Category: Literature

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American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages.

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It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. picked up some famous rhetoric from Parker. For example, Parker’s words, talking about slavery, were:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

This inspired Martin Luther King’s famous words:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln was paraphrasing words that Parker used in a speech in 1850: “A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”

Parker was a Unitarian. The Unitarians had more room for Parker than, say, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but even some of Parker’s Unitarian friends shunned Parker as Parker became increasingly heretical.

What were some of Parker’s heresies? For one, Parker pretty much threw the entire Old Testament under the bus as primitive and unbelievable (not to mention lousy even as metaphor) and dominated by a cruel and immoral God. The question of miracles, and whether miracles were important or not, apparently was a big theological issue in Parker’s time. Parker came to believe that New Testament miracles were of no importance and probably didn’t really happen, that a revelation stood or fell on its own merit. Parker believed that some of the teachings of Jesus — not to mention the apostles — was wrong and morally flawed. Parker also rocked the boat. He became an outspoken abolitionist. Even Boston churchmen during this era who disapproved of slavery were careful not to preach too vehemently against slavery, because it got people too excited. Abolitionists were expected to be discreet in genteel society.

In many ways, this book is a theological history as much as a biography of Theodore Parker. These guys weren’t just preaching sermons to their congregations. They also were carrying on a theological debate with each other, a debate that also reached into the newspapers and the many church journals that were printed at the time.

I think it would be fair to say that Parker’s heresy boiled down to this: That ultimately, conscience, not scripture, is the only reliable guide. Note that in his statement about justice, it is conscience that allows Parker to divine the arc of the moral universe. I think it also would be fair to say (nor does Dean Grodzins say such a thing in this biography) that Parker left theology behind and became a moral philosopher instead. I think it also would be fair to say the same of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually gave up the ministry because it held him back. As for moral philosophy, Parker certainly was influenced by Kant. Parker also read in twenty languages, and he was particularly interested in German philosophy of that era. On a year-long trip to Europe, Parker tried to visit Goethe’s widow, but she was out.

It’s a shame to lose the thoughts of people like Theodore Parker who were so far ahead of their time. It’s amazing, really, how much progress was made in the 19th Century by the intellectual elite, though very little of that filtered down to incurious common folk. The white Protestant churches preach the same old fundamentalist, know-nothing stuff today, as though Emancipation and Civil Rights and all that thought and progress never happened. One of Parker’s complaints about social injustice, actually, was that working people had to work too hard and had little time for reading and study and bettering themselves intellectually. I wonder what Parker would think of television. Congregations at the time — at least Unitarian congregations — actually followed these debates and got intellectually involved. As Parker’s fame grew, people packed large halls in Boston to hear him speak. Who buys tickets to lecture series today? Are there even any lecture series to buy tickets to?

This biography ends around 1846, about 14 years before Parker’s death in 1860. Is Grodzins planning a second volume? Or was it that Grodzins was primarily interested in tracing the development of Parker’s heresy, and that was a done deal by 1846?

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The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. By Bryan McGee, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

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When I bought this book, I expected only to browse it. I ended up devouring it. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, you never know where research for a novel might lead you. In this case, I was thinking about musical metaphors and interesting ideas for the Socratic dialogues in Oratorio in Ursa Major.

Truth be known, I am not that great a fan of Richard Wagner. I even have been to a performance of “Tristan and Isolde” by the San Francisco Opera, and that did not win me over to the music. I find the music (four hours of it!) difficult to listen to. Still, the legend of Tristan and Isolde is archetypal in Western culture. Jake, my protagonist and hero in Fugue and Oratorio in Ursa Major, often makes drawings of unusual buildings, and he has a bit of a thing for towers covered with vines and thorns (like the tombs of Tristan and Isolde in some tellings of the story).

Nevertheless, I think it’s very important to know just what a landmark Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” was in the 19th Century. The music was like nothing ever heard before. Orchestras declared it impossible to play. Singers said that it was impossible to sing. There were more than 70 rehearsals of the opera in Vienna between 1862 and 1864, but the performance was called off and the opera was declared unperformable. Finally Wagner succeeded in staging it, in 1865 — 150 years ago.

After 150 years, the debate still runs hot in some musical circles. Just what is Wagner’s Tristan chord? Is it just a modified minor seventh chord? Or is that G-sharp an appoggiatura to the A, putting the chord in a whole different light? (It’s not necessary to understand the music theory here. The point is that the experts have been arguing and disagreeing for 150 years, and there are several theories about what the chord is.)

Here is what the music looks like:

Here it is played on the Acorn Abbey organ:

Stephen Fry did an excellent documentary on the Tristan chord called “Wagner and Me” back in 2010. (More about this Fry documentary in a moment.) Fry emphasizes the unbearable longing that the chord expresses. Our ears want the chord to resolve, but in four hours of music, it never does — not until the very end of the opera. No wonder some people consider the opera to be torture.

What do we mean by a chord resolving? Even if you can’t read music and don’t know a thing about music theory, your ear knows all the rules. For example, if I sing the first line of this ditty:

Old MacDonald had a farm!

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear that musical phrase resolved:

Eee-aye eee-aye oh!

There. That resolved it. Or think of the last note of pretty much any song:

And crown thy good
With brotherhood
From sea to shining —

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear the last note, in which the dominant chord, as it always must, resolves to the tonic:

Sea!

Believe me, even if you think you know nothing about music, if you love music and listen to music, your ear knows all the rules. I doubt that any metaphysical system will ever be able to explain why music has the emotional effect on us that it has, but part of that musical effect, surely, is creating tension — even longing — in unresolved harmonies and melodies, and then taking us along for a nice ride toward the resolution.

In many ways, John Williams (who wrote the music for “Star Wars”) is the Wagner of our time. Listen to this performance of Leia’s theme and think about how the music creates longing and tension and demands that we listen until we hear these tensions resolved. The final resolution comes quietly at 4:11, with a lonely note from the violin, followed by the remainder of the tonic chord in an arpeggio from the harp. Again, it doesn’t matter what the “tonic” chord is or what an “arpeggio” on the harp is. Your ear knows when it has finally got what it wanted. When the final chord finally comes, the orchestra quietly takes over the chord from the violin and the harp and holds the chord for many beats, to let the resolution sink in and to give our ear the peace it was longing for:

You’re not in a hurry, are you?

Here’s an excerpt from Stephen Fry’s “Wagner and Me” documentary:

Part of what makes Bryan Magee’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom greatly influenced Wagner. Over the years, I have made repeated attempts to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and each time I have been turned back by the impenetrable density of Kant’s writing. Magee acknowledges that Kant’s writing was unnecessarily turgid and boils Kant down. We are all Kantists now. Magee does the same thing for Schopenhauer. And thus I learned that I am pretty much a Schopenhauerian, though not quite as pessimistic.

Magee is an engaging writer and has written a number of books aimed at making modern philosophy comprehensible to ordinary people.

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Published June 2, 2015, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 pages.

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I have long been fascinated with how in the world J.R.R. Tolkien managed to produce The Lord of the Rings. A year or so ago, I read his letters. Last June, a new book was released that adds a tremendous amount of scholarship not only to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, but also to Tolkien’s literary group, the Inklings, and to Tolkien’s biography.

This book focuses on four members of the Inklings — J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. Barfield and Williams are not nearly as well known as Tolkien and Lewis, of course.

How much fun they all must have had! They met regularly at a pub in Oxford, read from their works in progress, drank, smoked, ate, and butted heads up a storm. Part of the fascination for me is Oxford life. Oxford University has been a center of the intellectual life of the English-speaking people for almost a thousand years. The university press publishes an astonishing 6,000 books a year. And of course in my own post-apocalyptic novels it is Oxford from which the intellocracy is drawn that sets out to remake a post-apocalyptic world.

I have never been able to read C.S. Lewis’ books. My criticisms are much like Tolkien’s (though Tolkien and Lewis got along pretty well most of the time). Lewis’ books are oozing with Christian didacticism and allegory. Lewis was a proselytizer. He was glib. He was argumentative. His personal life was a mess. Though Lewis was not a fundamentalist, there are strong fundamentalist elements of his personality. For much of his life, he was virulently anti-Christian. Then he went through a transformation. As my old friend Jonathan Rauch wrote in one of his first books, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, fundamentalist personalities have a hard time with gradual, steady, evolutionary personal growth. Rather, they undergo sudden transformations and reversals, rejecting their former selves and heading in a whole different direction. Lewis was like that. To me he was not an interesting person, or an interesting writer.

J.R.R. Tolkien was very different.

It’s important to remember that it has been almost 100 years since Tolkien and other Inklings underwent their formative experiences as young men in the trenches in World War I. The war was an enormous existential challenge to those who lived through it. Then, in middle age, they went through it again with World War II. Oxford at the time was a kind of center of Christianity, a reaction, I believe, to the existential challenges of living in the first half of the 20th Century. They needed a state-of-the-art, Oxford-smart Christianity to make sense of their times.

Not all writers write for the reason Tolkien wrote — to try to find meaning in his life and in the times in which he lived. Tolkien always denied (not least, perhaps, to distance himself from didactic writers like Lewis) that there was anything allegorical in The Lord of the Rings. And yet it’s easy enough to see how his life shaped the story he told — a great struggle by the common folk against a great evil, his hatred for modernity and for machines, his love of untrampled nature, his belief in the power of myth, and his love for the English language.

Though by all accounts Tolkien truly loved ordinary people and loved to talk with them on his long country walks, he was not above calling them “orcs,” when, for example, they cheered for retribution against the Germans. The Inklings were not saints. They argued. They competed for the same academic posts and sometimes went in for a bit of backstabbing. They held grudges at times — sometimes for decades, in Lewis’ case. Lewis’ love life was a disaster (the splendid films “Shadowlands” give a very limited and one-sided view of Lewis and his brother Warnie).

Tolkien, however, comes across as the most likable of the Inklings, the Inkling with the soundest character. And of course it is Tolkien whose literary theory I find most appealing.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post Are You Sure, Ursula, in which I questioned whether Ursula K. Le Guin knows what she’s talking about when she charges Amazon with the crime of controlling what Americans read and dumbing down American publishing. As part of my argument, I mentioned local public libraries, in which books by a single author fill one, two, and often three shelves. These industrial authors dominate the stacks.

I was in a library today and took 25 photos of examples of this. Those 25 photos were just a sample, because I was in a hurry to get to an appointment. I’ve attached only one sample photo to this post. More would be redundant.

Who are some of these industrial authors? I recorded some of their names and looked them up on Wikipedia:

Clive Cussler has published more than 60 novels.

W.E.B. Griffin has published 38 novels under his own name, but he also has published under 11 pseudonyms.

Gilbert Morris has published more than 100 novels.

James Patterson’s books have sold more than 300 million copies.

Anne Perry has published around 90 novels.

Tracie Peterson has published around 90 novels.

Karen Robards has published about 50 novels.

Stuart Woods has published about 65 novels.

Danielle Steele has published more than 100 novels and has sold more than 800 million copies.

Stephen King has published at least 54 novels and has sold about 350 million copies.

Karen Kingsbury has published about 55 novels and has sold 13 million copies.

Robin Cook‘s novels have sold about 400 million copies.

I have never read a single book by any of these authors and never will. But industrial novels like this fill more than half the shelf space in our local libraries. Industrial authors obviously make a killing for the publishing industry. They hog the shelf space and push other authors out of the libraries. Their dominance of the publishing industry greatly reduces the odds that new authors will be published, read, and discovered by the reading public. How is any of this Amazon’s fault? This has been going on for years.

If you look at the bindings on these industrial books, you’ll find that the editions often are the same size, with the same cover design. They are meant to be identifiable as a set on library shelves. The author’s name on the spine often is more prominent than the title. In other words, it’s a brand.

Nobody could possibly write 100 good books. In fact, I question whether most people could even write 100 books at all. I suspect that, in many cases, ghost writers are doing the work.

Whether this is the fault of the publishing industry, or whether the public’s bad taste is at the root of it, is probably a chicken-and-egg question. The phenomenon also reminds us of the bell curve. Most people are pretty much just like other people, and weirdos like me live out on the fringes of the bell curve. This does puzzle me, though, because I would have thought that people who read are more individuated than that. Clearly I’m wrong.

In any case, I cannot see how Amazon can be blamed. In fact, I buy far more books from Amazon because of it, since I can’t find anything to read at public libraries.

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.