January
January
**** Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins. Edited by John Hall Wheelock. New Introduction by Marcia Davenport. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1979. These letters are from the Scribner's archives. I found myself leaning over the text about to fall in wishing the--at least some--"to" letters were also included. Perhaps for the 3rd edition? There is at least one, a very fine letter from Thomas Wolfe thanking him for his help. It is perhaps the last letter Wolfe wrote. To even think of the contributions to American literature made by Perkins sends a shiver through me. He had it all--the sensitivity to see a great work in a mountain of words, to support and encourage the author(even so far as to nurse maid some), with the Yankee reticence to not constantly be about feelings enabling his close relationship with Hemingway. He in away gave writers ideas but I think, and I think he knew this, that the could hear what the writer was about and his coming to the meat of it was a way of focusing and giving support to the writer. Pertinent to today (when a President comes to office that is perhaps not as committed to free speech) Perkins was a strong proponent of free speech, even when it is not pleasing to his sensibilities. There is more than one point of view he often said. Who is qualified to exercise censorship?
Read the essay in The Georgia Review Winter 1994 Snake Handling and Redemption on which Dennis Covington later based his book. He referred to the noise of a snake-handling service as "a spiritual jazz." It was, he said, about loosing the self. "Feeling after God is dangerous business."
During January I read through several hundred pages of War and Peace . I decided the time was right for the whole enchilada.
*** Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald . Unabridged Recorded Books, Inc. version. While not so much in the particulars, its mood is autobiographical of his relationship with Zelda. While Scott is thought of as from St. Paul, Zelda was from Montgomery, where the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum strives to interpret them both. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the best reason I've read to avoid alcohol.
During my annual visit to Jackson Street Books in Athens, GA, found Rabinowitz & Kaplan's A Passion for Books, Petroski's The Book on the Book Shelf, and the Twayne series volume on Robinson Jeffers. A fine bookstore. I would rather go to Athens for the books than the music!
February
A Passion for Books edited
by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. Foreword by Ray Bradbury. 1999. A
marvelous compendium of works by, for, and about book lovers. If you are not
one, don’t bother; if you are, you must have a copy.
My Pop is always
buying books:
So that Mom says his study looks
Just like an old bookstore.
the bookshelves are so full and tall,
They hide the paper on the
wall,
And there are
books just everywhere,
On table,
window-seat, and chair,
And books right on
the floor
And every little while he buys
More books, and brings them
home and tries
To find a place where they will fit,
And has an awful time
of it.
Once, when I asked him why he got
So many books, he said, "Why
not?"
I've puzzled over that a lot.
--Ralph Bergengren
Hold
onto your hats for the next messay (mini-essay)! It will be
wacky.
***** War and
Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Original 1865-1869; my copy a cheap Wordsworth
Classics paperback I hauled over half the country reading. A hardback version
would have acerbated carpal tunnel syndrome! Not difficult reading, just many
pages.
As I read through War and Peace, I found myself often mentally
wandering back to another long read in 1965. By no means to trivialize War and
Peace, I found myself saying Gone With the Wind rather than War and
Peace. Can there be any doubt that Margaret Mitchell read War and Peace before
she wrote GWTW? I think not.
Even Tolstoy's justification for not
including the horrors of serfdom rings a similar note to Mitchell's treatment of
slavery. Now of course I am aware of the similar actual opinions of the
aristocracy of both regions and, for the American South at least, some of the
reality as expressed in Children of Pride and elsewhere. Be it
Levi-Straussian structural similarity or evidence of her reading, the parallels
are interesting.
*** Camping with Henry and Tom by Mark
St. Germain. A play on Recorded Books starring Alan Alda, Lee Arenberg,
David Dukes, and Charles Durning recorded in 1996 and set during the famous
“camping” trip in 1921.Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Warren G. Harding escape
the secret service and talk. And argue. And entertain.
March
** The
Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith. Not a good Recorded Books to be
hearing during the recent precipitous fall of the stock market. Particularly
when the kind of tax cut our President calls for is the same type that fueled
the boom in the late 1920s that prefigured the October crash. Oh well, it’s only
money. But, it is not. It is the livelihood, savings, and retirement of so many
millions. Can a depression happen again? According to Orestes A. Brownson
(see my notes for
December 2000 ), such are organic within a capitalistic system. Galbraith
says much the same.
**** Train
Whistle Guitar by Albert
Murray. McGraw-Hill pb. 1974. The first of Murray's fictional memoir of
Scooter growing up along the north side of Mobile, Alabama. Much local color,
Mobile history, and lower Mobile River delta geography. I began this note with
all sorts of sociological notions. That sort of thinking is unfair to Murray.
This is a fine book and should be read as such. There is enough here, and in the
reader's own perception, to do the story justice.
**** The
Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray. The second volume of Scooter's memoir. Set
in Tuskegee with flashbacks to Mobile.
Scooter’s world is not presented by Murray with an angry jaundiced eye that
characterize some other chronicles of the black experience in the America. The
violence and the prejudice are there; their presentation is more in a
fact-of-life manner. He has alluded to this in an interview--that he saw the
same things Ellison did since their time at Tuskegee overlapped slightly; he
just was not as angry.
So little of
Scooter's world remains in Mobile. I do not know Tuskegee well but I would
guess it too is far different. That is but for the place names. Murray evokes
the landscape not through its detailed description but through the us of place
names and evoked memories:
We were sitting with our legs
dangling out of the tailgate of the truck en route to Whistler and as you went
on talking, there were also the voices of the other members of the team joking
and laughing at the same time, and I can also remember the corridor of
overhanging trees and also the power lines along that part of Telegraph Road and
how the exhaust fumes used to smell in those days that always become so vivid
again no matter where I am when I hear a band playing the channel to "Precious
Little Thing called Love" again. Anytime I hear that I also remember how the
loose macadamized gravel used to look bouncing along in the red-clay dust the
tires kicked back as you rolled away toward the billboards in the open fields on
the outskirts of Chickasaw.
But before we
got there we turned off and came on across Kraft Highway which was the only
concrete-paved strip to stretch that far beyond the city limits in those days.
Then somebody said we were on the Citronelle road and the next turn I remember
was the one that brought us into the sandy rut that I always remember when
something reminds me of the scrub oaks along the way to the playing field and
picnic grounds up to the cypress slope from the Eight Mile Creek swimming place.
Murray's great love of jazz
reveals itself in both books. But he also leaves us with an aria from a South of
the same time but from black Mobile County counterpoised to Faulkner's white
Yoknapatawpha County. These two books present a view of that world gone, not as
extensive as Faulkner's oeuvre, but every bit as rich. Anyone reading Faulkner
must include Murray as a counterbalance written in much the same--I call it
neutral--tone.
*** My Dog
Skip by Willie Morris on unabridged Recorded Books. I am ambivalent about
dogs. My father attributes this to a dogfight I walked into about 1954. I do not
remember it except for the bringing her (Honey) home. No, my reason lies more in
two areas, one of which repeated itself the night I finished this unabridged
tape--the barking-all-night dog. The other is the mess and smell. I do though
relate to Morris's feelings about his dog. While I barely had one like
this--Honey only during my fourth and fifth year--I feel the potential. Might I
suggest that guys who are reading this book or listening to the tape find a
place alone to experience the ending.
** The
Beginning Place by Ursula K. LeGuin. a 1980 book on a1991Recorded Books
unabridged tape by Rob Inglis. The K. stands for Kroeber, she the daughter of
Alfred, a seminal early anthropologist. This influence, as well as her mother’s
(Theodora, the author of Ishi ), reveals itself in her
books. This is a pleasant novel of true escape. She is the master, Tom
Deitz follows in his stories in her vein.
*** Blood
Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A 1985 book newly issued by the Modern Library
with an introduction by the inestimable Harold Bloom. Bloom has spoken so
emotionally about this book, both in this introduction and in an interview with
Brian Lamb on Booknotes ,that I had to
read it. It is certainly the most violent work I have read, with the possible
exception of Titus Andronicus. Bloom compares it to Moby-Dick, but
he has read it forty times and I but once. The lawlessness, blood, and gore of
the West, 1849-1850, comes through in the first reading. On the shelf with
Magic Mountain for a required second reading.
April
**** The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography by Walter Harding. Henry, we have need of thee at this hour. Just what role, what kind of man would Henry Thoreau be in this world? Would he be some stocking-capped Buddhist pontificating about as an ignored gadfly? Would he be an irascible irritant of the Ralph Nader ilk so annoying many that his message could not get through? Would again his message have to wait a generation for its significance to be understood and applied?
Perhaps such is the fate of visionaries. Who today falls within his domain? Of the just past generation or two, I would place E.B. White and Edward Abbey. What! A quiet New England writer of children’s stories paired with a gruff Appalachian environmental activist! Where is the balanced thought here? Bear with me a moment.
No amount of my polemic could, in the end, convince you these two were the prime intellectual descendants of Thoreau—after all, doesn’t everyone always mention Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. The latter two certainly took inspiration from Henry’s Resistance to Civil Government, more popularly known as Civil Disobedience, but they were not like him.
White was a renown writer for the New Yorker and the author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web. Read that story again. Look at the straight forward and loving presentation of Nature.
Abbey was something else again. Many may have trouble reading him due to his often coarse and only self-evident humor. But he was out in that Nature. He used his writing for its protection and by that probably gave rise to or at least encouraged the militant environment movement.
What does either approach have to do with Henry?
***** Travels with Charlie: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. An unabridged Recorded Books tape. I did not remember from my first reading (mid-1960s) the last run including New Orleans through Montgomery. In this stretch he focuses on integration struggles in the 1960 South. The way our parents' generation acted is here described in its sick and violent side--mothers hurling epitaphs at young black children only 2-3 years younger than me who were simply trying to attend a better school. Just what were they thinking and what form of christianity were they then practicing? Come to think of it, what is it we are still doing? Many southern school districts are re-segregated, most white students in mostly faith-based (there’s that word again) academies. The Republican Party of Alabama recently scored success in thwarting a new Alabama constitutional convention. The present constitution came into being to foster Jim Crow and dilute any political power blacks may amass (and poor and non-powerful whites it also turns out).That original document arose under the turn of the last century's Democratic Party. Before we confuse our historical metaphors, let us remember which is the party of Lincoln and which is the party of Jefferson!
**** Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister with Some Account of his Early Life and Education for the Ministry Contained in a Letter from Him to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston. Rufus Leighton, Jr. Boston. 1859. Written upon his retirement due to TB. He died a year later.
"I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which depend on no
logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of consciousness given by
the instinctive action of human nature itself." Pure
Transcendentalism.
"I never found it necessary to agree with a man's theology before I could ride in his omnibus or buy his quills." Pure tolerance.
*** Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry. A Books on Tape unabridged tape.
Another great man with the nickname Curly! In his
short life of 35 years, Crazy Horse remained a loner even among his own people.
No other interpretation can be drawn from the United States Indian policy and
actions, particularly of the 19th century, than we now draw from the violent
ultra-nationalists of the world. The U.S. was wrong, violent, genocidal, and in
violation of its very constitution. What do we need to do to let the past rest
more comfortably on our history? Since we do not let Germany forget its past,
nor be comfortable with it, perhaps we should not do either with ours. We both
must ask the question, "Does the ends justify the means?"
*** The Book on the
Bookshelf by Henry Petroski. Written by an engineer whose previous works
include a history of the pencil, the book is in places dry. But it is required
reading for bibliophiles, bibliomaniacs, and those who care how books are
shelved.
***** The Other Side of
the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton--The End of the Journey, Volume 7:
1967-1968. Who is alive today that falls in the intellectual caliber of
Merton and Thoreau? Sheer IQ possessors abound--Harold Bloom, wiz engineers,
professors, and the like. That is not what I mean. What I do mean is having that
plus a degree of introspection and a degree of personable ness. In other words,
a willingness to engage the, as well as, one's ,public. "Both the
conservatives and the progressives seem to me to be full of the same kind of
intolerance, arrogance, empty-headedness, and to be dominated by different kinds
of conformism: in either case the dread of being left out of their reference
group. I have to go my own way in terms of needs that are to me fundamental."
Still so true today.
*** Blood Lure by Nevada
Barr. G.P. Putnam's Sons. 2001. She continues to tell a fine story and as I
remarked in my mini-review of Liberty Falling --improve her writing at
every stroke. I would have made Blood Lure slightly more of a stand alone book.
It definitely helps to read the entire Anna Pigeon series. Perhaps that is how
they do it in the Mystery World!
May
***** 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff on Recorded Books. Again! I will return over and over to this book, a collection of letters between a New York-stuck writer and a London bookseller. The mind's eye is a wonderful theater in which to play this book, but amazingly, the movie is also very fine. Are there actually people left in the world that correspond by pen and paper?
**** Rabbit Remembered
by John Updike. Pages 177-359 of Licks of Love: Short Stories and a
Sequel. Alfred A. Knopf. NY 2000. Often we read to escape daily life. Coming
to Updike is an arrival at daily life, particularly for the eastern, white,
middle-class man. In Rabbit Remembered he delves deeper into the female side of
life than the other Rabbit novels. Dare we expect another in ten years? I'm
counting on it!
*** Memories of the Old
Plantation Home and A Creole Family Album by Laura Locoul Gore. Edited with
a commentary by Norman and Sand Marmillion. The Zoe Company, Vacherie, LA. 2000.
Memoirs of the namesake of Laura
Plantation in Vacherie, LA, one of the Mississippi River plantations open
for touring. It is just down river from the more well-known Oak Alley. A
fascinating tale of the Creole experience in Louisiana.
Read the historical
background chapter of *** Carry Me: Birmingham, Alabama The Climatic Battle
of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter .Simon & Schuster.
2001. From the Daphne Public Library. An amazing book about an unbelievable time
in American history when words like putsch and even Nazi can be used. You have
to read this to understand how being a member of the KKK could be considered
positive. Indeed, it is in comparison to those outside that then populist
organization. On Brian Lamb's Booknotes 27 May 2001.
** Torquato Tasso by
Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe. Satisfaction from others, and not from
within.
"The helmsman
at the very last clings to
The rock on which he was about to founder."
**** Jones Very: The
Effective Years, 1833-1840 by Edwin Gittleman. Columbia University Press.
1967. A fascinating book covering Very's poetic and transcendentalist years.
Jones Very was an example of a previously troubled soul encountering a
religious/philosophical model that has a "good fit" for using that negative
psychic energy. In his search for the God within, he literally became God's
Other Son.
*** Discovery
at Walden by Roland Wells Robbins. A 1999 Thoreau Society reprint of the
1947 report purchased at The Shop at Walden. This is certainly a paradoxical
book. First, Thoreau and other Transcendentalists cared little about physical
mementos of people or ideas so the search for the house site as a shrine would
trouble Thoreau--yet we are human. For me, this May, to stand and read from
Walden while facing the pond from the vantage point of his house door, was an
experience of connection. The site looks like this today, 
but in my mind's eye,
I saw me thus. 
A second difficulty
restraining my enthusiastic embrace of this book is the nature of the archeology
the job entailed. Frankly, it does not come up to archeological standards--even
the standards of 1945,the date of the excavations. Many say if not Robbins who?
I--and the preservation movement--say in the absence of threat, leave the site
untouched.
Even more troubling is the rest of Robbins career sparked by this work. He did similar excavations at other national monuments. Now I am a firm believer in dilettantism (in its original definition). But I also limit this to the domain of thought. Those endeavors that require destructive action such as archeology, paleontology, brain surgery, should be done by highly trained professionals. Think about it all day; write about it; do not dig.
*** The Art of Happiness by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D. A Simon & Schuster audio-tape from the Daphne Public Library. Wonderful to listen to this in the car, especially those (very) few moments when His Holiness is actually speaking. BUT, this is such an important subject, it must be revisited in print. Much of what the Dalai Lama says is at least a reflection of what Thoreau and many others looked for in their daily search for meaning. He--as a person--certainly seems to have transcended everyday cares, including such minor annoyances as losing one's country!
June
*** Robinson Jeffers by Frederic I.
Carpenter. Published just before
Jeffers death in 1962. Straightforwardly presents the different phases of
Jeffers’s career as a poet. To me, he is the closest thing we had in the
twentieth century to a Transcendentalist poet, yet at other times he seems to
deny the value of humanity, even calling his philosophy inhumanism. In Jeffers,
I do not so much see the harsh rejection of humanity as I see a total acceptance
of the hard side of nature--the rock, the wave, the sun. These will endure after
humanity has passed. Yet when my soul moves to agree with him, my intellect
intrudes and reminds me that these things too will pass--just not on a human
time scale. Jeffers's nature is the Nature of Thoreau and Emerson reified.
***** Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Translated by Victor H. Mair. Introduction by Huston Smith. My cat thinks more of this book than he does Zen for Cats. The cover has his teeth marks to prove it! A tremendous intellectual ferment convulsed Eurasia in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. Within a century these movements arose; pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Confusciousism Mohism Upanisadic Hindusim Jainism Taoism Buddhism Zoroastrianism and Biblical Judaism Materially, this was in the context of the rapid growth in the use of iron. It would be interesting to take a look at environmental changes that may have occurred at this time. While environmental determinism, like a belief in racial determinism is old hat and wrong, every now and then a book comes along that reminds us that often great, world-wide events occur seemingly simultaneously. With a small amount of effort, I am sure we could here see revolutionary changes in the Americas also at the same time. We can look historically at such events in at least two ways. One, of course, is to understand them and their context within history. The translator here, Mair, does an admirable job of reminding us that Chinese history did not develop in isolation from the rest of the world. A second way to look at such events is to seek an understanding of why they emerged in this simultaneous way. Can it be fully explained by diffusion--or independent invention? Did socio-political environments of the era have elements in common that fostered the rise of these religious-philosophical-often political systems? Or was it based more on fundamental changes in the natural environment that fostered a cultural introspection--are thinking of how things are done--a revitalization movement often stemming from this rethinking. Perhaps all of these ideas have some referent in this era, the era of the birth of modern philosophy and religion.
*** John Updike - Of the Farm A tiny Fawcett paperback bought for 50cents at a Dalton antique barn in the 1980s. Description of things and people soar in this tiny book. They are so well-crafted, I want to dash up to the mountains and spend a day describing my mother-in-law's old barnwood chicken house! Updike has an uncanny ability to describe women. His descriptions are true to the person but are of a sort seldom practiced today (this is a 1965book) for fear of the PC policy. One could make a case for his oeuvre becoming a manual for the restoration of the language after the PC police have been put to rest. Best quote: "Her religiosity seems unaccompanied by belief."
*** 1/2 Albert Murray - The Seven League Boots. Pantheon Books, NY.1995. This the third of Murray's trilogy of Scooter, reveals the mythosphere of jazz. I had difficulty getting a sense of time in this book but that may be because it covers so much time without being obvious about it. It is a good story and has much to say about the jazz band era. I also saw much wisdom there that while in a certain way had little to do with the story, remains wisdom:” In Spain she had come to realize that machismo was not a matter of aggressive arrogance but of a disposition to confront unfavorable odds...Machismo was not a matter of displaying force. It was a matter of overcoming fear with grace and style as well as with skill." And "Whatever you do, if you do it with enough class, you can make your ancestors smile in their graves."
And the language. And the sense of place: "Along with literacy, the most important portable equipment that your MCTS [Mobile County Training School] diploma certified amounted to a compass, a spyglass for microscopic as well as long-distance inspection, skill with pencil and paper, and a knapsack for the other minimal personals. But no maps and mileage charts and timetables. Because pioneer pathfinders, trail-blazers, early settlers, and frontiersmen must of necessity shoot their own azimuths, select their own triangulation points, and establish their own often tentative benchmarks."
** 1/2 Michael Crichton - Timeblends. A Random House audiobook, unfortunately abridged. Proof that a storyteller can pick up an idea and produce a book. This is a fine story and actually not that different from some ideas--and one short story I've written being a student of the past. Crichton uses more--far more--technology in his trip to the past but it is a fine trip.
As a student of the past though, it was annoying that yet another story is about conflict and war. I guess in the genre Crichton sells in, the wonder of the everyday life of the past is not enough. It was much the same in all the various Star Trek series and episodes. Often writing of the highest caliber (for TV) was evident but conflict was a central them in nearly every episode. This is such a constant that in one episode of the original Star Trek, the theme of the episode was that the absence of conflict was a very bad thing indeed. Does this suggest conflict is a central theme for humanity? No answers here; I just do not know. But the preponderance of human literary expression would strongly suggest so.
To bring this diatribe to somewhat of a close, I return to this book and the genre within which it exists. If you look in a limited rack of mass market paperbacks, you see that this is a gentler and probably the most well written of the bunch. [Not much of a close, but it will have to do.]
Ending the month once again trying to swim into the words of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As I do so, I wonder what the formal relationship is, if any, between the seeking of knowledge via experience or intuition on the one hand and the scientific reasoning methods of inductive versus deductive reasoning on the other.
July
Began Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman. Edited by Bruce A. Ronda. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT. 1984. I am the 4th owner of this (until I received it, unread) book. It pleased me very much to find a bookmark from a Concord, Mass. bookstore inside the book. Ronda’s long introductory essay is a detailed and good introduction to the New England intellectual, religious, and to some extent political stage just as the era of the American Renaissance and the Transcendentalists began. As the introducer of kindergartens into the U.S., and the sister-in-law of Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the mentor of Jones Very, the once fellow boarder with James Freeman Clarke's mother, Mann, and the Alcotts, her thoughts and company certainly cause me the sin of envy. She was concerned that too much insistence on individual rights would affect the organic unit of the family and by extension society. It would appear that she was right.
The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman. Unabridged narration by George Guidall. Recorded Books, Inc. 1970, recording 1990. From the Daphne Public Library. Hillerman's first novel of the Navajo police series for which his name is now forever linked. How many times I've wanted to be transported to a side canyon to be, to be in solitude amongst the setting of the Four Corners and of Anazasi ruins. As soon as my mind settles on the peaceful setting though, it wanders to a darker place wondering what else is out there. Hillerman wonderfully taps into that feeling at once confirming those fears and leaving the special nature of the landscape intact.
August
*** 1/2 Helene Hanff. Letter from New York. BBC Woman's Hour Broadcasts. Moyer Bell Limited, Mt. Kisco, NY. 1992. The scripts from her radio broadcasts read by another. There just is something about Helene Hanff. I think it is that her writing, whether it speaks to books, friendship, neighbors, or show business, reveals her sheer love of writing. The very act and result of writing. She cannot help this coming through in her writing; it is a part of her.
This book is another example-and a very fine one-of how Manhattan is a collection of neighborhoods, not just a megalopolis. It is good to be reminded such a thing still exists. Or put another way, Hope springs eternal.
*** Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman. Bring me more! More Hillerman!
My travel journal. July and August ( and May and June before that) brought on a more extensive round of travel than I have not experienced for some time, if ever. The travel also, I find, disturbs my reading pattern. I cannot concentrate while reading on an airplane. Most of my mental energy goes toward assisting the levitation of the airship. Since the first of May I have found myself on St. Simons Island; Concord, Mass; Auburn, AL (twice); Dayton, OH; Oklahoma City; Atlanta; Pittsburgh; the lower central valley of California(unfortunately 5 minutes after the John Steinbeck center closed for the day);Panama City, FL; Columbus, Mississippi; Europe (most especially the Schwarzwald or Black Forest, the home of my Seckinger ancestors with moments spent in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria); 2 Corps of Engineers lakes on the Chattahoochee River; and Ft. McCoy, WI via Minneapolis and the weather in Houston. Each of these trips is remembered solely because I wrote daily in a travel journal. Now the advertisement: the best medium I have so far found for that is the Clairefontaine 11x17 cm blank book UPC code 54507 09606 available both at Scriptura in New Orleans and Artlite in Atlanta.
**** Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its contexts. Edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. Mass Historical Society. Boston 1999. Distributed by Northeastern University Press. I mined incredible wealth from this tome that I was unable to keep long due to a short interlibrary loan turnaround time. Looking for a Christmas gift for me? This volume presents an incredible depth of scholarship (not to mention references for further reading and research) on Transcendentalism. While the editors correctly point out the stark individualism of its tenants, the school of thought can nonetheless be shown to have some shared characteristics and doctrines. They go into these in detail under the headings Reformed Protestantism; Belief in immanence of the divine; Intellectual influences; and social critique. The additional contributors to the volume represent a roll call of established scholars of the movement.
In Capper's historical analysis, he posits Vernon L. Parrington's The Transcendental Mind as the crowning achievement for the place of Transcendentalism in history. Before this work, only Emerson and Thoreau had been considered. I fished in its waters for a bit. This section is a part of Main Currents in American Thought: The Romantic Revolution in America 1800-1860. I could not help seeing the contrast while I had this book open of a discovery whilst channel surfing. The scan stopped on EWTN's Bookmark. Always a sucker for a book interview I watched for a minute. The subject had written a book on apparitions as interpreted by Catholic dogma. The interviewer went to great lengths to make the point that these visions were not necessarily “true" since they came from Mary to the visionary. There is no direct revelation from God to the individual. The counterpoint of this probably best describes Transcendentalism. Not only is it direct revelation the Transcendentalist seeks, he seeks it where God resides-within himself.
On that sleepless first night in Germany I reread **** 1/2 Roan Stallion by Robinson Jeffers. He sought the divine within the rock.
A purchase in Pittsburgh, I continue working through **** All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery by Henry Mayer. St. Martin's Press. 1998. I was unaware until this book that Thoreau had a piece (unsigned) in The Liberator. I am driven to read and understand this man who my slave-holding ancestors would have probably at least acquiesced in his lynching could they have got him to Sparta or Savannah.
A rather startling development occurred for me in August. As I began working into the use of a Palm Pilot, I found I could read a book on its screen far easier than on the computer screen. I read through a great deal of ** Eugene Field's The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. 1896. Not to its finish though given its overwrought writing style. It is a shame that his son ruined his bibliomaniac reputation by selling books claimed to be in the author's library, long after that library gave out. I will just stick with "The Calico Cat and the Calico Dog" and "Jest 'Fore Christmas, I'm Good as Kin Be."
September
At 7:20 AM on September 11, 2001, as I finished my
morning reading, I moaned that I was headed for another quotidian experience.
How wrong could a person be! Just minutes later, events played out that have
changed for the foreseeable future how we view the world. I think of the lost
and their families and wish them peace. I do so for all the victims of
terrorism, no matter where they be, here or elsewhere in the world. May I work
to seek out the best in me to apply to this new world.
As I completed the **** Garrison biography, I was most personally reminded that a single individual can indeed make a difference. We have so little patience now; Garrison spent over 30 years in his campaign to defeat slavery. Civil rights struggles continued for more than a century after that to arrive where we now are. This is not to say in MLK's terms to wait, but to assess where we are and to move forward deliberately towards the goal of full and equal opportunity with eyes on the prize letting sideline diversions fall by the wayside like so much chaff. Several campaigns must ensue in this effort:
1. The placement of adequate and appropriate resources in the public school arena.
2. Full desegregation of housing, houses of worship, and social clubs
3. Complete equality of economic opportunity
4. Willingness to court comment by speaking out against hare-brained ideas, no matter from which quarter they come: White supremacy or reparations.
Who out there is, like Garrison and King, fusing the politics of radicalism with the language of love?
** Beowulf, translated and read by Seamus Heany. A celebrated Irish poet working with a 10th century document written in Old English and about Danes at war. Jeez. The more I listened to this really the madder I became. It is a violent tale of bloody heroes known to us only because this tale of Danish warriors--read Vikings--is the oldest known document in English. You can even see the document in a virtual tour at www.. What over-incenses me is the importance placed on this violent tale in the study of English. Fear of having to read it in Old English probably kept me from majoring in English. And children read this violent tale far too early in life.
*** 1/2 Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. My copy purchased at Buchhandlung Wathari International (www.bookworld.de) in Freiburg, Germany for 28 DM, the equivalent of the cover price of $12.95. In a foreign land without a book, the reading DT's began setting in the second day. After a stop in several other Freiburg bookstores that carried books in English, I finally found one I wanted to read. This book actually finished a reading list of books provided me a few years ago by an Indian friend. It is not far from the publishing date of Philip Caputo's Indian County nor is it far from the subject. Both books are very fine treatments of post traumatic stress. This one of a World War II Indian, Indian Country of a Vietnam vet. This one reveals a greater sense of healing. May we all rediscover what that means.
A good part of my reading this month was in Henry David Thoreau's journal, the finest two million words in the English language.
*** 1/2 Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature. Albeit my second or third reading of this piece, I continue to have difficulty with it. It purports to be a unified theory of nature but I find Emerson's writing style seriously interferes with my absorption of it. I understand that many then considered it the initial spark and then the Bible of the Transcendentalists. So perhaps it must be read and considered as many do the Bible today, as a long line of aphorisms. And often. I do though get some sense of the whole after this considered reading.
Perhaps as his thesis, Emerson is saying that you should not let the parts get in the way of the whole, that you should not get bogged down in the details, that the sum of the parts is less than the whole, that you should see the landscape instead of the geologic strata. In nature as in life.
*** Winston Churchill: A History of the United States. A Random House Audiobook ready by his grandson Winston Churchill. This is a compilation of U.S. history from his History of the English Speaking Peoples. Very fine. Distilled and to the point. Listened to as I drove through central Alabama--including Selma, whose seminal historic event occurred the year of Churchill's death.
*** 1/2 Karen Armstrong - Buddha. Penguin Lives. I actually purchased something from QPB! Fascinating study. In it she focuses a good dead on the spiritual crises throughout the civilized world in the Axial Age (800-200 BCE). This age was pivotal to humanity since the ethos forged in this times continues to nourish us today: Gotama, the Hebrew prophets, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Socrates, and Plato gave rise to Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Monotheism in the Iran and the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe. She goes on to wonder why only these areas for which I have a couple of thoughts:
1. These areas had reached a state of literacy that enabled introspection of self and culture giving rise to a seeking of broader thought.
2. It or related responses occurred elsewhere also but are not as visible to the historian. She does not consider anything in the Western hemisphere. It would be interesting to compare archeologically observable events and cultural trends of this time with the historically recorded events of which she writes.
It is clear that New England Transcendentalism owed much to the Buddha and others of the Axial Age. One of the insights registered then was that the sacred was not "out there." It was immanent and present in each person's being.
The Buddha came to the opposite conclusion that Descartes would. Instead of "I think, therefore I am," to him the "self" was an illusion. He compared the human mind to a monkey wandering through the forest, first grabbing one branch, then another.
October
*** March to the Sea portion of the Memoirs of W.T.
Sherman on Recorded Books. As he put
it, a perfectly reasonable and judicious movement of his troops from Atlanta to
Savannah! As with all Southerners, I have family stories. My double great
grandfather Christopher White (nee in Hanover as Christoph Witte), a grocer in
Savannah, rolled his barrels of rice and whisky into the street for Savannahians
rather than let Sherman have it. My father recounts his grandmother telling him
that as a young girl, she sat on the seed corn, covering it with her long
skirts, so they would have seed for the next planting.
*** Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. 1959 in a 2000 AudioPartners unabridged recording by Tim Pigott-Smith, Auburn, CA. Hardships for the sake of exploration. The first peopled mission to Mars will not face these rigors.
**** Stephen King - On Writing. Unabridged on tape, read by the author. I was unsure what to expect since I am far from a Stephen King fan. This is a brutally honest, and very fine book on the writing process that should be read, and listened to, by every aspiring writer. Period. Includes his take on his 1999 accident.
Continuing on with HDT's journal
It is unnecessary to sacrifice the greater value for the less.
In his October, his wood warmed him twice.
** Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary Movements and Genres: American Romanticism, Edited by Jennifer A. Hurley. 2000. Recently the Daphne Public Library acquired this series of popular literary criticism. They are compilations of papers first given elsewhere and not nearly so accessible as they are here. A good deal of discussion on Transcendentalism. Tidbits from it include their derivation from the German idealists. One author, Richard Barna, refers to Transcendentalism as the Ultimate Protestantism: Calvinism modified by the assumption of the innate goodness of man.
November
*** 1/2 E. B. White: A Biography by Scott Elledge. 1985 My $6 trade paperback is slowly debinding itself but I am gratified I have it for it confirms my thought that the search for 20th century Transcendentalists did not have to be within the dense prose of literary esoterica, but all the while lay before us in the man of E. B. White, the pig Wilbur, and his friend Charlotte. Elledge even brings in Stuart Little, calling his search for Margalo similar to Thoreau's search for a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove. The last line of Stuart Little is, "But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction."
**** Coleridge's American Disciples: The Selected Correspondence of James Marsh. Edited by John J. Duffy. U of Mass Press 1973. Many of these letters among clergy. In them, Marsh clearly reveals the tension between the heritage of the Puritan mind and the new Romantic revolution sensibility. A main topic at the first meeting of the Transcendental Club, September 19, 1836, was Coleridge's and Marsh's distinction between Reason and Understanding. While he was a Transcendentalist (head of the Vermont branch), Marsh expressed his dissatisfaction with Boston Transcendentalism on its failure to develop a logical system. His true goal was to express Christianity in modern form. Marsh's fame rested then and now mostly on his Preliminary Essay to Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. He also influenced the methods of modern education. Dewey credited his influence. Marsh was another of the far too many victims of TB in the past.
** The Wild Flag by E.B. White 1946. White, completely put out with the way national governments acted during the first part of his life (1899-1946, so far) that he proposes world government. More than just an idle idea, he identifies the seat of that government as the new UNO, the United Nations Organization.
As naive as that may sound to us, remember that in its finest hours, the UN does lend credibility to world-wide programs today, e.g., the current campaigns against terrorism.
White is not completely without an understanding of human reality though. He does say
“It is going to be a slow process, and the sooner we begin the better. The thing which would make it much easier, of course, would be if another planet should turn up as a rival for stratospheric power...[then] it would be a damn cinch.”
*** The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. A play by Jerome Laurence and Robert E. Lee. 1971. No matter how much one reads on any issue or general subject area, a play often will crystallize that thought. In as few words as a long short story, Lawrence and Lee put the humanity and the depth of Henry Thoreau on the stage.
"What law ever made men free? Men have got to make the Law free.
...if I keep my mouth shut, I'm a criminal.
*** Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson. Few travel writers today can claim an exposition of the road as worthy as Stevenson. Theroux comes to mind as the nearest writing today. Today, such a tale as this would be 3-4 times longer, and would be replete with photographs. His is short, with only two line maps, leaving a part of the journey to your imagination. Too bad RLS was yet another victim of the past scourge of TB.
December
*** Wordsworth by Herbert Read, this the 2nd Edition of 1949. I have for some time thought Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage was the model for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. As I read here of his emotional affair in France just as the Revolution fermented, I am the more convinced. It is that story, transposed only in gender. Beyond my cute analysis, this is a fine biography of Wordsworth’s emotional development. Unfortunately, I was looking for his Transcendentalist philosophy, but that is the fault of my narrow vision, not this fine book. Finally in an appendix, Read briefly presents Wordsworth’s philosophy. His close I find appropriate:
For out of a slough of despond, induced by the failure of revolutionary hopes, the bitterness of personal remorse and self-distruct, Wordsworth plucked a faith of renovation, of new hope, based on a deep insight into the transcendental forces which continually operate to transform the world, to bring it in infinite cycles of time a little nearer to the image of God.
**** Stomping the Blues by Albert Murray. The 25th Anniversary Edition of which has just reached the Daphne Public Library. Fine. Just fine. Just as fine a book about music you could ever expect to read. It turns out to be really true that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are indeed the greatest! As he says : “…Louis Armstrong, Promethean bringer of syncopated lightning from the Land of the Titans that he was…”
**** Native Son by Richard Wright. An audiotape from the Daphne Public Library. This edition includes the Part 2 the Book of the Month Club originally talked Wright out of. This is a powerful book. I knew that and actually thought I had read it sometime in the past; that turns out to have been his Black Boy. Native Son is most incredible. To imagine the depravity of racism—and hopefully the changes that have been wrought, sadly since Wright’s death
More of Thoreau’s journal. Reading in his 1854
As this difficult year comes to a close, I begin my long awaited reading of E.O. Wilson’s Consilience. Through it and all my reading and thinking, I find some minor solace from the inhumanity of this year in human history. It also allows me to look forward to the new year with hope.
There are only 5 stars. * Could have avoided. ** OK. *** Very fine.**** I predict a lasting piece of literature.***** A world classic.
Updated: December 27, 2001 with minor edits December 1, 2007
© 2001 by Ernest W. Seckinger Jr