Nixon Now!

Rick Perlstein shared this link on Facebook. Campaign songs from former President Richard Nixon's political career proposed as a soundtrack for Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008).

Warning: these songs may induce nausea, particularly for anyone old enough to remember Nixon.

Book Prices: Two Artifacts

Reading through one of my old journals in the quest for a poem that I wrote eighteen to twenty years ago because my nineteen year old son said some things that reminded me of its central metaphor (dissipation of smoke), I stumbled across an entry that contains a list of books purchased, retail outlets, and total price spent over approximately one week. The number of texts acquired in that week seems excessive until I compare in to the number I have acquired in the past week.

One book appears in both lists.


Journal Extract

4 January 1990

I've gone hog wild the past few days in purchase of books. In San Francisco, at City Lights Books: Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone, trans. Paul Bowles; at Manzanita Used Books, downstairs from John and Kay*: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought; at the AHA [American Historical Association] conference: Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers; and Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson.

On the trip back to Washington at the Trees of Mystery Gift Shop: Marcelle Masson, A Bag of Bones: Legends of the Wintu Indians of Northern California.

Back in Seattle [before the trip back to the eastern part of the state and Washington State University where I was in my first year of PhD work], at Target: Gary Larson, The Prehistory of the Far Side; and Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time (which I read that night); at Shorey's: Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men; and Click Relander, Drummers and Dreamers; at Left Bank Books: Louise Erdrich, Jacklight; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; and at the University Book Store: Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe; and Claude Levi-Strauss, Triste Tropiques. The total price of these books was approximately $125.00.

Before this list in my journal, I wrote a paragraph that connected a comment in the last book listed to a book by one of my graduate studies professors.

At the end of "Sao Paulo" in Triste Tropiques is a description of attitudes among students at a freshly founded university that would bear juxtaposition with [Albert J.] von Frank's The Sacred Game. Levi-Strauss describes his students as hungry for new ideas to adorn rather than to inform. This hunger for intellectual adornment rather than eagerness to understand the development of the ideas is a form of provincial mentality. However, Levi-Strauss should not be construed as simply claiming that the European scholar's quality of mind is superior. Earlier in his narrative he describes how his own education taught him to reduce all systems to a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (he does not use these terms).


Second Artifact

At the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend, my wife and I went to Best Buy to look at memory chips for my camera and the Nook and Kindle readers. We left the store with none of these, but with two new iPads and some of the gear designed to protect them and enhance their use. Naturally, the iBooks reader was my first download from the App Store. It comes with A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh. I've added thirty-eight more books since then, including (I will not list them all) Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century; Ludvig von Mises, Economic Freedom and Interventionism; John Adams, Revolutionary Writings; Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne -- Complete; James Joyce, Ulysses; Ambrose Bierce, Write It Right (I own this in paperback, too); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (I also have the Library of America hardback edition); Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (I have a newer translation in paperback); William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room; and Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (see the list above).

The iBooks reader is one of six book reading and storage apps that I have installed so far. In the Kindle Reader, I have nine full books and three samples in addition to the free dictionary that came with it. These include Memoirs of William T. Sherman (about $2); William Gibson, Zero History (at ~$14, my most expensive purchase out of the approximately $35 that I've spent on books the past week); Greg Gibson, It Takes a Genome; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species; Karsten Muller, The Chess Cafe Puzzle Book; and the two volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (another text that I have in paperback).

In the Nook Reader, I have Bram Stoker, Dracula; and Rudyard Kipling, Kim. In other readers, I have such texts as Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; Fernando Pessoa, 35 Sonnets; Sun Tzu, The Art of War; James Wilson, Collected Works, vol. 1; Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; and quite a few more.


Accounting

Are books more expensive now than they were twenty years ago?

In the last days of 1989 and the first few of 1990 I drove from San Francisco to Seattle and managed to acquire fifteen books for $125. In the waning days of summer in 2010, after acquiring a device that cost some $600+ I managed to acquire fifty books or so for less than $40 without leaving my living room.


* John and Kay were friends of one of my professor's that put myself and another graduate student up while we attended an academic conference. It was in their home that I heard for the first time Allen Ginsberg reading Howl on vinyl.

Addendum: my wife reminded me that iBooks comes pre-installed on the iPad.

The Place of Democracy

A third place must be within walking distance from home, a place where one feels valued as more than a faceless consumer, where socializing, loitering and lingering are recognized as social assets, not commercial liabilities, where conversation and camaraderie prevail, where status and pretension have no place and where the hot political issues and the latest football scores gain equal attention.
Roberta Brandes Gratz, New York Times Book Review

A third place, as Ray Oldenberg defines it, may be a tavern or coffee house, a beauty parlor or general store, a diner or soda fountain. All these places where neighbors gather are essential to democratic society.

Instead we have today well planned and orchestrated "town hall" meetings that are fracturing as the disenfranchised--who want exactly the same thing as the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC--speak up out of turn, heckle, and yell, and generally create a disturbance. Ray Oldenberg, author of The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How they Get You Through the Day (1989), might suggest that the eruption of these protests stems from the same trends that gave us the mortgage crisis. Oldenberg's target is magadevelopment projects "promoted erroneously as community revitalizers" (Gratz). One thinks of Applebee's, billed as "your neighborhood bar and grill," and often planned as an integral piece of suburban development projects that "stifle democratic socializing and foster instead separation, isolation and alienation" (Gratz).


Serendipity

I have not read Oldenberg's book, but my memory of this book review has been stirred at least once every year in the past twenty years. Two weeks ago I found my old and tattered copy of "The Saloons of a Free People," New York Times Book Review (24 December 1989), 2. After writing about the taverns of graduate school and discussions of The Journal of John Woolman in a graduate seminar (see "The Greek Chorus"), I unpacked, sorted, and threw away almost the entire contents of an old file of miscellany left over from a rushed packing of things that seemed important at the time during a previous move. In that file were some notes from my reading of Woolman right next to this book review. I found the juxtaposition serendipitous.

The day I read that review remains clear in my mind. My siblings and I had gathered with our children and parents for the Christmas holiday at a time-share condo lent to my mother by one of her co-workers. The condo was on an island in south Puget Sound. We had been told to bring apples because the deer would eat them out of our hands. My youngest brother was able to get one deer to take the apple out of his mouth. I had to leave the gathering for a few hours on Christmas Eve to return my children to their mother in Seattle. On the return trip, I took the Bremerton Ferry back to the west side of the Sound. I recall feeling a sense of tranquility that night as the ferry pulled away from Seattle--tranquility was rare enough in the wake of my divorce to be memorable. On Christmas morning I enjoyed a quiet walk on the beach.

Perhaps this book review caught my eye because the coffee houses and taverns of graduate school were a little slice of paradise. They were not places of tranquility, but conflict. The conflict was much cherished and cemented me to my peers. We lived to argue politics and aesthetics, philosophy and current events. We watched the horrors of the San Francisco earthquake that fall on the television in The Cavern; there we argued about President Bush's invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, speculating about the significance of Bush's old CIA connections; and we continued our debates from the class where we read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, selections from Cotton Mather's Magnalia, John Woolman's and Benjamin Franklin's autobiographies, the Declaration of Independence, and other seventeenth and eighteenth century texts.

After the holiday with my family, I met up with Daggy and Wang in Seattle's U-District for a two day drive south to San Francisco, where the three of us were joining thousands of history professors and graduate students at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Because the United States was at war, I draped a US flag over the back seat of my Dodge Aries. This patriotic icon enlivened the discussions with Daggy (a German student studying here) and Wang (from China and hoping to remain in the US after graduate school). "I just don't understand you Americans and your flag," Daggy stated more than once.

I bought some books at the conference, and a bunch more when the spring semester started in January. The review of Oldenberg's book got filed away so I would not forget it. Yesterday, I finally ordered the book for $2 plus shipping from one of those megadiscount stores with warehouses in Seattle, Atlanta, Portland. The book may prove dated after these twenty years, but I plan to read The Great Good Place.


Un-American Activities

I think town hall meetings are as American as apple pie. ... They [protesters] had a right to express themselves. I wished that we'd have had a little bit more opportunity to discuss things before they started to boo. But they're all kind of performance art and they're all kind of opportunities of guerrilla theater to affect political issues and to make an impression, and I felt like it was a good discourse.
Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN), Quoted in "In the Crosshairs of Un-American Town Hall Protests"

Thanks to a poor choice of words by San Francisco's Representative in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in USA Today, the focus of health care reform has degenerated into polls and pundits concerned with the merits of protest. FOX News host Greta Van Susteren led off her interview of Representative Cohen with a question that has nothing to do with health care. She asked about the protests rather than the bill. When he managed to squeeze in some comments regarding the substance of the bill, and the protesters objections to things that are not in it, she asked whether he had read the whole text. Then, she interrupted his answer.

There was an anti-government individual who is an activist who circulated petitions on the e-mail to encourage people to come and to be concerned about some of the myths, the ideas that Congress had opted out, which is not true, that abortion was part of this, which is not true, that there would be -- seniors would be hurt by a diminution in health care, which is not true, that there would be euthanasia, which is not true. But all these things were used to get people out and people came there with those things in mind. And that's what they wanted to cheer and jeer about.
Cohen, "Crosshairs"

Van Susteren asked about the text's length, whether the Congressman had read it, and seemed disappointed that he had. She shifted to his understanding--revealing her own difficulties with a complex bill--so she could interject her argument that laws should be simple and short.

You know, smart people can write things so the rest of us can understand it. And here's the problem. If it is so complicated, the people down the road who are going to have to implement it, you know, that's going to be even a bigger nightmare and they're not going to get it right unless you guys write a bill that's very plain and very easy to understand so we can all understand it. I actually believe you can if you want to.
Greta Van Susteren, "Crosshairs"

Cohen was prepared and hit back with another talking point of the Right: activist judges. If a bill eschews technical language, it empowers the courts to interpret the imprecision of simple language. That's not something Van Susteren and her colleagues at FOX News want to endorse.

That might be how it plays in coffee houses too.

The Greek Chorus

John Woolman utterly lacks a sense of his own depravity.
James Stripes, Fall 1989

Professor Alex Hammond sought to provoke discussion with a question along the lines of how The Journal of John Woolman (1774) differed from the texts we had been reading. We were near mid-semester and had devoted the first half of this Seminar in Seventeenth and Eighteenth American Literature to the writing of the Pilgrims and Puritans--from William Bradford's Of Plimouth Plantation (c. 1650) and Anne Bradstreet's poetry to selections from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." For the bulk of the next ninety minutes, we debated Puritan ideology again--some of my peers thought we were finally leaving that behind--and focused upon my perceptions of Woolman's self-righteousness.

John Woolman was a Quaker, and had been among the earliest prominent Americans to speak out against the institution of slavery. Perhaps Hammond thought our discussion might focus upon his enlightened liberalism, but my comment drove us back into the darkness of New England Puritanism. In comparison to the theological orthodoxy and intellectual vitality of the Puritans, Woolman represented a fall from grace: he was a naive simpleton. Whatever merits might have existed in Quaker theology and the beginnings of the anti-slavery movement on the eve of the American Revolution, his anthropology was deficient--he lacked accurate understanding of human depravity.

At least that's how the discussion began that night.

The Puritans held no such illusions. Several weeks earlier, perhaps the second or third week of class, the assigned reading had been Bradford's history. One of my classmates celebrated the author's report on the case of Thomas Granger. Although the Puritans may have picked up a reputation in the intervening years for sexual repression, they did not shrink from public discussion of the details of buggery. There was no question that the teenage Granger was to be put to death as a consequence of his conviction, but biblical law demanded also the death of those animals which he had known carnally. The beasts were paraded before the court so the youth could positively identify "a mare, a cowe, tow goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and a turkey." It was hard for him to identify precisely which sheep, Bradford tells us.

Before class I had confessed to a couple of my fellow students that I did not get through the reading assignment. My claim, perhaps true, was that Woolman's sense of his own righteousness rendered me nauseous. Perhaps my embrace of the Puritan doctrine of total depravity was nothing more than a typical student strategy for avoiding a discussion for which I was not prepared. I had read the better part of The Journal of John Woolman, but not all of it. Graduate students, like undergraduates, occasionally skimp on reading assignments. For those of us in English and history--my degree program bridged the two--each class was generally one book per week (we usually carried three such courses at a time, and they all required research papers on top of the reading). Most folks cannot read that much day after day, week after week, without occasional lapses. However, my peers held the belief that I always finished the assignments. One or two knew the truth that night.

During the break--these three hour classes always had a ten minute reprieve--two of my buddies took me to task for dominating the discussion of a book I hadn't read. That week I had been busy grading papers for the courses I taught, preparing the research for my paper on Cotton Mather as the father of American Studies, and visiting my children three hundred miles away--my divorce would soon be final. I did not start reading Woolman until the day class met, and was not able to get through the whole in one sitting.


A Corner of Paradise

My future wife, the writer Claudia Ann Peck (1952-1996), had called us the Greek Chorus because we sat together at one end of the long table and often seemed to speak as a group. We thought were were smarter than our peers--Thad certainly was. Claudia was one of the first in class to suffer our ire when she made up some sort of Jungian nonsense in answer to the professor's question regarding Puritan notions of type and antitype. Professor Hammond habitually assigned individual report topics to each student in his graduate seminars--a nifty means of assuring that long discussion classes would not break down in embarrassing silences because no one had anything to say. Claudia had missed the previous week's class to attend her sister's wedding and did not know that she was responsible for this topic. Although, as her mother would tell me later, "Claudia is from the Bible Belt," she had learned little of Calvinism growing up in east Tennessee.

She did not comprehend the New England Puritan understanding of biblical prophecy, but she was well versed in Carl Jung's notion of archetypes. Her answer drew a fair amount of disdain from the neo-Calvinists at the other end of the table. We were rude. During the break, she let us have a piece of her mind. I listened, apologized, and the courtship began. Mark and Thad had run off to get some coffee or bags of salty snack.

Thad, Mark, and I had established ourselves as Calvinists--secularized though we were--and approached the works of the eighteenth century colonists with a reverence and enthusiasm rather unusual for our time and place. Mark had been raised in the Dutch Reformed church and attended Calvin College for his undergraduate degree. No longer a practicing Christian when I met him, he remained a Calvinist in much of his thinking. Thad's undergraduate degree was in Philosophy, he was something like 22 years old--the average age in my graduate program was early 30s--and seemed to understand everything that he read. Some of my peers that were frustrated by my ability to bring Bible passages into discussions about anything and everything--I had read the Christian scriptures cover-to-cover at least five times in the early 1980s--were nonetheless comforted to believe that I no longer considered the text authoritative. Meanwhile, my patience for the politics of the Christian Right was growing thinner day by day.

Even so, I could discuss unconditional election as if I embraced the doctrine, and I believed in human depravity--Danny DeVito's famous expression of this perspective in The War of the Roses hit the theaters that winter.

At fifteen, I became an evolutionist, and it all became clear. We came from mud, and after 2.8 billion years of evolution, at our core is still mud. Nobody could be a divorce lawyer and doubt that.
Gavin (Danny DeVito) in The War of the Roses (1989)

DeVito expressed this mud at our core as evidence of science, but I heard it as religious doctrine--the anthropology of the human condition in moral terms. The movie was released near the end of my own messy divorce, and I was looking for secular expressions of my dark understanding of human moral potential: the Reagan years had demonstrated at least that much, and now the elder Bush had sold his soul to become the high priest of Voodoo Economics.

But, I was in paradise! In graduate school, we read constantly and our social lives consisted of extended discussions and debates about our reading. A typical English graduate seminar met from 6:00pm to 9:00pm in a classroom with two eight foot tables set end to end. A dozen or so of us would sit around these tables with the professor at the head and argue our points with ample references to the text(s) in question. After class ended, the professor would go home, but most of the students would hike the one block to the nearest pub where the arguments would continue another several hours over pitchers of stout or ale. There discussions of Puritan theology often gave way to arguments concerning the proper pronunciation of Kierkegaard and just pricisely what he was advocating at the edge of the precipice. On weekends in the same tavern, English graduate students competed in the recitation of poetry--as the beer flowed, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were recited in Middle English.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
...

Notebook Artifact: Summer 1995

Written in a spiral notebook 28 June 1995, Fort Loudon Lake, Tennessee.

What we call history and what we call the novel are more recent than what we call the Columbian encounter. When Natives embrace writing and written genres, we cannot affirm that what they embrace is wholly Western because these forms emerged in a world deeply infused with economies and ideologies formed in contact with multiple non-European worlds. (Even the Renaissance and subsequent Reformation owe much to the deepening interchange between Christian and Muslim words that characterized the late-Middle Ages.) However, we might examine how “history” and the “novel” were formed as Western constructs during an imperial age, and how they must be reformed in our own and future ages. While American Indians were always present as the Other in history and the novel as we have received them, they now speak as agents who employ and transform these genres. Still, the Natives of today do no share the same world as their ancestors any more than Europeans and Americans share the same world as Europeans of the sixteenth century. Still yet, there is enough continuity with the past in present-day native communities that many writing as Natives offer perspectives that must be distinguished from the perspectives of European Americans.

American Indian fiction and American Indian history are deeply European American discourses. These discourses must be transformed by Natives, as well as by non-Natives writing about Natives, in order to more accurately render the worlds of the indigenes of North America—past and present. One location of transformation may be the construct that distinguishes “history” from “fiction”.

This is not to say that we must lose our ability to distinguish what is true or accurate from what is not. Rather, truth must be seen from other points-of-view. Truth may be situational, rather than empirical. It may be experiential, rather than objective.

I am not advocating that we abandon the practice of history, especially not ethnohistory and the new Indian history. I am advocating that the truth-claims of these genres of writing do not necessarily have priority over the truth-claims of fiction. In fact, certain so-called novels by contemporary American Indian writers, if not more truthful and more accurate than what we call history, at least offer necessary truths that cannot be accommodated within the constrictions of history as it is currently understood. It is possible, therefore, that some of the best work in American Indian history in our day is packaged as fiction, and is thus too much ignored by historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, who often believe they already understand these truths of fiction, too easily posit themselves as more enlightened than historians. Yet, without the groundings in material realities and the ability to step back from their subject matter that are second nature to the historian, they are equally restricted by their conventions of analysis. Despite a strong movement toward several forms of interdisciplinary multiculturalism in literary studies, the offerings of historians have been too much ignored. In taking fiction seriously as history, it is imperative that we remember the conventions of history as they have been received.

There remains a crucial difference between the food obtained by such human constructs as the atlatl, bow and arrow, gun, and slaughterhouse, and the food consumed by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in one of their imaginary meals. Too often, in extolling the truth-value of fiction, it is easy to forget the difference between the death of the Jim Loney of fiction and the many real persons who have died similar deaths.

Spiral Notebooks

A bit more than twenty years ago I started carrying a spiral notebook with me almost constantly. I usually wrote in it while reading—taking notes, jotting titles and authors of other texts that I planned to examine, proposing theses, writing initial drafts of key paragraphs, outlining course syllabi, composing poems, …

The habit of always having a spiral notebook with me has ceased since computers have become ubiquitous. These days I’m more likely to carry a notebook manufactured by Gateway than one made by Mead. Still, I have not entirely abandoned the practice. My computer bag has room for a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, and I still use them. Too often, however, it is easier to open Word and start typing.

As created text morphs from rough notes to polished prose, much is lost. Some of the loss is beneficial, but not all. My initial condemnation of some book or article may give way to cautious acceptance of another scholar’s perspective, or exuberance for a fresh approach may become the jaded recognition that notions discredited long ago might be resurrected once their refutations have been forgotten. My spiral notebooks preserve a record of these journeys. Those saved as files, even when new drafts have new names, are quickly lost. I’ll never again see the notes I saved just a few years ago on 5 ¼ inch floppies, for example.

Sometimes notebooks from decades ago are painful to read because they reveal astounding ignorance. Such humbling reading, however, can put into perspective my frustration with younger scholars (or with aged ones still pushing discredited ideas that I too once cherished). Other times reading these old notebooks offer fresh recollections of knowledge I’ve lost.