Culture – Page 39 – Into the Woods

Are you sure, Ursula?

Ursula K. Le Guin

Amongst the literati and literati-watchers, much has been made lately of Ursula K. Le Guin’s war on Amazon. Her first bombardment in this war was last year in a talk she gave at the National Book Awards. A couple of months ago, she continued with a post titled “Up the Amazon” at Book View Café.

As much as I respect Ursula K. Le Guin, and as much as I like some of her (slightly too literary) novels, she has still failed to convince me that Amazon, as a major bookseller, is of the devil. She writes, “Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS [best seller] machine.”

I can certainly agree with her on that, but I’m not convinced that the trail of evidence leads to Amazon.

Has Le Guin, I wonder, ever been to a Walmart and examined the books on sale there? Or the grocery store? In Googling for “books at Walmart,” I came across a blog post by an author named Keli Gwyn. The title of the post was, “Six Reasons I Get Excited When an Author Gets a Book in Walmart.” She writes: “Of the few books that make it into Walmart, most were written by big-name, best-selling authors with a tremendous track record of sales. The noted exception is a series of books from a traditional publisher that has already gone through the process of getting approval from Anderson Merchandising.”

Uh-oh. Who is Anderson Merchandising? She writes: “Getting a book into Walmart is difficult. According to the Walmart website, each vendor of any product sold in Walmart must go through an extensive proposal process. Those selling books must contact Anderson Merchandisers, the company that stocks the book sections in Walmart stores.”

Who is Keli Gwyn? In her blog, she describes herself as “an inspirational historical romance author.” She says, “My favorite places to visit are other Gold Rush-era towns, historical museums and Taco Bell.”

I just puked.

Walmart sells very few titles, only mass-market things that will sell by the millions. Amazon sells everything, including titles that haven’t sold a copy in the last five years.

But there’s not just Walmart. I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin has visited public libraries in America’s so-called heartland. She will find that half (I don’t think I’m kidding, though I have not done an actual count) of the books are inspirational historical romances by crank-’em-out authors. These crank-’em-out authors completely dominate the fiction shelves, with the titles of a single author sometimes two or three levels deep. I can’t tell you how many times I have walked the entire length of the fiction shelves in public libraries, A through Z, and found absolutely nothing to read. Even at the nearest used book store in Winston-Salem, which is pretty big, the shelves are filled mostly with mass market paperbacks by crank-’em-out authors.

Just a few days ago, I was in the nearest Barnes & Nobles. It was a Sunday. There were a lot of people there — the local literati. I make no attempts to keep up with any genre other than science fiction. But judging from the long science-fiction section with books by a great many authors, science fiction publishing seems to be doing as well as it ever did. (Though it puzzles me why Barnes & Nobles stocks so much science fiction and local libraries almost none.)

Anyway, I strongly suspect that Le Guin is blaming Amazon for phenomena that have much longer and deeper roots. Is Amazon making people dumber? Or are people just getting dumber? Is the market making people dumb? Or is the market just giving dumb people what they want? It’s sugar water in the grocery stores and Donald Trump on TV. Ursula Le Guin, I suspect, has lived in an ivory tower surrounded by academics for so long that she simply doesn’t know how dumb people are.

Amazon is the one place where you can buy any book, from any publisher, including university presses. If the book you want is out of print, you’ll be presented with a list of small booksellers who will sell it to you used, cheap, and get it to you fast. There have been a number of times when I needed a copy of an out-of-print book published in the 1930s and 1940s. I have always found it on Amazon. More than half the books I buy are from university presses. Would Ursula K. Le Guin really want me to stop buying these books on Amazon?

Of course, Le Guin’s issue is not about Amazon’s selling of books but rather about how Amazon’s marketing power is influencing publishers toward publishing crap, while also diminishing the compensation of authors. That may be an unintended consequence of Amazon’s market power, but all that Amazon really is trying to do is to keep the price of books down, in order to sell more books.

Le Guin accuses Amazon of “controlling what we read.” How could that possibly be, when Amazon sells millions of titles — more than anybody? Searching for any title, author, or subject you want is as easy as typing 1-2-3.

Notice also the slight disdain in Le Guin’s tone when she speaks of books that are self-published. She knows that, on principle, the ability of authors to easily publish their own books is something that she must approve of. But still I get the clear impression that it annoys her, because that too depresses the incomes of established authors with regular publishers and royalty streams.

One of my biggest disappointments recently where books and stories are concerned was the new “Poldark” series on British television (PBS in the U.S.). It is based on a series of very fine novels by Winston Graham, and a British television production of “Poldark” in the 1970s got it right. The 1970s television series was remarkably true to Winston Graham’s novels.

But Winston Graham died in 2003. The new television version of “Poldark” had been turned into an “inspirational historical romance.” Winston Graham must have rolled in his grave. The show was embarrassing to watch at times. It lingered on anything sentimental and edited in shots of flowers blowing in the wind to make sure we got it. The script focused mainly on romantic entanglements, attending to other parts of the story only when it couldn’t be avoided. Characters that were beautifully developed in Winston Graham’s novels and in the 1970s Poldark were severely neglected — because they didn’t have a romance going. Whoever adapted that screenplay would better serve the literary world by boxing up romance novels for overnight shipping at Amazon for $15 an hour.

Is it somehow Amazon’s fault that British television, PBS, Walmart, and the local libraries all now kiss the ass of the market for “inspirational historical romance,” or vampire novels (now out of style), or zombie novels (still in), or stuff written by authors who wear funny hats and crank out their plots while sitting in a Taco Bell? Even George R.R. Martin is whoring in the zombie market.

That in itself is a big part of the problem — authors who are whores to the market: romance writers, vampire writers, zombie writers, authors who crank ’em out so fast that they may have twenty or more titles in a single rural library. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, written during the time when he was toiling away on Lord of the Rings, unsure of when and how it would be published, he often remarked that there was a very small market for what he was writing, but that those who wanted it were starved for it. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why Tolkien’s trilogy is so great. He wrote the story that was in him to write, for the few who were starved for it. And when he stopped having stories to tell, he stopped writing.

Is it necessarily bad that publishing is a big business? Niche readers know where to look. For the first time in the history of publishing, that which bigger publishers turn down now finds its way to small presses or gets self-published. George Herbert’s Dune was rejected by more than 20 publishers before Chilton, a publisher of car-repair manuals, finally picked it up. The publishing industry has always made mistakes. I don’t think Amazon is to be blamed for the existence of a mass market and the junk that feeds it.

In my opinion, if the publishing market can make an author filthy rich, then that author is done. Think of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Orson Scott Card, Tom Clancy, or Danielle Steele. Authors ought to be a little hungry, and they ought to be terrified of what the market will think of their book.

I think that Ursula K. Le Guin is being more elitist than she realizes. Maybe she should visit a Taco Bell. Many authors (including most dead authors) can’t get their books into brick and mortar stores like Barnes & Noble, which mostly carries what’s new, or even into neighborhood independent bookstores. I admire independent books stores, but if we read only from their thin stock, we’d be only slightly better fed than if we bought all our books, along with our sugar water, at the grocery store.

I will buy books wherever I damn well please. And the author who wrote those books, no matter who they may be, probably will be grateful for the sales.

Earl Crow, still teaching people to think for themselves

When I started at High Point College in 1967, fresh out of R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, religion courses were required courses. High Point College (now High Point University) is still, I believe, affiliated with the United Methodist Church. However, its focus always was on the liberal arts, and the church did not try to keep it on a leash. Today, High Point University is a very different place with a lavish building and expansion program and, as far as I can tell, a focus on serving the modern economy.

In any case, I certainly would not have taken religion classes if I hadn’t been obliged to do so. As I recall, two semesters of Old Testament were required, followed by two semesters of New Testament. My teacher for both was Dr. Earl Crow. He later left High Point College for Wake Forest University. I was delighted a few months ago to see that Dr. Crow, now clearly in his 80s, had begun writing a column in the Winston-Salem Journal called “Everyday Religious Questions.”

Dr. Crow was one of the best teachers I ever had. He and a few other members of the faculty at HPC showed me something that I had never encountered before, despite the four-star reputation of the high school I had attended. That was the concept of teaching young people to question and to think for themselves, as opposed to opening a funnel at the top of their heads and allowing stuff to be poured in.

As I recall, my final paper for the New Testament class was on whether Jesus was mentally ill. There is a considerable body of academic literature on this, so researching such a paper was not particularly hard. There obviously was no censorship involved in what got into the High Point College library. I found many sources there to draw on.

I will never forget that Dr. Crow gave me an “A” on this paper, and I’m pretty sure I recall his giving me a funny smile when he handed me back the paper. If I’m not mistaken, I got an “A” for the course. No doubt I got a lesser grade for Old Testament, and I regret not ever having written a paper exploring whether everyone in the Old Testament was mentally ill. I should add here that I don’t think Dr. Crow gave me an “A” for this paper because he thinks that Jesus was mentally ill. I think it was because he knew that I was paying attention in class and because he likes not only good papers, but also open minds.

Imagine that. My hostility toward Christianity even then was well along. If you want to despise the church, pretty much all you need to do is to think for yourself and be dragged to a Baptist church for your entire childhood. (On the other hand, I have been in black churches, country churches, fairly often lately, and they teach a very different gospel of justice and equality, as, of course, do some “liberal” churches.)

But here’s the thing. Every fundamentalist I’ve ever encountered imagines that he knows quite a lot about the Bible. I have never met a fundamentalist who knew a damned thing. It’s also always assumed that I don’t know anything about the Bible. Because every fundamentalist assumes that, if you know something about the Bible and have actually read (most of) it, then you’d be just like them. Feeble minds think everything is obvious.

Dr. Crow, it seems, has spent his life opposing the forces of fundamentalism, inside the classroom and out. I found a book of his on Amazon, self-published, I believe, called Bible Stories You Shouldn’t Tell Your Children. One reviewer says that Dr. Crow “picks at scabs that fundamentalists don’t even want to acknowledge.”

In his column in the Winston-Salem Journal, Dr. Crow takes on questions sent in by readers, such as, Should Christians engage in war? What about the Christian concept of hell? You have mentioned that Paul felt women should be submissive, but were there not strong women portrayed in the Bible?

Apparently the Journal does not have a web page that collects links to all Dr. Crow’s columns, but here is a link to a search command that should find them.

While I was reminiscing about High Point College, another teacher came to mind whom I have thought about often over the years: Emily B. Sullivan, whose job as an assistant professor of English was to teach freshmen and sophomores how to write while guiding them through English and American literature. Though I never could quite make out what “existentialism” is (still can’t), and though I pretty much choked on pretty much the complete works of William Faulkner including his unbearable trilogy, I will never forget Emily Sullivan. She was the first person who ever told me that I should be a writer. Her love of literature was infectious. She understood — and somehow managed to impart to us — what beautiful English sounds like. On my papers, she often wrote little comments in French, but she was all about solid Anglo-Saxon English. It was Emily Sullivan who taught us how to scan poetry and from whom I first learned words such as “dactylic.” I have had fun with this all my life. I hope it cannot be said that any of Emily Sullivan’s students ever committed plagiarism. I am sure she checked our sources, and we would never have dared to fail to properly attribute, and to accurately represent, the ideas of others. One comma out of place and you were doomed down one letter grade. On some assignments for English composition, one grammatical error and you got an “F”. Can you imagine a professor doing that today? It would be considered abuse.

I have often referred to the concept of “intellectual DNA.” We pick it up from our mentors and associates, and from our reading, and we pass it on. It has been years since I worked as an editor. But even today, young people I encounter who care about language are likely to get my exhortations about English — its rhythms, some high-water and low-water marks in its history, the dangers of its vast vocabulary, and the poetry and precision that it is capable of. They would not know, of course, that I am passing on to them DNA that I received from people like Emily B. Sullivan. Who might Mrs. Sullivan have received it from? I will never know. I also don’t mean to imply that intellectual DNA always passes from the older to the younger. Often, young people get way ahead of older people. As evidence of that I need to mention only someone like Jedediah Purdy, whose new book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, just arrived. I probably will have a review of it before long.

Emily B. Sullivan, on the left

A little moral reasoning

Photo by Wildlife Conservation Unit

As the outrage swelled around the cruel and meaningless death of Cecil the lion, the memes intended to shame people started showing up on Facebook. The Black Lives Matter movement, anti-abortionists, veterans — everybody got in on the memes and op-eds. The theme was always the same: What is wrong with you that you show more concern over one dead lion than [insert cause here].

On Facebook and in letters to editors, I often am shocked by people’s apparent inability to handle even basic moral reasoning and by their inability to detect fallacy.

As for those of us who felt rage over the killing of Cecil, are we so small and limited in the range of our moral concerns that we can be concerned about only one thing at a time? Can we not be concerned about both Cecil and about veterans who are going without medical care? Is it written somewhere that concern for the welfare of animals must somehow be deferred until perfect justice for all human beings is achieved? Who has the right to try to shame us for our lesser concerns while claiming — narcissistically, I would say — that their cause trumps all other causes? Instead, why don’t we divvy up all the deserving causes and each of us choose the causes we’ll focus on according to our own experiences and passions?

I prefer the term moral philosophy, though one can also call it ethics. Moral philosophy has changed a great deal over the centuries as our understanding of justice has changed and evolved to become more inclusive. Probably the most prominent text at present in the field of moral philosophy is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The book is a very demanding read, but it’s well worth it.

There is a preacher in this county who constantly writes letters to the editor scolding those of us who don’t share his black and white, Augustinian, hell fire and damnation notions of morality. In a letter just last week in which he raged against marriage equality, he wrote: “If truth can change, it’s lie — it’s false!”

Horse shit. King Solomon had 700 wives. David had eight. “One man one woman” actually was a pagan innovation and did not originate with Abrahamic religions such as Christianity. Christianity picked it up from the pagan Romans. So what changed? If you pointed out to this local preacher these small factoids from the Bible he thumps to assert that he is always right, his authoritarian mind simply would not be able to see a contradiction. Cognitive dissonance would shut him down. He sees moral reasoning as a slippery slope to hell and instead clings to his blacks and whites.

Is the life of one lion worth more when there aren’t many lions left, as opposed to the time when the African jungles were full of lions? Does it matter how and why a lion dies? Are the lives of human beings worth less when there are 7 billion of us rather than 300 million? Does it matter how and why human beings die? Is the life of an obnoxious and cruel dentist from Minnesota worth less than the life of a Princess Diana? Are the lives of any two human beings worth more than the lives of the last two lions on earth? Would the world be a better place if the life of Cecil the lion could be exchanged for that damned dentist?

I’m not necessarily taking a position on any of these things. I’m just saying that they’re worth thinking about. And I refuse to be shamed by those who seem to think that it’s shameful to care about animals before humanity’s problems are all solved. If that were the case, neither our wild animals nor the billions of animals kept on factory farms will have a chance, ever.

Some doubts about the new “Poldark”

Ross Poldark and Demelza from the old 1970s series

I’m certainly not giving up on it after the first episode of the new “Poldark” was broadcast on PBS on Sunday. But I have some doubts about how well the screenwriter, the directors, and the cast really understand this story. I’m going to claim some standing to complain, because I’ve watched the old series from the 1970s many times. I’ve read nine of Winston Graham’s “Poldark” novels. I’ve even made my pilgrimage to Cornwall.

My biggest concern is that the new production is flirting with being a bodice ripper, aiming to capitalize on the success of the “Outlander” television series based on Diana Gabaldon’s books. (I’m aware that Gabaldon’s readers probably would not agree that her books are bodice rippers. I haven’t read them. But I did watch a couple of episodes of the American television production, and it sure looked like a bodice ripper show to me.)

Winston Graham was a different kind of writer. He certainly got involved in his characters’ personal lives, but romance was not really his theme. Nor are Ross Poldark’s relationships particularly romantic (though the new series is trying to make it seem so). There is never anything resembling real romance between Ross and Elizabeth. They bicker. They torment each other. But it’s not romantic. When Ross brings the young waif Demelza home as his kitchen maid, lice and all, that’s not very romantic either. One night some years later Ross gets exceptionally drunk, and …. But that, and Demelza’s confusion, are not very romantic. Nor is his marrying Demelza out of a sense of duty and responsibility very romantic — nor their struggle to make their marriage work with no social support, brutally hard times, Demelza’s temptations from the young Dr. Enys, and Ross’ going off to London after he was elected to parliament.

Graham does write very strong and complex women characters, but romance generally eludes them. The extraordinary Demelza character, whom the novels follow from the age of 13 to middle age, is a fine literary exploration of growth, complexity, and transformation. Elizabeth’s life is tragic. Verity, the embodiment of feminine modesty and virtue of that era, is too plain to be a romantic heroine, though she does find some happiness. The elderly and frail Aunt Agatha remains very much involved with life from her exile in an upstairs bedroom. Even the servant Prudie is a woman of many dimensions.

But “Poldark” is not a story driven by romance. Its themes are justice, inequality, social ossification, the rich, the poor, economic interdependence, the problem of aristocracy, the unfairness of life, the constant hope for a change of fortune. Winston Graham was a serious historian. I think that one of the questions that fascinated Graham was why France had a revolution (and nearly exterminated its aristocracy) while England did not. I think Graham’s answer to that question would have been: Because England’s aristocracy was decent enough (perhaps just decent enough) to not push the lower classes too far. There was no English equivalent of Marie Antoinette, no English version of Les Miserables.

One of the factors that makes “Game of Thrones” such extraordinary television is that the cast know their characters extremely well. I am wondering if the cast of the new Poldark have even read the books. I Googled for cast gossip in Britain (where the series has already been shown), and the gossip was pretty low-brow. If you watch the behind-the-scenes videos of the “Game of Thrones” cast, you’ll see that they love to sit around and analyze their characters. Whereas I get the impression from the new Poldark that the cast just parachute into Cornwall for a hasty shooting schedule.

I also question whether Aidan Turner knows his character very well (though it could be the director who is causing the problem). At times in the first episode, Turner’s Poldark comes across as mean or menacing, as though he struggles with a repressed demon. But Ross Poldark was not that kind of person. When Winston Graham’s Poldark was angry, it was almost always because of injustice or brushes with real wickedness (such as the wickedness of the Warleggans). The plot puts Ross Poldark’s man-of-the-Enlightenment character to every imaginable test.

Anyway, I hope I’m just being sentimental about the old series and that after a few more episodes of the new I’ll be hooked. It can take time for a cast to learn to work together. We’ll see.

I sense something historic here

The Rev. Dr. William Barber II at Rising Star Baptist Church in Walnut Cove

North Carolina government has been taken over by right-wing politicians who have been hastily enacting the billionaire agenda — lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for working people, the worst voter suppression laws in the nation, the privatization of education at the expense of the public schools, refusal to expand Medicaid simply to spite the president, cuts to unemployment insurance, the fast-tracking of fracking, and eagerness for oil drilling off North Carolina’s fragile coast. The chief source of resistance ought to be the state Democratic Party, but the state Democratic Party has been missing in action, largely because of exceptionally lousy leadership and debilitating scandals.

The NAACP rose to the challenge. The Moral Monday events in Raleigh have irritated and embarrassed state government every step of the way. The mastermind of Moral Monday and the president of the North Carolina NAACP is the Rev. Dr. William Barber. In the first two years of Moral Monday, not much was said about environmental issues. But now the NAACP has come out swinging on the matter of environmental justice. One of the catalysts was a deal between the state of North Carolina and the little town of Walnut Cove (in Stokes County) to do a core-sample drilling on town property to assess how much frackable gas might be down there. The site of this drilling is only a couple of miles from a large and dangerous coal ash impoundment owned by Duke Energy (at the Belews Creek Steam Station). It’s also near the Dan River, less than 20 miles upstream from a coal ash spill into the river last year. The coal ash impoundment and the core-drilling site are right on the edge of black neighborhoods.

Last night, the Rev. Barber spoke in Walnut Cove. Actually, it was a sermon, in a small black church nearly full, half with black people and half with white. His sermon was about why taking care of the land and water is a moral issue. I have never heard anything like it. We white people were stunned, because we’re well aware of how some religious people find support for the exploitation of nature and “dominionism” in scripture. But the Rev. Barber found quite the opposite, drawing mostly from Genesis and Zechariah.

Those of us who have been down in the grass roots for the last three years, locally fighting fracking, feel as though the cavalry have ridden in. It’s not just that the NAACP may file suits under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It’s also that no one is better at focusing attention on injustice than the NAACP, or better at organizing people. And frankly, those of us who have been working locally, more or less alone, managed to make our cry for help heard. I suppose it depends on what happens next. But it feels historic to have the NAACP’s most charismatic leader here in our little county. And I think it’s likely that right-wingers won’t control the state of North Carolina for long. They have overplayed their hand and exceeded their mandate, and lots of people including some Republicans are not very happy about it.

This was historic in 1978. To my knowledge, no African-American has run for political office in Stokes County since then. We are working on that.

Cwm Rhondda

I am almost finished with Neal Stephenson’s blockbuster science fiction novel Seveneves, and I will have a review of it soon. Last night, 50 pages from the end of this 866-page novel, I was touched by one of Stephenson’s erudite little details. Some characters sing a hymn, and Stephenson identifies the hymn tune as the Welsh hymn “Cwn Rhondda.” This hymn has somehow managed to survive the calamity that strikes Earth in the first paragraph of the novel.

Every organist knows that “Cwm Rhondda” is one of the great majestic Welsh hymns that often are sung at royal events at Westminster. Stephenson’s mentioning the hymn gave me an irresistible compulsion to hear it sung. I put the book down and went to YouTube to shop for a good performance. There are some terrible ones, to be sure. The good ones, and there aren’t many, are either from Wales or Westminster. This led me to reflect yet again on something I have long known: Americans simply cannot sing. There are American choirs that can sing. But Americans as a whole cannot, or won’t, sing. We even shame people who sing too enthusiastically. When I was a child, regularly dragged to church, there was a woman in the congregation who sang a little louder than everyone else, Cornelia. Everyone made fun of her singing.

The Welsh are different. Not only do they have a living culture of choral singing, they have a living culture. American culture, in so many ways, is dead, and our inability to sing together is a consequence of that. Singing together is of the commons, and we American individualists aren’t much into common things. At the big sporting events, do we stand as one people and skillfully sing our national anthem together? Of course not. Some popular singer sings it solo, and part of the sport is to see what sort of patented personal spin this singer can give to the anthem to try to make it water-cooler talk the next day.

I can remember only once in my life when I have heard a large group of Americans actually sing. That was around Christmas 1996, in San Francisco. There is an annual event in Davies Symphony Hall called “Christmas Pipe Dreams.” The hall is jam packed. Everyone sings Christmas favorites, accompanied by the hall’s enormous organ and perhaps a brass choir. They make games of it. The director may divide the audience by counties — Marin, Alameda, San Francisco — and see who can outsing each other. I am proud to say that I am an American who can sing, and at this event I sang at the very top of my lungs and yet could not hear my own voice because the sound was so enormous. Does this mean that the San Francisco Bay Area, unlike most of America, has a living culture and a respect for the commons? I would say so.

Anyway, here’s a link to a YouTube performance of “Cwm Rhondda” in a church in Cardiff packed with Welsh people. I believe the BBC made the video, though I don’t know what the occasion was. Listen carefully to the Welsh articulation of the vowels and consonants. There is nowhere in the world I’d rather hear English spoken than in Wales. I have visited Welsh friends in Pontypridd several times. “Cwn Rhondda” actually was written for a hymn festival in Pontypridd in 1905, which makes the hymn about 110 years old.

They sing the last few lines of the hymn in Welsh. Part of what we are seeing here is the surviving Celtic spirit. Listen to the recording with a good headset if you have it. The recording quality is excellent. The choir and congregation nail the details. Note the strength of the altos. I’m guessing that most young Welsh women learn early on whether they are better suited to be sopranos or altos and that they learn part-singing.

“Cwm Rhondda” in Cardiff

And to prove that the church in Cardiff is not an anomaly in Wales, here’s a congregation in Swansea similarly nailing it:

“Cwn Rhondda” in Swansea

A musical footnote: The congregation here is singing with the church’s choir. The choir is certainly well trained and well disciplined, but note how the congregation fully participates and how the congregation is paying just as much attention to the director as the choir. You can see this in the full stops at the end of verses (which the director is certainly controlling) and in the director’s ability to control the slowing tempo and fermata before the last line. The organist is probably watching the director on a video link. And by the way, that fermata before the last line is not just a director with good taste. It’s actually written into most arrangements. And, as long as I’m being a musical nerd, note the musical drama that occurs in the next-to-last line. On the words “Feed me till I want no more,” the tenors and second sopranos hammer the same repeating note with an also-repeating trochaic rhythm. While that note is repeating, the basses step down six chromatic steps, with all voices landing firmly on the dominant, with a full measure to move into the dominant seventh, followed, of course, by the last line and the inevitable return to the tonic. It is brilliant choral writing.

Brochs

I don’t want to drop any spoilers to the plot of the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major (which is in progress and which I hope to have in print sometime next year). But Jake does set out on a rather dangerous journey of what I would call cultural recovery.

I have put countless hours of thinking and research into imagining what the world would be like if Christianity had never existed. The church, of course, automatically supposes that it has improved the world. I beg to differ. The church really was just Rome, entangled in the theology of what, except for accidents of history, would have been an obscure (and theologically ordinary, for its time) Middle Eastern cult. The church systematically drove all the magic out of the world. It saw nature and the rest of creation as just resources, with no other inherent rights or value, for humans to exploit. It used the nastier parts of its theology to wipe out time-tested bottom-up social structures (which worked) and replace them with top-down social controls (which exact a huge toll on the human psyche, because people aren’t aware of any other systems and thus don’t even know what’s wrong with their lives). I could go on and on.

Thus I am fascinated, as a storytelling proposition, with what might happen if you took a contemporary young man like Jake Janaway and set him down in the middle of a culture untouched by Christianity. I chose Scotland as a key setting, partly because I love and am somewhat familiar with the British Isles. It’s also the culture of Jake’s ancestors, as it is mine. The Scottish coast also is only a few days’ travel, by sea, from Gaul (France), and hence the Scottish elite are aware of, though at a safe distance from, the turmoil of Rome’s clash with the more pastoral cultures of North Atlantic Europe. Rome called them barbarians, not least because they wore trousers (which popes and some clerics still don’t wear). But I would argue that Rome was much more ruthless and violent than the barbarians.

I also would argue that, had Rome been less violent and less ruthless, Rome and the barbarians eventually would have come to terms. Even in the first and second centuries B.C., the barbarian tribes were turning away from raiding as the centerpiece of their economies and were happy to produce things of value and trade with Rome instead. The tribes wanted Rome’s wine and luxury goods. Rome wanted commodities like tin and copper — and slaves. Rome required a constant input of slaves by the tens of thousands to drive its economy. Calling them barbarians made it much easier to excuse slaughtering and enslaving them. Even in the 19th Century United States, the church split over slavery. The evangelicals of the Southern Baptist Church, a major supporter of today’s Republican Party, split again in the 1960s over Civil Rights. It is only one of many of the moral failures of Christianity and the Roman politics that tends to revolve around it.

Anyway, if you lived on the coast of Scotland in 48 B.C., and if you were very lucky, you just might live in a broch. The brochs were fortifications, certainly, intended to protect the occupants from raids. They marked status. They almost certainly were watch towers and beacons. The brochs were situated so that a beacon fire at the top of a broch could be seen from the next broch, which could relay the signal onward. A system of flags, I suspect, also was used.

Not a great deal is known about the interior of the brochs (the timbers long ago decomposed), and it’s hotly debated by archeologists. They might have been roofed — or not. There were no exterior windows, so I am skeptical of how wise it would be to roof the entire broch, since it would always be dark inside. If I built a broch, I’d roof it partly, to let in some light. The double stone walls were mortarless. Between the walls there were stone stairs, and, depending on the size of the broch, chambers. There were windows in the inner walls facing the enclosed courtyard.

Obviously Jake is going to spend some time in a broch in the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major. There will be a thriving community around this broch. Jake will be able to learn quite a lot from them about what life was like for the Scottish Celts in 48 B.C. Much of this, of course, will of necessity be a project of imagination, but a great deal of it is based on a good two years of research and stacks of books that I don’t have any shelves for. Jake also will get swept up in what is going on in Gaul.

Bonterra organic wines

Back in the 1990s, when I was living in San Francisco, had a comfortable income, and had access to a deep cellar, I lived in the French mode, bought wine by the case, and fetched it from the cellar. A lot of the wine I bought was from Bonterra Organic Vineyards. Bonterra’s wines aren’t the sort of wines that will knock your socks off, but they’re good wines and a good value.

Now that I’m in North Carolina and now that retirement has suppressed my wine budget, I no longer buy wine by the case (though I probably should — it doesn’t really cost any more that way). I had not even seen a bottle of Bonterra wine in years. Imagine my surprise, then, at seeing several bottles of Bonterra organic chardonnay and cabernet in an ordinary country grocery store in Walnut Cove. I bought all the bottles that were on the shelf. The 2011 chardonnay was about $10 a bottle and the 2011 cabernet about $12.

I find this puzzling. How did organic wine from a not-very-large California vintner end up on a shelf in a country grocery store in North Carolina? I’m afraid that it probably means that the wine was not well reviewed, didn’t sell well, and got remaindered out to free up warehouse space. But I’m speculating.

Still, if you come across Bonterra wine, give it a try. I see from their web site that they have a wine club. I just might sign up. I have not yet opened the cabernet. The chardonnay is slightly watery though strong on alcohol, but it has good color and a nice, fairly soft chardonnay taste. In short, it’s perfectly fine for a $10 wine.

It occurs to me that I’ve not written about wines here often, mainly because retirement has cut into my wine budget. For the record, I am strongly of the opinion that California wines are the best in the world. I prefer wines from Sonoma County, but Napa and Mendocino will do.

The people strike back

From time to time, when I think it is of general interest, I will post here about what I’m up to as a local political and environmental activist.

When I bought land in rural Stokes County, North Carolina, and built the abbey here, I did expect to have some involvement in the county’s civic life. I never guessed, though, that at times it would seem like a full-time job. I’m now chairman of the county’s Democratic Party. Three years ago, Ken and I helped start an environmental group called No Fracking in Stokes. This group has had its hands full, and many people say that it is the most effective grassroots environmental group in North Carolina.

The scenic Dan River runs through the foothills of Stokes County. Its headwaters lie in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. After weaving southward into North Carolina, the river meanders north again toward Danville, Virginia. (The river is about two miles from the abbey.) A shale basin lies underneath parts of the river, and geologists think that some (though probably not much) recoverable shale gas lies in this basin that could be gotten out with fracking. This was on no one’s radar screen until 2012, when North Carolina’s newly elected Republican legislature, stimulated largely by banking money out of Charlotte that found its way into Republican pockets, became hell bent on dragging North Carolina kicking and screaming into fracking.

Last night at a public meeting in the little town of Walnut Cove, people were too polite to kick and scream. But they were mad as hell, and they fired high-calibre volleys across the bow of the Walnut Cove town board, which at its previous meeting had voted to allow geologists from North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources to do sample core drilling on the town’s property. Though it’s true that the issue had been on the board’s agenda and was posted on the town hall door or something, the larger truth is that the board was trying to sneak it through in the dark of night. A reporter for our local weekly newspaper reported it, and people were quickly up in arms. The next meeting of the board was packed. In fact, the town’s fire marshall had to prevent more people from entering the building. A bunch of windows were opened in the old frame building (which used to be a school for black children), and the overflow crowd was allowed to stand outside and look in.

A retired schoolteacher told me that, as a nervous mayor was opening windows, the mayor saw a sheriff’s deputy standing outside and said, “Are you the only one here?” The deputy replied, “I’ve got backup.”

There is a well established African-American community in Walnut Cove. They live mostly in two neighborhoods. The test well is to be drilled in one of those neighborhoods. The African-American community is angry because they weren’t consulted.

To make the situation even more dangerous, if fracking comes to the Dan River shale basin, it would be dangerously close to a huge coal ash impoundment at Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station. A breach of the 130-foot dam there probably would wipe out the nearby community of Pine Hall, and the ash would certainly spill into the Dan River.

Few things warm my heart more than people talking back to government when government does what big money wants rather than what the people want. It’s unclear at this time whether the Walnut Cove town board will — or even legally can — rescind its decision. But one thing is for sure. The people will pay them back at the next election, and the county’s Democratic Party will do everything possible to help them with that payback.

For those who would like more information on our environmental battles here in North Carolina, below are some newspaper links. You also are invited to join our Facebook group, No Fracking in Stokes.

Winston-Salem Journal

The Stokes News

Poldark is returning to PBS

If asked to name my favorite Masterpiece Theater series of all time, it would be “Poldark.” The series started in 1975. It starred Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark and Angharad Rees as Demelza. Rees, unfortunately, died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer. Robin Ellis, now 73 years old, lives in France and has an excellent web site and blog.

The Poldark series is based on a series of books by Winston Graham. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I read at least nine of the books. Graham, who was English, died in 2003. He was a fine historical novelist. He has a cinematic, masculine style, and yet his novels rival the novels of women writers in that Graham is able to explore and exploit the emotional entanglements of his characters.

The Poldark story is set in Cornwall right after the American Revolution. Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall after fighting in America. Everyone had thought he was dead. His father had died, and his family home had fallen into ruin. The woman he loves had become engaged to a cousin. He was broke and in debt. The story revolves around his trying to put his life back together. Poldark is a man ahead of his time. He is a man of the Enlightenment, but all around him it’s still the Dark Ages in many ways.

The new Poldark casts Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark. It is, like the 1975 series, being filmed in Cornwall. Where else do you get those romantic cliffs overlooking the channel? Turner, now 31, who is Irish, played Kíli in “The Hobbit.”

British viewers started watching Poldark on March 8. In the U.S., the series will start in June, on PBS’ Masterpiece.

The books have been re-released, apparently with cover images from the new PBS production. There also are Kindle editions.

Watch out. If you read these books, you’ll become obsessed with visiting Cornwall. On my first trip to London in the early 1980s, I took a train to Truro.

By the way, Winston Graham wrote another novel set in Cornwall, The Grove of Eagles. As far as I can tell, that book is out of print, but it is one of my favorite historical novels, and this reminds me that it’s time to read it again.