Red, Whitewash, and Black

I didn't fly a flag this last Memorial Day because I hadn't gotten around to replacing the old one, which had to be honorably discharged after flying away from the pole last November. The flag was attached to the pole with couple of thin plastic loops. Time and wind, apparently, had weakened them to the point that my flag flew free. Flag-freedom is inconsistent with the whole point of flags.

Anyway, I spent the day under a light cloud of citizen-guilt for not showing my pride. Entirely self-induced (I don't fly the flag on holidays to prove something to the neighborhood), I missed the the little ceremony of putting it out--the mute interrogation of its symbolism and the random associations it produces.

It wasn't a comfortable Memorial Day for national symbolism, however: I spent it reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's article about reparations in The Atlantic.

Reading about America's shameful history of racial prejudice, my mind kept hitting back at that pop patriotic slogan "Freedom Isn't Free" with such snide rejoinders as, "Yeah, it also requires slavery and theft." Coates's article had nothing to do with native Americans, but it didn't take much for the moral arithmetic of nation-building to amend the formula.

Even sadder, I kept thinking how all those we seek to remember on Memorial Day had died in vain because we the living couldn't figure out a way to live up to the ideals the flag represents.

And the flag, too, in and of itself.  I found myself going even further than Coates, in a way. He at one point in the article writes that "reparations would mean the end of yelling 'patriotism' while waving a Confederate flag." My reaction was: wrong flag, Mr. Coates. Most of what you write about - slavery up until the Civil War, Jim Crow, redlining - happened under the star-spangled banner. Maybe we shouldn't be yelling "patriotism" while waving the American flag until we face the reality that the effects of its long history of civic abuse thrive in ways that are injurious to our future as a nation.

It is, I realize, the height of folly for me to believe that there is any hope for any attempt at a moral reckoning, so the fantasy that the owners of Monticello would tithe the proceeds of their ill-gotten plantation tourist dollars into a fund for minority business incubation will always remain such. Too many people will point to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and say "mission accomplished" or "heckuva job, Brown vs. Board of Ed."

To anyone who thinks I've somehow joined the ranks of the "Blame America First" crowd (whoever they are), you're wrong. My shame and disappointment come from the fact that I'm practically religious about the nature of Americanism, its ideals, and its promises.

Every religion claims that its tenets are true, yet no religion can verify those truths except on the basis of faith and belief. My American religion believes that every American citizen is bound to every other American citizen by our common citizenship. The U.S. Constitution is our Torah; the Declaration of Independence is our Sermon on the Mount; our history provides our Chronicles and Epistles; our Constitutional history provides our Talmud.

If doubts have begun to bedevil me to the point that they drown out the apologists with their evidence of progress, some of it comes from my own immersion in American scripture:

• An obvious one: the Constitutional three-fifths clause that, for the purposes of tax assessment, distinguishes between "free persons" and "other persons." Slavery was euphemized into the Constitution. Four score and some-odd years and hundreds of thousands of slave-and soldier-deaths later, it was removed. But the taint was not. It's the kind of taint that turns the lofty ideals of Jefferson into the empty rhetoric of a political windbag.
• Federalist Papers #51: James Madison theorized that the Constitutional structure, through its deft balancing of powers and by its ability to act on individual citizens, would protect the rights of minorities in the states. Except the ones who had no rights to start with and who've had to fight every step of the way to get them in the first place and to keep fighting just to hold on to them.

But, believe it or no, it gets worse. I read Coates at the same time as I was reading a slim volume by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called Lines of Descent: W.E.B. DuBois and the Emergence of Identity. DuBois was one of the giants of Africa-America. A cofounder of the NAACP, he spoke out loudly on the subject of American racial discrimination when it was at its worst. The book details DuBois's education, particularly his years at the University of Berlin, at that time the pre-eminent institution of advanced historical and social thought, and as such provides a sort of intellectual history of DuBois's lifelong efforts to nail down the concept of race. More vividly, Appiah describes race identity for DuBois as "the angel he wrestled with his entire life."

DuBois understood early on that race had no validity as a physical construct, but he was powerfully drawn to the possibility of a Negro race as a cultural construct that would be found to be a positive force in human affairs. For example, he found in Negro spirituals an expression of Herderian Volksgeist, a striving of a corporate body toward a unique formulation of the human experience. 

Ultimately, however, the positive aspect of DuBois's definitional project foundered, even if DuBois himself "never left the world of idealistic ethical nationalism," according to Appiah. The project was sunk to the level of the white supremacist. Asked what it is that makes someone a black man, DuBois's most enduring answer, the one that seems to have had most resonance with him, was "the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia."

Or, he might have added, suffered whatever such "daily cruelties" and "public insults" of racism that attended his childhood in Massachusetts. Because they were certainly there. It was only in Germany that DuBois was able to live life beyond the artificial distinction of race. "In the days of my Sturm und Drang," he wrote, "this was the land where I first met white folk who treated me as a human being." And, in turn, the Negro came to see white folks beyond the prism of race: "I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks but folks.”

But no matter his kaiserlich handlebar mustache or his marriage proposal from the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, DuBois could not hold on to the sense that all people were just "folks." He - like the returning black American soldiers from every overseas conflict - had to return to a country where folks weren't just folks. They were white folks or black folks. And it made a difference.

It made a difference to DuBois by galvanizing his identity as "a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia." It gave him a cause and a struggle. He recognized that its source was tainted: “The race pride of Negroes is not an antidote to the race pride of white people; it is simply the other side of a hateful thing.” But there was no way he could turn his face on the overwhelming injustice and hypocrisy of the phenomenon: “If in the hey-day of the greatest of the world’s civilizations, it is possible for one people ruthlessly to steal another, drag them helpless across the water, enslave them, debauch them, and then slowly murder them by economic and social exclusion until they disappear from the face of the earth—if the consummation of such a crime be possible in the 20^th century, then our civilization is vain and the republic is a mockery and a farce.”

Can we say we are past all of that, finally, thanks to the civil rights movement? Are we at the point sought by DuBois, where he could be, as he wrote, "both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face”? Are we past the experience of the spiritual--the unique formulation that branded an entire people with the sense that only death would bring release from unyielding oppression--because it has faded in the sunlight of a here and now Promised Land?

I don't believe we are, partly because the healthiest, most robust plant in the conservatory of American culture is the racial one. It is watered and fertilized on all sides. Look at Barack Obama--black or white? White mother, right? So he's definitely white. What do you mean, he's black? Whatever happened to the mother tongue? Matrilineal identity is a strong, binding practice in many cultures; what do you mean, it's not available? Well, it just isn't: it's not available to an American whose skin is the same color as a slave's. The American mind is still riding Jim Crow in Georgia.

Not that the fruit of the racial plant is necessarily poisonous. Look, for example, at the development of the blues as an outsider phenomenon, as a way for a downtrodden, black minstrel to live a life free from The Man.

But nobody bargained on the overwhelming influence of the blues. Nobody figured that white boys like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley would sing 'em. Think how delicious it must be - the poison going down - that The Southern Man has made blues music part and parcel of his own identification as he follows his Rebellious course, imagining that his treason is patriotism, toward the destruction of a civic project that he can only identify as Yankee, even though its champions were mostly Virginians. Join him to ghetto gangsterism in all its misogynist, steroid, blinging, FUCK Y'ALL, 1-in-3-imprisoned-black-baby-boy rage, and we get the culture we deserve: the consummation of the union of hatreds in the big revival tent of the Whisky Rebellion, where Original Sin isn't just heritable, it's your birthday suit, and they ain't no changing it.

People who think the problem of reparations is a problem of who gets paid don't understand that reparations isn't about money. It's about repair. It's about fixing what has been broken from the very beginning.

Nor is it about amending the Constitution. The Constitution, through the process of ongoing juridical interpretation, is continuously morphing, even if, technically, the changes don't qualify as amendments. The changes surely have meaning, though, and they sure have effect. It isn't possible to think of a single "constitutional" issue and not realize that.

What the Constitution cannot do is to instill within us a sense of what it means to be a citizen. For example, it is obvious that the current argument about the Second Amendment rests, on both sides, on the individualistic side of the equation--on the right of the individual to own a firearm. What it entirely ignores is the civic aspect of the Second Amendment, which states rather baldly that a militia is essential to freedom. And yet where is the militia today? Where is the civic component of the Second Amendment? It does not exist.

So the project of reparations is a project of identity. It is a project to enable the notion of citizenship to form the core of one's American identity. It is as much a project of internal improvements as anything Alexander Hamilton or Henry Clay or Dwight Eisenhower ever imagined--and I use those names advisedly to show that something like this is as much a Republican thing as a Democratic thing. It is as much a technical endeavor as the space program or the Strategic Defense Initiative, and it will pay way more dividends.

Think of it as a huge flag project. I don't worship the flag per se. I revere it for what I believe it means. I identify myself with those meanings. I am one thread in the flag.

The thing about being a thread in a flag is that no one can be forced to be part of it. You have to choose to be part of it. Now what if the fact of the American flag today is that large numbers of people choose not to be part of it? The weave is coming apart; it's fraying; it's full of holes. It looks like the flag could use some …

I think I heard you say "repair." And why not? In the whole time it's been there, it's never been done.

Let's Talk about (Recorder) Love, part 2

Nested within the week leading up to the performance of Noye’s Fludde, unforeseen by fortune cookie or horoscope or Nostradamus, was a massively random second recorder event also involving a ship.

First of all, really, I don’t do that much recorder playing. And secondly, I never ever play recorder about ships. So when it happens twice in the space of seven days, you’d better believe I’m either the Most Interesting Man in the World, or I’m God, resting.

Anyway, the second event—which, temporally, was the first event (nesting! nesting!)—was this: I performed on the soprano recorder, epically, the epic 8-bar pennywhistle solo from the epic Celine Dion song My Heart Must Go On from the soundtrack of the epic movie Titanic. This was done in an epic concert by an epic middle school choir conducted by my epic wife.

But what really made it all seem like an epic voyage to the epicenter of the earth is that I was in the middle of a book written by a music critic, Carl Wilson, about his efforts to come to terms with Celine Dion; or more accurately, to come to terms with the fact that, while he can’t stand her music, millions of people around the world adore it. So, I was getting to play the epic music at the same time as I was reading about an epic effort to not hate it that, along the way, said some things that led me to ponder why Titanic is so epic and (nesting! nesting!) Noye’s Fludde is so not.

Odysseus, do you hear sirens? What? They’re singing Nearer My God to Thee? My God! (resting! resting!)

Given all this epicness—which I’d love to spice up if only I had an épicerie—I must first admit that using the soprano recorder for the pennywhistle was a massively uncool thing to do. Also, “massively” is the adverb of choice for qualifying descriptors connected with such epicity.

But, about the uncoolness. Carl Wilson believes in cool, or, rather in the power of cool. In his book Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, Wilson has this to say: “In early 21^st century terms, for most people under fifty, distinction boils down to cool.[Wilson’s italics] Cool confers status—symbolic power. It incorporates both cultural capital and social capital, and it’s a clear potential route to economic capital. Corporations and culture-makers pursue it as much as individuals do. … As much as we avow otherwise, few of us are truly indifferent to cool, not a little anxious about whether we have enough, and Bourdieu’s theory may illustrate why that’s not merely shallow: being uncool has material consequences. Sexual opportunity, career advancement and respect, even elementary security can ride on it. To ignore cool may mean risking downward mobility at a time when many people are falling out of the middle class.”

Bourdieu is Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist whose ideas of the derivation and dependence of taste upon social position are what’s left after Wilson boils down a brew of argumentation about aesthetics that also includes Kant and Hume as ingredients until they get vaporized. Gotta boil down to something.

If it seems like I’m boiling this down to dismissiveness (in massively epic fashion), it’s a shame, because I really did enjoy the book. I read it twice, and I re-read books as much as I play recorder about ships. I will give it four stars on Goodreads. Wilson’s dogged pursuit of “an experiment in taste, in stepping deliberately outside one’s own aesthetics” in order to answer the question “What is the real substance of the dislike I … have for Celine Dion” is indeed exemplary. The world could use more such exercises in empathy.

But, “distinction boils down to cool”? I can only register that with a wince.

Regardless of what people think about Dion, when it comes to “her” music, she is just the voice. She does not write the lyrics or the music. She doesn’t do the arrangements. So—making distinctions here, which I know is probably a different sense of “distinction” than the one Wilson uses, but it is the original, essential one—there are many aspects of a song like My Heart Will Go On that people may or may not like, and when it comes to the first 8-bar instrumental introduction, which sets the tone for the rest of the song, to use a recorder instead of a pennywhistle is massively uncool.

If you think like Wilson, you might assume I mean that the soprano recorder—due no doubt to its association with classrooms full of children using it to butcher Hot Cross Buns with such fervidness that John Wayne Gacy starts to look like Francis of Assisi—possesses some kind of downward mobility unpossessed by the pennywhistle, and that, as a result of using it, I’m going to fall out of the middle class. Outraged purists of epic pennywhistle solos, players of Cards Against Humanity, blue-faced Wallaceites, Celtomanes, fans of the Pogues and the Dropkick Murphys: all will rise up and prevent me from pursuing a career as a performer at epic middle school choir concerts, and I will be left to play for pennies on interstate off-ramps.

[A class of recorders in a gym. My ears bleed at the very idea.]

While I’m prepared to face that (more in a bit), that isn’t what I meant. I meant it is musically uncool because, well, it boils down to fingering.

It's not easy to explain if you're not familiar with how woodwind instruments work, but it's sort of like the difference between a fitted wrench and an adjustable one: the fitted wrench only works on one size of nut, but it works perfectly on that nut. The adjustable wrench, on the other hand, can be made to work on all sizes of nuts, but imperfectly so (slipping, etc.).

In musical terms, while both instruments are basically just whistles on a tube perforated with holes, an F pennywhistle matches the song key with a simple fingering pattern well suited to accomplish the slides and finger vibrato that a truly distinctive (meaning excellent) rendering of the music demands. The soprano recorder, on the other hand, can play the notes, but has to use harder, more awkward finger patterns and combinations to do so. These so-called "forked" fingerings can't provide as many of the characteristic stylings, so it doesn't sound quite the same.

It meant I'd basically be faking it. And fake it I did. Epically, of course.

But what you must know—and here’s the “more in a bit,” all you Cropdick Celtomanes—I tried to buy an F pennywhistle the weekend before the concert, but the local music store only had the usual selection of D’s, which works for 95% of Celtic music, so why stock an F? For all those people who make a living playing the first 8 bars of My Heart Will Go On with middle school choirs?

So, now you know: if I fall out of the middle class as a result of faking an epic pennywhistle solo on the soprano recorder, I fall advisedly.

It all boils down to massive épiceries.

Let's Talk about (Recorder) Love, part 1

I peaked last Sunday morning, 18 May, 2014. My whole life, in one respect, led up to that day’s hour between 11 a.m. and noon.

It wasn’t peaking at the same level that getting married is, or having children is, or having children get married is. Those are the Himalayas of life geography, to me anyway.

No, this was a lesser peak, but still a significant one. Let’s just call it my Ararat, for an obvious reason: Last Sunday I peaked as a recorder player by performing the solo treble (alto) part in my church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde.

Britten composed his setting of the Noah story designedly to accommodate the varied abilities of amateur and professional musicians. Thus, the treble recorder part calls for a solo player and ripieno players. Ripieno recorders? I knew the term from its association with violin family members in the Baroque concerto grosso, which alternates between sections of the whole orchestra playing together—the ripieno passages—and sections when just the soloists play. As one who’s been in a roomful of people learning to play recorder at the same time, I had to question the wisdom of this particular aspect of Britten’s orchestration.

Happily for the musical quality of the production (I like to think), there were no ripieno treble recorders. It was just myself along with two descant (soprano) recorders, both played tastefully and in tune by my wife and one of my daughters. Three is a good number of recorders. More than that, and the warbling starts to move along the timbrometer in the direction of shrieking.

Three is an even better number of recorders if it’s two parents and an offspring. It was the second time for me—so that I now realize with no small bemusement that maybe the peaking was indeed of an Himalayan scale.

I’ve been a recorder player since I was a child. My parents played recorder. My mother taught me to play; my father set a rigorous performance standard. Occasionally we performed as a trio—The Barry Consort—in churches or at the occasional downtown arts festival in Chattanooga.

I still have the books we played from. Most of the music consists of keyboard or string pieces transcribed—in a peculiar mid-20^th century variation of Tin Pan Alley—by arrangers who seem to have lived off the ravenous hunger for something, anything for recorder demanded by participants in the great recorder revival (the recorder having gone extinct in the 19^th century).

The picture above show the cover of an exceptional case: a recorder trio actually composed for recorders in the early 1700's. My mother's handwriting shows that its 5 movements--minus the Overture, which her handwriting says to "skip"--took 10 minutes to perform. (Notice the stamps: House of Music on 732 Cherry St., Chattanooga--back then music stores had music, meaning sheet music; and my father's handmade recorder name stamp.)

At less than 2 minutes per, our selections were generally very short—often, in the case of the up-tempo ones, less than a minute. These tunes were originally written to be danced to, and as such, originally, would have been repeated 3 or 4 times, then followed by other tunes, similarly repeated, to form a long enough set to make the dancers require a break to refresh themselves with perry, flip, or shrub.

Here's the first page from a two-page piece from the Faber book shown above. I just timed a "performance" of the whole thing in my head, with repeats as marked. It took 44 seconds.

These pieces The Barry Consort played one time through. There was no dancing to recorder music at downtown arts festivals in Chattanooga. This meant my father did a lot of talking to pad the program, which was fine, really, because nobody knew what continent recorders came from or what they ate or why anybody would want to consort with them. With that level of not knowing, everyone seemed okay with letting my father be the ranger in a musical Jurassic Park.

Among the first things you learn about these creatures is that there are two sets of fingerings, which go by the names of the pitches that sound when you cover all the holes: C and F. At first I played the C-fingered instruments, the soprano and tenor. In the trios played by The Barry Consort the soprano generally had the prominent part—the “lead” or the “melody” or whatever label best says “here be flash.” Naturally that was the part I wanted to play, but I would’ve had to assassinate my father to have it, so I settled for the backup quarterback role: I could scrimmage by myself with the soprano part, but in performance I played tenor. Functioning musically as the bass voice of the ensemble, it was the largest of the three instruments, and it was being played by the smallest person in the trio. Thus, quite early on, I became aware of the many ways that size does and does not matter.

In The Barry Consort my mother played the F-fingered alto recorder, which, sounding the inner voice, is analogous to the viola in a string ensemble. I think it was the Bohemian composer Dvorak who said the viola is the most important instrument in the orchestra. The viola is also the butt of most instrument jokes. It must’ve been these I was channeling in my musically preconscious recorder trio days: alto equals viola does not equal flash.

Except, as I was soon to learn, alto does not necessarily equal viola. In Baroque music, it turns out, alto equals rock star. When J. S. Bach writes a part for “flauto,” he doesn’t mean flute like we think of flute. He’s using the term as shorthand for “flauto dolce,” which was Baroque music’s term for the alto recorder, one of its pre-eminent solo voices. I hadn’t ever been a real lover of Baroque music until I went to college and began playing Bach on the oboe. I was hooked. So badly did I want to learn F fingering and play Bach’s Brandenburg flauto parts that I dreamed myself into it: I had a dream that mapped out the alto’s F-fingering for me. I’d gone to bed unable to read alto recorder music; when I woke up the ability was there.

I learned those Brandenburg parts; I learned a whole book of alto recorder parts from the Bach cantatas; I never performed them, but I scrimmaged them. I coulda been a contenda.

(The music above is one of my favorites: the recorder part to the aria Bestelle dein Haus from Cantata 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit.)

I did go on to work out a folk-rock improvisational style on the recorder that my friend Lawson Garrett let me use in some of his songs.

But at the age of 60, while I didn’t think about it much, I would’ve told anyone that my recorder glory days had happened back when I was playing tenor with The Barry Consort in a big tent out in front of the Tivoli Theatre in Chattanooga and questioning the appeal of 50-second one-off tunes.

When the church music director asked me a couple of months ago if I knew any recorder players who’d help with a performance of Noye’s Fludde, I told him I’d try to find some (I know a few musicians). I wasn’t eager to play—I had the idea that Britten’s use of recorders would be infantile, along the lines of Carl Orff. Nothing against Carl Orff at all. I just didn’t want to tootle rudiments. While I was procrastinating on finding any other recorder players, the music director got the music to me.

Holy spit.

This wasn’t Orff. This was a real alto recorder part. It ran the gamut from the lowest notes to the highest ones. It had difficult keys. It had some demanding passage-work. It had … flutter tonguing. Flutter tonguing! That’s when you roll your r’s while blowing. I could do it, but I’d never ever performed a flutter tongue. More than a part, the alto recorder had a role: as the voice of the dove in the Noah story, it’s the recorder that delivers the musical news of dry land to the passengers of the ark.

Even so, I can’t say I jumped at the opportunity. Could a church choir pull this off? There would be one rehearsal of the entire production. Just one?  Just one rehearsal for a Britten opera? Those are long odds. Even if the story has the ark making it through the flood unscathed, there was no guarantee that we would. I practiced my part and hoped for the best.

As it happened, the choir’s core soloists—vocal majors at ETSU, along with a couple of others in their cohort—carried the main parts with aplomb, and, with them leading the way, Britten’s crafted involvement of choir, children,  instruments, and a hymn-singing congregation worked its magic.

While somewhere in the orchestra, helping the ark to Ararat, a recorder player wound up high and dry on a peak of his own.

Fade to Black (Friday)

Recently people were thinking about where they were fifty years ago on Nov. 22, 1963. I was in the fifth grade classroom of Dorothy Leader, one of the notoriously few Democrats residing in the town of Signal Mountain, Tennessee. When the word came that President Kennedy had been shot, Mrs. Leader collapsed in tears. School was dismissed early that day.

Why do we remember some days so well, while the memory of other momentous days--not one whit less significant in the large or small scheme of things--fades into nonexistence? My children remember the Challenger explosion; I don't.

Where was I last Dec. 14? At work, probably; I don't remember. It was the day of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. A horrific Friday, which I probably followed via news reports on the Internet. Probably. What would there be for me to remember? Sitting at my desk looking at a screen? I do that every day. But that's what I remember about 9/11: I was sitting at my desk looking at a screen. I remember it very well.

But even if not the stuff of visceral memory, 12/14 to me became something more important. It became a symbol of quite a different kind of vulnerability than did 9/11: a symbol of America's failure to accomplish the Second Amendment.

Rather than a single, flashing moment that can be replayed in slow motion, it's more a sense of inscribing marble.

The Sandy Hook massacre, a Black Friday for the ages, happened last year during Advent. My Advent is shaped not so much by liturgical dates as by the traditional songs sung during the season, including The Coventry Carol, about the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod. I used an instrumental version for a little movie that I put together a couple of days later.

A couple of days after that I wrote a blog to explain it all. To explain why Sandy Hook was the result of a monumental failure of the country to live up to the Second Amendment. The real Second Amendment, not the one spouted by the N.R.A. You know, the real Second Amendment? The one that begins "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state ..."? The one whose current, eponymous Wikipedia article leads off saying has nothing to do with service in a militia?

What settled in was kind of a sense of horror, matched by a huge, questioning kind of wonder: horror at this colossal void in our civic makeup--something's supposed to be there, but it just isn't--and then why not? And why isn't anybody talking about this? "Well-regulated militia" ... "necessary" … "security" … "free state." But ... but ... but ... There is no well-regulated, citizen-armed militia. There hasn't been one since forever. Does anybody not feel the least bit insecure? No? Well, I guess not. After all, we have the National Security Agency.

It's obvious that we don't believe what the Second Amendment says about a well-regulated militia.

I spent the year inventing a stage where there are people who talk about it, think about it, dream about it, sing about it. Because isn't that the way the real Second Amendment imagines it to be? Not "when the caissons go rolling along," or "off we go into the wild blue yonder," or "to the halls of Montezuma." Listen to that, forefather revolutionaries: The devil of a standing army has all the good tune. Somebody needs to change that.

So now, in time for the first anniversary of that awful day in Connecticut, is a book written so it will always be remembered: Bathrobes Pierre. It's out, for sale, available in print or ebook. 80% of royalties will go to the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, which I'll track on the book's website. There'll be a launch on Dec. 14 at the Acoustic Coffeehouse in Johnson City from 3 - 4:30 p.m. Not many books come with a soundtrack.

Just because this is a benefit for Sandy Hook, don't think that this is going to be your knee-jerk, libtard, gun-nut-hating screed. Part of the problem is that the country is unnecessarily divided by the reigning, unbalanced interpretation of the Second Amendment. This is very much a "we the people" kind of book. We need to stop thinking about gun control and start thinking about gun organization. We need to stop contracting out our fighting and start having to do it ourselves: it's a proven way both to cut down on the number of wars and make decisive the ones you do fight. Part of the purpose of the book is to remind all Americans--men and women-- that, according to the Second Amendment, the dimensions of our civic duties are much greater than we currently imagine.

But hey, it'd be more interesting to read the book. There are some interesting characters. There's a plot. There's a denouement. Oratory. Humor. Sarcasm. It doesn't ask "Who is John Galt?" but "Who are we?" Give it a, er, shot. Aim it at your friends. Here's some trailers you could share:

Bathrobes Pierre trailer 1

Bathrobes Pierre trailer 2

Wonderwall Martyrs

Wonderwall Martyrs (music video) 

This is a disaster ballad of sorts, a simple verse/chorus song written at least partly in a centuries-old tradition of topical balladeering.

The disaster commemorated here is the May 13, 2013, Rana Plaza clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh in which perished more than 1,000 people, mostly women. It was a horrendous catastrophe--the deadliest structural failure in modern history.

After that awful event I found myself humming the beginning of former Beatle George Harrison's song "Bangladesh." The lyric for those notes is simply the name of country sung twice--six syllables, short/short/long, short/short/long--on the notes of a minor triad: "Bangladesh, Bangladesh." Harrison wrote his song back in 1971 as part of a relief effort to raise money for the then-new country, which was wracked by civil war atrocities and natural disasters. Something made me want to use the beginning of Harrison's song as the framework for a new song to honor the memory of the slain. I wanted the first syllables to rhyme with "Bangladesh." Under the circumstances, "Rana death" seemed appropriate.

Harrison also produced an off-album that I liked very much, called "Wonderwall." It was a motley collection of mostly instrumentals. While the referent of its name is to something from Hindu mythology, my thinking was being shaped by the fact that mega-retailer Walmart has been a prime beneficiary of low labor costs in Bangladesh. I saw the victims of Rana Plaza as the martyrs of a system that returns billions in profits to such corporations as Walmart even as it buries its workers beneath the rubble of the false promise of a corporate Wonderwall.

The present disaster in Bangladesh is not the result of war or storms. It is the result of greed. It is the result of a global fashion industry that looks for the highest possible profit margin by finding the cheapest labor and the least regulations. People like me reap the benefit--good clothes at low prices from Walmart--even as other people elsewhere in the world get killed making them.

Bangladesh is a poor country--154th out of 187 countries on the IMF ranking of GDP per capita (2012). Certainly its people need jobs. I do not have an answer to the gross maldistribution of global income. All I say is that, if this is the result of some Adam Smithian invisible hand, it is certainly not a benevolent one, and perhaps we can allow for an invisible handkerchief to weep into whenever these things happen.

Which they will do, as they have done whenever and wherever greed cuts corners--which it will always do. It wasn't difficult to find connections with garment-factory disasters in the past, most notably the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, when 146 people--again, mostly women, as garment workers overwhelmingly are--lost their lives in a Manhattan skyscraper because managers had locked the doors to stairwells and exits.

Because Bangladesh is a Muslim country, the song invokes Allah. But because the history of garment worker disasters shows it to be an international problem in an unjust world, the refrain includes "Dios" and "Elohim" as supplications of the poor and the powerless.

The azan (call to prayer) at the beginning of the song is an incipit transcribed by Dr. Alaeddin Yavasca and Yusuf Eroglu. It is in the public domain.

I tried to use pictures and graphic materials that were in the public domain; many were made available through Wikimedia Commons.

The traditional tune "Rights of Man" also makes an appearance (with modifications to fit the chords). Surely the title of the tune refers to the book by Thomas Paine, in which he says that governments that do not benefit all their citizens, men and women, are illegitimate.

Lyrics:

Rana death
fight for breath
Wonderwall martyrs on the floor
gave it all
after the fall
Allahu akbar

Saw a crack
in the wall
8 floor high factory
if I go back there
I'm sure to die
Allahu akbar

Chorus:
Allah O Dios Elohim
yeah, away!
Praise the one who threw the stars
Allahu akbar

What a jerk
I still hurt
bossman come to me from his sports car
he said get to work
I STILL hurt
Allahu akbar

Chorus

Made a bet
ain't cashed in yet
bossman he died in the fall
how can a desert
be so wet?
Allahu akbar

Chorus (twice)

The Appalachian Appellation, or the London Derriere

Many people I know, among them good friends and family members, get exercised if someone pronounces "Appalachia" as "Appa-LAYSH-a." You might say "them's fightin' words," except that it's more a fightin' pronunciation.

In case you don't know, dear innocent person from outside Appalachia, the correct pronunciation is "Appa-LATCH-a" (or Appa-LATCH-an, if you're walking a certain trail by that name).

And when I say "correct," all I really mean is that I have to say that. Unless I want to be visited at night by an unruly crowd of certain good friends and family members, who, normally calm and reasonable to a fault, lose all sense of proportion when confronted with an alternate pronunciation of this word.

There'd be a howl like you wouldn't believe.You'd think someone was trying to pry the family musket from hands that weren't quite cold and dead. Or mine coal underneath your house without paying you for it. Or not let you kill Injuns.

Sorry. I take that back. Sorta.

Most recently, the Appalatchian pronunciamentally-correct applauded novelist Sharyn McCrumb's high-horse pontification on the subject: it's like saying "Londonderry" in northern Ireland, instead of "Derry." If you say the former, heaven forbid, everybody knows you're siding with the enemy. Everybody knows you've taken sides with those who stole the land from the original inhabitants.

Aside from its tendentious inaccuracy and over-simplification, what's so goldurn hilarious about this is that the people who "stole" the land in Ulster were the same people who, for the most part, "settled" the Appalachians ... in the latter case at the expense of the people from whom came the word "Appalachian." So don't be saying a pronunciation pits a goldurn furriner agin you, and you's a by-god native and you know what's what ... when in fact you ain't the native. When in fact you did the takin'. WHEN IN FACT ... sorry, let me not howl. Let me just ask, "How do you pronounce 'hypocritical?'"

I grew up in Chattanooga. Nearby was Lafayette, GA, which natives pronounce "Luh-FAY-it." The Lafayette in Indiana is pronounced differently by the natives there. And neither one is how my French-speaking Louisiana creole grandmother thought it ought to be. And by the way, she came from "Nawlins." What am I supposed to say to someone who says "New ORlins" or even more horrifyingly, "New OrLEENS"? Who's right, the French who say "Paree," or the rest of the world who say "Perris"?

The reality is that the Appalachian pronunciation "controversy" is a simple sectional disagreement over pronunciation, nothing more. People above the Mason-Dixon Line who live in the Appalachian region, and who have lived there ever since they settled it away from the by-god Injuns, tend to pronounce it "Appa-LAYSH-an." People below the line in the south pronounce it "Appa-LATCH-an." Friends and family: This is just another example of Yankees being wrong, y'all. Simple as that. What do you expect from people who don't drink iced tea year-round?

As for Londonderry, I'm sure everyone knows that the popular song Danny Boy is sung to the tune Londonderry Air. If you decide to take Sharyn McCrumb's advice and abbreviate the name of the tune and announce that you will sing Danny Boy to the tune of the Derry Air, you'd better be prepared to, as it were, back it up.

The Crime of the Nation

You know the symptoms, anyone who's grieved: the sob surges that you fight to contain; tears sting the eyes. It's a paroxysm. We have them in rage and in grief.  Sometimes in both.

I remember having particularly mixed-up ones after 9/11: so much sorrow for the dead, and so much fury at the attack. Anger, I think, had the edge, at least for me. That's not the case now, after last Friday's massacre of children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut. All I feel now is grief.

Everybody finds a way to cope, and to hope. Music and elevated words in foreign languages help me. It feels as if Brahms Requiem saved my life at one point--not only its music but its German words: Selig sind die Toten. I don't know why those strange words feel better to me than "Blessed are the dead." Maybe in some sense it's an attempt to approach the absolute foreignness of eternity. Music seems to work that way, as we were reminded last week with the death of Ravi Shankar, who believed that music gives us a joyful link to the universe.

Or a sorrowful one, even during the Christmas season. Nothing could be more sorrowful than the Coventry Carol. But how poignant it feels now; how stabbing! It's a lullaby, for crying out loud, a lullaby about King Herod's slaughter of the innocents. "Lullay, thou little tiny child." More unbearably, in the traditional mummer's play about the event, the singer is a mother singing to her doomed child. I used to play it on recorder in a trio with my parents. Back then I thought it never really belonged to Christmas. In my childish literalness I didn't think there could be a chronological connection to the Nativity. Accurate as that may be, I don't feel that today. I can't look at anything, from seasonal decoration to mundane commonplace, and not think of the disappearance of these children ripped from life. Nor can I say anything that feels appropriate to the grief. All I can do is place my feelings on some raft of a foreign language and say lacrimae rerum.

Literally, "tears of things." These are the words that Virgil attributes to Aeneas when the escaped Trojan prince, cast ashore in Carthage, wanders into a temple where he sees a frieze of the battles for Troy. The memory of his slaughtered family overwhelms him, and, Virgil writes, Aeneas cries a river, saying "Is there anywhere in the world that does not have miseries to cause such tears, that does not share such sorrow?"

But, importantly, the weeping Aeneas also says to the marble image of slain King Priam, "lose your fears, for your fame will bring some benefit."

I wonder: Can we say that when we are shown the pictures of those killed in Newtown? Or is it as if they were doomed, as surely as the victims of Herod, and for nothing?

Considering this question, let's keep Virgil a little longer as our guide to our national purgatory. It is from him, also in the Aeneid, that we get the expression "beware of Greeks bearing gifts." The perspective is a Trojan one--beware them because the "gift" the Greeks brought to them was the hollow wooden horse that brought about the city's destruction. But Virgil has an even more telling line only a little later: Crimine ab uno disce omnes. "From a single crime know the nation." The crime of the Greek nation, in the Trojan view, was treachery: the wooden horse was presented as a peace offering, when in fact it was the opposite.

What is the crime by which our nation is to be known?

I had never heard of Newtown, Connecticut. But the night before the shooting I was reading 1775: A Good Year for Revolution by Kevin Phillips, an important and well-received account of the events that gave the American rebels a strong enough headstart to see them through the ensuing war with Great Britain.

In a section of the book that discusses the colonial militias there is mention of Newtown as being at the time "suspect" for its Tory sympathies. As I read, the name flashed by and melted into the other names-Fairfield, Litchfield, Ridgefield--until the next day, when the news broke. I thought, "Didn't I just see that name?" It wasn't in the index--the mention was too inconsequential--but I hadn't read very far past the mention and was able to find it at the top of p. 155.

Coincidentally, Newtown is mentioned in the part of the book that discusses the role and importance of colonial militias. Phillips, citing military historians as "the literary equivalent of expert witnesses," says that the militia functioned as an "internal security force" that made and kept the hinterlands safe for the patriot cause and enabled the Continental Army to confront the British on the battlefield. To elucidate the nature of this internal security duty, he quotes historian John Shy (A People Numerous and Armed) at length (p. 162):

Once established, the militia became the infrastructure of revolutionary government. It controlled its community, whether through indoctrination or intimidation; it provided on short notice large numbers of armed men for brief periods of emergency service; and it found and persuaded, drafted, or bribed, the smaller number of men needed each year to keep the Continental army alive. After the first months of the war, popular enthusiasm and spontaneity could not have sustained the struggle; only a pervasive armed organization, in which almost every took some part, kept people constantly, year after year, at the hard task of revolution.

Of course we know why this is important: because we, in our ignorance or weakness, have settled into an accepted understanding of the Second Amendment that is wrong, even though its meaning should be as plain as day.

The "well-regulated militia" understood in the amendment, by the testimony of history, means a militia that is an organized, statutory creature of state government. They were military organizations with a hierarchical structure. They were not every man or woman for him/herself, packing heat in a handbag or a bedside table or a man-cave gun rack. While they might presumably draw on those resources, as the Second Amendment clearly intends, equally important is organization and preparedness so as to bring to bear those resources for some public purpose.

We cannot understand or interpret the Second Amendment without reference to a well-regulated militia. To do so is to accept the kind of anarchy that is to blame for the disaster that we have just experienced in Connecticut. Even if we insist that "Congress shall make no law," nothing prevents the states from acting on their own constitutional subordinations of the military function to the civil authority by obligating those citizens who choose to be armed to perform some civil duty. It should be a requirement: own a weapon, be enrolled in the militia; do militia duty just as you would jury duty.

Like what? After all, there are no more Tories to tar and feather. What about being assigned--with regular training--to be a school security guard and being given civil leave a few days a year to perform the assignment? Even if assault rifle ownership is restricted after Newtown, there will still be ample opportunity for mayhem, and our schools are woefully under-protected. If our ancestors on the frontier, in all their Founding Fatherly wisdom, formed civil militias to respond to the threat of violence, why should we not do the same?

What is the crime of the nation? What hollow, wooden horse beckons, appearing as a gift, but posing a treacherous threat? It is, quite simply, our confusion of private rights with the public good on the subject of gun ownership. This is a criminal misconstruction of the Second Amendment. Individual concealed- or open-carry vigilantes are not and cannot be the "Militia of this Country," upon which George Washington conferred the title "Palladium of our security." Palladium? The Founding Fathers, conversant with the classics, knew this to mean "safeguard." (Troy again: the Palladium was the wooden statue of the goddess Athena that was believed to protect the city and that, according to Roman legend, was brought to Rome by Aeneas.)

Our security is not safeguarded by private individuals with guns. They might be able to defend themselves, but they do not defend us. To riff on another Virgilian phrase, there ain't no unum e that pluribus.

Such a nation, such a crime. Lully, lullay, our little tiny us.

Friend My Deathbed Poems

Here's a little bit of a spoiler to the book The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe: These are the last words that the author's mother ever read:

If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it.

The words are John Ruskin's, taken from a daily devotional lying on the bedside table where Schwalbe's mother died of cancer. Early in her illness one afternoon awaiting chemo, mother and son had formed a "book club" and kept it going for two years until death cut off their discussion with a volume of Alice Munro stories still to share.

As his mother lay in extremis, Schwalbe read to her a poem by Mary Oliver called Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End? It ends "Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold/fluttering around the corner of the sky/of God, the blue air." Schwalbe reports that he felt "a bit self-conscious" when he read the poem.

When my mother--a lover of reading--was dying under similar circumstances, someone--I remember it being my brother Kevin--read to her one of her favorites, the grandfather's poem from Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, which begins "How calmly does the olive branch/observe the sky begin to blanch." It was a beautiful performance absent, I hope, of any self-consciousness at all. That came later, when after she breathed her last we sang Amazing Grace in a spontaneous spasm of fideism for which Mama must bear responsibility because she hadn't picked out a suitable agnostic alternative.

My mother and I didn't share books in the same way did the Schwalbes. Ours was a more librarianly type of sharing, where she shared what she knew about a book so I would read and enjoy it. Which I pretty much always did.

So, now I wonder, what did she last read? Or, meta-read? Christopher Hitchens, who became someone she would've admired, records meditating on crucifixes and their Inquisitorial significance as he lay dying in--ironically?--a Catholic hospital. Mama was at home, in what was and would be again the dining room, attended by tall bookshelves in two of the corners and perhaps comforted by their presence: priests of the mind.

Thinking about these rites of passage, I am struck at how much they have to do with reading. And then, ping-ponging back to the other pole, I wonder, after my birth, what was I first read? And also what did I myself first read to my children after they were born? And how soon? And every step of the way beyond and since: being read to/reading to, learning to read/teaching to read, being wed/wedding, being lost/losing, lifecycling/lifecycling.

Thinking thus, I wonder about Andrew Keen's notion of reading. He's written a book called Digitalvertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us.

I like boogeymen as much as anybody--but boogeymen are supposed to be present, in a very frightening way. Keen's boogeyman is invisible. At least for the first 43.33 pages of his book. That's when I put it down and went looking for a real nightmare.

Keene's alarm bell in the night is "the socials are coming." Everything and everybody (meaning tech companies) are jumping on the social networking bandwagon so they can ride the next tsunami to the moon.

Well, I'm reading Keene's laundry list of SocialVibe and PeekYou and BeKnown and thinking, "So what? You know what happens to tidal wave-propelled buggy moonshots: they don't work" when he reaches the ne plus ultra his argument:

Phew! And if this vertiginous wave of social networks isn't enough, then there is social reading - offering a giant collective hello to book lovers everywhere. Yes, reading, that most intensely private and illicit of all modern individual experience, is being transformed into a disturbingly social spectacle. Some of you may even be reading this book socially - meaning that instead of sitting alone with this book, you'll be sharing your hitherto intimate reading experience in real-time with thousands of your closest Facebook or Twitter friends via your e-readers. ... You see, social reading does, in a sense, represent the end of the world. It means the end of the isolated reader, the end of solitary thought, the end of purely individual literary reflection, the end of those long afternoons spent entirely along with just a book.

See those italics? Those are his! The end of the world! But why am I not scared? I'm the kind of person who would've pooh-poohed Noah as a warmist, and I know this about myself, so I should pay attention.

So what do I do? I give up on the book. I put the book down. I say finis to this book. And I'm using a blog and probably Goodreads to record this opinion of the book, so that ... so that what?

Mr. Keene, I don't brag about Twitter followers like you do. I don't have Twitter followers. My dog doesn't follow me. If he slips the leash, he's gone!

This blog, Mr. Keene, is my diary. Believe me: No one reads it!

And as for Facebook and Goodreads, well, they're sort of like sitting around the table in the high school cafeteria and talking about things and showing pictures, except you don't have to surrender your cookies to the Key Club bully. Or instead of having to call lots of people, you can call them all at the same time.

I will say, though, that some people are very quiet on their end of the line. I know what they're up to, though:
they're engaging in an intimate reading experience--with your damn tweets, no doubt, Mr. Keene! Ha! Caught you red-handed! Sharing! Italics yours!

To think that my and Will Schwalbe's mothers died believing that sharing was a good thing.

Get your deathbed poems ready. And then share them with somebody else. They'll be thankful. And will probably sing Amazing Grace anyway.

Wick-ipedia

A business seminar. An economist, a marketing consultant, a professor, a manufacturer. All have been asked to give their views on how businesses can get the best results in the near future. The economist says "get a more predictable regulatory climate from the government." The marketing consultant says "hone your brand." The professor says "keep an eye on what happens in Europe." The manufacturer says "be creative."

Of all the answers, I am most struck by the manufacturer's. I am surprised by it. But even more surprising is his expansion on it: "More testing in schools isn't going to produce creative people."

"Have I heard him right?" I wonder. It's not what I expect a manufacturer--conservative in dress, manner, and probably politics--to say. After all, isn't it the business community, more than any other, politically pushing the idea that more testing equals more learning? Didn't the standards-based idea that produced No Child Left Behind and the current testing regime get its muscle from the business community? Sure, there were regular Janes and Joes interested, but face it, this is the US of A, where Business is the only voter that really matters.

But is Business saying something different now? Are they thinking, "Oh, standards--that's so nineties!" Whether there is a retreat from the testing regimen or not (I listen for the sound of brakes being applied by the massive educational bureaucracy), the manufacturer at the seminar is far from being alone. Nor is it exactly breaking news: IBM's 2010 CEO survey indicates that the 1500 CEO's surveyed "now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics."

A Newsweek article from the same year invoked the survey and added a gloomy warning of American educational decline, not in achievement, but in creativity. The article mentions an American educator describing the current testing regime for his Chinese counterparts, and they laugh at him, saying that America is moving in the direction of the old Chinese system of education.

(I hasten to say that this is not a criticism of teachers. Nothing makes me cringe more than Pink Floyd's gratuitous "Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone!" Teachers are the front-line soldiers, the grunts of a misbegotten war. If you want to hear a passionate account of the myriad missed opportunities all but guaranteed by the foregone conclusion to the power struggle between teacher and unwilling student, talk to a teacher. Or watch the movie The Class and put yourself in that guy's shoes.)

You don't have to look very far to see that schools aren't just not good at creativity, they are in many respects quite bad. Here are a few examples: marching band, marching band, and marching band. Oh, and its whipping boy, football, that freakish distortion of the idea of physical fitness for all.

It almost seems that there is an inverse relationship between schooling and creativity. It's not rare for people who are both driven and smart to see the disconnect between school learning and the reality of their lives and figure out a way to cut loose. Look at all the illustrious CEO dropouts: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. (Granted, they're college dropouts; but just think how much richer they'd be if they'd quit earlier.) Why should anyone believe that school-based education holds the key to the future when those people are the shining examples of creative business success? And this is nothing new: Thomas Edison didn't even go to school, at least not much: he famously home-schooled himself in public libraries.

Those, however, are the success stories, the rare cases. We're not supposed to advocate dropping out, but if you have a passion for something and, according to Malcolm Gladwell's formula for the success of outliers, 10,000 hours to spend on it, why not? Of course, the vast majority of dropouts experience nothing like the success of Kupferberg et al. But they do experience the same disconnect between school learning and the reality of their lives. How much creativity is being wasted because of that?

More importantly for creativity, what about the majority of students who don't drop out? If we're getting worse at creativity, it's not because schools are getting worse at teaching it. It's because they're sucking more spare time out of kids' lives. If we want more creativity, we have to figure out some way to cut back the dominion of schooling. Or change the way schooling works.

Much as I should like to be alone in my folly, in this particular case I am not. If you google "schools" and "creativity," your top result will be a lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, luridly headlined "Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity." The ideas expressed in the lecture appear in expanded form in Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, which was first published in 2001 and re-released , "fully updated," in 2011.

Robinson's essential point is this: Schools, with literacy as their core function and with an industrial model of production as their modus operandi, serve only to promote effective test-takers and, ultimately, academics. What about those with other interests or abilities? "For them," he says, "education has always been an alienating experience."

Furthermore, subjects thought to be the most relevant to the adult world of work--math, science, language--are regarded as most important.  What about the arts? What about design? What about working with your hands? What about working with people? (Other than the non-credit variety known as bullying.) Robinson espouses a view of intelligence that comprises all areas of human achievement, not just the narrow band of subject matter "knowledge." Lest anyone think he means to detract from literacy, he says, "This is not an argument against developing academic abilities: it is for an expanded concept of intelligence that includes but also goes beyond them. If we fail to promote a full sense of people's abilities through education and training, some, perhaps most, will never discover what their real capacities are."

The emphasis on that last sentence is mine. Why do we persist with a system of education that we know to be not only hugely wasteful as it is, but just the reverse of what we should be doing? As a librarian who believes that learning and creativity are lifetime endeavors whose wellspring is the interests and passions of the unique individual, and that these endeavors deserve the support and encouragement of society at large, I am appalled at the wastage we tolerate, simply because we have a system in place that has "always" been there. One symptom of our societal blindness is that very few people regard libraries as having much to do with the education project, when in fact they should be one of the cornerstones.

Robinson seems to have a sense that part of the hope for transformation lies in broadening our understanding of how learning happens:

Nowadays, "school" refers to particular sorts of formal institutions that provide organized instruction, especially to young people. I am going to use the term here in a broader sense to mean any purposeful learning community, whether for children or adults, public or private, compulsory or voluntary. I include formal institutions and voluntary gatherings, from pre-kindergarten to universities, community colleges and home-based learning. Education is often associated with children and young people. By "education," I mean all of it from pre-kindergarten to adult education. When I use the word "student" I mean anyone who is engaged purposefully in learning, whatever their age and whatever the setting.

One can only hope that such a holistic, communal sense of learning takes hold. One can only hope that "no child left behind" will become "every child in front"--meaning not that there should be an equality of outcome but that there should be an equity of resources and a commitment as radical and binding as a Hippocratic oath to the value of the individual.

There is a saying commonly mis-attributed to Socrates that "education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Plutarch happens to be the most likely source of that sentiment--Socrates, after all, only asked questions--but, regardless, the vessel--our desire to learn--is already full within each one of us. How is it to be lit? Hmm, a question. Maybe it was Socrates after all.

His eye is on the sparrow and/or bottom line

It starts to seem like the chorus of a song: "I sure am lucky to work in a public library." I think I declare this at least once a week, usually when I meet with my Nevermore Book Club on Tuesdays. This last Tuesday was no exception.

My "job" for my book club is to read something--or, more often, some things--and then show up and talk about it. When there are multiple books, I like to have a thematic thread connecting them, but this is as often as not a bit of a joke, e.g. a history of Babylon and a book about vertical gardening.

Luckily for me, the library is a phenomenal place to generate connections between books. It's almost as if that's a library's reason for being--unlike a bookstore, say, which exists to sell books. There really is a  noticeable difference between staging opportunities for discovery and staging opportunities for purchase. It's as obvious as the difference between the Dewey Decimal System (or any shelf-order classification scheme) and marketing-based notions of display.

The details of last Tuesday begin with this phenomenon. Two books side by side on the new book shelf--330.973 jostling 332.49792--made me feel like Elijah hearing the still, small voice. They were Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, by Edward Conard; and The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen. Promising, no?

Even if there wasn't literally a voice (you wish), something was telling me something. One a book by the former managing director of Bain Capital (Mitt Romney's pot o' gold) and the other a book about one Daniel Suelo, who, having sworn off money altogether for essentially religious reasons, lives as a squatter in a cave on federal lands near Moab, UT; a reasonable, science-minded corporate mover and shaker vs. an irrational, faith-based social worker dropout: that's as close as you can get to thesis and antithesis. And who among you is without synthesis?

Suelo's book reveals him to be an example of what some deride as a "holy fool." Driven to live exactly according to the Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly where it says "therefore do not worry about tomorrow," Suelo dumpster-dives for food. But beyond that, he's engaged in his community as a volunteer, mostly for crisis centers and food programs. A "fixture" at the Moab Public Library, he uses a computer and the library's Internet access to maintain a blog that advances various causes, but mostly the cause of personal freedom from the tyranny of the money system. He is nothing if not principled. Here's a sense:

I went down to the train tracks and ran into a 60-something toothless hobo I'd met days before. He was nursing a beer and setting up camp at the underpass. "I was surprised when you came up and talked to me the other day. People usually don't talk to me," he said. I vented my cop woes onto him. He asked if I had a Bible. "Yeah, I found one in a dumpster," I said. "I like to read the Bible," he said. "Keeps me from getting lonely." He told me I could hope a train all the way to Bakersfield.

Conard, the tycoon/plutocrat, is principled as well, but his principles derive not from any scripture but from the belief that enabling investors is the best thing for everyone. If we want full employment, don't tax investors. If we want better health care, don't tax investors. If we want innovation, don't tax investors.

Conard finds the basis for his system in economic facts and figures--in science, in other words. In his words, as if to say "this is the way things are. It's not just what I believe." And part of the way things are, as Conard says again and again, is that success in the marketplace is the proper basis for morality and fairness.

For example, Conard's science has anointed "investors" as the saviors of the world. Investors are "risk-takers," and the object of their investment is invariably "innovation."  Woe be to you, says Conard's science, if you do not partake:

Many liberal-arts majors choose selfish solipsism over the burden of shouldering the risk and responsibility critical to increasing economic growth. They study literature and art history rather than computer programming and engineering. To add insult to injury, these people often cite a lack of fulfillment from Richard Easterlin's never-ending aspirational treadmill as their reason for choosing not to take risk or shoulder responsibility. They recognize that working hard won't make them happy. Yet they claim hard-working business leaders, problem solvers, and risk underwriters are the selfish ones, and that higher marginal tax rates and income redistribution are the true moral course. ... We should demand their leadership and risk taking as a moral responsibility--no matter their happiness--and declare as selfishly immoral the unwillingness of talented people to shoulder the burden of contributing to this supply. University professors--who lead our children--should be in the front lines of this campaign. They often preach the opposite, promoting liberal arts over engineering, computer programming, and business administration."

Yes: "liberal-arts majors" are "selfishly immoral" for their lack of risk taking, for their "selfish solipsism" of not going into such productive fields as computer programming, engineering, and business administration.

Oh, and remember: this is science.

Conard provides unassailable proof of this with a chart that shows how science test scores affect productivity ... but wait a minute. Isn't that Poland down there with the good science test scores and low-ish productivity? And isn't he trying to make the point that the USA does really well ... despite the fact that its top competitors in productivity have better science test scores? Could it be that ... surely not ... but could it be that ... hey, wait, don't go there. Conard's science proves it's impossible ... but maybe the reason for America's higher productivity, compared with higher-achieving science nerds like Finland and Hong Kong, is ... liberal arts majors.

Take a look at his litany of success stories: Google, Facebook (what, not Myspace?), Youtube, etc. How do they make their money? Not because anybody's lured by their sexy algorithms. No. It's advertising revenue, the same source of excess cash-wash float-foam that brought us broadcast television and now social networking via Internet. People buy ads. Who makes those ads? Ad people. Mad Men. "Creatives." Not engineers.

Nothing against engineers! Conard is absolutely right to say we have to encourage innovation, and engineers have infinite opportunities for creativity. But it's creativity of a different sort. It's not the same kind of creativity that enables advertising--hence marketing--to succeed. Artistic creativity--whether visual, linguistic, or musical--is an important component in an area of commercial endeavor that is fundamental to the kind of tech success that Conard brags on.

And the better it's done, the more successful it will be. For example, my money's on WordPress over Blogger as the blog platform of the future (even though I use Blogger) just because it's paid more attention to what looks good. Blogger feels like interior decoration by engineer; WordPress feels like the kind of design that winds up in MOMA (oops, art history there, sorry). Years from now, after Apple goes to its reward, Steve Jobs will still be remembered as the man who made fonts mainstream.

But let us remember that, by Conard's own invocation, this is a matter of morality. Where Suelo would give a Bible to a hobo, Conard would invest millions, as a moral act of benevolence, in something that a liberal-arts refugee (acting!) has sweet-talked him into thinking is "innovative," e.g. Myspace. What happens next? Fascinatingly, this is where Conard and Suelo come full circle and agree.

To both of them, the explanation for "why things turn out the way they do" is: chance. This is what "God" comes down to for Suelo. "If the best-laid plans were folly, then did it follow that mere chance was divine? This was Suelo's hypothesis: 'Chance is God.'" This is also the "Darwinian" randomness of the market that Conard finds thrilling and inspirational: "Survival of the fittest sets a high bar for success. Like the hit-driven music industry, one breakthrough requires hundreds of small, forgotten, and ruthlessly pruned failures." Investments are enormous, both in success and in failure. As to the actual predictability of success, Conard has only this shrug of the shoulders: "Success represents lucky investments in almost certain failure."

So much for the Protestant work ethic. Might as well be a hobo drinking beer in the morning. Given this randomness, how can success be regarded as a measure of individual productivity? And why should it be regarded as a yardstick for support to be received from public sources, support that is expressly legitimized as a safety net against the vagaries of a Darwinian marketplace?

And yet, amazingly, that's what Conard says: "Providing government services--health care, for example--that are somewhat proportional to each person's economic contribution is critical to the country's long-term success." How can this possibly be justified, even in Conard's "system," which is a crapshoot? Conard does of course justify it by saying "otherwise we must tax successful risk takers."

But take two equally hard-working, risk-taking engineers with innovative ideas; due to the vagaries of the market and the minefield of commercialization, one succeeds, but the other crashes and burns. Has there not been a social benefit from the effort of each, regardless of the economic contribution? If one breakthrough requires hundreds of failures, do the failures not "earn" something for their effort, something intrinsic that markets are too blind to recognize?

If they don't, then forget about goodness, beauty, honor, kindness, decency, generosity, the virtue of hard work, and any number of other qualities, including motherhood--which doesn't exactly lend itself to making an economic contribution unless you can be sure that your kid is going to be an engineer MBA with a job at Facebook (but not Myspace).

"Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?" Jesus famously asked. Might there be, behind this question, the thought that what you do for others is more important than what you do for yourself? Is that not also the crux of morality? Now, everyone--you too, liberal-arts majors--compute the probability that you can help others the Suelo way (absolute poverty) or the Conard way (wealth to buy your way into Heaven). What's your answer?

Sorry, Mr. Conard: you can't argue with science.

Creole Insinuation

I sing the birdsong of my desert ground
To mark my territory well.
No one will listen; no one will hear:
Why risk your bliss for hell?

All heterodox, I follow the tangents;
I'm quite the eddy-floater:
I, the rebel with my uncause,
Invisible to the voter.

Uncataloged, unclassified,
Unsigned, unclubbed, unlabeled,
Disliked, discarded, maladroit,
Malapropos, and disabled,

With malice toward none and malarkey toward all
(Clarity? Such baloney.),
My dissed divorce from reality
Doesn't provide much alimony.

Refused by the Salon of the Refused!
Don't cry for me, Guatemala!
I'm a citizen of the USA,
and that's a hard fact to swallow!

I'm the melungeon who got away:
The creole insinuation
Into the KelticK Kremery
of your inbred imagination.

Dislike

I've been trying to find an opportunity to watch Entre les murs (The Class), the French movie that won the top prize at Cannes in 2009. What it's about (from what I've read) is a year in the life of a middle school French class in inner-city Paris--which means the students are ethnically diverse and anything but privileged. Even though I've not seen it, I have found some scenes on TV5, including one in which an Antillean student named Carl delivers his "autoportrait" as part of a class assignment. He says:

I like to play soccer. I like to play on the computer. I like to flirt with pretty girls. I like to go on vacation to the Antilles. I like fries, zouk, and dancehall. I like to watch MTV Base. I like my parents and my brother. I like my friends, and staying up all night. I like the show Bitter Tropics. I like my apartment complex. I like the show Internal Security. I like to eat out and daydream. I don't like people who cry over nothing. I don't like techno and techtonic. I don't like showoffs. I don't like visiting my brother in prison. I don't like New Star and Star Academy. I don't like politicians, the Iraq War, goths, and skaters. I don't like mean teachers. I don't like math, racists, and I don't like Materazzi. I don't like Paul Eluard College and I kind of like being here.

Likes and dislikes. This is who we are, isn't it? How many of us, asked for an autoportrait, would come up with something much different in substance? We might even want some help, as seems to have happened here, along the lines of "just say what you like and then what you don't like." A strange thing happens, though, going from likes to dislikes.

The likes make sense as a category, because, no matter what it is, it's something that produces a simple pleasure. What's zouk? I had to find out (it's an Antillean dance), but it didn't make any difference. Included in the list of likes, whatever it was, I knew it was something that somebody enjoyed.

The dislikes, though, lack that kind of immediate understanding. Rather, reading through Carl's list of dislikes produces a destabilizing, complex, questioning attitude. The only thing immediate about it is the question "Why?"

• people who cry over nothing
• techno
• techtonic [techno dance]
• showoffs
• visiting my brother in prison
• New Star [French TV show similar to American Idol]
• Star Academy [French reality TV show featuring wannabe pop singers on tour]
• politicians
• Iraq War
• goths
• skaters
• mean teachers
• math
• racists
• Materazzi [the Italian soccer player who, in the 2006 World Cup Final, provoked the French player Zidane to head-butt him, which led to Zidane's expulsion from the game. Materazzi had grabbed Zidane's shirt; Zidane said if Materazzi wanted his shirt he could have it after the match; Materazzi--according to himself--countered with "I'd rather have your sister;" that's when Zidane went all metalogical on him.]
• Paul Eluard College [French middle school]

Why, for example, does Carl in a single sentence lump together math, racists, and Materazzi? Don't these represent different types of dislike, and various degrees? The sentence, however, is a confrontation: it challenges this reaction. Judge, jury, and executioner, it condemns the lot to a confraternity of badness and loads them into a guillotine-bound tumbril (hey, this is France).

Just like the dislike button on Youtube.

I've never used it myself, but it's been used on me, or rather on some videos I've posted to exhibit an oboe technique I've developed called the Celtic oboe, most recently one that gave a little explanation as to what it was and how it came to be. 

Celtic oboe is one of my many follies. It's a frivolous, fringe example of the phenomenon known as "the adjacent possible" in which someone takes things lying around, well-known and well-used, like wheels and shoes, puts them together and, voilà, roller skates. Well, there was the classical oboe, and there was traditional Irish music as played by the uilleann pipes; put the two together and, voilà, Celtic oboe.

Except it was anything but as easy as that. I had to learn circular breathing. I spent hours tinkering with different fingering combinations and applying them to music. The inventing continues. As far as oboe is concerned, when I started this folly there was no technique, no tradition, and certainly no teacher.

In general the purpose of the videos has been to say "Hey, random oboe player out there in the universe, this is interesting. You might like trying this yourself. You might figure out something else to do with this kind of technique. Like put it on roller skates."

I don't know if it's had that effect at all. I do know that there are people who dislike it enough to go beyond ignoring it and punch the dislike button. I'm imagining that the haters are either oboe (classical) purists or Irish trad purists who think I've committed an act of mongrelization that shouldn't be allowed to stand. You know, the kind of thinking that produces Aryan supremacists and ethnic cleansing.

But, painful as it is to think that my cherished folly (I don't deny that it is folly) properly belongs in some cultural landfill, I've learned to put things in proper perspective through a series of serendipitous encounters with books.

I recently (back before the most recent Youtube dislike) started reading How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, by Elijah Wald (and liked on its back cover by Tom Waits: "It nailed me to the wall."). Wald's introduction explains how his history will be different. He would try to go beyond such labels as "jazz" and "rock," which, as shibboleths, have become in our time static categories rather than the fluid potentialities they were when they were being invented. Those fluid potentialities were being transformed by all kinds of influences and factors--like the commercial one--that purists would just as soon forget.

But what stands out is Wald's adoption of classical pianist and modern music expositor Charles Rosen as his guide to how we should go about explaining music. This quote from Rosen (in slightly altered form) heads Wald's introduction:

Dislike has no significance and no importance if it is not accompanied by understanding--and that implies the admission of at least the possibility of love.

Wald joins Rosen in his assertion that "Some of us are willing to try to understand what is alien to our experience" unlike those whose respond with outrage to something that is "disconcertingly new."  Wald says of his historical work, "The most difficult thing about understanding the past is appreciating the choices and tastes that seem strange or disagreeable and trying to confront them on their own terms." [my emphasis]

Then, reading Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter H. Diamandis, I encountered the notion of the adjacent possible, which seemed to fit Wald's expository apparatus like a glove. Finally, preparing for a session of my book club and familiarizing myself with When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, by T.M. Luhrmann, the author's own summation of her approach to her subject jumped out at me: "Anthropologists are taught as students to seek to understand before we judge."

It all stacked up, from the music historian, music critic, technologist, anthropologist: admitting the possibility of love, appreciating music by confronting it on its own terms, discovering via the adjacent possible, understanding before judgment. All of these writers contributed haphazardly to the idea that the Celtic oboe, however foolish, had some value ... because someone valued it.

But it's important, too, to go back to Carl's equality of dislikes and remember that we're talking about music. We're not talking about racism. Rather, we shouldn't be talking about racism. But opinions of music that don't admit the possibility of love have descended to the same gutter that flows into racism.

So there you have it: serendipity, with the capstone from a book about God, clearly evidence of divine favor on behalf of my folly. Dislikers, be warned: someday down the road you'll be working your way out of purgatory and will catch sight of me in the angel band of Celtic oboes and will disappointedly exclaim "Oh. My. God." And you will go right back where you belong: to the Garden of Perpetual Dislike.

My Name Is Mud

My name is Mud. You renewed your acquaintance with me last weekend, when you washed me out of the filters of your pond's fountain pump.

The jet from the water-spitting carp fountain had been progressively weakening in the past weeks. You'd last cleaned the pump quite a while ago--last summer? that long?--and you were sure you'd find me in there, gumming up the works.

It's unfortunate, I suppose, that your painstakingly-dug French drain ne suffit pas toujours, and a global-warming, torrential downpour (they happen more often, don't they?) conjures me out of the ground and lets me cloud the water in the pond so that you can't spy upon your goldfish: unfortunate for you whose view must always be clear.

Less so for me who makes you work to regain your clarity.

You didn't want the pump motor to burn out, so you unplugged it, hauled the pump bag up from the bottom of the pond, and marveled at the weight after all the water had drained out. "Mud," you thought.

Yes. Me.

You'd never let the pump go this long without cleaning. Your French intestine de bassin and pump filter allies had done a pretty good job of keeping me out of the water and in my wet ghetto, but you were right: I was forcing someone else to pull my weight. Time for a cleansing.

All you had to do was dismantle the little net house that held the pump--take out the walls, the floor, the ceiling--and shower them in a strong jet of water. Out I flowed. Down the driveway, looking like a runnel of mocha. But you were much too aware of my provenance in clay and fish shit to make that comparison at the time. Nor did I suggest a sunset's draining of the light from the sky or a cloud-streaked moon or any such happily romantic notion. Your memory of squishy lake-bottom wading was too strong for that. Nor did my purging even conjure any current-event regrets that you couldn't donate me as enriched water to some millet farmer in east Africa.

Instead, you spiritualized me into metaphor. I suppose I should thank you, since that is supposedly the substance of the hereafter--spirit, I mean. Maybe metaphor too. Or conceit. As in angels. How could conceit not be the argot of angels?

But it was nothing so lofty. I can't even claim "metaphor," actually. It started with an adjective, and maybe it just ended there. It was just you with a hose consigning me to the storm drain of history and thinking about a book, analyzing its style, deciding it was "muddy," and wondering if it was the translation. 

The book was My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate. (You can claim that he stole the title from you, since your playing with My Name Is Mud goes back a half-century.)

You've never distrusted the translator as much as you did with this book. But the translator has won prizes too! So you decided to make me the scapegoat for the unsettled state of the rhetoric, the murky atmosphere of so many of the scenes in which the characters careened from one emotion to a different, remote one--for example, from fear to love, or vice versa--as if they were playing tackle hopscotch in pea-soup fog.

Lacking any verisimilitude of a real, inner state, you the reader felt alienated from the narrative, when you prefer to dive into it and swim around in it and shake fins with the manta rays. The characters seemed to be allegorical constructs rather than flesh-and-blood people (except they did bleed). "Cartoonish" doesn't quite catch the reality.

Which is too bad, given that most of the characters were illustrators of illuminated books.

But maybe unsettlement was part of Pamuk's purpose? The chapters were all told from the perspective of a different "character," whether an actor in the story or a book illustration (such as a dog or a tree or a color, which is all the title of the book means). Some characters recounted their own violent death as it happened--obviously, then, part of the point was to create a certain distance between the narrative and the events being described, the same kind of distance that exists between an illustrator and his or her illustration.

The kind of distance that exists between mud and its cleansing.

With art occupying the center of this book, you found myself wanting an entirely new genre, or an entirely new literary/artistic phenomenon, which would involve the display of artistic details--as they occurred in the telling--simultaneously with the telling itself. Pamuk's alternative was to resort to long lists of things being depicted, which you perceived  liturgical quality, like the names of victims read at remembrance ceremonies, as if the mention of them has spared them the fate of a final disappearance. But did this not, in fact, disembody the art? Trick it out as a meaningless babbling in tongues? If Ottoman and Persian artists drew horses from memory instead of from live models, what did they look like? You the living lack those memories. Only with the sight of their art can you make sense of things. Can you live clearly, without mud.

You did think it ironic (as you watched the filter wash go from brown to khaki to tan to silver) to complain about the limitations of this novel--limitations to do with the written word--when its most significant theme is the conflict between calligraphic, Islamic art and representational, "Frankish" art. In the Middle Ages, the illumination of books seems to have been a way of bringing representational art into Islamic cultural productions; as long as the miniature illuminations were marginal conjectures of "what Allah sees," they were approved. Whereas, now, with this book, you wanted to see what Allah sees just so you'd have a companionable representation of what Pamuk wrote. What you got was reduced to words on a page--and it wasn't even calligraphy.

I drained away, leaving you imagining a flash of universal comprehension and calling it cosmocallipsychosis. How will you breathe life into that lump of garbage? From mud you came, and to mud you will return.

Your name is Mud.