an essay

The voice of hubris.

As I have noted elsewhere here, my mother’s parents were illiterate. They were the type of mountain people who knew one book only and that by ear, line by line repeated, and knew those stories as they played out in their own lives. Their deep knowledge was hard won and held closely. When advice was given it should be heeded.

My grandfather would have been a good writer if he had been born to the opportunity. He told stories as easily as cutting a plug of tobacco and they usually lasted about as long. The final spit toward the nearest gully was the end of it. He often told stories we had heard before, but we listened and laughed to ourselves at the changes along the way.

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Aural Hobgoblins

I was speaking with a kind gentleman the other day. Reluctant though I was to disagree with him because of his generosity to me, I could not help but contradict his thesis. As I understand it, film music should not be interpreted apart from the context that made it possible. In addition, there is a pervasive use of incidental music in our lives that serves a potentially insidious purpose–which shapes us and moves us.

If I am misunderstanding the thesis, it may be because it borders on many similar ideas rampant in the area of literary criticism. I cannot read music, and have only a small knowledge of musical history. What I understand quite well is what I enjoy hearing. And beyond that, there is a clear and primordial relationship of music to everyday human life that is not difficult to comprehend.

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Greed!

If I were to suggest that no author should be paid more than, say, $100,000 per book, some readers would actually accept the premise, if not the exact amount. I have spoken to such people. I have listened, not very patiently, to a proposal that great books should be paid a higher advance than lesser books. This was by a literature major who had graduated from Harvard, a renowned local college which has recently lowered its standards. I have even read a proposal that there be a minimum placed on what a publisher can pay per word. This was in a promotional brochure for a proposed “writers union.’

The absurdity of all of these ideas relegated them quickly to oblivion. But nevertheless, they will be proposed again, and again. It is a smallness of mind which is tightly bound to an egocentric view of the universe. It is a verbalization of the thought that if I cannot get such rewards, then no one should have them.

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In our time.

In his time, one of the most admired of the Transcendentalists who hold such a prominent position in the American literary firmament of the 19th century was a man who is all but forgotten today—would in fact be forgotten but for one daughter who was in her own character far more like her mother.

What was loved about Bronson Alcott is difficult for me to see now. I have engaged the question several times in my life, beginning when I was nineteen or so and attending an experimental college in Vermont. Alcott was an experimenter with ideas, and much interested in educational reform, and thus an easy target for someone looking for an answer to the wholesale human stupidity that seemed to overwhelm the world about me at a time when my generation were being used as cannon fodder in Vietnam and nuclear annihilation was the only monitor of peace.

Who was this man who was so loved by Emerson, Thoreau, Parker, Fuller, and Channing—and at least respected by Hawthorne and the difficult Mr. Garrison?

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Newton’s Fig

Before Newton observed the descent of the apple, the gravity of his realization was well known. However, he was the first to establish this identification in a code that might be applied as principle to the understanding of other mysteries. As a result, the whole field of physics was born, and all of the scientific marvel which followed from it. Might Newton then be entitled to ownership, or at least a share of the ownership to all of our modern uses of gravity?

In my youth, an article appeared called The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin. At the time, it was the second most thought provoking thing I had ever read. It prompted one unfinished novel in response at a time when I was overextended with other ambitions and has recently been the seed of a new effort I am well into the midst of and hope to finish in a year or two.

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Because the maroons are running the asylum–part 3

Years too late, I am just getting used to the new medium. I have been on the reader end of this shtick since the mid-90’s, but producing a web-site offers an entirely new prospect.

A friend who shall remain Scottish sent me a link in response to the second installment of this series of rants about the business of writing, editing and publishing. As a consequence, I have completely re-written the original drafts of this post and the next. Such feedback and response was not possible in the world of ink and paper, and thus another dawning of light on Marblehead.

I was again humbled by the potential of the internet in making this very post. For a long while I have told a simple story as an example of a moment of realization which now appears to be a false memory, a conflation of several different journeys made over thirty years ago which I have unconsciously edited for a selective purpose and remembered as one.

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Because the maroons are running the asylum–part 2

There is one element, and only one, in the publishing process which cannot be replaced—without which, publishing, per se, would cease to exist. Most people, when asked what that is, will answer quickly, “the author.” But they would be wrong. Most people don’t want to think about how things work. They simply want it to work and they want it now. Any attempt to explain the importance of knowing is met with indignation—as if the reality is a mistake and their wanting is the matter.

Virgil wrote his poetry with a quill. Herodotus wrote his histories in the same manner. Neither had any concept of publishing, and yet we are still reading them.

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Because the maroons are running the asylum–part 1

I would like to say I stopped aspiring years ago. It can be bad for your health, psychologically as well as physically. It is something one often does in the dark, alone, beneath the covers, or in the shower. But, obviously, its not true. I still do.

Failed aspirations are at least frustrating, and often the hard futility of dreams turned to dust can produce a bitterness which colors your responses to other matters of life and death and spoils the small enjoyments which are cumulatively the better part of a life.

It occurs to me that it was dumb luck that I chose other outlets for my aspirations in addition to my writing. Bookselling has been a joy. And better than that, taking a part in the raising of three kids has been more important to my happiness than anything else I could have imagined on paper.

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Turn! Turn! Turn!…but laid upon its edge, the grindstone becomes a wheel.

My mother’s father watched as an early airplane crash-landed in a corn field near Canton, North Carolina about 1908, and he noted to me fifty years later how the dried stalks ripped the fabric of the wings. My Father’s father was a river boat captain on the Mississippi. As an assistant Captain working for the Steckfus Lines, he unwittingly hired an underage musician named Armstrong in New Orleans to work in the band on the return trip to St. Louis. The air age and the jazz age seem well behind us now, but I grew up with the stories of those times.

My mother’s great grandfather was a doctor to Confederate troops. That once seemed quite remote to me, mostly because she never knew him–but he had cared for my grandfather when the boy was stricken with polio, a great killer of the time, and saved him and then raised him as his own so that he may one day see that early airplane. I myself was part of the testing of the first Polio vaccine on Long Island in the Early 1950′s.

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When a paradigm ain’t worth 20 cents

So I had this idea.

I was reading an article I printed out from Drudge about how the newspapers were dying because nobody was reading them anymore. This was during a break in my own work wherein I bemoan (as in piss and bemoan) the passing of the book and the end of civilization. Earlier I had Googled up statistics on reading and found yet another tombstone statement about how the average American consumes less than a book a year. I wiped my word weary eyes and complained out loud to myself, “Self. You used to read a couple of books a week. Now you read little more than a book a month. Ain’t you part of the problem?”

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