Read and Repeat: Fairy Tales for Grown-ups

Recently, the literary air has buzzed with chatter about “readability”: is a book that is easier to read somehow worth less than one that is more difficult? Should we automatically reward more challenging books over less trying ones?

No, I say! Definitely not, decidedly not!

Let’s look at the fairy tale. This is, incontrovertibly, a stripped-down genre: good versus bad, action and reaction. But we tell and retell these basic stories because of their simplicity and the basic vibrations they stir within us. Gianni Rodari, an Italian writer and journalist, has been most celebrated for his children’s books, but a few of his tales simply sing to us adults who long to be children again.

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto is a simple and, yes, very readable story about a wealthy Italian baron and his search for immortality. Straying somewhat from the fairy tale model, no one in the story is particularly good (though several are particularly evil). Character depth concerns Rodari far less than character quirks, and the author’s creative capabilities construct an unforgettably charming tale. As any good fabulist knows, the story is in the details.

The charm of numbers, for example, weaves its way throughout the narrative—so deceptively simple but used just right. The Baron Lamberto suffers from twenty-four maladies, a list of which his butler frequently consults.

“The baron gets his numbers mixed up sometimes.’
‘Anselmo, I am really suffering from twenty-three today.’
‘Your tonsils?’
‘No, my pancreas.’”

Further on, twenty-four bandits named Lamberto — the 24-L — invade the baron’s island. They demand twenty-four million dollars — one million from each of the Baron’s twenty-four banks. To help with this ransom, Lord Lamberto summons the twenty-four bank directors and their twenty-four assistants.

But the bulk of the story’s wonder lies in its love of words. Through repetition of his name by a very well-paid group of six strangers, the Baron realizes his dream of vitality and is reborn — the power of a single word. Rodari, delightfully exercising the craft of comedy, illustrates our own daily neglect in our lazy pronunciations. Signora Zanzi is “very careful not to draw out the second syllable [of Lamberto], to keep from bleating like a sheep.” In general, when the staff pronounces Lamberto’s name, one cannot hear the capital L, a problem that the Baron desperately tries to resolve. Just try not to smile about that.

The story itself is, perhaps, not so unbelievable. It’s not quite science fiction or even fantasy. It’s strange enough and, yet, just slightly not-strange enough that we can begin to believe in it. The quirks, the wordplay, those are for the grown-ups. The temptation to believe in what we know is not true, that’s for the child. And is that not exactly what we want the best fiction to accomplish? Simple it may be, a quick read, certainly, but Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto delighted me in its playfulness. Rodari amended our world into one where even funerals have happy endings.

If you are looking for a book that transports you, that contains details you will return to for years to come, and that you may, someday, give to your children, it’s this one. Simple does not equal simplistic or, worse, deficient.

I am thrilled to have discovered this book and Rodari’s writing as an adult; they will both remain on my shelves, alongside the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as a story and a storyteller that never grow old (much like the Baron himself). Readers: are there fairy tales to which you continually return? Moral tales, fables, creation stories? Do they remind you of childhood hopes, invigorate forgotten possibilities? I hope so.

On Writing and Jazz

Quite often I re-visit books I’ve enjoyed as a younger man to make sure they “hold up,” and almost every time, on each subsequent pass, I discover new levels of emotion elicited by the works. They hold up, all right. Re-reading Charles Mingus’s mercurial, non-linear autobiography Beneath the Underdog has once again left me melancholic for what once could have been. Beware brothers and sistahs: I’m about ready to get soft on you: I love writing — I make a decent living working at it . . . but more than anything I adore playing Jazz.

I mean Jazz Jazz. . . . “Jass,” as some, more naughty New Orleans bateristas used to sheepishly write on their gargantuan bass drums at the turn of the 20th century, while they swung hard both rhythm and bottle. Jazz, brothers and sistahs, amen! Not the “smooth” bullshit that now passes for this once pure, most original American jambalaya of blues, race, sex, whisky, and pimp life. Not Najee jazz. Not Kenny G jazz. Jazz! Specifically Modal Jazz. And Hard Bop.  And Bebop. You know the kind: Dizzy and Miles and Coltrane and Dolphy and Mingus and Monk and Bird played it. Invented it. Perfected it. The Jazz that evolved in the mid ’50s from the original Fathers (Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Oliver, Bechet, Armstrong) but that, for unfortunate reasons, stopped resonating with American audiences somewhere around 1965.

Before I came to realize I would write for a living, I was convinced I would work as a musician; a drummer, to be more specific. And I was on the right path, too: early lessons in percussion and the kit, sight reading, music theory / history. But back then (age 11) it was rock music that muscled its way in and brainwashed the grey matter. I came to understand Modal Jazz and Hard Bop much, much later than a trained, wannabe-working musician ought to have. And so rock music diverted my attention and, I feel, made me miss my Jazz train (‘Trane?). Sure, I played rock / pop music in some cool, local (Washington D.C. / Baltimore) venues (even toured the east coast for a short time) and had a bit of fun for a handful of years, but my regret of not having come to study Jazz sooner persists and haunts me to this day. I coulda been a contender. I coulda swung with the best of ’em: Rich, Krupa, Morello, Webb, Blakey.

It’s all right, don’t feel sorry for my shattered dreams (I’m quite adept at self pity as you can see); in a way it’s a very good thing. The realization that I’d never be Max Roach provided for a seamless transition to a life built upon writing. After all, I had been an avid reader since age 5 or 6 — a positive byproduct of being an only child growing up in Communist-era Romania throughout the ’70s.

But (fiction) writing and Jazz are such diametrically-opposed ways to make art . . . at least for me. Whereas one requires relative silence, isolation, a solitary chunk of time during which the (this?) writer flirts with addiction, madness, and descent into one of Dante’s various circles (or temporary residence in any Hieronymus Bosch painting), the other is an uplifting, instantaneous experience of an improvised, running dialogue with your fellow artists: intuitive phrasing, call and response, blue notes, prosody . . . an immediate validation or rejection of that which you have just created. Listen, you gotta have giant balls to get up on that stage night after night, play something different every time, while being instantly judged by your peers and audience. Yessir, you can’t hide your shortcomings or mediocrity behind pseudonyms or the relative anonymity of the Internet. You’re out there hanging yourself out to dry. And you better deliver. Every night. Now that’s bollocks and tough-as-titanium skin, mates. That being said, both processes necessary for writing and music improv are extremely attractive to me.  They’re the yin yang in my life. I crave to experience both. I am selfish, I know.

Writing well, and sustaining that brilliant level for the duration of a novel is ambitious and challenging for me. A full time job, marriage, fatherhood, mixed in with the daily, soul-grinding details of life that infringe upon that elusive chunk of quality time, make the craft of writing sacred, but at the same time quite fractious. I envy those lucky scribes who have somehow stumbled upon those oases of temporal nirvana, and who can afford to, as Gertrude Stein once said, fuck about for 23 hours a day, in order that they may write for that particular one. OK, I paraphrased that. But you get the point of my coveting.

Truth is, for me, writing has always come in sudden and sometimes unexpected spurts. I’ve never truly had the luxury to cogitate and compose for too long, and so, like an infantry grunt, I’ve remained vigilant and prepared myself with Moleskine (given my financial state) and pen for those magical times “it” hits me. Consequently, I’ve written just about anywhere you can imagine — including more than a few men’s room stalls in federal and state buildings’ washrooms. I am proud of those venues, all of them. They’re like constant boot camp. They are Sergeant Hartman on your ass, relentlessly.

Lately I write strictly on a computer, as it seems there is a machine available no matter where I am. Between laptops, desktops, iPads, and even their smaller cousin iPods (which I mainly use to take notes or jot down ideas), I have nearly full time access to writing. I know, I am lucky. I don’t take that for granted. But I cannot say that during those dog days of emergent technology when I wrote with stubs of broken #2 pencils in ruffled notebooks on packed subway trains, writing was necessarily more dynamic or more “legit.” That would just be me romanticizing things. And if you know me, you’re laughing uncontrollably now. What I am trying to say: the computer hasn’t mechanized or destroyed my creativity; it hasn’t taken away the humanity or emotional dynamics of my writing.  Nor have the inconsistent settings or the venues, although lately I’ve settled in a comfy enclave tucked into a corner of my bedroom, by a window overlooking some really nice oak trees.

I like the idea of incorporating Modal Jazz techniques into the process of writing prose. That is to say, I enjoy improvisation, particularly of dialogue, within a larger framework or mode, rather than plot twists and turns, or devices as the framework itself. Nowadays, most of the dialogue I write, particularly in my short stories, I don’t edit. Dig what Jackson Pollock said to interviewer William Wright in 1950: “I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident. I do have a general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it’s direct.”

I wrote my book Short Lean Cuts in the same manner, and the prose is experimental; short sentences and fragments, meant to be very much like improvised solos — crescendos and diminuendos — exploring  a particular mode in rhythmically and melodically varied ways. The mode is the chapter. And in a greater sense, the chapters themselves further act like solos within the mode (the theme) of the entire book. I know it may sound pretentious, but it’s not meant to be. The book is an experiment; a fusion of my love for Jazz and literature.

In Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus is often all over the place, but not without losing that most important thread: his humanity. His account is not linear, it’s at times ugly, utterly personal, and by no means a simple factual narrative like you would expect. It’s a work of art. It’s deranged. And it’s so beautiful.

They both are — writing . . . and Jazz.

A Universe That's Three Inches Tall and Weighs Three Pounds

My parents’ drafty two-story house in Ohio contains approximately forty-three gazillion books. At least one bookshelf stands in every room — hardcovers lined neatly along family room built-ins, rows of children’s classics in the attic. Glossy art books squat on top of sofa tables; literary journals rest facedown on bathroom counters. Nightstands, toilet tanks, the pool table — everything is a bookshelf. An antique hutch in an upstairs bedroom comes particularly to mind, a piece of furniture so overloaded with my mother’s ecology textbooks that it looks about to give out, as if to say: C’mon. No more.

Even the unfinished half of my parents’ basement — concrete-floored, hairy with cobwebs, fringed with venerable toys and raccoon traps and dusty brewing supplies — carries books in its corners. And it was there, one afternoon when I was twenty-two, home from a year in Colorado working as a grill cook, that I stood in front of an old file cabinet surveying the titles stacked on top.

These were my brother’s retired college books: Norton poetry anthologies; Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; The Harper American Literature, Volume 2. I was leaving for New Zealand in the morning, to live out of a backpack for seven months, and I had traveled overseas enough by then to know the importance of choosing the right book. The last thing you want is to find yourself five miles above the Pacific, fifteen hours left in your flight, with “Soaring, shivering, Candace inquiringly asked . . .” in your lap.

In the center of the stack a teal spine about three inches high drew my eye. The thickest of the lot. The Story and Its Writer.

I lifted the book down. Sixteen hundred onionskin pages, one hundred and fifteen short stories, three pounds. The stories were arranged alphabetically by their writers: Chinua Achebe to Richard Wright. Such a book would be absurd for backpacking.

And yet, as I held it, the book slipped open to an early page as if under its own power. I read, “Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down.”

Sherwood Anderson. One sentence. It was enough. I lugged the book upstairs and wedged it into my carry-on.

I landed in Auckland and boarded a ferry and decided to hike the circumference of Great Barrier Island, a remote, windswept protuberance of bays and hills in the Hauraki Gulf. I bought potatoes, four sleeves of Chips Ahoy, a can of tuna, two pounds of noodles, and a can with a picture of a tomato on it that said Tomato Sauce. I bought white kitchen trash bags: one to keep my sleeping bag dry, another inside which to sheath the three-pound brick of The Story and Its Writer.

For my first seventy-two hours on that island it rained every minute. On my third night — I hadn’t seen another human being in two days — a storm came in and my tent started thrashing about as if large men had ahold of each corner and were trying to shred it. Sheep were groaning nearby, and my sleeping bag was flooding, and I wanted to go home.

I leaned into the little shuddering tent vestibule and got my stove lit. I started boiling noodles. I carefully cut open my can of tomato sauce, anticipating spaghetti. I dipped my finger in. It was ketchup.

I almost started crying. Instead I switched on my flashlight and opened The Story and Its Writer. For no reason I could articulate, I began with “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” by Alice Munro.

By the second paragraph the tent had disappeared. The storm had disappeared. I had disappeared. I had become a little girl, my father was a salesman for Walker Brothers, and we were driving through the Canadian night, little bottles in crates clinking softly in the backseat.

Next I flipped to Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon.” Now I was clambering up a ladder onto the moon. The last page left me smiling and awed and misty: “I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon. . . .”

Then I lost myself in the menacing, half-drunk suburbia of Raymond Carver. Then Isak Dinesen’s “The Blue Jar.” The line, “When I am dead you will cut out my heart and lay it in the blue jar” is still underlined — underlined by a younger, wetter, braver version of me — as I sit here in Idaho with the book almost twenty years later, warm and dry, no ketchup in sight. I press my nose to the page: I smell paper, mud, memory.

When I eventually stopped reading that night, and washed back into myself, I had eaten two entire sleeves of Chips Ahoy. The rain had stopped. I unzipped the tent door and stepped back onto Great Barrier Island. The stars were violently bright, electric-blue. The Milky Way was stretched south to north. Orion was upside down.

For seven months I carried The Story and Its Writer through New Zealand. I hiked my way from the tip of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island and Nadine Gordimer came with me; Flannery O’Connor came with me; Tim O’Brien came with me. On a sheep farm in Timaru, John Steinbeck whispered, “The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.” In a hostel in Queenstown, Joyce whispered, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.” In a climber’s hut beneath the summit of Mount Tongariro, John Cheever whispered, “Is forgetfulness some part of the mysteriousness of life?”

Maybe we build the stories we love into ourselves. Maybe we digest stories. When we eat a pork chop, we break up its cellular constituents, its proteins, its fats, and we absorb as much of the meat as we can into our bodies. We become part pig. Eat an artichoke, become part artichoke. Maybe the same thing is true for what we read. Our eyes walk tightropes of sentences, our minds assemble images and sensations, our hearts find connections with other hearts. A good book becomes part of who we are, perhaps as significant a part of us as our memories. A good book flashes around inside, endlessly reflecting. Its shapes, its people, its places become our shapes, our people, our places.

We take in a story. We metabolize it. We incorporate it.

Imagine you could draw a map of all the experiences you’ve had in your life, and superimpose it over a map of all the books you’ve read in your life. Here you worried your daughter was failing out of school, here you gave a nun a stick of chewing gum, here you saw a man dressed as a referee weeping in a Honda Accord. And here a boy in an egg-blue suit handed you an ornate invitation to a party at Jay Gatsby’s, here you met the harpooner Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, here you floated a stretch of the Mississippi with a slave named Jim. Here you crouched in a tent in the rain and read Isak Dinesen’s “The Blue Jar” for the very first time.

Everything would be intertwined; everything would transubstantiate. There would be your life, your memories, your loves and doubts. Then there would be the faint tracery of the lives of your parents, your grandparents, their parents. Then there would be your dreams. And then there would be all the books you have ever read.

I spilled hot chocolate on The Story and Its Writer. I dropped a corner of it in a river. I brought it back across the Pacific and went to graduate school and used it to write literature essays and then to fumble through my first efforts as a teacher. And now I have my own house, my own dozen bookshelves, and the big teal spine of The Story and Its Writer sits on one behind my desk as if waiting to fall open again. If I look at it long enough it seems to pulse.

We are all mapmakers: We embed our memories everywhere, inscribing a private and intensely complicated latticework across the landscape. We plant root structures of smells and textures in the apartments of lovers and the station wagons of friends and in the backyards of our parents. But we are readers, too. And through stories we manage to live in multiple places, lead multiple lives. Through stories we rehearse empathy; through stories we live the emotional lives of other people — people in the future, people in the sixteenth century, people living in Pakistan right now. We fall, we drift, we lose ourselves in other selves.

What I have learned and relearned all my life, what I learned growing up in a house overspilling with books, what The Story and Its Writer taught me, what I relearned last night reading Harry Potter to my five-year-old sons, is that if you are willing to let yourself go, to fall into the dazzle of well-made sentences, each strung lightly one after the next — “Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down.” — if you live with stories, you will never be alone.

__________

Editor’s Note: “A Universe That’s Three Inches Tall and Weighs Three Pounds” first appeared in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning and with a foreword by Ray Bradbury.

Horrocks Shows That Even In Bleakness And Heartbreak There Is Beauty

Caitlin Horrocks’s short story collection, This Is Not Your City, begins with this short, perfect sentence: “It is July and we are a miraculous age.” When I read it, I knew I would love the book, or at least I would love this first story. I felt I was listening to a strong, capable, and, most importantly, confident voice. The story is “Zolaria” and easily my favorite of the collection of eleven stories that make up the book.

The astonishing thing about this book is that it is a debut collection by a young author as this is a collection of tremendous depth and breadth. There is an impressive range to these stories, limited only by Ms. Horrocks’s imagination, which is vast. It is no surprise to learn from her bio, that she “lives in Michigan, by way of Ohio, Arizona, England, Finland and the Czech Republic.”

The stories are sharp, dark, inventive, and surprising. There is an emotional honesty to these stories and these characters, who are not victims nor martrys. I loved the moments of dark humor as well. In the story, “World Champion Cow of the Insane” (and if you think I’m not jealous of that title, you would be wrong), a young woman takes a part-time job teaching basic computer skills to the elderly and one of her students types into the subject line of an email: “Fucking Ignoramous = YOU.”

Horrocks shows that even in bleakness and heartbreak there is beauty. The prose is simple and uncluttered and powerful, as in this sentence, from the inventive story, “It Looks Like This”: “Sometimes while I’m making dinner or piecing a quilt or writing a paper, I just sit and know that Elsa thinks I’m a fish, and that things turn out all right for all the swimming things in the world.”

And this, from the dark and devastating story, “Steal Small”: “If this is what I get in the world, I’ll take it. Love and squalor, but mostly love.”

And here, from the unforgettable title story: “Nika is a practical child, and has never, as her mother once did secretly, rhymed storm clouds as dark as her soul, or a love that burned like fire.” Horrocks writes with such empathy and wisdom and such breadth of knowledge and experience, that one believes that, like the Iowa actuary in her story, “Embodied,” she has lived 127 lives.

Caitlin Horrocks is a talented, assured, and versatile writer and this is simply a stunning debut collection. I highly recommend this book and look forward to anything else that bears her name in the future.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book.

We live in a bizarre generation. That is a fact. The awe and confusion that older generations have in the face of our quick-adapting, technologically saturated youth is immeasurable. It is also something well noted; nobody denies the reality that we grow up now immersed in technology or that information is increasing at an insanely exponential rate. Something that is perhaps less seriously mulled over is the effect of this culture on the personalities of today’s youth. The desocializing effect that Facebook and Twitter have, the dichotomy created between online and “IRL,” and the nurturing of the self-absorbed ego that now occupies the center of attention in your own social network are all usually jokes; the kind made about your friend who spends too much time online. But those jokes take on a real value in Michael J. Seidlinger’s new work In Great Company.

In Great Company is a bizarre book. It wavers between being the personal journal of a guy obsessed with his various internet handles  and the battle log of a commander at war, self-indulgent and intent on destroying everyone around him. It is easy to hate the narrator of the text. He, himself, comments on that often. But what he is demonstrating is important and the hatred perhaps comes from a minor degree of self-recognition (and latent self-loathing). Seidlinger has created a character that takes all of the qualities that I suggested earlier (effects of the Internet) and develops them to extreme levels. The disgust provoked by this character, in my case, is really a fear of becoming him.

Early on the narrator professes: “I can only / Quantify moments here, online.” The absorption of the self into an identity on a social network is the only real “event” in the text. Nothing is happening externally. The action is all within the narrator. He speaks to this transformation from human to handle frequently and alludes to an inability to reintegrate into life outside the web with satisfaction: “I am counting / On the unpredictability of the / Digital surf to give me the / Experiences I can no longer get / On my own.” The easily felt repulsion for this character turns into sympathy when you start to look upon him as a social eunuch, removed from the joy of engaging in real-world, fruitful interaction. You can further poke holes in this self-absorbed identity via the errors in the text (mostly, typographical; likely, unintentional), a further reminder that the intimidating voice that speaks is human after all, and like many college-degree bearing students who majored in English or creative writing, he makes typos.

As the text progresses, the confusion between cyber identity and real life intensifies, particularly with the introduction of the “virus.” A trifold interpretation of “virus” as a literal ailment that is contracted and spread, a digital corruption that likewise infects, and as a social disease of cyber obsession (the undoing of the normal functioning personality) makes the narrator’s (and most young readers’) condition very real. The hyper formation of a constructed identity eventually culminates in the loss of identity: “I / Can see my skeletal features, / Looking back at me, when I / Look, I look fearlessly. Go / Ahead, do the same . . . You see the outline of your / Skull?”  This skull-like face graces the cover of the book, a sort of dark, apocalyptic version of that blue, outlined head on Facebook.

The risk of defacement, self-absorption, and losing touch with reality has given way to many of the greatest texts in literature. Noah Cicero related In Great Company to Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground. It also reminds me a bit of Augusto Roa Bastos’ novel I The Supreme. But where these novels demonstrate a certain personality type and condition that are universal, the circumstances surrounding them don’t hit close to home for most contemporary readers. That is why In Great Company is so disconcerting. Its circumstances are those that surround the majority of us in this day and age. Its suggestions are possibilities perhaps too real for people aged thirty or younger.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book. The warning is that you may come out of it feeling a little “disembodied” or “skeletal.” If you don’t, then you are probably in severe self-denial.

And Oppose Them We Must, For It's Our Land And Water And Air: A Review of Wendell Berry's What Matters?

In the heady days following President Obama’s election, my friend who edits the monthly newsletter for the village where I lived asked me to write a brief book review. She had some space to fill. And I was so excited to have a president whom I could imagine reading a book that I chose to frame the review as a book recommendation for our new, literate leader. The book I chose was Home Economics, a book of fourteen essays by the farmer/poet Wendell Berry. It had been part of the curriculum from a favorite course I’d taken as an undergrad, Ecology & Literature, and I had dragged the book along with me through multiple moves, after it had been stored for some time in my mother’s basement, because it is one of those books I knew I’d go back to over and over, the writing succinct and sharp, measured and real, and the thoughtfulness and deep observation behind it reflecting the kind of company I like to keep. And I wanted our new president (and anyone reading the village’s newsletter) to read it because already I could sense that our food system was failing, and that some straight talk from a proper farmer was just what the man with the power to steer things and oppose Monsanto (as well as the consumers fed by that system) needed to hear.

So imagine my delight, two years later, when my husband showed me, while shopping at Home Green Home, that Mr. Berry had a new book of essays out, What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2010). Turns out some of the old essays are included, but they’re as relevant as ever, and the situation is more dire than ever, as our monopolistic, monocultural, industrial farming methods have only “advanced” in the past twenty years while his wisdom has gone unheeded.

And it’s not like his is a lone voice in the wilderness. He is heir to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, developed in A Sand County Almanac (and featured in the highly recommended film Green Fire), colleague to Bill McKibben (Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) as activist/author imploring our government to see the rationality of preserving the living systems that sustain us, peer to poets like Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers, reiterating in myriad forms the fleeting expression of being a human not quite at home in nature.

He is a man capable of a poem like this:

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

Like Jeffers he sees the big picture, “watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight / Waver like a spent rocket, wavering toward new discoveries, / Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;” so when he expounds, in the midst of the demise of the global economy, on what exactly has gone wrong and how we might fix it, I figure we should listen.

And so, too, does Herman E. Daly, economist and author, who writes the excellent forward, in which he bemoans the fact that, because Berry is a farmer and a poet rather than an economist, those who most need to read the book, the economists and statespeople, probably won’t. (But if enough of us common folk do, and figure out that we, by starving these gigantic corporations of their profits and building our own local economies, as Shannon Hayes details in Radical Homemaking: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, those statespeople and economists will become superfluous.)

Though the land he relates with is located in Kentucky, the manner of that relationship is universal: it translates. Not only the joy to be had in observing and working with the particulars of habitat, but the immanent danger of the extractive economy. In Kentucky it’s strip-mining for coal; in upstate New York, the fossil-fuel industry wants to risk our water and air, the vineyards and organic dairy farms surrounding our town of Ithaca, with a process called hydrofracking, though we do our best to oppose them. And oppose them we must, for it’s our land and water and air, these things that make up the commons and which no person, not even a “person” as powerful as Halliburton, has the right to spoil, or even risk spoiling, for profit; they are the very basis for the good life. As they’ve already left people around the world struggling to live within ruined habitats, these supranational corporations (a great term, that, worth the cost of the book all on its own) clearly don’t care that the landscape may be debased and well nigh uninhabitable by the time they’re done with it; they neglect to mention that the few jobs they create will be temporary and go primarily to workers from elsewhere. They care only about profit. As Mr. Berry perfectly puts it in the final essay, “The Total Economy”:

“The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as ‘a person.’ But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who ‘let their money work for them,’ expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super-government with the power to overrule nations.”

A warning: he makes no bones about his being a Christian, though he’s the sort of Christian who actually pays heed to the message of the gospels, the sort that would make those “Christians” on TV and inside the Beltway burn with shame, were they, in fact, capable. And though his religion colors his language, he’s aware that not all his readers share it, and one needn’t share it in order to grasp his meaning. In what I consider the keystone of these essays, “Two Economies,” he resorts to a biblical expression to denote all that is, “The Kingdom of God,” and notes that a person raised in the East would recognize what he’s talking about in the term “the Tao,” and finally settles on a culturally neutral term, “The Great Economy.” And what a loss to those who have been made allergic to any hint of religion by the aforementioned hatefreaks (the stupid and the mean who have hijacked our spiritual traditions and from whom I’m in the process of reclaiming mine), because if you can’t get through his biblical references you won’t get to read paragraphs like this:

“It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so short-sighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call ‘nature,’ then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy-nilly, a virtue. But competitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our ‘wastes’ are toxic, and why our ‘defensive’ weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between ‘free enterprise’ and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.

Not only religion has been made suspect by its public practitioners, but discussions of morality itself seem questionable. Can anyone be blamed for hearing the term “moralist” as a pejorative after the likes of William J. Bennett? Wendell Berry is indeed a moralist, but the immorality against which he levels his eloquent opprobrium has nothing to do with who takes whom to whose bed, or what someone chooses to drink or smoke, but is the greed and competitiveness that have left our society one in which so many children go to bed hungry while a few enjoy cake dusted with gold. And which has left us with fouled air, water, and soil, and eliminated thousands of species eternally from existence.

So I say, moralize on, my man! And he does, in essay after essay, addressing issues of land use, human relations, education, consumerism, the value of diversity, and the colonization of the country by the city, always filtered through his deep relationship with the natural world and an honest striving, despite so much that could encourage the contrary, to love humanity, of which he understands himself fully a part. Relentlessly he calls out contemporary economics and politics on their bull, with lines like, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” And he calls the reader to live with the same approach, with affection for the land and our neighbors and responsibility to the future. He answers the question in his title with this: What matters is that which both supports life and makes it sweet, and it ain’t bigger and bigger piles of money.

Happy Thanksgiving from The Lit Pub (with James Herriot)

I’d like to begin with a little confession: I had no idea what book I was going to write about for today’s post until about 5 p.m. yesterday, on Thanksgiving eve. It wasn’t the end of the world — my backup plan was to publish any of the 50+ posts we already have scheduled for the weeks ahead, but I wanted to write up something myself, a personal message from me to you, something special befitting the holiday (and no, the irony is not lost on me that I settled on a European author, but bear with me). In particular, I wanted to provide a bit of an update about where we are now with The Lit Pub, and of course, as ever, I wanted to write about a very special book, a book I love. The problem was, I just wasn’t sure what book it should be; all I knew was it had to be the right book, a book that means something to me, a book that perfectly captures the nostalgia for all the warmth and loveliness that I think Thanksgiving — insofar as it brings families together — is supposed to inspire us to feel.

With time ticking on and my fear growing greater that I’d have to post something by someone else — a disservice to her or his efforts, I thought, due to the high probability that traffic would be slow on the holiday — I took my dilemma to Team TLP. I thought, Hey, maybe I can just run a Happy Thanksgiving post. I asked everyone what they’re thankful for and here are the responses I got:

Josh Denslow wrote: “I’m thankful for electronic submission managers because now I barely ever have to go to the post office.” A minute later, he added: “I’m also grateful for this community. I’ve had a really fun year.”

Samuel Ligon wrote: “I’m thankful for meats and cakes and pies and tax incentives.”

Alex Pruteanu wrote: “I’m grateful for reasonably priced gin and reasonably priced dry vermouth. I’m grateful for Submishmash and for zines that allow simultaneous submissions. I’m grateful for editors who make concrete, quick decisions — no matter whether or not I agree with them.”

Brian Contine wrote: “I’m thankful for paper over board, fair use, and brief nudity in graphic novels.”

I wrote: “I love yr resistance to sentimentality. I will more than make up for it with my own thanks-givings.” (And I will, I will.)

Then Dave K. wrote: “I’m just thankful to be alive and still creating. This year has reminded me that, while my blessings might be extremely basic, they are nonetheless important and more than many other people have.”

(Thank you, Dave K., for being so sweet. And while I’m sure the others were being no less sincere, I still wanted to tsk tsk them, Mother Hen of The Lit Pub that I am.) Then I got really worried because time really began to run out. I wrote:

“I have no idea what book to even write about. I’m either totally screwed or will pull something out of the depths of my soul by midnight. Or, much easier, I’ll run someone else’s post, which sucks for them because nobody reads the Internet on holidays. Sorry gang. I totally suck.”

But that’s when Brian Contine came to the rescue with: “Thanksgiving is about food. Any favorite foodie books?”

There it was! I immediately thought of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small — no, not because I thought of all the tasty creatures great and small (tsk tsk!). Seriously, there isn’t another author out there that can make me as hungry as James Herriot. The way he writes about farming life, working up an appetite, and all those Yorkshire Dales farmers who invite him into their homes after a calving or a lambing or a foaling for a bit of their wives’ home-cooked meals is mouth-wateringly delicious. Furthermore, the BBC series on-demand at Netflix does a fine, fine job of showcasing housekeeper Mrs. Hall’s 3-square-meals-a-day philosophy. . . .

But there are other reasons that make James Herriot’s memoirs so perfect for today’s post. Before I get into all that, though, how about some background information? All Creatures Great and Small is the first of five semi-autobiographical novels / memoirs by Alf Wight, who wrote under the pen name James Herriot. The first four in the set are titled after lines from Cecil Frances Alexander’s quatrain:

“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”

The fifth, titled Every Living Thing, has this on its back cover:

“Herriot’s last memoir, Every Living Thing, is a truly heartwarming read, breathtakingly full of his deep joy in life, sense of humor, and appreciation of the world around him.”

I don’t think any other blurb can sum up these books as well, though not for lack of trying. You should certainly turn your attention to the far left column and read the other blurbs (go on, just skim through them over there), which are incredible — not to mention, for the first time ever, I’ve also felt compelled to include the links to reviews on Google Books, Goodreads, and Amazon, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of fans’ responses is emotionally and staggeringly overwhelming.

These five books are probably sold as a set, though, to be honest, I didn’t even know about the fifth until last night, when I dashed out to my local Barnes & Noble to snag a fresh, clean copy of All Creatures Great and Small, which I would like to give away to one lucky winner. (All you have to do is leave a comment here about what you’re thankful for between now and midnight EST Sunday, November 27, 2011. Multiple comments earn you multiple chances to win, so if you’re thankful for many things, leave several comments! The more the merrier, and the winner will be selected at random and announced on Monday, November 28, 2011.)

My personal history with these books goes all the way back to high school. I randomly stumbled upon All Things Wise and Wonderful in the lending library of the condo association my folks lived in. I pulled it off the shelf and headed for the pool. That night, I broke the lending library’s rules and took all four books back to the condo with me (on the honor system, we were only supposed to take out one book at a time, and we were supposed to return them promptly). All four books, completely and totally worse for the wear, are now displayed on an end table in my living room. One, I’m not sure which, is missing half a cover, due to a very hungry dog’s very sharp teeth. And yet, those four books are very special to me and deserve their elevated status — not on the bookshelf, no, but on display where anyone can see them when they come into my home.

Every time I look at them, which is just about every day as they’re in plain view of the couch I sit on and the dining table where I eat, I remember how I left Florida with those books a changed person. I returned to my high school (I lived away from home) with those four books and began writing about them. My English teacher, Sara Berry, at the School for Creative and Performing Arts (now the nation’s only K-12 school of the arts), is someone I am extremely grateful for today. She changed my life, and I was lucky to have her for two years. My 11th grade English teacher, she was also my 12th grade English teacher because that year the former 12th grade teacher retired and Mrs. Berry moved on up with us. And it was for her 12th grade AP English class that I was required to write one reading response a week. They didn’t have to be long — only four pages, if memory serves — but on this particular week after that break, I turned in a 25-page research paper on James Herriot’s tetralogy.

For the first time in my life, I had gone to the library and researched postmodernist, feminist, and deconstructionist perspectives on the works of an author (and although I may not have understood the terms and the quotations I found, I pulled and cited them like it was my one and only job on earth). I turned in the essay, worried that Mrs. Berry might roll her eyes at the sight of so many broken staples in the upper left corner (she was a sarcastic one, that woman), but when it finally came back to me, she had written only one word in her recognizable red scrawl: “Amazing!”

At the risk of even further digression, I should go back in time a bit. In the 10th grade, I wrote essays for English class, sure. I did all right. Got A’s and B’s. In the 11th grade, I turned in my first essay and Mrs. Berry wrote on it: “Oh please!” I revised it and she wrote: “See me.” It was the first time anyone had ever challenged my writing. She inspired the best out of me, and it was a painful year of excruciating “See me” and “Oh please!” responses. But when 12th grade rolled around, she accepted me for her AP class, and I was writing pretty decent essays. And, to no one’s great surprise, that was the year I bailed on my long-term major, Jazz Theory and Music Composition, and headed upstairs to the 3rd floor, where I auditioned for the Creative Writing teacher and became a creative writing major. I wrote awful poems, plays, and stories, but at least my essays for Mrs. Berry had shaped up by then. I probably knew MLA better then than I do now. By the time I graduated, I didn’t even consult my Hacker.

In any case, James Herriot has been with me for the long haul. I’m 30 now. I was only 17 then. It’s strange to think that these books have been with me for nearly half my life. But it’s comforting, too. I’m thankful for these books, the stories in them, the memories that Herriot shares. And I’m so grateful, too, that I’ve got this opportunity to write about his books again now, if for no other reason than I am currently working on a memoir and there is something very special and unique about Herriot’s light touch when it comes to the sentimental. Further, as his books are “semi-autobiographical,” and somewhat fictionalized, I’m thrilled to have this revelation today that they qualify as being hybrid in nature. As I like to fancy myself an expert-in-training when it comes to hybridity, I couldn’t be happier that I can add Herriot to my list of genre-blurring authors.

Yet I digress, more and more it seems, with every new paragraph. Here I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to write about, and now I’m writing too much. I haven’t even told you about what he writes about. In a nutshell: his life as a veterinary surgeon in the Yorkshire Dales, taking care of small animals in the surgery on-site and taking care of large animals like horses, cows, sheep, and pigs, on the farmers’ properties. His cast of characters includes his boss, Siegfried Farnon; Siegfried’s younger brother, Tristan; their indomitable housekeeper, Mrs. Hall; James’s wife, Helen, and their children; and, of course, the many farmers and animals they all tend to at any time of day or night, “rain, snow, or blow.”

The books, plain and simple, are heartwarming. The BBC series on Netflix captures them perfectly, I think, and I’ve spent the past many months making my way through the various seasons and episodes. (If you watch only one, make sure it’s Season 2, Episode 7, “Tricks of the Trade.” Granville Bennett is one of the great and classic characters of the series, and Christopher Timothy, the actor who plays James, is probably at his finest as the “straight man” that he generally always has to be, given the eccentricities of everyone else around him. Additionally, I think the entire cast is perfect, and so there’s no need to fear watching an episode, seeing the actors, and worrying about not being able to imagine the characters if you were to go read the books. When I read the books, I see the actors, but they do such a damn fine job of it, nothing’s lost, only gained. In fact, many will recognize Robert Hardy, the actor who plays Siegfried Farnon, for another of his more well-known characters: Cornelius Fudge.)

Obviously, then, I absolutely recommend these books. You could read them at bedtime to your youngest children they’re that “good” and “clean” and “fun,” although there are sometimes bad people, dirty animals, and sad cases too far gone for any cure. But I couldn’t think of a better way to break such truths than with these books, and, really, they offer a bit of an escape, to a simpler time and a distant past when hard work and neighborly kindness were what got us through the days. It’s an important message, and one I’m thankful to have at my fingertips any time I need it. To be able to say that these books have been with me for the long haul is my privilege, really — I mean, of course they have; quite simply, I love them.

It is this kind of love that I hope all of us at The Lit Pub will continue to bring to our recommendations and consistently share with you all — love of reading, love of good strong characters and the great stories they live, love of authors who touch us each individually for those tiny little reasons that make us the unique human beings and readers that we are.

Finally, and to close, I would like to take this moment to thank everyone at The Lit Pub for doing what they do — all the Staff Writers, Assistants, Data Gatherers, Interns, and, of course, all of our readers who make their way to this website whether randomly or via links from all of the bloggers and web editors out there who have been kind enough to tell others about us. We couldn’t do it without you, and for this I will most certainly raise my glass to you tonight at my own table; until then, let me tell you here how much I appreciate all that you have done. Thank you, all of you, and have a very, very happy Thanksgiving.