries can be improved at the same time their budgets are being hacked to death.

A council spokeswoman said: “The council approached a number of specialists to bid for work on the Growing Your Library project. IDEO, an international company whose UK headquarters are in Camden, was chosen in competition with a number of other agencies, as they offered the best combination of experience, capacity and proven track record in the field.”

Well, if this was the best of the lot, what did the other bidders look like? I’m reminded of that D.J. Taylor novel with a running subtext of the increasing rip-off of UK governments by management consultants running around a couple of decades ago in the country’s haste to privatize everything that moved. This sort of thing is the logical result—let’s have a firm of design consultants decide what libraries are for and how they should be used. After all, librarians wouldn’t necessarily have any idea of how to improve services, obviously, or anything above and beyond what you could extract in a day-long brainstorming session

Actually, given the apparently marginal state of libraries, we may as well have a design firm given an assessment of how to improve library usage. Libraries in the UK (and apparently in the US as well) are under pressure—over the past ten years over 100 libraries have been closed in England, visits per capita have been declining (marginally, but still), and expenditures per capita have been rising sharply. I can think of lots to fault the Labour government for, but increasing funds to libraries (until very recently) is not one of them. But, ultimately, libraries in the UK really depend on local council funding—and councils are currently hurting, so it’s not surprising that libraries make an easy target. It’s not as if anyone actually makes money from them. This is a familiar story, with a number of explanations—increasing access to the internet and other electronically-delivered information elsewhere, the increasing uneducatability of a number of children, and, perhaps, the possibility that people just read less—although I would need more convincing on this last point, in this country where not only is the major book award televised, but the bookmakers give odds on the potential winners.

So there are good reasons to get a broad range of inputs here. But it’s not clear to me that having librarians and library staff become the functional equivalents of the sales force at the Apple store is the right approach. Or brainstorming sessions, for that matter. What is needed, first of all, is a commitment to culture, and its preservation, and broad public access to it. In many respects, there is an admirable commitment to this notion here, or at least there was when times were good. But for a country with the literary heritage that this one has, even the closure of one library is a measure of our failure to meet this commitment

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting.

“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster ride,” Alten admitted. “There have been strange extenuating circumstances.”

Disney’s option expired when the head of the studio was fired. New Line optioned Meg in 2005, with director Jan Le Bont (Speed) attached to the project.  “Every department at New Line was excited about the project,” says Alten. “Unfortunately, the new script went off course from the novel, and the two CEOs never were committed to making a giant shark movie.”

As soon as the rights reverted back to Alten, he wrote his own script with producer Belle Avery. “It rocks,” Alten says. “I can’t wait to see this hit the big screen.”

Alten and his many Meg fans may get their wish. Private funding may soon be in place as part of a $150 million budget, with producers deciding on which A-list director will helm the first in what Alten describes as “a potential blockbuster series.”

While Alten waits for news, his fans still have Hell’s Aquarium to sink their teeth into. “I wasn’t sure I was going to write a fourth Meg book,” Alten said. “I realized there was more going on, more story to tell. I think it turned out to be the best of the series.” A fifth book in the series, Meg: Night Stalkers, is already in the works, although Alten said it will probably be the last.

“I have a lot of other stories I want to write,” Alten said.

Aside from the release of Hell’s Aquarium, the paperback edition of his thriller The Shell Game was just released on September 8. Originally published in early 2008, the book suggests a neoconservative plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city and blame the disaster on Iran. For the paperback release, Alten made significant revisions. “I changed it to reflect an Obama administration in power when the next ‘false flag’ event is unleashed and blamed on the so-called war on terror,” Alten said “It’s actually a scarier book.”

Alten enjoys the challenge of blending fact and fiction in his work as a way to make the books as thought-provoking as possible. “I research as much as I can. I pull together pages and pages of text, which I have to understand myself—I have to teach myself,” Alten said. In particular, he pours through newspapers and internet sites, always looking for the latest science news.

“The internet is the most important tool for me,” he explained. “When I find something, I can redirect the story toward that new information so that it becomes an important plot point. It becomes integral to the story and changes the dynamics of the story.”

His challenge, he said, is to make the factual material as “palatable” as possible. “I have to make it part of the story, not something that interferes with the story,” he said. “My hope is that the reader comes away more educated.”

He also wants them to be entertained. “We all go through stress. We’re all worried about the economy, about insurance, about whatever,” he said. “When they pick up one of my books, I want them to have fun. It’s pure escapism, pure entertainment.”

Alten prides himself on his close relationship with his fans, many of whom appear as characters in his books. “I can’t think up small bios for a hundred people,” he explained. “So, I use real people.”

Alten responds to e-mails from fans by offering encouragement and advice or sometimes just a thank you. “If someone has invested their time and money into one of my books, they deserve that,” Alten said. “It’s one of the most important things to me.”

His fans, in fact, encouraged him to write his 2005 hit The Loch. Originally, the thought of writing about the Loch Ness monster had little appeal to Alten. “That’s hokey,” he said. “I don’t believe it. It’s a tourist trap. It’s impossible for a population of air-breathing reptiles to reproduce there for sixty-five million years.”

But a readers poll convinced him to reexamine the idea: overwhelming response from his fans showed they wanted a Loch Ness Monster book. “I approached it as a skeptic in the story,” Alten said, “because readers will approach it as skeptics.”

So, he dove into the research and found some contemporary theories that suggested something beyond a stereotypical Nessie. “I attacked the mythology—attacked it with science,” Alten said. “This was not Disney; this was something nastier. I like ‘nastier.’”

But the nasty giant sharks of Meg will always hold a special place in his heart.

“As a teenager, I was fascinated by stories about shark attacks,” Alten said. He also credits as inspiration an old photo “of six nerdy scientists” posing inside the jaws of a megalodon.

Megs grew in excess of fifty feet long, and they weighed upwards of 100,00 pounds, making them the largest carnivorous fish to ever swim the oceans. Their jaws hyper-extended open some ten feet—providing plenty of room for nerdy scientists—and were filled with rows and rows of serrated teeth, each about seven inches long.

“I wondered why nothing commercial had ever been written about [megalodons],” Alten said.

The public definitely had a taste for them, as evidenced by the success of Alten’s first book. “Meg got me out of my little apartment and into a house,” Alten said.

He sounds a cautious note, though, because his career has seen so many ups and downs. He and his family had to sell their home years ago when the Disney deal went sour. He’s had to switch publishers several times when his first publisher, Doubleday, dropped his second book deal when the house was being taken over by Bertlesman; his second publisher, Kensington, only wanted more shark stories. In 2007, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a situation he blames on the stress associated with writing The Shell Game.

But good news came recently, too. The rights to his Mayan Doomsday series, Domain, were optioned by movie star Manolo Cordova and 11 11 films. Domain, translated in Spanish as El Testamento Maya, was a runaway best seller in Spain and Mexico.

“I’ve learned never to get too high or too low,” Alten said. “There are variables I can control and more I can’t. Parkinsons was a bad break, but many other people have situations strike that are far worse. I try to keep things in the right perspective. As for the movie deals, I can’t control those things. My job is to write the best books and scripts I can, and God will take care of the rest.”

And so Alten continues to write and wait, hopeful that the “big news” will come soon—and that his giant shark will be unleashed on moviegoers at last.

“Take a walk with me,” I said.

My students, some twenty-one freshmen, followed me into the hallway. “We’re going to take a walk around the building,” I told them. “I want you to just notice things.”

With my cowboy boots clicking on the tile floors, I moseyed down the hall with the pack of students behind me.

Some of them chit-chatted with each other. Almost all of them wondered what the heck we were doing: If this class was Composition and Critical Thinking, why were we going for a stroll?

The hallway makes a loop around the building, so about a minute and a half after we’d departed, we’d circled our way back to the classroom door.

“I’m sure it can be tough to notice things when you’re talking,” I said, “so I’d like you to take another lap—but this time, I really need you to notice things. Don’t let yourself get distracted, and please be considerate not to distract others.”

Again the pack strolled down the hallway. I watched them turn the corner—some of them still murmuring—then turned to face the opposite direction to greet them on their return.

As they filed back into the classroom, I asked them to jot down five things they noticed, and after a couple of minutes, I asked them to share their observations.

The funny red color of the walls. The plaque for the university’s five Pulitzer winners. The pop machine with three buttons for Mountain Dew. The plastic tube full of recycled batteries. The LED sign that said “Welcome class of 2013.” A classroom with students in it.

“Which classroom?” I asked.

“That one over there,” the student replied, pointing through the wall in the general direction of “right.”

“Anyone notice how many classrooms are over there?” I asked. No one had. Someone guessed, hopefully but incorrectly, “Five?” I shook my head. “Three classrooms and a computer lab,” I told them.

“It’s important to pay attention to details because, as a writer, you’ll need to share details with your readers if you want them to really understand what you’re talking about,” I explained. “‘Funny shade of red,’ for instance, may mean one thing to you—” I pointed at a student, then at two others, “—but it may mean something else to you or to you, so when you describe something you need to be sure you’re not being vague. ‘Funny’ doesn’t really mean anything.”

I shifted gears. “So far, y’all are just telling me about things you saw,” I pointed out. “How many sense do you have?”

We went through a few more details that they’d noticed. The click of my boots. The dean of the journalism school, smiling, as he passed my students in the hall. A display case full of books by alums, including one by Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto. Laughter from a classroom. The smell of fall in the air by the building’s front door.

“As your peers were sharing things they noticed, how many of you heard things that you didn’t notice?” I asked. Everyone’s hand shot up. “What I’d like you to do is take another lap, and this time, look for something that one of your classmates saw that you didn’t.” Off they went.

When they returned, I invited them to consider what we were up to. “Let’s assume for a moment that our walk is a metaphor for writing,” I said. “What does it mean?”

I took a sip from my tea and, over the rim of my mug, watched the students as their ideas percolated. I could see it on their faces, and I could see their eyes light up as they started to get it.

“The more times you go over something, the more you’ll notice—like if you’re doing editing,” a student offered.

“You need to take your time so that you notice things when you’re proofreading,” offered another.

“And you need to take your time when you’re gathering information before you write, too,” said a third. “That way, you can be sure you have enough material when it’s time to write.”

“Does the walk give you time to think about what you’re going to write?” someone asked.

I nodded. “I never sit down to actually write until I have it all worked out in my head first,” I replied. I then pointed to a young lady whose hand had shot up. “Having an extra set of eyes look things over can help you catch things that you didn’t catch,” she said.

“You need to be able to work at your own pace,” said another young lady.

“Yes,” I said, “you need to find a pace that allows you to do your best work. The first time we went around, you let me set the pace and y’all just followed. In this field, as a communications professional, only one reporter gets the scoop. Only one PR agency gets the client. Only one writer gets the award. If you stick with the rest of the pack, you won’t be ‘the one.’ Break away from the pack and work in a way that lets you work to your best potential so you can be ‘the one.’ Show people things no one else is showing them.”

It’s the best piece of advice I can give them as young writers: “Take the time to take the walk.”

“It’ll be hard,” I acknowledged. “You’ll have so many demands on your time. There are nine million things to do at college, and they’re all more fun than editing and proofreading and researching.

“But look at the benefits you get from devoting that extra time. You have a much richer experience as a writer, and you can do a much more effective job with your editing. You can help people see things they don’t notice for themselves,” I said.

“Take the time to take the walk. You’ll be amazed at what you get out of it.”

Meld the slipperiness of memory with the manic power of pop culture and you’ll get an idea of the lens Rebecca Brown uses to look at the world these days.

Brown’s newest book, American Romances, a collection of eight essays, mixes and matches in surprising ways: Oreo cookies and Gertrude Stein. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The Invisible Woman, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, and the God Squad. They’re all in there—along with a lot of Brown herself.

“I’m trying to understand my individual life in the context of other things,” she explains in a phone interview from her Seattle-area home. “Clearly, some of the pieces are very personal. The autobiographical stuff is really autobiographical.”

Brown, who’s taught writing for twenty years, is best known for her novels: The Haunted House, The Last Time I Saw You, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary—eleven in all. Her 2003 book Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, a powerful retelling of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, provided her the opportunity to explore memoir.

But nothing quite compares to the essay style Brown creates in American Romances. “This was something different for me,” she says. “It was nice to do something different.”

Brown says she sort of just happened onto essay writing. She started by writing short pieces for various alternative presses and local weeklies, penning book reviews, essays about current events, and even a gonzo-style encyclopedia entry on E.M. Forester’s Aspects of a Novel. “I try to describe what I’ve read and what I’ve looked at,” Brown says.

The experience not only opened a new genre of writing for her but it opened a new kind of dialogue for her with readers. “I loved writing about the real world and getting that reader response,” Brown says. “There’s more of an immediacy about the conversation than when I’m writing just fiction.”

Calling the pieces in American Romances “essays” perhaps pigeonholes them into a genre that might sound too formal to really capture Brown’s imaginative approach. She infused her essays with personal memories that, she readily admits, are sometimes undependable or nostalgic. She peppers her essays with endnotes that take on tangential lives of their own. She offers citations for the things she stuffed into her head, giving readers bibliographic breadcrumbs they can follow as she makes connections between fantastically disparate elements.

Who knew, for instance, that a clear connection existed between “east coast Puritanism” of early America and the “west coast hedonism” of the late twentieth century? Who knew that Susan Sontag and Oscar Wilde both had connections to the Invisible Woman?

“People are responding to the pop culture and the unexpected juxtaposition of things,” Brown says. “This was a new way to play, a new way to add to the possibilities of writing.”

Brown uses Nathanial Hawthorne as an organizing conceit for American Romances, and she gives herself creative latitude by quoting from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables. “When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude,” Hawthorne wrote, explaining that a romance “has fairly the right to present [the] truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

Brown characterizes it as “a degree of personal fantasy—a blend of personal fantasy with facts.”

Take, for instance, her essay “The Priests.” Brown had been challenged to “write a mythic story about food.”

“Well, I was a white kid from the suburbs,” Brown says. “I didn’t have anything exotic or unique. I didn’t have Mama’s home cookin’. Our home cookin’ was boxed cookies.”

So Brown’s essay begins as she and her childhood friends playact as priests, using Nico wafers for communion. The essay gets into a discussion about the history of church communion rites, which gets into a discussion about various secret church societies, which gets into a discussion about the church’s persecution of homosexuals. Oreo-like cookies get involved, which of course evolve into Oreos. “The way you opened it, then what you did, would tell you and your fellows who you were,” Brown writes. Gertrude Stein gets involved, too.

“Clearly, Gertrude Stein wasn’t a high priestess of Oreo cookies,” Brown chuckles. “But all the history stuff in the essay is true. Some of it’s pretty horrible. I’ve found tying together humor and tragedy to be a useful tool for getting at things.”

Brown tried to get at some equally sensitive topics in her other essays without coming at them head-on. “I don’t know how to write about those ‘Big’ things directly—things like ‘Love’ or ‘God,’” Brown says. “That’s the kiss of death to me. I have to look at those things from a sideways angle.”

She cites her essay “My Western” as an example. “I started writing about westerns and all those images of heroism and masculinity, and suddenly I realized, ‘That’s my father,’” Brown says. Suddenly, her discussion of the closing scene of Shane—when the cowboy rides off at the end with a kid yelling “Come back! Come back!”—parallels her own experience as a child when her father left his family.

The essays touches on other westerns, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist, for instance, and Brown draws parallels between her father and John Wayne. “He grew up in a culture with ideas of how men should be,” Brown says. “He really was a man who mourned the heroism of his earlier life. If he had been born as part of the Rat Pack, that would’ve been perfect for him but, y’know, he was a dad. He didn’t fit. He was born in the wrong era.”

This intermingling of cultural zeitgeist and personal reflection is pretty typical in American Romances. Brown also threads a nuanced sense of history throughout her pieces. “[T]he past is not so long ago, you tell me, and neither is the future,” she writes. The same could be said for the essays themselves: the past and the future are never far from each other, and sometimes the lines even blur.

“I guess I consider these ‘lyrical essays,’” Brown says. “How is that different from a memoir? How is a memoir different from a novel? There’s a contemporary, fiery conversation going on about those things. But you know what? It’s not a new conversation at all—we just think it is. Hawthorne and his contemporaries had the very same conversation.”

That conversation interests Rebecca Brown, the writing professor, but Rebecca Brown, the writer, seems interested more in the impact of her work than how its categorized. “Art is about touching the heart,” she says.

Brown is sure she’ll write more essays, but she’d also like to get back to her fiction, so she’s not yet sure what form her next major project will take. “Nothing’s worse than sitting down and looking at a blank page,” she says. “I’ve written a number of books by now, so you’d think I’d know how to do it—but I don’t. I’ll just have to wait and see.”

In the intervening years, the town has reinvented itself around the rain. Homeowners have rigged giant sheets of plastic, like umbrellas, over their homes. Officials have constructed a series of canals around the town to siphon off water. Townsfolk have to go to the giant gymnasium if they want a rain-free place to exercise.

And the town itself has even earned a new nickname: Mudville.

The world is a whole lot cozier for Mudville’s creator, author Kurtis Scaletta. He sits on the couch of his living room with Torii, one of his five cats, meowing at him. Scaletta is eagerly awaiting the start of this year’s baseball season because it brings with it the release of Mudville, his first Young Adult novel.

“People are still excited about baseball in early spring, so that’s when baseball books tend to come out,” Scaletta says.

But Mudville has more than just baseball. The story centers around a pair of foster brothers, one a pitcher and the other a catcher, who share a close friendship but also a sibling rivalry. “I’m really interested in the relationship between a pitcher and a catcher,” Scaletta says. “That friendship is maybe the tightest friendship in sports.”

Roy, the catcher, narrates the story. He’s a very agreeable guy, Scaletta says—in contrast to his foster brother, Sturgis, the pitcher, who’s a bit more volatile. “But he has a lot more talent, too, so Roy really needs him,” Scaletta says.

During the big game against their arch-rival, Moundville’s team falls way behind early. Then the storm clouds move in. As the rain begins, a batter steps to the plate and manages to keep Moundville’s team alive by fouling off seventy pitches—and then the umpires call a rain delay.

“I like to think of it as a tall tale,” Scaletta says.

The story picks up when the rain lets up twenty-two years later and the big game has to resume. By that point, the kids of the original players have to step in where their parents left off.

“There’s a lot going on in the larger story,” Scaletta explains. “There’s baseball involved, but thee are also family dynamics, there’s history, there’s mystery. I hope it’s all inseparable.”

* * * * *

Like a lot of other writers, Scaletta had a few manuscripts under his belt before he finally sold Mudville.

His first novel, written in 1995 as his graduate thesis at the University of Maine, focused on a virtual reality similar to “Second Life.” “It was Second Life fifteen years before Second Life existed,” Scaletta says.

He has cooked up stories about a young girl whose editorial cartoons become a smash sensation; a circus elephant who lives on a dairy farm and teaches the cows there to dance, turning them into a roadside attraction; and a young girl who finds a book with her name, Samara, on the cover, which opens to fanciful adventures.

His follow-up to Mudville, Mamba Point, is currently working its way through Knopf’s editorial department toward a 2010 publication date. Inspired by his time living in Africa, Mamba Point features a boy who’s made a pet out of a black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest snakes.

“I’m basically a workaholic,” admits Scaletta, who tries to time his projects so that he’s actively writing one manuscript while another is at the editor’s. “There’s always something going on. I’m always busy.”

Mudville was the first of his manuscripts to work its way through the editorial process, and as a first-time author, Scaletta found the process rewarding. “I didn’t realize how much an editor becomes part of a book,” he says. “If Mudville had gone to a different house, with a different editor, it would be a somewhat different book. It’s like the producer of a record—an editor makes that same kind of stamp on a book, but unlike record producers, who have their name on the record, you can’t see the editor’s name on the book.”

Mudville began its journey to publication in 2004, when Scaletta first “jotted down some ideas” for the book. By 2005, he had a complete manuscript, which he then consigned to a desk drawer for a year. “I got married. I earned a [second] master’s degree. It was a busy year,” Scaletta says. “My wife’s the one who saved the book. She’s the one who encouraged me to pull it out of the drawer and whip it into shape.”

The “really thorough” revision that resulted took almost as much work as the original draft, Scaletta says. “I changed the tense to present tense from past tense. When you change every single verb in a book, that gets pretty intensive,” he says.

Mudville finally gets its call on February 24. It will be one of several baseball-related books to hit shelves around that time—which is when spring training gets under way for Major League Baseball.

“The competition is fierce,” says Scaletta. “Not only are there are dozens of baseball books coming out, there are even two other baseball books by Minneapolis authors coming out at the same time as mine. Even if I had the modest goal of being the best-selling author of a baseball book from Minneapolis, I could still be third.”

Those books, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane and Top of the Order by John Coy, come out February 24 and March 3, respectively. “Apparently you can’t spit in this town without hitting a YA baseball author,” Scaletta jokes.

But like the characters in Mudville—and like every baseball team preparing to start the upcoming season—Scaletta has high hopes for his own book. Perhaps, he says, Mudville will even end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame—in their bookstore, that is.

“Everyone has high hopes in the spring,” he says. “In a world where the Tampa Bay Rays can end up in the World Series, anything’s possible.”

Verily, we have arrived at the end of all culture. Perhaps predictably, the culprit is technology. Or, to be a bit more specific, the culprit is Microsoft, which has now infused the art of songwriting with the same kind of magic and warmth you’ve come to expect from Excel.

Microsoft is pitching software designed for you, no musical training required. You sing the words as best you can, and its Songsmith software supplies computer-matched musical accompaniment.

Words … fail. Fortunately, Microsoft has produced a commercial that tells us everything we could ever want to know. Really, it tells us a lot more than they wanted to tell us. And no, this isn’t a parody put together by Cupertino cultist types with too much spare time on their hands. This is an actual Microsoft production. Before watching, go ahead and swallow anything you don’t want to come come shooting out your nose.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Never mind that Microsoft was aiming for “over-the-top comic irony” – you can only ask so much of self-effacing humor.

Fortunately, the Internets are full of smart-asses. So let’s consider the implications of the Songsmithization of our culture.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh, here’s another:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Still with me?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our popular culture has been dealing with the specter of “autonomous technology” run amok since Frankenstein, and in my cyberculture classes a few years back I had my students pondering the relationship between humanity, technology and actualization. Of interest was that third leg – where technology and actualization meet, where machines become self-aware and strive toward a higher ideal of self. That I called the “posthumanities,” and that’s where conversations about artificial life and artificial intelligence get interesting for me.

Those of you who have nightmares about Tron can rest a little easier tonight. If this is the best technology can do in the way of creating art, humans are okay for a couple more years, at least.

Still – imagine how scary Frankenstein would have been if Victor had owned Songsmith….

Thanks to Dr. Greg Stene for calling this travesty to my attention.

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.

********************************************************************************************************

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.”

Orcs by Stan Nicholls is too much of a good thing. Perhaps because the book is a promotional tool as much as a literary experience.

Orcs contains three of Nicholls’ novels, Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder, and Warriors of the Tempest, packaged together into a handsome bundle that’s currently being pushed at the major book chains in advance of the 2009 release of Nicholls’ next round of Orc books. Orcs also contains a short story that serves as a prequel to the novels, plus a lengthy author interview.

My plan was to read one of the three novels in the omnibus, go on to something else, then come back to the other pieces at some undetermined point in the future.

The Orcs had other ideas.

What I didn’t realize is that the novels are three separate novels the same way The Lord of the Rings is three “separate” novels. It’s all the same story, just divided into multiple volumes. So, once I read the first, and it ended with a series of cliffhangers, I was pretty much committed to the whole damn thing.

Fortunately, Orcs was easy reading, and I had a huge chunk of time, so I dove in and spent a few days of my holiday break in Nicholls’ world of Maras-Dantia.

I’m not sure anyone needs to commit that kind of time all at once to Nicholls’ work, though.

The Orc books have garnered a lot of attention since Nicholls published the first in 1999, and they’ve become quite a hit among fanboys (and fangirls) of the fantasy set.

The writing itself is good. While Nicholls is no literary master, there is efficient competence to his prose. Best of all, his action scenes are excellent, and he keeps ‘em coming. There is, literally, never a dull moment. It’s two-fisted sword action all the way through.

For 769 pages.

The three novels basically comprise of one episode after another after another, with only the thinnest plotline tying them together. A band of warrior orcs breaks ranks from the service of their evil queen to go on a quest to gather five mystic totems. No one knows what the totems do. No one knows where they are. The orcs themselves happen to stumble upon enough clues so that when they find one totem they also suddenly (and conveniently) learn where another one might be.

In this fashion, Nicholls strings together a series of adventures—interspersed with plenty of random outbreaks of violence—to create entertaining escapism. But 769 pages of it was a bit much, and strung together as the three novels were, the anticlimactic ending felt rushed and unfulfilling.

The world of Maras-Dantia that Nicholls creates is pretty interesting, and he peoples it with lots of interesting things—dragon riders, a kingdom of trolls, a war between nyadds and merefolk—but this is not a world of rich textures and long history like, say, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Everything serves as exotic backdrop for the Orcs to fight and hack and slash and fight some more.

It doesn’t seem like this foreign land is very big, either. Horsemen traverse it in two or three days. The geographic scale seems underwhelming—just like the entire omnibus.

There’s also a not-so-hidden environmentalist agenda to the book: humans are despoiling their world, wrecking environmental havoc and making life miserable for all the world’s other inhabitants. That’s a huge theme running throughout the book.

Orcs made an entertaining diversion, but it was too much of an entertaining thing. By the end of the book, I had long been ready to be done, and I was grateful when it finally was.

But, as you may recall, there’s a well-worn adage about books and covers.

Man in the Dark, a thin volume only eight-and-a-half inches tall and not quite six inches wide, caught my eye with its leafy, mulchy , concretey artwork, beautifully embossed and glossed and splashed with just the right dash of stars-and-stripes color.

It’s hard to capture an impression. But the book made one. The text on the inside flap drew me in even more. This cover had me, book, first line, and sinker.

I should really, really know better by now.

Man in the Dark hardly delivers on anything its cover promises.

That said, the novella is a quiet, elegant exploration of the loneliness that comes from physical and emotional isolation. It’s a beautiful little book (its cover notwithstanding).

At the center is 72-year-old August Brill, a bed-ridden convalescent recovering from a car accident. The lingering pain keeps him awake at night, and so he lies in bed, in the dark, and tells himself stories. “That’s what I do when sleep refuses to come. I lie in bed and tell myself stories,” he says. “They might not add up to much, but as long as I’m inside them, they prevent me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget.”

Brill’s wife had died not long before his car crash, and he’s had a difficult time dealing with her loss. He’s also haunted by the many regrets of his life, most of which resulted from his own admittedly poor choices.

“Give me my story,” Brill says, choosing to overcome his physical isolation by freeing his mind. “That’s all I want now—my little story to keep the ghosts away.”

The “little story,” as teased on the book cover, is of an “America not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued.”

This “other war,” as Brill describes it—“America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead”—provides an interesting distraction for as long as Brill maintains it, but midway through the book, it devolves into intentionally self-aware muck and then peters out. Brill gives up on the story as his real-life ghosts intrude.

Yet the civil war motif runs strong throughout the book in a variety of ways. The characters’ isolation forces them into combat with themselves—even as their internal combat forces them into isolation.

Brill’s daughter, Miriam, for instance, with whom Brill lives, has retreated into isolation following a messy divorce. She avoids dealing with her own heartbreak by tending to her broken father. “I wish to God she would learn the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are,” thinks Brill, with all the wisdom of someone who’s committed his share of rotten acts and now lies awake at night, regretting them.

Brill is troubled, too, by the cocoon his granddaughter has wrapped herself in following the death in Iraq of her estranged boyfriend, Titus. The death, particularly grisly, haunts Brill, too, because Titus had once been Brill’s protégé.

While isolation begets loneliness, Auster’s book suggests that isolation can also bring healing and lead to hope. As Brill’s long night finally stretches toward morning, he, his daughter, and his granddaughter quietly confront those things that keep them all up at night.

So, for me, the old lesson was again relearned. Don’t judge Man in the Dark by its cover—as cool as it was, the story inside was so much better.

Cinematic ethereal, spaghetti western flavored retro-futuristic music with powerful female vocals. // A sweeping, cinematic, wide-screen journey that combines ethereal sound scapes with surf-tinged guitar. Perfect for those late night rides across the desert with the top down.
…
Uniquely original retro-futurism.

Yeah, that’s fair. But there’s a lot more to say about The Lost Patrol and their new CD, Midnight Matinee, which has quickly vaulted onto my list of likely 2008 platinum awards.

In this past week’s ArtSunday, I noted the TLP’s vast array of influences. Today I’d like to talk a little more about the music and the band, and in the process, hopefully I can convince you to wander over to their MySpace page and give them a listen.

I think I’m taken with TLP because I’m always looking for the next great new sound. Of course, there probably aren’t any truly new sounds to be had, and if there were it might not be something that would actually bear listening. So what I mean is that I’m always listening for people who have found ways of taking the sounds that have gone before, assimilating and synthesizing them, and producing something that recalls the influence without imitating it. This is what all great art does, ultimately – it stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before.

Steve Masucci, the genius behind it all, has clearly internalized the essence of a legion of great artists: Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Johnny Cash, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ventures, The Stranglers, Phil Spector, Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, Gary Numan, The Church, The Damned, The Chameleons, Dusty Springfield, The Cure, V.A.S.T., The Nightblooms, The Cult, The Beach Boys, Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, A Flock of Seagulls, Dead Can Dance, Smashing Pumpkins, Sisters of Mercy, The Shadows, Al Caiola, Jack Nitzsche, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The Verve, Jean Michel Jarre, Duane Eddy, Andy Williams, Angelo Badalamenti, Allison Krause & Union Station, Mazzy Star, Tarnation, The Catherine Wheel, The Sundays, Sigur Rós, Echo and The Bunnymen, Medieval Baebes, Aimee Mann, Miranda Sex Garden, The Shaggs, Joanna Newsom, Goldfrapp, X, Kate Bush, Lovespirals, Abby Travis, Curve.

And while their listed influences don’t include U2, I can’t help thinking I hear echoes of The Edge’s Achtung, Baby guitar sound in there, as well. Also, as noted in that Sunday column, Masucci’s songs pay homage to auteurs like David Lynch, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Wes Andersen, Sergio Leone and John Waters.

So if you imagine Midnight Matinee as Duane Eddy teaming up with Hope Sandoval, Jon Crosby and The Church to do a soundtrack for a new David Lynch Western Gothic epic starring Johnny Depp and a wrung-out Elisabeth Shue, with powerful supporting turns from Zooey Deschanel and Javier Bardem, you’re probably more or less on the right track.

Still, being able to imagine this in my head doesn’t help me label it for you. In truth, I have a hard time pegging what genre, exactly, the band is working. Its aching, cinematic beauty, bespeaking a loneliness bigger than the Wyoming sky at dusk, argues for a spot on the fringes of Goth. The reverberating twang of Masucci’s guitars reminds me not of Country, but of traditional Western (and here feel free to think about a more lyrically melodic counterpoint to Munly or Slim Cessna). While it’s not industrial by any stretch, it’s right at home on a playlist with bands like Fiction 8 and The Birthday Massacre. Fans of DreamPop and Shoegazer bands will have no problem at all slotting it alongside Lush, Catherine Wheel, the late great Space Team Electra, early Verve, or even Asobi Seksu, Blonde Redhead, Jets Overhead, LoveLikeFire, The Raveonettes and Slowdive. And I think somebody needs to put “Blue Lullabies” in the soundtrack of a surfing flick.

All of which, I guess, makes it “indie.”

The accomplishment of Midnight Matinee is even greater when we realize that shortly after last year’s spectacular Launch and Landing was released, singer Danielle Kimak Strauss left the band. Danielle was born to sing Masucci’s songs, and I wasn’t terribly optimistic about their ability to replace her. But Mollie Israel has stepped in nicely, to say the least. The two women are similar vocalists in a lot of ways, but I’ve decided that Israel projects a slightly airier quality than did Strauss, whose approach was perhaps a tad more … resonant? It took me a couple of spins to adjust, but in the end I think they’ve replaced a fantastic singer without missing a beat.

Which makes me wonder how incredible Israel will be once she’s had a couple years to really own her new place at the mic.

You’ve probably figured out by now that Midnight Matinee comes with a big thumbs up. You can sample (and buy) the entire CD at CD Baby.

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. This passage from Gibson’s latest finds the protagonist, a journalist who was formerly part of a short-lived band (of precisely the sort you’d expect to fascinate Gibson – not a huge commercial success, but possessing an intellectual depth that would assure riveted cult status for a generation or more) talking with her new employer (again, a typically Gibsonian character, intrigued by the potential to bridge the critically obscure with the commercially popular). In the exchange, we understand that Hollis (the protag) was influenced, but not in a linear (read, discernable) fashion, by music of a completely different genre than what she was producing.

I was thinking about this as I listened to Midnight Matinee, the new release from The Lost Patrol, a band that made my Best of list last year for their outstanding Launch and Landing CD. When you visit their MySpace page and scroll down to “Influences,” you get the damnedest list: Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Johnny Cash, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ventures, The Stranglers, Phil Spector, Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, Gary Numan, The Church, The Damned, The Chameleons, Dusty Springfield, The Cure, V.A.S.T., The Nightblooms, The Cult, The Beach Boys, Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, A Flock of Seagulls, Dead Can Dance, Smashing Pumpkins, Sisters of Mercy, The Shadows, Al Caiola, Jack Nitzsche, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The Verve, Jean Michel Jarre, Duane Eddy, Andy Williams, Angelo Badalamenti, Allison Krause & Union Station, Mazzy Star, Tarnation, The Catherine Wheel, The Sundays, Sigur Rós, Echo and The Bunnymen, Medieval Baebes, Aimee Mann, Miranda Sex Garden, The Shaggs, Joanna Newsom, Goldfrapp, X, Kate Bush, Lovespirals, Abby Travis and Curve.

Now, a lot of this makes sense when you listen to them. But then you get some more influences: films by David Lynch, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Wes Andersen, Sergio Leone and John Waters.

Again, a lot of this makes sense when you consider the way in which The Lost Patrol’s music connotes landscape – wide, empty, frontier spaces at dusk, burnt oranges fading to blackest, solitary blue.

Once upon a time I thought of influence in that linear form that Hollis references – poets inspired by poets in ways that were evident upon reading. Musicians whose lineage could be tracked in quirks of phrasing. Painters whose technique never quite escaped the gravitational well of the masters they copied in their adolescence. And so on. As I learned and developed in my own right, though, I came to understand the non-linearity of influence: how one musical style could inform something new and apparently different; how certain types of influence can hide in the woodwork, only revealing themselves to those who study the hardest; and how influence can work across genres – music on poetry, painting on film, dance on sculpture, etc.

Those who have read my poetry have noted the straight-line artistic heritage: Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, Charles Wright. (Not that I’m worthy of those comparisons at all – it’s just that whatever I have done has aspired in the direction of these epic artists.) But I also like to note how important my early exposure to ancient masters like John Donne shaped my perspective – I doubt that’s as evident to most readers.

Earlier in my “career” I played with rock music influences, as well, sometimes going so far as to riff on Springsteen and Mellencamp and U2, and today my poems are frequently indebted to all kinds of musical insurgencies.

But there’s more. My writing has always been pretty impressionist. I’ve never worried about the hard narrative edges of the “stories” being told, but have instead focused on the imagistic, on the colors and vague shapes and details that were deliberately misremembered. There’s a lot of Monet and Degas in my poetry, in other words.

I was once called a “Jungian pagan” by a friend (who’s probably reading this and can identify himself if he wants to), and while I’m not 100% sure I’ve figured out what that means, there’s no denying that my writing trades heavily in the iconic, the totemic, the deeply symbolic. Jung? Sure, but also Yeats doubles back in here, and I can’t disregard the importance of Tarot in helping me think about what lies at the core of certain people, events, relationships, etc.

And what about the guy quoted at the top, William Gibson? The world I write about is frequently technological and urban, concerning itself with how my culture and my generation are being, have been, colonized by autonomous technology – that is, technology that appears to operate with its own agenda. Gibson is a core part of that, as is Bruce Sterling, and in depicting these moments I also draw on visual imagery from films like Blade Runner and the oeuvre-wide vision of directors like Tim Burton.

There’s nothing terribly profound in all this. Essentially it boils down to “influence is a highly asymmetrical, nonlinear process.” But since a novel and CD got me to thinking about my poetry, it seemed a worthy subject for a Sunday blog.