Great Expectations

from the Newport Mercury

Two hundred years after his birth, Charles Dickens’ love for serial storytelling and his observations about the rich-poor divide still endure

If we were truly to do right by Charles Dick­ens, and celebrate his 200th birthday on Feb. 7 in as supreme a fashion as the legacy he left us in print, this article would have to be the cul­mination of 30 or 40 serialized chapters dis­cussing, in grand narrative style, Dickens’ many contributions to English literature. In such a framework, I, Evan P. Schneider, writer and editor of such columns, would also own and publish this very paper in which they would appear. That would be true Dickens style. I’d call it The Newport Nexus and to real­ly top it off I’d be writing under the penname Arthur P. Werth.

Since that’s not, sadly, how this piece has come to be (for one, I’m a long way off from owning a newsweekly), it seems in the very least an appropriate homage to the literary lion to discuss Dickens’ long shadow over some very contemporary experiences.

Should Dickens awake from his eternal repose tomorrow, he may not be as surprised with our world as you might think. Take televi­sion, for example. Turn on any network or cable channel most evenings and you are most certainly destined to experience one of Dick­ens’ most enduring influences: the serializa­tion of addictive sprawling narratives.

It’s hard to recognize now, browsing the bookshelves, thumbing tomes such as A Tale of Two Cities or Little Dorrit, but Dickens’ hefty tales were not originally published as weighty single-volume novels; they were seri­alized, issued installment by installment, usu­ally once a week — just like a television show.

Remember The Sopranos? Or Six Feet Under? The Wire, or even LOST? As we await from week to week for a new installment of Mad Men (will the fifth season never start?) or Downton Abbey, it’s not difficult to imagine Victorian Londoners similarly clam­oring every Wednesday or Thursday, eager for the newest issue of Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round to hit newsstands, inside of which would be a few chapters of his newest novel. In the week between episodes, readers would no doubt compare interpretations of characters’ intentions, love interests, and futures in the story, expressing surprise or outrage over the action of that week’s episode.

It’s as if in the past 10 years, television writ­ers have rediscovered Dickens’ sizeable, inter­esting ensemble casts and winding, layered stories and put them to use on ABC, CBS, AMC and FOX, really upping the ante from the days of Dallas and the quality of Days of Our Lives. If you’ll recall, it wasn’t that long ago that primetime TV shows were composed almost entirely of simple dramatic action that was both introduced and resolved in one 22- or 47- minute episode. (For a great book-length discussion on this evolution, check out Steven Johnson’s enthralling Everything Bad is Good For You.) Many of these current, often complicated and beautifully nuanced televi­sion dramas, with their tangled plot lines and dozens of characters to keep track of, are direct descendants of Dickens’ stories.

But primetime television is not the only thing Dickens would recognize about our cur­rent world; he also would recognize the debt crisis. Through a majority of his fiction, Dick­ens explores the troubling emotional conse­quences of personal and national debt, that cloudy relationship between finance and a sense of fulfillment, or unfulfillment, as the case may be. In the 1850s, debt was an impris­onable offence. (Imagine that! Not paying your bills was criminal.) And now look at us: debt (personal, national and international) is the basis of our “civilized” economy.

Like a handful of Dickens’ characters, many of us have been pulled into the downward spi­ral of an unbalanced budget — a dangerously powerful vortex (Hard Times, anyone?). In order to get by or get up that next rung in the ladder, we have been encouraged to take out loans and buy things on “credit” even though we really cannot afford to do so. Left with little choice, our spending continues and our debt increases.

Pick up Dickens’ Little Dorrit and you’ll be confronted with an eerily modern conflict in which guilt is both an economic deficiency and an emotional state, with Dickens making the case that the two types of guilt are inex­orably linked. Most likely due to the time he spent as a child laborer when his father was in debtor’s prison, Dickens was inspired to create characters who must navigate a flawed eco­nomic system as worn down beings who end­lessly toil at work in capitalism’s “wonderful engine,” Dickens’ thinly veiled metaphor of industrial society.

Most of Dickens’ work, in fact, is rife with some commentary on economic pressures, making his body of work as relevant today as it was 150 years ago. Dickens’ enduring message, therefore, is one we might be wise to heed: who­ever remains within the clutches of debt will never be free to do as they wish, even if they think they can. This goes for people as much as it does for nations. When economic unbalance remains, a cycle of borrowing and debt build into an unscalable wall of oppression.

“None of us clearly know to whom or what we are indebted,” Dickens wrote. As such, it seems worth noting on his 200th birthday that perhaps we all owe a lot more to Dickens than we may have previously thought, or even known.

A Simple Machine, Like the Lever

Thanks to the good folks at Propeller Books, my novel, A Simple Machine, Like the Lever, is now available.

Should you like to get a copy, you can pick one up at great independent bookstores like Powell’s in Portland, OR or Matter Bookstore in Fort Collins, CO or Village Books in Bellingham, WA.

Or if you’d rather, you can also find it on large online retailers.

For reviews of and interviews about the book, as well as some other nifty information such as upcoming readings, just head over to my website. Cheers!

And You Will Be Landfill

from a coffee table book now available by New Belgium Brewing Company, originally published in Propeller Magazine

{Day of show routine for the 2009 Tour de Fat: Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Boise, Fort Collins, Denver, San Francisco, San Diego, Tempe, Austin}

8:00AM: Wake up in undisclosed location, usually on couch of a friend, or friend of a friend of a friend. Sometimes seedy hotel, though not usually, as that costs money. Get dressed in Goodwill-procured period-correct attire. Brush teeth, maybe, and apply deodorant.

8:30AM: Ride bicycle with full backpack (water, shoes, business cards, etc.) to find coffee at nearest local café en route to festival site. This inevitably includes getting lost.

9:00AM: Arrive at site. Stare at the vast expanse of stages and gimmicky devices scattered about on the grass and think, “Here we go again.” Sigh. Then hug every other coworker with whom I’ve been on tour all summer/fall and experience relief of company.

9:05AM: Locate Wolverine Farm Publishing’s Nomadic Engagement Device (aka “literary gypsy cart”) tucked somewhere under a tree where NBB carnies have stashed it after unloading it the previous day.

9:15AM: Set up cart, restocking Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac and Matter Journal to be sold throughout the day.

9:30AM: Find more coffee, usually from someone’s car trunk, then chat to the one adoring fan who has come early and sought out the cart and wants to make small talk about font and perfect binding.

10:00AM: Remount bicycle and join wandering, raucous bicycle parade through city. Shout, “Happy Saturday” over and over until it is true and my lungs ache with exertion.

11:00AM: Lock bicycle to cart. Duck backstage to don Landfill costume, consisting of Tyvek faux-Haz Mat suit, gas mask, trash can lid adhered to construction hat, and rubber boots and gloves.

11:15AM: Appear onstage during opening theme song number. Dance around holding a sign reading, “Landfill.” Think to myslef, “This is my life as a writer?”

11:16AM: De-costume backstage.

11:17AM: Mentally prepare to sell books.

11:18AM: Sell books.

1:00PM: Reappear onstage as myself, sans Landfill costume. Clap hands excitedly as a free cruiser bicycle is given out via wristband numbers. Lower bicycle to giddy (buzzed?) raffle winner.

1:05PM: Return to selling books at the cart. Talk to people who had no idea there would be books for sale at a bicycle/beer ballyhoo and convince them that it is a wise pairing and that they will like these books. Besides, these books are the same price as a beer, so, hey, why not, right? Please… Excellent!

2:00PM: Find food at one of the vendors and pay for it with a special blue token. Mutter, “Thank you,” and wander for a few moments in the shade wishing I could take a nap, and that I hadn’t decided on a full wool get-up or drinking two beers before food.

2:10PM: Yes, sell more books and “engage people.”

3:45PM: Reprise role of Landfill as festival goers are told how many pounds of compost, trash, and recycling they have created during the day. Landfill always has the smallest amount.

5:00PM: Pack cart closed and drag it near the truck where it will be loaded later in evening by people paid way more than me.

6:00PM: Turn down several invitations to party in cool bars across the city and instead hope I can sleep as soon as possible, but realize that I can’t remember the address of the place I’m staying, and I’ll have to ride around until I find it.

8:00PM: Eat food. Collapse. And then think regretfully that I should have more stamina than this.

My Apologies

a project completed for Portland, Oregon’s 2011 Fun-A-Day

1. Hello, Fun-A-Day. I thought I should warn you that this whole thing, these letters to people all over the country, it’s like a telescope into my subconscious. You will soon be stumbling around in my head, swimming in my thoughts, muddied in my strangeness, and for that I’m sorry because being in my mind is a lot like being in Germany when you only speak French. See? Like that. I don’t even know what that means.

My apologies,

Evan P.

======

2. That was very nice of you, inviting me over like that with just a few other people, into your home, your kitchen, your simple life. You even made food, nice food that I should have eaten without comment. And yet, when you said, “You eat meat, right?” I responded, in all seriousness, “Are you kidding me?!” I really did think you were kidding, but you were not. You didn’t know that for abstract reasons such as “localism” I was not eating meat. Really, I was fatter than I had ever been and wanted to slim down. I’m still embarrassed. Let’s hope you have forgotten my response that evening, and I, in the future, am more grateful than I am philosophical. How condescending.

Happy New Year,

Evan P.

======

3. Sorry I ruined summer. I’m also sorry that I stole that last phrase from the internet.

I hope you’re liking New York,

Evan P.

======

4. Hello. There’s no good way to say this, so I’ll just say it: I’m sorry that the car ran out of gas on the way back from the body shop. As you know, I had just barely paid it off, then as you also know it achieved massive hail damage. But what you didn’t know was then I ran out of money, then I asked you for some, then I was out of town and you were nice enough to pick it up for me. My very own car, for godssake. Not the one you bought for me when I was 15, but the one I bought as an adult. Plum ran out of gas. There’s really no way to very easily apologize for this, so I’ll just stop. I love you, though.

Your son,

Evan P.

======

5. The problem is the cats. They are boy cats (which means they’re pretty big), loaded with feline energy and so they like to play at night in the apartment right above you. They are so loud. If I was you, I would pound on the ceiling with a broomstick, but you must be really tolerant, or just hard of hearing. Anyway, thanks, and sorry.

Your upstairs neighbor,

Evan P.

======

6. I’m sorry that I did not cheer loud enough for you to win the National Championship game.

Better luck next year,

Evan P.

======

7. After having too much to drink at the Holiday Ale Fest last month, you guys invited me over to join you in going to a birthday party. I didn’t know whose birthday it was, but I said sure, I’ll go. Then I brought my friend Kenneth. In preparation, you made a delicious dip, which I did not know was for the party. You’re always so nice, providing so many tasty things when you have me over, I thought this was one of them. It was not. I’m sorry I ate more than half of it before we even left. I was drunk and hungry and I’m still uncomfortable with the fact that I did that. I wish I could go back and not eat it, but I can’t.

Maybe I’ll see you guys again soon,

Evan P.

======

8. Remember that time I scoffed at the type of cereal you bought? That was cruel and awful. I hate that. I’m sorry.

I hope you can still love me,

Evan P.

======

9. I’m sorry that due to its age and brand my “smart” phone produces texts conversations like this:

Evan P.: Were

Evan P.: Were you at

Evan P.: Were you at the Blazers game last night?

Dan: You are drunk. And, yes.

Evan P.: No, my phone is drunk. Blackberry is the worst phone ever in the   history of the world. I’ve told you as much.

Dan: Judith composed that to cover for you.

Evan P.: False. I wish. I can’t wait for Verizon to get the uPhonr

Evan P.: Waha g

Evan P.: H

Your friend,

Evan P.

======

10. I had too much cheese at lunch and you came around the corner just as it was hitting me. Sorry about that. I hope this doesn’t damage our workspace relationship.

See you tomorrow,

Evan P.

======

11. I’m sorry I don’t know what I’m doing. I wish I did. This would be a lot more enjoyable.

Hopefully, I’ll learn,

Evan P.

======

12. Do you remember that time we were playing in front of the yard as kids and I said we should box each other, and then I punched you as hard as I could in the stomach before anyone said “Go!” That was a low thing to do. You can hit me anywhere you want next Christmas if you wish.

Until then,

Your brother

======

13. I am sorry that when you wake, at times you have had no real rest at all. I would not be able to function in such a case. In fact, the only authentic meaning I often find in life is that which is given to me when I awake, freshly optimistic about what my hands and eyes and mind can possibly do that day before bed. I hope, then, that you will not be long and estranged from your enlightening moments in the dark.

All best,

Evan P.

======

14. I’m sorry you didn’t get interviewed for that job for which you applied and for which I wrote you a letter of recommendation. That was a lot of work.

Better luck next time,

Evan P.

======

15. I am of course very sorry for any confusion, but would like to point out that the air is nice for this little while and I hope it blows through your hair and past your face softly enough to tickle, but just hard enough to remind you that the wind, though invisible, is still really something.

Onward,

Evan P.

======

16. Sorry: this much fun is hard to describe.

See you next year,

Evan P.

Nebula

from Propeller Magazine

At 17, I read a terrifying copy of National Geographic one night before bed. Near the end of the issue, a relatively short article that explained “where stars are born” highlighted photographs the Hubble Space Telescope had recently returned, and featured several unbelievable color images of the Orion nebula.

By way of earning my astronomy merit badge, I was pretty familiar with Orion. You could easily find him near the horizon on most clear nights by locating his belt–three prominent stars that pointed diagonally up through the dark black sky. But despite the previous celestial knowledge I possessed leafing through National Geographic, the very idea that stars could be born and die was surely new to me.

Stars, to my knowledge, were simply balls of light that floated around the planets. Never once had I been told there were things beyond our galaxy, and that no one knew where the universe ended. How could that be possible? Hadn’t scientists been able to predict and/or guestimate how things worked, and when they started, and at the very least, where they ended?

The most frightening aspect of this article about expanding galactic clouds of gas and dust was not necessarily the idea that we didn’t know everything about them. It was the terminology the article used to explain these findings that so disoriented me. “A scattering of stars,” one of the photograph captions read, reaches “across six light-years of space (35 trillion miles).” But light-years only ever appeared in movies and pulp fiction about alien spaceships. Why was National Geographic trading in this language of absurdity? That distance, 35 trillion miles, was deeply confusing. And then it petrified me.

I tried to read on, but I grew further troubled that though I could plainly see it out my bedroom window, we could no in way ever travel to Orion, even in a dozen lifetimes. The terms and conditions of outer space coming to me at warp speed out of the pages of this magazine–the idea that the cosmos is infinitely filled with supernovas and Trapezium stars and stellar ionic winds–worried me so badly that even as a high school senior, I quickly closed the magazine and stuffed it beneath my bed.

I was unable to comprehend “six light-years of space,” and it scared the shit out of me. What I didn’t know then was that this would be my first taste not of science fiction, but of hard, immovable fact: the truth that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, I’m just a tiny irrelevant being–a disquieting reality that the closing and hiding of a magazine, of course, would never ameliorate.

Challenging Traditional Wisdom: Two Books by and a Chat with Steven Johnson

from the Newport Mercury and Rocky Mountain Bullhorn

The Ghost Map

How Do You A Stop an Invisible Killer Who Haunts the Neighborhood?

Unless you are a hardcore lit nerd, it’s hard to imagine that a book about Victorian London would be an evocative and exceptionally fantastic read. It’s even harder to believe that such a book would be wholly relevant to the plights of modern civilization, and yet that is exactly what you get with The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson’s historical narrative. Via telephone, the bestselling author of the polemical Everything Bad is Good For You (see below), Johnson confessed that The Ghost Map is “not just a book about history,” but “a book about why this particular point in history is incredibly relevant for a number of reasons.”

That point in history is the horrifying cholera outbreak on Broad Street in London’s SoHo district in 1854 that ultimately claimed hundreds of lives in less than two weeks. Told in chapters named for each day that the epidemic ravished through the neighborhood, Johnson follows the path of Dr. John Snow, an amateur epidemiologist who has a theory that the spread of the disease is somehow related to the water pump in the center of the district. Though it does so understatedly, The Ghost Map turns out to be a strong case against mass-market consumerism while drawing attention to “engaged amateurism,” as Johnson writes, and the underlying heroism and undervalued advantages of knowing one’s neighbor.

Both high readable and wonderfully conceived, The Ghost Map is a resounding and noteworthy lesson in perspective and the interconnectivity of everything, from microbes to city infrastructure. Not unlike Everything Bad, The Ghost Map utilizes what Johnson calls a “long-zoom approach,” backing up far enough to have a bird’s-eye view of patterns of life and death. “One of my favorite parts of the book was attempting to figure out why the miasmatic theory [that cholera and other diseases were transmitted through the air and not the water, like we know today they are] stayed around as long as it did.” Johnson’s speculation on this point is one of the book’s most venerable aspects. Tying together parallel facets of bacterial and human evolution, microbial and urban consciousness, as well as medical and political history, Johnson subtly yet effectively compels his readers to undertake a sort of collective self-assessment on the way they live now.

Asked why he took on the topic of Victorian disease, Johnson asserted that “the history of bad ideas is especially important to teach. Every age in the history of humankind has had an enormous blind spot that they don’t know about. A hundred years later, though, we can look back and see our mistakes.” Answers and revelations about these errors often come from those who “think across many fields of study at once.” Success, it seems, is the result of working on different levels simultaneously.

The Ghost Map closes with musings on the future of humans, cities, and diseases that love nothing more than densely populated areas. And though the epilogue, with its ruminations on the next one hundred years, is truly terrifying, it doesn’t lack a dose of optimism. The book’s last line is, “So let’s get on with it,” a simple declaration that works to capture Johnson’s confidence that the human race can do monumental amounts (both individually and communally) to change our world, but only when it finally chooses to do so.

Not surprisingly, Johnson is at work on his next book about the “transmission of creative and original ideas,” especially those by amateurs. Who would have thought that the local dedicated novice—the heroic figure at the center of The Ghost Map—might turn out to be our greatest weapon against disease, terrorism, and global warming?

Everything Bad is Good For You

How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

Steven Johnson has great news for America’s couch potatoes: “All around us the world of mass entertainment grows more demanding and sophisticated, and our brains happily gravitate to that newfound complexity.” That’s right. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, even Surviror and The Apprentice and LOST challenge and improve our cognitive abilities. What once was dismissed as low-brow garbage has hugely redeeming features.

If you’ve been at all conscious the last fifteen years, you should be shouting, “What the hell?!” As Johnson states, “The most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all.” Is this guy saying that hours spent in front of Grand Theft Auto and 24 are improving our culture and not dumbing it down as years of critics have demanded? Yes, and he’s damn convincing about it, too.

Consider video games whose objectives are rarely explicitly spelled out, whose completion requires great multitasking, whose graphics are multidimensional, whose narrative mazes spawn thousands of online chatrooms. Or a television series that asks the viewer to follow as many as twenty plot threads an episode over years of syndication and leave out vital information just to get viewers more involved.

Johnson’s message is extremely difficult to disprove: “Popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.” The question Everything Bad begs of us, though, is at what cost? If watching these shows and playing these games and involving ourselves in the vast realms of the internet is making us smarter, it could also be making us fatter and less available for living life ourselves.

Everything Bad brings up poignant problems our society soon needs to face collectively.  Johnson’s conclusion, in which he states that parenting is still eminently important as is moderation and consumption of mass media, should have been his preface so that no one misunderstands his overarching point: popular culture can be extremely enjoyable, but also dangerously addictive. Convenience and entertainment could be our culture’s newest disease if we are not careful.

Ron Carlson on Work and Thought

from the Newport Mercury

There are certain books you read that once you’re finished you can’t believe you ever existed having not vicariously lived through the experience on which the book hinges. This feeling is often accompanied by an introduction to an author you can’t believe you didn’t know had been writing all these years while you read one mediocre memoir and unaffecting novel after another. It’s like meeting someone out of the blue one day and somehow having an intensely immediate bond after only a few bits of conversation in a bar or cafe.

But this, in fact, is exactly what happens with Ron Carlson’s novel Five Skies. Radically simple, the novel involves three men who are hired and descend on a barren expanse of Idaho to build an enormous ramp that will be used in a daredevil stunt. Not knowing one another beforehand, the men work day in and day out as summer blooms and their own troubled pasts come to light. As anyone who has been there knows full well, there are hardly any hiding places on the grassy Western plains and accordingly, Darwin Gallegos, Arthur Key, and Ronnie Panelli find little to do there but work and think, think and work. And work, it turns out, is what Carlson himself believes the book is fundamentally about. Via telephone, Carlson said he thought Five Skies showcased “people solving their problems by using [their] bodies to combat abstraction.”

When asked if there were any overt influences on his creating Five Skies, Carlson said that his writing the book “paralleled the way the men in the novel build the ramp—step by step, over many years.” Five Skies, in fact, is only one of three books Carlson has published in the last 25 years (The Signal was released in June, 2009). “I kept interrupting it with other work,” Carlson said, unaware, it seems, of the irony of his statement. “My father was an engineer, a brilliant and very careful person. We talked a lot about that, using oneself to make something happen, to achieve something.”

Carlson, who teaches at the University of California at Irvine and who has written four collections of short stories and three other novels, considers the various distinctions his novel has garnered “pure gravy.” His sentiment, like many of the phrases and scenes that make up Five Skies, seems not only completely honest, but also perfectly descriptive, one of the author’s and the novel’s greatest attributes.

All told, Five Skies may end up reminding readers of Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, especially in the sense that the characters are all forced to confront their mortality as each participates in, as Carlson’s character Gallegos puts it, an argument with God. “There’s a dichotomy of having a heart, but also having skin and a body—that outer/inner struggle,” Carlson said. “I wanted to write a book that dealt with that dichotomy because I distrust the easy generalization. I don’t know that we learn anything by the easy epiphany or the visceral realization. Decisions are complicated and messy.”

The novel is certainly not all flowers and gems of self-realization, however, like a lesser book would be. Even more thoroughly, if subconsciously, linking himself with Hemingway, when asked if there was any one thing he really hoped readers would take from Five Skies, Carlson said, “A simple story that’s as true as possible. That’s what I want them to get and take, because a day’s writing is something I can stand on.”

Book A Minute: East Of Eden

Condensed from vague memory

Some parts of California are very dusty. It’s hard to live there, and even harder to grow food, but an Irish family lives there anyway and they are named the Hamiltons. They are good people. One day, a stranger moves in nearby. The stranger’s name is Adam Trask. Adam was in the army but isn’t anymore because he ran away and became a vagrant but now wants to do right by himself and have a home. Adam has a brother named Charles who is strong and hard, and as adults, the two brothers live on a ranch near the Hamiltons.

In another town lives a young woman named Cathy. Cathy is mean-spirited and sexual and wants to hurt everyone she ever meets. One day, someone—a pimp—beats Cathy up and dumps her on the porch of the Trasks. Adam likes her. Charles doesn’t. Cathy still hates everybody. Adam falls for Cathy. Cathy uses Adam. They get married. Charles gets mad, then Cathy gets pregnant.

Charles dies. Cathy gives birth to twins, but still hates Adam, and also hates the twins, so she shoots Adam in the shoulder and runs away to a town nearby and changes her name to Kate and becomes a prostitute and eventually comes to own the brothel. The twins—Caleb and Aaron—grow up with Adam on the ranch with a Chinese man named Lee who is a better father than Adam. Lee is funny and the smartest man in the book, but he pretends not to speak English.

Caleb and Aaron grow up. Adam grows old. Lee stays the same. Eventually, Adam tracks down Cathy, whose name is now Kate, and yells at her for shooting him those many years ago. Cathy is unmoved. Cathy dies. Adam grows even older. Caleb starts a business so he can make money and make his father proud. Adam is not proud, but Adam does lose a lot of money trying to ship cold vegetables to Boston. Aaron wants to marry a pretty girl. The boys find out their mother is a prostitute and one of them is sad, so Aaron goes to war. Aaron dies there. Adam has a stroke. Lee stays the same. Adam blesses Aaron, and then the reader cries.

Hawthorne at the Farmer’s Market

from Propeller

By early spring of 1841, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s employment with the Boston Custom House had come to an end. Then in his late 30s, Hawthorne had just published his first collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales, to little acclaim, and he was occupationally free to explore lifestyle options for himself and his bride-to-be, Sophia Peabody. So in April, though scholars are not wholly in agreement as to why, he packed up a few possessions and headed off into the forest to learn how to grow food, tend the land, and raise animals at Brook Farm, a transcendentalist experiment in communal living among the woods of eastern Massachusetts.

The Hawthorne that readers most often encounter in the 21st century—almost exclusively by way of high school drudgery—is the Hawthorne who surveys the landscape of Puritanical guilt and repentance via the likes of The Scarlet Letter and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Lesser known, but perhaps more fascinating, is the Hawthorne who was as deeply interested—at least for a time—as Emerson and Thoreau in the ideals of transcendentalist protest; the Hawthorne who for a summer was “transformed,” as he writes in a letter, “into a complete farmer” in an environment he regarded “one of the most beautiful places” he ever saw; the Hawthorne who by the end of that very same summer, though, was ready to swear off, once and for all, the eco-minded and cooperative living he had found there.

Enter The Blithedale Romance, a novel not widely considered one of Hawthorne’s best, but a tale based on the writer’s farm-filled summer that he published in 1852, some ten years after his stint at Brook Farm. In it, dandy poet narrator Miles Coverdale decides to escape bustling city life to take up residence at an idyllic and secluded community, where he makes friends with a bewitchingly intelligent and lovely feminist named Zenobia, a workhorse philanthropist named Hollingsworth, and a waifish young orphan girl named Priscilla. What transpires between them is mostly dry highfalutin debates sustained over hours of hoeing and cooking, with one or two curious and furtive forest meetings—that is, until the narrator poet goes back to the city, having tired of the whole experience. “I was beginning,” Coverdale thinks to himself, “to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.” As its characters lose their physical way and their moral bearings, each attempting to discern the most responsible means of existing together, and as the rural union itself begins to crumble, the novel becomes one in which a disillusioned Hawthorne indirectly criticizes the reasons people seek to leave society.

While The Blithedale Romance can hardly be used to exemplify Hawthorne’s literary prowess, it nonetheless remains a convincing testament to the dangers inherent in communal living. Furthermore, the book goes a great distance in reminding current-day eco-praising locavores that the desire to have chickens in the backyard and vegetables in planter boxes is not as revolutionary, sustainable, or utopian as we all might think.

Whereas globalism was the bent of the 1990s—if not the whole of the 20th century itself—Brook Farm’s brand of rural Romanticism seems to be enjoying a vigorous and renewed popularity in the form of contemporary anti-Industrialism. Lawns everywhere are being uprooted, and expansive vegetable gardens put down in their place. Major newspapers routinely run articles about how live chickens and goats are the new decorative yard gnomes, and how small communities across the country are dedicating themselves to growing, buying, and eating locally, with reference to the calendar. Michael Pollan’s books on food and food systems are by now mainstream commodities, and even my mother calls to tell me she saw Oprah and Martha talking about ways to live more organically. With all this environmental “green” commotion—eating what’s in season, minding our carbon footprint, supporting farmers, and compost, compost, compost—it’s fair to wonder if we’ve haven’t wandered into some Neo-Neo-Romantic era.

The romantic (Romantic?) envy of many neighborhoods is now the yard from which not a drop of rainwater escapes unused, and the excited talk of the housing blogosphere is intimate square footage rather than baroque and unwieldy vastness. It has even become fashionable to consider getting off “the grid” entirely, and then to invite friends to live at self-made sustainable communes. And as we all know, “green-ness” itself has already been co-opted and marketed back to us by makers of automobiles and bottled water—the very products environmentalists most often speak out against. Think of Honda’s new speedometer that, when you drive carefully, goes green, or Ford’s SmartGauge that lights up with little green leaves when you slow down.

Instead of passing each other impersonally in the fluorescent aisles of the supermarket where everything is flown in from—gasp—South America, we convene at the farmers market and buy up each other’s merchandise, while wholesome bluegrass music reminds us of our humble organic origins. The modern day run at revolutionizing our world is one in which we’re trying to have fewer cars clog our streets so that we can hear the hum of bicycle tires. Earth and soil and health and community—why haven’t we thought of this before?

We have, of course. Steward Brand, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s and 70s, would have us remember the “first-wave” environmental movement of those decades. But that wasn’t actually the first wave. Or, at the very least, the steps Brand and his clan took thirty years ago beg comparison to an earlier era still—the 1840s—during which more than fifty different agrarian-centric communal experiments sprouted up across the country. And Hawthorne joined one because he was like us: he wanted to find another way.

In a letter to his sister Louisa that Hawthorne penned shortly after arriving at Brook Farm, he earnestly exclaims, “I have milked a cow!” Hawthorne’s excitement is that of someone learning about natural cycles and truly experiencing Earth systems for the first time. Admittedly, who hasn’t grinned widely when picking fruit off the vine, or when convening with nature in some way that one doesn’t often experience in a city park? The Bowdoin graduate had begun to rise early every morning to tend to the chores of a full-on small-scale farm, hoping to then spend the afternoons writing. “We found,” Hawthorne writes to his fiancée later on in his stay, “white and purple grapes, in great abundance, ripe, and gushing with rich juice when the hand pressed their clusters.” His sincere response to the affect of the countryside is the very core of Romanticism. The life he was living at Brook Farm, as well as the life he depicts at Blithedale, were undergone, as Coverdale says, “in quest of a better life.”

The dichotomous relationship between the urban and rural lifestyle that Coverdale uses when saying, “Air, that had not be been breathed…Air, that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city!” is really just a 19th century version of the same oppostions we still banter around today in discussing conventional/organic, sprawl/sustainable, or local/not, whereby the city is vilified, and the rustic triumphs as emotional and moral victor. Like Hawthorne, Coverdale is overcome with how great it is to be in the openness of the country.

Unfortunately, it wears off. He is not long in residence at Blithedale before he cries out, “Pigs! Good heavens, had we come out from among the swinish multitude, for this?” Reality sets in. It doesn’t take Coverdale much time to believe that “in reference to some discussion about raising early vegetables for the market—We shall never make any hand at market-gardening.” The life of the farmer is hard and humble, and therein lies one of the most contemporarily-relevant aspects of the novel: it questions our own swooning infatuation with the pastoral, and the way many of us have brought that lifestyle into vogue—and onto our property—without fully understanding what it means or what it takes. In other words: If rural farm life was that great and that sustainable, why did we collectively give it up?

Meandering through the pages of Blithedale, it’s difficult not to see the similarities between its growing number of us in the 21st century who are taking up an Earth-friendly rhetoric more energetically every day. There are many cries to raze our food, transportation, or health systems and replace them entirely, and they sound similar to the folks at Brook Farm who intended, as Phillip McFarland writes in Hawthorne at Concord, “to save the world by setting a good example.” The self-secluded activists like George Ripley and Margaret Fuller, upon whom Hawthorne drew in writing Blithedale, wanted little more than to live sustainably (veganism, for example, was a documented practice even back in the 1840s), pool their labor, share their knowledge, be collectively self-sufficient, and thereby offer a model solution to the ills of their world. These groups emphatically turned their backs on the unhealthy habits of society, and preached a back-to-the-land movement.

“How difficult a task we had in hand,” Hawthorne writes near the beginning of Blithedale, “for the reformation of the world.” By the middle of the story, Hollingsworth, a character whose utopian designs include building a giant institution for the reformation of criminals, goes on a sort of tirade and yells, “Your fantastic aspirations make me discern, all the more forcibly, what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this [farm], on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?”

But Coverdale is in the thick of a daydream about one day when the members of Blithedale will be remembered as farmer-hero-saviors of the future world, people who had prescience enough to make a change toward a “simple, natural, and active life”—a change that would, in effect, save the entire world from the clutches of unhealthy urban industrial destruction.

Brook Farm burned down. This was in 1846, though, five years after Hawthorne had shoveled his share of dung there through the hottest months of the year. Though its remaining residents tried to rebuild it, the enthusiasm surrounding the endeavor had evaporated, and people began to leave. They were unable to keep alight the “warm and bright beacon-fire” Hawthorne describes the characters of Blithedale as having in mind, a fire which they “kindled for humanity.”

In the novel, Coverdale states that he and his kin are in “a day of crisis,” and “in the critical vortex.” With a very serious global warming conundrum to be solved, a rising world population, massive food and clean water shortages, a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy, and many clogged transportation systems, it’s hard not to think we are in just such a critical place.

Just as importantly, though—and as Hawthorne would perhaps counsel—we would be wise to make certain that in going green, we aren’t just slumming in want of entertainment. Giving up a fancy lawn for corn and leeks and heirloom varieties of umpteen different tomatoes could prove just another passing fad. “Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of earthen cups tonight,” Hawthorne writes, “and in earthen company, it was at our own option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again, tomorrow.”

One of the lessons of Blithedale is that if and when we fill our yards with chickens and growing food, we might eventually come to feel like Coverdale: “I seriously wished that the reformation of society had been postponed about half-a-century, or at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question. What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in!” The reality is that dirt is dirty, animals are animals, and if you’re going to sustain yourself at a remove from society, it’s going to be a lot of work.

The most enlightening revelation of The Blithedale Romance and Hawthorne’s time at Brook Farm is not that the well-known writer couldn’t hack it as a farmer, though. Neither is it that people, even the most forward- and collective-thinking among us, are egotistic and self-serving in the innermost recesses of their being. It’s that when we seek to overhaul a system we believe is failing, there are going to be millions and millions of different opinions on what must be done to fix it. The opinion that survives in the pages of Blithedale, as Hawthorne gripes, via fiction, about the failures of farming and socialism, is that “real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance” and that “honesty and wisdom are such delightful pastimes—at another person’s expense.”

In a letter to David Mack dated May, 1842, in which Hawthorne considers the merits of investing himself back into a communal farm, he writes that the most important question is “how my intellectual and moral condition, and ability to be useful, would be affected by merging myself in a community. I confess to you, my dear Sir, it is my present belief that I can best attain the higher ends of my life by retaining the ordinary relation to society.”

Blithedale poses the question of whether removal from society is praiseworthy at all. Total removal, nowadays, is almost wholly impossible, but people can still distance themselves from participation in what they see as mainstream destruction and unhealthiness. Hawthorne seems to suggest that going a step further—undertaking a revolution of that mainstream system—needs to be done carefully, or the result could be as regrettable as the system it replaced.

“Philanthropy,” Coverdale reflects at the novel’s end, when tragedy of some variety has struck down almost every character associated with the farm, “when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, is perilous to the individual.” Using a metaphor of alcoholic distillation, Hawthorne goes further and posits, through Coverdale, that when we use philanthropy, like local farming, to forcefully reform world systems, it “ruins the heart,” because “the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out,” will ultimately render life bland.

Is it unwise to think about our individual contributions to the world’s decimation, or how we may be inadvertently polluting or reinforcing awful systems? Of course not—it’s helpful to the health of our bodies and our planet to think about what we consume, where it comes from, and how long it will last. But The Blithedale Romance suggests that the desire to overthrow an entire system—seeing  a utopian alternative on the horizon if we can get everyone to give up their cars, eat organic, and stop consuming so much—is just as dangerous.

The true test, of course, of the lasting power of this third-wave environmentalism—like the two that have preceded it—will be how many seasons its proponents can keep it up. Chickens are noisy birds, and vegetables can be difficult to keep alive. Cows need milking, and other animals run off. Just as some people are naturals at community organizing and others good at running businesses, still others are great at farming. The beauty of a free society is that we all have the possibility to do what we like—or at least not to have to do what we don’t. Socialist-oriented communities—or at least Hawthorne’s experience of them—can require us to give up far more than what we get in return.

It’s also possible that Hawthorne just wasn’t cut out for farming. And maybe he just wanted to vent about how poorly that summer turned out. But the question remains: was it even necessary for him to be self-sufficient in the first place? And maybe Blithedale, like the real-life Brook Farm on which it was based, was not particularly well organized. But that still leaves the central question: must we wholly detach ourselves from society in order to revolutionize it?

For Hawthorne, the answer seems clear. “Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months,” he muses near the end of the summer in another letter to his sister, “in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so.”

Nicholson Baker’s Great Simplicity

from Propeller

There’s just something about Nicholson Baker. And since this is a book review, I would be willing to bet you want to know what that is. You’re sitting there wondering to yourself, What’s this ‘something’ that’s so great? First, I suppose it’s probably that his work goes into great and lovely and resounding detail about everyday existence, and because of that, there’s something for everyone in his books. I go around preaching his name to anyone I know who likes to read, even to people who just like to read a little bit, which is really saying something. Here’s this author who can appeal to both voracious readers and vehement nonreaders at the same time. How can that be?

Here’s the thing: I guess I can’t actually recommend The Anthologist to everybody. If I was looking for a Nicholson Baker book to recommend across the board, to everyone I know, it would be A Box of Matches. That’s the one. It really is. But I’ll tell you what, if you like yourself some really great writing, and you’re into poetry even just nominally, The Anthologist will blow your wig right off. Clear into last week. You’ll have to go searching for that wig, because it will have been taken off your head by a deft draft of surprise when you weren’t even expecting it to be windy. You didn’t even know you wore a wig, did you?

Though I’d really, really like to, therefore, I cannot in good consciousness recommend The Anthologist in a wide sweeping arc—like those seed-sowers of yesteryear who stood in fields open-handed—but it has nothing to do with how great or not great the book is, because The Anthologist is truly magnificent. Simply stunning, in so many subtle ways. For example, when the narrator, Mr. Paul Chowder, a poet who has been hired to write an introduction to an anthology that he cannot bring himself to write, dashes off, “And we all love the busy ferment, and we all know it’s nonsense,” it’s just heartstoppingly beautiful and true.

The reason I can’t recommend it to everyone, then, has more to do with the fact that not everybody is ready and willing to climb into a book that’s ostensibly about a poet thinking about poetry. But I wish they were, because then they’d get this line, too: “So poetry and alcohol are what the responsible doctor should prescribe, and maybe letter writing, as well.” How amazing is that? Baker’s protagonist argues that without depression, without angst, we would have no art, no poetry, and no music. None of it. Medication, and our country’s tendency to overindulge in it as a means of ‘coping,’ has gone off and killed greatness.

Anyway, because Paul Chowder can’t do what he’s hired to do, he finds himself unable to pull his life fully together, and thereby loses many of the only things that are going well. This causes him, instead of writing the introduction that he should be writing, to sit alone and think about his girlfriend, who left him for not writing the introduction, and about her lying next to him in bed at night. “What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again,” Paul wonders. “Wouldn’t that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability and I get to hold them. That’s simply insane. Inconceivable.”

The faint humor innate to Baker’s work is tender and endearing and can even choke you up. As you walk out of the back of The Anthologist, you won’t necessarily be laughing, though. Just smiling, happy to be alive in a world in which a writer as grand as Baker still roams around and offers up his thoughts, like simple, juicy, delicious little plums, on a chilled plate, for us to eat.

Remembering Millard Kaufman

For a great many reasons Millard Kaufman was an anachronism.

For one, he never had email, and for two, he thought most movies today are “made for kids,” and he was certainly a noteworthy exception to our youth-obsessed society, and as such may have forced us coin a phrase at the opposite extreme of “child prodigy.” With his debut novel Bowl of Cherries back in 2007, we might have rightly considered Kaufman the antithesis of the long-hailed John Keats (whose entire oeuvre was written before his death at age 25), and the often-lauded Jonathan Safran Foer (who, in his mid-20s, published a highly successful first novel). “I’m a late bloomer, I guess,” Kaufman told me once via telephone. At the time I spoke with him he was 90 years old. “Movie producers are looking for writers as young as possible nowadays,” said the Mr. Magoo co-creator who worked in film until the age of 86, “and I’m not as young as possible.” But why a novel? I asked. And why at age 90? “It’s about existence,” Kaufman said. “How do I do it? How do I keep going?”

Kaufman’s inquisitiveness and tenacity shine brightly throughout that first novel. Slightly reminiscent of Sartre’s “The Wall,” Bowl of Cherries is the story of Judd Breslau (a 14-year-old genius, ironically enough), kicked out of his graduate program at Yale and, after a series of wildly unlikely events, is thrown into an Iraqi prison to await his execution. Nowhere in the tale does Kaufman relax his sharp wit or penchant for lucid observation. As Judd ponders adolescent beauty alongside imminent death, in fact, Kaufman’s writing summons the ghosts of Nabokov and Kafka. Judd globetrots seeking his first and only love, Valerie, but finds himself in the shadow of a multi-armed political and intellectual beast, a conflict that Kaufman said was rooted in both human temptation and the mysteries of the world. “How the hell did the Egyptians build the pyramids?” he asked me rhetorically. “Umm, I’m not sure,” I told him. “Exactly! No one seems to know!” he responded. “And why did Thomas Chatterton, a little-known English writer, commit suicide at such a young age? But above all,” he went on, “what are humans supposed to do with their excrement?”

I left that last question alone and, needless to say, Kaufman’s other conundrums are not that easily answered either, but, as he said, “Nothing is impossible. We have been through many terrible losses and defeats and each time we have survived,” which explains why as Bowl of Cherries progresses, Judd’s past and future converge, as does world history. The cyclical, parallel motifs of which Kaufman makes use suture together not only the threads of the plot, but his outlook on the plights of our modern world. “I’m not necessarily optimistic, but we’ll manage, we’ll get through this, too,” he said. “We will not be defeated that easily.” And he wasn’t. Before Kaufman died in 2009, he completed Misadventure, a second novel that McSweeney’s released earlier this year. The beautiful aspect of Kaufman’s optimism was that it came at a time when Bush was still in office, before the Recession had begun to let up, and before any significant headway had been made in health care reform. “That’s another wonderful thing about human beings,” he said. “We try to solve every damn thing.”

Fruit, especially a bowl of cherries, is tempting, both allegorically and literally. The bowl of cherries in Kaufman’s novel, though, packs a wickedly subtle surprise and like the book itself can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Fraught though it is with existential futility, the floor of Bowl of Cherries never falls through all the way to hopelessness. “Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail—but we just have to keep plodding,” Kaufman said, a statement that goes far to answer why he decided to write a book while most of his peers were watching The Price is Right reruns and drinking fiber stirred into a glass of water.

Even if attention is drawn to his book’s rather abrupt deus ex machina fireball of a conclusion, or its ornate vocabulary that will thoroughly exercise lazy readers, it seems Kaufman, even at 90, was a step ahead. At the time that I spoke to him, Kaufman was already hard at work on Misadventure and in so doing seemed intent on proving that younger isn’t always better.

At the end of our conversation Kaufman asked me if I wanted to go to lunch in San Francisco soon, which I unfortunately never had a chance to do since I was at the time living across the country, a fact that seemed to slightly, though only temporarily, perplex Mr. Kaufman. “Well,” he said, and paused. “Maybe someday, then,” he said.

Yes, Millard, maybe someday.

On The Road Now For More Than 50 years

from the Newport Mercury

True Kerouac style would demand that I compose this retrospective review on my typewriter, jacked on coffee, cigarettes, beer, and with more than a few holy notions floating just out of reach of my peripheral vision, dancing and digging syncopation of magnificent complexity. Instead of retiring at 10:00PM, I would write on through the night, burning as though a fabulous wick of hope and wrath runs up through my chest and out my mouth. Besides, there are too many things that need to be written and declared to just go to bed. In the morning, having not slept, I would hitchhike my way to the office to drop this piece off (perhaps more than a little crumpled, its few measly pages taped together), and be off to New York or San Francisco. No, Mexico. I have friends down there who want me to come visit. I would be off to Mexico tomorrow at dawn with not so much as twenty dollars in my pocket and a donut.

As it is though, I am in front of an Apple PowerBook in a warm apartment while iTunes churns out The Raconteurs and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. 50 years changes a lot of things. 50 years, in fact, and the country, its problems, and its conveniences have imploded almost inconceivably. Despite that fact, On the Road has endured somehow, if not literarily, then at least as a cult classic for those who feel the pulls of night and newness. Kerouac’s intentions, revelations, and cross-country frivolities have resonated across decades, but why exactly?

First published in 1957, it is well known that On The Road did for the Beat Generation what The Great Gatsby did for the Jazz Age, an admonishment, however, that has not been swallowed without its share of controversy. No one book will ever accurately represent masses of disaffected citizens—or at least so goes the argument. There are those who side with Truman Capote in believing that Kerouac only typed, but never actually wrote a word in his life. Others ravenously collect his work like they do that of Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, authors they believe capture the essence of mental, spiritual, and cultural revolution.

Wherever we place him, though, it seems we can safely say that Kerouac himself was ill-equipped to become a spokesperson for those who would make On the Road their Bible. Even so, the fact remains that his work successfully symbolizes an act of exploring the great dichotomy that is human life (forever perched as we are on that edge between impotence and omnipotence) and eventually discovering our place and purpose amid birth and death. Not that Kerouac ever states this purpose so explicitly; in fact, he prefers to let us interpret the sheer overwhelming and brilliant confusion of his travelogue however we will. You dig?

If anything, the stark and harrowing message of On the Road is that same well-trod motif of living like there’s no tomorrow. The book suggests that the most important experiences in life just happen and cannot be planned for. But where does this get us when there is, in fact, a tomorrow?

Herein lies the addictive quality Kerouac’s novel, the reason it has been so often read in its half-century on the shelves: Dean Moriarty, the novel’s whirlwind hero who defies convention and strews himself across the country in a fiery mess of sex, jazz, and speeding, is in all of us. That part of our souls, however, rarely gets a chance to exist, let alone flee from the confines of capitalism and civic duty. He is our irresponsible though deftly intelligent foil, our id. Dean, in short, does what we only dream of.

On the Road chronicles so much of what we wished we could do, but cannot—indeed, will not. If in the end of the novel it’s hard to remember where all we have been in its pages, it’s because we have been everywhere and nowhere at the same time, making the book, in a sense, timeless. Kerouac’s America no longer exists, but even if it did, few of us could muster the courage it takes to live ride-to-ride, dollar-to-dollar. We flounder and hide in normalcy whereas the characters of On the Road embody communal insanity. This group of friends sees life in ways we never will. They are furious and crazy and unfazed by poverty and getting lost. These situations are terrifying to most people, the worst stage of existence imaginable, but to Dean and Carlo, Sal and Ed, these are moments of estrangement to embrace, and for that very reason, they will remain popular icons of rebellion, I’m willing to bet, for another 50 years at least.

Anthropomorphic Apocalypse

from Propeller Magazine

In 1920, Karel Čapek was thirty years old and unhappy with the political stance of the Prague newspaper that employed him as a cultural editor. He and his brother Josef had already (at the same time Karel was working at the daily paper) started their own satirical weekly, but for his next writing project, Karel moved on from journalism. What he wrote instead was a play, which he titled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). While the last word of the title (derived from the Czech robota, or serf labor) was a lexical creation Karel credited to Josef, the play itself featured a relatively uncomplicated storyline. A desire for the computerization of work, standardization of produced goods, and “the cheapest labor” drives humans to create something that will work in their stead: humanoid machines. In essence, humans are terrible workers and deserve better anyway, so why not make this whole deal easier for everyone, and let machines grow food and make clothes and raise children? Finally, after all these centuries of doing things themselves, people can sit back and relax!

It doesn’t work out. At the story’s climax, the team of scientists who have been in charge of creating and disseminating the world’s working class machines are trapped in their office, surrounded by insurgent robots with orders from their leader to kill every human on the planet. In their most terrible moment together, however—in that last hour when they have a chance to provide humanity a glimmer of hope by destroying the robot blueprints and thereby preventing the machines from multiplying—the scientists instead decide to trade the blueprints to the robots in exchange for their personal freedom.

It’s a laughably sad scene, not only because it reveals the selfishness that lies at the core of human nature, but also because that plan, too, doesn’t work: one of the scientists burned the designs several hours earlier, without telling the rest of the group. Next, the human go-between dies in negotiations when he tries to climb an electric fence. Like a pathetic group of mice trapped in a maze of their own devising, the last remaining humans run around the room, arguing and crying out in lament. The head scientist crouches in desperation and, musing on his life’s work, asks his hands aloud, “How could you? — Hands that used to love honest work, how could you do such a thing? My hands! My hands!”

Then, there’s a knock at the door. “Oh, God, who is here?” the scientists ask in unison.

It’s the robots.

Born in 1890 in Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia (located in present day Czech Republic), Karel Čapek would not stray far from disastrous themes throughout his career. Often grouped with Huxley and Orwell as a writer of “speculative fiction,” Čapek was deeply interested in where humanity was headed. Unlike much science-fiction work that succeeded it, for instance, R.U.R.’s chief concerns are not with the evolution of technology, but instead with that of humanity. For Čapek, reasoning that had prioritized results and streamlined moneymaking over process and health had led to a slippery slope on which humanity was ignorantly perched. Čapek’s recurring argument is at its core a Marxist one: humans come to recognize that their hardships are a result of having been separated from the production of the things they rely on for survival. Below the surface, however, and deeper than a merely theoretical distancing from work, Čapek offers an eerily accurate estimation of the effects of actual automation, and how it may conceivably doom the human race.

In nascent 20th century Eastern Europe, Čapek lived surrounded by several fearful developments, and those take the spotlight in his work. Filled with the language of oppression, revolution, tyranny, and disillusionment, much of his best work revolves around humans who repeatedly make shortsighted and selfish choices. Not unlike A Brave New World and 1984, therefore, Čapek’s writing deals with the ethical implications of progress: given the power to control one another, and capable of unleashing newfound technological advances, Čapek wonders in his work what sorts of decisions humankind will end up making.

He wasn’t shy about acting on his concerns, either. As a teen, he had been expelled from a high school for belonging to a banned student group. After finishing R.U.R., he resigned his position at the newspaper whose politics he disliked, and political activism remained a central interest for him. Employing a variety of genres over the years (ranging from fairy tales to drama to novels to political nonfiction), Čapek remained concerned with how humanity would survive through continued world wars. He even struck up a friendship with Czechoslovakia’s first president, inviting him to weekly salons Čapek hosted.

Despite his concerns and advocacy, world events did not turn in his favor. By 1938, Hitler was at Czechoslovakia’s door, and the Gestapo had named Čapek the country’s public enemy number two. He refused to flee his country, but at the end of the year he came down with double-pneumonia, and died on December 25. His early death, however, probably saved him from a worse fate: his brother and collaborator Josef died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

These days, Čapek is often mentioned—when mentioned at all—in that role as a forefather of speculative fiction. Even a brief glance at his biography, however, is enough to make clear that his material about annihilation and the dehumanizing effects of totalitarianism are decidedly not speculative. He lived them.

Before his death, though, Čapek finished another defining project: War With the Newts, a novel that tells the story of what happens when humans discover a species of intelligent amphibian and, for the novelty and economy of it, teach them to speak, work, and in turn, fight. Again eager for progress and unwilling to think decisions through to their possibly dire consequences, Čapek’s humans bring about their own destruction by toying with nature and taking avaricious shortcuts. Near the end of the novel, a giant talking salamander states his demands to mankind over a crackling broadcast system. “Hello, you people!” he croaks. “Don’t get excited. We have no hostile intentions towards you. We only need more water, more coasts, more shallow water to live.” As dystopian narratives of this strain tend to go, a war between them and us inevitably breaks out, but true to Čapekian style, humankind loses. Despite having “no hostile intentions,” the newts conquer man swiftly and easily.

In a rather unconventional manner, War With the Newts works its way to a culminating chapter called “The Author Talks to Himself,” in which the novel’s narrator tries to reassure his own inner consciousness that this couldn’t really happen. People really won’t go so far as to foolishly destroy themselves trying to get ahead, will they? “It’s not so bad,” the author asserts in a moment of hope. “The world won’t perish because of the Newts, and mankind will be saved; it only needs time, and you will live to see it.” But then he pauses. “Please, can’t you do anything?” It’s a Cassandran internal dialogue directed, in actuality, at the reader. We can change things, can’t we? We can turn this around. It’s not too late!

Alas, Čapek has bad news. “Do you think I wanted any of this to happen?” the author asks. “I did what I could; I warned [people] in time. Nothing can be done to prevent it.”

When we speak of Czech writers, our go-tos are usually only Kafka and Kundera (whose writing, many scholars have pointed out, is arguably more Western European than it is Czech), and yet before Asimov, Bradbury, Dick, or Crichton, it was Čapek who warned us in literature about the problems that accompany mechanization, capitalism, and ambition. In both R.U.R. and War with the Newts, the drive for convenience and the desire to have things done for us is what puts humans at odds with each other and our own health. Čapek would not be surprised in the least that contemporary thinkers write manifestoes on eating (the slow food movement), letter writing (the slow communication movement), close-knit economies (the local movement), and eliminating debt (the responsible credit movement)—he wrote about the same problems that spawned these movements, and long before even the first Depression.

And then there’s war. Robotic warfare has made it possible to attack without soldiers present, making war itself that much easier to wage. Hand to hand combat is as archaic as understanding where our food comes from (and what’s in it), knowing where our money goes when we purchase something, or understanding how our energy use is silently poisoning us. As a whole and in several concrete ways, Čapek’s work goes so far as to make a tidy bookend to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Not only does much of the conversation in Čapek’s work center on creation and collapse, but also like Milton’s work, it is really about temptation. If, as the story goes, we were created in God’s image but then betrayed him, Čapek assures us we will get our further comeuppance. Indeed, in attempting to create our own paradise out of ease, convenience, and luxury, Čapek warns that if we don’t take great care with what (and why) we create and how we work, we may be in for a more devastating fall yet.

While the consequences about which Čapek writes are dire, the work itself is also laced with fragments of hope in moments where characters realize that to live and eat by the toil of their own efforts is deeply fulfilling. As such, War With the Newts and R.U.R. also resonate with echoes of other classic literature, from the intelligent horse Houyhnhnms who preach peace in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the dreadful experiments of Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. The scientists in R.U.R. suggest that a being who “feels joy, plays the violin, wants to go for a walk, and in general requires a lot of things [is], in effect, superfluous.” But since humanity crumbles in Čapek’s futuristic world, that sort of unfeeling thought process is revealed to be our species’ Achilles’ heel. Working with one’s hands, taking walks, and wanting things, it turns out, are not only what make us human—they are what will actually save humanity.

This idea is supported by the rather weird endings to Čapek’s work, strange philosophical prophecies in which humans die out, but the concept and prospect of humanity itself lives on. In War With the Newts, for example, the author, in musing with himself, mentions that it is possible that after the Newts have run their course and inevitably destroy themselves, too, humankind may be reborn in some valley, and work its way to prominence again, until we face the same questions and decisions. In R.U.R., before he dies, the lead scientist convinces himself that the two robots with whom he is speaking deeply and truly feel for each other, and therefore might be more human than he originally thought. It’s a hopeful delusion, one that ignores scientific fact, and so he urges the two robots to run off into the woods to be together, live simply, and love one another—like people.

But did Čapek really believe this was possible? Did he believe that any species, whether human, lizard, or robot, could at some point curb its collective desire to get what it wants most: money, rest, and luxury? Maybe not. “It occurred to me,” he once wrote, “that history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people; i.e. everyone.”

The Duality of Dynamic Power

From PDX Writer Daily

Direction of the Road, by Ursula K. Le Guin, with original woodcut by Aaron Johnson, Foolscap Press: Santa Cruz, 2007; # 20 / 150.

Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power, collected photography by Paul Shambroom, Weisman Art Museum: University of Minnesota, 2008.

“This system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power…”
~ Václav Havel, last President of Czechoslovakia, first President of the Czech Republic, “The Power of the Powerless,” 1978

Power is often a matter of perspective. “Powerful” people are usually those who perceive themselves to be such, and accomplish tasks and jobs with the belief that they are who they think they are. “Powerlessness,” likewise, can be understood as perceiving oneself to be either in want of what one doesn’t have, or unable to procure that which others are already enjoying. Both situations—powerfulness and powerlessness—are contingent on a certain perspective.

But what if that perspective changes? What happens when people don’t want or don’t perceive themselves capable of handling the power they have been given? Two recent publications present conceptually different examinations of this interplay between authority and viewpoint.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Direction of the Road,” originally published in the mid-1970s, has been given new life of late by Foolscap Press in a special limited edition book released in 2007. Pressed on linen wrapper paper made by La Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal, Foolscap’s edition comes in a portfolio box covered in Japanese cloth, and includes an original anamorphic woodcut by Aaron Johnson. The sum of this fine craftsmanship is a rare and slim volume that is itself an experience in perspective, corporeality, and power.

As the inside cover explains, anamorphic art, whose origins date as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, has enjoyed a long history in which artists have experimented with “perspective and other ‘anamorphic projections’,” while “challenging the viewer’s usual conventions of looking.” The book’s introduction suggests that “Aaron Johnson’s woodcut continues this exploration and achieves two things at once: his art casts the viewer into an active role in relation to the art and, more important for this story, it allows the image freedom of movement,” which is most certainly true and alluring from the get-go.

The result is a stunning reading experience. Direction of the Road is told from the perspective of a large oak tree that believes its duty is to grow and shrink as people come and go in relation to it. It would be an understatement to say the tree “believes” in the role it serves, since the tree never vacillates in this conviction; it exists simply to grow and shrink as people come closer to it or recede from it. The tree strictly adheres to this place and purpose in the universe, a position it believes is secure.

Enter Johnson’s woodcut. Inside the large rectangular folded portfolio in which the story is bound, there is fastened a cylindrical mirror that the reader is instructed to place on end next to a semicircular, warped-seeming woodcut. Once the mirror is in place, it magically reflects the woodcut image as a crisp illustration of a large tree and a person sitting beneath it, while two birds fly past overhead. But the reflected woodcut also has another important characteristic: the reader can, by moving closer to and farther away from the mirror, experience the tree growing and shrinking in size, just as it behaves in the story.

The narrative doesn’t last long, but in its few pages, decade after decade pass atop a small hill from where the tree watches humanity progress, all the while remaining diligent in its duty of getting bigger as people approach and smaller as they retreat, never failing, as the story’s original 1974 introduction states, “to uphold Relativity with dignity and the skill of long practice.” Though it hardly needs upkeeping or modernization—since the story seems naturally timeless—Le Guin updated the introduction for this release, adding that if the tree that inspired Direction of the Road still stands on its Oregon hillside, “it is coping after the single outburst of anguish [that is recorded in the story] grandly and without complaint.”

That singular eruption to which Le Guin alludes is the crux of the story: one day, a car runs off the road and strikes the tree head-on, killing the driver. After this event, the tree objects to the power with which it has been imbued: to crush people unintentionally. Since the driver only really sees the tree for the first time when looking up at the last moment before striking its trunk—all these years, the tree was there, but was a mere afterthought for the driver, a part of the landscape that went unnoticed—the tree declares that “it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death.” Since the driver confuses the tree for death itself, the tree gets even angrier, or at least as angry as an old oak can become, and concludes: “For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal. If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.”

The exhibitions catalogued in Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power (Weisman Art Museum: University of Minnesota, 2008) also explore the idea of who has power, what they do with it, and how they look from a particular perspective.

In a sense, Shambroom’s work, like the lens in Le Guin’s book, is anamorphic: it forces the viewer to consider his or her own perspective in regard to the image. In many cases, the pictures Shambroom offers are of things 99% of us would never see, or at least not as they are presented here. Shambroom’s subjects include top secret locations (including military bases, nuclear weapons facilities, and security and defense training procedures) and often capture empty spaces: offices devoid of human presence, meetings before they begin, and the insides of factories.

Picturing Power is a gorgeous collection that is capable of making any reader/viewer wonder about who is actually in charge of our cities, our countries, and our world. In addition to over 40 full-color pages of prints, the book includes several insightful essays by notable art critics on Shambroom’s work, and a fascinating interview of Shambroom himself by Stuart Horodner, curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

“The intersection of beauty and horror,” Shambroom says in the interview, “adds a tension that’s important to me and to any of the images I make.” It’s the presence of these opposing sensations that places Shambroom’s work in parallel with many historical conceptions of hegemony, since authority is always simultaneously a glorious and dangerous thing to possess. “They are supposed to present people as being heroic,” Shambroom states of his pictures, “but then there’s a series of questions that you start to [have]: this person is here to protect me, but do I really feel safe—safer—knowing that this person is in this gear doing this job?”

Take the image on the book’s cover, “Level A Hazmat Suit, Yellow (‘Disaster City’ National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center, Texas Engineering and Extension Service [TEEX]),” as one example. In it, a strangely and menacingly outfitted person wields detection devices for, one guesses, identifying lethal substances in the atmosphere, but he stands amidst a bucolic setting, alone, as if seen through a Viewfinder. The response one has to this image is largely connected with the power one senses this person possesses. It’s as if the photo’s subject knows and is equipped for a disastrous situation that the viewer, on this side of the image, is in no way prepared to handle. “I do have respect for these people,” Shambroom adds in the interview, “and that has nothing to do with whether I think the policies that they are carrying out are the best policies for our country and for the world…I’m just not sure these activities address the core of the problems we face in the world.”

Stark, usually sparsely populated, many of the photographs capture places without people, or a single person or lonely group that has been granted power, which gives the images a ghostly, dismal feeling. We wonder, much as we do of Le Guin’s tree in Direction of the Road, whether these people actually want the power they have been given. “I really don’t set out to provide answers,” Shambroom says.
How do we determine who should be in power? Is it the person or people who know the most? The people who have the most experience? The people with the best ideas and plans? Our own recent Presidential election centered on many of these very queries. In reference to his having taken these pictures, Shambroom claims, “No one else knows how to do it. And I’m not going to let anything stop me because if I don’t do it, it’s not going to happen.” Echoing what the tree utters in Direction, Shambroom seems to wonder whose job it is to make decisions that impact everyone else. Not without his own sense of personal perspective, however, the artist concludes, “It is necessary to my process to have those delusions of grandeur as long as when I come down I realize that’s what they are and I still have to wash the dishes at home.”

Art as Life, Life as Art: Three Documentaries

From PDX Writer Daily

The Cruise, dir. Bennett Miller, 1998

“If I have an essential goal on the cruise right now,” says Timothy “Speed” Levitch in a documentary about his life as a bus tour guide in New York City, “I think that the simplest goal is perhaps to be able to exhibit that I am thrilled to be alive and to be still respected.”

Which is to say that The Cruise is really not about Speed’s life as a bus tour guide in New York City at all. Rather, the film centers on one man who speaks and thinks more precisely and eloquently about cockroaches and parks and desperation than you ever will about Shakespeare or mechanical engineering or memes. Speed, whose nickname most assuredly comes from the rate at which he talks (you may recall his vignette in Waking Life at night on a bridge), spends the entire film constantly navigating away from what he calls the “anti-cruise,” which is obviously everything that stands in the way of “the cruise.” Right?

Though it’s difficult to put a finger on what exactly “the cruise” is, since it’s really an urban philosophical treatise more than anything else, Speed puts it this way: “The cruise is about the searchings for everything worthwhile in existence. It is about walking into the bar and lusting after all the worthwhile possibilities of the world. It is about flesh. It is about waves undulating. And it is about exhibitionism…I mean, that’s how I feel about cruising right now.”

With rants about the grid system, disappointing his grandparents, breaking up and getting back together with the city he loves, the myth of the lamed-vavniks and the Baal-Shem-Tov, a babysitter who tried to choke him, the solidity and solidarity of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the sensuality of terra cotta cornices (not to mention amazing recitals of poems, letters, novels, and speeches) The Cruise is nothing less than a whirling, twirling beauty, burning itself at both ends.

If you’re still confused after watching it, though, don’t despair. Simply rest assured that “having an intimate quote unquote love affair with a flower is far more psychotic and riveting than having a love affair quote unquote with some of the banal creatures of the human race, although I’d be into that, too.” So would we, Speed. So would we.

***

Man on Wire, dir. James Marsh, 2008

Philippe Petit’s ego is about as large as some of the abysses across which he has tightrope-walked, and yet this documentary about his 1974 crossing back and forth between the World Trade Center towers is supremely impressive mainly because it’s so damn unbelievable.

Mixing interviews, archive footage, reenactment, and still photography, Man On Wire is one of those rare films that makes you feel both completely inspired while also paralyzing you as you sulk and wonder what you’ll never do because you’re: 1) too scared; 2) too lazy; 3) too undetermined; or 4) all of the above.

Even if you’ve heard of Petit’s legendary feat before, this film is breathtaking in that it sheds light on the years of planning and reworking and disagreement that went into four men sneaking into the towers (costumed as workmen and businessmen) and stringing the wire between the two buildings in the course of a harrowing sleepless night. And though security measures in such places would probably thwart similar attempts today, the film does a beautiful job capturing this rebellious artistic act that somehow succeeded against all odds.

Petit, in the film’s climax, revels in the stunt for almost an hour on the wire in the crisp foggy morning air of August 7th, all while stunned and smiling onlookers below gawk and exclaim and swoon. The police, though irritated, also seem in awe of the man they arrest, even if they later let go him without pressing charges, citing the artistic quality of his deviance as reason to overlook his trespassing and impersonation and reckless endangerment.

Man On Wire reminds us of today’s street artists like Shepard Fairey (of Andre the Giant/OBEY and Barack Obama/HOPE) and Banksy (the artist who broke into museums to put up his own paintings), guerilla criminals who are beautifying our world one act at a time. Like Petit himself, whose spectacle has been called the greatest art crime of the 20th century, the philosophy “create now, apologize later” seems to live on. And god, if that’s the case, what the hell did you and I do today?

***

How to Draw a Bunny, dir. John W. Walter, 2002

Ray Johnson is the most famous artist you’ve never heard of. In fact, let’s be honest: even as we were about to begin this review of the documentary we watched and loved that trumpets his life and work from the 1960s through the 1990s, this writer totally forgot his name. And yet despite his slipping from our collective memory relatively often, Ray Johnson was known by and involved with many of the biggest names in Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Christo, to name a few) during his day.

Johnson, however, was one weird son of a bitch. Spending time on tasks and details no one else in their right mind would focus on (or even notice 95% of the time), Johnson constructed elaborate layered collages and paintings, but also involved himself as a performance artist (like hammering a box over and over and over, or throwing pieces of paper into the air and dancing around them, or dropping hotdogs from a helicopter) and considered himself to be the founder of mail art (in which he would send altered newspaper and advertisement clippings to different friends all over the country, calling the experiment the “New York Correspondance [sic] School).” His art was, very simply, his life.

The best aspects of How to Draw a Bunny are the interviews with Johnson’s colleagues who try to grasp him and sum him up for the camera, which is always a futile endeavor. The film is littered with hilariously frustrating stories: his agent recalls how nightmarish it was to represent such a slippery and rambling figure; a gallery owner says Johnson used to call and say he wanted to do a show of nothing, by which he may have meant something, or anything, but also maybe nothing; one of his portrait subjects shares letters from Johnson fraught with complicated and arbitrary price calculations for each artwork in a series.

Considering how integral Johnson figured a participating audience was to and in his work, it’s not surprising that he turned his own life, and death, into an exhibition. The very narrative framework of How to Draw a Bunny, and the concept that stays with you after the film, is the investigation of Johnson’s apparent suicide on January 13, 1995, through which he left us a byzantine, beautiful, and self-contained piece of art.