The Oregon Review

The Mind of C.E.S. Wood

2011-12-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

As Americans once again embark on our election rituals, here are a few thoughts of one of Oregon's most effective writers, Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), a pioneer lawyer, poet, writer and political activist.

"Of all the stupid solemnities of courts I think the stupidest is, 'Liberty cannot be permitted to pass into License.' If any power can say what is Liberty and what is License, then there is no Liberty. Liberty means the right to peaceably say all things and peaceably do all things; being answerable for the consequences. All our constitutions say this, but what is the value of a constitution in a graveyard?"

"The Better American Federation, having no experience with ideas, suppresses everyone found carrying an idea concealed about him without a permit."

"Naturally, our morals are cared for by God's special bodyguard. Where you find a raid on freedom because of immorals, indecency and obscenity, there you will find the obscenity is all in the immoral minds of some moral Christians. There are, I believe, more than four hundred stripes and shades of Protestants. How they dipped their various quarrels out of the small pool of the Gospels I do not understand. That is their business. It shows great ingenuity and and an earnest Christian endeavor to send souls to hell. The only real authority we have says that God made man in his own image, and let it go at that. He himself does not ever to have been ashamed of His image or His handiwork."

Selections from Too Much Government, 1931.

Pessoa's "Antinous"

2011-10-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

FernandoPessoa (1888-1935) wrote “Antinous” in 1918, but the story of Emperor Hadrianand his young male friend Antinous dates from 130 AD, when it both began andended. In that year Emperor Hadrian, 54,lost his beloved companion at the age of 18, presumably to drowning in theNile. Royston Lambert’s extraordinary biographical history of therelationship of Hadrian and Antinous, Belovedand God (1984), their times and how Antinous has been represented to usover the centuries is the best source for more information. Also see MargueriteYourcenar’s remarkable creation, Memoirsof Hadrian.

Antinous

Fernando Pessoa

The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’ssoul.

The boy lay dead

On the low couch, on whose denuded whole,

To Hadrian’s eyes, whose sorrow was adread,

The shadowy light of Death’s eclipsewas shed.

The boy lay dead, and the day seemed anight

Outside. The rain fell like a sickaffright

Of Nature at her work in killing him.

Memory of what he was gave no delight,

Delight at what he was was dead anddim.

O hands that once had clasped Hadrian’swarm hands,

Whose cold now found them cold!

O hair bound erstwhile with thepressing bands!

O eyes half-diffidently bold!

O bare female male-body such

As a god’s likeness to humanity!

O lips whose opening redness erst couldtouch

Lust’s seats with a live art’s variety!

O fingers skilled in things not to betold!

O tongue which, counter-tongued, madethe blood bold!

O complete regency of lust throned on

Raged consciousness’s spilledsuspension!

These things are things that now mustbe no more.

The rain is silent, and the Emperor

Sinks by the couch. His grief is like arage,

For the gods take away the life they give

And spoil the beauty they made live.

He weeps and knows that every futureage

Is looking on him out of the to-be;

His love is on a universal stage;

A thousand unborn eyes weep with hismisery.

Antinous is dead, is dead for ever,

Is dead for ever and all loves lament.

Venus herself, that was Adonis’ lover,

Seeing him, that newly lived, now deadagain,

Lends her old grief’s renewal to be blent

With Hadrian’s pain.

Now is Apollo sad because the stealer

Of his white body is for ever cold.

No careful kisses on that nippled point

Covering his heart-beats’ silent placerestore

His life again to ope his eyes and feelher

Presence along his veins Love’sfortress hold.

No warmth of his another’s warmthdemands.

Now will his hands behind his head nomore

Linked, in that posture giving all buthands,

On the projected body hands implore.

The rain falls, and he lies like onewho hath

Forgotten all the gestures of his love

And lies awake waiting their hotreturn.

But all his arts and toys are now withDeath.

This human ice no way of heat can move;

These ashes of a fire no flame canburn.

O Hadrian, what will now thy cold lifebe?

What boots it to be lord of men and might?

His absence o’er thy visible empery

Comes like a night,

Nor is there morn in hopes of newdelight.

Now are thy nights widowed of love andkisses;

Now are thy days robbed of the night’sawaiting;

Now have thy lips no purpose for thyblisses,

Left but to speak the name that Deathis mating

With solitude and sorrow and affright.

Thy vague hands grope, as if they haddropped joy.

To hear that the rain ceases lift thyhead,

And thy raised glance take to thelovely boy.

Naked he lies upon that memoried bed;

By thine own hand he lies uncoverèd.

There was he wont thy dangling sense tocloy,

And uncloy with more cloying, and annoy

With newer uncloying till thy sensesbled.

His hand and mouth knew games toreinstall

Desire that thy worn spine was hurt tofollow.

Sometimes it seemed to thee that allwas hollow

In sense in each new straining ofsucked lust.

Then still new turns of toying would hecall

To thy nerves’ flesh, and thou wouldsttremble and fall

Back on thy cushions with thy mind’ssense hushed.

»Beautiful was my love, yet melancholy.

He had that art, that makes lovecaptive wholly,

Of being slowly sad among lust’s rages.

Now the Nile gave him up, the eternalNile.

Under his wet locks Death’s bluepaleness wages

Now war upon our wishing with sadsmile.«

Even as he thinks, the lust that is nomore

Than a memory of lust revives and takes

His senses by the hand, his felt fleshwakes,

And all becomes again what ‘twasbefore.

The dead body on the bed starts up andlives

And comes to lie with him, close,closer, and

A creeping love-wise and invisible hand

At every body-entrance to his lust

Whispers caresses which flit off yetjust

Remain enough to bleed his last nerve’sstrand,

O sweet and cruel Parthian fugitives!

So he half rises, looking on his lover,

That now can love nothing but what noneknow.

Vaguely, half-seeing what he dothbehold,

He runs his cold lips all the bodyover.

And so ice-senseless are his lips that,lo!,

He scarce tastes death from the deadbody’s cold,

But it seems both are dead or livingboth

And love is still the presence and themover.

Then his lips cease on the other lips’cold sloth.

Ah, there the wanting breath remindshis lips

That from beyond the gods hath moved amist

Between him and this boy. Hisfinger-tips,

Still idly searching o’er the body,list

For some flesh-response to their wakingmood.

But their love-question is notunderstood:

The god is dead whose cult was to bekissed!

He lifts his hand up to where heavenshould be

And cries on the mute gods to know bispain.

Let your calm faces turn aside to hisplea,

O granting powers! He will yield up hisreign.

In the still deserts he will parchèdlive,

In the far barbarous roads beggar orslave,

But to his arms again the warm boygive!

Forego that space ye meant to be hisgrave!

Take all the female loveliness of earth

And in one mound of death its remnantspill!

But, by sweet Ganymede, that Jove foundworth

And above Hebe did elect to fill

His cup at his high feasting, andinstil

The friendlier love that fills theother’s dearth,

The clod of female embraces resolve

To dust, o father of the gods, butspare

This boy and his white body and goldenhair!

Maybe thy better Ganymede thou feel’st

That he should be, and out of jealouscare

From Hadrian’s arms to thine his beautysteal’st.

He was a kitten playing with lust,playing

With his own and with Hadrian’s,sometimes one

And sometimes two, now linking, nowundone;

Now leaving lust, now lust’s high lustsdelaying;

Now eying lust not wide, but fromaskance

Jumping round on lust’shalf-unexpectance;

Now softly gripping, then with furyholding,

Now playfully playing, now seriously,now lying

By th’ side of lust looking at it, nowspying

Which way to take lust in his lust’swithholding.

Thus did the hours slide from theirtangled hands

And from their mixèd limbs the momentsslip.

Now were his arms dead leaves, now ironbands;

Now were his lips cups, now the thingsthat sip;

Now were his eyes too closed and nowtoo looking;

Now were his uncontinuings frenzyworking;

Now were his arts a feather and now awhip.

That love they lived as a religion

Offered to gods that come themselves tomen.

Sometimes he was adorned or made to don

Half-vestures, then in statued nudity

Did imitate some god that seems to be

By marble’s accurate virtue men’sagain.

Now was he Venus, white out of theseas;

And now was he Apollo, young andgolden;

Now as Jove sate he in mock judgementover

The presence at his feet of his slavedlover;

Now was he an acted rite, by onebeholden,

In ever-repositioned mysteries.

Now he is something anyone can be.

O stark negation of the thing it is!

O golden-haired moon-cold loveliness!

Too cold! too cold! and love as cold ashe!

Love through the memories of his lovedoth roam

As through a labyrinth, in sad madnessglad,

And now calls on his name and bids himcome,

And now is smiling at his imaged coming

That is i’th’ heart like faces in thegloaming –

Mere shining shadows of the forms theyhad.

The rain again like a vague pain arose

And put the sense of wetness in theair.

Suddenly did the Emperor suppose

He saw this room and all in it fromfar.

He saw the couch, the boy, and his ownframe

Cast down against the couch, and hebecame

A clearer presence to himself, and said

These words unuttered, save to hissoul’s dread:

»I shall build thee a statue that willbe

To the continued future evidence

Of my love and thy beauty and the sense

That beauty giveth of divinity.

Though death with subtle uncoveringhands remove

The apparel of life and empire from ourlove,

Yet its nude statue, that thou dostinspirit,

All future times, whether they will’tor not,

Shall, like a gift a forcing god hathbrought,

Inevitably inherit.

»Ay, this thy statue shall I build, andset

Upon the pinnacle of being thine, thatTime

By its subtle dim crime

Will fear to eat it from life, or tofret

With war’s or envy’s rage from bulk andstone.

Fate cannot be that! Gods themselves,that make

Things change, Fate’s own hand, thatdoth overtake

The gods themselves with darkness, willdraw back

From marring thus thy statue and myboon,

Leaving the wide world hollow with thylack.

»This picture of our love will bridgethe ages.

It will loom white out of the past andbe

Eternal, like a Roman victory,

In every heart the future will giverages

Of not being our love’s contemporary.

»Yet oh that this were needed not, andthou

Wert the red flower perfuming my life,

The garland on the brows of my delight,

The living flame on altars of my soul!

Would all this were a thing thoumightest now

Smile at from under thy death-mockinglids

And wonder that I should so put astrife

Twixt me and gods for thy lost presencebright;

Were there nought in this but my emptydole

And thy awakening smile half to condole

With what my dreaming pain to hope forbids.«

Thus went he, like a lover who iswaiting,

From place to place in this dimdoubting mind.

Now was his hope a great intentionfating

Its wish to being, now felt he he wasblind

In some point of his seen wishundefined.

When love meets death we know not whatto feel.

When death foils love we know not whatto know.

Now did his doubt hope, now did hishope doubt;

Now what his wish dreamed the dream’ssense did flout

And to a sullen emptiness congeal.

Then again the gods fanned love’sdarkening glow.

»Thy death has given me a higher lust –

A flash-lust raging for eternity.

On mine imperial fate I set my trust

That the high gods, that made meemperor be,

Will not annul from a more real life

My wish that thou should’st live fore’er and stand

A fleshly presence on their betterland,

More lovely yet not lovelier, for there

No things impossible our wishes mar

Nor pain our hearts with change andtime and strife.

»Love, love, my love! thou art alreadya god.

This thought of mine, which I a wishbelieve,

Is no wish, but a sight, to me allowed

By the great gods, that love love andcan give

To mortal hearts, under the shape ofwishes –

Of wishes having undiscovered reaches–,

A vision of the real things beyond

Our life-imprisoned life, oursense-bound sense.

Ay, what I wish thee to be thou art now

Already. Already on Olympic ground

Thou walkest and art perfect, yet artthou,

For thou needst no excess of thee todon

Perfect to be, being perfection.

»My heart is singing like a morningbird.

A great hope from the gods comes downto me

And bids my heart to subtler sense bestirred

And think not that strange evil of thee

That to think thee mortal would be.

»My love, my love, my god-love! Let mekiss

On thy cold lips thy hot lips nowimmortal,

Greeting thee at Death’s portal’shappiness,

For to the gods Death’s portal isLife’s portal.

»Were no Olympus yet for thee, my love

Would make thee one, where thou solegod mightst prove,

And I thy sole adorer, glad to be

Thy sole adorer through infinity.

That were a universe divine enough

For love and me and what to me thouart.

To have thee is a thing made of gods’stuff

And to look on thee eternity’s best part.

»But this is true and mine own art: thegod

Thou art now is a body made by me,

For, if thou art now flesh reality

Beyond where men age and night comethstill,

‘Tis to my love’s great making powerthou owest

That life thou on thy memory bestowest

And mak’st it carnal. Had my love notheld

An empire of my mighty legioned will,

Thou to gods’ consort hadst not beencompelled.

»My love that found thee, when it foundthee did

But find its own true body and exactlook.

Therefore when now thy memory I bid

Become a god where gods are, I but move

To death’s high column’s top the shapeit took

And set it there for vision of alllove.

»O love, my love, put up with my strongwill

Of loving to Olympus, be thou there

The latest god whose honey-colouredhair

Takes divine eyes! As thou wert onearth, still

In heaven bodyfully be and roam,

A prisoner of that happiness of home,

With elder gods, while I on earth domake

A statue for thy deathlessness’ seensake.

»Yet thy true deadless statue I shallbuild

Will be no stone thing, but that sameregret

By which our love’s eternity is willed.

One side of that is thou, as gods seethee

Now, and the other, here, thy memory.

My sorrow will make that men’s god, andset

Thy naked memory on the parapet

That looks upon the seas of futuretimes.

Some will say all our love was but ourcrimes;

Others against our names the kniveswill whet

Of their glad hate of beauty’s beauty,and make

Our names a base of heap whereon torake

The names of all our brothers withquick scorn.

Yet will our presence, like eternalMorn,

Ever return at Beauty’s hour, and shine

Out of the East of Love, in light toenshrine

New gods to come, the lacking world toadorn.

»All that thou art now is thyself andI.

Our dual presence has its unity

In that perfection of body which mylove,

By loving it, became, and did from life

Raise into godness, calm above thestrife

Of times, and changing passions farabove.

»But since men see more with the eyesthan soul,

Still I in stone shall utter this greatdole;

Still, eager that men hunger by thypresence,

I shall to marble carry this regret

That in my heart like a great star isset.

Thus, even in stone, our love shallstand so great

In thy statue of us, like a god’s fate,

Our love’s incarnate and discarnateessence,

That, like a trumpet reaching over seas

And going from continent to continent,

Our love shall speak its joy and woe,death-blent,

Over infinities and eternities.

»And here, memory or statue, we shallstand,

Still the same one, as we were hand inhand

Nor felt each other’s hand for feelingfeeling.

Men still will see me when thy sensethey take.

The entire gods might pass in the vastwheeling

Of the globed ages. If but for thysake,

That, being theirs, hadst gone withtheir gone band,

They would return, as they had slept towake.

»Then the end of days when Jove wereborn again

And Ganymede again pour at his feast

Would see our dual soul from deathreleased

And recreated unto joy, fear, pain –

All that love doth contain;

Life – all the beauty that doth make alust

Of love’s own true love, at the spellamazed;

And, if our very memory wore to dust,

By some gods’ race of the end of agesmust

Our dual unity again be raised.«

It rained still. But slow-treadingnight came in,

Closing the weary eyelids of eachsense.

The very consciousness of self and soul

Grew, like a landscape through dimraining, dim.

The Emperor lay still, so still thatnow

He half forgot where now he lay, orwhence

The sorrow that was still salt on hislips.

All had been something very far, ascroll

Rolled up. The things he felt were likethe rim

That haloes round the moon when thenight weeps.

His head was bowed into his arms, andthey

On the low couch, foreign to his sense,lay.

His closed eyes seemed open to him, andseeing

The naked floor, dark, cold, sad andunmeaning.

His hurting breath was all his sensecould know.

Out of the falling darkness the windrose

And fell; a voice swooned in the courtsbelow;

And the Emperor slept.

And the Emperor slept. The gods camenow

And bore something away, no sense knowshow,

On unseen arms of power and repose.

Poetry of Ernest G. Moll

2011-02-21T18:27:00.000-08:00

I recently had occasion to read three collections of poetry by Ernest G. Moll (1900-1997), an Australian poet who taught for many years at the University of Oregon after obtaining degrees from Harvard. For a good introduction to his work, I suggest the following books:

Cut from Mulga (1940) won the Australian book of the year and is representative of his earlier work.

The Road to Cactus-Land (1971) provides a good look at his more rural rustic poetry.

The Well and the Star (1983), which includes a number of delicate, tender poems of recollection and appreciation of his late wife.

For a summary of his career see this site. Note that some other web sites give a date of 1993 for his death. This is incorrect.

Face launchings

2010-03-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

Millihelen: the unit of female beauty required to launch one ship.

(heard on the BBC program My Music rebroadcast on March 13, 2010.)

The Changing Face of Natural History

2010-01-13T16:26:00.000-08:00

Twenty years ago, David Orr from Oberlin College wrote a superb essay entitled “The Virtue of Conservation Education” in the journal Conservation Biology (Vol. 4 No. 3, Sep. 1990). In that essay he attempted to make clear that although conservation of natural resources is a rational need with a sound economic basis, it is more importantly a moral imperative. He then used this foundation as the basis for an argument for more resources to be devoted to conservation education.

Ten years later, David Wilcove and Thomas Eisner wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sep. 15, 2000, p. B24) of the “impending extinction of natural history.” In this exceptionally clear call to higher education’s leadership, they noted that the kind of detailed observation-based awareness of the natural world that is customarily classified under the heading “natural history” was being devalued precisely at a time when it was most needed in academe and in K-12 education. In that same year The Economist (April 29, 2000, p. 77) recognized the need for a continued recognition of the useful work of amateurs (what a Cornell University scientist called “citizen scientists”) in many sciences, particularly field studies.

In 2002 came the Great Manifesto, Steven Herman’s extraordinary commentary “Wildlife Biology and Natural History: Time for a Reunion” in Journal of Wildlife Management (Vol. 66 No. 4 p. 933-946). Herman, then a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, walked the reader through a short history of biological management and mismanagement, explaining why a detachment from the land almost always damages the ability of scientists to produce useful work in fields related to ecology.

Where are we today and where are we likely to go, on the road of natural history and the relationship between humans, especially young people, and the land? The answer is a strange mixture of hope and doubt for the years ahead.

Isaac Asimov, in his classic Second Foundation, allows a minor character to make a fool of himself pontificating to a teenager that he doesn’t need to go look at actual ruins himself to figure out which group of scientists is right or wrong. He just needs to read everything they wrote and weigh the “evidence.” That problematic attitude is, unfortunately, with us today, at least occasionally. Our increasingly urban young people seem to think that food comes from stores.

The habit of detachment from personal observation even affects professionals. When I served as co-editor of Birds of Oregon (Oregon State University Press, 2003), at least two authors employed as academic professionals stated in drafts that the species they were writing about was sedentary, that is, the birds present in an area as breeders are essentially the same individuals that are present year-round: they don’t migrate. Had either author actually spent time in the field outside the breeding season they would have realized their error, because a distinct migratory movement occurs and they would have seen it themselves. As it happens, most of the literature on these species is about their breeding status, with winter data limited but showing that the species is present. The authors had read this material and concluded that because the species was present in the same places in summer and winter, it was sedentary. They were wrong.

How are we raising our students today? Do they ever see the natural world as it really is? Yes and no. Professors such as Stewart Janes at Southern Oregon University, Chris Butler at Central Oklahoma and Drew Lanham at Clemson regularly take classes into the field. Even “upper crust” colleges have had such faculty: Ann Haven Morgan of Mt. Holyoke was the nation’s expert on freshwater insects and other pond and stream life—one of the best photos of her shows her up to her knees in a pond, showing an amazed student what she had in her net. But do such colleges have field programs now?

Of course much depends on parents and their attitudes toward the outdoors and toward exploration by their children.

Colleges mold the clay they are given, and an 18-year-old who has never paid any attention to the outdoors except when it inconveniences her at the golf course is less likely to be willing to explore it at college. It is no accident that a disproportionate number of the nation’s wildlife managers and field biologists grew up in the interior West, upper Midwest and rural South, where the natural world is part of everyday life, and hunting and fishing are common pastimes.

The emergence of hyperprotective parents in the past generation or two has also had an effect, and is also largely an urban issue. It has some effect on the ability of teens to spend time in natural places. The notion that teenagers have to be tethered by cell phones and their location known at all times is very recent.

We have come a long way, and not necessarily in the right direction, from the days when Robert Ridgway, who became one of North America’s finest ornithologists, could join Clarence King’s 1867 western expedition at age sixteen, returning nearly two years later. On a smaller scale, Oregon naturalist David Marshall got permission from his parents to cross the Oregon Cascade Range in 1941 with fellow teenagers—by bicycle. A parent who allowed a fifteen-year old to take such an exploring trip today would probably get a visit from the local social service agency and be charged with child abuse.

Some organizations focused on the outdoors recognize that schools and colleges generally do a poor job of supporting meaningful education in how the natural world works. The American Birding Association has for many years operated special programs and camps designed for young people interested in birds and other wildlife. They even have scholarship programs for those students whose families can’t afford to send them. Organizations such as the Boy Scouts still conduct outdoor activities, but scouting does not appeal to many young people, in part because of its expressly religious character and the perception that liberal kids are not welcome.

Cornell University has had the foresight to establish the eBird database, through which field data can be entered, almost in real time, into a huge database from which range maps and movements can be generated as needed. The project, overseen in part by students, is working toward data-entry from field-friendly devices such as iPhones, which will, among other things, have the effect of making field biology “modern” in the eyes of many younger observers. These students are the ones who tell my office that they maintain an e-mail account (which didn’t exist when I was a student) only because they sometimes need to communicate with “old people.”

Let’s recognize that actual experience with the forests, rivers, grasslands and mountains of our continent is a necessary part of the education of a well-rounded student. Passion for a reality is always greater than interest in an abstraction. These generations cannot be expected to care about and preserve something that exists for them only in pictures. It isn’t necessary to cross the continent like Ridgway to find good places to study natural history. Schools at all levels can take steps to make sure that our future professionals know more than what they read in books.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan

2009-12-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan, for your decision to cover the horrors of Iran in a truthful way, as they must be covered. You may not win any "industry" awards for this coverage, but given how the news industry has performed, who would want them? Please continue this crucial and unique work. You win my award.

Colin Brumby of Australia

2009-11-25T19:01:00.000-08:00

The centerpiece of my recent trip to Australia was the opportunity to meet Colin Brumby, one of the world's greatest living composers. Brumby's music is varied and always enjoyable. I particularly recommend his Symphony No. 1, flute works and the Clarinet Sonatina. He has an extensive catalog of choral works with which I am less familiar, but I can recommend Jesu, Son Most Sweet and Dear, available in the U.S. on a recording called Gaudete by Soli Deo Gloria Cantorum. Many of his other works can be ordered from the Australian Music Center in Sydney.

World News

2009-07-06T19:48:00.001-07:00

The trials of Sam-Unwise

2009-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

I met Portland mayor Sam Adams when he was 18. At least he looked 18. I am fairly sure that it was the same Sam Adams, but the room was kind of dim. He was kind of cute, maybe I should have asked him out. I was about 30 when we met. Let’s see, 30 minus 18 is a 12-year age difference. Is that, well, proper?

Let’s look around in society for examples from respected leaders. Senator and envoy George Mitchell was 60 and wife Heather was 35 when they met, so that’s a 25-year gap, pretty impressive. William O. Douglas was sixty-six when he met twenty-two year old Cathy at a Portland bar. She became Mrs. Justice Douglas, a 44-year difference. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich started out a little differently by marrying his barely-former high school teacher when he was 19 and she was 26—a bold step but only a seven-year difference. He’s on a different wife now and the gap is more traditional, if you will: she’s 23 years younger.

So we can dispense with Sam’s preference for younger partners. It is traditional, almost Republican, you could say, if you throw in Henry Kissinger’s younger wife and any number of others that we could unearth. Reviving that issue is simply political necrophilia.

So that leaves Sam-Unwise with the problem of the Age of Consent, a concept under which legislators who remember lust in the abstract but are too old to recollect what it feels like establish cutoff dates for the behavior of those who still have it. As far as I can tell from online sources, most U.S. states set the age at 16, some at 17 and a few, including Oregon, at 18. In other words, states pick an arbitrary age.

Until the Supreme Court acted, the age standard was different in some states for gay couples, as if there were something fundamentally different about the nature of the bond. The age remains different in some states for people who want to marry, as though a person who can’t consent by virtue of immaturity suddenly matures if he wants to marry at 16.

This is the astonishingly murky thicket of baseless laws into which our new Attorney General has been lured in a moment of inattention and from which, if he is as smart as he is supposed to be, he will quickly emerge without doing anything stupid. Sam’s kiss-and-fib is getting to be stale political theater, a fine example of something upon which scarce public funds should not be spent. Start with schools, unemployment, health care, water quality, public safety and potholes.

Oh, the room where I met Sam was the newsroom of the Oregon Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon, where I was working in the mid-1980s. Sam came in to have some political argument with the staff (that’s why I’m pretty sure it is the same guy) and told me that he didn’t like my position on something (got to be the same guy).

I’m nostalgic for what might have been, Sam. It’s true, I’m 52 and fat, and I was briefly a Republican, though I never inhaled. These days I’m a respectable professional, not without charm, and single. Say hello sometime.

Michael Oakeshott and Educational Change

2009-01-31T09:28:00.000-08:00

As we enter 2009, higher education is twenty years downstream from the publication of Michael Oakeshott’s perceptive and crisp collection of essays The Voice of Liberal Education (1989). This year, as Andrew Sullivan’s 1989 dissertation on Oakeshott is finally published (Intimations Pursued, Imprint-Academic 2008), Oakeshott has slowly emerged from the bucolic cottage of British philosophy to become recognized as one of the 20th Century’s more significant thinkers.

When Sullivan studied Oakeshott’s work in the late 1980s, only two dissertations had ever been written about him. Today there is an Oakeshott Studies series of books (of which Sullivan’s is the tenth) and his name, if not exactly shouted in the corridors of social philosophy, is at least whispered in the shrubbery and mumbled by the water cooler. A superb look at Oakeshott’s educational thought, Kevin Williams’s Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott, appeared in 2007 as Volume 8 in the series. Anyone interested in either Oakeshott or the philosophy of education should consider this excellent treatment as required reading.

Although most of his writing was about social and political philosophy, with an interesting lintel of religion over some passages, he did write significant works on education. Put briefly, his view was that liberal education is “… ‘liberal’ because it is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants.” This is a distinctive view that is deserving of more attention. The other key feature of his thinking about education has to do with the way he thought about work. He thought that work ought to be fun, or to put it another way, that work, properly conceived, is fun, a form of pleasure common to the philosopher, baker and tradesman alike.

But isn’t Oakeshott that disreputable ur-beast from pre-modern times, a Conservative? Yes and no. Anyone who conceives of Oakeshott as a conservative in the sense that an American would use the term today might well ponder his comments on the connection of the university to the more mercantile aspects of society:

“[Such things as advanced training]…belong to a world of power and utility, of exploitation, of social and individual egoism, and of activity, whose meaning lies outside itself in some trivial result or achievement—and this is not the world to which a university belongs; it is not the world to which education in the true sense belongs. It is a very powerful world; it is wealthy, interfering and well-meaning. But it is not remarkably self-critical; it is apt to mistake itself for the whole world, and with amiable carelessness it assumes that whatever does not contribute to its own purposes is somehow errant. A university needs to beware of the patronage of this world, or it will find that it has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage…”

Well. If that’s conservative, I’ll have a platter, thank you.

What does this somewhat obscure thinker have to tell us about the state of higher education today? First, it is instructive to see that Oakeshott, whose views of education are certainly traditional if not conservative-American, does not attempt to throw away technical and “workforce” education as some education theorists have done. On the contrary, Oakeshott acknowledges quite clearly the value of technical training and its essential role in society—he just doesn’t call it education, a word for which he reserves a specific meaning. We, on the other hand, use the word “education” to mean almost anything, and we always crown it with a certain sunrise halo: if it is education, it is not only good but it is beyond criticism.

If his views have a certain Bloomian familiarity, they are also set forth with an admirable lack of sulfur: there is no fuming here, just a statement of condition. One might be listening to a prominent dentist taking note of the difference between molars and canines: there is a difference and it is important, but there is no core moral failing by one and ascendance of the other.

If we assume, as I do, that what Michael Oakeshott classified as education continues to have value, how should it be provided to those who want it and who can benefit from it?

There is a very basic question here, and it is the question of want versus need. Over the past hundred years, our society has moved away from building social institutions and norms around what people need (often determined by an elite) and has re-centered them on what people want. This is perhaps a natural consequence of free markets and their underlying philosophy and certainly reflects one core value of the American character: people like to make their own decisions and don’t like to be told what to do, even if it is supposedly good for them.

The question of education’s value to the individual versus that value to society as a whole is one we hear and see all the time, and I need not ride that horse for long. However, it must be saddled briefly in order to look at what Oakeshott viewed as a core purpose of education as he conceived it. That is, whether there is a loosely related set of ways of thought that people should know in order to be considered educated.

The Oakeshottian view is to some extent the opposite of the E.D. Hirsch approach: there are few facts to be learned to be considered an educated person in the universe of Oakeshott’s education. What Oakeshott really wanted, and what he considered education, was the development of critical thinking. Not just its development, but a recognition that critical thinking was the distinction, or at least the most important one, between an educated and uneducated person, and that calm, measured thought was a goal and outcome of education, especially what we would call “higher education,” a term he disliked.

It may seem strange, then, that Oakeshott was no great friend to science, classifying it as in effect a natural extension of technical fields that existed on the edge of the world of real education. He conceded that science, at least in some of its aspects, might earn a cranny or two along the edge of the plateau of real education, but in his heart science always had the word “applied” cemented to its backside, and mere application was simply mechanics in action. At whatever level, science was simply moving objects from one place to another, in theory if not in practice. Although it might require the use of critical thinking grounded in traditional learning, it had no place in the development of that thinking, and therefore was but an ancillary to education.

If liberal education is decoupled from “satisfying contingent wants,” let us look further at the question of needs versus wants. If we classify critical thinking as a good thing or even a core principle of higher education today (and there is significant evidence that we do not), how do we get the medicine into the patient? Careful thinking requires time as well as attitude, an attention span that is not programmed into the iPods I have known. Traditional-age students don’t have much interest in critical thinking. They want jobs—sort of—which means taking enough classes vaguely related to their interests in order to get a degree that leads to employment vaguely related to what they think they like.

How, today, should a young person become knowledgeable about the world and what it contains? How should young adults develop judgment? In Oakeshott’s words,

“The world in which many children now grow up is crowded, not necessarily with occupants and not at all with memorable experiences, but with happenings; it is a ceaseless flow of seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection nor choice but instant participation.”

This, included in the 1989 collection, was written in 1975, the year I graduated from high school, before personal computers, laptops, cell phones, i-anythings, bluetooth or blueray, before much more than three or four TV stations were available in most places. That it is exponentially applicable today makes clear the prescient observance of Oakeshott, the basic trend in society and one of the most important issues facing education now as then: can people who do not want to learn—to whom learning and measured thinking seem to come from a foreign country—be made to learn anyway, and with what result? Does it truly serve the interests of students or society to revise courses to resemble not just sound-bites, but thought-nibbles? Where is critical thinking as a natural, cultivated habit in our current students?

If students today want to go to graduate school in the professions, they have an icy focus on grades and competitive placement. If they want to pursue an academic career, critical thinking may be part of the larger picture, but it is not a major factor in success. What matters most is fitting into the rather mechanical process through which a graduate faculty cranks an elderly pasta-press to make more people like themselves. How many faculty genuinely welcome active disagreement from their graduate students? Some do, but many don’t. How many graduate students are willing to swim upstream to their goal when swimming downstream will work? Some, not most.

I suspect that Michael Oakeshott would be as concerned about today’s faculty as about today’s students. The students he would recognize immediately as a product of their times, and he would know that the times are unlikely to produce many 18-year-olds who are truly interested in learning for its own sake. How could there be such students in bulk? There never have been. They are circumscribed by certain ecological limits, if you will; if not exactly societal carrying capacity, at least a recognizable fact-pattern, one which I will call Oakeshott’s Law, using his own words: “the possibility of being wise entails the possibility of being stupid.” In short, we will always have knuckledraggers, and society needs to decide what to do with them. Engaged in critical thinking they ain’t.

Our society, particularly in the U.S., has never come to terms with the fact that it contains, indeed constantly produces, people who are essentially uneducable, who cannot make a useful, compensable contribution to their communities and must grudgingly be maintained through alternate means, as our cultural norms quite properly require that they not be simply dumped in the river. They are no more capable of learning in the Oakeshottian sense or any other sense used in higher education than is my neighbor’s cat. Yet because Americans believe that everyone can “succeed” if given a chance, we give acre-feet of chances, yet many boats fail to float.

If millions of learners genuinely interested in learning for its own sake existed, what would we do with them? What skills would they offer in exchange for food? It may be that the Oakeshottian world of learners was made up entirely of people who had a private income and need not work. I doubt it, in part owing to his particular view of the meaning of work. Yet I think he could adjust to modern students—after all, he knew them in his heart thirty years ago. It is the faculty that would make him wonder. So many, now, teaching to the job market or the test. They are plumbers, Joes and Janes, teaching a skilled trade. They don’t need or want their students to exercise critical thinking, they want to produce students who can perform tasks and get jobs. This is of value to society, or at least to employers, but is it education?

Not in the Oakeshott world. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out, “Education, itself, if reduced to the purpose of ‘training’ or ‘socializing’ citizens for a particular end or ‘common good’ is anathema both to human autonomy and to the correct understanding of education itself….”

Education in the Oakeshottian mold is today largely a private matter. If it happens at all, it happens in private homes and small circles of people with similar interests. I see it occasionally in the stupefyingly precise discussions that some teenage birders have with each other over such subjects as sandpiper molt cycles. It can be seen here and there in public universities, somewhat more often in private colleges, in spots at community colleges and essentially never in for-profit colleges.

For the most part, though, it is accidental, because it has been decoupled from the curriculum in most colleges and operates only as a function of personality: only certain faculty are interested and make any effort to advance the ideas that Oakeshott would recognize as educational. Indeed, many faculty, hired to haul on the fourth starboard oar of the pasta-press, have neither the time or inclination to engage in “education,” for they are paid to train. Then again, only a few students are capable of linking with the best faculty to produce the superreaction that we would all recognize as the Socratic ideal transmuted into 21st-Century minds.

Sadly, the students and faculty who really want to have education, disconnected from contingent want, are spread around the higher education universe and do not often meet. The ideal norm of an Oakeshottian college, in which most of the inhabitants are capable of this kind of interaction and performance, requires that people who want it gather in community, and this is a rare animal in the wildlife park of colleges today.

Does that mean that it is never sighted in the wild? Well, I think it is alive, mainly at small, unusual colleges. It is detectable, you know, an immanent smell as of a very good dinner being cooked no great way off. It is at Deep Springs in California, I’m pretty sure. Gutenberg in Oregon, Berea in Kentucky, St. Johns. There are variants in many smaller liberal-arts colleges, but it is these same places that will have trouble surviving the next twenty years because they don’t produce worker-bees on purpose. What does the future offer for St. Johns, Evergreen State and the oasis-squares of smaller colleges, big-names and no-names, dotted across the upper Midwest?

I am increasingly persuaded that only through a policy of complete independence from governments can higher education, a term Oakeshott disliked, flourish in a way that he would recognize. We atheistic liberals scoff at the wingnut bluster of Hillsdale College bunker-hunkered in its Michigan grouse-park, barking in the general direction of Washington, D.C. and scorning government money. Yet it is the model toward which we must work, without the religio-capitalist undertow.

The notion that students can ever again work their way through college at public colleges is entirely unmoored from the facts. At Oregon public universities, with which I am familiar, a student who could earn a year’s tuition by working 20 hours a week in 1965 would have to work 46 hours a week all year today to cover tuition. How, exactly, can students who spend all their time working or worrying about how and where to borrow more money be expected to focus on learning?

Yet there will be no more state subsidies sufficient to reduce the cost of public colleges. That era has been fading for fifteen years; in another fifteen it will be of interest only to academic historians. It is not that our elected officials lack good will: here in Oregon good will, and good decisions by elected officials, are easy to come by, even exemplary in recent years. Resources, however, are not easy to come by, and never will be again. The parents of today’s students are shocked at the cost of college, but the children of today’s students will live with it from birth and their parents, in school today, will have no illusions whatsoever.

We need more colleges of quality that are committed to offer their programs for very low fees, with an endowment that is designed to allow this forever and trustees who are committed to build and maintain such an endowment to that end. We need to recognize that government financial aid in meaningful amounts is over, as an effective large-scale policy. Governments are not going to have the money. That means that students will have to borrow increasingly onerous amounts or not go to college. Student loans in the amounts now required are not financial aid, they are financial oppression.

We do not need more endowed business and professional schools. We have scores of them and most are simply monuments to ego. We surely do not need more endowed athletic programs, which are simply tycoon-toys licensing school names from their parent universities. What we need are endowed undergraduate colleges and programs.

If Oakeshott’s view is a conservative one, as if often assserted, then we should expect conservatives to recognize that students distracted by huge debt loads and excessive expectations of paid work while enrolled cannot be expect to focus on learning. Such conservatives should therefore be taking steps to endow small colleges around the country, and perhaps honors programs within large colleges, so that students attending them can study free of constraint. That would be education worthy of the name.

Michael Oakeshott viewed “…school as a transaction between generations, a way of passing on from one generation to the next an inheritance of the distilled cumulation of human understanding.” If we are to reclaim that goal, as we should, we need to get started.

On the loss of Reginald Shepherd

2008-10-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

The recent death of poet Reginald Shepherd to cancer at the age of 45 affected me personally, although I never met him. We had corresponded a fair bit by e-mail and I recently donated the funds to bring him to speak and read at the University of Oregon—that cannot happen now, but arrangements are underway to use those funds and additional donations to establish a student poetry prize in his memory at Oregon.

Those of us who are working on the Reginald Shepherd Prize are starting to ask the questions that inevitably arise: what does it mean to honor a poet, and how can that unique gift, poetic voice, be properly set forth for purposes of establishing criteria for a student prize?

It is easy enough to honor an historian with a prize celebrating new work in that field, or a particle physicist by establishing the Quark Jockey of the Year or some similar clearly related award. But how should we set the criteria for a prize honoring the life and work of a poet? Unless that poet writes about one thing or only in a single form, the life, the work and the “voice” are all quite varied. We’re moving words around to come up with something like “poetry that honors the classical and modern traditions with precision and beauty.” It’s still a work in progress.

Reginald’s work—though we never met he always signed with his first name—was certainly borne aloft on the great wings of candor, so we can’t have any winners who waffle, fudge or hide the toys. Nor can we have mere diction-divers who, upon surfacing, scatter words here and there to see what happens—one of Reginald’s mentors, the great science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, would eat us alive if we honored something sloppy. Yet if we offered the prize to a student poet whose work displayed, say, "infrared fire burning through visible passion," who is to say what the winner’s work looks like?

I once described Reginald’s work in a review as having “intense volcanic roiling,” but I’m not sure that helps guide a student writer. There are similarities between describing poetry and describing wine: “the poems displayed a rich essence of marinated cedar overlaid with fresh Wensleydale, with thistles of filbert and turpentine sparkling through a haze of windblown borax.”

Should we honor his breadth of emotion, which in turn reflected the life of a black gay man growing up in the Bronx and eventually passing through Bennington, Brown, the University of Iowa and Cornell? Sure, but emotion is a genus, not a species. We all see and feel diferently. Poetic emotion can appear in the urbane scrollwork of J. D. McClatchy, the high church pointillism of Carl Phillips, the mythic immersions of Cameron La Follette, the whisper-forest of W. S. Merwin.

It is sometimes easier to describe what a poet didn’t do and didn’t like rather than to classify his work into a poetic taxonomy. There were no pallid stones in his work, he never attempted to leap chasms on melting wings of assumption, he had no time for the poetry of pathological personalism, he recognized that after a certain point economy of expression becomes chastity of imagination, he had no allergy to facts and he wasn’t about to geld any lilies merely because critics preferred parsnips—let the lilies show their stuff.

Reginald was a remarkable correspondent. He is the only person with whom I intentionally saved an entire e-correspondence (will there be collections of letters published, ever again?). Perhaps that was a premonition that it would end too soon. One example of how many subjects could gracefully occupy a small space in his writing is:

“If I ever find out what “emo” means, I will let you know. I did a reading at Columbia University week before last and asked some of the students there, but didn't get a clear answer. I think it's music by “sensitive” but definitely straight boys who play guitar and may or may not wear eyeliner. Fall Out Boy seems to have something to do with it.

I too came across Aqualung by accident, having seen "Pressure Suit" (from his second U.S. album) on TV and then backtracked to his first U.S. album (which is a compilation of two UK albums, which I might try to track down). I adore "Strange and Beautiful" and also "Falling Out of Love," as well as "Good Times Gonna Come" and "Another Little Hole."

That's a good point about my colonization being the problem to begin with. Damned imperialist cancer! And now I'm partially decolonized. Does that mean I'm a dominion or a commonwealth or something, like Puerto Rico?”

Ultimately, his published work demonstrated with sometimes painful clarity the great canyon between those who play the instrument and those who play the music. Reginald Shepherd played the music as well as anyone, and that’s what we’d like our prize winners to do as well.

Reginald has now gone on what Theodore Roethke called “the long and terrible way,” and we who remain can honor him best by never forgetting what he really stood for: no halfway house for the intellect, no auto-referential academic priapism. The best, always, or why bother? In Orpheus in the Bronx he noted that there is a mainstream of American poetry, “broad, sluggish and muddy” that offered “convenient epiphanies in prosaic anecdotes not interesting or shapely enough to be short stories.”

His own work, issued to date in five collections, is never sluggish or muddy, and we will expressly forbid glutinous turbidity when the prize is first awarded in 2009. Instead we will require purity, light, joy and truth of the kind that he displayed in one of his masterpieces, You, Therefore, included in his 2007 collection Fata Morgana (Pittsburgh) and dedicated to his partner, Robert Philen, which begins:

You are like me, you will die, too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine…

and ends:

… home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name.

Let us recall Elliott Coues’s definition of genius as “that union of passion and patience which bears fruit unknown to passion alone; to patience alone impossible.” Reginald’s passionate genius outraced his patience as his illness progressed, and we are fortunate in that at least one posthumous collection will appear.

In the final essay in Orpheus in the Bronx, he answered the question “Why I Write” by saying “I write because I want to live forever.” The blooms of his genius are exsanguinated, but we can honor their living colors forever with as many Reginald Shepherd Prizes and other joys as those of us who knew him can imagine. Reginald once sent me an e-mail addressed to “Sunshine” and concluded with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” but even that one ended with his unique good-bye, so with his words I must say my good-bye: “peace and poetry” forever, my unmet friend.

NOTE: a slightly different version of this essay appeared October 16, 2008 in Inside Higher Education.

A vision of youth

2008-07-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

"At sixteen, we would have been able to wander over the roads together, we would have had the sea at our right, the lonely East at our left, and before us, at a great distance, some venturesome inn in which to try our luck at satisfying all those hungers.

"At night we would have pressed our faces to the windows, to see families preparing for happiness; and we would have gone down the chimney into rooms that otherwise were too calm, and we would have frightened the people who were about to fall asleep.

"In the morning, before dawn, we would have had a swim and we would not have had headaches."

André Gide to Paul Valéry, December 15, 1895.

Reginald Shepherd's Orpheus

2008-06-09T18:43:00.001-07:00

I am pleased to recommend the following:

Orpheus in the Bronx Reginald Shepherd
Essays on Identity, Politics and the Freedom of Poetry

This is Shepherd's first full-length collection of essays related to poetry and the creative arts, and it brings his usual brilliance and clarity to bear on a wide variety of issues:

"A poem has never oppressed anyone, though I was once on a panel at a gay writers' conference with a black lesbian performance poet who implied that literacy was oppressive to black people, which certainly would have been news to the slave-owners who tried to keep their property from learning to read."

This is the kind of blow-off-the-cultural-cobwebs-with-a-jet-turbine writing that is rare in most books and common in Orpheus. Shepherd, whose identity is made the old-fashioned way, with original work, has a great deal to say about identity poetry based on collective defense perimeters rather than true individuality. He also discusses the nature of the urban experience and its connection to poetry, why he has chosen to write and other topics of interest to anyone who writes or reads poetry.

The book also contains exceptionally perceptive commentary on the work of Alvin Feinman, Genet, Wallace Stevens, Linda Gregg, Samuel R. Delany, Aaron Shurin, Donald Britton, Tim Dlugos, D. A. Powell and Jorie Graham. Graham is a poet whose work I have always had trouble appreciating: thanks to Shepherd, I can approach her work from a new angle that may shed more light than the old ones.

Shepherd also provides a useful mirror to what really happens in today's writing, for example:

"...much mainstream American poetry (and there is indeed a mainstream, broad, sluggish and muddy) seems never to have heard of modernism (or even, in too many cases, of Keats), retailing equally aimless examples of therapeutic self-exploration or convenient epiphanies in prosaic anecdotes not interesting or shapely enough to be short stories: what has been called the 'I look out the window and I am important (or sensitive)' school."

Buy it. Read it.

Ivorybill

2008-06-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Ivorybill

In light’s final hour
I went for a walk
In primeval forest today,
A stroll I had made many times
Watching for mythical wings

I saw phantom deer
Glance quick overhead
At shadowy forms they know
Ghostbirds in ebony train
Flying the gantlet of fate

For three seconds near dusk
In a glade found in time
I saw into the umbra
Where life breathes anew, and
Thought I saw Lincoln pass by.

A definition

2008-06-09T18:38:00.000-07:00

What can’t be wrong can’t be science.

Civilized and Uncivilized Societies

2008-04-14T18:49:00.000-07:00

It has been unfashionable for some decades now for observers of human political relations to talk about what it means to be a civilized nation. Such discussions tend to slide sideways into an argument, or in most cases a chorus, regarding the wicked nature of empires and the evils of cultural imperialism, to say nothing of the escaping hiss of racism. However, on that terrible morning of September 11, 2001, the boundaries of allowable discourse changed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in one of his finest moments, looked upon the ruins of the World Trade Center towers and said “This is not an attack on the United States, this is an attack on civilization.”

He was right, but political observers caught up in the more horrible aspects of that day and the fumbling wars that it spawned have forgotten or ignored the important cultural statement in Blair’s few words. We have been distracted by the often clumsy response of the Bush administration and the apparent incapacity of the world in general to recognize the nature of the situation. Blair’s statement remains relevant today, and it is time to speak while this window of permitted discussion remains slightly open.

Blair properly acknowledged, in a situation that made his point starkly clear, that there is a meaningful, legitimate, recognizable difference between civilized and uncivilized societies. Our world contains both, some in the form of nations, and they are not morally equal, whatever their legal status may be. In effect, he said that our world contains barbarians who act against civilization. Civilization is on one side of a symbolic gate and barbarians on the other.

This may seem so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning—Samuel Huntington discussed the issue somewhat in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, and others have talked about it as well—but it raises important fundamental points about how societies interact and the nature of their relationships with one another. The norms of the post-World War II era have erected a spindly superstructure, rooted in the concept of the United Nations and indirectly in our own Declaration of Independence, that declares with breathtaking sweep that all of the world’s peoples are citizens of sovereign nation-states and that these states have, at least formally, identical rights and privileges in the world political community, such rights being universally acknowledged by all other such states. This admirable act of hope blithely looks past, or at best minimizes, extraordinary differences in culture, economic capacity and leadership norms, leaving us today with a set of expectations that rest on sands of dubious stability.

American commentators of the political right have approached this package of issues by focusing on international law. Their view, boiled loose from its protective layers, is that the U.S. can and should do whatever it wants and needs to, and to hell with anyone else. Conservatives such as Robert Bork would filter international relations through a lens of morality, while Charles Krauthammer would simply toss the idea of international law. Huntington acknowledges the origin of the term “civilization” as the opposite of barbarism. However, he focused in his book on the ways in which different kinds of civilizations will interact with each other, without spending a great deal of time examining the consequences of renewed barbarism for our conception of the nation-state and, for lack of a better concept, the rules under which such states are allowed to exist.

All of these writers were too cautious, or perhaps they felt too constrained by the norms of American public discourse. That may seem like an odd statement for a cultural liberal like me to make about a clutch of people clearly far to the right of center, but I think it is time to have a frank discussion of just what it is that requires us to treat other people as having institutional rights roughly equal to our own.

Civilized societies owe only limited acknowledgement of equality and legitimacy to uncivilized, that is, barbaric, societies. This is the truth that can’t be, but must be spoken aloud in today’s political arena. In short form, societies that have, and use, peaceful means of resolving problems owe no duty of mutual acceptance to societies that are fundamentally based on, or widely accepting of, the use of violence in settling differences. If we do not recognize this, and if we continue to pretend that we owe all of the courtesies of the parlor to people who would happily cut our heads off, then we will see many more heads of our people and the people of other civilized nations cut off. The sword cannot indefinitely be held off by the pen, however artfully wielded that pen may be.

Our own nation has been sometimes eager, sometimes reluctant, to use the sword and anything else that came to hand, including nuclear weapons, both with and without coalition partners. We have, during our less respectable periods, been perfectly willing to harbor and support anyone who would oppose a communist, real or imagined. A fair chunk of south Florida culture is a living memorial to our ridiculous obsession with the “threat” of Fidel Castro, whose treatment of his own people is a bad thing in itself but hardly a threat to the U.S., except to the extent that it affects the Florida electoral vote.

Yet with rare exceptions, the U.S. has not tried to destroy nations or peoples that stayed home and respected their neighbors. For the most part, American power has been exercised against people who emerged from their own sovereign space to harm others. That threat of harm still exists. The notion that a civilized nation owes a duty to an uncivilized nation to respect the latter’s borders and policies no matter what lurks within them is a common and very dangerous presumption in today’s very dangerous world. An assumption that such a duty exists means that civilized nations are always waiting to be attacked, and will be attacked.

In the days of muskets, civilization could afford this very lofty moral seat. We could easily survive the consequences, which were limited to a fairly small number of people directly, and to the larger population mainly in subtle, longer-term ways. That is not true today. The basic concept of no first strikes (applied to conventional warfare and anti-terrorist actions) presupposes that we can easily allow a few arrows to fall upon our leather shields. That approach has no answer to the placement of a nuclear weapon in one of our cities, the release of major biological agents or the willingness of suicide flyers to dive into a nuclear power plant or dam.

What limits exist to the right of self-governance? The answer cannot be that there are no limits. We have seen too many wars and exceptional acts of destruction by governments against their own people in the past 75 years for such an argument to have much credence. Once we leave behind the absolute right of nation-states to do what they will within their geographic boundaries, we enter a very misty arena where political theory tangles with cultural imperialism, the less obvious subspecies of racism, notions of self and the rights of individuals, and of course the basic right not to be killed.

At what point does my right to walk down a street outweigh your right to kill me in the name of a culture? Upon what basis may I take steps to ensure that you are incapable of killing me or that your chances of doing so are greatly reduced? Must I obtain a partner, and if so, what kind and how many? What steps are effective, and of these, which are appropriate and reasonable? Note that we must look at effectiveness first, for without it, reasonableness produces no result.

The fact that George W. Bush has made a unique, historically massive and truly extraordinary mess out of U.S. foreign policy in much of the world, a mess that may take a generation of sound leadership to correct, cannot be allowed to blind us to one thing that he has always understood: the United States has no choice but to take action against our enemies elsewhere if we want to avoid seeing them here again. This has nothing to do with Iraq, a war begun behind a curtain of falsehood, fought and won with some effectiveness and followed by an ill-planned occupation maintained at great cost toward unclear ends to help a people who, in significant part, want us to go away. It has to do with people who do want to kill us, wherever they may be. I think Senators Obama, McCain and Clinton all understand this, which is to the good.

There remains the very significant problem of definitions, categories and subtleties. The United States already recognizes that there is such a thing as state-sponsored terrorism (in which we never mention our role in Nicaragua), and we maintain a short list of nations that in effect have a scarlet “T” supplied by us hanging around their necks. Is that enough? No. The U.S. needs to make clear that it does not recognize the right of any nation to shelter or arm terrorists, and reserves the right to take punitive action against terrorists inside any nation that does so. That policy, not the idiocy of an occupation of Iraq, is what we need to have in place in the coming years.

We need not adopt the hyperventilated anti-Muslim rasping of the late Oriana Fallaci, but we would be well advised to attend when she opens windows of such clarity as this, from her final book The Force of Reason:

“We fight this war to free Iraq, Bush and Blair had said. We fight to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq as at the time of Hitler and Mussolini we fought to bring democracy and freedom to Europe and Japan. … I objected: you’re wrong. Freedom and democracy are not two pieces of chocolate to give as a gift to those who don’t know them and don’t want to know them. In Europe the operation succeeded because in Europe the two pieces of chocolate were a food we knew well, a heritage we had built and lost, thus we wanted them back … . In Japan it succeeded because Japan had already begun the march toward progress in the second half of the 19th century. … Freedom and democracy have to be wanted. And in order to want them you have to know what they are.”

She goes on to argue that many Muslims don’t understand or want freedom or democracy because those concepts are contrary to “theocratic totalitarianism.” Thomas Friedman commented in the New York Times in January, 2007 that the Muslim community rises up in anger about cartoons in foreign newspapers but remains silent with “no moral voice” when it comes to constant mass slaying of Muslims by fellow Muslims. He concludes that “if Sunnis and Shiites can never form a social contract to rule themselves—and will always require an iron-fisted dictator—decent government will forever elude them.”

Muslims from the more anti-western nations are an easy (and sometimes appropriate) target, but the concept of barbarism vs. civilization has no particular connection to any religion. As an atheist I treat no religious view as correct, and I support no crusades. The world contains many barbarians; I offer no brief to rank bullets by whether they are stamped with a cross or crescent.

We need a new terminology that more accurately describes what clashes we really face. We face a clash between civilization and barbarism. Barbarism sometimes wears a mask, and sneers that because of our nature, we must bow before the mask while the barbarian strikes us down. It is possible to determine the difference between these two broad classifications of humanity in many cases, some of which involve distinctions between nation-states. We must not fear to strike off the mask and call the barbarian by his true name.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his 1990 book On the Law of Nations, noted the political right’s view with some alarm, concerned that “There is a risk that we will jettison the whole idea of international law where the unilateral use of force is concerned.” International law has always allowed any nation to defend itself against attack. Our defense can’t treat all nations as having an equal right to respect, the traditional view of international law, because some are unable or unwilling to cease their barbarism.

Martha Finnemore, in her 2003 book The Purpose of Intervention, provides an exceptionally clear overview of how norms regarding international intervention have changed. She notes that among the modern trail of justifications for intervention are such relatively recent ideas as protection of human rights, but that changing social norms also establish an expectation that nations not act unilaterally even in pursuit of such obviously “good” goals. Multilateralism seems to have acquired a mantle of presumed good will sufficient that many states capable of acting on their own now seek at least nominal partners.

Beyond the realm of actively barbaric states, many nations are simply not capable of meaningful sustained self-governance more complex than the loose organization of bribery and quasi-military thuggery. The notion that modern, civilized nations should pretend that such countries are due the respect owed functional governments is problematic. In my work I routinely encounter the systematic fraud machine that is called a government in many nations of Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific islands and locally in central and southern Asia. I have the legal authority to reject such frauds and that is what I do. A government is due respect only insofar as such respect is earned by conduct.

The noted national security writer David Isenberg reminds me that international law treats all nations as sovereign, but that sovereign does not mean the same thing as equal. What is an appropriate meaning for sovereign today? Does it mean absolute autonomy to take any action whatsoever regarding its own citizens? Noncitizens? Does it mean that a nation may allow itself to become an international safe house for murderers?

And what does the word “equal” mean when filtered across linguistic and cultural membranes? Equality among nations is recognized pro forma in the U.N. and in the international custom of treating the ambassador of St. Kitts with courtesies nominally identical to those of the ambassador of France. Does equal mean the same thing to the people of North Korea, the U.S., Iran, China, France and Sweden? Clearly not in the rights and responsibilities of their peoples in the political and economic arenas.

I do not argue for a return of empires, through which the strong subjugate the weak. Their day is rightly done. We must, however, recognize that some peoples are unfit to govern themselves within acknowledged boundaries as fully independent nations. They are unfit because they are barbaric, not civilized, or because they have demonstrated unfitness through sustained incompetence in the basics of government. The world needs a mechanism through which such peoples can participate in the family of nations without also having the right to prepare and execute harm against others.

Some kind of protectorate, restriction or supervision system is needed for nations that become mere Petri dishes for the breeding of horror, but the current international political climate, rooted in the fiction that all peoples are sovereign by right, does not allow for such an arrangement. The right to self-determination has become a right to be allowed wanton destruction. Owing in significant part to the unprecedented sacrifice of national credibility by the Bush administration, the United States must re-earn the political trust necessary to participate in any such system of international relations.

However, public policy in the United States and elsewhere in the civilized world can and should change to recognize the difference between peoples that are civilized and those that are not, and our formal relations with different kinds of entities, and those few on the margins, should allow for these fundamental differences. If we do not do this, great harm lies ahead for our own people and for the cultures they represent.

Timeless wisdom

2008-03-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble--yes, gamble--with a whole part of their life and their so-called 'vital interests'."

Albert Camus, 1937

Donoghue's "On Eloquence" and the boutique book market

2008-03-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Among the slurry of small boutique books that seem to be the current rage in publishing, Denis Donoghue's On Eloquence (Yale, 2008) is one of the more interesting offerings. Donoghue thinks of eloquence as "the dancing of speech," and a value in itself, not a mechanism to pursue other goals. Although I am not familar with all of the sources that Donoghue uses, as a general-interest reader I can find nuggets in this kind of mini-book. The book is a mixture of personal reminiscence and commentary on the effect of words in a wide variety of settings, social, political and personal.

This reminds me of James Merrill's comment that he enjoyed the English language in its billiard-ball sense, of setting words spinning off each other. Merrill is sometimes criticized as being a poet of surfaces, yet much of what we are aware of in life consists of surfaces, and we consider beauty a virtue. In fact, another of the recent boutique offerings, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (Harper Collins, 2004) by the late John O'Donohue is dedicated entirely to this subject.

Eloquence for its own sake. Beauty for its own sake. These are examples of a whole string of short books that seem to have come about owing to the author's personal interest in a subject that at first glance appears obscure and unlikely to attract readers. Yet they do.

The prime example from recent years is Dava Sobel's Longitude (Walker, 1995), a short, tiny book about the invention of an accurate maritime measuring device that is no longer in use. What could be more obscure and less likely to find an audience? Yet it found millions.

This seems to be the archetype that led to such books as Eloquence, Beauty, Eric Wilson's Against Happiness (FSG 2008) a fascinating but brief offering about people's unfortunate desire for a life of dubious smiles, Alan Lightman's A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (Pantheon, 2005), Carl Honore's more substantial but heavily anecdotal In Praise of Slowness (Harper, 2004) and such richer offerings as Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style (Harper, 2003) and Robert Grudin's American Vulgar: the Politics of Manipulation versus the Culture of Awareness (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006).

There are variants of the personal short-book that don't fall easily into categories. Among these are Gordon Smith's Remembering Garrett, (Carroll & Graf, 2006), a brief story of a young person's suicide that is a remarkably personal sharing-session by a sitting U.S. Senator about his late son, and how that loss affected his family and the way he worked in the political arena. Kendall Hailey's splendid The Day I Became an Autodidact (Dell, 1988), written when she was a teenager, about ways of learning and the odd expectations of young people by society, is longer than some but an almost purely personal story.

Even such offerings as W. H. Auden's 1976 The Prolific and the Devourer (Ecco), essentially a much shorter, more organized set of comments similar to his A Certain World (Viking, 1970), fall into the category of boutique bookettes on topics of personal interest. The market has always been there; many of John Jay Chapman's wonderful essays of a hundred years ago first appeared as very small books and Victor Gollancz issued his commentary Our Threatened Values (Gollancz, 1946) in such a format. Moving from eloquence for its own sake to rhetoric for the purpose of persuasion, we can look to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and even the Federalist papers for more examples.

Even as society bemoans the shrinkage of commercial publishing and writers claw their desks at the latest rejection, it is clear that for those whose passion can be set forth in a readable way, the market really does exist, and we the readers can expect to see a continuing flow of small books focused on all manner of topics.

The moated castles of today's poetry

2008-02-02T21:40:00.000-08:00

Recent commentaries by Reginald Shepherd, Ann Lauterbach, Adam Kirsch and Christian Wiman all include a concern about the tendency of modern poets, at least American ones, to write from an excessively personal viewpoint and to form hives that buzz in a similar way, heads in and stingers out, serving mainly each other.

Shepherd, author of the just-out literary commentary Orpheus in the Bronx (Michigan, 2008) is one of the nation’s best poets and literary critics. He comments on his blog (http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/) on a book and essays by Ann Lauterbach, whose enthusiasm for modern writing is tempered by a growing concern that poets are clumping into identity-castles to the detriment of poetry as a whole, and especially the poetic audience. These clusters tend to write as though they are only poets of a group, not poets as individuals. Thus we have womenpoets, gaypoets, longshorepoets and other double-jointed po-beesten. As Shepherd points out,

“Such fixations on labels and side-taking seem more prevalent in the online poetry world (certainly in the world of poetry blogs) than in the print poetry world, where things are much more fluid and flexible, though such compulsive territorializing and fence-building is far from absent there either.”

Lauterbach’s book The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2005) discusses, among other things, the concern that literary movements such as “Language poetry” or other identifiable trends can end up driving the poets, rather than the poets driving the movement. If poets move along in a huddled cluster behind a predetermined literary shield and don’t go outside its penumbra as they write, are the poets really writing from what they have to say, or are they forming a series of moated guilds for the purpose of mutual support and protection? This kind of branding or commodification is part of what Shepherd discusses on his blog.

Lauterbach writes of this problem in one of her essays (from the journal Diacritics) with uncommon clarity and a calm dedication to what words really mean that has become rare in poetic circles of late:

“The aspiring young poet begins to write in such a way as to invite a certain critical attention, to ‘fit’ her work into one or another critical category. This is the main function of being identified with a group or school, to draw critical attention that individual poets, not affiliated with a movement or group, cannot easily attract. ‘New York School’ or ‘Language Poetry’ are given brand-name status, commodifying and homogenizing, so that critics (and poets) can make general identifications and totalizing critiques without having to actually contend with the specific differences among and between so-called members of the group. Those not so identified are left out, often understandably embittered or confused, as the idea of an individual iconoclastic poet gives way to collaborative and tribal identities. Thus the marginalized world of poetry begins to imitate other identity formulations which increasingly govern contemporary academic, cultural, and political life. Frightened by exclusionary clubs, the poet ceases to identify herself with the essential margin from which a vital critique must come.”

There is so much of importance packed into this lens-hard paragraph that I hardly know where to begin talking about it. First, there is the understandable desire of a poet (or any creative person) to attract attention to their work. This, in today’s world of poetry, also necessarily means links to employability, publishability and whatever level of fame a poet can expect within the literary world (not much).

There is also the general problem of narrowness that grouping inevitably creates. I write poetry about the natural world, and many of my friends have come to think of me as a nature poet. There are some very fine poets who can fairly be classified thus (Pattiann Rogers and Mary Oliver come to mind), but I don’t think of myself that way. The looks from my reader-of-nature-poets friends may get a little wide-eyed when they turn a page in my next collection and find a long poem about a 1944 naval battle off the Philippines next to a haiku about a college reunion and a dark reminiscence of my jury service in a child molestation case. I’m afraid my market placement as a nature poet is slipping.

Adam Kirsch touches on the problem of excessive narrowness in his recent collection of reviews The Modern Element (Norton 2008):

“Today, the poetics of authenticity is securely established. … Yet it should be clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. … The sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once.”

What does it matter if you speak with an authentic voice if no one is listening, or perhaps worse, if they hear what you say but either can’t understand it or, having understood it, wonder that you bothered to write it. Poetry needs to be more than just unplanned bleating: we can all make noises, but if the only purpose of your sound is to make yourself feel good or call attention to yourself, please spare us the distraction.

Finally, there is the matter of the “essential margin” and the idea of the critique. Movement-clusters in the world of writing almost by definition cannot abide critique except to the extent that another member may suggest better ways to carry the group’s water to its literary destination. This brings us to the fundamental problem of the moats, what lies within them and why it lies there. Do these moats protect a convent or a harem? It doesn’t matter. In both cases the virgins are all serving the same master. It is not the nature of the group’s master that matters, it is the existence of a master. A “school” of poetry is a master. A poet worthy of the name can have no master.

Shepherd’s blog and Lauterbach’s book discuss whether literary movements can become in effect a commodity. A literary movement can become a commodity, or at least a brand, to the extent that what its members produce is purchased by a definable group of people. In the case of poetry production, that group may well be each other, within or hovering on the fringes of that movement, head in and stinger out.

  What a horrible idea, "poetry production." In today’s literary climate being a successful poet means being employed primarily because one is a poet—that is, paid to be a college-based poet instead of having an ordinary life and writing from that experience. In this unfortunate context it’s a natural term.   There are rare exceptions but this is the normal, the common, definition of success.

Writing from a group identity rather than an individual identity generates a certain level of safety, protection, and an uncompromising commitment to adequacy. This is hivewriting: the hum is constant and the result a good nap.   What it never does is produce excellence. However, in that it matches American society. We live in an age that is threatened by excellence, resists it (especially in education) and thinks any kind of clear statement of position contrary to the direction the bull is running is socially damaging (to the speaker) and unprofessional.    

Poets by the hundreds have started building their careers by humping along familiar lexical tracks trodden deep with dust by the herds. It is sad to watch. They all want jobs as protected college-poets. They want their extra-large photo in American Poetry Review, which would be hilarious if it were not such a peculiarly American way of establishing virtue-by-celebrity. Imagine where we would be if we had spent our literary column inches gazing upon photos of, say, Auden, Spender and Bishop, recorded for history by Isherwood, that ultimate pre-digital recorder.

Many modern poets become part of artificial moated cloisters constructed so that poets can run around inside them squeaking to each other like rodents turning a wheel. To what end? Although I understand and respect James Merrill’s statement that he’d rather have one perfect reader than write for the great mass of people, surely poetry written as a group member for the group is too incestuous to serve any but the crudest needs. The fact that the phrase “career in poetry” exists as a meaningful concept in academe is cause for humor tinged with revulsion. But that is how poetry works in the U.S. today, in groups and with the same kinds of networks and cliques as appear in other employment clusters.

Christian Wiman, the current editor of Poetry magazine, in his recent essay collection Ambition and Survival (Copper Canyon, 2007) offers a clear view of what has to change:

I have long believed, though, that to be truly ambitious is to be alone. Wordsworth says that a poet must eventually forswear all aid and criticism of his work or his ability to discern what’s real there, what is most and only himself, will become too debilitated to function. Aligning oneself with a group is not the same thing as seeking criticism, but there is a way in which such identification dulls this blade of solitude, makes it easier to believe in what you’re doing, and thus easier to become complacent.

The net result of this self-congratulatory clustering is that far more people think that they are good poets than is actually the case. The fact that they do not have—and can never have—a readership outside their guild doesn’t seem to affect their understanding of their fundamental status. They are chimeras flitting in the forest of their own imagining.

An astonishing number in poetry's legions are parading about unclothed but for their self-woven corona graminea. In their pride of cult they have forgotten that the grass crown of the legions cannot be self-awarded. Even the consuls could not award it. It comes in its own time, from the people who have seen with their own eyes the supreme acts which earn the honor. When we see writers crowned in chaff, let us say so. Let us award our grass crowns to poets of all schools (or none) based on their work.

McCain/Obama in '08

2008-01-21T15:21:00.000-08:00

Why not?

If Senator Clinton wins the Democratic primary (and let's remember that it is she who is running, not Bill, Release 3.1), why would Obama run with her? It would ruin him. She would never allow him to play a meaningful role in her government, and he'd be slowly filled with the special poisons that seem to be dripped into people who spend an extended period in Washington.

If Senator McCain wins the Republican primary (I think Romney is the more likely winner), why would he want any of the third-stringers, vacuum-brains or bean-counters as a running mate? He has nothing to lose by picking up the phone and calling Obama.

Given that everyone would expect McCain to be a one-termer, thousands of independents and maybe 5-10 percent of Ds would defect. I think McCain/Obama would run above 55 percent in a general election.

Even better, that kind of ticket would not have much effect on House or Senate races, except to encourage the extraction of time-serving nitwits of both parties.

I'd rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee and McCain as the Republican, which would be good for the country and pretty much ensure a serious hosing-out of Washington. But if we can't have that race, let's see them team up.

Parasites or Symbiotes?

2008-01-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

For some years now I have lived in the flatlands of southern Eugene, Oregon, a community that goes out of its way to attract and retain a wide variety of people who are unable to support themselves through conventional means. Among these are a collection of more-or-less amiable drunks and urb-edge ne'er-do-wells who seem to make a significant part of their income from the collection of cans and bottles from the 12-block-long zone between the University of Oregon campus and the Albertson's supermarket, which has an automated can and bottle sorter that produces chits refundable for cash at the store.

I have always felt a faint revulsion as these draggletropes stagger past my house on their daily systolic rounds with big santa-sacks of cans and shopping carts of bottles. I have wondered why so many people in this neighborhood allow, even encourage, the collectors. At the same time, I have always grumbled to myself about the necessity of taking cans and bottles in for refunds myself. The refunds - at most a couple of dollars for a large paper bag of cans - are hardly worth the energy of taking them back.

I have started to wonder whether in fact the collectors are both a natural phenomenon, no more to be despised than politicians, and useful social symbiotes for we yuppies. Last week I decided to test myself. I took a large sack of cans that I didn't feel like dealing with out to the curb by my driveway and parked them in an obvious semi-public place where no one could fail to detect my intent to be rid of them. A few hours later they were gone !

I should have been outraged, as usual, that someone would live this way, on the frosty edge of theft, but I found myself all but giddy at the prospect of not having to deal with those cans. They were gone and could be removed from my list of things to do. The relative value of time and money has changed as I grow older, and the parasites of five years ago have become the symbiotes of today. In exchange for about $1.50, an inconvenience was painlessly removed from my life. The price is right.

Firewand

2008-01-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

Firewand
(for Howard Shore)

Songwind born in stars,
endless golden spiral
from ancient furnace deeps
relentless, burning, choral.

Notes incised through dusk,
each edged in frozen flames
chipped rainbows from the sky,
reforging them as names.

Blazing iris flowered,
unsheathed its primal glow,
unknown scintillations,
spectra heretofore unknown.

A rushing breath of silence
frosted the cold Ring,
exhaling ghastly riders
astride foul leathern wings.

Brazen portals glimmered,
unleashed their lance of song,
aureolan escort
for a tempered iron throng.

Bold blustering of horns
burst on the sanguine stone,
brought argent riders steeled
down the edge of crumbled hope.

Scything bows of chaos
resolve in measured joy
throw back the noontide dusk
as misty swords deploy.

Except in dreams no sound
to equal scarlet thunder,
except in dreams no firewand
to crack black stone asunder.

How to paint this soundstorm,
How to classify the dawn?
It is enough that I lived through it;
It is enough that I lived on.

(On the occasion of hearing the Seattle Symphony and Chorus perform the Lord of the Rings Symphony under the direction of composer Howard Shore, July 17, 2004)

Investment news

2007-12-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

The latest investment option, available in the new year, is called a Broth IRA. All money placed in it will be invested in beef or chicken stock.

Huckabee's Bottom Line

2007-12-13T10:11:00.000-08:00

Spot the typo:

(CNN)Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's comments about AIDS in 1992 have come back to haunt him as he surges into the national spotlight in the 2008 presidential race. Dana Bash reports from Miami, Florida about Huckabee's views on some hot bottom issues from the 1990's and whether the Republican White House hopeful is sticking with those views today.

Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise"

2007-12-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise" is subtitled "Listening to the Twentieth Century," and that is an apt if laughably understated description. This glorious book is a must-read for anyone interested in music, and also for anyone interested in the ways in which music affects and is affected by society.

I am not a music critic of any subspecies, but I do listen to a fair variety of what is broadly classified as classical music, as well as popular and folk music centered around my own formative era. I know what I like and what I don't like, and for the most part I am content to allow such determinations to translate as good music and bad music.

To his credit, Ross does not tell the reader that a particular composer would do the world a favor by jumping into traffic (James Merrill wrote of his wish that Schoenberg's piano would collapse mid-concert so the audience could flee), but rather sets forth the conflicts and changes in music from the late 1800s through today.

There are acres upon acres of fascinating cultural linkages in this book. The effect of jazz and traditional Negro music on Dvorak and various French composers may seem arcane and brutally old, but this week I heard the Eugene Symphony perform a set of traditional spirituals with the splendid young baritone Nathan Myers. The guest conductor, David Alan Miller, mentioned some of this history in his introductory remarks, and then proceeded to conduct a set of eight songs re-set with orchestra by eight different living composers.

When I saw this dangerously modern item on the program, I expected something that I could barely put up with between Smetana's "Moldau" and Dvorak's Symphony No. 8. In fact Myers was superb and the modern orchestrations were interesting and often gorgeous. Miller's comments could have come directly from "The Rest is Noise" and perhaps they did. History matters. History is relevant. History is happening.

Also here are the excruciating political entanglements of Shostakovitch, the iconic swirl and unexpected political difficulties of Richard Strauss, the dark musical involvements of Hitler and his enablers, all in perfect balance. I have never understood the "why" of Schoenberg, atonalism and the strange unpleasant sound-splatter they caused and still cause in music, but having read Ross's history of this, I have a better feel for it. It still sounds awful, but the reasons why we hear some of it even today are more clear.

What Ross does better than many writers is create and maintain connective tissue. He recognizes the flow of key events and adds only those side details that really build the story. I am reminded of such books as John Keegan's "The Price of Admiralty," Roy Jenkins's books on Gladstone and Churchill, Michael Barone's "Our Country" or Robert Massie's "Dreadnought." The perfect blend of detail, consequence and insight is rare, and Alex Ross is a master.

Just one example is his description of the Prokofiev opera "Semyon Kotko" in which "a change in Soviet foreign policy forced a revision of the opera's libretto. The signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 meant that Germans could no longer be depicted as villains."

The tone, however, almost always stays fairly light, with doses of appropriate humor, such as the inclusion of a scene in which American soldiers, not recognizing a bust of Beethoven, cause Strauss to grumble that "if they ask one more time, I'm telling them it's Hitler's father."

The long autumn sunset of Stravinsky, the long vernal sunrise of Copland, the clattering surge of twelve-tone sound and the late twentieth century advent of so-called "minimalist' composers such as Philip Glass are all here.

Ross is writing expressly about classical music, but toward the end of the book he begins including references to song and popular music. I hope that this is a teaser for his next book; little would be more worth anticipating than Alex Ross on the last 100 years of American song.

By way of epilogue, I sent Alex Ross a thank-you note, together with a CD featuring the Symphony No. 1 of Australian composer Colin Brumby. Ross, no culture-snob, sent me back an e-mail saying he had never heard Brumby before, loved the symphony and did I have any more Brumby? I sent him Brumby's piano concerto and two clarinet works this week.

History is happening.

Music for the Ages

2007-11-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

This evening when I decided to play some music from iTunes while working on my latest book, I was surprised to see that "Sean's Library" had appeared among my choices of places to get music.

Now who might Sean be, I thought, and why is his library or any other part of his person taking up residence in my computer without so much as a "good evening"? Is this the next step by Dick Cheney to invade my personal space in search of terrorists? Then I recalled that this had happened once before, and represents one of the stranger aspects of sharing a network with others who have iTunes: anyone's music is available to others on a play-only basis.

The only network I am on, as it happens, is my own wifi station, which is also used by my neighbors across the street, three college-age guys including a Sean.

My next realization was that I was about to know more about Sean than he thinks I know. And he about me, should he download my music library as well. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he was getting my collection of, er, exotic videos also. Well, he'd sure know me better after seeing those. Fortunately videos don't seem to transfer.

Then the decision. Do I, well, peek? Do I really pry into someone else's musical tastes unasked? Granted, we are both from Tillamook County, but that hardly seems enough of a connection. But one little peek can't hurt, can it?

Well, here are some things I have heard of. Linkin Park, I think they did "In the End," a great song that I know from the On The Rocks acappella version performed at the University of Oregon. Metallica, not my style but I know what it is. But what on earth are Alice in Chains, Dashboard Confessional, Dropkick Murphys, Hatebreed and, really, Lesbians on Ecstasy?

But wait, what is this? Beatles, not a huge shock. Creedence? And is this really---it IS Magic Carpet Ride ! And this can't really be In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida? Oh but it is. Cat Stevens. Charlie Daniels Band. Acres and acres of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. A tasteful selection of Queen, well, well. Vans Halen and Morrison. And yes, a phalanx of Bob Dylan. Bach in a cameo.

My duty is clear. I need to make sure than Sean does not miss out on Al Stewart, Imogen Heap, Aqualung, Colin Brumby, Lindsay Mac, Phil Ochs, Guster, Nero, Indigo Girls, Steeleye Span, The Pogues, Stevie Nicks, Shaun Davey, Ture Rangstrom, Philip Glass and Jimmy Eat World. It takes a village to raise the musical awareness of the young.

And those Dropkick Murphys - not bad, not bad at all.

Wicked or otherwise?

2007-11-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

Strangest self-description found on the web lately:

"I'm currently going to school to be a marketing agent for my step-mother."

Another gem:

"Be naughty...Save Santa the trip"

The ins and outs of online dating

2007-11-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, a friend with a dubious sense of humor mailed me a copy of A Consumer’s Guide to Male Hustlers – to my office, in an ordinary envelope. The secretary displayed the calm professionalism for which we had hired her by opening and delivering this, as it were, disrobed object with my daily mail stack, offering no comment whatsoever. The book itself is a perfectly straightforward overview of the mechanics of hiring pleasure-boys and the nature of their profession.

Although I have never been in that particular market as provider or customer (setting aside the time when I, a college student, was offered five dollars to perform an unlikely act), I have wondered from time to time just what the less visible side of gay male dating was like. The advent of large, Internet-based databases for gay men to join and use as dating services makes the world of dating exceptionally broad, whether you are looking for Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now.

I recently joined a number of these services to see how they work and how they differ. I also attempted to arrange meetings with two men who provide what Craigslist matter-of-factly calls “erotic services” in order to ask them how their profession works in the age of Internet-based dating. Historically, hookers and hustlers, mostly young, lurked on certain streets at certain times in order to find customers. Today it seems that at least the more upscale ones use the Internet to peddle themselves. Unfortunately one of the hustlers changed his travel plans and the other simply did not show up. I suspect that the latter was a student doing a research paper on people like me while I was doing one on people like him.

Joining the various services is easy. As a gay man, I only joined the ones that offered a chance to meet other gay men “in my area.” It turns out that some of the services interpret “my area” to include the entire northwest rain belt: they gladly sent me profiles of “local” men from Seattle to Eureka. Of the services I joined, Dlist and JustGuys are free, Manhunt has a nominal fee, Gay.com a higher fee, Elitemate pretends to have no fee to start with but is all but impossible to use as a guest and has by far the worst signup process. Men4Rentnow, which might be called a special-purpose site, and which I didn’t use other than to look at its setup, has no fee. The general-purpose Craigslist is also free. There are lots of other services, but these seem to be the largest or most active ones.

These services vary greatly in purpose, ease of use and tone. Most of them are straightforward dating sites, though Elitemate seems to be mainly a bait-and-switch site designed to generate names and addresses for spam and the like, as is Naughtyornice. Both of these use bogus posts to Craigslist as bait. My test of their various signup sequences made that pretty clear, though I gave them mostly bad info and they are now sending a lot of messages into space, not to me.

Gay.com is one of the older sites and has a lot of men on it, but it is brutally commercialized, poorly laid out, has clumsy, sometimes nonfunctional controls for moving from page to page and includes a cute little trick in the registration process through which it hopes you don’t notice that it reinstated a fee that the registrant thought had been deleted through an opt-out. In short, lots of guys but a real hassle to use.

DList and JustGuys seem to be connected in some way, though I did not spend any time looking into that. Both are fairly easy to use basic services that have pictures, info about the guys and minimal advertising. However, they seem to add members rather slowly, which means that when I want to meet Mr. Right Now on Saturday night, the available faces are pretty much the same ones (in my “local area”) that have been offering themselves for some weeks or months. These sites are heavily used by college-age men, perhaps because they are free.

Manhunt is the best all-round service. For a small fee, you get a very well-designed, user-friendly structure that is all but adless, has plenty of people on it who really are in my local area (heck, I even recognized two of them), and does not seem to generate a separate spamflow. The site seems to have been designed by people who might actually want to use it, and flows wonderfully.

Craigslist is, in many ways, the most practical, and is an increasing favorite among both gay and straight people wanting to generate dates in their area. It is also becoming a favorite way for prostitutes and gay male hustlers to promote their wares, as was discussed in an Oregonian feature article this fall.

One of the main problems I ran into with all of these services is that I don’t speak the language very well. I’m a 51-year-old who does not own a television or a PDA and whose cell phone is rarely on and used with minimal competence. The combination of gay sex-term babble and text-message code shorthand (shortfinger?) used by twenty-somethings often produces a homotextual sputtering that reads the way my Scottish ex-boyfriend sounded when he got agitated: only half the words needed for meaning are present on a canvas of apostrophes, and they don’t mean quite what they would in standard English. Reading what people say about themselves (and what they want in a date) can be as clear to an amateur as FAA tower-chat or the more arcane marine forecasts of the National Weather Service.

But in all this world of linguistic obscurity, fake photos, unlikely measurements, no-show hustlers and unrealistic expectations, I did emerge from this experiment with one actual date, a perfectly delightful evening with a tall, dark, handsome 23-year-old. So my commitment to research has had, if you will, a result with benefits.

On shooting varmints

2007-10-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

My local newspaper, the Eugene Register-Guard, published a story by Rebecca Taylor on October 17, 2007 in which a local resident accidentally shot a visitor. As of today, the victim is still alive. The story, however, brings to light an interesting aspect of American rural culture, the concept of the varmint. In our local case, the shooter was described as firing the shot from a "small-caliber Ruger varmint rifle." Now what is a varmint rifle?

Ruger makes solid, mid-priced, good-quality firearms (I have used their pistols) and the rifle in question, though this was not specified in the story, was probably a .22, which fires a fast, small bullet suitable for killing crop-damaging rodents and other very small animals. My mother was a good shot with this kind of rifle while growing up on a farm near Salem, Oregon.

But what is a varmint and why did the shooter fire at "what he thought was an animal" in the brush?

My dictionaries, and such supplemental works as Woods's The Naturalist's Lexicon, make clear that the word varmint is a variant, if you will, of vermin, which in turn is based in the Latin term for worm but is today used more broadly to refer to any kind of loathsome, obnoxious or unpleasant animal, particularly a small animal.

I used to do some consulting work for Leupold & Stevens, an Oregon firm that makes high-quality optical equipment, especially scopes for use on firearms. Some of these are also marketed as great for varmint shooting, mounted on a .22 rifle or long-barrelled pistol, or perhaps a slightly higher caliber. One doesn't usually shoot varmints with large-bore weapons such as .44 revolvers or .45 automatics.

So what is a varmint, really, in daily use in rural America? The term has come to mean just about any small animal under almost any conditions. That is the shame of all who enjoy shooting sports.

I have no quarrel with hunting, having enjoyed from the land of Oregon venison, elk, rabbit, curried bear and even frog legs from frogs caught by my uncle and prepared to perfection by my grandmother. Likewise, it seems to me fine for farmers and ranchers to get rid of ground squirrels that pepper pastures with ankle-breaking holes (though setting up nest platforms for raptors might be more effective).

But our local shootist wasn't out to get dinner. He wasn't trying to keep his land safe and productive. He certainly wasn't protecting himself. He saw something move - something completely unidentified - and he shot it for fun.

From what cultural sump do we get the idea that killing animals purely for pleasure is morally acceptable? The idea is not limited to slow-witted young men out for a joyride on an ATV: hunting big game purely for trophy purposes is perfectly acceptable, even among the wealthy and educated. That is a subject beyond the meaning of "varmint," but is clearly related.

We see young men (mostly) shooting Burrowing Owls off fenceposts simply for target practice. In the case of most birds, unlike most mammals, this is a crime. Even my new neighbor, a nice young man, last year shot (with his varmint rifle) a raccoon in a residential district of Eugene, which was illegal not because it was a raccoon, but because he fired his rifle inside the city. I wonder if he could clean out the neighborhood cats for me?

So we return to our young ATV rider who fired at something unknown that moved in the bushes. The headline on the article referred to the shooter as a "hunter." Wrong. Hunting by definition has seasons and rules, and is limited to certain animals. Our young man, waving his rifle, admits to simply firing at something rustling in the underbrush. Just a varmint, let's shoot it for fun. I wait for the shame. I wait in vain.

Religious versus secular territory: a response to C. John Sommerville’s "The Decline of the Secular University"

2007-09-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

What is the best way for universities and religion to co-exist? Some would say in different time zones, others think that Bible college is the only Great Book program they will ever need. C. John Sommerville’s "The Decline of the Secular University" (Oxford, 2006), which focuses on this question in a mostly practical way, is one of the most worthwhile books on the purposes of higher education to appear in recent years.

As a college evaluator, I find it enlightening, as a nonbeliever I find it challenging and as a citizen I find it in part persuasive. However, its focus on one religion (albeit one under which much of western culture arose) and its lack of awareness of what is really happening in religious education in the United States today weaken what is otherwise a very important message.

In academe, and to some extent in society and government, we have come to believe that anything that isn’t science (broadly defined to include applied technologies) isn’t important, and to the extent that everything else can be made to look and quack like science, it moves up the ladder of prestige (and might get better funding). Another way of looking at this issue is that if a book or article does not contain numbers, it is not important.

Page Smith made this point in Killing the Spirit (1990), which was less pointedly about the role of religion in universities. Sommerville makes it more explicitly, citing specific examples of what science can’t do and of scientists who have seen the light, or at least a light. He asks universities to reestablish their role as a place in which moral questions are taken seriously and in which religious people can comment on these issues as a natural part of the everyday life of collegiate culture without being dismissed as weirdos or defined away as nonacademics. I, speaking as an atheist, think this would be a plus at most institutions, whose students and faculty are today obsessed with money, prestige and job training.

Sommerville tends to conflate morality with religion and religion with Christianity, which poses certain obstacles to his goal of persuasion. However, he points out quite correctly that the expandable basket called “religion” in fact contains such a wide variety of philosophies and belief systems that to discuss it in generic terms risks a result so bland and devoid of weight that we might as well not bother. That said, surely his definition of religion as “that which gives access to something beyond the ordinary” is astonishingly flat and godless.

He treats Christianity as a culture or philosophy more than a faith, or at least shelters faith behind an amiable flurry of familiar academic language. His God does not smite (at least not directly) and his Jesus is more an emeritus faculty member worthy of respect than the Son of God. Although he does not ignore what I will boldly call the religious aspects of Christianity, Sommerville hardly mentions such things as divinity, the idea that God could have a son or whether anyone has risen from the dead lately and in what form. Sin does come up occasionally and appropriately, but forgiveness in an expressly ecclesiastical sense is modestly tucked away behind the curtains. Is this the Son of God who dare not speak His name?

The problem of distinguishing between Christianity as a distinct religious faith and the “Christian culture” underpinning the clusters of nation-states that have grown up with it exists in many venues, not just universities. It is an everyday presence in the courts. It is also a discussion not limited to Christianity. The late Oriana Fallaci recently pointed out in The Force of Reason (English edition, 2006) that as Islam moves into Europe, its culture seems likely to demand more concessions from European social norms. Europe is finding that its Christian-rooted tendency to treat others fairly may result in social changes and behaviors unacceptable to most of its inhabitants. Israel faces this question daily: is it a Jewish state in which others may live under certain conditions acceptable to Jews or a state that happens to contain mostly Jews - for now?

Can secularism render a nation vulnerable to a less accomodating culture based in a different faith than the sometimes nominal Christianity that the “West” hardly notices because we have lived with it for so long? Fallaci says yes. Many Americans of faith would agree. This is not Sommerville’s principal subject, but he clearly thinks that an educational system that has no common, natural, everyday way to discuss moral issues, including from religious viewpoints, is not well suited to the education of people who have to deal with such issues. I agree.

It may be that the book’s subject matter, which has to do mainly with what ought to happen in universities, does not have a need for visible altars and wood from the cross, but it is a little odd to read about Christianity as though universities could benefit from its undoubted capacity for encouraging moral discourse without mentioning its most fundamental basis: belief in its tenets. There is a hint of Wizard of Oz in the approach: we won’t talk about what is behind the curtain and let’s see if anyone notices.

On the rare occasions when other religions appear, they are mere ghosts who pass across the stage, bow slightly and are ushered courteously to the egress. Surely the presence of a vigorous Christianity smiting, loving and saving its way across campuses could only be made more interesting to faculty and students by a Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism doing the faith-based equivalent? Yet they do not figure in the book in a meaningful way.

The Corruption of Religion by Science

One problem that the author does not discuss, the absence of which constitutes an unfinished wall in his perimeter, is that religion has allowed itself to be corrupted by the notion of science as the only source of what is true. Religion, especially certain subspecies within Protestant Christianity, seems to be caught in a Charybdis of self-doubt that results in it believing that science really does have the answers. This results in a sorry, unseemly panting after misapplied scientific methods and associated tinsel (a museum of creationism?) that serves only to tarnish what fine metal remains of the edifice of faith.

Sommerville recognizes this problem. He points out quite correctly that science by itself contains no “should” function: “science itself didn’t teach [Nazis] that humans shouldn’t be treated as things.” He seems to have more respect and understanding for scientists who recognize the limits of what they do than for social scientists who seem less sure of themselves and therefore less willing to even discuss matters of faith and morality. The great American essayist John Jay Chapman wrote of science that it

“…neither sings nor jokes; neither prays nor rejoices; neither loves nor hates. This is not her fault, but her limitation. Her fault is that, as a rule, she respects only her own language and puts trust only in what is in her own shop window.”

This, written in 1910 (reissued in A John Jay Chapman Reader, University of Illinois Press 1998), is both more and less true today. Science as a sealed monolith is even vaster and more dominant than in Chapman’s day, yet many scientists as individuals are keenly aware of where it fits in the modern world and what it can and cannot do.

Indeed, there are scientists (e.g. physicist Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious, 2005) who write on these themes, and a recent brutally academic conference paper collection (Is Nature Ever Evil?, Willem Drees, ed., 2003) in which writers from academic backgrounds in science, philosophy and theology take the subject so seriously as to achieve in their writing the atomic density of platinum.

In order for universities (and all other schools) to allot an appropriate place to religion and morality, whatever that place may be, and for the discussions that Sommerville wants to take place, religions must stop trying to be sciences. Art does not try to be psychology, theater does not try to be chemistry and engineering does not try to be Bach except under unusual leadership, but religion wants to be science. Religion must cease attempting to stuff itself into the Trojan horse of creationism in order to canter backward through the wide-open portals of science, and must step back from the whirling genetic cell-storm of evolution and natural selection.

Science (a set of fact-gathering processes used for certain purposes) does not pretend to be religion, and religion (a way of viewing life and the world from the outside) should stop thinking that it has to be a part of science. There is no reason for religion to want or need to be science, and it sullies itself by trying.

Why does religion want to be science, aside from acquiring some of the prestige that science holds in our society? Because it wants to play on every field, not just its own. This is not unique to Christianity: watch how the mullahs treat art and literature. The commonplace sin of jurisdiction creep can be found in other parts of academe, but religion, at least the major monodeity sky-god versions that include most Americans, is unique in one respect that is fatal to a potential role in academe: it enters the Great Conversation that Sommerville rightly cherishes with the answers and is not interested in changing any of them, no matter what the questions may be.

That is untrue in any other field found in a university with the possible exception of units run by famous athletic coaches, which are arguably religions as well. Christianity is therefore unable to fully participate in the diastolic give and take through which ideas are refined, modified and improved in a collegiate setting: it can only speak, it cannot listen. This is not wrong in itself, but it precludes the kind of meaningful cross-pollination that Sommerville hopes could happen were faith-based dialogues to occur more often.

I simply don’t agree when the author says that

“...Christians, at least, do not think it discredits theology that it is still a work in progress, any more than it discredits science to think that it may be just beginning.”

This statement supposes the refined, academic theology of, say, 1850 or even 1950, rather than the absolutist inerrant faith that drives much of practical theology on the American ground today. If there is one thing that I have learned as a state regulator who works with a wide variety of religious colleges, it is that they do not think their theology is a work in progress - little is more carved in stone than what they believe and teach.

What the Religious Market Demands

If that earlier theology were still marketable to the masses of American believers whom Sommerville thinks secular colleges need to reach, we would not have hundreds of incompatible Bible colleges and church-basement degree-granters peddling their mutually exclusive wares in every sizable community.

Consider who religious colleges can’t reach. Missouri, where I once worked in higher education, has 34 accredited and about 50 unaccredited degree-granting institutions controlled by churches. Note that the 34 are not public universities or even secularized independent private colleges, they are church-controlled institutions representing 14 different Christian sects and four independent but expressly Christian entities. Among these 34 exceptionally various accredited educational providers scattered widely across one state, the people who attend the fifty - fifty - small unaccredited religious colleges in that same state could find no religious comfort zone.

Louisiana has 55 unaccredited degree-granting religious colleges, Georgia has 40, South Carolina 28 and California a staggering 250. Many other states have them, too. And these are the ones that we know about. We are absolutely sloshing in the heady brew of religious postsecondary education. But we do not live in a society in which religious groups have any interest in expanding their theological homes: Christianity today is a splintered faith of wall-builders and bunker-diggers.

There are exceptions, and there are people of faith who can work very well within an academic setting. However, they are the ones who are most flexible in their ways of interacting with others and most interested in learning how their faith might learn from the world, not just preach to it. They are therefore as disconnected as many nonbelievers from the large blocks of people whom Sommerville refers to here and there in the book, those of faith outside the academy who are, in reality, not interested in what anyone else thinks or believes.

If these extraordinarily varied believers were suddenly transported to Sommerville’s University of Florida, what would they contribute? Certainly a stunning volume of noise, but a meaningful dialogue on moral issues? I doubt it. Sommerville seems to recognize this in his discussions of interactions between religion and science, where he in effect divides Christianity into those who are not interested in merging with science (people like him) and those who mistakenly want to fight on foreign ground.

But in our large society, it is Christians who want to fight science within the enemy’s own walls who are the principal leaders most critical of educational systems. They do not want a dialogue with science or within academe, they want to uproot science from its own territory, which is impossible, despite occasional burnt books around its fringes. How very odd that people who would never consider the truths of their faith subject to public vote often expect such votes on the truths of science, which are equally immune to majoritarianism.

They, as Christian leaders, don’t have faith in the sacred ground whence they came, the ground where the forest of morality grows, where ethics was born in its shaded glens, where right defends its battlements against wrong. Most importantly, where science cannot go. Until they do, their role within universities will be viewed as largely destructive and not serious in the academic sense.

Finally, Sommerville doesn’t say much about other sources of nonfactual authority that are available (or should be available) within education. Certainly philosophy need not have a base in western religion, though to be sure some of it does or did. Concepts of beauty, meaning and other fundamentally esthetic matters should, as the author suggests, have a greater role in what happens inside universities.

However, they don’t have to come from a Biblical or even religious source, unless the word “religion” can simply be interepreted to include anything not connected to the scientific method, which strikes me as cheating: defining the problem away with a whisk-broom rather than dealing with its odd spikes and edges.

The credibility problem of religions in academe

When religion’s most widely visible faces are always talking about a narrow range of issues and never seem to care about anything else, the credibility of religion inside the university as a source of viable views on life in general is seriously circumscribed. The peculiar political dichotomy of Catholic leaders who are so visible regarding abortion and so invisible regarding the death penalty, both of which are theoretically contrary to that faith’s teachings, is one example of this problem. Religion that does not look or act like a source of consistent moral leadership is unable to assume that role in any venue, let alone one in which truth, however broadly defined or culturally based, is a goal.

To the extent that people who are active because of their faith look and act like political cherry-pickers who read the latest polls before speaking out, their claim to authority from moral sources is degraded. People of faith are perceived by many as hectoring, intrusive, obsessed with sexual issues (the least likely speeches for anyone not already an adherent to listen to) and uninterested in poor people, social justice (pick your definition) or improving people’s lives. Congressman Barney Frank’s famous comment of certain religious conservatives is still applicable today: they think that “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

I am far more inclined to listen to a religious leader’s thoughts on an important moral issue if that leader is not attempting to acquire or use government power to make me act like him. Once again, uncertain faith seems to have come to believe that secular authority, like the cast-off pyrites of science, must be used to bolster a shaky religion. Why? Is it simply the common human desire to force other people to do things? A failure to persuade on moral grounds?

The relatively recent movement of some religious leaders away from a James Watt-like “the-end-is-near-so-stripmine-today” mentality and toward an ethic of environmental stewardship is a good sign of broadening of the religious dialogue, and its collision with the money-driven norms of politics will be interesting to watch. Our nation and our universities would surely benefit from religious activity that has the effect of getting people to look at their lives and their world with a greater awareness of moral issues and the consequences of moral choices.

Lest I seem to be a tribune of niggling, I need to mention once again that this is an excellent book that raises issues that absolutely need to be raised, in writing that is sometimes so delicately pointed that the stiletto can hardly be felt, for example, in a discussion of dogmatism in the collision of belief systems in ancient Europe, that we owe to Jesus “the idea that religion goes bad when it used in support of power systems.” Amen.

I would welcome to the academy any person of faith who can make a genuine contribution on religious grounds to the discussions of issues affecting humanity. Sommerville states that “universities have too easily assumed that their job was to dispel wonder.” I wholeheartedly agree, and would line up with him on the side of wonder any time. However, in order for wonder rooted in faith to recur on campus on a significant scale, changes that I do not expect would have to occur within the larger communities of faith in the country.

Respect cannot be imposed, it must be earned. If religion has lost the respect of university communities in recent generations, it is not just because of change inside the walls. Only when religion once again acts like religion instead of desperately pawing the middens of science and politics for shards of someone else’s legitimating grail can it earn back a senior place at the timeless table of learning.

If not religion, what?

2007-09-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This essay is slightly revised from a version that originally appeared on August 31 in Inside Higher Education. It has been reposted in part on the Canadian Catholic education site: Tomorrow's Trust: A Review of Catholic Education (http://www.tomorrowstrust.ca).

In a variety of arenas, from politics to high schools, from colleges to the military, Americans argue as though the proper face-to-face discussion in our society ought to be between religion and science. This is a misunderstanding of the taxonomy of thought. Religion and science are in different families on different tracks: science deals with is vs. isn’t and religion, to the extent that it relates to daily life, deals with should vs. shouldn’t. There are a few areas of overlap, but when science strays outside questions of fact, it rapidly loses its identity.

These are fundamentally different trains. They may hoot at each other in passing, and many people attempt to switch them onto the same track (mainly in order to damage science), but this is an act of the desperate, not the thoughtful.

It is true that a portion of religious hooting has to do with is vs. isn’t questions, in the arena of creationism and its ancillary arguments. However, this set of arguments, important as it might be for some religious people, is not important to a great many (especially outside certain Protestant variants), while the moral goals and effects of religious belief are a far more common and widespread concern among many faiths. I was raised in Quaker meeting, where we had a saying: Be too busy following the good example of Jesus to argue about his metaphysical nature.

Until recently, most scientists didn’t bother trying to fight with religion; for the most part they ignored it or practiced their own faiths. However, in recent years Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris have decided to enter the ring and fight religion face to face. The results have been mixed. I have read books by all of these authors on this subject, as well as the interesting 2007 blog exchange between Harris and Andrew Sullivan, one of the best writers active today and a practicing Catholic, and it is clear that a great deal of energy is being expended firing heavy ordnance into black holes with no likelihood of much effect.

The problem that the scientific horsemen face is that theirs is the language of is/isn’t. Their opponents (mostly Christians but by implication observant Jews and Muslims as well) don’t use the word “is” to mean the same thing. To a religious person, God is and that’s where the discussion begins. To a nonreligious scientist, God may or may not be, and that is where the discussion begins.

The two sides, postulating only two for the moment, are each on spiral staircases, but the stairs wind around each other and never connect: this is the DNA of unmeeting thoughts. Only shouting across the gap happens, and the filters of meaning are not aligned. That is why I don’t put much faith, you’ll pardon the expression, in this flying wedge of scientific lancers to change very many minds.

Dennett’s approach is quite different from the others at a basic level; he views religious people as lab rats and wants to study why they squeak the way they do. That way of looking at the issue seems insulting at first but is more honest and practical in that it doesn’t really try to change minds that are not likely to change.

But these arguments are the wrong ones at a very basic level, especially for our schools and the colleges that train our teachers. The contrapuntal force to religion, that force which is in the same family, if a different genus, speaks the same language in different patterns regarding the same issues. It is not science, it is philosophy. That is what our teachers need to understand, and this distinction is the one in which education colleges should train them.

Those of us who acknowledge the factual world of science as genuine and reject the idea of basing moral and “should” questions in the teachings of religion are left seeking an alternate source for sound guidance. Our own judgment based in experience is a strong basic source. The most likely source, the ‘respectable’ source with sound academic underpinnings that can refine, inform and burnish our judgment, is philosophy in its more formal sense.

The word “philosophy” conjures in many minds the image of dense, dismal texts written by oil lamp with made-up words in foreign languages, and far beyond mortal ken. In fact, many writers on philosophy are quite capable of writing like human beings; some of their books are noted below.

When we introduce more religious studies into our K-12 schools, as we must if people are ever to understand each other’s lives, the family of learning into which they must go also contains philosophy. It is this conversation, between the varieties of religious outlooks and their moral conclusions, and the same questions discussed by major philosophers, that needs to happen.

Philosophy is not all a dense, opaque slurry of incomprehensible language. Some excellent basic books are available that any reasonably willing reader can comprehend and enjoy. Simon Blackburn’s Think, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’ A Passion for Wisdom and Erik Wielenberg’s Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe are some recent examples.

An older text providing a readable commentary on related issues is John Jay Chapman’s Religion and Letters, still in print in his Collected Works but hard to find in the original, single volume. Chapman wrote of changes in our school system that:

“It is familiarity with greatness that we need—an early and first-hand acquaintance with the thinkers of the world, whether their mode of thought was music or marble or canvas or language. Their meaning is not easy to come at, but in so far as it reaches us it will transform us. A strange thing has occurred in America. I am not sure that it has ever occurred before. The teachers wish to make learning easy. They desire to prepare and peptonize and sweeten the food. Their little books are soft biscuits for weak teeth, easy reading on great subjects, but these books are filled with a pervading error: they contain a subtle perversion of education. Learning is not easy, but hard: culture is severe.”

This, published in 1910, is remarkably relevant to education at all levels today. The idea that philosophy is too hard for high school students, which I doubt, simply means that we need to expect more of students all through K-12. Many of them would thank us.

Paul Kurtz’s Affirmations and my brother John Contreras’s Gathering Joy are interesting “guidebooks” that in effect apply philosophical themes in an informal way to people’s real lives. There are also somewhat more academic books that integrate what amount to philosophical views into daily life such as Michael Lynch’s True to Life: Why Truth Matters, physicist Alan Lightman’s A Sense of The Mysterious and the theologian John O’Donohue’s Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.

Some of these are denser than others and not all are suited for public schools, but the ideas they discuss are often the same ideas discussed in the context of religions, and sometimes with similar language. It is this great weave of concepts that our students should be exposed to, the continuum of philosophical thought blended with the best that different religions have to offer.

The shoulds and shouldn’ts that are most important to the future of our society need to be discussed in colleges, schools and homes, and the way to accomplish this is to bring religions and philosophies back to life as the yin and yang of right and wrong. That is the great conversation that we are not having.

Coaches and their Degrees at the University of Oregon

2007-08-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

Note: this essay originally appeared in the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard on August 28, 2007

Recent stories and George Schroeder's excellent column on the diploma-mill degree purchased by Dave Serrano, a former candidate for baseball coach at the University of Oregon, raise several issues. Are diploma-mill degrees legal for use? Do coaches need degrees at all? Do athletic directors?

Oregon law separates degrees into three categories. Standard degrees such as those issued by the UO, Lane Community College, Eugene Bible College and other accredited schools can be used with no restrictions, although employers may require certain kinds of specialized accreditation or preparation. Degrees that go through the state's approval process also are legally valid for most uses.

Unaccredited degrees from U.S. colleges and foreign degrees from colleges not comparable to accredited U.S. colleges can be used in Oregon with a disclaimer of accreditation, provided that the college actually exists as a legally operating degree-granter in its home jurisdiction.

The last category is what are usually called degree- or diploma-mill degrees, those simply purchased, sometimes requiring "life experience," often not. Using such a degree in Oregon and many other states is illegal; in Oregon, it is a Class B misdemeanor as well as a civil violation. It is the floor below which no degree used in Oregon for any purpose, public or private, is allowed to fall. The Legislature established this nationally recognized standard in 1997.

Any employer who allows an employee to use a diploma-mill degree had best have a good attorney and deep pockets for the potential liability claims when that employee screws up. Unfortunately, it is that third category into which Serrano's degree falls. Therefore, had the UO hired him, he would have had to erase the degree from his rèsumèwhen he took the job.

But should coaches be required to hold degrees at all? Of course not, because athletic "departments" are not really parts of universities, at least not at top-level schools. The UO athletic department is an ancillary business that is allowed by our cultural norms to use the university's name and trademarks to operate a large-scale entertainment business. The more private money it gets (thereby freeing other actual and potential funds for academic uses) the better.

That is why someone such as Pat Kilkenny is a good choice to lead such an enterprise. He's an experienced businessman with the ability to attract and manage money. The fact that Kilkenny has no degree is a who-cares. The problem he faces is that he is unaccustomed to operating within the slow, talkative process of academe, in which his actions will be publicly trashed by low-income people he has no choice but to work with. He is accustomed to doing things in private with people in his own economic stratum.

But I'd take one degreeless Kilkenny - even with an absurd, poorly considered cheerleading team - over 10 Serranos with degrees from a mailbox in Delaware. The problem with Serrano and those like him who acquire and use bogus degrees is not that they are bad coaches; it is that they are proven to have poor judgment.

An employer, including the UO, always can require that a degree meet whatever requirements the employer deems appropriate. Many employers require that degrees be from accredited schools; some require certain kinds of accreditation. Employers interested in finding out more about how to distinguish real from fake degrees should use the

A degree is not a toy or a decoration. It is a public credential that people rely on in many aspects of their lives. Degrees don't tell us all we need to know about a person, but we need to respect their value, not trash it.

Idaho Sex God

2007-08-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

Comes word today from the town crier in the guise of CNN that conservative Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has pleaded guilty to a charge of lewdness based on his behavior in the Minneapolis airport restrooms with a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer.

Ah, family values, exemplified by this salty pillar of the right-wing mountain west, a man who displays the conservative paint but lacks the moral primer. Craig must be so very thankful that his indiscretion was revealed on the same day that Alberto Gonzales finally choked on his own rat sandwich and resigned as attorney general, leading the political news.

But it won't be enough. Craig's supporters will rally around and screech entrapment, his loyal family will loyally familize as needed, but he's done as a credible public official.

And he didn't have to do this. All he needed was to get an account on DList or Manhunt, under the name, say, Large in Lewiston or Pocatello Pork, and he could discreetly arrange for whatever boyfriends he needed.

And the cop wasn't really that attractive, was he, Larry?

George W. Bush in Perspective

2007-08-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

An acquaintance and I were discussing the appalling sump of the Bush presidency not long ago and concluded that the next bumper sticker needed in our community should read "Nostalgic for Nixon."

The Plaid Dragon

2007-08-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, traveling through small towns in eastern Oregon en route to various birding destinations, my family sometimes ate at a restaurant that had a dragon on the sign out front and served Chinese food. However, the dragon was plaid, I recall green and white but that was 35 years ago. The restaurant, with its menu of egg flower soup and chow mein, was called Scotty's.

In 1972, this strange juxtaposition was a true oddity and became a family joke. My mother would sometimes refer to plaid dragons when something seemed out of place. Today, cultural interpenetration has become so everyday that it takes a moment to notice things that hardly seem incongruous anymore. Yesterday, for example, I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Hispanics who referred to the the food (among themselves) in a mixture of languages. I don't know what the Spanish words for kung-pao chicken are, but "pollo" is a word that never saw Shanghai.

In June I was in Barrow, Alaska, which is 60 percent native Inupiat but otherwise boasts a remarkable mix. Right across the street from our motel was an excellent Korean restaurant whose owner (a first-generation immigrant Korean) brought us her home-made kimchee. Then we had lunch at a good Italian restaurant-also operated by a Korean family, serving Swedish tourists, German scientists and all other comers, just down the beach from the local Inupiat whale-roast and no great way from the North Pole.

I should not be surprised. This week I joined the U.S. branch of the Arthur Ransome society, an organization devoted to promoting the wonderful books of the British writer and encouraging children to enjoy the outdoors. The society mentions a bit about its own history, and it turns out that the first branch was not in Ransome's beloved Lake District. It wasn't in England at all. It wasn't even in an English-speaking country. It was in Japan.

West Coast Credibility

2007-08-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Thacker, a professional colleague, was recently interviewed by Julia Silverman, a young reporter from the northeastern part of the U.S. She seemed surprised to have been asked to interview him, and one of her first questions was whether he felt that he had any credibility issues in advancing his cause, because he was from the west coast. He got over his incredulity at such an inquiry quickly enough to provide a suitable answer, and the interview continued.

In fact, he is the leader in his line of work in the U.S. I would call him cutting-edge, which the reporter didn't seem to know, even though that's why she had been assigned by a major news outlet to speak to him. He was so intrigued by her peculiar inquiry that he checked into her background and found that she had gone to an upper-scrapings private eastern prep school and a similarly top-froth college in the northeast. It was clear that her cramped cultural world stopped well short of the Ohio River, unless it allowed for access to Chicago (presumably her Far West) by aircraft. If she is a skier, it's at Mt. Mansfield, Vermont, not Aspen, let alone Sun Valley.

Her story, which was picked up in my local paper, the Eugene Register-Guard, referred to Portland, where Lloyd works, as an "outpost," as though she expected to find smelly trappers hauling beaver pelts through Pioneer Square. In fact, metro Portland is larger than any city in Ohio and all but five in the whole Northeast coastal corridor.

Why is it that the west, home of Apple, Microsoft and many other successful leading organizations, including Oregon's Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Leupold optics and many others, is perceived as having an inherent credibility gap? At the risk of unseemly immodesty, I will note for the record that I am probably the best in the U.S. at what I do, too, and certainly in the top few. I was the only person in my line of work to be invited to represent states at a U.S. Senate hearing a few years back. It seems to me perfectly normal that someone from the northwest would be a national leader in his field.

I wish we could see more, not less, spatial and social diversity in the sources of what we read and hear. I subscribe to many journals, and they all seem to feature the same suspects from the northeast corridor bleating at each other the same lines they used ten years ago. Enough of this east-coast upmanship. We're not impressed. We don't need it any more. Our world looks out on the Pacific future, not down into ancient arguments of the North Atlantic and eastern Europe.

The easterner who wonders why we are not worried about our credibility has nothing that we want. We do not envy her cities, her coastlines, her social culture. We have seen them. We know what they are. If we do not shout our gloriousness so that she knows it in full splendor, it may be because we are not a shouting people, or perhaps we do not need to be found.

Definition

2007-08-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

Covenant: agreement among witches

Cheerleading for Men

2007-08-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

The University of Oregon recently announced that it was going to expand its athletic offerings to include baseball for men and varsity cheerleading for what the university called "women." Federal law requires that such offerings be balanced so that men and women have similar opportunities.

A friend who has observed this situation closely commented to me last week that the university's decision is appalling because cheerleading is a bogus "sport which will prepare young women for lucrative jobs in the adult entertainment industry. A 'sport' which not one of the men I know who have teenage or pre-teenage daughters would allow their daughters to participate in."

In fact, cheerleading is quasi-sexual entertainment for men who think of the participants as "girls." It has nothing to do with women in the same sense that other varsity sports do. This is an almost-humorous fumble for the new athletic director, Pat Kilkenny. I think Kilkenny was a good choice for this job. He gets two strikes before his head is in any jeopardy. This is strike one.

There is a solution. Make varsity cheerleading a men's sport and replace the proposed addition of men's baseball with a genuine women's sport. That would show a true commitment to equality before the law.

We're waiting, Pat.

Foreign Policy

2007-08-03T15:18:00.001-07:00

Bumper sticker seen in Eugene, Oregon today:

"YEEHAW! is not a foreign policy."

Let the South Go

2007-07-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

Why not? Why not let the South go? After all, they wanted to leave and we Yankees made them stay. Big mistake. We should have seen their desire to leave as an opportunity to solve problems. But that was then and this is now. There were problems that needed fixing back in 1860, and I guess we had to keep the South for a while to fix them.

But why keep them now? They would love to leave. That solid block of densely religious, profoundly redneck good-ol-boys would gasp in relief as the weight of the hyper-rational Upper Right Coast, the libertarian West and those good-government Lutherans in the upper Midwest was lifted from their shoulders. We hardly need to mention the Left Coast. They could establish their own national religion and those who didn’t like it would have free passage North.

Of course, poor Utah would be rather stuck, but then so would the non-Southern parts of Florida. But just imagine: the United States of Northern America would no longer have to pay attention to those screeching Miamians who pretend to want to return to Cuba. Missouri would take a deep breath and stay North, though the bootheel might simply join Arkansas for the convenience of all.

The biggest question would be what to do with Texas, but then, the rest of the nation wonders that right now anyway. As I recall, Texas entered the Union reserving to itself the right to split into up to five states if necessary. Well, now’s the time. There’s cottony East Texas, The Valley, the Greater Panhandle, the Plateau and West Texas. East Texas clearly belongs to the Conf…that is, to the South; the Panhandle, Plateau and West are clearly western. And the Valley, well, why not give it to Mexico on a more formal basis? That would be great for international relations and all the spring break parties at South Padre Island would be Cancun del Norte: somebody else’s problem.

Party realignment in the United States of Northern America would be rapid. Democrats would become Labor, Republicans would become what they were back when places like New York and Connecticut elected them, and Libertarians would become a serious force in the interior West and Alaska. Those who couldn’t live in a genuinely secular country could simply move to one of the new Free South states.

Think of the policy issues that would be so much easier if we let the South go. Civil unions, abortion rights and teaching evolution would all be common sense in the North and felonies in the South—so much more simple and no reason for doubt in anyone’s mind. No serious fights over Supreme Court justices (in either country). Northerners could wash their hands of the question of who is responsible for rebuilding New Orleans where a city shouldn’t be. Southerners would not have to care why the money is being spent on a bridge in Alaska instead.

All those upsetting Dixie flags would be nationalized in the South and, as flags of a foreign government, legally restricted in the North. Slavery is out of fashion just now so its return need not concern the black population in the South, where life would go on as badly as it does now. In the North, life for urban black people would continue to be as bad as it is now. Affirmative Action would disappear completely in both countries, neither of which pay any attention to it now.

Think of the border crossing problems that would be solved. People in New Jersey would no longer have to think about what to do with Haitian boat people. They’d be sent to North Carolina to work for $1.49 an hour in the newly rejuvenated textile industry. If they didn’t like it, they could go back to Haiti.

A wetback would be someone who swam the Potomac River, not the Rio Grande. At least the Potomac is still wet. Anyone who crossed the border illegally in West Texas or New Mexico could simply be sent Down The River until they were back in Mexico del Norte east of Falcon Dam.

Words like NASCAR would slowly disappear from the Northern lexicon, as would the phrase “labor union” in the South. Wouldn’t southern employers really be more comfortable on the warm side of NAFTA anyway? Whole new cultural traditions would rise: the World Series would be truly international (Montreal and Toronto being relieved of traditional token roles by the addition of teams from the South).

Then there’s the food. I concede that I would miss good catfish, but then tourists would be welcome (at least married boy-girl Christian tourists) and they could have catfish. But northerners would no longer have to deal with okra, pickled pigs’ feet, grits and other delights of southern cuisine. Pecans are overrated, anyway. Southerners could restrict public consumption of lutefisk and California wines. A brisk trade in corn and rice would be a firm base for commerce, as would the sale of oil, wheat, shrimp, potatoes and many other staples and manufactured goods.

Without the South, the United States of Northern America could make a plausible case for merger with any Canadian provinces that were interested. Quebec could become independent and negotiate with France for control of St. Pierre and Miquelon. British Columbia would fit in just fine with the west coast and most of the provinces would be much more comfortable with the USNA after the South departed.

Conservative Alberta would be left slightly stranded like Utah, but they would have a lot in common with the Dakotas and Montana, and would actually boost the prairie vote in the expanded Congress, as Alberta has significant population centers.

That raises the question of capital cities. Washington has always been a lousy place for a capital, Ottawa not much better, so merger with Canada would allow some compromises. A more central location, less vile summer climate and air service in winter would certainly be issues. A new, smaller federal district between Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska might work well. But where would the South put its capital? The shining star of Atlanta is an obvious choice (Richmond having slipped a little in relative glory in the past 150 years), but I can see the Dallas-Houston axis being a bit uncomfortable ceding place to a comparable rival. I suspect that a compromise with no pretense to secular glory such as Oxford, Mississippi would do very nicely.

So let us end this most unnatural civil union. Release the South from the surly bonds of the Constitution as we know it, and let all peoples breathe free.

The Well-tempered Beretta

2007-07-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This essay originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2007

The recent shootings at Virginia Tech have raised an old question: Should we allow responsible people to own guns to protect themselves and others?

Along with about 7,000 of the 325,000 people in my county, I have a permit from the sheriff to carry a concealed gun. Many more people keep guns in their homes, for which a permit is not required. In fact, no permit is required to carry a gun openly in my state of Oregon, or in many other states, although that practice is so uncommon outside very rural areas that most people don't realize it is legal.

Some of the people at the colleges and universities I visit as part of my job probably didn't know that I carry a gun on their campuses. Now they do. I carry it as protection from criminal attacks, and I couldn't have gotten a permit if I had a serious criminal record or had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems.

I know how to operate my gun safely; I know when I can use it legally; and I never leave it where anybody else could take it. I practice shooting at a range, to make sure that I remain competent. Yet even some of my friends think I am strange, possibly wicked, for owning a gun. I don't understand that view. Surely each person has the right to decide whether to kill or die — and that is the choice we are talking about.

Should I — a 51-year-old bookworm with no significant biceps — have to defend myself with a broom handle if a knife-wielding thug attacks me in my yard? It is true that, given reasonable warning, I might be able to run away. But why make me run off my property merely because some criminal has run onto it? Though I was raised a Quaker, I no longer accept that flight is morally superior to self-defense.

One reason for my decision to carry a gun is that I live in a small city in the mostly rural Western United States. In rural areas, guns are readily available to criminals and unwilling victims alike.

Also common in the West are some of the less congenial animals. Cougars have entered the city where I live twice in recent years; one hid under a house. Black bears are common, although they are usually not dangerous. Usually. Wolverines live at one place where I go birding every year, and where many people camp. I once went to a small store in southeastern Oregon and found a rattlesnake guarding the doorway. Granted, snakes can usually be escorted away with a long-handled push broom (after being swept away from the store, the serpent promptly slithered under the driver's side of my car, where it waited in the shade), but I don't always carry a broom.

Of course, the key issue in most people's minds is whether, in an emergency, it is right to use a gun not against an animal, but against a human. Some people would not shoot another person in self-defense. I would.

The argument that the police can't be everywhere may sound like a cliché from the National Rifle Association, of which I am not a member — not believing in a personal right to own machine guns or armor-piercing bullets. In fact, it is an important reality. There are few police officers in rural America; those we do have (my father was one) are usually located in isolated towns. In some parts of Oregon where I go, the nearest police officer may be 50 miles away, across uninhabited country.

That fact adds to the general libertarian attitude in the West of preferring to solve problems personally. Sometimes government help is not an option: The district attorney of my county announced several years ago that no misdemeanors and only major property crimes would be prosecuted, owing to a lack of resources. In effect, he transferred the economic burden of resolving "minor" crimes from the public coffers to citizens' insurance rates.

There is certainly something macabre about the idea, shown graphically in a cartoon shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings, that we should just let the good guys and bad guys shoot it out. Yet it is even worse to pretend that the good guys and bad guys should be treated as morally equivalent.

The question of who should be allowed to own a gun is a legitimate one, and it is proper to ban private guns from certain places, like courtrooms. But let's argue about gun ownership from a coherent moral and factual position, not from the gut reactions of any one moment, however tragic that moment may be.

On Becoming An Expert, or How I Lenskafied Myself

2007-07-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This post originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2007. It will appear in the Daily Australian in September, 2007.

I am an expert. Everyone tells me so. They tell me that I am an expert on diploma mills and degree fraud because I have been working professionally in that field for many years. I have become either glorious or notorious, depending on whether the person evaluating me got a degree from a genuine college. I am invited to write book chapters and introductions and give speeches and testimony, owing to my general splendor in that arena. However, I don't have any degrees in higher-education administration or policy.

They tell me that I am an expert on birds because I have published three books about them, including co-editing Birds of Oregon (Oregon State University Press, 2003), a five-pounder whose bibliography contains 4,000 citations. I proved that volume's worth and my expertise when asked, by a person who hadn't seen it, if she could carry it in her pocket in the field. I said, "Sure, if you're a large kangaroo or a small aircraft." I don't have any degrees in ornithology, either.

I may be a nascent expert in a few other subjects - time will tell. Or will it? Who makes those decisions, anyway?

To pick an example that may be unfairly obvious, who decided that Noam Chomsky was an expert in everything? Did he simply declare that one day, following which the assembled masses bowed down in unison? How does a renowned professor of linguistics transmute into an expert on world affairs and the human condition? Surely this is a mega-meme of great cultural import: Word has gone forth that Chomsky is an expert.

I can understand that a chemist would be treated as an expert in chemistry, and an architect an expert in design. That approach doesn't quite work, however, when novelists are classified as experts in literature for academic purposes - given that the creative force and the explicative force are profoundly different - and linguists become experts in political sociology.

The relevant difference may be between fields in which clear questions lead to definitive answers, and those in which opinions - that is, individual aesthetic or value judgments - render all truths flexible. The line may be between the sciences and everything else, or it may lie somewhere in the murk.

Chomsky seems to be an expert because he says he is, and enough people agree. It doesn't seem to matter which people, as long as there are enough of them. Writers such as Wendell Berry and Camille Paglia (both favorites of mine) are in a similar category.

Perhaps that is all that is necessary: We can all be the Rula Lenskas of our own domain. Do you recall the late 1970s TV ads featuring a woman who sailed forth - draped in couth, untrammeled by care, her nose in the air – and imperiously announced, "I'm Rula Lenska"? Nobody in the United States had ever heard of her, but her brazen self-declaration of splendor levitated her briefly to the status of cultural icon. In fact, she was and still is a successful if rather offbeat actress in her native Britain, and the cultural joke may be on us: She is technically a Polish countess, though not, as it were, practicing just now.

Can I, if you will, lenskafy myself? To a certain extent, I can; that is how some people develop reputations.

There are limits, of course. I could stroll into Fermilab and declare myself an expert on particle physics, and my friends George Gollin and Heidi Schellman, who really are such, would just look at me oddly, say "whatever," and go about their business. That is because I cannot really navigate the quark jungle. At some point, the waiter brings the check, and the lenskafier has to be able to pay up with appropriate coin.

However, if I declare myself an expert on, say, the poetry of Loren Eiseley, the music of Colin Brumby, or the essays of John Jay Chapman, I cannot be dismissed out of hand. I should at least have an opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. In the fine arts and many of the social sciences, there are no mazes of facts to negotiate, as there would be were I to attempt to feel my way through the glutinous slurry of quarks, leptons, and forces with which physicists work.

In theory, I can be just as much of an expert in more-subjective fields as anyone else. If I say that Brumby's Symphony No. 1 is better music than anything by Virgil Thomson and merits standing alongside the works of Edward Elgar and Samuel Barber, or that Edwin Muir is a better literary critic than Edmund Wilson, I can be challenged but not corrected. Those are judgments of value and quality.

Of course, I might end up like Wilson's fictional Galapagos iguana, which, when questioned by a fictional zoologist, declared that it knew all it needed to of its world, and that it was an über-being. Experts greater than I may pick me up by the tail and carry me off for further study, which is what happened to the iguana in Wilson's tale.

To what extent is being an expert the result of our education and the degrees we hold? My degrees from the University of Oregon are in political science and law. Neither has any special relationship to the arcana of evaluating degree programs, or anything whatsoever to do with the distribution and movements of the spotted towhee.

Alex Walker, one of the more important ornithologists in Oregon history, had a day job at a cheese factory. As far as I know, he had no college degrees at all. Was he not an expert? I met him in 1969, and he certainly seemed like one to me. His data were collected in an appropriate manner, and his articles appeared in the field's major journals.

On the other hand, we now have scores of M.F.A. factories in the United States, pumping out certified experts in poetry, fiction, drama, and that useful catch-all, literary nonfiction. Yet when we look at our best living poets - let me herewith declare that they are W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich- we see no such "professional" degrees. Nor do we see those degrees in most foreign countries. Even worse, some American universities now offer creative-writing Ph.D. programs, which will not give us better writers but merely add an invisible layer of academic dignity to the emperor's current unnecessary garments.

American universities also produce in great numbers that peculiar cultural artifact, the Ed.D., which seems to denote a certified education bureaucrat. Surely we need education bureaucrats in moderation - I am one, and I argue for both need and moderation from personal experience - but we don't need a unique credential for them.

Why do Americans insist on believing that degrees confer worth and qualification? The citizens of other nations are following our example here, as shown in Ronald Dore's excellent The Diploma Disease, but we are clearly the masters.

I have always appreciated Paul Valéry's view: "Let us confess: The real object of education is the diploma. I never hesitate to declare that the diploma is the deadly enemy of culture. As diplomas have become more important in our lives (and their importance has done nothing but grow as a result of economic conditions), the less has education had any real effect. ... The aim of education being no longer the development of the mind but the acquisition of the diploma, the required minimum becomes the goal of study."

Not long ago, I had a submission rejected (by a newspaper editor who has accepted other work of mine) on the ground that I was not enough of an expert on the subject. His concern, at least officially, was not that the piece was wrong or poorly written; it was that if he accepted my commentary as a nonexpert, he'd have to accept lots of other commentaries by
nonexperts, and then where would we be?

He had rejected my attempt to lenskafy myself. Of course, he doesn't have to accept anything he doesn't want to, and it may be that he was sparing us both by not saying that he thought my piece really stank.

I hear the carping already. You object that "lenskafy" is not a real word, and that I have therefore constructed my argument on at least one faulty tower. I disagree. If Richard Dawkins, a nonlinguist, can establish the word "meme" no great number of years back, and I get to use it in this essay, then I, with equivalent professional authority, can create the word "lenskafy" and establish its meaning. I declare myself competent to so expand the English language.

I will even ask an expert linguist to weigh in on my right to do so. Noam Chomsky, where are you when I need you?

A Glorious Wind: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. University of New Mexico Press, 2003

2007-07-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

NOTE: this post originally appeared in the journal Fireweed

Whenever a writer as powerful as Gabriela Mistral is translated by a writer as distinctive as Ursula Le Guin, the result is likely to be unfortunate or glorious. Le Guin taught herself Spanish, though she doesn’t speak or write the language, but poetic translation requires as much esthetic sense as linguistic facility. She recently issued her own translation of Lao Tzu (she does not read Chinese), and has now brought forth not only the largest collection of Mistral’s work ever available in English, but a translation of great beauty, filled with the sensitivity to subtleties of human experience that we have come to expect in her own novels and poems.

Any translation is the creative work of at least two people. The key to a successful translation is to convey as much of the original writer’s meaning as possible without the translator’s own creative personality burning through. In this review I will attempt to convey a sense of how Le Guin approached her task compared to how others have translated Mistral.

There are four previous selections of Mistral’s work in English: a 1957 selection by Langston Hughes, a sizable block published in 1961 by Mistral’s literary executor Doris Dana, Maria Giachetti’s 1993 “Reader” that also includes some prose, and Christiane Kyle’s large-format illustrated edition of The Mothers’ Poems issued by Eastern Washington University Press in 1996. The latter has relatively few poems but is visually spectacular. These four have significant differences in selection and none is complete. Neither is Le Guin’s; with her characteristic directness she simply says that she was unable to translate some of the poems satisfactorily, so didn’t. Nonetheless, this is the largest collection now available in English.

How should a translator approach a poem? With respect, modesty and trepidation, one hopes. Yet excessive caution can drain the life out of a poem and convert it from inspirational art to a technician’s wordpile. We can be thankful that Le Guin knows how to balance respect with boldness, thereby filling the English words with the same earthy fire for which Mistral is known in Spanish. Consider how she handled The Foreigner, a poem that appears in all three of the previous major collections. Le Guin’s version in its entirety reads as follows:

“She chatters about her barbaric seas,
seaweeds and shores that nobody here knows.
She prays to a bodiless weightless god.
She looks so old she might die any moment.
She’s made our own garden alien to us,
planting cactus and saw-toothed grasses.
She breathes life from the desert wind,
and she has loved with a blanching passion
that she doesn’t talk about, and if she did
it would be like the map of another planet.
She’ll live among us eighty years
always as if she’d just arrived,
speaking her panting, whimpering tongue
that nobody can understand but animals.
And here among us, on some night
of fearful agony, with only her fate
for a pillow, she’ll die
a silent death, a foreign death.”

The word “seaweeds” is a good example of Le Guin’s esthetic sense leading her to the right poetic word, not just the right English word. The Spanish in this line is “algas,” which is a general word for algal plants. In theory the Spanish for seaweed should be “algas marinas,” yet in the context of the lines, “marinas” is clearly not necessary because the first two lines are all about seas and shores, thus “seaweeds and shores” is both accurate and poetically superior in English to what two of the other translators used: Giachetti’s “mystic algae and sands” (a strange combination in English: mystic algae?) and Dana’s “sands and algae unknown to me.” Hughes also had the good sense to use “seaweed,” though his line “God knows what seaweeds and God knows what sands” seems overcooked, since the “God knows” parts are not in the Spanish at all.

The very first line gives an idea of what poets do in translation. The poem begins “Habla con dejo... .” which translated literally, means “speaks in a slight accent” (Hughes version) or perhaps more precisely, speaks with an odd accent. Le Guin starts simply “She chatters,” which does not convey the meaning of “dejo” very accurately, yet in the context of the poem as a whole, fits very well, because this foreign woman is babbling away about all these strange things, and “chatters” also suggests that the sounds are less than understandable, much as an exotic parrot or monkey might sound.

Compare this to the technically purer but boring Hughes version or the Giachetti version “She speaks with abandonment” and Dana’s phantasmic excursion: “She speaks with the moisture of her barbarous seas still on her tongue,” far afield from the words of the original but poetically the most vivid. Le Guin has stopped at the edge of the revisionist abyss, Hughes never got close to it, Giachetti is off on an uninspiring side trail and Dana has leapt the abyss in one stride, in effect presenting her own images filtered through the original. Such is translation.

Le Guin does not always choose the word I would choose-for example, her “saw-toothed grasses” is milder than the “claw-like” grasses of Hughes or the dangerously active “clawing grasses” of Dana, which I like best because it fits with the idea of a strange, foreign, uncomfortable, possibly dangerous garden. Giachetti launches into “herbs that rustle in the wind like sails,” which does not convey the image of harsh difference that the original intends, as well as having a curious notion of herbs. I might have said “clutching grasses.” It is a question of what image the translator sees in the original and wants to retain.

Giachetti does hit exactly the right note with her “elvish animals” where Le Guin uses simply “animals,” Hughes “beasts” and Dana the technically accurate “little beasts.” The Spanish word “bestezuelas” clearly implies a diminutive, and the “elvish” provides both the size and the idea that maybe these little creatures are able to communicate in some way with humans a la Narnia, thus “elvish.”

This collection is not the complete poems of Mistral in English that we still await, but anyone who hungers for a broad selection of poetry from Latin America’s first Nobel laureate will find a consistently readable and poetically crisp array in Le Guin’s new translation.

Finally, one of Le Guin’s best poems, “For Gabriela Mistral,” appears in her own collection Sixty Odd, apparently inspired by her work on this translation. Sixty Odd is a fitting companion to her translation of Mistral.

The Risk of Reading

2007-07-30T17:41:00.000-07:00

Our reading choices build our intellectual universe book by book, essay by essay, poem by poem. We who read are faced each day with choices about what, from the extraordinary delta of writing flowing past our islands, to pluck from the flow, set aside and (perhaps) read. How do we decide what is worth the risk of reading?

I use the word “risk” in its Vidalian sense: Gore Vidal has famously written that he only reads fiction by Nobel prize winners, thereby being assured that he will never read a bad book. This is the opportunity-cost approach to reading that brings the word “risk” to mind. We have only a limited number of hours in which to read. Some of that time is necessarily spent reading professional material which, although it may contain kernels or even nuggets necessary for our work, also contains enough mere dicta, the space-filling dreck and overstuffed furnishings of academe, that we don’t generally read it for pleasure or enlightenment.

We are increasingly expected to make no errors in our reading decisions, to avoid side channels and to read the “right” books, especially because we are all short of time. Sometimes these books, the ones “everybody” is reading, prove to be exceptionally good, for example Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Sometimes they leave us wondering “what was that all about?” I have a list of the latter that my lawyer would rather I not publish.

It is true that my own tastes are suspect. After all, I have said many times that Moby Dick is a brilliant story up to the point that whales enter the picture. I know some English professors who agree with me, but they have to pretend that they think the book is great because everyone knows that it is. How can you get tenure if you think Moby Dick is a turkey instead of a whale?

There is a peculiar lack of judgment, or perhaps a lack of willingness to judge, in what we hear of books. It is pretty rare to hear someone say that a book is awful, especially if received wisdom says otherwise. But what is a good book, really? A good book is a book that inspires you, that resonates with you, that conveys a message to you that is effective. What it does for a reviewer at the Times Review of Books, Toni Morrison or President Bush makes no difference.

There is one way to resolve the question of what to read when presented with the stacks of new books that tumble like so much clinker-lava into our mailboxes, doorways and work-spaces. Ignore them. Take a break from the new and return to the books that have made a difference for you in the past. These are the books that have always spoken with a clear voice, have such a rich weave that different threads are visible in each new reading, or seem to adjust their effect successfully when read under different conditions or in different settings.

Most of us have these books to which we return, year after year, when the latest stack looks a lot like slag, the nuggets are oppressed by excessive overburden (I dedicate that phrase to the memory of W. H. Auden, who loved mines and geologic terminology) and we need a refresher in every sense of the word. Thus I return to Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, the essays of John Jay Chapman, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens and Vidal, Asimov’s Foundation series and the mysteries of Arthur Upfield (yes, one can profit from reading mysteries many times, if they glow with setting and humanity as Upfield’s do).

The poetry of Carl Phillips (well-known), Cameron La Follette and Leonard Cirino (‘unknown’) and W.S. Merwin (ultra-famous) meets my needs at a similar level: it doesn’t matter which ones are the “best” or best-known. The nation’s most gifted poets are not necessarily like each other: I might enjoy the rushing surges of Reginald Shepherd one day and the delicate brush-notes of Ce Rosenow the next.

I also think Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1915 children’s story The Lost Prince ought to be considered a classic owing in part to a character called The Rat, and I have read Arthur Ransome’s young adult adventures many times.

Likewise, there are some very well-known and successful writers, e.g. Charles Simic and Ray Bradbury, whose work simply doesn’t reach me. So make your own decisions about my tastes. It is true that we need to emerge from our lexical wombs and try new things now and then, but if reading a book, no matter how Great or touted, results only in a yawn or a who-cares, we are not obligated to salute it.

I recently had occasion to evaluate a formal Great Books program for a college in another state, and the school proposing the program seemed to realize that in this whirling cloud of iPods, MySpace, cellular devices, Blackberries and other electronic shrubbery, they need to do something to make books interesting to students at all. To their credit, they realized that the canon, although mostly traditional, needed to have its windows opened to let some new air in.

What do we recommend to young readers? Too often it is what they “should” read rather what we ourselves actually like and find most enjoyable and enlightening, not just once, but over time. For that reason I don’t usually give young people books from the heavier or more ancient end of the spectrum (except maybe the Satyricon). I give copies of the things that I have the most passion about and that have made the most difference to me. I can’t sound genuinely enthusiastic about anything else.

When I have given a young person one of my own choices, I often find that yes, nineteen-year-olds can and do decouple from their electronic universe to read a good book. There is, of course, an element of self-selection and cherry-picking involved: I encounter few dullards because I choose to avoid them. Yet I was once a fraternity advisor and participated in a round of pass-the-bottle with young people who were largely in the middle and lower register of the academic production line, and some of them read books, too.

We who claim that writing is important too often assume that students’ lack of interest in course-related reading or books means that they are not interested in words in general. That is less true than we sometimes think. If we take the time to offer young people unusual reading choices that reflect our own passion for reading, we’d see that although the text may not be on their iWhatever, it may still catch the sparks that all young people have, and kindle from those sparks fires different from our own, but light, real light, all the same.

The Musical World of Shaun Davey

2007-07-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

The works of Ireland’s Shaun Davey remain oddly unknown in the United States. The U.S. is in general a friendly venue for Celtic-themed music, where musicians such as Alasdair McIntyre and Bonnie Rideout can fill moderate houses and such spectacles as “Riverdance” can draw as well as any major performer. Why, then, is the superb music of Davey never heard except in odd snippets on radio shows such as Thistle and Shamrock?

The main problem is that Davey does not fiddle away his talent, if the expression may be excused, on little pieces and folksy songs. His talents, well-known in Ireland and the United Kingdom, are usually devoted to massive, distinctive works that involve acres of musicians or large blocks of time. In other words, not the kind of music that crosses the Atlantic with a couple of flutes and a harp for a road show. To a great extent, Celtic music is perceived as coterminous with folk music, outliers such as H. H. Hardy excepted (and not often played, either). It is as though the whole notion of an Irish (or Scottish) composer (of anything but “folk songs”) is unnatural.

Consider Shaun Davey’s major works to date. The ones with which I am most familiar are the splendid song cycle “Granuaile,” (1985) about the unorthodox life of Irish seafarer Grace O'Malley, “The Relief of Derry Symphony,” (1990) the set of collated historical songs collectively know as “The Pilgrim” (1983, CD 1994) and the historical setting “The Brendan Voyage” (1980). He has also written extensively for television programs in Europe.

The Brendan Voyage can be thought of as a musical companion volume to Tim Severin’s remarkable 1978 book of the same name. The composer credits this book as inspiring him to write the piece, which is in essence a concerto for Uilleann pipes and orchestra. The book describes Severin’s efforts (ultimately successful) to build and sail a replica of Saint Brendan’s leather boat hypothesized to have sailed from Ireland to the New World around 500 A.D. Davey’s suite, my least favorite among his works, is nonetheless a lush, powerful musical translation of the storms and joys of a small-boat passage across the North Atlantic. Wilder than Debussy’s La Mer, it is full of the swirls and crashes of the northern ocean.

The Relief of Derry symphony represents another historic event, though one that can be authenticated with more precision: the siege of Derry in northern Ireland in 1689, in which the city, defended by the Protestant army of William of Orange against an attack by the Catholic army of James II, held out in the face of starvation until a fleet of ships finally broke throught and saved the city. Stated musically, it is a stunning achievement.

“Relief” begins with a clear trumpet solo and duet with light orchestral support, reminiscent of Tim Morrison’s pure ascendants in James Horner’s score for the movie “Apollo 13.” It then moves into what amounts to a musical recollection of the movement of two armies and the closure of the city, emphasized by the arrival literally from offstage of a pipe band. When the piece was premiered in Derry (it was commissioned by the city for the 300th anniversary of the siege), this band actually arrived from outside the building, and this “they are coming” effect is apparent and effective even on the recording. The closure of the city gates is followed by a period of orchestral blaring and rumbling to represent the ensuing bombardment and siege, which killed an estimated 15,000 people.

It is in the closing segments that “Relief” rises to the level of a masterpiece. First, there is a lovely song called “The White Horse,” sung on the recording by Rita Connolly, which represents the image said to be visible over the city at the height of the siege. This song is a blend of plea and lament for the city’s suffering people, as simple and perfectly imagined as possible. Rising even above this plane, the orchestra drifts into a period of quiet, then the wind changes, and with it, the city’s fortunes.

The arrival of the relief ships, which catch the rising wind and force their way through a boom to reach the city, is represented by steady, increasing surges in the rhythm of the piece, culminating in a glorious ascending theme topped by the ringing of the city’s bells. The piece closes with a quiet concluding air, said by the composer to represent the city’s thanks for deliverance and, at the same time, a wish for peace in modern times.

“Granuaile” is Davey’s song cycle built around the life of one person. The Pilgrim is built around the life of an idea: the early Christian missionaries, for lack of a better term, working within and emanating from the Celtic lands in the early centuries after Christ. It is a rather loose assemblage of twenty-two related pieces, some of which are a little too rambling but several of which are astonishing in their power and grace. Of the latter, I especially like the haunting “Iona,” the amiable roar of “Ymadawiad Arthur,” “Samson Peccator Episcopus” and the concluding sequence, which features the lush purity of Rita Connolly singing “The Deer’s Cry” (imagine a priest alone, sailing in a small ship to a faraway land) and finally the glorious sprawl of “A’Ghrian,” again featuring Connolly but including the entire musical force.

It is the sheer size of the forces required and the unique requirements of the music (The Pilgrim features songs in both modern and historical Celtic languages, and most singers are not trained in Old Cornish) that contribute to the lack of performances in the United States, yet I suspect that “Granuaile” and “Relief of Derry” would be relatively easy to stage, since they require no special forces other than pipes, which are not rare. “Pilgrim” is easily disassembled into a “selections from,” in fact the recordings involve only half of what was actually performed at the Lorient Festival in 1983. The same is true of “Brendan,” though it is less musically interesting.

I hope that the music of Shaun Davey finds and keeps a larger international audience, which it deserves.

Let Today's Children Explore

2007-07-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

Most days at lunch, I hear cell phones go off, or see middle-aged moms dialing in near-desperation to reach their teenage children. These children are not in Darfur or in the path of a tornado, they are nine blocks away at the high school or grocery store. The children also call their parents, though they usually call their friends first.

When did this desperate desire for constant contact develop, and why? It is surely true that security is on people’s minds these days, but the amount of hourly contact between parents and children seems absurdly high. Perhaps it is unreasonable to single out parents, since teenagers have always been phone-happy with each other. Yet it is the claustrophobic embrace of parents that limits children from developing their own judgment.

I know a family in which the only child, seventeen at the time, once ran six miles home—uphill—to ask his father to come help him change a tire rather than figure it out himself or ask anyone in the small, friendly town where the car had its flat. Even today his parents, accomplished professionals, stick to him like remoras in the apparent absence of lives of their own, though at 21 he has now held a number of interesting summer jobs elsewhere in the country and indeed the world.

How did children get so dependent on their parents in today’s society? When I look back into history, I see a different model. I see Robert Ridgway.

Remembered today as one of North America’s preeminent ornithologists from the late 1800s until his death in 1929, Ridgway had corresponded as a boy with naturalists in the biological survey in Washington. He was eventually offered a spot with one of the major natural history research expeditions to the west.

These surveys were sometimes formally associated with commercial needs, indeed, one of the greatest sets of reports from such expeditions is incongruously titled “Pacific Railroad Reports.” Of course, today in Texas the oil and gas industry is regulated by a body called the Railroad Commission, so nomenclatural peculiarity may not have changed much.

Ridgway went west with the expedition in 1867 and spent almost two years collecting specimens and living detached from towns. He was sixteen years old when he left for the west.

If today’s parents allowed their teenage child to go off into a wilderness for two years with a group of people largely unknown, the child would be forcibly removed into state custody, stuffed into a lavender-scented suburban home, and the parents would be charged with a crime. The child would learn nothing except not to trust the government, which I concede is a good start in life.

The argument that today’s world is more dangerous is simply erased by the example of Ridgway. More dangerous than traveling across the Rockies and into the deserts of the interior west on foot and by horse in 1867? That is not a remotely credible assertion. What are the dangers between home and the grocery store? Sure, drugs are fairly easy to come by, but constant parental phone calls will hardly stop that. I have a good friend, a lawyer, who is the very avatar of the hovering mom, and her daughter is a heroin addict today despite all the contact imaginable.

If I may be permitted an example of childhood exploration from the world of fiction, consider We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea (1937), arguably the best novel by Britain’s Arthur Ransome. Owing to a series of perfectly plausible misfortunes, four children, the oldest perhaps 14, are on board a small sailing vessel when it parts company with its anchor in the harbor and drifts out to sea in a fog. From that point on, the children, who have some experience sailing small boats, have to figure out how to stay alive while blowing across the North Sea under poor conditions. They can’t call for help, they just have to figure it out.

Gary Paulsen’s excellent Voyage of the Frog has a somewhat similar scenario involving one boy and one small boat. Paulsen thinks that young people today can rise to the occasion when necessary—indeed he specializes in this kind of literature—but Frog was published in 1989, when cell phones were less ubiquitous. I wonder how he would deal with today’s always-in-touch modes of living? I suspect through the simple expedient of dropping the cell phone overboard; the ocean is a good venue for stories that require something to disappear beyond recovery. Of course, figuring out how to break a hypothetical 2007 Frog’s built-in GPS and homing signal would take more ingenuity.

What we really have today is a change in expectations of young people’s growth and independence of thought and judgment. As a society, we don’t have any broadly-pursued expectations that make sense; what we have instead is a strange mixture and no norms. We have foie-gras parents whose idea of child-raising is to force-feed their child year after year on an oppressive diet of parent-supervised Good Activities, while never really knowing what their child’s interests are and never allowing the child much room or time for spontaneous exploring in new directions.

We have car-key parents who think a car for the kid solves everything. What it does is change the parents’ worries from time-pressure based on constantly lugging little Jane all over town to phone-pressure: “Jane, where are you right now? Are you ok?” We have indetectable parents, of the kind who didn’t know that their drunken sixteen-year-old was trying to kick in my door at 2:15 one Sunday morning. We of course have some parents who truly raise their children and pay attention to their need for growth in experience and judgment.

Judgment is the key. How is a teenager supposed to learn judgment without ever being allowed to exercise any? We have to allow children to make mistakes. How are teenagers who never have wine with dinner at home going to develop an understanding of what alcohol actually does (until they are off somewhere with their new car keys)?

I have a nineteen-year-old friend who has been rock climbing and going into serious wilderness with his peers for many years, and they have developed their judgment through experience. Last year they wisely aborted a plan to summit Mt. Rainier (having climbed most of the way up) because they could tell from experience that conditions were going to get worse.

This experience of how life really works and how the world really is needs to start before children suddenly go halfway across the country to college, or join the army, or sign up for the summer on an Alaskan trawler. Children need to be encouraged to explore the world in all its glory and strangeness early in life, bumping into objects and falling over experiences, so that their judgment is already a sturdy sapling when they suddenly face the winds of independent adulthood.

A tribute to University of Oregon singing group On The Rocks

2007-07-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

The nine knights of midnight went by us tonight,
rode in on meteors, trailing a glow
as they crossed the high pass leaving indigo snow,
escorting Orion right down from the sky
their golden glissando stirred us from sleep

As from subsurface caverns a river burst forth,
saluting the riders with unbridled force,
with pillars of azure, pure magnetized light
reflected in prisms of diamond-cut ice,
the joy of their passage made waterfalls cry;

We gathered nearby on the shuddering ridge,
heard the cedars step back with a great sigh of stone
as nine ebony steeds newly wreathed in fresh stars
rode down the stunned mountain with blazing red manes
their cinnamon wake-blast a full mile wide

The riders came on, too bright for the eye,
rejoicing, they unstopped celestial pipes,
their rainbow aurora rang out to the peaks
as a peal of white horns between torchlight and steam
called out to the Earth for its blessing and then

From the well of creation the voice of the deep,
the long bronze subecho of harmonic time
boomed down the canyon of oncoming day
bringing the dreamfall, a glitter of bells
to welcome the riders and offer fair winds

The air tart with ozone, they thundered on past
leaving us sleepless with wonder and awe
for they sail at dawn for the nine hundred isles
escorting their prince to a new hunting ground
where the cold barren dust will ignite at the sound.

Ned Rorem and the Future of Song

2007-07-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

I am not sure why I did not come across the writing and music of Ned Rorem until I was 47. I had seen his name occasionally over the years with no particular spark. A couple of years ago a reference to one of his diaries—I can’t even remember where I saw it—finally registered with enough effect and I dug up a used copy of the New York Diary at a local bookstore. By the time I was 30 pages into it I knew that I would have to read all of them, and listen to his music. I have now read many of his books and own several of his music CDs.

The recent release of both his latest set of essays (Facing the Night, Shoemaker & Hoard 2006), a collection of his letters to various famous and less famous people (Wings of Friendship, Shoemaker & Hoard 2005) and not long ago a collection of his earlier works (A Ned Rorem Reader, Yale 2001) provides an opportunity to look at his life works as a whole. I have to say “works” rather than “work” because Rorem, in his own words, is a generalist in the European mode, not an American-style narrow specialist. He does more than one thing well.

Rorem is frustrated at the prospect of being remembered more as a writer than as a composer. I lost track of the number of times in his writing that he declaims “I am a composer who also writes, not a writer who also composes.” But that is not how history works, and history won’t weigh in with any definitive trends for another twenty years or so. It might be more accurate to say that his writing is likely to survive in toto as a body of literature read and discussed for decades to come, while his music is likely to be remembered in bits and pieces, with much of it fading out over time. Yet that is what happens to most composers and to most music. If it does not happen to all of his music and all of his written work, he will be among the rare few.

For example, who outside Australia knows well the gorgeous work of Colin Brumby, whose Symphony No. 1, clarinet works and Piano Concerto ought to be played by all of the world’s major orchestras? Is Shaun Davey, whose Relief of Derry Symphony and Granuaile song cycle deserve great acclaim, a household word in the musical community outside the Celtic world? How many American concertgoers have heard the splendid Sonata da Chiesa of Adolphus Hailstork, from our own country?

Music is a world in which “modern” has become synonymous with “unpleasant,” which leads orchestras wanting an audience into the closed loop of miscellaneous dead Germanic tunemongers, with an admixture of other dead Europeans (what to call them – a froth of French, a roulade of Russians, a briskness of Brits?) and only the occasional living composer, generally the unpleasant ones. There are exceptions to the rule of modern unpleasantness: in addition to Brumby, Davey and Hailstork, John Tavener, Arvo Part and William Hawley come quickly to mind.

Rorem is fortunate in that during his lifetime his music has been played fairly often, and some of his work that capsized instantly upon completion (e.g. his First and Second symphonies) has recently been refloated with considerable approbation. The Bournemouth Symphony recently released the first commercial recording of those two symphonies (as well as the Third, which had a brief life thirty years ago) directed by Jose Serebrier, and these works are astonishingly fresh and full of zing, a perfect blend of identifiable melody and modern intonation. This recording was nominated for three Grammys.

Rorem asks that he be first judged as a composer and I can say that I am very glad he is one, because his best works are likely to last for a while and have certainly brought me a lot of pleasure. That is all most composers can expect. Nonetheless, I think the diaries will, over time, be viewed as a unique literary masterpiece, burning in the dim corridors of historic time with a brighter flame than the music.

What is it about these diaries that makes them so appealing? There is a certain flavor of celebrity, of course, since Rorem (still composing and reasonably spry at 83 as I write this) fell in with a lot of well-known people in Paris, New York and elsewhere in the 1950s. Hearing of his interactions with people such as Jean Cocteau, Edward Albee and Leonard Bernstein, often when the Famous Person was not yet famous or was just getting to be known, has a certain sparkle. Rorem’s willingness to state the, how can I put it, bare facts as he saw them, even when those facts are a bit more colorful or just more visible than what we usually see, adds spice to the overall tone.

Most of all, there is a sense of seeing sixty years of history open leaf by leaf, progress season by season. It is simultaneously a personal history, a history of 20th Century music and a broader history of changes in American society, all at once, like the twining of cultural DNA from one horizon to the other, with some recognizable patterns but a lot of change and unique perceptions.

In its personal aspect, the diaries are also a history of gay culture. Rorem grew up in an unusual environment for the mid-century in that his Quaker parents were apparently not too troubled by the fact that he was gay, or at least accepted it with grace. It is interesting to compare his relatively open experiences to the more constricted social beginnings of contemporaries Gore Vidal and James Merrill. Vidal grew up inside the American political establishment, choosing to write for a living (a living that was a little sparse from time to time) rather than accept the horror of teaching. Merrill did not really have to work for a living (Merrill as in Merrill Lynch) but became a respected and prolific poet. Both became open about their sexuality in a rather careful, restrained manner, though Vidal wrote about homosexual attractions early in his career.

Rorem, on the other hand, wrote matter-of-factly about the joys and disappointments of his own activity chasing men decades before such revelations were common. He did not belabor the issue, it was just part of his life so it came up naturally in his writings without taking over the story. It is that matter-of-factness that makes these works stand out in the period in which they were written.

What I find most resonant about Rorem’s diaries is his frequent descriptions of how the creative process works (or doesn’t work). He does not discuss the process of writing music in much detail, but the various issues that any creative person faces, and the peculiar misconceptions of friends and family about that process, make for a table-pounding “right on!” sort of reading experience. The fact that I am also a gay person raised in Quaker meeting, as he was, makes this sense of having found a philosophical uncle all the more rewarding.

A good example of his perfect evocation of the necessities of the creative process can be found where he refers to a friend who thought that the sights and sounds of Morocco must have been a great inspiration to his work, since he did so much early work there while vacationing, in a manner of speaking, from his nominal residence in southern France. In fact, the great advantage of working in Morocco, in addition to a Gide-like exploration of the joys of young male Moroccans, was that no one could find him or distract him there, so he could pull the shades against the glories of Morocco and actually get some composing done. This is precisely the experience and reaction that I have had and that many of my friends who write and paint have had, to which I can only say “preach it, brother Ned.”

For anyone who wants to experience the extraordinary breadth of human experience, including the greatest joys and the most horrifying losses, through the eyes and ears of a great writer and great composer, read the sixty-year saga of Ned Rorem in his own words, and listen to the generations of songs, symphonies and other music that this unique American voice has brought us.

Returning to the world of American song in which Rorem was the leading composer for many years, I listen and I hear a universe utterly changed, and yet there are niches in which song, in a form that Rorem would recognize, though different from his own, is flowering. A few years ago I heard the University of Oregon’s all-male singing group On the Rocks while driving home one night. Local station KLCC played their version of Dire Straits’ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and I had no idea who was singing or where this amazing a cappella version of the song had come from. I called the station and they said that it was a local group called On the Rocks. The station had a CD but seemed to have no idea where it had come from or where to get it.

The next day I went into a music store near the University and mumbled something to the clerk about the song. Before I was finished with my incoherent tale of music found and perhaps lost, he said “On the Rocks” and got a copy of their debut CD off the rack for me. These CDs had been flying out the door all morning, and turned out to be the highest-selling CD for the store all spring. I personally bought a dozen as gifts and an additional fifteen for people at my office who had heard my copy. In an extraordinary violation of professional norms, I even called my staff into my office on some pretense, closed the door and played it for them on my computer’s reasonably good speakers.
What is so special about OTR, as they are often called? When I first heard and saw them, the group consisted of nine men ranging in age from 18 to 22, and they sing songs. Well, so do lots of groups. Someone who had not heard them asked me “is that, like, barbershop?” Ah, no. In fact when I invited one of the members whom I knew slightly to the regional barbershop contest—held about five blocks from his house—he answered with great courtesy that he did not think any of the members would be interested.

College musical groups are common. A cappella is much less common, and least common of all is for a group of young singers to make their own splendid arrangements of very recent popular songs—sometimes songs that had only been on the radio in the original version for a matter of months—retaining the original content of the song but adding their own unique silk and fire to produce something that the university’s other singing groups simply describe with the phrase “they’re hot.” Today there are other such groups nearby; I recently heard the UO women’s group Divisi, Southern Oregon University’s Dulcet and Oregon State University’s Outspoken. Many other colleges have them: for an astonishing listening experience, buy a copy from iTunes of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” performed by Northwestern University’s group ‘Freshman Fifteen’. This, their own arrangement, simply assassinates most other performances—and there are dozens. Buy the whole CD. Groups at Yale, Cornell and Michigan have been especially good in recent years.

OTR has made their own arrangements of the song “Hear You Me,” originally by Jimmy Eat World, “Demons” by Guster, “Street Spirit” by Radiohead, Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and “In the End” by Linkin Park, as well as “Romeo and Juliet” and others. They have also recorded Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Billy Joel’s touching “Lullaby.” I had never heard many of these songs before I heard the OTR versions; indeed I did not know that many of these musical groups existed. Why not? Because I am, musically, an old person at 51.

Even if I had known of them, I would not have listened to their music, simply because people do not generally listen to popular music except for that of their own generation and, if unavoidable, of their children’s generation. Since I have no children and do not own a television, there is no venue in which I would hear this music. So at the very least the “transliteration effect” of my local singing groups OTR and Divisi has allowed me to experience music that I never would have heard. Barbershop, which my brother sings and I enjoy in moderation, is essentially a fixed style. Its generational crossover is more limited than that of the collegiate acappella groups, which are
the true transfer agents of modern American song.

Rorem has commented that it is inappropriate to compare the new music of his generation (generally, the first half of the 20th century, perhaps including the 1950s) to modern popular music because the former is, if you will, classical, while the latter is not. Thus he objects to, for example, comparing Aaron Copland and Bob Dylan because of the nature of their music in a technical sense. I follow this argument and agree with it up to a point, but the question and its answer needs to take into account the changing role of music and songs in society.

My late mother was exactly Ned Rorem’s age; she was born one day later. In her youth, adults knew lots of songs from earlier days as well as from their own generation, and in general young people heard the same songs as adults, whether they learned them or not. My great-grandmother’s Liberty Chorus Song Book, issued in 1919 by McKinley Music Co. of Chicago, was used by my grandmother’s family and recently came to me. Its editor, Anne Shaw Faulkner, also author of “Music in the Home,” closed her introduction to the Liberty Chorus songs with the following declaration about a man returning from World War I: “he will want to sing and to have his loved ones sing at home, at school and in all community gatherings.”

These were not only pre-headphone years but almost pre-radio years, with limited offerings available. The first commercial radio station was licensed in 1920, only three years before my mother was born. The phonograph, today almost an artifact, had just switched to “long-play” 33 rpm vinyl from hard 78 rpm “breakables” in my childhood. It was first patented in 1877, so two generations before my mother’s had heard music either only as live performances or as families listening to early discs. Listening to music on phonographs required electricity (not uniformly available in rural areas) and quite a bit of effort since the discs were hardly compact: the ones I saw at my grandmother’s home were about half an inch thick and contained very little music, requiring multiple discs for even shorter pieces.

Today, members of the same family typically have separate musical lives, and the song, as a “high” art form that Rorem knew and wrote for to great effect, has largely been supplanted by the song designed to appeal either to everyone (often in the form of advertising jingles) or to a specific target audience (country, rock, rap). Loved ones generally don’t sing together at home or anywhere else, let alone at community gatherings.

If a single vocal form that meets the esthetic needs of all generations can be found today, it is a cappella singing by truly creative groups like OTR and its collegiate compatriots. Once when I attended an OTR/Divisi show, the age range in my own contingent of about 15 people was nine to 83, and the entire audience reflected this astonishing mix. I do not see that cross-generational appeal (outside music schools) elsewhere in vocal music.

Before OTR became well known at the University of Oregon, I attended one of their shows and stood in line next to a couple of college-age women. They had heard of OTR and a friend had invited them, but they had not actually heard the group. They were discussing the group and asked another person in line what kind of instruments they used. “None” was the response, to which one of the young women looked at the other in amazement and said “but what do they do?” They sing, and singing is not called the “first art” for nothing.

One of my former co-workers, who is retired and lives her musical life mainly within the classical and operatic tradition, attends many OTR and Divisi shows. Her favorite song in their repertoire is “Romeo and Juliet,” with Jeremy Davidson’s supple, down-home baritone solo, available on OTR’s first CD. After she had been to a couple of their shows and was singing the song in the hallway, I asked her what she thought of the Dire Straits original, which is a favorite of mine. She looked at me and said:
“Who is Dire Straits?”

Yes, modern American song is different from that of Rorem’s generation, but it is in good hands.

Licensing Folly

2007-07-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

I recently saw an advertisement in my local daily newspaper in which the person providing the service described herself as a ‘licensed aesthetician.’ This is the pinnacle, no, the ultimate sinkhole, of American commercial nonsense. That such a phrase would be used in advertising on purpose suggests several things, all of which are bad. First, the advertiser thinks or pretends that the phrase has meaning. Second, the potential customer may be hornswoggled into thinking that it means something. Finally, the casual reader may believe that the philosophical concept of esthetic judgment is subject not only to objective evaluation, but to control by either a guild or the government.

In this case the term “aesthetician” refers to an exalted subspecies of the beauticians who paint women for a living, but consider even the generic term. What is a “beautician,” anyway? As far as I can tell, it is someone who paints women in order that the women will differ from each other visually within a socially acceptable range of colors and patterns. In our society, women are still differentiated by their appearance, men by their money. Therefore every community has shops where women are painted to differ from each other and men are trimmed to resemble each other, so that we can evaluate each other properly.

One cannot blame the newspaper that carries the ad: the fact that such an ad appeared at all suggests that perhaps the newspaper is in fact attuned to its community, saying more about the nature of the community than of the media. Finally, as a libertarian I must allow fools their choices. I am tempted to run such an ad myself (having first issued myself a license) and see which licensing agency emerges to send me a cease-and-desist letter. My attorney has a feral grin at the prospect, and the entertainment value alone …but I will resist.

What will we see next, licensure for poets (“Mr. Whitman, may we see your license please? We’ve heard some queer things about your work”) or certificates to practice art (“Ms. O’Keeffe, the Committee on Artistic Standards finds your work to be, well, too negative. The beef industry has some concerns about all these skulls….”) ? With luck, the Committee might lumber in its ponderous propriety too close to Justice at the Supreme Court building and be found mysteriously headless on the sidewalk the next morning, but we should not rely on divine intervention when bad ideas seep into public policy and societal norms.

The idea that esthetics can be subject to oversight and professional judgment is a subdisease embedded in our society’s extraordinary overreliance on paper credentials instead of people’s actual skills and abilities. John Keats's 1965 book, The Sheepskin Psychosis, was one of the first to point out the phenomenon. A more recent treatment of the issue, Alison Wolf’s Does Education Matter (2002), makes quite clear that many assumptions about the value of education as such in order to ensure higher earnings are simply false. Ronald Dore’s The Diploma Disease (1976, revised 1997) discusses this issue by comparing the British education and economy to that in several other nations.

The bottom line is that educational credentials, be they silly certificates or non-research doctorates, are largely a proxy for intelligence, upbringing, perseverance and attitudes, not in most cases a skill base, and because of this, employers use education as a legally acceptable screening device. Schools and colleges in many cases simply add a gilt stamp to what amounts to a pre-selected set of people.

As W. H. Auden put it, “A teacher soon discovers that there are only a few pupils whom he can help, many for whom he can do nothing except teach a few examination tricks, and a few to whom he can do nothing but harm.”

Artificial reliance on paper credentials (a license to commit esthetic judgment is simply the most absurd current example) does not serve a public interest, and society should stop supporting it except in rare instances. There is a difference between a degree and a skill set, a diploma and experience, a paper credential and good judgment, a certificate and a knowledge base. A degree can serve as a proxy for some portion of those desirable characteristics, but it remains no more than a proxy. Let our society stop asking for paper credentials and start looking at what people can do. And let us drop down the nearest oubliette the idea that there can be such a thing as a licensed aesthetician.

new blog

2007-07-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

This blog will become active around August 1, 2007.