Category: Book culture

Update

I managed to get bronchitis and laryngitis at the same time (I always think it’s amusing when preachers, who make their living by talking, get laryngitis). This slowed me down: I haven’t had much energy for a week, and my brains feel like Swiss cheese.

But I did have enough energy to finally update The Folk Choir Song Book, which was first published in 2009 (when I was coming off two years of directing a folk choir at a UU church). I’ve corrected many typographical errors, removed one song that turned out to be covered by copyright, and added some fun stuff that didn’t make it into the first edition.

Update, 2023: this book is no longer available.

Amiri Baraka: a brief appreciation

When I was in college, I wanted to take a course that was being offered on the history of jazz; but I was still a physics major, and didn’t have the time. So I bought the main book for the course, Blues People by LeRoi Jones, and read it on my own. I was listening to a lot of jazz at the time, and Jones — who had changed his name to Amiri Baraka by the time I read the book — showed me how jazz grew out of the historical and social experiences of people of African descent in the United States. It was one of those books that changed the way I understood the world, and started me off on an intellectual journey that led to Harry T. Burleigh and James Weldon Johnson and Sun Ra, and (by a circuitous route) to James Cone and William R. Jones.

Blues People has, I think now, a deep theological strain to it. When I read James Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues, I couldn’t help comparing Cone’s understanding of African American music to Baraka’s understanding, not entirely favorably. Cone focuses too much on Christian doctrine, and I think that tends to exclude some of the irreducible African-ness of the spirituals and the blues, and later jazz. Baraka, on the other hand, showed how African Americans remained a part of the African diaspora, keeping their spirituals in some sense separate from the white man’s religion, and he showed (I thought so, anyway) the way so-called secular music could made sense out of lived experience, could bring meaning to life. I later learned — heard, really — how jazz could incorporate the lived experiences and meaning-making of other cultures, particularly Latin American cultures, but also various white North American cultures. Baraka opened my eyes to how jazz can express cross-cultural thoughts and longings and meaning-making, and so I came to understand it as the religious music par excellence. And so it was that Baraka opened my heart to William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist? (the answer to the title is a nuanced and qualified yes). I don’t think you can understand God in the same way after you’ve read Blues People.

Baraka’s poetry had less of an impact on me. I love some of his individual poems: “Numbers, Letters,” for example, had some exquisite lines that have stayed with me for years, that match or surpass anything written by Allen Ginsberg or the more famous white Beats:

If you’re not home, where
are you? Where’d you go? What
were you doing when gone? When
you come back, better make it good….

…I am Everett LeRoi Jones, 30 yrs. old.
A black nigger in the universe. A long breath singer,
wouldbe dancer, strong from years of fantasy
and study….

That’s what I wanted to be: a long breath singer who is strong from years of fantasy and study; but I never made it, though the poem stayed with me. Some of Baraka’s poems have been living inside me for years: “Numbers, Letters” of course; and “For Hettie” and “Legacy” and “Poem for Speculative Hipsters” and others. But I could never sit down and read a whole book of his poems, the way I could with Langston Hughes or Elizabeth Bishop (I must have read “Geography III” a few dozen times) or Denise Levertov or Lucille Clifton. The fault is mine, I know. I can recognize Baraka’s brilliance, I can appreciate the bracing clarity of his moral insight, I need the white heat of his anger — but I feel that he demands something of his readers (and of himself) that is beyond human ability; or at least beyond my ability. It’s hard to read a whole book of poetry when you know that you’re going to fall short of what the poet demands of you; when you know that you or any error-prone, love-befuddled, smelly, awkward, confused and all-too-human being can not live up to what the poet demands. Adrienne Rich is a little that way, too: when I read poets like Baraka and Rich, I know I’ll never be good enough, never be able to transcend my humanness, never be able to get to that land towards which they point. It’s tough to read a whole book that makes you feel that way.

And it’s hard to know what we’ll do without Amiri Baraka. We need people who will hold us to impossible standards. I miss him already.

POD for liberal religion

With the ongoing evolution of print-on-demand (POD) and ebook technologies, the publishing industry continues to change rapidly. Here are three new items in the publishing world that recently caught my eye:

(1) The November, 2013, issue of Independent, the member publication of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), has part 3 of a series titled “What POD Can Do,” in which various small publishers report on how print-on-demand fits into their business model. In this issue, Dave Biesel of St. Johann Press reports:

“One of our early authors was John Shelby Spong. When his current publisher was not interested in reprinting his early titles, he asked if we would keep six of his books, including Honest Prayer, in print. Since we did not have deep pockets, we started by printing 50 copies using POD technology…. We ahve purchase rights to other published books, including Jim Burklo’s Open Christianity….” (Burklo, by the way, just spoke at our church on the topic of homelessness.)

St. Johann Press’s model would work well for some older Unitarian Universalist titles. For example, I’d like to see some of James Luther Adams’s books get put back in print using this model — it would take very little front money, but you could have copies on hand to ship immediately.

(2) One of the teens at church pointed me to Booksie.com, a platform that she uses to put finished drafts of her writing online for comments and feedback, which she then incorporates into final revisions. Yes, this sort of thing has been done before — scribd.com comes to mind — but Booksie looks like it is emphasizing the social networking side of writing. Might be a good way to solicit feedback on one’s writing.

(3) The UUA might finally be catching up to the advances in digital publishing. From Long Ago and Many Lands, a great Unitarian Universalist story book first published in the 1940s, was reissued by Skinner House in 1995. Skinner House finally stopped publishing it a couple of years ago; I still use it as a curriculum resource, so when I need a copy I search used booksellers online.

But recently, the UUA decided to reissue From Long Ago as an ebook. This is an obvious step to take: you can keep the title in print, but you don’t need to keep any stock on hand. Unfortunately, however, it was only reissued in proprietary Amazon Kindle format, instead of in an open ebook format.

Furthermore, as long as you’re going to go through the trouble of setting up a book as an ebook, you might as well run it through Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign and lay it out as both a print book and an ebook. Then you can send the files for the print version to a POD printer, and drop-ship small orders from the POD printer instead of carrying books in inventory. And if you want to have printed copies to sell in person at, e.g., General Assembly, you only buy as many as you need.

*****

It’s a whole new publishing world out there, and we liberal religionists should sit up and take notice of the possibilities opened up by POD. In the article “What POD Can Do” mentioned above, one small publisher notes, “Because of POD, our books are effectively ‘out of print’ only if we decide to delist them. Most of our books continue to sell long after their peak. There is very little cost to keeping a book active, and POD makes this very easy.” So many liberal religious classics could be made available, either as ebooks or print copies — and interesting new books can be developed very inexpensively.

The story of the two wolves

Since some of you like tracing first references of things, I want to alert you to an interesting development in the comments thread of a recent post. Amanda posted a comment in which she said she had been powerfully moved by the native American story of the two wolves, a good one and a bad one, who are fighting; the one you feed the most is the one who wins the fight. I like that story, too, and Amanda’s comment got me wondering which Native people the story came from; the earliest printed reference I could find for the story was a 1964 book on Christian prayer which attributed the story to the Mohave people; in that version, it’s two dogs who are fighting, not two wolves. Then Erp got in the act, and found the story in a 1914 Bible commentary, where the story was attributed to “an Indian.”

Now I’m really interested in this question. If you can find an earlier printed reference to the story, I’ll send you a fair trade chocolate bar, in addition to which you get bragging rights.

And thanks, Amanda, for starting us off on this interesting quest.

Reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Yesterday I finally finished reading James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I can’t remember when I started reading the Life of Johnson, but it was probably during the 1990s. I bought a used copy of a paperback edition, which I believe I found at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and that edition is a 1987 reprint; so I must have begun reading after 1987. And I was obsessed with eighteenth century New England history during the 1990s; reading Boswell’s account of one of the most interesting lives of mid-eighteenth century London fit right in with that obsession. So it has taken me about two decades to finally finish reading all 1,400 pages of the book.

I made pretty good progress at the start: as I recall, I read the first third of the book in a few weeks; this part of the book takes place before Boswell actually met Johnson, and it takes the form, more or less, of a narrative. But after this first third of the book, my progress slowed. I would read two or three of Johnson’s conversations, as recorded by Boswell, and I’d have to pause — pause to appreciate the beauty of the language, and to think about what Johnson said. A page of my handwritten notes remains between pages 986 and 987 of the paperback, and I copied out this passage in full:

[Sat. 25 June 1763]

After having given credit to reports of his [Johnson’s] bigotry, I was agreeably surprized when he expressed the following very liberal sentiment, which has the additional value of obviating an objection to our holy religion, founded upon the discordant tenets of Christians themselves: ‘For my part, Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.’

Rereading this, I can see why I thought it worthwhile to copy this out by hand.

Johnson was prone to fits of melancholy — today we would probably call him depressive, an unlikable and clinical word — and on this same page of notes I copied out this brief passage: Continue reading “Reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson”

Moral law

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, offered an interesting statement yesterday in response to the mass murders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a statement that reveals a coherent moral outlook. According to a report in the New York Times, LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” He therefore proposed providing armed security guards in every school in the United States. The report goes on to quote LaPierre as saying

Now I can imagine the headlines — the shocking headlines you’ll print tomorrow…. More guns, you’ll claim, are the NRA’s answer to everything. Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?

This is only a partial exposition of this particular moral outlook. Zane Grey, popular author of Western novels, gave a somewhat more complete exposition of this morla outlook in his 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage. Towards the end of the chapter titled “Faith and Unfaith,” the gunman Lassiter is explaining to the heroine Jane Withersteen why he must keep his guns:

“Blind — yes, an’ let me make it clear an’ simple to you,” Lassiter went on, his voice losing its tone of anger. “Take, for instance, that idea of yours last night when you wanted my guns. It was good an’ beautiful, an’ showed your heart — but — why, Jane, it was crazy. Mind I’m assumin’ that life to me is as sweet as to any other man. An’ to preserve that life is each man’s first an’ closest thought. Where would any man be on this border without guns? Where, especially, would Lassiter be? Well, I’d be under the sage with thousands of other men now livin’ an’ sure better men than me. Gun-packin’ in the West since the Civil War has growed into a kind of moral law. An’ out here on this border it’s the difference between a man an’ somethin’ not a man. Look what your takin’ Venters’s guns from him all but made him! Why, your churchmen carry guns. Tull has killed a man an’ drawed on others. Your Bishop has shot a half dozen men, an’ it wasn’t through prayers of his that they recovered. An’ to-day he’d have shot me if he’d been quick enough on the draw. Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy- one.”

For the character Lassiter, to be a man (not “to be human,” but to be a man) means being able to protect yourself, and implicitly to be able to protect women and children. According to Lassiter’s character, the Civil War caused a kind of moral vacuum — the Civil War meant the destruction of a way of life, the triumph of Northern industrial might over the South’s emphasis on honor and duty. Even “churchmen” carry guns, and kill people, denying that Christianity can offer an alternative moral outlook that effectively competes with the moral outlook that requires a man to carry guns.

Packing a gun continues to be a “kind of moral law” in the United States today. I find it hard to name another moral law in U.S. society today that is as compelling to as many people as packing a gun. LaPierre knows that he isn’t going to convince those of us who hold to a different moral law; but he also knows that his moral law of packing a gun attracts more adherents than any other single moral law.

This clash between moral outlooks, between moral laws, is not going to be over in the near future. And at the moment, the moral law of packing a gun remains stronger than any other alternative.

Indirect economic attrition

In his short story “The Upside Down Evolution” (c.1985 in Polish, 1986 in English), science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem claims to have read a military history of the world written in the twenty-first century, and used what he learned in his novels:

In 1967, I wrote a science fiction novel entitled His Master’s Voice (published in English in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). On page 125 of that edition, third line from the top, are the words “the ruling doctrine was … ‘indirect economic attrition’,” and then the doctrine is expressed in the aphorism, “The thin starve before the fat lose weight.”

The doctrine expressed publicly in the United States in 1980 — thirteen years after the original [Polish] version of His Master’s Voice — was put a little differently. (In the West German press they used the slogan “den Gegner totrüsten” — “arm the enemy to death.”)

The policy of indirect economic attrition has changed significantly with the fall of the Communist Bloc; nevertheless, it remains an effective foreign policy, one which will, no doubt, be followed by either major presidential candidate.

The author of Mark Tidd

When we were kids, my sister Jean and I discovered the Mark Tidd books, written by Clarence Budington Kelland, while we were staying at our grandmother’s house in Staten Island, New York. I remember one of the books was inscribed “To Bobby” — that was my father’s name when he was a boy — from his mother.

Jean and I loved Mark Tidd. He was smart. Even though he looked funny (he was fat, and he stuttered), he always got the better of potential bullies. He and his three buddies got into all sorts of interesting adventures — in one book they took over a failing newspaper, in another book they ran a store, in another book they rented an entire broken-down deserted resort hotel — and they were always saved from looming disasters by Mark Tidd’s brains.

I tracked down some of the Mark Tidd books a few years ago, to see if I would like them now as much as I liked them when I was a kid. The plots and characters were pretty good, as juvenile series books go — the plots and characters obviously look to Tom Sawyer as a model (Tom Sawyer is explicitly mentioned in the opening pages of the first book; see also “Michigan Authors and Their Books,” Michigan Library Bulletin, vol. 16, no. 4, Sept-Oct. 1925 [Lansing, Michigan], pp. 22-24) — but as an adult I picked up on some undercurrents that made me uncomfortable. In the first book, Mark Tidd and his three friends form a secret society, which they model on the Ku Klux Klan; even though there’s no overt racism in the book (everyone in the story is white), even mentioning the Ku Klux Klan positively made it hard for me to like the book. (The later books don’t mention the KKK.) In the rest of the books, Kelland extols the virtues of hard work , honesty, and financial know-how — these are values I can affirm — but he doesn’t seem to recognize that a key ingredient to Mark Tidd’s success in his various enterprises is the backing of his father’s immense capital.

Recently I tried to find a biography of Kelland. Continue reading “The author of Mark Tidd”

A book that changed your life

The monthly memoir writing group at our church follows a standard format: people in the group can read something they have written since the last meeting (usually based on last month’s writing assignment); then I read a passage from a published memoir, and give an assignment based on that example; then the last hour is devoted to writing.

We can’t meet this month. I was going to send out the assignment via email, but it seems to me it’s important to hear the example read out loud. So I made a video of this month’s writing assignment… Video removed — the full text of the video is below:

Welcome to the September online writing group.

Since we can’t meet in person this month, I decided to do a video of this month’s assignment — I was inspired by Mike’s video version of one of the memoirs he wrote. And I’m going to suggest that if you know how to make a video, you might do your own video of yourself reading last month’s assignment, and share it with the rest of us via email.

Now onto this month’s reading….

Frederick Douglass needs little introduction to any American. He was born into slavery, escaped to freedom in the north via the Underground Railroad, and become one of the most compelling speakers against slavery. He wrote three autobiographies, each of which describes his life in slavery and his escape to freedom; the later autobiographies tell something more of his life as a free man.

Douglass taught himself to read when he was twelve years old, and still a slave. He had to learn in secret for his master expressly forbade him to learn how to read, saying it would make him discontented and ruin him as a slave. When he finally did learn how to read, there was one book that changed his life, and set him on the path to becoming one of the most famous and effective abolitionists. Here’s how Douglass describes the book that changed his life:

When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially respecting the FREE STATES, added something to the almost intolerable burden of the thought — I AM A SLAVE FOR LIFE. To my bondage I saw no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, about this time in my life, I had made enough money to buy what was then a very popular school book, viz: the Columbian Orator. I bought this addition to my library, of Mr. Knight, on Thames street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and paid him fifty cents for it. I was first led to buy this book, by hearing some little boys say they were going to learn some little pieces out of it for the Exhibition. This volume was, indeed, a rich treasure, and every opportunity afforded me, for a time, was spent in diligently perusing it.

Among much other interesting matter, that which I had perused and re-perused with unflagging satisfaction, was a short dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave is represented as having been recaptured, in a second attempt to run away; and the master opens the dialogue with an upbraiding speech, charging the slave with ingratitude, and demanding to know what he has to say in his own defense. Thus upbraided, and thus called upon to reply, the slave rejoins, that he knows how little anything that he can say will avail, seeing that he is completely in the hands of his owner; and with noble resolution, calmly says, “I submit to my fate.” Touched by the slave’s answer, the master insists upon his further speaking, and recapitulates the many acts of kindness which he has performed toward the slave, and tells him he is permitted to speak for himself. Thus invited to the debate, the quondam slave made a spirited defense of himself, and thereafter the whole argument, for and against slavery, was brought out. The master was vanquished at every turn in the argument; and seeing himself to be thus vanquished, he generously and meekly emancipates the slave, with his best wishes for his prosperity.

It is scarcely necessary to say, that a dialogue, with such an origin, and such an ending — read when the fact of my being a slave was a constant burden of grief — powerfully affected me; and I could not help feeling that the day might come, when the well-directed answers made by the slave to the master, in this instance, would find their counterpart in myself.

This, however, was not all the fanaticism which I found in this Columbian Orator. I met there one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches, on the subject of Catholic Emancipation, Lord Chatham’s speech on the American war, and speeches by the great William Pitt and by Fox. These were all choice documents to me, and I read them, over and over again, with an interest that was ever increasing, because it was ever gaining in intelligence; for the more I read them, the better I understood them. The reading of these speeches added much to my limited stock of language, and enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance. The mighty power and heart-searching directness of truth, penetrating even the heart of a slaveholder, compelling him to yield up his earthly interests to the claims of eternal justice, were finely illustrated in the dialogue, just referred to; and from the speeches of Sheridan, I got a bold and powerful denunciation of oppression, and a most brilliant vindication of the rights of man. Here was, indeed, a noble acquisition. If I ever wavered under the consideration, that the Almighty, in some way, ordained slavery, and willed my enslavement for his own glory, I wavered no longer. I had now penetrated the secret of all slavery and oppression, and had ascertained their true foundation to be in the pride, the power and the avarice of man. The dialogue and the speeches were all redolent of the principles of liberty, and poured floods of light on the nature and character of slavery.

With a book of this kind in my hand, my own human nature, and the facts of my experience, to help me, I was equal to a contest with the religious advocates of slavery, whether among the whites or among the colored people, for blindness, in this matter, is not confined to the former. I have met many religious colored people, at the south, who are under the delusion that God requires them to submit to slavery, and to wear their chains with meekness and humility. I could entertain no such nonsense as this; and I almost lost my patience when I found any colored man weak enough to believe such stuff. Nevertheless, the increase of knowledge was attended with bitter, as well as sweet results. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest slavery, and my enslavers. “Slaveholders,” thought I, “are only a band of successful robbers, who left their homes and went into Africa for the purpose of stealing and reducing my people to slavery.” I loathed them as the meanest and the most wicked of men.

As I read, behold! the very discontent so graphically predicted by Master Hugh, had already come upon me. I was no longer the light-hearted, gleesome boy, full of mirth and play, as when I landed first at Baltimore. Knowledge had come; light had penetrated the moral dungeon where I dwelt; and, behold! there lay the bloody whip, for my back, and here was the iron chain; and my good, kind master, he was the author of my situation. The revelation haunted me, stung me, and made me gloomy and miserable. As I writhed under the sting and torment of this knowledge, I almost envied my fellow slaves their stupid contentment. This knowledge opened my eyes to the horrible pit, and revealed the teeth of the frightful dragon that was ready to pounce upon me, but it opened no way for my escape. I have often wished myself a beast, or a bird — anything, rather than a slave. I was wretched and gloomy, beyond my ability to describe. I was too thoughtful to be happy. It was this everlasting thinking which distressed and tormented me; and yet there was no getting rid of the subject of my thoughts. All nature was redolent of it. Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge, my spirit was roused to eternal wakefulness. Liberty! the inestimable birthright of every man, had, for me, converted every object into an asserter of this great right. It was heard in every sound, and beheld in every object. It was ever present, to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. The more beautiful and charming were the smiles of nature, the more horrible and desolate was my condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, and I heard nothing without hearing it. I do not exaggerate, when I say, that it looked from every star, smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

From My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass, Library of America edition of his three autobiographies, pages 225-227.

Of course, this is a particularly dramatic example of how one book can change someone’s life. Your life may be less dramatic than Douglass’s (and if so, you are probably glad of that), but you still probably have had a book change your life in some deep way. Or perhaps it was a poem that stuck in your memory and changed how you saw the world; or a short story, or a speech, or a sermon. Books, poems, stories are all part of a grand conversation that can include our entire culture, and that we can take part in.

Your assignment, then, is to write about words that changed your life. How old were you? How did you find this book? Where were you when you read it? And what was the immediate effect of this book on you?

You know the rest: write two pages, or about 500 up to a thousand words, and bring it to the next class.