an essay

Journey Man

Sitting in the cab of a small car, alone for many hours and over many days while traveling cross-country, will produce a lot of rethinking of old problems and the discovery of more than a few new ones. In that enclosed space, I have come to the not so subtle realization that writing (and reading) is very much like traveling. An exploration. In fact I write by question, from inquiry to inquiry, like a journey with no absolute course.

“Why did he do it?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“But how?”

I do have a purpose, an ultimate goal, but I tend not to pre-determine its length or breadth until a shape has been conjured out of an accumulation of questions and answers–words chosen one by one for how they illuminate the path ahead. I think it’s the way many writers do it. More

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What we reap.

The word is not good.

On a recent journey, it was simple enough to find a bookshop in a major city. A few perhaps. A Barnes &  Noble. An independent bookshop. Larger cities might even have two or more. Especially if there is a university close. Perhaps, if the city aspires to a significant intellectual life, you will find a good used bookshop as well. But most American cities today do not have an independent bookshop. A fact. Many do not even have a book chain outlet. The great majority do not have a used bookshop. More

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Concerning Modern Slavery

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This was adopted in 1865, seventy-four years after the first ten amendments—a full lifetime–and at the cost of far more than the 620,00 lives recently lost in the Civil War.

Slavery, the forcible enslavement of one human being for the purpose of another, is variously defined as bondage, servitude, and thralldom–all aspects of ownership, subjection, control, and captivity.

Now the question arises: what part of this idea, if any, do you not understand today?

Let’s make this personal. Speaking at the safe remove of the third person is a waste of breath and ink or ether. I am personally interested in the answer. What is your difficulty with this Constitutional prohibition on slavery or the definition given here? Do you disagree with it? A part of it? What part is that?

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The Anti-heroic Phallacy

Modern fiction is, by authority, a literature of anti-heroic impulse, anti-heroes, and the failure of mankind. Most primarily the dramatic action of the modern novel is dependent on a Freudian fallacy which pretends that human behavior is guided by sexuality, and as a subset, by greed as a form of sexual domination. After the misguided suppression of sexual matters in the Victorian age, this sort of ad hominem theorizing once appeared liberating to an intellectual community already estranged from the daily toil of the larger community. Don’t we all have these sexual feelings? Are we all not guilty of the original sin? The ‘hero’ does not save the damsel in distress for reasons of good will and humanity, but to rape her.

We have several generations of this sort of tripe polluting the academic mind at this point. I am 62. I was first introduced to a supposed sexual subtext of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ when I was 16–in a high school class no less. The joke is that such pseudo-intellectual claptrap is still being foisted on new generations of sixteen year olds as if it is recent revelation. The Victorians are still being challenged as if they are ‘the Man,’ in the same way as Nazi’s are still the villains in so many movies after sixty years of Pol Pots and Stalins, Idi Amins and Che Guevaras, Mao Zedongs and a dozen other mass murderers more relevant to the current world scene.

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deus ex machina?

So a friend of mine was telling me about a bit of behaviorist evolutionary theory and I found it very appealing. I have generally found most behaviorism as unscientific as any religion–drawing conclusions from insignificant or incomplete data and thence supposing whole worldviews. Thus the activities of ants might become a modus for human action or the pre-calculated terms of conduct of lab animals in a closed system become rules of human political order.

But all behaviorists are not so insane or inane. Their foundational methods are actually scientific and their discoveries can be enlightening. It is usually when they begin to extrapolate from mice to men that they go terribly wrong. Such pseudo-scientific theory is so 20th Century!

So I listened to my friend and found his proposition very appealing and immediately began to self-consciously wonder why. Why?

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Wyeth in passing

When Andrew Wyeth died I found myself reviewing many past thoughts and realizing a few new ones. He was by far the preeminent painter of my time, one of the first living painters I became aware of as a youth. I cannot remember the exact text, but his work was the cause of the first argument I ever had about art, and subsequently many others. His father, the fabulous N.C. Wyeth, had filled the dreams of my childhood with colors that challenged the nature of the ordinary. And that path lead back and beyond to the great Howard Pyle. Andrew Wyeth’s personal life made the national and world news. Books of his work were bestsellers and helped pay my rent during the 1970′s as I started life as a professional bookseller. But his greater importance to me was, from the first, that he made me think.

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Morphology

Two of the greatest American authors among us today are Tom Wolfe and John McPhee, both of whom are often pigeonholed as part of the New Journalism school that arose in the 1960′s, but are in fact just plain good writers alive by chance at the same time, and both, by the nature of the academic mind, in need of tags so that their work can be more readily handled or dismissed. I am in awe of both men, and have re-read portions of their work to see if an examination of the bones might reveal the source of their magic–on a par with dissecting the golden goose.

My younger brother re-introduced me to McPhee in the early 1990′s. My brother is a geologist and was taken with several of those works which border on that territory, as well as the one on Alaska if I remember correctly. I had only read one of McPhee’s books at the time, the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed–brought to it by my own interest in lighter than air vehicles–and was not yet enamored with the man’s work. McPhee was a bit too cool on a subject that was hot to me.

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Fungible!

I do not remember who taught me the word, ‘fungible.’ I am as sure that I did not discover it in a book as I am of any memory, but I cannot recall the person who opened that window in my mind. I have a vague recollection of repeating the word aloud and being told its meaning. I believe the discovery must have been in high school because it appears in a manuscript of the time.

The importance of the word to me lay in the sudden self-awareness that others had wrestled with the amoebic edges of memory and found a word for a phenomenon I was already encountering. We often exchange actual and original purpose or intent with a better cause when we recall our actions. Price may have been the determining factor and money the motive for accepting the price, but it was, after all, the perfect gift, was it not?

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Post hoc ergo propter hoc…again.

When, about ten years ago, I made the decision to begin writing seriously again, the first project I undertook was a juvenile–a story I had imagined many years before and given up on.

I think the decision was tied to an example of foolishness which is worth re-considering: that it would be easier to write a juvenile–to break the ice before getting on to the harder stuff.

The common belief is that childhood is blessed by simplicity. Things were easier then. But this is quite false, of course. We all know that, if we know anything. But we want to believe it for reasons which are themselves complex.

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of smaller homes and gardens

I have designed at least a thousand homes in my life. None of them built. Designing a home to suit a specific need has become my way of relaxing. It’s a quick and purposeful refuge from those realities I need to escape. Watching a baseball game is good, but not nearly as good.

Looking back over some of the designs, many of which took weeks to complete, I can trace my own intellectual and emotional history as well as my economic state of mind. The homes are smaller during periods of financial difficulty. They were largest when my bookshop business did best. But, more interestingly to me, they all have a central idea or purpose and looking at older plans now reminds me of dreams I’ve had and perhaps forgotten.

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