Category: Personal

Art

…And the Winners Are

I should be writing fiction instead of writing about it, but I must continue my year-end summations.  I’m off tomorrow, so I intend to get down to serious stuff.

Anyway, I read some pretty good novels this past year.  Much as I admire, respect, and feel a duty to read broadly in nonfiction, when it gets down to it, fiction is what I live for.  (Well, Donna comes first, sure, but as we’ve been writing a novel with our lives…ahem)  Fiction takes me away.  It opens things up, offers newness in a way nothing else does.

As I get older I find myself reading more slowly, soaking in the sentences.  This has the consequence of making me impatient with poorly-written material.  Or material that is well enough written but really has little to say.  Not that I’ve always got my nose in weighty tomes or Significant Prose and Important Literature, but there’s gotta be some meat on them bones, know what I mean?

That said, I caught up with what I consider “snack” reading in the form of Margaret Maron’s  “Deborah Knott” series.  A new one just came out, otherwise I could claim to have read all of these.  I don’t know why I’m so taken with these.  They fall into the crime fiction category of “cozies”, a term I learned only in the last couple of years.  It’s about solving the crime and shows little gore.  Not thrillers.  More personal, character-driven excursions.  PG-13 (although Deborah herself…well, you need to read a couple of these).  I like the characters, the setting is a small community in North Carolina, and Maron tilts at obviously long-favored windmills.  She has a separate series set in New York, the Sigrid Harald series, and in the last Knott book—Three Day Town—the two meet.  They are evidently related and from what I’ve seen of the new one, this is a trend that will continue.  The difference in style and approach between the two series is striking.

I also did some “catching up” with older SF that I never read—or, if I had, I’ve forgotten.  In that vein, I read a pair of Doris Piserchia novels—Star Rider and A Billion Days of Earth.  Piserchia could be a good representative of the waning days of New Wave science fiction.  Her skill was in novelty of idea and velocity, whipping you through the story so fast there is no time to notice any flaws.  Both these novels were part of Bantam’s Frederik Pohl Selection series from the early to mid-1970s, a line that included Delany’s Dhalgren and Sterling Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey.  According to Pohl, Dhalgren was the only one of these that actually made money for the publisher, which is unfortunate if true—he published some very good novels.

Also, because I was involved in an event with him at the St. Louis Science Center, I read David Gerrold’s Yesterday’s Children, which is basically a science fiction take on Run Silent, Run Deep, and really demonstrates Gerrold’s skill with psychology.  I also read his Space Skimmer.  Gerrold is most famous for his Star Trek episode, The Trouble With Tribbles—and deservedly so—but he is a really fine novelist and ranges across a  wide spectrum of subject and form.

After that event, I was asked to introduce the screening at the Science Center of the movie Fantastic Voyage, which I hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  To prepare, I read both Asimov’s original novelization and his second version, Fantastic Voyage II, which he published in 1987—because he really wanted to address some of the problems inherent in the original premise.  I was amused at his “solution” to the key problem of miniaturization and mass.  I still possess my original paperback of Fantastic Voyage (a bit worse for wear after 44 years) and enjoyed the return visit.

I also read a couple of Mack Reynolds novels from the Sixties—Commune 2000 A.D. and The Towers of Utopia.  I say “from the Sixties” and my ghod can you tell!  There is a charming-if-maddening naïvete in these novels that make them read like something for children (if not for the almost innocent obsession with sex).  Both are set in the same world, a time when the planet has come under the thrall of a single government.  Everything is fine, needs are met, but of course there are Those Who Don’t Fit In—Libertarians, basically—and revolution is in the offing.  It’s not so much that the premise is bad, but the execution…so Sixties.

Also from that time, though, was The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd, who had a steady if not stellar career and published some interesting novels.  This one, though—his first—remains the one everyone seems to remember (if they remember him at all).  This is one I think I read when it came out (1968) but I couldn’t remember, so I reread it.  Again, there was that delightful, nostalgic naïvete, the flavor of Something Lost.  But Boyd was not quite so innocent as Reynolds in his understanding of human psychology and the problems of political solidarity (of any kind!) and while the end becomes almost absurdly optimistic and playful, I found the novel to be a fun trip through some really interesting ideas.  It’s an alternate history, but you can’t tell for a good part of the book.  Only toward the end, when time travel becomes a factor in “restoring” history, do the variations make a larger sense.

Some of these novels suffer from compression.  Today, it’s nothing for a science fiction novel to run 300 to 500 pages, which allows for a full examination of premise and ramification, but Back Then there were constraints, and most of these books were usually only 200 pages, sometimes (often) less, and a great deal got crammed in.  The practiced reader could fill in the gaps, so to speak, but this was one reason so many readers coming late to SF found them ridiculous and indecipherable.

That said, many others seemed to have no trouble with the length given.  Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Ursula Le Guin’s early work—none of it felt particular “slight” by virtue of such compression.  The difference between a fine writer and a merely good one?

Roger Zelazny was one who had no difficulty working within the confines of 60 to 80 thousand words.  I’ve been making my way through his oeuvre for some years now, and he is a gem in the tapestry of SF.  This year, I read Creatures of Light and Darkness, Doorways In The Sand, and My Name Is Legion.  The last was a bit of a clunker, but the other two are classic Zelazny.  (I am not much taken with his most famous series, Amber.  Don’t know why—they’re fun reads, but they leave me flat.)

Another “vintage” writer I’ve been catching up on is James Blish.  Most folks remember him for the series of Star Trek collections he wrote based on the original series.  Blish was a prolific writer who did some solid work in the 50s and 60s, including his other “most famous” work, Cities In Flight.  He was also one of the first serious critics in the field, publishing still-relevant essays as by William Atheling.  His novels, though short, are studies in the efficient telling of idea-centered stories. This year’s reads were The Star Dwellers, its sequel Mission To The Heart Stars, and Titan’s Daughter.  The last is particularly interesting, being a eugenics-and-bigotry story, told very much with the 50s civil rights movement in mind.  Blish, unlike Boyd and Reynolds, was not naïve.

Moving briefly away from SF, I read Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first in his epochal series Dance to the Music of Time.  Some have claimed this is a British Proust.  Frankly, I found it dull and uninteresting.  The kind of thing I have no patience for in so-called “mainstream” literature.  Minute studies of people with whom I have no connection nor, through the instrument of the novel, desire any.  Very well-written, but navel-gazing at its refined best.

On the other hand, I read Jean Genet’s A Thief’s Journal, which is also a minute study of character, but one I rank comparable to Gaddis, Pynchon, Bolano.  The difference between this and the Powell is in its innate ability to twist your sensibilities and take you through An Experience.  Powell’s novel hinted at such, but really came down to just a cataloque of what these people ate and where they went.  The Genet puts you Somewhere Else.  (Which is one of the chief pleasures of science fiction, by the way.)

Which brings me to Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first of his epic Aubrey/Maturin series.  I’ve tried to read this a few times  before.  This year, sitting at home recovering from appendicitis, nothing else to do but eat soup, sleep, and read, I took another crack at it and got through.  I’m a Hornblower fan from long ago.  This is very different from the Forester.  The detail is fit for a historian and, for my money, drags the story, which by the end of the book had me.  I’m told the subsequent books get better and that, really, it is all one long novel interrupted by covers.  I’m not sure I’ll continue it, but I’m glad I finally read it.

I reread Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and once more felt carried away by the sheer ebullience of his language.

I then read Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, written in the 50s, but with none of the sentimentality of the usual SFnal doomsday fare.  This is a well-reasoned study of a changed society and Brackett never flinched from looking human fear and prejudice squarely in the face.  This one should be talked about on par with A Canticle For Liebowitz, On The Beach, Fail Safe…Brackett, if she is remembered at all anymore, co-wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back.  She was a first-rate writer and did some great SF, but this one is her masterpiece.

There was a handful of newer works I read that I want to recommend.  Embassytown by China Miéville I have written about already.  I have also written something about Jo Walton’s Among Others.  I may have inadvertently and certainly unintentionally given offense there, but I want to stress just how good a book that is.

But my friend Carolyn Ives Gilman published her epic novel (in two parts) over the last year-and-a-half, the second volume of which is Ison of the Isles.  (The first part is Isles of the Forsaken.)  Go.  Buy.  Read.  Great stuff.

I also read the new Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel, Garment of Shadows, by Laurie R. King.  She continues to delight in this ongoing series about (and ostensibly by) Holmes’ wife.

Our reading group completed Dante’s Commedia finally, after seven years of canto-by-canto reading and analysis.  I intend to do a post or two dedicated solely to that, but I’m still mulling it over.

I haven’t mentioned a number of books which I read and enjoyed.  No slight intended to any of them, but this has gone on long enough and I hit all the points I intended to make and recommended what I wanted to recommend.  I may cover a few of them in a separate post (in fact, I’m looking at my list and seeing a couple that deserve longer treatment) but for now I can wrap this up.

Naturally, I think everyone should go out and buy some of my recommendations.  If you do, do so at Left Bank Books.

Good reading to you.

Art

The Scroll At Year’s End

I read around 80 books, cover to cover, this year.  Currently I’m in the middle of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and odds are I won’t quite manage to finish it by the 31st (annoying life-type stuff keeps getting in the way and I do not want to zip through it; too many delicious bits to risk zipping past) but I will say a couple things about it at the end of this.

Of the historical nonfiction I read this year, a chunk of it went into the second volume of the trilogy I’ve been working on for a while (which, before you ask, still has not found a publisher, but I’m going to start the third volume next year anyway).  In that vein, I read The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder, a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, one of the last archdukes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Pleasurably readable, this chronicles the familial ins and outs of a complicated imperial family during the period in which empires collapsed all over the world and the scions of such dynasties found other things to do with both their time and their pedigree.  While it may seem odd today, Wilhelm was one of those who “adopted” a nation to champion—Ukraine—which more or less had to be created from whole cloth out of certain ethnic minorites other states claimed.  I read this mostly for the background, which informs the second volume of my own book, but I was so taken by Wilhelm that I inserted him in one scene.

Along those lines—since this is the character I put Wilhelm in the scene with, and because I’ve used him as the bad guy throughout the trilogy, albeit in a somewhat distorted form (we are talking alternate history after all)—I read The Panther’s Feast by Robert Asprey.  I’d read this back in high school—in fact still have the Bantam paperback copy of it—but remembered only that Alfred Redl, who ended up the most powerful intelligence officer in the Austrian Empire, was a traitor, selling secrets to maintain his exorbitant lifestyle as well as his secret life as a homosexual, and set the stage subsequently for the rout of Austria in the First World War.  I chose him for the antagonist and did some fiddling with history to make him a count.  Asprey’s book read like a novel, but he backs up his portrayal with an impressive amount of research.  Again, the full flavor of the Austrian Empire is on display.

Much as it is in Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor, which is largely about Vienna in 1888 and ’89 and the last days of Crown Prince Rudolph.  The cast of characters running through this short but meticulous work brings the period to life—Klimt, Mahler, Freud, Herzl, and Schnitzler.  (I have Morton’s Thunder At Twilight on my TBR pile, which is about Vienna on the eve of WWI.)

In preparation for volume three, which will be set during the Napoleonic Era, I read a decent biography of Fouché, who was minister of police under Napoleon—but also involved in the Directory and worked also for Louis XVIII and the restoration.  His legacy plays a part in the series as the namesake of the state police in my story—the Fouchendarme.  A most fascinating player in that whole period, the man who literally had the goods on everybody and thus not only escaped the guillotine but maintained considerable power.  According to Hubert Cole, whose biography of him I chose, he was a more or less consistent republican throughout that period, but he was also a pragmatist.  He should be remembered for the tremendous number of people he did not arrest as for those he did.

I needed background on Paris as well.  I found one book that purported to be a street by street history which was so difficult to keep straight, I gave up.  (I may try again.)  But I found Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, which is not only very readable, but contains stories that delight (for instance, the tale of how Marie Antoinette delayed the royal escape by turning the wrong way coming out of the Tuileries and ending up doing a long nocturnal circuit of the city, eating up hours while the king and court waited).

Tangential to these—using the writing of a novel as an excuse, really, to range over some histories I wanted to read anyway—I read America’s Constitution by Akhil Reed Amar.  Amar has done a book on the bill of rights as well and more recently published a more speculative work on our “unwritten” constitution.  In this one, he breaks the constitution down by section and analyzes it both historically and legally and sometimes philosophically.  His command of minutiae and understanding of shifting context make this a pretty good work on which to base a deeper understanding of our Founding documents.

I’m becoming more and more interested in early American history.  The last several years have seen major distortions in public by prominent politicians who seem to feel that the general ignorance of the American populace of their own history is sufficient for them to think they can get away with blatant misrepresentations.  But it is a complex history and even people reasonably conversant with the broader outlines of our history can be forgiven for not knowing—well, a lot.  So I have a growing pile of books, one of which this past year was Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder, which is a thorough re-examination of the life and impact of Aaron Burr.  She details in the introduction the unfortunately shoddy history of biographies about this man, of whom most people only know that he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason.  (That he was tried seems enough to convince most people that he was guilty, even though he was thoroughly acquitted and the real traitors in the affair were never indicted.)  Hard upon that, I read Gore Vidal’s novel, Burr, which obviously predates Isenberg’s biography but also seems to anticipate it.  Vidal evidently didn’t think much of Jefferson and his portrayal of some of the key figures in the Revolution may make some people’s back teeth ache, but it is an excellent novel and succeeds in bringing the period to life.  (As noted above, I’m now reading his Lincoln, which thus far feels equally well grounded and evocative of time and place.  Novels and biographies such as these play a very important role in public life, insofar as I think it essential that we do all we can to lance the boil of deification which enshrouds our famous forebears in cauls of inhuman adulatory buffer.  One need not shortchange someone’s reputation for significant achievement by also pointing out that he or she was in many ways just like anyone else, and could be just as much an asshole or an incompetent.)

Among the other nonfiction books I read this year, I can recommend four in particular.  In no kind of order, they are: Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahnman, Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon, Nom De Plume by Carmela Ciuraru, and Sleepwalking Through History by Haines Johnson.

The Kahneman is a detailed study of how people make decisions, how, in fact, the brain and mind process information and come to conclusions.  While this may sound like a dry tome, it is anything but, as he uses illustrations from his own life as a researcher and tells the story in a lively style.

I have come to the conclusion that one should read at least one Heat Moon book just for the sheer elegance of his sentences.  More, his has a gift for evoking place and mood.  Blue Highways is his first book, a chronicle of a circumnavigation of America by way of the “blue roads on the maps”, the lesser used state roads. In this instance, it is also an evocation of time—the late 70s—before America began to change with the Reagan “revolution.”

Which segues nicely into the Haines Johnson book.  Johnson chronicles the actual workings of the Reagan Administration and the cultural context and tears away the curtain to reveal the man at the levers.  Reagan’s reputation as a “great” president is one of the best pieces of spin control we have ever seen and this books shows why.  It is easy to point to Reagan’s presidency as the time when everything started to go sideways for so much of what America wished to be and become, but it can be tricky making the argument among certain people who venerate the man—a veneration born of image rather than substance—and having a source of details is very useful.

The Ciararu is a delightful history of famous pseudonyms.  Mark Twain, George Sand, George Eliot, Simenon (a lot of Georges!) and others.  Concise biographies open the door on the how and why of these authors and their pen names.  Fun.

I also read Ellen Chesler’s admirable biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor, which also chronicles the history of the birth control movement in America and the contiguous struggle for equality of women.  Historical amnesia can have serious consequences, especially in a time when gains made decades ago are now in danger of being lost because so many people simply don’t know what it was like and what it took to achieve what now can be taken for granted.  This a good place to start to find the social and political grounding of some of our current absurd culture wars.

These were the significant nonfiction books I read this past year. I’ll do the fiction in a separate post.

I wholehearted recommend everything I discussed here—in case there was any doubt.

culture

Mayan Sunset

Mayan Sunset, Midwest Theater
Mayan Sunset, Midwest Theater

 

Daylight.

Vast dome of god-magma, spare us!

(Whew!)

That was close.  Had we chosen a different calendar, things might have gone differently.  The Great Cycle, though, has been completed and now, we stand upon the apron of a new Age.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a slim volume back at the turn of the century about Millennialism, calendars, the human urge to impose order upon the innately disordered.  He wrote lovingly about what is basically our habit of taxonomic assertion.  These things go here, those over there, and by all means we must keep this stuff apart.

What defies rational explanation is our apparent fascination with End Times.

Or does it?

There is something oddly relieving in the idea that Something will take us out of our situation, arrange the universe in such a way that we won’t have to deal with the irritating minutiae of actual existence, day in and out, year upon year.  Taxes.  Utility bills.  Listening to the weather report.  The latest world disaster.

The death of friends.

There is a thread of the Apocalypse long favored by science fiction writers, primarily, I think, for its wonderful trick of wiping the slate clean and allowing for a brand new start.  Of course, we won’t be swept from the stage, only all the rest of a burgeoning, unwieldy humanity that seems to make it so difficult to straighten things out.  We—the protagonists (of course)—would have the opportunity to start all over.  Even something as nascent as H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds offers the chance to redraw the maps of tomorrow by thoroughly trashing today.

Some of our favorite stories are about exactly that.  Even in the Bible.  The proto disaster novel had early beginnings.  The Flood is exactly that kind of wishful thinking.  To a lesser extent, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.  (Clearly, Lot and his lot thought of themselves as the new versions of Noah and his brood.)  It looked like it was going to happen again, too, when Yeshua was crucified.  Read those passages and all the components of a ripping End Times yarn are there!  Earthquakes, bad weather, lightning, the oppressive sense of doom.  (The story teller there played a trick on everyone, though, and the world didn’t end and the next day everyone woke up and realized they still had to manage.  Damn.)

Alas, we aren’t to be let off the hook that easily.

I think this one, being so well-publicized and consequently such a big let-down, should be seen in a more positive way.  We survived the Mayan Apocalypse (which was never in the cards anyway, never predicted—the only thing that ended was a cycle of the Mayan calendar, specifically what they called an Initial Series) and the day dawned and look, Christmas is still, as they used to say, right around the corner.

Another end that didn’t.

Maybe, though, we should look at it as an opportunity for the kind of new beginning we always talk about, hear about, dream about, but then never really do anything about.  Look at it this way—the weather (at least here) was pretty severe, the elements were getting ready to dump abyssal payback upon us, and collectively we were spared.  We have found ourselves survivors upon our spinning world, alive and in possession of the possibilities of a New Dawn.  For whatever reason, another chance is ours.

People are always coming up with End Time scenarios, but what happens the next day is always a bit thin after all the sturm und drang of the actual apocalypse.  But then, that’s for each one of us to write, hmm?

After all, one Great Cycle has now ended, the previous Initial Series is over, a new one is upon us.  Maybe the next cycle really can be great.  For a change, maybe it would be a good idea to do what we keep telling ourselves is the best part of the season.  Stop hating, open up a little.

‘Tis the season.  We’ve survived.  So what are you going to do with your second chance?

Peace.

culture

Addenda Tragicus

I mis-reported something in my previous post.  I said Adam Lanza did this with a pair of pistols.  At that time, that was the report I had, from early news items that did not mention the assault rifle.  But he used one after all, so a correction is in order.  I also said 26 people had been killed, but that was students and teachers and did not include Lanza’s mother, who he killed at home and was apparently the first victim, nor Lanza himself.

I said “we are a people enamored with violence” and yes, I meant Americans, but obviously that is no real distinction, and the bizarreness of such incidents is hardly confined to us.  This report from China is about a similar tragedy.  (This man used a knife, and while some folks are making a point of the fact that none died as opposed to the Newtown event, I think that misses the central fact.  The report goes on to detail that this attack was only the latest in a growing number of similar assaults.)  Here is another detailing a slaughter in the wake of something we may sometimes characterize as a “western” trigger.  Then of course we have become so inured to stories of honor killings and the massacres of terrorists, it may be that we simply discount them and are willing only to focus on our own tragedies as if we should somehow be immune to this sort of thing.

But there are two things I want to add to what I wrote yesterday that I suggest feed this kind of inexplicable event.

The Westboro Baptist Church plans to try to picket the funerals of the children in Connecticut.  Why?  Why else?  Homosexuality.

But we are beginning nationally to discount them as nutjobs, obsessed with their own religious celebrity.

However, Mike Huckabee has weighed in, telling us that the shootings occurred because “we have systematically removed God from the schools.”*

When I talked about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, this is an example.  Most people are going to shrug this off, the overblown posturings of a disappointed presidential candidate with a viewpoint sharply athwart mainstream.  But I think that also misses a crucial point.

I said we like very much to find reasons, to explain things, and in the face of the inexplicable we tend to grasp at anything that seems to offer a reason.  We are reluctant, it seems, to simply say “I don’t know, it was one of those things” and then keep looking for meaningful answers.  Meanwhile, these kinds of explanations hang around, suffuse the zeitgeist, drift about until sympathetic minds adopt them.

Theology 101:  if, as we find in many strains of christian thought, “god” is by definition “within each of us”—because we are his creations and, presumably, he loves us—then any one or number of us who go into a place bring him with us.  Furthermore, children are by christian operating principles “innocent” and certainly the special ones of Jesus’ attention.  Which means that god is inextricably linked to gatherings of children and a school is chock full of god.

Obviously, this isn’t what Huckabee and his ilk are talking about.  They mean we refuse to put up a crucifix in the classroom and hold organized prayers every day.  They aren’t interested in the nous and spirit of their propositions, only in the propaganda opportunities missed by means of the separation clause.  They don’t trust individuals to carry god with them wherever they go, they want public demonstrations and regular indoctrination seminars.

And because we won’t do that, they suggest that god is letting slaughter happen.  God, in other words, is holding hostages and killing them (he’s all powerful, right?) when he doesn’t get his way.

Back in the aftermath of Katrina, Pat Robertson was spewing a line that New Orleans had been inundated because we have shoved god out of our lives.  This in one of the most religious per capita nations in the Western Hemisphere.  “God doesn’t go where he’s not invited.”  He should have done a survey of the number of neighborhood churches there were (and are) in New Orleans.  It was a cruel, unworthy sentiment that was also based on the idea that his god punishes people because others ignore him—and then doesn’t tell anyone that this is the reason the tragedy happened.

Oh, Scripture?  You mean Sodom and Gomorrah and the search for the righteous?  Lot, who was so righteous he intended handing over his daughters to a mob of horny debauchers rather than risk pissing off his god by letting his messengers be diddled?  Lot, who then later got drunk in a cave and fucked those same daughters, at their contrivance (of course, because it’s always the women at fault) because they thought the whole world had been destroyed and it was time to act like Noah’s kids and repopulate?  That story?  Very uplifting.  (I got in trouble in grade school over that one for (a) bringing up the cave and (b) wondering how come if god could send angels to Sodom to warn Lot’s family he couldn’t have sent the same pair to the cave to tell them the world was okay.)**

You’ll forgive me if I find that kind of reasoning specious and insulting.

Obviously, it doesn’t matter to these people what may actually be going on in the hearts and minds of others, only what we appear to have going on.

So in the wake of a tragedy that, in any meaningful way is the equivalent of an earthquake or a tornado, we see certain folks adding to it by twisting the circumstances into an opportunity for theocratic propaganda.

Which, intentionally or not, feeds the paranoia of certain folks by reinforcing the kind of final solution thinking they may already be indulging and which may from time to time lead to more tragedy.

We have better stories than this.  We need to be telling them.  Often.  Loudly.

Oh, and Huckabee’s position on firearms?

“My position on the Second Amendment to the Constitution is as clear for me as the position held by most journalists toward the 1st Amendment. While I do not consider myself a “gun nut,” I proudly own a variety of firearms and enjoy hunting as well as sports shooting. But even if I were not a hunter or did not enjoy shooting, I would still be a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment right of Americans to own firearms for self-protection and as a matter of principle.”

But of course, using the same twists of logic he used about Newtown, we have no right to be safe from his god.  Not even children.  (Yes, I am making a point by making an extreme case.)

We can do better than this.

_______________________________________________________

* Does it need pointing out that what did the killing did not come from within the school?  That, metaphorically, evil broke in?  Yeah, well, maybe it does…

** Yes, I state it crudely—it is a crude story and deserves no better.

 

 

culture

Insanity

Doubtless whatever I say, someone will find fault, take offense, withdraw into positions, place guard dogs at the gates and lookouts in the towers.

We are a people enamored of the idea of violence.  We like the idea that when it gets down to the proverbial nitty gritty we can and will kick ass and take names.  Americans are tough, not to be messed with, ready to exact justice by knuckles or 9.mm.

Until something like this happens and then we recoil from our own defining myths with a collective “but that’s not what we meant!”

Adam Lanza murdered 26 people in a grade school, 20 of them 1st graders.  Children.  Reports indicate he shot some of them multiple times at close range.

Someone, somewhere, by now has made the argument that had any of those kids been armed, Lanza would have been stopped.  Maybe not in the media (but I could be wrong) but in living rooms and over dinner tables.

Because we are almost as obsessed with Finding Reasons as we are of retaining an image of personal power born of a romanticized version of a Frontier that for the most part never existed.

Back in the metaphorically rich Sixties, at one of the last “above ground” meetings of the Underground, there was a session dedicated to the proposition that it was encumbent upon good revolutionaries to set about killing all newborn whites.  Because, the argument ran, through no fault of their own they were destined to grow up to be part of an oppressive ruling elite and it was necessary to nip this in the bud before the conditions of oppression found new blood to enforce the status quo.

Now, this was not acted upon.  I bring it up to make the point that people adopt narratives and take positions that in their extremity produce bizarre ideas.  The vast majority never come to fruition—they are ideas, discussions, bandied about by people who, in their own way, are trying to find explanations for and impose order upon a world that seems chaotic and malign.  To some extent, we all do this.  There is even an upside to it—fiction writers produce cathartic works that thrill and entertain.

And, in a sane world, go no farther.

But there are always those who internalize the narrative extremes and find cause to act.

We’ve had a string of these recently.  Just this morning there was another report of a shooting, in Newport RI I believe, some loon snapped off fifty shots in a mall or on a beach.  No one was injured this time.  All we have is the lone gunman shooting at the demons around him.

Demons?*

Listen to some of the rhetoric of the past couple of decades, rhetoric that once had a limited audience, but since the age of Cable and the Internet has blossomed with a concomitant ease of isolating narrow bands of data, enabling people to create bubbles and live in them in ways never before possible, seems today more concentrated, vitriolic.

Back in the early days of the Moral Majority I heard Falwell preaching blood in the streets.  End Times Nonsense.  The Apolcalypse is upon us.  Final Days.

Insanity.

But that does not mean these people—preachers and preached—are themselves insane.

No doubt there will be an attempt to characterize this young man as mentally ill.  How else could he have done this?

I believe this misses a crucial point.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt made the case that Eichmann—and by extension most of his colleagues in the Third Reich—was not evil, not in any classical sense of being demon-possessed or mentally deformed.  He was a functionary, a bureaucrat, doing a job.  The most you could say is that he had bought into a paradigm that was at base evil, but it came from many factors.  Key among them was the narrative he had accepted that allowed him to think along certain lines that led to Holocaust.

It’s frightening because it tells us that any one of us could be just like him.

If you live inside a bubble, your view of the world is distorted, the solutions you may find will be at odds with the common, but you do not need to be clinically insane for this to take hold.

Which brings me to one of those gnawing, irritating factors in the second half of this issue.  The guns.

Lanza did not do this with an assault rifle, which has become the icon of mass killings.  He had a pair of pistols.  Automatics, to be sure, but that only makes what he was able to do faster, not any more terrible. And here is the frustrating point that so many of us of a certain generation wrestle with.

I grew up in a house full of guns.  My father was a gunsmith at one point.  We had the equivalent of a small armory in the house.  Several of them were antiques, but a number were quite modern.

It never occurred to me once to use one to settle a problem.  And trust me when I say that if anyone would have fit the profile of one of these killers, it would have been me.  Bullied, ignore, frustrated, introverted, socially inept, and very, very stressed from a feeling of injustice in the way I was treated.

It never crossed my mind to kill anyone.

In terms of the weapons themselves, I treated them with the utmost respect, fully aware of their power and potential (we hunted).

Now.  What the hell has changed?

I do not here side with the NRA.  They have taken it upon themselves to advocate a position which crosses the line into inanity, but which is based on the self-perceived rights of a constituency which for a very long time was perfectly mainstream.  But like other such issues, a worm of right-wing paranoia has crept in.  They do not come right out an say it, but they represent people who believe in their bones that the 2nd Amendment gives them their sole guarantee that the United States will not become a tyranny.

What I will say is that this position makes it very difficult to even discuss rational limits on firearm possession.

Something which once was entirely at the determination of local authorities.

(I find it ironic that people who reject “federalism” out of hand for any number of other matters—schools, healthcare, poverty relief, etc—depend more and more on a federal solution to even state attempts to control firearms.)

An insistence that people like Lanza are mentally ill in some way combined with this absurd stance on a presumed right to not only own but potentially use lethal force for political purposes and a marrow-deep suspicion of government has created an unconscionable situation.  We can all of us not only imagine but I suspect name people who should not own guns.  Neighbors, even.  They are not insane.  They may be irresponsible.  It’s likely some of them—many of them—side with the no-limits attitude of the NRA.  They may simply espouse a worldview born out of narrative completely at odds with reality.

The scary thing here is how close this issue brushes up against 1st Amendment rights.  If, as I seem to be suggesting, we need to look at the kinds of stories we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, doesn’t that border on advocating censorship of some kind?

No, I do not.  But it should be recognized how closely entwined the two things can become.

What I do advocate is some kind of program that punctures all these bubbles people have been living in.

When the Republic was founded, the fact of the matter is the “armed forces” was The People.  We didn’t have much of a regular army—in fact, rejected having one—and our various police forces were not very good.  The fact is, a substantial portion of the population lived in isolated, frontier regions where owning a firearm was not only desirable but essential.  We live upon that founding narrative, even though the frontier is long gone and the fact is that the police and the armed forces are so far and away better equipped than any citizen soldiers might be that the idea of resisting them is almost laughable.  But the fact is, we likely wouldn’t resist them.

But this nonsense over the intent of the 2nd Amendment is silly.  The phrase is “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” not “the right of persons (or the right of people)” to do so.  The Framers understood language, sometimes clearly far better than we do.  By not saying simply “persons” or “people” but instead “the people” they made it clear they intended a political entity, not individuals under any circumstances.  They meant that the militia was the local community, that used to muster to drill from time to time in the town square, and as things became more and more settled, fewer and fewer individuals owned firearms of their own.  They would get them from the local armory if need be (which is exactly what the British were on their way to seize at Lexington and Concord).  What they meant was the right to exercise military force belonged to the citizens.

Let me finish by pointing out that the one thing we seem reluctant to talk about, on either side, is precisely that lost element of responsibility I mentioned earlier.  What the hell happened to us?  We have gone from, presumably, a nation of responsible adults to a nation of emerging armed camps with no ability to teach the next generation anything of value.

I do not know why Adam Lanza did what he did.  I would very much like to know why he thought what he did was not only acceptable but his only option to redress whatever ingrown, isolated, paranoid wrong he thought needed redressing.  I want to know why he thought that was okay.

That is just as important, if not more so, than rationalizing this asinine debate over the proliferation and possession of firearms.

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* No, I do not believe in demons as in “Satan’s minions” or spawn or what have you.  But some folks do believe in them and act accordingly.

Absurdity

12-12-12

Because I can’t resist the date.

Urban Abstract 2, 2012
Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Passagway
Passageway

It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

culture

Games, Women, Growing Up, Remembrance

I want to talk a little bit about women.

I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.

First, a video:

Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way. Which sets the stage for this:

Really, Tiedemann?  You really get that from a bunch of mouth breathers in basements playing online games?

It has been my experience that one of the components of “gaming” has always been a self-defensive insularity, an in-group “bunker mentality” that defaults to mindless rejection whenever anyone suggests that maybe the game in question is, you know, stupid or dangerous or fosters questionable attitudes.  Balance goes out the window when the game is threatened, even its accoutrements.  Online games or field sports, I don’t care which, there is a mindset that some adherents embrace which reduces reason to the buzzing of a fly when the game itself is threatened.  (You may not quite grasp this unless you have been threatened with bodily harm by members of a varsity football team for the mere suggestion that something else is more important for the school than new uniforms for them, that maybe it would be a bad idea to cut Band because there isn’t enough money in the budget for both.)

Combine that with the nature of in-groups and you have a perfect recipe for this kind of nonsense.

And yes, I think teaching people that just because they belong to a group gives them unquestioned privileges vis-à-vis The Rest Of The World is a formula for creating objectionable behaviors in certain members of that group.

In this case, the members of the He Man Woman Haters Club.

I grew up watching The Little Rascals on tv, and one of the repeated tropes was Alfalfa’s inability to “man up” and tell Darla to stay in her place.  Spanky and the others had their club and Darla and her friends attempted again and again to break into it.  Barring that, divide and conquer.  It was an early lesson in sexual politics, and I wonder sometimes if the writers and producers knew what it was they were portraying.  The subtext was the immasculation of Alfalfa, who continually embarrassed himself—and by extension The Gang—with his romantic goofball behavior when Darla winked at him, bent her finger, and drew him off for a tryst.*

The message was clear: girls are not to be trusted, not to be tolerated, unless you want to be a doofus like Alfalfa.

Then puberty hits.

Personally, boys who don’t know how to talk to girls well into adulthood I think don’t know how to talk to other boys, either, but the games template of childhood provides a format for pretense.  Don’t discuss feelings, don’t share anxieties, talk about the Game.  The Game substitutes for genuine sharing.

Who am I talking about?  Not a majority, certainly, or we would be unable to have this conversation on any level.  But a large enough slice of the male population to cause trouble.

Wait a minute, Tiedemann, you’re not blaming the games, are you?

Tempting as that is for me, no.  While I do believe the games reflect the attitudes of those who are involved in them, blaming the games is like blaming Jack Daniels for drunk driving.

(I don’t like most games, I admit.  I’m not competitive that way and most games are zero sum endeavors.  I like chess, but I don’t play it to win, and for some reason that seems to be okay in chess, there’s no chest beating of any kind.  But I was once nearly beaten up in a bar by a pissed off foosball player who invited himself into our game and got angry because I didn’t play to win.  I don’t like that attitude and I avoid it when I can and I find it wired into most games.)

Men who beat women, who killed them, who are outraged by feminism, who think in terms of “women’s proper place” are alien to me and rather pathetic—instead of working on themselves and their own shortcomings, they blame failure on everybody else, and the women in their lives are close and available for them to exercise what they conceive as their “manhood” in the most bestial way.  I would pity them but for the very real damage they do.

I wrote about that damage and one of my defining moments here.

I’m thinking about these things today because it happens to be an anniversary.  Twenty-three years ago today the Montreal Massacre occurred.  A frustrated, pathetic excuse of a human being decided (assuming such actions can be derived from a process of decision making) to vent his anger at failure by—wait for it—blaming women for his inability to fulfill himself.

But remembering that, I’m also thinking about the new women in my life.  I’m working for Left Bank Books now and in the past weeks of learning my way around I’ve been working with some of the coolest women around.  What a shame it would be if they couldn’t do what they do and be who they are because some bipeds with external genitals and low I.Q. held sway in our society and decided—because they lack the imagination or perception to see past surfaces and their own limbic reactions—women “shouldn’t be doin’ that kinda stuff.”

(As I’ve written before, I do credit my lifelong love of books and an early exposure to science fiction for preparing the ground for the feminism of my adulthood.  I’m hard pressed to think of a better antidote for what is, at base, a profoundly anti-intellectual cultural ill.  The inability to reason, to understand, to empathize, all this feeds the kind of insularity and self-limitation that can result in these deeply irrational—indeed, anti-rational—behaviors.  Do I think reading alone is a cure?  Of course not.  But, for cripessake, guys, read a book once in a while!  Get out of your own heads!)

I’m grateful to the women in my life: friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and I can say without reservation that I’d rather be in their club than in Spanky’s.

Better yet, let’s stop all this nonsense about clubs.  I never got my membership card in the He Man Woman Haters Club—I was too much a wimp to qualify—but then, I never applied.

_________________________________________________

*Tryst?  Why, yes.  What else is it?  She gets him off alone, there’s a lot of goofy grinning, sharing of a meal, coy conversation.  No, of course there’s no sex, but Darla has segregated Alfalfa away from the other boys and…it’s all done in such childish innocence, but really look at those interludes and analyze them, then imagine Darla and Alfalfa about ten years older.

And of course the proto-stereotyping of gender roles is right there.  Darla is the seductress—ostensibly she’s trying to break down the group cohesion among The Gang, but that’s secondary—and Alfalfa is the male naif, completely taken by Darla’s attention and unable to control himself—or even speak intelligently.  And of course when it’s over he’s the one who’s been embarrassed—been “had” by the female and made to look foolish.

_______________________________________________________

__________________________________________________

** Science fiction was where I first and continually encountered strong, self-possessed female characters and models for what I came to believe women were, both potentially and preferably.  Sure, there were plenty of the standard models in SF, but there were also powerful, independent women who early on showed me that any assumptions about female inability, weakness, or ideas of “proper place” were all just noise.

blog

Book Recommendation

This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase.  For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…

China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade.  Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.

Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.

It’s an ongoing debate, and Miéville himself has weighed in on it, namely the definition of science fiction, principally in relation to fantasy.  What it comes down to for me is a question of philosophical utility.  Does the text at hand offer an examination of the “real world” consequences of a philosophical question given the constraints of a universe we recognize as that which is accessible by science?

A bit long-winded, maybe, but insofar as any fictive enterprise can be shown to deal with the consequences of questions, the defining terms in this instance—or at least the limiting terms—are “philosophical”, “real world”, and “science.”

Let me deal with this quickly, since I’ve dealt with it at length elsewhere.  By science I do not mean the rigorous application of what we know of science—if that were to be the determinant, 99% of SF would not qualify, and of that which did, a goodly portion would be enjoyable for a relatively small, self-selected audience.  What I mean by this is more on the order of an æsthetic stance vis a vis the narrative, mainly that the background setting and the foreground action conform to the forms we readily identify as “scientifically defined.”  The universe as understood by scientific enquiry.

Basically, a vision of a “real world” that we can recognize and agree fits with what we can understand as how the universe operates.

This automatically throws out most fantasy conceits.  (If you take the trouble to redefine your elves and fairies as parallel human species ala evolutionary branching or as aliens, you have retasked your imagery to perform a science fictional exploration.)

Which leaves what I consider the most interesting and salient of components, namely the philosophical aspect.

Science fiction is self-consciously philosophical, insofar as it is deeply, principally concerned with questions of how to live in a changed universe.  Not just technologically, but ethically and morally.

Which brings me to the Miéville and my rather bold claim that it is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade.

The conceit dealt with here is the question of language and its relation both to biology and to a universe that evolves, changes, and is largely unexplored.  Miéville gives an alien race whose language is hardwired into their biology.  They do not “learn” it, they are born with it and simply mature into its proper use.

And they cannot, therefore, lie.

Enter humans.

The humans, as is our wont, work to learn to communicate with these aliens—the novel is set primarily on the alien homeworld, where humans have a single, rather naked and fragile colony/embassy— and when they succeed, they nearly destroy these aliens, who in response to the threat very nearly destroy the colony.

Throughout, there is discussion and examination of language, its uses, and how it relates to both the universe at large and the inner landscape of individuals.  The examination, which in many ways is an abstrusely philosophical one, is absolutely central to the action of the novel.

And this is what good science fiction does!

I won’t here go into further detail.  To do so risks spoilers and if you’re in least interested, you will not thank me.  (I will say that Miéville has produced one of my favorite lines in all science fiction.  No, I won’t tell you that, either.  I want you to have the fist-pump experience I did when I read it.)

I must also add that while in some ways what I have described might easily be seen as a dry, plodding work, the exact opposite is true.  Miéville is a gifted stylist and his prose rush along, carrying the reader through an adventure.

So for Christmas, for yourself, for a treat, go on-line at Left Bank Books and buy a copy.  Read it, give it away as a gift, feed the SF geek in your life, or introduce someone who has stubbornly refused to see the merit in all this “space stuff” to something of undeniable intellectual worth.  Wednesday, December 5th, it’s 20% if bought online.

Do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

Art

Post Thanks

I asked Donna this morning, “Is this the first Thanksgiving we’ve spent entirely alone, at home?” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think so.”

Just as well.  I seem to have caught a bug that has churned me up a bit the last couple of days.  Not bad, just very uncomfortable, leaving me not in a very congenial mood.

But it got me thinking on the nature of the day and its uses.

 

 

We lounged, walked the dog, talked, read a little (I’m finishing up a stack I’ve been working on for a time and this morning completed William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways), talked some more, napped, ate a little.  We did not engorge.  Neither of us felt good enough for a feast, so perhaps we came through the day more clear-headed than in past years.  We watched a favorite movie—Pleasantville (which I still think is one of the finest films ever made, easily in my top 100 if not my top 20)—and thoroughly appreciated each other.

Our tradition has been to take the first invitation that comes for the day, but this year the one that came with geologic regularity did not come—regrettably, I suspect politics has scuttled that one—and we demurred on another.  No matter, I’m glad it worked out this way.

I skim on a light froth of gratitude most of the time.  I subscribe in no way to the notion that what I have has come entirely by my own hand.  I have no problem crediting others for their contributions to who I am and what I have done.  I’ve been through periods of ill-advised hubris, thinking myself wholly self-completed, and all it left me with was an ashen taste of disappointed affirmation when I realized how unfair and ungenerous such an attitude can be and how hurtful it is to express it.  I am grateful.

I am grateful for my friends, of whom I have more than my share and who are among the best people I can imagine (and I have a pretty good imagination).  There is no way to adequately assess how important they are and have been to my life.  We have among us constructed many a worthy moment, torn through seminal evenings with laughter, tears, and unspoken commitment, reinvigorated shattered hopes among each other, and sat through despondencies together like old sailors waiting for the tide.

I am grateful to live in a place, in a time, where I can think any thought, read any book, make any art, and live according my own principles, and all without having to steal such privilege from anyone else around me.  I live in a house of books and music and art that resonates with songs of imagination and whose walls are only place markers by which the true horizons of my inner life can be appreciated in the comparison.

I am grateful to have the wherewithal to understand and appreciate what I have.

I like to think that in some small way my life has meant something, if only to a few people, and that I will not have spent my time frivolously and without effect.  If this single vanity is not self-deception incarnate, then I am grateful to have lived to a purpose.

I’m grateful for my dog.

I am mostly grateful to have a companion who shares with me without reservation.  Donna has been the best, insofar as I can understand the term, a soul mate, the one with whom I have both laughed and cried the most, and with whom this life has taken on the contours of its present delights, of which, though I complain often of what I have not yet achieved, there are many.

Everything else is secondary, transient, novelty, replaceable, but for which I am also grateful.

To all of you who have added grace and joy and the pleasure of shared experience to my life—to our lives—I thank you and hope the coming year will see a few of your hopes fulfilled.

It’s a good life.  Appreciate it.

Art

Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

And yet.

People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.