Hillbilly allergy: Elizabeth Catte's itchy response to J. D. Vance

So (as the first word of every narrative must be these days) let's say you're in a bookstore and you notice a book. Across the top the title yells in black caps WHAT YOU ARE GETTING WRONG ABOUT APPALACHIA, and so your first thought is, "Who, me?" Elizabeth Catte's book is meant to serve as a counterpoint to J. D. Vance's popular Appalachian Elegy. But there's no subtitle to that effect, and the introduction clearly indicates that, yes, you -- whoever you are -- are getting stuff wrong about Appalachia.

The comforting news for all of us wrong'uns is that we're wrong about something that apparently has no real substance. Commenting on whether or not Vance should be considered "authentically Appalachian because he migrated outside the region," Catte says, "I don't give a damn about geography." On the other hand, she gives such a damn about culture that she refuses to "ascribe" one to those who "self-identify as Appalachian." This really is like saying that Appalachia doesn't exist. I wish Catte would make that argument  -- it very much needs to be made -- but she doesn't. 

The actual meaning of Appalachia -- whatever it is and if indeed there is one -- is very much beside the point in this book. Catte does pose the question, "What is Appalachia?" at the outset, but she-who-doesn't-give-a-damn-about-geography gives a perfunctory geographical definition based on the Appalachian Mountains and then -- because it has no weight -- immediately shoves it aside in favor of a definition imposed by the "top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who we are or what we are." This definition of Appalachia -- a sort of geographical zombie arising from a pauper's grave -- is the Federal government framework devised to administer the War on Poverty. Thus, says Catte, "the region came to be defined by poverty, and subsequently poverty came to be defined by the region."

This sounds like a 3-card monte game of agency in which you-who-are-wrong-about-Appalachia are the mark, trying to follow Catte's fluid misdirection:  "I'm hesitant to tell you who Appalachia is, but I can tell you who keeps it alive: young individuals who work in racially diverse fields, including education, hospitality, and healthcare." Because in Appalachia there are no retirees delivering Meals on Wheels.

Catte also favors tortuous argumentation pursuing tendrils of supposed influence, e.g. into a discussion Vance's association with IQ controversialist Charles Murray and their shared interest in Scots-Irish culture she drags an account of forced re-settlement, institutionalization, and sterilization at the time of the creation of the Shenandoah National Park, a story that features New Deal-era photographers, sociologists, politicians, and farmers. Tenuous conspiracy-theory connections demonstrate to her satisfaction a "strange bond between up-and-comers on the Appalachia circuit and salivating eugenicists" (maybe the audiobook will have creepy background music) and justify her condemnation:  "I don't dislike Vance because he talks about 'hillbilly culture.' I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents."

Catte is right to take on Vance's superficial ethnic determinism and teases out his more recent influences: Colin Woodard's American Nations ("Greater Appalachia") and Jim Webb's Born Fighting, even though her quote from the former invokes a more diluted ancestral pool than just Scots-Irish. And when she hacks at the root of the myth, the best she can do is allude to the "sharp corrective" of historian Wilma Dunaway and archeologist Audrey Horning to the effect that "eighteenth-century Appalachia was a fusion of a variety of European ethnic groups and other groups that reflected African and indigenous descent." Sharp? That's like shaving with a butter knife. It would've been sharper to refer readers to Harry Caudill's Darkness at Dawn, in which he pooh-poohs the idea of Scots-Irish (meaning specifically Ulster Scots) influence in the Kentucky mountains by noting the relative paucity of the real markers of Scots-Irishness: not "feudin' and fightin'," as Vance's good ol' boys would have it, but enduring Scots Reformed churches and schools -- "enduring" meaning that once established on the frontier, they remained and flourished because not to have those churches and schools meant abandoning your Scots-Irishness.

Alas, Catte can't use Caudill because he was another one of those up-and-comers on the Appalachian circuit who bonded with salivating eugenicists. If you don't know who Caudill was, here is historian (and Catte-approved) Ronald D. Eller's take on his influence: "Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia [Night Comes to the Cumberlands], Caudill's passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people." Catte's rendering has a twist: "Caudill became the spokesperson for Appalachia and a translator of white mountain poverty to the nation."

Notice that word "white." Catte very much wants her readers to understand that Appalachia is more racially diverse than the white sheet Vance covers it with. This is an excellent goal: Appalachia is part of the South and as such was shaped by African-Americans even when it seems not to have been (see also "banjo" and "fiddle" and "buck dancing"). But Catte won't achieve that goal by covering Caudill with that sheet, as she clearly does: "Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation's attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty." Vance might have set himself to that task, but it is plainly evident that Caudill did not. Caudill's Night is subtitled "a biography of a depressed area," and that biography includes African-Americans (whom he calls "Negroes") as slaves, railroad workers, and miners. No, he doesn't separate them out for special treatment, but he does include them in an even-handed, matter-of-fact way. Might this not be considered an accomplishment, given the Civil Rights-era year of publication (1963)?

Catte's take on the racial component of Caudill's influence might be unfair, but all's fair in love and war, and Catte is engaged in a polemic against Caudill ("polemic" comes from the Greek word for "war," as no doubt the classicist Catte knows) apparently because -- in Catte's telling -- 11 years after the publication of Night, frustrated with the lack of progress, Caudill came to consider his region's poverty to be "genetic in origin" and "largely irreducible," which viewpoint he shared in a "fan letter" to eugenicist William Shockley. The two went on to meet once and continued to correspond, discussing the possibility of voluntary sterilization and intelligence testing, with Caudill's advice tending to be how to, in his words, "avoid some critical and troublesome newspaper publicity."

Catte includes Caudill's widow's opinion that publication of this part of his correspondence in 2013 was an effort to "besmirch" his reputation. Whether or not that is the case, this information is hardly shocking to anyone who's read Caudill. It was abundantly clear in Night that Caudill's belief in "brain drain" dilution of a "seed stock" rested at least on a dysgenic notion, even if it outlined no eugenic solution. 

So, what should this mean for Caudill's influence? Catte clearly wants him read out of the Appalachian canon and bemoans the "fatigue" that comes from living at a time when Amazon links Caudill with Vance in a two-fisted vise of recommendation, which to Catte means that the two most influential books about Appalachia were "used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists."

Her warrior rage blinds her to the missed opportunity that would come from a side-by-side consideration of the two. And why should Americans not exercise the ability to choose the lesser of two evils? They are politically condemned to it anyway. The books provide a dramatic contrast: they are vastly different, not only in structure and in content, but more importantly in the nature of the solutions proposed for the region. Vance -- from the narrow confines of a memoir -- might counsel a simplistic Horatio Algerism, but the lesson of his personal experience is "get out." Caudill -- from the expansiveness of his deep and broad study -- might be absolutely brutal on everyone in eastern Kentucky, not just the poor, for permitting the wastage of their mountainous Eden, but what he proposes in essence could easily be updated into a Green New Deal for Appalachia. In other words he says, "Stay and make it right." Which side are you on?

Catte's real, overarching villain -- whose freshest, most recent stooge happens to be Vance -- is a "monolithic" narrative of Appalachian "otherness" controlled by power that enriches some at the expense of others: "[C]redibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian [sic] is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn't care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies."

Catte appropriates the idea of Appalachia as "other" from America from scholar Henry Shapiro (Appalachia on Our Mind), but by the time it emerges from her Procrustean bed, Shapiro's concept is both stretched and squeezed. What Shapiro says about local color writers and home missionaries of the 1880s and 1890s Catte applies to "outside entrepreneurs" and "industrialists" of the early twentieth century. Shapiro's concept of otherness embraces all conceptions of Appalachia between 1880 and 1920, even those of reformers who, sensitive to the interests of the mountaineers, wanted to work with them on their (the mountaineers') own terms seasoned with the lessons of the Danish folk school. One of the exemplars of that effort was the Highlander Folk School of upper east Tennessee, which is on Catte's short list of heroes. But to Catte there is only one purpose for otherness: exploitation, so that "Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose" in order to "be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence."

That narrative certainly exists, but it was not the only one used by the exploiters. Catte seems to be unaware of an entirely different portrayal of mountaineers as possessing positive, desirable characteristics for developers. These portrayals were used by town boosters to attract industry to the region. It is remarkable how unchanging they were over the course of many years during the 20th century. Tom Lee, author of The Tennessee-Virginia Tri-Cities: Urbanization in Appalachia, 1900 - 1950, cites a 1985 promotion of Johnson City: "Over 200,000 conscientious workers uphold the dedicated 'pioneer' work ethic in our Right-to-Work State. … A fair day's pay for a hard day's work." This "rhetoric of promotion," Lee says, was largely unchanged from the beginning of the century when boosters boasted of the "unlimited supply of intelligent, white female workers." Of course, paternalistic, capitalistic exploitation of unorganized workers was still the purpose, but the labor force was depicted positively, not as morally degenerate primitives.

(It is odd that Catte should describe the narrators of the Appalachian "other" to be "universally men."  From the beginning women have been among the most articulate and influential definers. Local colorist Mary Noailles Murfree was there at the creation; Emma Bell Miles was an early interpreter of the mountains for valley folk and other furriners; Ellen Churchill Semple's 1901 "anthropogeography" was one of the first true scholastic studies of the human aspects of Appalachian geography; and Olive Dame Campbell, besides being a folksong collector, took her late husband John C. Campbell's "mass of notes" and an outline to write the book that he could never bring himself to write.)

If there is a defective, monolithic narrative abroad these days about Appalachia, it is that Appalachia is all about coal. Catte seems happy to accept that monolith shaft, tipple, and flue. Granted she is reacting to the latest incarnation of Appalachia as coal-crazy "Trump Country,"  and she is most concerned to show how Appalachians have struggled against the economic, social, and geophysical depredations of coal extraction. The result, however, is that effectively Appalachia becomes eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. It's time to bring back the Georgian "expatriates" of the Appalachian Studies Conferences from the 1980s who adopted the refrain "Not in North Georgia" to remind their coal-leagues that Appalachia is neither monochrome nor monotone and is nothing if not complex. Catte gets the complexity, but the reactiveness of her approach allows the monolith of coal to dictate her narrative to the extent that it weakens her advocacy for an expansive understanding of the region. If we knew more about the breadth and variety of Appalachian geography, history, and culture, and understood that Appalachia has a future that transcends coal -- even in Kentucky and West Virginia -- maybe we'd have a better chance of not being wrong about it. Maybe we'd feel some hope and start getting things right about it. 

But to do that, you have to give a damn about geography and its economic, political, and human consequences. Because if you're talking about Appalachia, that's pretty much all you got. If you try to erase it, as Catte seems to want to do, you got nothing. The irony is that she cares more than she lets on. After a Tennessee upbringing, it was during a brief hiatus in a Texas town as polluted by oil as Appalachia was by coal that she was somehow convinced to return to her Appalachian homeland, and so back she came, as she says, "to fight smarter" on behalf of everyone who was "not important enough not to be poisoned." How somehow was she convinced to return? It seems to have been at least in part the aesthetics of geography: Silas House's "language in the kudzu and it is all ours" or the "bright purple of ironweed" that is a "symbol of Appalachian women."

She now works with others "with the hope that we might call into being the end of what Rebecca Scott called 'the dismal banality of the dominion of coal.'" How to call into being that end? We have to multiply the possibilities, and they are endless, once you start looking at the land and, yes, the culture, and see the infinite ways it can nourish and inspire, and then build on those ways that create rather than destroy.

If that sounds like moonshine, so be it. It wouldn't be the first time for Appalachia.

Frederick Douglass and "The Bagpipe Lesson"

I will come to The Bagpipe Lesson eventually, but will start of by examining a different instrument-inspired painting.

It is one of those iconic works of art whose very familiarity contributes to under-appreciation: The Banjo Lesson, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in which a young boy sits in an old man's lap and plays a banjo, which the old man supports up at the nut end while the boy frets and strums. Both the figures are of African descent, as was Tanner himself.

There are several reasons why I have tended to under-value the work. Probably the chief one was the faded, poor print that I used to see on a daily basis in a dispiriting location in a library, rather than a vivid original exhibited with positive optimality at a museum.

Also -- to me, anyway -- its subject matter and treatment wafted a hint of that cloying air that has spoiled Norman Rockwell for me. Perhaps it is unfair to Rockwell that his work has come to personify -- quite literally -- the happy-face superficiality of the commercial American soul, when in fact he was capable of capturing, incisively and glaringly, such challenging subjects as the racial millstone hung around the necks of American children. 

Thanks to an informative appreciation by Farisa Khalid, however, I can not only give The Banjo Lesson its due, but can also see that there is a more complex, almost ironic connection with Rockwell than the one I had always felt. Besides providing the nice archival service of showing Tanner's photographs of his original subjects, more importantly Khalid's article situates the work in two cultural contexts: an endlessly suggestive (because of the subsequent history of the banjo) Appalachian one as well as the more general one of blackface minstrelsy, by which it becomes clear that Tanner -- painting in the 1890's -- sought through the medium of high dignity to rescue his subject matter from Ol' Zip Coon.

But the rescue went unappreciated by the clueless master class, which continued to pay commercial illustrators like Rockwell to show African-Americans only in servile roles (as Rockwell himself has attested). Thus, following a tip from Khalid, we can see Rockwell -- in a print that appeared in an advertisement in a 1926 Saturday Evening Post -- at once borrowing from and violating the original by placing the old man in tattered pants and work boots performing to the delight of a well-dressed little white boy, plaid tie flung over one shoulder and beating a gleaming living room floor with a couple of sticks. 

This is not to demean the journeyman Rockwell, who increasingly chafed against the prevailing caste rules and to some extent broke loose of them later in life, so much as to provide a stark example of the conceptual prison of color racism into which America seems to be locked. Tanner himself said it well: residing in Paris, where he did not experience discrimination due to the color of his skin, he said, "In America, I'm Henry Tanner, Negro artist, but in France, I'm 'Monsieur Tanner, l'artiste américaine.'"

In today's America it has become politically incorrect, even in the Republican Party, to utter -- or appear to utter -- white supremacist notions, as Iowa's Steve King recently found out. Yet if we parse King's words as he wants us to, we uncover a notion that I bet the vast majority of Americans agree with: Western civilization is white.

I'm going to let that statement sit and stew for a moment. My hope is that the longer it sits, the more ridiculous it begins to seem. I do not begin to know what images and notions will come to mind with "Western civilization," but if we assume it to mean the ascent of certain aspirational and idealistic concepts, "white" is nowhere among them.

By coincidence I'm writing this on the eve of the celebration of the day given over to a different King -- Martin Luther King Day -- when it would be reasonable to expect Americans of visible African descent to look for some evidence that their fellows of visible non-African descent have at long last gathered them in the embrace of citizenship, social equality, and cultural affirmation. The last is perhaps not hard to find, but as is demonstrated by the history of jazz, r&b, rap -- not to mention the vast domain of professional sports -- the benefits of the cultural marketplace don't automatically trickle down or radiate out any better than the economic ones. Jackie Robinson desegregating professional baseball can happily coexist -- as a phenomenon -- with lynching and restrictive housing covenants.

I have long believed that the essential ingredient of understanding American culture -- politics included -- is the study of its long and torturous struggle to live up to the promise of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as personified, if you will, by the Statue of Liberty. That means coming to terms with Indian removal; with slavery and the dismal, continuing record of racial discrimination; and with gender-based discrimination; all of them noxious to the self-professed notions of "liberty" and "justice" pledged by the mass Americans from youth.

And yet this belief of mine runs counter to the notions of patriotism at large today in which the flag is associated primarily with a standing army! Of all things to make a true Spirit of '76er roll in his grave! Aaargh! A standing army is one thing they fought to get rid of! Did we learn nothing in school?

Perhaps less than nothing. Perhaps detrimental habits of thinking, like believing Western civilization is white. Happily there is a cure. If only I could prescribe it. I can at least recommend, though. As good a place to start as any is David Blight's recent, landmark biography -- subtitled "American Prophet" -- of Frederick Douglass, the escaped-slave abolitionist and autobiographer who achieved celebrity status as a writer and lecturer both before and after the American Civil War. The book is long and to me was bogged down by the minutiae of family "warts and all," -- as landmark biographies require -- but forewarned is forearmed: the informed reader should persevere. It is worth it.

It is worth it because Douglass and the manner in which he shared the lived experience of slavery and racism are exactly the kind of lens by which to view American reality. It very much matters how we view our past: Douglass himself was indefatigably motivated by this idea. As Blight writes, "he knew that peoples and nations, like individuals, are shaped and defined by their pasts. Douglass was acutely aware that history was both burden and inspiration, something to be cherished and overcome. He also understood that although all people crave stories, some narratives are more honest than others."

Thus it was that Douglass -- who soared to prominence with his riveting accounts of life as a slave and his searing indictment of the institution and its evil effects -- faced the rapid washing away of civil rights gained during the Radical phase of Reconstruction, due in part to the rise of a Lost Cause narrative that portrayed the Confederates as noble warriors whose bravery was due the respect of their Northern, white "brethren." Douglass would have none of it. Slavery was the essential foundation of the Confederacy, and he unrepentantly "waved the bloody shirt" after the Civil War to remind his fellow Americans of that fact.

When Robert E. Lee died, for example, Douglass was appalled at the national veneration for the Confederate leader. "It would seem," he wrote, "that the soldier who kills the most soldiers in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven."  Douglass boiled it all down to "he was a traitor and can be made nothing else."

It is interesting to read this in the context of today's sanctimonious reverence for "heritage," especially in the South, where the word seems inevitably to accompany the display of Lee's anti-USA battle flag. Here again, Douglass had his finger on the pulse of the "wickedly selfish" American character: "Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [types of tea] will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets," but "millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us, and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as 'sucking doves.'" The very Americans celebrating their "own heritage" are "content to see others crushed in our midst."

Any real understanding of Southern "heritage" has to include the history of Ku-Klux-style repression and lynching. Of this latter Douglass said in a letter promoting a pamphlet by anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells, "If American conscience were only half alive, if the church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened … a scream of horror, shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read." One has to wonder how many Southern heritage websites include a link to Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative museum in Montgomery, AL?

It is also suggestive and saddening to "read forward" African-American despair -- from expat Henry Ossawa Tanner to W.E.B. DuBois to the Southern leavers of the Great Migration to Ta-Nehisi Coates -- from Douglass's insistence that anything other than blacks staying in the South, no matter how deep the nadir of race relations, how bitter the exploitation, or how strangling the rule of the lynch mob, meant "a premature, disheartening surrender" of emancipation and the civil rights gained by the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These seem in some ways like the glib words of someone ensconced in the relative security of a federal job in Washington, D.C., but Douglass was if nothing else unmoving in his constancy to the need for struggle despite the odds. He had seen miracles accomplished before, and they might be again. As biographer Blight says, this prefigures the reality of the modern civil rights struggle, in which people "have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality." 

Blight's prophetic Douglass trumpeted the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. These, it must be remembered, are universal ideals, applicable to all humanity. They are meant to be effected by the U.S. Constitution, as Lincoln reminds us in his Gettysburg Address, as an example available to the world to follow. Douglass's voice -- steeped, as was Lincoln's, in an autodidact's immersion in the Bible -- serves as the prophet returned from Babylon saying "it is up to us to build it here." And who is "us"? It is nothing less than the entire mongrel segment of humanity resident in the United States, acting on behalf of the world.

Douglass insisted on the universality of his humanity. An enduring part of his message had to do with his bi-racial status: he was the son of a slave mother and a slave-owning father. He would use this to taunt his hearers in lectures that sometimes spilled over into a seething fracas of brickbats and fisticuffs as a result. In some instances, though, his racist challengers seem to have been charmed by his courage and forthrightness, as happened in 1850 in New York City, when a speech to the American anti-Slavery Society was interrupted by a "mob" led by German-Irish ward boss Isaiah Rynders, "the nation's foremost political thug," whose gangs--Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits--rioted to attain their ends and were able to face down the police. Invited to have their say by Garrison (Blight calls it "theater of the absurd") a Rynders-surrogate discoursed on the inhumanity of blacks and said they were a species of monkey. Douglass--standing right next to Rynders--appealed to the audience to look at him and his "wooly" head and asked "Am I not a man?" Rynders, interrupting, said he was only half a Negro; Douglass drew laughter when he said that yes, as son of a slaveholder, he was "a half brother to Mr. Rynders." Douglass argued on behalf of the community of all immigrants; blacks had after all produced the cotton and sugar that they all enjoyed. "We only want our rights. … I have a head to think, and I know God meant I should exercise the right to think … I have a heart to feel, and a tongue to think … and God meant that I should use that tongue in behalf of humanity and justice for every man." On this occasion the rioters left peacefully, having apparently vented their bile to their own satisfaction.

(By "man," Douglass meant women as well. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of equal rights for women.)

The identification of Douglass with universality is perhaps best captured by his connection to Scotland. This might come as a surprise to those who display the twin x'es of the Confederate battle flag and the Scottish cross of St. Andrew on their bumper and think that is all there is to be said on the subject. But consider the following:

• Douglass's last name was his "freedom" name (his birth name was Bailey) first suggested by his rescuer Nathan Johnson, who according to Blight took the name from Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake. The recently-escaped Bailey liked the Highland clan name's "strength" as a word, stamped it with an extra "s," and entered into his new and ultimately historic identity. Later on, after he himself had read the novel, Douglass found pride that he shared his name with "the great Scottish chief."
• Douglass freely imbibed Robert Burns and found inspiration in the way Burns opposed the "bigotry" of the clergy and the "shallow-brained aristocracy." Douglass used not only Burns's poetry but also his example as a writer whose (in Blight's words) "performative intensity" provided Douglass with a "model in life and on the page." 
• Steeped in Scott and Burns, and unafraid to anathematize the Free Kirk for "blood money" -- income from slaveholders -- Douglass was a huge hit in Scotland in 1846. This was a critical time for Douglass, as part of the reason of the tour was to get him beyond the reaches of his former owner. He had already tasted freedom elsewhere in the British Isles, but as he wrote from Edinburgh, it was there that he experienced equality: "I enjoy every thing here which may be enjoyed by those of a paler hue -- no distinction here."

Douglass took his inspiration from anything, regardless of its source, that promoted the ideal of one, single, universal human race. Thus was there a connection between the poetry of Burns and the music of his own "brethren in bonds":  it was the sound of pride and dignity butting up against prejudice and oppression. Douglass used the poems of Burns to get his listeners to feel that "A man's a man for a' that," despite color. And of the songs of slaves, Douglass understood their visceral purpose by hard experience: "To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. … If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul."

The ensuing, sorry record of master-race misapprehension of the cultural products of the enslaved and of those forcibly, violently separated from civil society begins with Douglass' bald statement that "I have been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears."

One wonders, with this mournful cast shaping his taste in music and with his affinity to Scotland, what Frederick Douglass might have thought of that most evocative of sorrowful instruments, the bagpipe? This isn't just a random thought that comes out of the wild blue from someone devoted to folly who himself plays the bagpipe. It is more an effort to fill by surmise a blank left by biographer Blight, who notes in his book that, late in life, Douglass dabbled in art patronage; among other things he, along with some others, donated to the library of Hampton Institute a painting by none other than Henry Ossawa Tanner, discussed above. The painting was called The Bagpipe Lesson.

Douglass was solicited by Tanner himself, by letter, and did not see the painting before it was bought. One wonders what came to mind when he read the letter, which included the painting's title? Who would not assume a Highland bagpipe, that noble stereotype of bagpipes everywhere? Only a member of that minority of cosmopolitan bagpipe nerds might imagine an Italian zampogna or a Breton biniou -- which is in fact the instrument depicted in the painting, all bag and no pipe, an appearance both more rotund and jovial than the Highland pipes, with their elongated drones, the howitzers of a perennial Om.

As it happens Tanner, studying in Paris at the time, toured the countryside in search of genre settings to paint and lighted upon an educative scene paralleling the one in The Banjo Lesson, which he had painted in Paris less than a year before. Both paintings now reside in the Hampton University Museum, the bagpipe one due in part to the largesse of a Frederick Douglass to whom music was the mournful means of living through pain, whether it be felt on a plantation in the American South or a pasture in Scotland. 

At last, then, we come to the question -- or rather the challenge -- posed by the paintings: how do we teach the children? And what? Is it only fact and technique? Or can it contain meaning? Here again we can turn to Douglass for an answer.

A close associate of John Brown, Douglass was widely deemed guilty by this association after Harpers Ferry and had to flee into temporary exile to escape the consequences of this alliance (despite the fact that he'd counseled the raider against striking the Federal arsenal). Afterwards, Douglass helped construct the martyrdom of Brown, but the "detailed historical and mythic image" (Blight's words) that he imparted was "not a story to please but to pain" (Douglass's words). Blight again: "Brown was a martyr and a victor, but also a classically tragic hero never to be forgotten, a symbol always to trouble and spur the American conscience."

America suffers from a whitewashed conscience, a whitewashed culture, a whitewashed memory, and a debased level of civic participation because it fails to confront the extent to which the majority culture is built on blindness to the fact that the roots of its heritage are deeply sunk into oppression and facile, superficial, criminal expropriation -- to me a necessarily stronger and more appropriate term than "appropriation." That long musical history mentioned above -- minstrelsy, jazz, blues-and-r&b-inflected rock, rap -- can be understood as not so much a borrowing as a stealing with an intent to ignore when it does not demean. Commercialism, like drumming, covers a multitude of sins. It is part and parcel with Woodrow Wilson introducing progressive government along with federalized Jim Crow segregation. It is part and parcel with insisting on a bleached national anthem that exists only for "the troops" -- a concept alien to the 1776 founding spirit if there ever was one -- and cannot comprehend the continuing inability of "the brave" to provide a home for freedom.

We cannot teach what we do not know. And if we do not teach the true and ongoing pain of the nation, we cannot teach its aspiration to glory. If all we teach amounts to "tech," we miss the whole point of America.

To me one of the greatest musical discoveries of all time is the "blues" harmonica. This does not mean the technical artifact itself, the row of brass tongues inside a shiny metal housing, but rather the musical invention of playing that artifact in a way different from the one it was meant to be played -- off-prescription, as it were. It's like the backbeat taking over THE BEAT from the downbeat.

I was privileged one time to share with an African-American audience in the auditorium of what used to be Frederick Douglass High School a personal rendition of the "history" of this musical invention: whether or not it came as a result of "freaking" the inhaled (drawn, pulled, sucked) notes low down on a harmonica, at some point someone in America of African descent struck upon the idea that the basis of harmonica playing is not blowing, but inhaling: when you pick up a harmonica, don't blow; draw. That is your key. And this changes everything for a harmonica player. It is to me a discovery right up there with Franklin's lightning: it is musical electricity. I can be thankful to whatever unnamed musician(s) made the discovery, and turn the power to my advantage. But at the same time, if I do not carry with me an understanding of the historical context of this music -- an appreciation as it were, as informed as everyone ought to be of where Henry Ossawa Tanner's paintings came from -- and accept the gift as a challenge not only to mourn the wrongs of the past but, as well, to try to right their continuing consequences, then I'm just another American celebrating a soulless heritage like a sucking dove.

Wise Man

"I just want to learn to play the one song," he said.

Just to be sure I understood, I asked if that was the only thing he wanted to learn.

"That's right. There's this one song. And I want to learn it. Ain't no other a one I want to learn."

I met him one December day in the studio up in Bristol, where I was unrepentantly follying: recording a song to be played on loop in my casket after I die. (The best part of THAT trick is I expect to be cremated.) Anyway, there are frequently characters lounging on the fringes at the studio in Bristol, which you might expect from a place that records everything from ghettotech to truck-driving country to zombie rock to hardcore Southern gospel quartet.

These are for the most part non-musical characters who can teach you a lot of important things, e.g. the kinds of sharks drawn to your surfboard in Florida depending on whether you're hung over from tequila or whisky. And this guy was no exception. He was there with a friend who was recording his chickens so he could get pristine sound to lure trespassing coyotes, and sure enough, back there in the glass booth was a straw-filled box with a hen in it.

"You got to scare it up a little bit to get the right note of helplessness that a dog'll come to. Wild turkey or woodpecker's really best, but chicken's'll do in a pinch. Plus they're a whole lot easier to get in the studio."

He was from up in Virginia, up in Wise County "almost over to Lee County, where Virginia gets whittled into Kentucky," and he was telling me how to catch snapping turtles by sticking your hand in the air pocket of a muskrat den submerged in a creek bank. I was feeling all "Wind in the Willows" excited, learning this important thing, when he stopped and asked, "By the way, where do you live?"

I told him I lived down in Kingsport, and when he asked what part, I said I lived out in Colonial Heights; Kendrick Creek area.

"You don't know Boogaloo Ridge, do you?"

I asked if he meant Buckaloo Ridge, uphill from the creek; I live in a suburban development on the slope of that ridge.

"Hm," he grunted with a smile, as if there was something he knew. "My papaw's buried down there. On top of that very ridge, just up from the last gap to the south. It's hard to find. You can't see it from the road unless you know what you're looking for and all the leaves are down. Looks like a little chapel. I doubt you know it, but if you did know it, you'd know it."

I told him I liked to walk on the roads over the ridge for exercise, but I didn't know about his papaw's grave. That was when he said he wanted to learn the dulcimer. I was sitting warming up on one for my session, so it's not like the request was out of the blue.

"My papaw had him, oh, I don't know, a bunch that he'd made. I kick myself for not learning from him, but he was gone before I was really old enough to know any better. Anyway there was this one dulcimer that he had that was set up to play slide-style, not noter-style or finger-style, and there was this one song he played on it. And that's the one I want to learn. I just want to learn to play the one song."

We shook on the deal: I'd teach him the one song. I asked him what it was. I figured it'd be a commonplace, like "Amazing Grace."

"Nah, you don't know it," he said, shaking his head. He was silent a long moment, and then he asked, "When is Christmas?"

To say I was taken aback by the question is to put it lightly, but I hadn't conversed with a legion of studio characters in the course of my lifetime for nothing, so I deflected: "You tell me."

He weighed me a moment, as if he wanted to be sure I was deserving of hearing what he was about to say. Catching snapping turtles was one thing; Christmas was another.

"I mean," he began, "it could have been any day, right? We weren't there. You ever heard angel music? You live your whole life -- you work, you go to school -- and you just accept it like you accepted bell-bottoms or low-ride jeans or shooting people in the back because that's just the way it is, and don't tell me you don't!  Well, I ain't no different, really, except maybe in the fact that the one thing I could never accept was this one-day Christmas thing. I wanted Christmas to be all the time, and I mean the real thing, the birth of Jesus thing, with me as one of the Wise Men who'd just stick around and not return home by another way just to avoid Herod and let him slaughter the innocent. That's where we are, all the time, in a world that slaughters the innocent because adult nonsense is the millstone that we hang around all these babies' necks! Excuse my French here for a moment, but doesn't it piss you off that there's only one day a year when we say 'peace on earth, goodwill toward men,' and can't mean 'everybody' by that? And here we got people thinking they're punching a ticket for eternal life and meanwhile they go screwing up everybody else's lives. To hell with that! Man, you can look at me and know I don't have much. And you and me, our candles are burning now but for how much longer? You might not make it to dinner! Look at you, smiling at me like Mona Lisa. You probably think I'm some kind of a nut. Well, that song I want to learn, it's that song that makes me think this way. I never heard it outside my family. My papaw said he learned it from his papaw. I don't know if that's true, but …"

He was pretty much ranting, so I cut in to help him focus and asked him to sing the song for me, which he did. His voice was pitched real low -- it was a bass melody. Easy folk tune, nothing to it. Then I got him to sing it in snatches so I could get the words notate the melody.

As the story is told/it was a cold, starry night in winter/when a baby was born to a woman who'd known no man.As a boy he would never grow old/but he gave up his life for sinners/so the whole world might understand/the grave has no song to sing;/death has no sting;/our lives are a gift we bring when we live for one thing:/As the story is told, when we join our hearts together,/lift our voices in song,/give the gift that belongs/to the now and forevermore.

I was only just done when he said, "Hey you gotta go, there's Mike waving you in."

And there was Mike, the studio engineer, waving chickens out and me in. I went to work follying, and in the meantime the turtle-hunter left while I was in there. I haven't seen or heard from him since.

But I did go looking for his papaw's grave. The very next night I walked the road over the ridge and was where the power line cuts through close to the summit when I encountered thundersnow and an abandoned TV. How could that not mean something, right? So next day I went back and where the TV had been (it had apparently apotheosized) I cut down the ridge and bushwhacked over away from civilization down toward the last gap from the south. It was getting colder and clearing but still snowing some. I wound up going too far, all the way down to where there's a water tower, so I made my way back north and when I came to the first gap, I just got on the ridge line and followed it up, and there it was.

Just as he'd said, a little chapel, complete with gothic windows, but they were empty, and the roof had long since fallen in. There was a stone floor, but no indication that this was a grave. I looked around but didn't stick around.In spite of the turtle hunter's implied invitation, I didn't want to push my luck. And there were spirits to think about. After all this was someone's grave.

But now that I'd been there, I had to go back. It was a folly after my own heart. And now that I knew where it was, I could reduce the amount of trespassing involved: approach from the other direction, off the road, down into the gap, up the slope, and there I was.

This time it looked like someone else had been there, and from the looks of it a child: there were toys set up in a scene from a juvenile phantasmagoria: a trio of thumbkins, two of them capped with an oversized hand, arrayed before a  decapitated faun into whose hollow body had been poked a branch from some weedy bush.

Then something happened to make me seize with terror: music came from underneath the floor. That is, from the grave. It was the turtle hunter's song -- "As the story is told …" -- accompanied by the sound of a distressed chicken meant to lure trespassing coyotes.

Something told me I might not ought to stick around, so I returned home by another way.

Orphean orphan: rehearsal for dying

I went to the doctor the other day for the checkup that carried me over the threshold into Medicaredom. Which, 55+ senior discounts and 70-is-the-new-40 aside, is as official as it gets: I'm old. [Insert champagne-cork-popping and party-hat-confetti smileys here.]

It was a great success, the checkup. My only complaint was that my hearing is not going gentle into that good night. Going gentle was birdsong: it left when I was very small. As a result there has never been to me any such thing as birdsong. It is the fictitious invention of a dangerous subset of hypersensory people, i.e. the mass of humanity, and deranged as divine revelation.

Not going gentle, on the other hand, is me playing a note on a keyboard and hearing -- instead of a clear, ringing pitch that my voice could hit, dead center, as was heretofore the case -- an amorphous penumbra of jangle that requires a Venusian probe of harmony, solfege, and vocal slide-rule to triangulate. Or when I play an octave -- the first two notes of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" -- and hear an interval that is more like somewhere over a bebopper's wet dream.

Why did the musician leave the unnerving performance? Because it was disconcerting.

In moments of despair I self-medicate by grabbing a 12-oz. plastic soda bottle from the recycling bin, blowing across the top to make it sound, and simultaneously humming. When the hum matches the bottle's fluted pitch, the bottle leaps into vibrating mode in my palm like a pager telling me my food is ready to be picked up. It is the greatest symphony ever.

But this isn't how I complain to my doctor. I complain by talking about a thing I'll never do again -- tune an orchestra to A440 -- and then going off on the tangent that A440 hasn't always been the standard pitch; in fact, back in Bach's day it was more like A415 and the oboes were without keys, more like recorders, but isn't it funny how extinct technology can be re-invented because now early music purists are demanding to hear that music on those instruments at their A415 pitch, which I've only done once back when I took an adult student of mine down the back roads of northern South Carolina to the Atlanta workshop of Harry Vas Dias, where it was actually a baroque oboe d'amore -- an alto oboe -- that Vas Dias put in my hands along with a reed and opened Bach excerpt book to an oboe d'amore duet from the Christmas Oratorio and he said let's play and mirabile dictu (how I love that phrase) I was able to play it thanks to the forked fingerings that I knew from recorder, and man it sounded so good and true, we went on for a whole hour like it was 1734 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig all over again.

and if that is gibberish to you, well, lots of people say there is such a thing as birdsong.

So I didn't complain to my doctor so much as gush, as wipe out entire communities downstream from a breached TVA dam, spewing tsunamic tales of playing Dvorak and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and my doctor, what does he do? Wiseguy, he goes into librarian mode for the patient who's a career librarian: he recommends a book, and nothing medical or healthcare related, either: a novel. And I don't think he does it thinking or knowing that it's bibliotherapy. I think it's his friendly way of trying to save lives by patching that TVA dam back together.

I immediately go to the public library to pick up my Rx: Orfeo: A Novel, by Richard Powers. And consume it. And enjoy it almost as immensely as a plastic bottle vibrating in the palm of my hand. The plot is good enough to keep you turning pages and wondering where things are headed, and on that basis I can recommend it to anyone intrigued by the crossover implications for music of genetic modification and the security needs of the anti-terror state.

But the best part to me is the writing about music, 20th century classical music in particular. Even though Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven figure to some extent -- Bach especially -- most of the love in this book goes out to Mahler, Messaien, Shostakovich, Reich, and to a lesser extent Cage. I say "love" because of the lengths to which Powers has gone to describe performances of their works.

Describing music in words is necessarily nothing more than a flight of fancy bullshit -- unless a composer has given you the "program" the music is describing. For example, the first four notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony are commonly believed to "be" Fate knocking at the door. It is debatable that Beethoven himself intended any such meaning. It is also possible that he intended only to suggest the song of an Austrian bird, the yellow-hammer. Or he might have intended no meaning at all and used such fairytales as these to fob off busybodies obsessed with meaning in music.

About the only thing that can be said that is indisputable about the opening of Beethoven's fifth is that, in 2/4 time, allegro con brio, there is a silent downbeat followed by three eighth notes on the fifth of the scale of C minor followed by a half note (with fermata) on the third of the scale; these two measures are immediately followed by the same pattern involving the fourth and second notes of the scale.

And there you have the whole of the problem of writing about "pure" music, i.e. music that has no pre-determined meaning: which do you prefer, dry technical jargon, meaningless to the layperson, or some kind of bullshit about Fate singing the song of an Austrian yellow-hammer?

Richard Powers is well aware of this problem and addresses it thoroughly in an extensive interview with arts journal Music & Literature that appeared soon after Orfeo was published. In his response to the question, "Was it daunting to start writing about music, trying to touch upon its effect on people through writing fiction?" Powers says right off "it's something creative writing teachers and those who expound on fiction traditionally warn writers against trying to do." He never took the "prohibition" to heart because, a musician himself, he always related to music in a linguistic way. He says that there are things like timbre and texture that language can't get to, but he found that his affinity to such things as harmony and structure had a parallel in literary composition. Most convincing to me, though, is what he says about music "as the primary subject matter of the novel," and by music he means not so much its sound per se as "the effect of sound on makers and listeners," and as a cultural activity, as a social act, an historical act, a political act."

Thus when writing about performances of pieces by these twentieth century composers, Powers is sure to situate them in a deep bed of context from the composers' (or, in the case of songs, the lyricists') personal lives or times, e.g. the tragic death of young children that produced a feverish bout of grief-stricken versifying and produced the Kindertotenlieder set by Mahler; the concentration camp setting for much of the composition and the performance of Quartet for the End of Time by Messaien; or Shostakovich's quizzical response, in his Fifth Symphony, to potentially deadly criticism of his music by the despot Josef Stalin.

But -- all of the epiphenomena aside -- there is still the actual performance to be reckoned with -- or in Powers's case, the description of it. For the purposes of this excursion there is a good brief example from Orfeo: the first song in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. If you're not familiar with it and your ears are reliable, it would be worth the 6:02 to listen to it before reading on. (My unreliable ears and inexact memory needed help in the form of a musical score -- ah, the synesthetic marvel of literacy, where seeing is hearing.)

Here is most of Powers's description. The listener whose seance is described is Els, a composer, the main character of Orfeo.

A click on the remote, and the music starts up. And one last time, in the bare opening notes, Els makes out the sounds of a death foretold. The death of a child he spent his life trying to revive. At first there's only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from spare fourths and fifths. The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by a bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. Now the sun will rise so brightly. [lyrics translated by Powers in italics] ... The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle. Scant, muted violas and cellos in their upper registers enter over a quavering harp. The line wavers between major and minor, bright and dim, peace and grief, like the old hag and lovely young thing who fight for control of the fickle ink sketch. The voice sings, It's almost as if nothing terrible happened in the night! Nerves gather in the broadening orchestra, joined now by clarinet and bass clarinet. Then the killer touch, the daub that Els would have traded his soul to make. The ensemble falls away to two pianissimo strikes on the glockenspiel. Then two more. A child's toy, a funeral chime, a light in the night all rolled into four soft, ringing high D's. ... In the fourth return of the instrumental interlude, the song turns deranged and the twentieth century begins. The orchestra sets off in a frantic ecstasy, gusting through chromatic swells and counterswells, shaking loose of all center, anchored only by a deep, droning pedal point in the horn. The frenzy breaks. Flute and oboe attempt the opening lines again, but they're dogged now by the tolling glockenspiel. A small voice says, A little light has gone out in my tent. The notes set a path where their offspring must go: upward into the light, over the surrender of the strings and hollow harp. But the song stutters and catches. The voice drops out, while the surging orchestra carries the melody forward. Two measures too late, the singer rallies -- Heil! -- to welcome the joyous light of day. The orchestra obliges, pushing toward redemption. But at the last moment it falls back into minor. The last word belongs to the glockenspiel, repeating the singer's final note three octaves higher, throwing off glints from a place unreachable by grief or consolation. [paragraph] At eighteen, hearing these songs while holding Clara's breasts was like graduating from the Crayola eight-pack to the rainbow box of sixty-four. At seventy, alone in the house with an untouched glass of scotch, Els can still make out, in the songs' recesses, the germ of freedom that isn't done with him. Why should the bottomless grief feel so bracing? The day is lovely; don't be afraid. Over the decades, he'd read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener ... Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els's life beyond saying. [pp. 34-6]

Els the composer listens intently, affixing thoughts to passing sound: the thread of frost, the parallel privacies, the harmonies at once nostalgic yet laced with the coming fever dream, the rocking of the empty cradle, the derangement of the song and the beginning of the 20th century. The carriers of the actual music are the instruments (our imaginations provide their characteristic timbres) and the singer's words.

The prose here is technically a hodge-podge of information about the composition (orchestration and harmony) taking on by association the meaning Els assigns to grief, Mahler's biography, and the twentieth century. But technically so what. This is very effective writing about music.

It is only when Els breaks into memory of his own life that a jarring, seemingly false note intrudes. I guffawed at the sentence about the breasts and the crayons. But Powers follows this with a matured reflection on a life sweetened by this sad music. Maybe the comic dissonance is intentional, the garish crayons meant to contrast with the aged and the blended: the glass of scotch. Untouched.

In describing musical performance in this way, Powers allows the imagined sound -- in the ear-fueled brain of an imagined listener -- to take the mind where music cannot dependably take it: to the verbal articulation of a discrete, inspired, mystical idea. Another poignant example is this from his description of the end of Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time:

The end of the End, when it arrives at last, comes as a solo violin above piano throb. Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war. Out of a cloud of shimmering E major chords -- the key of paradise -- the violin hints at all a person might still have, after death takes everything. The violin rises; the piano climbs along toward some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing. The praise wanders higher, into C minor, through a frozen minefield of ambiguous diminished and augmented chords, rising again to another major, then one more in the octave above. From out at the edge of the key- and fingerboards, the line glances back at a lost Earth on a cold night, when there is time no longer. [p. 117]

All that a person might still have, after death takes everything; some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing: Messaien's music -- assisted, granted, by his own descriptive program -- only "says" these things because his use of E major, C minor, and violin and piano ascending into their highest notes inspires Powers to think them and articulate them. The reader can well believe that the listeners themselves -- either the original concentration camp audience or Els -- would have had an inchoate and inarticulate sense of those things rather than the full-fleshed idea. But that is what words are for.

I have a purely personal favorite thing about Orfeo: the high point of Els's career as a composer, and his one real success, is an opera written on the subject of the rebellion and siege of Münster, Westphalia, in 1534-5, during which an Anabaptist attempt to establish a radical City of God went badly awry and was brutally suppressed by Lutheran forces. Powers puts in a bravura performance describing a performance of an opera that does not exist (unless he himself has written it). What possesses me to favor this aspect of the plot is that one of the novels I've written, also about music and its epiphenomena -- Blue Oboe -- uses the same event as the pattern for a similar, ill-fated theocratic adventure in contemporary times in Kingsport, Tennessee, of all places.

The title of Powers's book is of course a reference to the Classical myth of Orpheus, the singer-lyre-player who took his ability to charm nature with his music down to the Underworld to charm Hades into releasing his dead wife Eurydice, which Hades does on the condition that Orpheus not look back on his return journey. This very thing Orpheus does, and back Eurydice goes. It would make for good book club conversation to try to figure how the myth figures in the plot of the book -- I haven't found that Powers gives this away anywhere, and I haven't settled on a favorite interpretation.

But it seems not really to matter because the book's resonance -- particularly with the choices of music -- seems more Judeo-Christian than Classical. The life and death on offer here are metamusical riffs on transcendence rather than the stay of execution bargained by the original myth. The prominent place of the Christian Messaien; the use of Reich's Proverb -- with its lyric lifted from a spiritual Wittgenstein; the assignment of the composer's high point to an opera about an Anabaptist visionary theocracy: all of these seem to fix the vibe well beyond the territory of Hades.

Maybe music is the closest we get to the City of God so sought-after by crackpot, delusional, would-be saints. All of the Judeo-Christian attempts to verbalize that City seem only to collapse to the ironies that the IAMTHATIAM is inarticulate and the Word is inarticulable. But with music we are able to express something along the lines of "We might not understand you, God, but we do feel you, we really do," especially when we have something like Messaien's violin (via Powers as Moses) ascending into the Hint At All a Person Might Still Have After Death Takes Everything.

So that when, like me, you can no longer hear what you once could, except in your mind, it brings you to a place not unlike death and you can start to see what that something might be.

I'll be damned if it isn't birdsong.

Mourning in America

Walking into the public library this morning, I noticed the flag at half-staff. The occasion is the murder of 11 people in Pittsburgh, shot by an anti-Semite while they observed the Jewish Sabbath in a synagogue. At the sight of the flag my first thought was, "With the frequency of these kinds of killings, when will half-staff become the standard practice, and full-staff be the exception?"

It's impossible to put thought into these kinds of events without the mind being mobbed by emotions and notions clamoring for attention. Which ones to pursue? Which ones to allow to burn out? I let myself think for a little bit that half-staff days might be a good measure of sociopolitical climate change in the US, but then discarded the idea: in the first place nobody seems to be keeping track; in the second there are better indices of mass murders and hate crimes; and those better indices cover such deaths as those of Vickie Jones and Maurice Stallard, two African-Americans who were shot earlier in the week in Jeffersontown, KY, by a white gunman with apparently racist motivations, and who deserve their own half-staff remembrance, as do all victims of sectarian hatred, the bile in the American melting pot.

As I try to think about these things, I am influenced by the speech given by Rabbi Arthur Rutberg of Congregation B'nai Sholom, who spoke last night in Johnson City at a vigil in remembrance of the Pittsburgh victims. He talked about the fact that these were Americans struck down in the act of worship on what was to them a holy day. To me this is like a kick in the gut. If our constitutional pact of citizenship does not protect them, whom does it protect?

I am also influenced by having just completed a book by Michael Lewis called The Undoing Project, which is about the work of two secular Jews, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, to understand how the human mind actually functions when it thinks -- or tries to think.

I read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow a few years back and heartily welcomed the culture-clearing gust it blew into the study of the act of thinking. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Freud, he at least indicated the complexity that besets human brains in the process of cogitating, and yet for decades (if not centuries) the model of human thought was the one-dimensional rationalism of homo oeconomicus. Kahneman's book put paid to that notion and begins to scratch the surface of the layers of psychological bedrock that show "I think therefore I am" to mean little more than "hold my beer."

Throughout that book Kahneman credits his partnership with Amos Tversky as having produced the breakthroughs in speculation and modeling that led to this sea change in thinking about thinking, but the focus was on results, not on the partnership. Michael Lewis's book brings the partnership to center stage and in his usual, very readable way delves into the interpersonal dynamics that produced insights that might have gone undiscovered or undeveloped to either man working alone.

As such it underscores the necessary tragedy entailed by the hubris of human thinking, particularly in isolation. In Kahneman's words, from a 1973 talk, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of a jungle rat" had given itself "the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." It was "troubling" (Lewis's word) that "crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority." Lewis adds, "the failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings," place the entire human race at the mercy of leaders who could doom it "by a series of avoidable mistakes."

But where the book hits hardest, right now, is with what is invoked by its title: the undoing project. It refers to the instinctive reaction that humans have to an unfortunate or tragic event. How might it have been avoided or prevented? This is the human brain working to "undo" the event. To Kahneman and Tversky it was useful to examine how people responded to questions having to do with, for example, the death of someone in a plane crash. In imagining that the person's death could have been avoided, what was easier to think, that the plane did not crash or that the person took another plane?

What anyone engaging with the Pittsburgh tragedy is doing right now, at some level, is trying to undo it. It is as natural a human response as any other emotion. Whether the response is Donald Trump's "more guns" or Moms Demand Action's "Disarm Hate," anyone pondering the event cannot help but try to imagine how it might not have happened. To say that there must be a period of mourning before thinking these kinds of thoughts is to believe in the man in the moon; it is positively inhuman to the point of being sociopathic. Anyone disavowing political intent in the act of mourning an event like this is too detached from actual grief to be listened to.

Kahneman and Tversky gave us a starting point: the process of undoing can be a positive one if we allow it to sift through all the wreckage of our tragedy-strewn thoughts and ideas. Nor is this something we can do by ourselves. In response to a situation like Pittsburgh -- or any other of the tragic killings so common in America -- we could assemble the will and the wit of the nation to think how it might not have happened so as to take appropriate action in the hope that it might prevent such events in the future.

It is the job of leadership to motivate the will and convene the wit of the nation to this end. Will this happen? One of the most discouraging things about these events is the evidence not only that such leadership is nonexistent, but also that its nonexistence is as quintessentially American as the bile in the melting pot. If that's the case, it's not something that can be undone.

That would be not so much mourning in America as just mourning America.

The sermon that no one will hear

The cover letter clipped to the manuscript began, "She lived in a dream."

I looked back at the brown glassine envelope, addressed to "Director," to see the return address -- All Saints Church/Speke, Merseyside, UK -- and at the fountain-pen message on the back, "Do not mail until 2018."

Inside, the letter repeated the address at the top, along with a date -- 23 May, 1956 -- and began, "Dear sir or madam:"

"She lived in a dream. She showed up one day straight from the Speke airport right across the street. American. 'I'm looking for a Wet Nelly and a flat.' A flat in postwar Speke? When they couldn't throw up council houses fast enough? But dreamlike the estate agent knew of an old woman way over on Western just across from the 86 line stop who needed a lodger. Eleanor came to see me every day, always bringing me a coffee and a Wet Nelly, which she'd also had no problem finding. She lived on them.

"And died of them. Wasn't here long. Seven years? Every wedding we had she was there. She collected the rice after and then made a little sachet with a lovely note, all smiley faces and hearts and congrats, very American, for the couple. 'I borrowed them anyway, so it's only fair,' she told me, meaning she put the people into one of her novels that she never published ('Horrors! The stain of publicity!'). She would also sit at the front window of her flat and look out of it at passersby. She was borrowing them as well. Another thing she did was keep a paper face in a jar by the door for when an unexpected visitor rang; she would slip it on and open the door, so that the unexpected visitor would be faced with a bearded man in a Highland bonnet wearing -- horrors -- pants. This gave her such a laugh. And the visitor's reaction was something else to borrow. She would even go outside with it when a bus passed by and "flash" (her word) schoolboys. 'They are so easy to scandalize!'

"One day, along with the customary coffee and afters (with her there were no befores) she brought me the enclosed manuscript. It was, she said, 'the sermon that no one will hear.' Why not? I asked. Her answer: 'Thomas Jefferson is my only communicant, and he is dead. And really, padre,' she went on, 'you must read something besides Westerns. They're not good for you. Eisenhower reads them.'

"Not long after, she died right in front of me. Lights out, just like that. Probably the Wet Nellys. They're good but you're meant to eat other things as well. Westerns for the body is what they are. I should've thought of that for Eleanor Rigby. She'd have taken umbrage, which would've been good for a laugh. Anyway nobody came to her funeral because I didn't need any witnesses to my dodgery. I had the undertaker bring the coffin back to a spot in the churchyard as close to the gate as possible so she could have a view. Had the hole dug but filled it in myself and was just wiping the dirt from my hands when two lads walked by, back towards the estate from the airport. "George here was just showing me where Birdman was killed the other day," said the more gregarious one by way of a conversational device by which to mine me of information. They asked who it was and where was her stone? I said it was Eleanor Rigby, but now she was buried along with her name. Even though she was unsaved I gave her the ground; it went a wee bit shy of protocol, but I didn't care -- and that is what I told them. Was it a good thing for me to put the truth onto these young and accidental witnesses? For me it was a scapegoat mechanism, I suppose. By putting it onto them, my secret was safe. No one would ever hear more of Eleanor Rigby.

"They walked away. I heard the reserved one, the one named George by his baby-faced companion, muttering, 'With a story like that, it was probably the lady from that wedding who picked up the rice and who flashes our bus with that Highlander mask. All the crazy people. Where do they all come from?'

"As to their question about the stone, I finessed it into silence. How could there be a stone with the dates 'Born Dec. 25, 1990 - Died May 21, 1956' on it?

"There, it's told. All this writing! It's night and no one is here. Anybody walking by would think I was writing a sermon! Now I can get back to darning socks. 

The letter was signed Fr. H. M. McKenzie.

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

The sermon that no one will hear:

My text for today is Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, in that heyday of America when the U.S. President -- himself not only a Harvard man but the author of a slim tome -- possessed a broadly-informed and questioning mind, which inspired the wisecrack that he was less the successor to Eisenhower, who read Westerns, than to Jefferson, who read Adam Smith. This, together with a certain Cold-War, post-Sputnik mobilization of expertise, made it a moment of promise for the American intellectual. It was nonetheless tenuous, since it came only a few years after a junior senator from Wisconsin gave his name to an era of publicly slandering the patriotism of those who exhibited broadly-informed and questioning minds. And that, wrote Hofstadter, was just the lurid worst of a general condition.

What is this "anti-intellectualism" that is a defining characteristic of American life? For the most part, it is not so much an -ism as it is -- in the mouths of farmers, evangelists, workers, or businessmen -- an antipathetic grunt of disrespect for the sniffy elitism of the learned, those self-anointed popes of a bookish truth -- useless and impractical to a man, and effeminate to boot -- pontificating from lonely, lofty perches in isolated ivory towers or filthy bohemian garrets. (And this was, remember, before women figured as a class capable of higher thought.)

But Hofstadter also includes some less likely candidates in his league of "antis." Among them are educators: the Presbyterians and especially the Methodists of the Great Awakening, who -- while prompted to convert through inarticulate spiritual processes -- nonetheless championed basic education as the key to unlocking the Biblical source of the holy djinn; also progressive education reformers of the first half of the 20th century whose goal was to make the child -- each and every one of them -- the font of his or her own education, which, given the culture in which he or she was raised, might favor manual over textual or linguistic learning.

With these it becomes clear that Hofstadter's intellectualism is the bookishly studious descendent of traditional humanism and its regnant modus sciendi. Not the downstream branch that in the 21st century has become almost synonymous with atheism, traditional humanism hails from halls of classicism that rang with grammar-based learning of languages (at first Latin and Greek) and the close reading of texts (at first Latin and Greek), which became the basis for logico-rational argumentation, most often in writing. Not for nothing did the Puritans of New England call their primary schools "Latin schools." They meant "Latin (and Greek)", and it was the only real way to proof the Holy Writ and rub the djinn-bottle.

And from thence the way to arrive at the linguistic jungles of Finnegan's Wake or the inundations of Infinite Jest or the efflorescence of the New Textamental, parabolic fictions in search of reality. How did we get from the Puritans to Handmaid's Tale? 

It was not so much a tortuous path as it was an amazement, the cultivation of a semiconscious state of ratiocination in which to lose oneself, never caring to find the exit because it is the only reality that matters. More: it is reality itself. In the beginning was the word, and from there it's words all the way down.

Garden of Eden become Garden of Earthly Delights, it has become the only reliable way by which things are known, understood, given meaning, and proliferated to each fresh generation. The rubbing of the djinn bottle produced more and more exotic and non-Biblical djinni -- here a Declaration of Independence and a U.S. Constitution, there a Uniformitarianism leading to the idea of a blind evolution of species -- but the methodical exploration pushing back the horizon of truth continued unabated, even if its refinements, grotesqueries, and idiosyncrasies made it a puzzle to the uninitiated that remains unsolved. It is an acquired taste, the apprenticeship is long and lonely, there is no guarantee of material gain, and no one in the family understands what the hell it is you do or why. But with the right reading and writing materials, the self-exiles in this garden are happily stuck with even such a boor as Socrates for a neighbor. "The unexamined life is not worth living": etched, cross-stitched, or aerosol-painted?

Theirs is the quest in questioning, the inheritance of the great salvific torment: How do I know I am saved? With death holding the answer, all life becomes an ever-larger question that winds up burying the afterlife. That is the great, the important, the only thing, burying all else: the Vesuvius to the Pompeii of the world; the destruction that is an ending and a beginning.

Seek and ye shall find that which keeps you seeking. 

Hofstadter does well to question why, in the minds of progressive educators, this text-based enigma-cracking was not something that most children wanted to do and thus why it should be replaced by wood shop and home ec; and also to castigate them for organizing entire schemes of instruction that gave preferment to this displacement. But is the progressive response a thing to be lumped with foaming-at-the-mouth Billy Sunday's learning-is-from-the-devil vituperations? It is not, and Hofstadter is wrong to cast them from the same mold.

The progressives were not antipathetic to the project of solitary, book-based exploration; they just didn't see why a kid curing Sitzfleisch in the library should be the beneficiary of public resources when he or she was obviously perfectly happily being left alone with legible crumbs. What help did they need? They're fine by themselves. Look at all the others! They need wood shop and home ec!

Interestingly, there is a parallel story, one that comes from the [ahem] temple of learning itself: the public library. It is the story of the "library faith" that puts Jefferson with his Adam Smith on the same plane as Eisenhower with his Westerns. If Hofstadter-style American anti-intellectualism were looking to make a Hollywood blockbuster, this is the story it should tell. But Hofstadter missed the story altogether.

In his epic the [ahem] temple of learning is overlooked; it doesn't even make green room cash bartender, much less understudy. The closest he gets is to mention Andrew Carnegie and his "munificent gifts to education." This generic munificence is linked, however, to Vanderbilt and other tycoons' investment in the reform of higher, i.e. university education, stultified in their view by the dead hand of reliance on dead languages and much in need of a modernizing lava bath. There is also mention of Carnegie's own love for "liberal" education, which in Carnegie's words "gives to the man who really absorbs it higher tastes and aims than the acquisition of wealth, and a world to enjoy, into which the mere millionaire cannot enter." 

But how did Carnegie get there? Hofstadter doesn't say. The contextual implication is that it must have been through some pre-reform institution of higher learning. In fact it came through a disciplined, self-directed program of reading books borrowed mostly, in Carnegie's telling, from the 400-volume private library of an iron manufacturer with a soft spot for broadening the horizons of ambitious but impecunious working boys. That was the learning device that Carnegie wanted to make available to every ambitious but impecunious working boy out there, by planting a public library in every American town.

The common school? Provide this kind of education? Whom are you fooling? You can stuff a turkey, but you can't stuff a brain. Real learning was an inner-directed, lifelong habit of mind. It didn't need classrooms. It didn't want classrooms! It wanted libraries full of books.

Public libraries, of course, already existed, but Carnegie's enthusiasm for them kicked the institution into national high gear. It was in its original conception to be the university for the Carnegie-style Everyman, where a person of sufficient passion for learning would find the resources (books) to advance his knowledge. It is a very American story with many pre- and post-Carnegie exemplars, notably such as Benjamin Franklin, the mid-19th century Boston Brahmins, and the women's club movement of the Progressive era that changed the civic landscape: by building temples of learning, where the American masses would achieve their higher education.

Give me an [ahem] somebody! The American Everyman showed his interest in disciplined, self-directed learning through reading books by staying away from the public library in droves. There were a few little Carnegies, people like Thomas Edison, just not most people. What was a library to do? Mr. Carnegie hadn't said; he didn't know; he thought everybody was like him. Librarians ensconced in their cobwebbed reference collections consulted their existential tea leaves and lo! Out of whole buckram appeared the notion that leisure reading led ineluctably to serious reading. Mirabile dictu! The "library faith" was born. It didn't matter what you read. Reading = good. A pulp diet inexorably leads to dolmata with Socrates.

Despite the offer of free popular reading, most people continued to favor the alternate technologies of radio and long automobile drives in the country to the point that, after World War II, there was serious concern about the viability of the entire public library project. It was time for a reckoning. The Carnegie Foundation sensed that something had gone awry. It funded the Social Science Research Council to carry out a "Public Library Inquiry," national in scope, that would study the "empirical research literature on the users of public libraries and what they use them for." Involved in the project were such library lights as researcher Lester Asheim, who helped formulate the library gospel on censorship ("We're agin' it."), and Mary Utopia Rothrock, library consultant to TVA, who served as the only woman and one of two librarians on the 7-member project committee.

The PLI released a number of reports. One of them, published in 1949 as The Library's Public, was the first to document and define the unempirical "library faith" that put all reading on the same plane and posited the existence of what became known as the "reading ladder": as a person read more and more, he/she naturally and effortlessly went up rung-by-rung from good (it's all good!) to better, or more challenging. Despite the lack of evidence for this, librarians to this day embrace the notion without a second thought, or remove the ladder altogether (it was blocking the reading rainbow). Intelligent design, meet library science.

The Library's Public also delivered the bad news: 10% of adults used the public library on a monthly basis. The slightly better news was that a third of children/youth did the same. However, this positive finding was darkened by the apparent fact that this use was dictated by school requirements. Information? "As a source of information, the public library has little reality for most people." Bottom line: "The general public has little knowledge about the public library and its services and seems to regard the public library as a fine thing for a community to have--for other people to use."

Here was the report's silver lining: those other people -- that 10% -- made really good use of the public library, to the point that the report referred to them as "a kind of 'communications elite'" because they were also heavy users of such mass media like newspapers, magazine, and radio (this was before the widespread use of TV). This was an elite formed not by maldistributive factors, which is the case with wealth and class, but by the mere personal use of a generally-available public resource.

The report recommended in very general terms that public libraries should embrace the reality of being a niche service and should provide more direct support to the 10% of the people who used them. Public libraries as a mass institution? Fuhgeddaboudit.

What public libraries then did fuhgeddabout was the PLI, except when they wanted to trot out a scapegoat. Its recommendations were entirely ignored. Public libraries doubled down on scratching the public itch for popular reading. In libraryland the catchphrase became "Give them what they want." With the advent of feature films on video, public libraries enjoyed the same brief seventh heaven as Blockbuster. Popular culture trumped everything. Self-education was a cynical rationale to be trotted out at budget time, arrayed in the vestments of the library faith.

Along came the computer-Internet revolution. Many public libraries, particularly small ones, were lifted into the new era by the philanthropy of Bill Gates, the Carnegie of the Information Age. But Gates has in mind more than just a technology upgrade. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making an ongoing, global effort to "support the transformation of libraries as engines of development" as well as "to foster innovation in libraries." If this effort has an analogue to the PLI report, it is the 2014 report of the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries entitled Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries. 

Even though the report's peppy tone tries to give the impression that libraries are raring to embrace change, it's easy to read between the lines that these are the soothing words to the press of the coach who has just spent half-time in the locker room screaming at a chronically under-performing player: "One more screw-up, and you're done!"

No more being a mere "repository of materials"! It will take on new roles that will extend "far beyond book lending." As for its staff, fewer will be needed "to put books on shelves" and "a lot more" will need to be educators. "What libraries need is to become more intentional in the ways that they deploy resources in the community." And they're going to have to show solid, measurable "outcomes" -- not "outputs" -- that "report how the library is helping to achieve community goals and objectives."

At the same time, the report acknowledges that there is lots of good to build on. Usage is up from the PLI days, with a quarter of the population reporting monthly use according to the 2013 Pew Research survey cited by the study.  Score one for popular reading!

And, in almost a direct echo from the PLI study, people still value libraries as a community asset even if they don't use it. The report quotes an Illinois city manager -- one imagines a dyspeptic curmudgeon slumped in the back of the meeting room with an allergic reaction to flip chart brainstorming -- warning against a too-quick embrace of "the next big thing" and saying, "The library is a place you don't know you need but couldn't live without." No stinkin' outcome measures for that guy.

His is very much a lone voice in this report, which in large part is a shitstorm of technocratic, nonprofit management platitudes and cliches for the Information Age: "The emerging value proposition of the public library … knowledge economies … exploitation of means of production and knowledge … entrepreneurial learner … new channels of sharing and distribution of knowledge." And there better be measurable outcomes or you're off the team.

Nonetheless, despite its complete lack of anything resembling authenticity or humanity (can bots commit cultural appropriation?), the report has the unintended value of serving as a progress report of public libraries since the PLI.  But what the Aspen report characterizes as passivity is more a stubborn refusal to abandon the notion that libraries should favor leisure above learning. It is the settled habit that understands popular reading or viewing -- elevated by the annual intoning of the mantra of the library faith -- to be its meal ticket.

Ironically, the Aspen report -- for all its futuristic pretense -- effectively brings the public library full circle, to its original, serious, unfulfilled purpose. The Aspen participants may think they are "re-envisioning the role of the public libraries as a vital learning institution and engine for individual, community and civil society development," but in fact there is no re-envisioning at all. The public library founders of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie, and the Progressive-era women's clubs thought about the role of the library in pretty much the same way. They just didn't have computers, the Internet, or "emerging value propositions" chained to arbitrary outcomes, however measurable.

Where the traditional library and the Gates library diverge, however, is in their understanding of where the library's beating heart lies. The truest conception of the library is that it is where a questing individual can go in search of knowledge. It was knowledge that was to undergird the education of Jefferson's yeoman's farmer, who in turn was to undergird the American republic, and it was this ideal that drove the public library project from the outset. It is still paid lip service in the library faith of the contemporary public library, and a faint echo still reverberates in the Aspen report.

For the most part, however, the Gates project refuses to listen to this voice and, when it isn't trumpeting the next-big-thing version of wood shop -- the 3D printer -- it follows the siren call of the "problems" approach: identify the "problems" facing the community and work on them. Anyone who has ever spent the least bit of time working on an effort to prioritize community "problems" knows that wherever the planning vessel winds up, the outcome is as likely to be a smashup of a politically-influenced, advocacy-laden exercise in social marketing as it is to be the actual, truest need. And the library, as a result being "intentional" in how it "deploys resources," finds those resources disappearing into the maw of more astute players of the game.

Why, with the cornucopia of informational resources showering upon us, do we have to focus elsewhere than on individual learning that can be turbocharged with the help of libraries -- particularly when they cooperate and collaborate. Libraries are among the most collaborative of institutions, but public libraries, especially small ones, depend on local and state funding that If they can doesn't even allow them to keep pace with technology's new added costs, and now the champions of tech want what there its to be diverted to wood shop. That this should be the "next big thing" in the face of the failure of the Internet Public Library (1995 -2015) is clear evidence Hofstadter-style anti-intellectuals are running the show and are thus wasting real opportunities.

Meanwhile the Federal government resolutely refuses to lead and fritters away its "library" money on atomized grants for the industry-subsidizing networking that are the opioids for the poor little libraries' tech addictions. It's not like they have a choice, either. When it was canals and railroads that could tie the country together, the Federal government didn't hesitate. And now that the linkages are virtual, it washes its hands and say, "No can do"?  Game-changing projects that would be national in scope are not hard to conceive. The best example I know is the Hathi Trust online collection, with full-text searching inside its 13.7 million scanned volumes, but more is possible. 

Why not, at long last, simply respond to the interests of those individuals who come to the library with a serious interest in learning? Yes, help them with the new tools that computers and the Internet have made available. But be intentional in deploying library resources not just to meet their needs but to extend them and elevate them, whatever knowledge they pursue. Libraries have always recognized the full gamut of subject matter to be deserving of support. There is no need to privilege STEM, for example, any more than there used to be a need to privilege Latin and Greek. The processes and patterns of support will be the same for everyone regardless of subject matter:

• Physical books remain not only a huge "value proposition," but are also the enduring "library brand" (much to the chagrin of public libraries, some of whom have called it "an incredible disconnect" from reality). However, the emphasis should be on a collection carefully selected and maintained to encourage and support individual learners.
• The copyright death of Google Books (although alleviated to some extent by the Hathi Trust) places all the more value on a national network of inter-lending libraries, which already exists but the full use of which is hampered by burdensome user fees. Interlibrary loan in support of registered research projects should be subsidized so as to enable borrowing from private research libraries.
• Establish a national purchasing consortium to pay for access to copyrighted material in digital form (ebooks, journals, etc.)
• Make registered autodidacts the library's core constituency and the focus of the mission. 
• Offer a READ (Reading-Educated AutoDidact) degree.
• Use data to demonstrate the superiority of the READS degree to the university one. This should be a piece of cake. Hunger beats forced feeding anytime.
• Transition library staffing away from clerical functions (processing, circulation) in the direction of knowledge functions that support self-learning. Establish a "Peace Corps"-style Federal program to develop a new professional program and recruitment for this new focus, with premiums for candidates with high levels of student debt.
• Publish papers, essays, blogs, games, movies, musical compositions, etc., that derive from the work of autodidacts.
• Develop programming (lectures, podcasts, presentations, book reviews/talks, discussion groups) based on the work of library "students."
• Provide lengthy blocks of computer time (4-8 hours) to enable adequate research time and focus, particularly with multimedia. Use equipment logs to insist on appropriate use.
• Embrace the shush along with noise-canceling design and technology.

Why privilege these individuals? In the first place, let us remember what has been privileged, already, instead, with public money: on the education side, an enormously-expensive facsimile of learning via classroom instruction and on the library side Eisenhower's leisure over Jefferson's learning.

In the second place, it's the wrong question. The right question is "why privilege learning?" I won't try to answer that question except to say that our society has said that it does, but then proceeds to go about it in a way that is not only inefficient in terms of resources and results, but also discouraging of those habits of mind that will lead to lifelong learning. Why privilege the classroom instruction of an arbitrary selection of facts or skills, presented as a pre-ordained array, when real learning best proceeds along an inner-directed path?

If this is American "anti-intellectualism" -- as Hofstadter says -- it is a strange beast. It apotheosizes knowledge as the spiritual guarantor of democracy  and then builds an educational system that ignores the truest form of it. Well-meaning attempts at re-invention (Carnegie, Gates) have built and outfitted many buildings, but their most important contributions have been to perpetuate a hollow institution.

E. Rigby, M.L.S. (2012), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

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

I went looking for Eleanor Rigby. She was back at her desk, eating a doughnut and drinking coffee as she updated the library website. One feels slightly sorry for a person who's been saddled by her parents with a notorious name. Such an imposition. It's doubly sad to think of her gilding the lily like that, too. If any song had a completely prosaic birth, it was her namesake. Paul noodling "Daisy Hawkins" and something about rice at a wedding and then tossing it like a carcass to his mates -- not including John Lennon -- so they could cure it.

"Nice [ahem] fountain pen font on the back," I said, handing her the envelope with the manuscript inside, "but you can't fool me. Time travel notwithstanding, there is still just one Eleanor Rigby who could've written the review. And she went to Catholic, not UT, didn't she? So no, the review can't go on the library's book review blog. You are staff, Eleanor. You are not one of our wacky autodidact contributors thinking she is writing for the New York Review of Books. You know the rules for adult staff as well as I: only books published in the current year, with 5/1 preference for popular fiction or genre fiction. Books that people will read, Eleanor."

She flipped me off with a 3-beat finger: "WESTerns. FUCking. SUCK! And Goodreads has a character limit of 20,000 characters, so FUCK YOU!" and went back to work.