Category Archives: Book Reviews

Hamlet and Ophelia

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Emma Kenney

William Shakespeare has written many beloved plays that are still incredibly popular today. Perhaps one of his most well-known plays is Hamlet. This tale of duty and betrayal has been read by many, and Hamlet’s soliloquies are some of the most recited monologues and iconic scenes of all time.

Over the years there have been many versions of this play. It has been performed with famous actors such as David Tennant, and it has ben done as a movie. There have been television show episodes and books semi-based off of it. One book in particular, however, is based off it a bit more than others. Ophelia by Lisa Klein tells the story of Hamlet from the perspective of Ophelia. It is an interesting read from a point of view that is rarely shown or even thought about. However, the book does contain quite a few differences from the original play’s storyline, which show it to be something of a different nature than Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The first big difference between the two stories is the fact Lisa Klein’s story shows Ophelia and Hamlet as children. The novel starts when Ophelia is roughly ten and hamlet is in his mid to late teen years. It shows Ophelia before she came to the castle and then as a child within the castle. Klein’s story talks of neglect Ophelia faces at the hand of her father and depicts her as a young tomboy who would much rather run around and roughhouse with the boys than sew or play music. It shows the reader how Ophelia became a lady in the queen’s court and how she rose and fell in her eyes. These are all topics Shakespeare’s original play doesn’t even touch on, as the focal point is not Ophelia but Hamlet.

In Hamlet, Hamlet doesn’t decide he loves Ophelia until after she is already dead, but in the story by Lisa Klein, Hamlet declares his love for her much sooner, although he does so in secret. In her story only Horatio knows of the declared love between the two and helps them to marry in secret. Hamlet declares his love for her many times in the book and chases after her soon after Ophelia turns fifteen or sixteen. He is able to finally woo her and they are often seen in the novel sneaking away to kiss or to do more saucy things. This is all very different from the original storyline where, as previously mentioned, there is no mention of Hamlet even remotely liking Ophelia until she is already dead.

Hamlet’s descent into madness is also much different in the original play. For starters, since it is about Hamlet himself you see way more of the descent than you do in Ophelia, and there is a much greater focus and emphasis placed on it than in Lisa Klein’s Ophelia. In the play we see even from the beginning he is not mentally well, and we get wonderful speeches such as the following:

To be, or not to be — that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep — no more — and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep — to sleep — perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprise of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. — Soft you now, the fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

While Hamlet still tries to convince his friends in the play he is merely pretending to be crazy, there are enough speeches and lines from him to show he is really not just pretending at all. The novel, however, is lacking some of these vital quotations and scenes. While one can definitely still tell Hamlet is crazy, the reader doesn’t get to see him fall into it slowly and surely. It is portrayed more along the lines of, “Oh my dad is dead? I guess I’m completely and totally mental now!”  It is quite unfortunate, as that character development is one of the things that makes Shakespeare’s play so wonderful.

One of the biggest differences between the novel and the play is the way Ophelia’s tale is ended. In the play she is depicted as going mad, and she falls from a tree in what is suspected to have been suicide. In the novel she does what Hamlet claims to do and fakes madness in attempt to protect herself. When this only draws more attention to her, she freaks out and starts trying to figure out how to escape the castle and all of Denmark. Finally, with the help Horatio and the queen she fakes her death and flees Denmark with basically only the clothes on her back and some money from the queen. She ends up at a convent where she spends the rest of her days as the “doctor” for the town. This takes up the entire second half of the novel (in what is considered to be, by many, one of the most boring and useless halves of a novel ever to be written in the English language). Also, while she is at the convent in the novel taking care of all the sick and crazy people, she ends up giving birth to Hamlet’s son, whom she names (drumroll please) Hamlet. This is something incredibly and drastically different between the novel and the play, as Shakespeare never wrote Hamlet to have an heir at all. Lisa Klein’s novel, however, takes some creative liberties, however, and writes one in.

Another difference between the play and the novel is theme and focus. The novel places emphasis upon “sexual awakening,” to the point of taking away from the plot, which is something the play never does. The focus is on Ophelia, who she is, and what she does, as well as on love, how it should make one act, and whether love is ever true at all. One important theme is how all of humanity is corrupted, specifically by lust, and how that lustful corruptness affects everyone. It also shows that if the king falls so will the kingdom, though the play shows this as well. The play talks about corruption like the novel, but in the play the focus of corruption is placed upon the desire for power, not upon lustful desires. It depicts most of the corruption in the story to come from character’s desires to rule and to be in charge or to be honored and recognized by all. The play focuses on Hamlet, his descent into madness, and the fall of Denmark instead of on Ophelia and what she does and thinks. The focus is never really placed upon love at all, because that’s just not what the original story is about, other than when Ophelia is trying to cure Hamlet’s insanity by loving him and bidding him to love her back.

It is incredibly easy to see how different these two are, and those differences are why Shakespeare’s beloved Hamlet has stood the test of time and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia has barely been heard of. Though Shakespeare brings them up in interesting ways, the themes of his play are important and relatable (we all deal with death and with corruption). Because of that his play will continue to stand the test of time, unlike those that warp and change these themes into something less than. The play is loved for its quality of writing and plot, and when one tries to change that too much it is better to have just invented a different story altogether. Ultimately, though, it is safe to say both these stories do share one thing: they show that at the end of the day we all have to choose. We most chose to deal with our grief — to run from it or to face it head on.

What Else Was Going On?

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Christopher Rush

Hello, friends.  Twenty-five issues.  Where’d they go?  Twenty-five issues.  I don’t know.  I sit and I wonder sometimes where they’ve gone.  Appropriately enough, as of this writing, we are a few scant months away from my twentieth high school reunion, so those reflective thoughts have been and will continue to be quite prominent in my head.  But, hey, we  aren’t here to talk about me … well, we are, but let’s try to keep it positive.  As you already know, a significant portion of my summer was taken up with Beach Boys and Beatles material, at least the first half of the summer.  About mid-July, I hit the proverbial wall and found myself taking notes on the first time the Beatles heard Elvis songs and minutiae like that and it dawned upon me … I’m  preparing too much for this class.  I was doing Mark Lewisohn-level work, and I’m not ready to write the definitive work on the Beach Boys and the Beatles — I just wanted to teach a course about appreciating and understanding their music and the times.  Thus, after about eight intensive weeks, I just stopped, focused on other things, read different books, played some games, and relaxed quite a bit more.  (I also took a nonsensical on-line course about Graphic Novels in the Classroom to renew my teaching license, since higher education is all a scam, but I’d rather not talk about that now.)

As is our custom, here are some brief and most-likely unhelpful book reviews about most of the books I read from late spring up until the beginning of this current school year.  Shortly after I curtailed my Beach Boys/Beatles preparation, I realized I hadn’t read any Nero Wolfe books all summer and repaired that nonsense toot suite (and found myself on a bit of a mystery kick for a while).  Enjoy, friends.

Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, Jacques Barzun

Rating: 2 out of 5.

I feel somewhat abashed giving a book by the superb Jacques Barzun only two stars, but according to the authoritative site Goodreads (or “goodreads” as it wants to be known on its own page), two stars equates to “it was okay,” and since Simple and Direct was okay, two stars it gets. I’m not really sure what the ultimate function of this book is: surely it’s not a textbook for classroom use, as entire hordes of young people posing as students collectively work through revising sentences with diction they’ve never heard (perhaps the original audience was familiar with his language, but none today); I certainly did not feel impelled to work through the exercises on paper — I was fine thinking through them while reading them. Toward the end Mr. Barzun gives us an extended survey of punctuation, but inscrutably he defines colons in contradistinction to his own usage throughout the book.

Not to harp on its deficiencies, but organization, another facet of writing upon which Mr. Barzun attempts to instruct us, is almost wholly useless in this work. True, it has distinct chapter headings covering divers aspects of writing, helpful enough, but beyond that … utter chaos. Mr. Barzun traipses merrily from sub-point to sub-point, devoid of meaningful connection or reference-work ease of finding/accessibility/utility. Mr. Barzun gives us wonderfully trenchant tips on diction, tone, style, revision … while you’re reading through the book. Aside from a virtually meaningless index, we have no realistic way of using this book as a reference tool for attacking individual writing errors.

So read it … once. Try to absorb as much as you can. Perhaps copy out the twenty basic rules for writing Mr. Barzun scatters throughout his pages for general guidelines of decent writing. Then … give it to someone else. I doubt you’re going to want to keep it for multiple uses.

Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley

Rating: 0.5 out of 5.

Well … that was rubbish. Not only is this full of biases and horribly inappropriate “practice exercises” (many of which deal with various forms of human perversion), but also it is laboriously redundant and ultimately a gigantic waste of time. Basically, Biff Tannen will crash into a truckload of this book in Back to the Future, pt. 4. Several years ago, without reading it, I snagglepussed their list of “the right questions” for a class handout on critical thinking, supplementing the list with better context and purposes and kept telling myself I would read the whole book some time and find out how I can make that handout better. Now I know: I can eliminate their list of “the right questions” and make up my own questions and completely eliminate all trace of this product from my classroom.

For these “authors,” the two-fold purpose of “Critical Thinking” is a) to know for whom to vote and b) to know how to respond to advertisements. That is all. I’m not making this up; the book says that’s why we need “critical thinking.” Not for “how to become a worthwhile person,” not for “how to make the world around us a better place or the people around us better people,” not “to pursue truth and beauty and other affirming absolutes.” No, just to know the right candidate (and it takes about four pages into the book to find out what political party the “authors” think is right) and how to say no to all advertisements (as if we didn’t all know that by the age of 12 anyway). Yes, in the concluding fake final chapter reside some insincere “well, we’re all in this together, so be sure to use your critical thinking skills to help others out” stuff, but we can all be fairly certain someone’s grandfather who signed the paychecks way back in the 2nd edition days (back in the ’90s, when all smart people knew Islam had run its course) required this and now it’s just left over because it sounds all warm and sincere (or so they “think”).

Now, not much wrong exists with the actual “right questions” themselves, yet the need for entire chapter-like things explaining them does not exist at all. This could have worked much better without the “practice examples,” the nonsensical repetition, and everything but the final “why is this question important” box. One easy indicator of how much piffle suffuses this work is the fact the creators decided to highlight the important notices by both demarcating the essential points with thick grey borders flanking the significant paragraphs and beginning said paragraphs with the emboldened world “Attention.” One would suppose only one of these devices would be necessary to indicate the distinctively special nature of the material, but the authors chose both. And then they repeat themselves a lot. Thus, this would have been quite fine as a three-page pamphlet. Alas, the authors decided the route of horridly overpriced textbook instead of concise, useful pamphlet. Alas.

One could also mention the repletion of contradictions throughout: after redundantly explaining how important the “right question” under evaluation in each individual chapter is, the authors will often prepare you for the conclusion of the chapter (and the wretchedly off-putting practical examples) with “yes, but, sometimes it’s not like that, so do your best to make sure when the right time to ask this right question is right.”

One final concern about this (aside from the concern about their comments to the effect “emotions should never play a role in any decision”): the authors adamantly warn us against thinking in dichotomies. On the surface, of course, this sounds like good advice. Who can fault Pink Floyd for enjoining us against thinking in terms of “us and them”? The concern rests, though, in their outlandish declaration “never think in terms of right and wrong.” Because this is a dichotomy, it must be the wrong (irrational) way of making decisions and viewing the world. Everything that is good must have more than two options. And on and on. I’d say it’s rubbish, but that would be an insult to banana peels, cockroach husks, and last month’s Wheat Thins, and I don’t want to insult them.

Don’t waste your time. It’s a short work, but life’s too short for this work.

A Crown of Swords (The Wheel of Time #7), Robert Jordan

Rating: 4 out of 5.

While this follows the same pattern (if you’ll allow the expression) of the last couple of entries in this series, a good number of positive advancements occur (mostly toward the end, of course) in characterizations and overall storyline. One gets the impression this is “the rest” of Lord of Chaos, picking up right after it (unlike the earlier entries that often pick up a couple of months later). Either that, or we have advanced enough along in the story timeline we can expect the rest of the series is just going to be a continuous account of what is going on in “real time” (in a way). Back to the pattern: a lengthy dealing with the aftermath of the last entry’s climactic explosion, extended time with the Nynaeve/Elayne/Matt and Perrin sidequests, increasingly more menacing time with the Forsaken, a humorous look at what the White Tower is up to, decreasing time with the Aiel, and brief adventure with people we forgot were mentioned two novels ago but now suddenly give us the impression they are going to become B-list or even A-list stars of the series, and then another slam-bang finish in which Rand fights another Forsaken and conquers yet another territory. It may seem redundant, but it isn’t: the familiar weavings of the Pattern is obviously a fundamental aspect of this series, and by this time the basic format enables unforeseen and refreshing variety for us readers even within the expectations.

Halfway through the series, (and more words halfway through than A Song of Ice and Fire will be when it is finished sometime this century…? maybe?) we finally get some things we’ve been waiting for since basically the end of book one: Nynaeve finally gets her act together, Elayne and Egwene start getting their acts together, Rand gets some more of his act together, some good things actually happen to our heroes (for once), and bad things happen to the bad guys (sort of — they also gain more victories, but that’s fine). Is that spoiler-free enough for you?

Because so many positive things happen (though they don’t come pain-free, of course), some of the chapters in the final third of the book are among the most enjoyable of the series so far (and I’m pretty sure that’s not because it’s freshest in my memory): The First Cup, Mashiara (especially), Sealed to the Flame, Ta’veren … you read these and you think “finally, people are listening to our heroes! Let them get done what they need to get done!” It’s a very reaffirming feeling, and it’s not “unrealistic.”

It was a good book — maybe not as “fun” as The Dragon Reborn, but it was a very fast-moving book that felt like it was giving us things we’ve been wanting for a while and propelling us in a new direction (even if it will keep following the pattern). Yes, it has that ambiguous part in the middle with Queen Morgase that may be one thing or may be another, but I’m sure that will be worked through soon enough. Yes, it does have the Seanchan again, which is a) very frustrating (aren’t things bad enough with the Dark One and the Forsaken and the Black Ajah?), b) super impressive how Mr. Jordan would think to add that layer, and c) another big sign things are going to get even crazier in the books ahead (especially now we are in the second-half of the saga). But this was a good one, especially impressive after the major changes and excitement of that last entry — it’s just getting better and better. (And it’s better than ASoIaF … boom.)

Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Rating: 2 out of 5.

These really weren’t that good. They come across as the angry contributions of an intelligent man who doesn’t want any supernatural to exist, and because no supernatural exists (because he wants no supernatural to exist), he’s angry about how boring and meaningless life is but it’s God’s fault for not existing. Something like that. I admit it’s been a few months since I read Miss Lonelyhearts, which was the main reason I picked this up (the book not the time), but I was not favorably impressed. Clearly I’m wrong, since other people like it, and anger=greatness, but there it sits. Instead of dealing meaningfully with love and faith and human experiences, Miss Lonelyhearts just swaggers around grumbling and assuming and then just stops. It is Modernist, after all.

The Day of the Locust, likewise, gives us that same Modernist not caring attitude about how life really is, just glancing around at the bleakness and discontent and assuming this is how it always has been, always is, always will be, and God doesn’t exist and is to blame for not existing and how banal everything is, and it just stops. Nathanael West would have vilified Brian Wilson for portraying Southern California as a wonderful place of sunshine and happiness. But you know what? I’d rather listen to Brian Wilson than read more Nathanael West. Go on, tell me how wrong I am.

The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, Teresa Patterson

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I believe this was the first Wheel of Time book I owned, or close to it at any rate. I remember years ago leafing through it agog, thinking how could I ever possibly become familiar with all of these races and nationalities and conflicts … and then years later after finally reading books 1-7, most of it was easy reminders. Considering the clever viewpoint of the material, long before GRRM started doing basically the same thing (not this particular volume, but in general), the absence of the very things we want to know (the Creator, True Source, Age of Legends) may be disappointing, but there’s enough gathered tidbits to whet our appetites for the second half of the series (not that we needed more).

I know a few people have derided the artwork for the last twenty years or so, but considering the horrible conditions under which the artist was given to work by the publisher, I have no problem with it. My only wish concerning the art is I wish we had visuals accompanying the dress of the various military in the last few chapters especially. The descriptions are good, indeed, but visuals would abet those sections very well. The included visuals of our heroes don’t really match what they look like in my head as I’m reading, but that’s fine.

I’m glad I finally got to this book — it feels very strange having carried this around several moves cross-country and through major life changes (college, marriage, children), and now I’ve read it. Enough about me: obviously, this book is not for you if you haven’t read Wheel of Time books 1-7. You should really just read it when you’ve read them. But, if you have read them, you won’t get a whole lot of new information here, though the scant sections on the Forsaken, the Age of Legends, and a few things here and there are worthwhile (especially if you don’t pay cover price for it). It did help clarify a few things (like how Lews Therin is really “the Dragon,” not a Dragon reborn — he was the first Dragon, making Rand really the only “Dragon Reborn,” in the entire history of however many times the Wheel has turned, and how Artur Hawking was not a reborn Dragon himself just a good ruler hundreds of years after Lews Therin), and for that it was worthwhile for me. Plus a life marker reached. On the whole, satisfactory.

The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Jaroslav Pelikan

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Ah, it was nice to read intellectual discourse again (it had been a while, especially concerning nonfiction). I don’t mind name dropping, but I have Robert Duncan Culver’s copy (he parted with it willingly), replete with his own comments and asides, making it a nifty bonus-filled read for me (and whoever gets it after I shuffle off). As you likely know, Mr. Pelikan is pretty top notch about things, and his insights and enjoinments and adjurations make a good deal of sense throughout his four mostly connected lectures/essays. I wish it were longer, actually. He does a fine job contextualizing all sides of the Tradition issue, including the atheists who think it’s all rubbish, even pointing out how those who continue to follow Emerson’s call for rejecting tradition are guilty of following a tradition. It’s full of spectacular lines, none of which will be quoted here because it’s all the way upstairs and I’m down here. Track this down. It’s really good. Of course, if you are one of those Emersonians, you’ll probably not like it because it will point out how wrong you are, yet it will do so intelligently and respectfully — something you may not be used to from people who disagree with you and write things (post things) today.

And Four to Go, Rex Stout

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When you get to the end of summer and realize you haven’t read any Nero Wolfe all year yet, it’s way past time to get on that. This is another trim, clean, crisp group of Nero Wolfe adventures mostly though ancillarily pertaining to holidays. “Christmas Party” is a surprising revelation to what lengths Nero Wolfe will go to keep Archie Goodwin in his employ (and single). “Easter Parade” is a very clever mystery about ancient machines known as photographometers (I believe), fantastickal boxes of antiquity that were used to visually capture a moment of time without also letting you order pizza. This, too, has a surprising revelation concerning to what lengths Wolfe will go to acquiring rare orchids, including asking Archie to steal them!

“Fourth of July Picnic” is also bizarre, but not in a bad way — whenever Wolfe is out of the house the story feels unsettled. Wolfe is on deck to give a speech about the restaurant world and, of course, a murder is discovered during his speech. The problem is an eyewitness can testify no one went into the room of the murder except Archie and Wolfe! Another unique aspect of this mystery (though a bit of a theme for this collection) is motive for murder is almost a nonfactor in the crime solving. Archie and Wolfe spend almost no time on “why” the murder, just “who.” “Murder is No Joke” is another very clever mystery with an obvious set-up: a painfully obvious ruse to befuddle Wolfe at the very beginning, but soon that ruse takes on new twists and nothing is quite so obvious anymore.

Top notch collection. Strangely, as readers, we are torn between wanting to spend time with Archie and Wolfe and the rest but wanting short, concise stories we can inhale and enjoy quickly. This collection with four very short yet rich stories balances that tension perfectly: short, quick stories, but four instead of the usual three. “Satisfactory.”

Champagne for One, Rex Stout

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Another enjoyable Nero Wolfe adventure, once again Archie gets into some shenanigans and drags Wolfe into it against his will. While this sounds like Archie’s job description in general, this time Archie is present at the death of a young woman and believes it’s murder … even though everyone else at the event says it’s suicide, the cops believe it’s suicide, and no proof for murder seems to exist other than Archie’s instincts. For us, for Wolfe, for Fritz, this is enough. Of course that’s tough for Cramer to swallow, and even more difficult for the Police Commissioner to swallow, who has a surprising and secret offer to make to the brownstone residents! Fans of the Hutton/Chaykin series will recognize this as an early episode, and the show is rather faithful to this novel, leaving out only a few brief scenes that only confirm a few things for the detectives — but even with the familiarity from a faithful adaptation, the original story is neither stale nor dull. It almost drags a bit toward the middle as many Wolfe novels potentially do, but this one does not lag noticeably. One helpful aspect of the book is its more lucid expression of the connection between the instigator of the mess and the perpetrator of the mess, which was slightly glossed over in the episode. It’s still brief here, but combining both makes the entity of Champagne for One feel enjoyably complete.

Plot it Yourself, Rex Stout

Rating: 4 out of 5.

My wife and I listened to this during a long car trip years ago, so moments of it felt vaguely familiar, but I could not remember any of the important things. It’s nothing to brag about, considering it isn’t a very long novel, but I read this in one day; I say that not to brag but to emphasize how gripping it is, especially after the first shocking twist about 24% into the novel. It starts out rather dry, admittedly, and even Wolfe is bored by what is being offered him at the beginning, but once it kicks in it really moves and grips. This is chock full of twists and surprises and even shocking moments. The gang is all here: Cramer, Stebbins, Saul, Fred, Orrie, Fritz, even Dol Bonner and Sally Corbett. This may rank as among the best Wolfe stories, and that’s saying quite a bit, I think.

To Catch a Spy, Chris Scott

Rating: 3 out of 5.

This is two books in one, akin to Moby-Dick and Les Misérables, but whereas Moby-Dick is about 50-50 philosophical whaling guide/novel, To Catch a Spy is 75-25 philosophical inquiry/spy novel. Mr. Scott strikes you immediately as one who feels very strongly about knowing words and is compelled to impress you with them. He namedrops most of the Beatles/Beach Boys’ spiritual mentors early on, proliferates the book with antique literary references, and just generally makes the book difficult to read. I’m by no means a skilled, quality reader, so maybe it’s just me and my infacility with language and words and things. And stuffs and items. We are bombarded with several names and codenames at the beginning of the book, so much so one will have great difficulty remembering who is whom throughout, even perhaps until after the book is over, and while that is part of the spy atmosphere, it doesn’t make for an enjoyable reading experience of a spy atmosphere, for most of the book.

Much of this work, as I said, is a psychological treatment on the good ol’ spy game back in the glory days of the Cold War, when men were men and Bruce was Scarecrow and Pierce was Remington and life was good. Aside from all the horrible things that were going on at the time, of course. But the Spy Game was a Gentleman’s Game back in the day, when agents and double agents and triple agents all seemed to know each other and hang out at all the old familiar places. Or did they…

We are treated to the mentality of the different players in this game: what it’s like to investigate why an agent switches allegiances, what it’s like to be a high-level strategist who concocts plots and counterplots, what it’s like to be a Russian puppetmaster/tightrope walker standing in the gap between trust and betrayal, and what it’s like to be a tool-turned-tool user. Or are we…

Suddenly, all the psychological underpinnings are swept away and we are LeCarréd away into a breakneck spy catching thriller … but which spy are we catching? And which do we want to catch? The last few pages have a significant number of twists and countertwists jam-packed and slam-banged together, which may “salvage” the book for some who thought it would be more Ian Fleming-like than John LeCarré-ish. I found it rough going for awhile, but the ending “made up” for it (though I won’t be keeping it and reading it again in my life).

Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers

Rating: 3 out of 5.

While it is likely this book suffers from the typical “first entry verbosity,” Ms. Sayers has deftly created a new kind of sleuth, though one that is eminently aware of his place in the history of British detectives. New readers to the series may be surprised (as I was) just how frequently Mr. Holmes’s name was mentioned. Christians that have been given the impression Ms. Sayers is a Christian author will similarly be surprised at the frequency of the, shall we say, “d-word” as used by our “hero,” yet Ms. Sayers never gives attentive readers the impression Lord Peter Whimsey is a Christian. Interestingly enough, it is his policeman chum Parker who is fond of reading Biblical commentaries.

The mystery itself is mildly intriguing, but as I said above as the first mystery novel by Ms. Sayers (as far as I know), we can easily ignore the unnecessarily lengthy bits in hopes she will hone her craft soon enough. This adventure does have one very compelling moment toward the end, however: our hero has willfully if impetuously put himself in the clutches of the fiendish murderer (primarily to ascertain if his heroic deductions are correct, we suppose), placidly allowing himself to be destroyed … until Whimsey’s hand grabs the villain’s in a “vice-like” grip, followed by one of the most intense tacit stare-downs in literature. All in all a fine beginning to the series, especially as one acclimated to Ms. Sayers’s style.

Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Surprisingly more tedious than the first Whimsey adventure, Clouds of Witness treads territory most series do not tread until much later: family misadventure (thus two surprises in one sentence). Having been introduced to the strengths and some failings of our new hero in the first entry (as is typical for new mystery series), our knowledge of Lord Peter and his policeman chum Parker is expanded by more encounters with the rest of the current Whimsey clan, as Peter’s stoically uninteresting brother is preposterously accused of murder, primarily (if unintentionally) by their own sister! And while this should make for a riveting and fresh perspective on our hero and his world, mostly what we learn is how right the ’70s punk rock scene was in vilifying British peerage (no offense to the truly noble nobles out there). The whole system, especially its self-satisfied legal system, is perfectly exemplified by George Whimsey, and we have an immediate and deep-seated understanding and respect for why Lord Peter only associates with that bunch when he has to.

While this case is distinct enough from the first, despite both being murder cases, the speed of the novel slows down tremendously with a preponderance of clues, lengthy dialectic engaged with those clues, immediate rejection of everything that was just bandied about by a new revelation at the commencement of a new chapter followed by a lengthy (and spurious) account of whereabouts and actions likewise immediately refuted at the dawn of the following chapter, supplemented with a bevy of new clues, surprising new witnesses, and lengthy discussions about them all. And while I acknowledge that is usually how most mystery novels go, this one goes on in “figuring out whodunnit and howdunnit” stage a trifle too long (possible six trifle’s worth). Not that this is bad, mind you, and Ms. Sayers does concoct some interesting twists, but readers should be aware we are not in the “concised” phase of the Whimsey canon yet (if indeed such a thing exists … I’ll keep you posted).

The Liberal Arts: A Student’s Guide, Gene C. Fant Jr.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

As the Dull Train plods into Dull Station, we close our uneventful ho-hum. Please exit lugubriously and be on your way.

I don’t want to sound harsh, but that’s basically this book. I was very interested in this series, but this was not the ideal place to start. Perhaps it’s me: maybe I’m at that point at which I don’t need yet another “initial student’s guide,” of which this certainly is one of. Not only is it very much a beginning guide (one hopes it’s not truly aimed at college students … junior high kids, maybe), it deceptively has virtually nothing to do with the Liberal Arts. I was hoping for an engaging overview and interaction with the classical Liberal Arts, somewhere around seven in number I believe, but this little-yet-overlong pamphlet does not truly engage with them. Mr. Fant, Jr. spends some time dabbling with Science and Language Arts and how they can be neat-o, and he does give some attention to God and Stuff like that and how Thinking and Work and Bible-thing-items can be beneficial to one’s thoughtlife, but none of that is really what anyone reading the title wants from what the title advertises. Typically, and especially disappointingly, it ends with a peevish and irritating lament of Mr. Fant, Jr.’s own personal educational background experiences, its ups and downs, its Liberal Artsiness and its Non-Liberal Artsiness, effectively albeit inadvertently confirming for us he really doesn’t have much of a grasp of what the Liberal Arts are (seems like it’s some cloud-like “thinking about what you read” pastime), and neither will you if you read this book. Surely better intro. guides for the actual Liberal Arts exist.

1000 Songs that Rock Your World: From Rock Classics to one-Hit Wonders, the Music That Lights Your Fire, Dave Thompson

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Let us try to disassociate the concept of “this book” with “the list of songs” concerning which “this book” purportedly exists. First, “this book.”

This book is pretty much shash. One gets the impression the photographs had been laid out meticulously, the categories of songs and song selections had been worked out over a good long week or so, and then with approximately four minutes remaining before sending the master proofs over to the printer, someone snapped his or her fingers and said, “hey, shouldn’t we say something about all the songs?” And four minutes later we had a slew of “This song really rocks even today,” and “A great song that makes your heart break … but does it?” and “Can feeling bad really feel so good?” and while those are not direct quotations, you’ve basically got a sufficient synopsis of the content of “this book.” I admit it does have a small mattering of historical surveys of famous musicians and songs and such, but none of the extended stories are worthwhile. Most of them end up with a “gotcha” attitude, as if we are the jerks for thinking this book was about to take something seriously for once (and we are, especially if you are late in the book and still thinking the people who made this book know anything or care anything about music).

The overall structure is likewise confusing: it begins with a treatment of presumably Mr. Thompson’s Top 5 of the 1000, but after that we are treated to topical surveys of the songs with no notion of what number the song is in the 1000 or why. We are given no explanation for why “Telephone Line” is 1000, “With or Without You” is not on the list, or even why “I’m Not in Love” is considered a good song (presumably because it took a long time to make in the studio). Perhaps the book is not primarily about the ranking and why, but it begins with the ranking, explains the top 5, gives us a few famous people’s “top 5”s, and gives us no real explanation of why the shift in treating the songs topically or why these songs “rock our world” and not others.

Sometimes this book has “in their own words” for the brief descriptions of the song, but most of those are along the effect of “yeah, we play that song a lot on our tours, and we didn’t know it was going to be a hit when we wrote it!” — nothing that adds to our understanding or appreciation of the song, really. Strangely, sometimes the song will feature purported direct quotations from the singer/band/writer without calling it “in their own words.” Punctuation errors, spelling errors, discontinuity between the song and the photo of an album by that band abound throughout … hasty, poorly edited, slapdash work, filled to the brim with utterly unhelpful words.

Now, “the list of songs.” We know going in it will be a uselessly subjective ranking, and the fact “Bus Stop” is supposedly the best song of all time proves from the very beginning this fellow need not be heeded about anything music-related. Unfortunately, as intimated above, he (or whatever typewriter-trained troupe of marmosets he had writing copy for the other 995 songs) persistently proves it for another 200+ pages. I have nothing against “Bus Stop,” but as the best song of all time? Tish and pish. “With or Without You” is not my favorite U2 song, either, but not even in the top 1000? But Garbage is? and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds? And almost no Genesis, no Collective Soul, a whole lot of radio hits, almost no Beach Boys, and I could go on and on. I know, it’s all subjective. I had too much hope for objectivity with this. It has none. But most of us don’t when it comes to this sort of thing.

Sure, it has perhaps a handful of interesting tidbits from James Taylor and ELO and a few other things you’ll learn, and some of the posters from back in the day are historically interesting if not envy-inducing (you could have seen them and them and them! for $5!?!? sort of thing). But is the entire journey worth it? I don’t think so. But if you are interested in what the list is, send me an e-mail and I’ll send it to you. I’m still working through it, and while it has led me to some interesting songs I’ve never heard (of) before, which is a positive, it’s also proving I have not missed out on too much already either. Thus, it’s a mixed bag. I can recommend “this list” for comparison and thought-provoking discussion, but not “this book” for those purposes.

Armoured Onslaught: 8th August 1918 (Battle Book No. 25), Douglas Orgill 

Rating: 4 out of 5.

(Note: These next two books are from a fantastic yet criminally out of print series the Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century. Don’t be put off by the title — the 20th century was rather violent and we need to understand it, Also, the “illustrations” are mostly historic photographs you can’t see anywhere else. If you ever see any book in these series buy it.)

This was a very enjoyable book. One might suspect that is simple praise considering how predisposed I admit I am toward this Ballantine series, but my predilection for this series works against potential poor entries in it. I say “potential” because I haven’t read one disappointing entry yet. I usually enjoy (so to speak) well-told stories about World War I, and this facet of the development of tank warfare was one facet I wasn’t so familiar with, as most of my WW1 reading has been broad whole-war surveys (plus Ms. Tuchman’s The Zimmerman Telegram). I appreciated Mr. Orgill’s treatment of the diverse attitudes to the tank coupled with his generous portrayal of the technical aspects of the tank’s development. It would be easy for lesser writers to be tendentious about the technical aspects or overwhelm the audience with specifications and minutiae, but Mr. Orgill does neither. His tone is inviting and educational and engaging even when explaining the data of the generations of tanks.

I found the reticence for the tank quite interesting, both from the Allied side and the Central Powers side. The general failure of Allied tanks at Cambrai due both to cool-headed Germans with tantamount anti-tank guns and the failure of the construction of early tanks could have easily been the end of tanks for decades if not longer  … but a very few visionaries saw the potential of the tank, even as the nature of WW1 itself demanded so much revision of “musket and pike”-era warfare strategy. Perhaps my favorite part was the line about how so few leaders understood just how different WW1 was from everything they were used to in war, especially the traditional cavalry. Gone were the days of outflanking your opponent with clever cavalry charges and scouting — with trench warfare, there were no flanks anymore. It is such a momentous notion in a few words: the world has changed significantly and fully. Technology is not a neutral thing. This was an enjoyable, educational book.

Japanese High Seas Fleet (Weapons Book No. 33), Richard Humble

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Surprising myself quite a bit, I may have enjoyed this book even more than the Ballantine book on tank warfare in World War 1. What’s so surprising about that is I had (and still have) virtually no interest in naval or air combat. I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone in the Navy or Air Force — I sincerely thank you for your service. For some inexplicable reason, conflict simulation games about naval or aircraft combat just do not interest me in any way. It’s not because I have had bad Battleship! experiences or anything like that. I have owned Midway and Luftwaffe and a few other games of their ilk, but none of them appealed to me. I say again I can’t explain it. I have no desire to play X-Wing or Armada or Wings of Glory.  Strangely enough, I had many enjoyable hours playing TIE Fighter and Wing Commander II back in the day — they did not spoil my appetite for the genre either.

For whatever reason(s), naval and air combat just don’t interest me … but this book was engaging, interesting, informative, well-written (even for a 28-year-old kid) and I plowed through it. I suspect part of my interest came from its Japanese-centric perspective (coming, I understand, from a European Caucasian’s research/analysis/synthesis framework) — you don’t get that too often, at least, I haven’t. Mr. Humble gave what appeared to me (and I less humbly consider myself a fairly attentive and sensitive reader to that sort of thing) a balanced and respectful treatment of the positive and negative aspects of the development of the Japanese navy from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of WW2, within the limitations of the series, of course.

Especially interesting was the seemingly universal problem of “Decision Makers in Charge” not listening to the wise counsel of actually knowledgeable, competent people, such as Yamamoto — why would high command not listen to him? Mr. Humble answers that question well, of course, but those of who feel like they are in similar situations are still boggled and bamboozled by it.

The only thing preventing me from giving this five stars is it ended too abruptly for me. I wish it had a few more pages (or even paragraphs) of conclusion — what lessons should be learned? what syntheses can we create from this history? Now, please don’t interpret that as “I can’t you do that for myself” … oh, I could. My point is I wish Mr. Humble had done it, because his writing and treatment of the subject was so riveting I wanted to know more from him based on all the reading and research and work he put into it and couldn’t necessarily say because of the limitations of the series design — the work just somewhat abruptly stops. I wanted a fuller, longer conclusion to the entire journey. If it had that, I would be willing to give this five stars, something I don’t give too often (keeper of the stars as I am). This was great. (I still don’t have any desire to play naval or air wargames, but I really liked this book.)

Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught, James V. Schall

Rating: 3 out of 5.

It pains me deeply to give something by the great Father Schall a mere three stars, but the presentation of this o’erhasty, slipshod, ramshackle of a haphazard collection knocks it down at least one star. If St. Augustine’s Press has an editorial staff, either this book was compiled while they were on a Department Retreat or they need to have a stern talking to (far be it from me to advocate anyone getting fired, but the editorial, proofreading, transcribing work here was atrocious).

The other sort of drawback of this collection, and it truly perplexes me to discuss any “drawback” with a collection of Father Schall, is how similar many of the entries are. I understand that is mainly the point, and I certainly don’t begrudge Father Schall for revisiting his favorite (and indeed worthwhile) themes in divers publications over the years, but to have so many so propinquitous in subject matter presented in a bemusingly “book-like” presentation feels like we are somehow being gulled. The occasional notion these discrete essays are now chapters in a cohesive (but not truly) book is also jarring at times.

But let’s get down to it. This is a collection of essays, however similar, of one of the great thinkers of our day, Father James V. Schall. Any chance we have to read some of this thoughts, to be refreshed by his decades’ worth of reading and reflection, to be reminded to read the things he has read, well, we are in for a good time. There’s not too much on “teaching,” per se, but there is a fair amount on “being taught,” and being taught by James Schall, even if, as he would be the first to admit, he is “merely” repeating the words of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Johnson, and Schultz, is as worthwhile an experience as this life affords.

Iron First Epic Collection: The Fury of Iron Fist, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama, Roy Thomas, et al.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I wonder if Mr. Claremont’s contract back in the day had a “paid by the word” clause to it. But I kid Mr. Claremont: he saved the X-Men and we can all be grateful for his and Mr. Byrne’s tremendous run on that and New Mutants and many others. Even so, Mr. Claremont radically changes the nature of Iron Fist as a character. He begins as a very somber, almost mute character solely focused on his actions and motivations as a serious student of martial arts. Mr. Claremont takes all that away, giving us a very loquacious thinker and talker. Some will like that, some will not, especially as a good deal of it is reminiscent of early ’60s Stan Lee scripting (i.e., “let me say/think the actions you can see me doing with the accompanying pictures!”). But that doesn’t matter, since it all happened forty years ago.

What starts out as a tale of vengeance quickly turns into a tale of self-discovery: Danny Rand now has to live a “real” life away from the home he has known for most of his mature life, and along the way he gathers some allies and foes, and while all of that is the making of a pretty interesting series, when Mr. Claremont takes the reins, the initial creativity of villains and martial arts conflicts effectively goes out the window. He does an interesting job continuing some of the ideas of the early pre-Claremont stories, but the short-lived nature of the series once Iron Fist gets his own series also sees a few rather important storylines/conflicts disappear into thin air. Fortunately, some other big stories are wrapped-up in Marvel Team-Up issues included in this collection, but one wonders what could have been had Iron Fist’s own series continued.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the series is Iron Fist’s complex and fresh relationships with Colleen Wing and Misty Knight. It’s best to read it for oneself in the series, but the complexities and directions Danny’s relationships take with these two Crime Investigation partners is the most impressive aspect of the different direction in which the Claremont-era goes.

It’s a mostly-complete set, as far as the early Iron Fist era goes (it could have had a few other Marvel anthology issues), but the total package, changes and flaws and limitations and all, is a very impressive, worthwhile package and a great deal. You get the first appearance of Sabretooth, early John Byrne drawings of the X-Men, some clever scripting and plot twists (some abandoned ideas and characters as well), and a fairly cohesive-ish story. This was an enjoyable collection on the whole.

Whew, that was a full summer, wasn’t it?  Though, truth be told, some of those were read before the summer began and after it ended.  Anyway, we hope you enjoyed our exciting and rather diverse 25th issue.  As always, it was great to hear from some old friends, and the work of the current students is none too shabby, either.  Here’s to twenty-five more issues!  Until next time, friends!  So long!

Summer in Paradise by the Reading Light

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Christopher Rush

As you may recall, one of the major goals for the summer of 2017 was to read extensively in preparation for the current (as of this writing) elective Critical Listening, awkwardly subtitled “The Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Their Times.”  While that goal was partially achieved (not every work acquired during the summer was read in time for the course and some were intentionally postponed due to over-preparation), room for improvement persists.  Thousands of books have been written about the Beatles alone, and the complete library on the Beach Boys is not an unimpressive amount either, so I knew going in there would be neither time nor money enough for a complete preparation up to my standards.   Not even Mark Lewisohn has read every book about the Beatles, and that’s saying something.  Even so, it was an enjoyable summer of reading and listening and watching, and while you may be surprised at some of the missing volumes (I still haven’t gotten a copy of David Leaf’s essential Beach Boys and the California Myth, for example, since it is rather pricey on the secondhand market), feel free to send my way things you think I should have concerning these subjects.  What is covered here is the rather eclectic array of works I did have access and time to read before the overwhelming nature of the project reached its breaking point, after which is a list of the works I have waiting on the back burner for future exploration.

Dark Horse: The Life And Art Of George Harrison, by Geoffrey Giuliano

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Until I get the opportunity to read I, Me, Mine, this will serve as the major study on George Harrison’s life (in print) (perhaps Mr. Scorsese’s Living in the Material World will surpass either or both). Mr. Giuliano is a knowledgeable source, which at times provides helpful insights tempered by awkward self-effacing “I don’t want to offend anyone, but…” sorts of comments. His tone at other times is bemusingly insensitive, such as during the potentially life-ruining addictions to drugs seasons of George’s life. (Similarly, Mr. Giuliano presents himself as a devout Hindu, yet the tone during much of that portion covering George’s life at times lent me to believe Mr. G thought George was just playacting.) Still and all, this does a fine job of surveying the life and art of George Harrison, the highs, the lows, and the introspective in-between. One wonders why a third edition covering the final five years of George’s life hasn’t come out, though the hinted-at falling out between George and Mr. G could have had something to do with that.

Perhaps the highlight is the dearth of Beatles-era coverage; that time has been covered by others such as Mr. Lewisohn far better than a reporter of Mr. G’s divers interests no matter how passionate could provide — but Mr. G knows that’s not why we are reading his book anyway. We want to know about the earlier times (likely) and the post-Beatles times (more likely). And while I enjoyed the reading of it all, even if a good deal of it made me sad (such as the bizarre George/Pattie/Eric Clapton situation and the perennial drug addiction issues), some of the periods I was most interested in were glossed over or not included (the Traveling Wilburys and the end of George’s life — but that last isn’t something I can fault the book or its author for). Thus, it surveys it all, and gives a significant amount of time to George’s spiritual journey, but Mr. G tends to lean more heavily to the era in which his personal experiences overlap George’s, which isn’t surprising for a journalist to do, though it does make for some of the more awkward portions of the book.

Should you read this book? If you are a George Harrison fan, certainly. If you are a Beatles fan in general, yes. If you want to know more about the ’60s, Beatlemania, and the like, maybe. If not, I’m not too sure. It’s not what one would call a “general interest” sort of biography. It answers a few questions, but it also raises more indirectly (such as, if each of the Fab Four was eager to move on to new things, why was the breakup so acrimonious?), which isn’t quite as helpful as one would want in a “definitive” or at least “updated” biography. Yet I am glad I read it, giving me a provocative peek into the life and art of the Quiet Beatle.

The Gospel According to the Beatles, by Steve Turner

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Fortunately, this book is not what I thought its title implied: this is not a “hey, Christians, let’s look for Bibley-messages in Beatles tunes and sanitize them so we can enjoy them guilt-free!” book. That would be horribly distasteful, both for Christianity and the Beatles. Instead, Mr. Turner gives us a more honest survey of the spiritual journeys of the Beatles (though, let’s be honest, it’s approximately 84% about John, 15% about George, .6% about Paul, and .4% about Ringo) from recklessly secular existentialists to drug-catalyzed spiritualists and beyond. Mr. Turner, who we learn actually got to interview John and Yoko once, begins with a general but intriguing overview in the first chapter about the nature of the Beatles as evangelists of their own rapidly-evolving religion, especially once they started to acknowledge their role/opportunity as influential people, and ends with a refreshingly personal essay on his own lifetime with the Beatles that somehow evades tendentious piffle while simultaneously explaining his impressively respectful and erudite commentary on Christianity throughout the rest of the book: he believes it. And in that rest of the book we get a mostly fascinating perspective on the changing attitudes and beliefs of the Fab Four (though, again, mostly John).

I’m still a bit confused by Mr. Turner’s decision to begin the book with the “Jesus incident,” though I sort of can convince myself why he would, since it’s likely the most famous spiritual-related moment in the Beatles’ career — though, since the rest of the book is chronological, it’s odd to begin with the “turning point” of their lyrical and corporate career then jump back to their (mostly John’s) childhood religious experiences in the following chapter. Even so, Mr. Turner gives us a very researched account of the episode with trenchant commentary, including a rather chilling observation about if Al Benn of UPI hadn’t just so happened to turn his radio to local station WAQY’s broadcast while he was passing through at just the right moment to hear DJ Tommy Charles’s “ban the Beatles” ratings stunt, John Lennon may be alive today. What started as a fairly meaningless local stunt in Alabama (based on a months’-old magazine interview, no less) spiraled into an international brouhaha involving everyone from the KKK to David Noebel.

The rest of the book, as I said, is a chronological journey through the major spiritual moments of the Beatles’ collective and solo careers. John is perhaps the most interesting case after all, having had the most formal religious instruction/experiences as a young boy combined with the roughest childhood (father left, mother killed in a car accident when John was young). John goes through the most oscillating religious life of the group: early choir boy training to cynical rejection of spirituality mainly due to loss to famous musician with everything money can buy to searching for something immaterial beyond for meaning/purpose/et cetera to drugs as a gateway to cosmic oneness to Transcendental Meditation to cynical atheism to magic/spiritism/Buddhist-like panoply of Yoko to dalliance with Christianity to Give Peace a Chance. George doesn’t have many religious youth experiences, gets involved with drugs around the same time as John, gets involved with the Maharishi with the others, then gets involved with Krishna and more or less spends his life there off and on. Paul is the steady, materialistic, willing-to-dabble, Love is the Answer guy we all basically suspect he is. And Ringo is the mostly laid-back one who dabbles with his buddies but finally arrives at the efficacy of spirituality further down life’s long and winding road.

Throughout it all, Mr. Turner gives us what appears to be a well-balanced presentation of the ideas, events, catalysts, and reactions the Fab Four experienced through the good times and bad. Mr. Turner does not just give us the usual line “the Beatles got really good when they started taking drugs,” but instead he reminds us even the boys themselves understood not too long after their drug experiences drugs were not the goal of life, despite what Timothy Leary and Michael Hollingshead and others were preaching. Drugs may have “expanded their consciousness,” but drugs also damaged John, George, Paul, and Ringo in long-lasting ways. The Beatles’ best songs and attitudes during and after their “drug period” were not because of drug usage, and while Hinduism may have prompted their social involvement more than Christianity, the quest for truth remained strong in them all (more or less) — but not because of drugs.

This book does not attempt to tell the whole story of the Beatles. This book focuses on John’s, George’s, Paul’s, and Ringo’s spiritual lives before, during, and after their time as Beatles. At times the book feels like Mr. Turner’s attachment to the subject is about to interfere, but it never does so for more than a moment, even in the very personal conclusion chapter. I began the book with trepidation especially about its title, but this book was a challenging and encouraging treatment of one of the most important yet grossly neglected aspect of one of the 20th century’s most influential groups. I will likely be reading this again sometime soon.

Wouldn’t it Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, by Charles L. Granata, Tony Asher (Foreword)

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Though a bit hagiographic at times (no doubt precisely how I sound when speaking of Babylon 5), this was a very engaging story of the making of perhaps the best rock album of all time. Mr. Granata gives us a modicum of historical background prior to the album, with a smattering of post-Pet Sounds knowledge, mainly relating to Smile and Brian’s miraculous return to the land of “emotional stability” as Brian calls it — none of which is wholly new but all of it is presented well and concisely. For my purposes in reading this book, Mr. Granata’s sparse yet efficient history was an ideal compilation of pertinent episodes in the life of the Beach Boys beyond the main album under discussion, so I very much enjoyed that unsought aspect as well.

Some may say this enthusiastic (shall we say) presentation suffers from too much verve, though I certainly wouldn’t want to read a history of Pet Sounds from some one who didn’t like it very much. Some may say it suffers from too many technical details, though considering Mr. Granata’s background, such technical aspects (such as the nature of the recording equipment, the tonal/harmonic construction of the vocal arrangements, the psychological reasons why we respond to such celestial harmonies, the history of recording/printing/tracking/compression/digitization etc.) of the album is part of Mr. Granata’s main purpose in writing this book. The subtitle (the title itself is never addressed why Mr. Granata chose that track as the initial focus) clearly indicates this is about the making of the album, not just a “here’s why I love it so much” biography (though there is plenty of that, most of which is strings of unexplored/unsupported superlatives — I don’t disagree, I just would have preferred a tad more substance in this area).

Some may be confused, as I was, why Mr. Granata intentionally did not speak to Brian Wilson directly. He says it was a purposed choice, but that’s all — no explanation why he made that choice. Some may be confused, as I was again, why Mr. Granata intentionally gave us a revised edition in time for the 50th anniversary of the album … but then said nothing about the 50th anniversary tour beyond one brief reference by (I think) Tony Asher in the foreword! Why this book couldn’t have waited two more months for some words on the phenomenal 50th anniversary tour with Al Jardine, Blondie Chaplin, and more is very perplexing.

Be that as it may, it’s hard to disagree with Bruce Johnston, Carol Kaye, Tony Asher, and others when they say this may be the definitive (if concise) story of the great(est) album Pet Sounds. I’m not saying this book (or the tour) made me think PS is the most enjoyable Beach Boys album to pop in on a whim (even Brian says Friends is his favorite), but it will give you a great appreciation for it and its worthy claim to greatest of all time.

Meditations of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Rating: 2 out of 5.

I’ll give this to the Maharishi: he didn’t want life to be boring. No “stare at the wall and empty your mind” sort of path toward spiritual enlightenment for him (or for us). True, I don’t agree with most of what he says in these three treatises, but considering his theological/philosophical presuppositions, he is rather consistent throughout, if ambiguous about quite a few important details. It was enjoyable to spot some of the lines I must believe influenced some of the lyrics of the Beatles and Beach Boys (such as the “all this is that” line concerning the unity of all things in a spiritual way and the obvious “jai guru dev” benediction), and likewise it was satisfying in an intellectual capacity to read thoughts so influential in the world for some time, even though, as I said, I disagree almost wholly with them. Does anyone still believe Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, et al. believe and teach the same things? Possibly only the people with symbolically-constructed “coexist” or “tolerance” bumper stickers (people who don’t subscribe to any of the belief systems represented by those symbols, naturally). But that aside, the notion all wars, hostilities, aggression, crimes, and such like those are all the result of internal conflicts and wrong thinking is … facile? at best. I’m not denying some truth resides in the notion: clearly all hate and antagonism and acts of destruction are built at least in part upon the platform “I am better/more right/more important than you.” Yet the solution of all that being looking within to one’s personal divinity doesn’t seem to provide a proper answer: how can one’s internals be both the cause and the solution to one’s problems? I am rather ignorant about these things, of course, so I am not a trustworthy authority on Transcendental Meditation or the Maharishi or any of it, but those are a few of my initial reflections. Feel free to leave them where they are.

The Beatles, the Bible, and Bodega Bay: My Long and Winding Road, Ken Mansfield

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I’ve had this book probably since it first came out (2000), but as is often the way, I didn’t get around to reading it until the right time. It was pretty good, and I would like to give it another star, but Mr. Mansfield’s tendency toward puns especially about song titles got rather irritating. It’s his first book, so I trust he stopped doing that in his later books. This is the only memoir (perhaps the only book of any kind) officially accepted by the Beatles (and Yoko). Perhaps that is because it is so positive about everything and everyone (except Allan Klein), but since I am not an insider on any level like Mr. Mansfield was, I can’t say.

Structurally, Mr. Mansfield oscillates rapidly between Fab Four days and (mostly) mid-’90s beachside scenes, which takes a bit of getting used to, but it happens so frequently one gets used to it soon enough. Mr. Mansfield does not give us a straight chronological approach to his reflections, interspersed as they are with his contemporary spiritual communion moments, which is also a bit perplexing at first. Effectively, Mr. Mansfield is reflecting on a few major experiences he had with Capitol Records and the good fortune he had to be in the right place at the right time to become a trusted member of the Beatles’ inner circle (perhaps second or third tier/orbit) for about five years. Mr. Mansfield does discuss a few other post-breakup experiences with the lads and others of that time, mostly positive memories, though a few sad memories trickle in toward the end. Mr. Mansfield does allude to some personal bad experiences in his own life post-Beatles, but he doesn’t give us many details or descriptions, so we are left assuming the ’80s were a rough part of his life until he met the woman who soon became his (second?) wife. Similarly, many of his contemporary (mid-’90s) episodes along Bodega Bay come across as psalm-like wrestling with negative life experiences with little context (though he does identify two specifically: the death of a friend/young father and his (Mr. Mansfield’s) diagnosis of incurable cancer, but since that was 1995 and he is still with us in 2017, I guess he was cured after all). I don’t want to sound like I’m disappointed he didn’t share the dark moments of his life in more detail — the ambiguity works well enough.

Overall, I learned a few things from Mr. Mansfield’s perspective, especially his unique experience of what it was like for other Capitol artists (such as the Beach Boys) who suffered whenever a new Beatles album came out, or the animosity and serious backlash (including financial repercussions) when some radio stations felt snubbed by not getting “first crack” at a new Beatles single or album. I would have preferred more such experiences beyond the somewhat repetitive “the boys were great, everything was magical, I was so lucky” sort of talk that happens throughout the book. Still, quite a few of his favorite moments (an impromptu jam session with George/Clapton/Donovan here, a pub lunch with Paul there) make for enjoyable reading about moments you could never know about otherwise. Rough spots and all, I thought it was pretty good.

The New Sound, by Ira Peck

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Not to sound too much like Vanessa Huxtable, but this was “interesting” mainly for its historical perspective on the “new sound” of rock-and-roll, even though rock-and-roll had been around for over a decade by the time of this compilation. I did not realize this at first, but this is a Scholastic publication aimed at the youth, which now explains some of the tone and diction choices sprinkled throughout. There is one apparently famous (infamous) extended exploration of Phil Spector toward the end (by the other Tom Wolfe), which did seem at the time rather more antagonistic than it needed to be, especially considering this collection is intended to give helpful information — but I suppose the kids of the day were supposed to be antagonistic toward the millionaire youth instead of recognizing his unique contributions to music (whether you like them or not).
Maybe because this was written by a bunch of grown-ups for youth in the 1960s, back when kids didn’t know anything since they were kids and adults were the best because they were adults, but this doesn’t have a whole lot of helpful/meaningful/deep content. It would be one thing to be a light frothy gossip book, but it’s also a light frothy gossip book that talks down to its audience most of the time, and a light frothy gossip book that talks down to its audience most of the time by Scholastic no less, supposedly a bastion for intelligent works for the children.

I don’t want to sound like it’s all bad — it does have a few interesting “in the moment” perspectives on the “new California sound” of Jan and Dean and the … Beachboys? (The Beach Boys, as I’m fairly certain they’re usually called, despite this coming out in 1966 at the apex of their Golden Age, get only about three scattered mentions in various article things, never a serious — or as serious as this compilation gets — treatment or chapter all their own, which is particularly puzzling, especially since their “uncoolness” supposedly did not begin until the year after.)

There is one glaring aspect we can’t really ignore, and we should also keep in mind this is a product of its time, and that is the frequent mention of the … “brown sound.” This is the “sound” of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Motown. Boy, those ’60s must have been everything people say they were, by golly. At least one article (sadly, an abbreviated treatment of a longer work that would be worth tracking down) by Jeremy Larner discusses the hypocrisy (though he doesn’t use that word) of the music business of the day, starting off by telling us how Nat King Cole was once beat up during the middle of a concert by the White Citizens Council in good ol’ Birmingham, Alabama in order to protect the good white folks from the Devil’s destruction by means of the “brown sound.” Nat King Cole. Let that sink in for a moment. Mr. Larner then goes on to tell us about how a lot of white singers sold a bunch of records by basically stealing them from black artists (now, to be fair, the Beach Boys did effectively lift Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and turn it into “Surfin’ USA,” but they did give Berry credit … after pressure, yes).

One other essay stood out positively, an engaging “Defense of Bob Dylan” by Henrietta Yurchenko. This stood out mainly because it was the most well-written and least tendentious in tone (slightly above Jeremy Larner’s, even). In the afterglow of Mr. Dylan’s Nobel prize, hearing about the contention in the mid-’60s about whether Bob Dylan fans are able to enjoy Pete Seeger and vice versa was very intriguing. Ms. Yurchenko offers a balancing act, in that the world of quality folk music can contain both Seeger and Dylan (no doubt a position taken for granted today).

The short mostly frosting “discussion” on the Beatles by future villain Arnold Arnofsky was nothing special, like most of this collection. It ends with a bizarre recollection by, of all people, James A. Michener, the man himself, and how he was once asked to spend a weekend of his life judging dozens of wannabe rock stars in a pre-American Idol talent contest. It was a fairly enjoyable recollection of what he learned and experienced as a complete novice in the world of rock-and-roll (surprising no one, I’m sure), but I suspect I found it enjoyable because of who it was and my history with him and his works — so you probably wouldn’t like it as much.

If you can track this down (I stumbled upon it Providentially in an Outer Banks thrift store) by some preternatural means, go for it … but only if you are a ’60s music buff to a more-than-advanced degree.

Brian Wilson (Icons of Pop Music), by Kirk Curnutt

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about this is I believe the author successfully accomplished what he attempted to do: this is a well-reasoned, well-supported examination of the lyrics, musical contributions, and legacy of Brian Wilson that presents and cuts through a good deal of the hoopla, both negative and sentimental. I’m no David Leaf or Mark Linnett so I can’t testify to the complete success of the project, but even with the occasional tone dips Mr. Curnutt surveys a wide variety of viewpoints on the major areas of discussion and draws very solid conclusions from them. The only drawback, just like Mr. Granata’s revised treatment of Pet Sounds, is it came out about six months too soon! He alludes to the forthcoming 50th Anniversary Reunion but alas can do no more than speculate — I wonder how that event would have figured in this work (well, probably not much, come to think of it).

As a focused non-fiction (instead of rambling fan-fiction) treatment of what Brian Wilson contributed (and didn’t) to the Beach Boys and the “California Sound” and more, this work mostly eschews the extremes, even making multiple references to the dangers of over-sentimentalizing Brian’s perceived frailty and thus should never be criticized. Thus Mr. Curnutt does not hagiographize nor does he cast aspersions — he even presents a good defense of Mike Love (something you don’t see in Brian-focused works).

I found every section very helpful: coming from 2012 his historical background navigates all the major biographies and works up to that point and provides what appear to be adept assessments of their weaknesses and strengths. His longer section on the lyrical world of Brian Wilson was very insightful, especially as it dealt with so much of the misinformed perceptions about Brian’s lyrics and how many of “his” lyrics are not just Mike’s but also Tony Asher’s, Gary Usher’s, Van Dyke Parks’s and more. Even a good number of the “autobiographical” songs we sometimes find too much in aren’t solely the work of Brian Wilson … and that’s not a bad thing, says Mr. Curnutt.

The longest section, about Brian’s musical distinctions, is very thorough and diverse, ranging from Brian’s ability to sculpt in the studio what he heard in his head (in a good way for Pet Sounds, not so good for Smile at times) to his oft-derided bass playing technique and what seems to be everything in between.

The final section on the “myth” of Brian Wilson is also engaging, though it does not treat on the 50th Anniversary, No Pier Pressure, or Pet Sounds 50 as we may want (perhaps a revised edition will come out eight months before Brian’s next major release). Mr. Curnutt, as I said, is not interested in rehashing (so to speak) painful memories, but he does address what needs to be addressed quickly and academically, and his conclusions are part of what makes this such an enjoyable read (apart from the very insightful and rare analysis of Brian’s actual contributions, the bulk of the book, and what really make this required reading for BB/BW fans): Brian Wilson is not “one thing” — he may seem like an abject figure today, a shell of his former self, but aren’t we all? Let’s see you weather what he has and come out better. (Mr. Curnutt doesn’t say it precisely that way.)

By “not just one thing” Mr. Curnutt means he is not just a “figure of melancholy” whose only greatness is in his sad songs and whose sense of humor is too simple/corny to make him “deep.” Some of the best insights in the book discuss our misguided attempts to contrast him with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and the other storied lyricists of his day, or how we misunderstood the Beach Boys because they weren’t “hip” like the Rolling Stones, when “hip” really means “vulgar and sassy.” Mr. Curnutt points to quite a few clever, sly lines in “golden age” Beach Boys lyrics that aren’t all that “tame” but not so blatant as what everyone else was doing. Why do we find fault with Brian Wilson’s sense of humor and think only his sad songs are “deep”? We are wrong to do this, says Mr. Curnutt, and by jingo, he’s right.

Perhaps Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were “guilty” of idolizing “The Myth of Southern California,” an exotic paradise that may have existed in early ’60s America but surely is long-gone now (just like the sweetness of all of America and the world). But … what’s wrong with that? As Mike said, “everybody knows a little place like Kokomo (or pre-Summer of Love Southern California) so if you want to get away from it all go down to Kokomo.” What’s wrong with reveling in simplicity, earnestness, decency, and good timin’? Nothing. So read this book and re-evaluate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. (And Mike.)

The Beatles, God & the Bible, by Ray Comfort

Rating: 0.5 out of 5.

“So, you liked the Beatles, huh? Guess what! They’re in Hell, Hell, HELL!” That’s pretty much what this embarrassment is about. It’s embarrassing for the Beatles and people who like them, it’s embarrassing for God and people who believe in Him, and it’s embarrassing for the Bible and people who believe in that. The two most cited reference works from Pastor Comfort are Wikipedia and Playboy. Do you need to know any more? All of the “background” chapters truly read like some high school kid paraphrasing Wikipedia, except without the life, the interest, the zeal, and the meaningful context/accuracy. Those chapters are dreadful.

Then come the “critical commentary” chapters, basically Pastor Comfort (who will be glad to remind you he is the star of a television program syndicated around the world) blindly flailing with pinking shears around a religious-type comment or experience with the Beatles, jaggedly divesting it of any meaningful context. Following this treatment, Pastor Comfort begins his barrage: “clearly, real Christians don’t say or do things like this. Real Christians never fear, never worry, never sin. Real Christians never, EVER consider taking the Lord’s name in vain. Ever.” I’m not making that up. I may be contracting a few different commentary moments into two sentences, but he does make those sentiments clear throughout this work. “Real Christians” never sin; “real Christians” never worry; “real Christians” never are haunted or regretful of their former misdeeds.

For no explicable reason, Pastor Comfort spends an inordinate amount of time trying to convince us Mark David Chapman was not a Christian. Apparently it is difficult for some people to understand a man who admittedly sought out the Devil’s advice and listened to him and then murdered someone in cold blood is not a Christian. Most of the book is about John Lennon and Mark David Chapman, but it’s not any good. Pastor Comfort spends some time trying to convince us Paul McCartney does not believe in God, even though Paul McCartney has done a terrific job of that over the years on his own. Among the panoply of cringe-inducing moments, certainly high is Pastor Comfort’s treatment of Linda McCartney. I was going to identify some of it, but it’s too hateful and too nauseating. (Pastor Comfort wants us to believe getting an MBE helped make Linda’s death better for Sir Paul — and that’s not the worst part.)

Despite the fecund territory for Pastor Comfort to interact with George Harrison’s life and beliefs, he doesn’t really take a lot of time to interact with George, other than to hammer us heavily and repeatedly with the fact George couldn’t possibly be a Christian because he doesn’t worship the same way he does (well, there’s a tad more to it, but I thought a sly Stones reference, if you’ll allow, would make some of the hurt go away).

Wasn’t there another … Rango? Bingo? Banjo? Oh, yes. Ringo. Pastor Comfort barely has time to tell us a few things about Ringo in the final chapter, as if he doesn’t matter at all, and since he said the “d-word” and casually used God’s name in vain (though, since Jesus didn’t speak English, it’s possible “God” isn’t His “real name” anyway) Ringo can’t possibly be a Christian. Despite what Steve Turner has to say in his far-superior book The Gospel According to the Beatles, which I would far recommend above this pile of hooey any day of the week, according to Pastor Comfort Ringo Starr can’t possibly be saved, since he does not fit his checklist for “real Christianity.”

Did I mention Pastor Comfort has a checklist that delineates what “real Christianity” is? Oh, yes, he does. In the secret aftermath of his … whatever this was, Pastor Comfort gives us lengthy advice on how we as “real Christians” can avoid headaches and hardships in the Christian life (most of which entails buying and using the curriculum Pastor Comfort and his company have designed, surprising no one).

Please don’t read this. Please don’t buy it for your friends and family members who like the Beatles, God, and the Bible. This thing doesn’t really have anything to do with any of them.

The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience, by Timothy White

Rating: 4 out of 5.

This is a pretty full work, as most people already know. It’s not a quick biography of the people in the subtitle, since it takes over a hundred pages for Brian to be born. Context is king in this work: context of the Wilson family, context of the California experience, context of the cultural factors going on during the Beach Boys era (mostly the “golden age” era). I’m not sure it was intentional on his part, but Mr. White makes a stark contrast of the Beach Boys and the beach life — too much anger, too much pain, too much disappointment passed down from generation to generation; not only was Brian not made for these times, but the “Beach Boys” were not made for the “beach.” When they tried to break away (so to speak) from their early, false image, the fans, the record label, the Decision Makers wouldn’t let them. Somehow, their most creative and experimental era (’67-’73 or so) is their least popular, and from the mid-’70s on, they are stuck being a Greatest Hits band mostly against their will. The beach is all about freedom, fun, good times — and though the BB sing about these all the time, this life was effectively denied them (one generation to the next).

This is not precisely Mr. White’s viewpoint, but it seems to be there, underneath, and not too deeply. This is also not to say the Beach Boys never had any good times in their lives or that they didn’t enjoy making and playing the music, but Mr. White as so many other biographers do conveys the perpetual sense of pressure, disappointment, self-recrimination, artificial stimulation excess, psycho-physical-emotional breakdowns, and almost miraculous survival through it all. It’s truly miraculous Brian Wilson is still with us (as of this writing), having gone through no fewer than three life-shattering epochs, even one of which most of us could not handle let alone all three. And that does not even count the deaths of his brothers and the British Invasion, an event that seems in retrospect like a mere irritation in the lifespan of the Beach Boys.

As I said, all of those comments are undercurrents — none of that is White’s point or emphasis. His is an optimistic work, despite the generational heartache, especially as it reached its completion in 1994, shortly after Brian achieved his final and permanent freedom from “Dr.” Landy. If you want to know what “The California Experience” was like in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, this work will likely never be surpassed (surely no one will ever locate let alone read the Cali-centric tomes, pamphlets, magazines, and miscellany in the bibliography). This work (calling it a “book” seems a derogation) brings to vivid life what the subtitled individuals experienced in that time, doing so in an accurate and openhearted perspective that puts the pessimistic view of Nathanael West to shame. It’s not an easy read (and not just because of the sorrow), but if these subjects interest you, this is among the top-tier “must reads” of Beach Boys lore.

In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, by John Lennon

Rating: 2 out of 5.

The back cover of this collection highlights several words from reviewers. One important word they all forgot to include is “tedious.” Before you get on your high horses about how sacrilegious it is to defame anything by John Winston Lennon, you should try reading it for yourself, which is likely something you haven’t done. It’s not very good. People are fond of saying John Lennon was fond of Lewis Carroll. This is not Lewis Carroll. This is an angry young man — and don’t get me wrong, he certainly has quite a few legitimate reasons to be angry — who has translated “boring and difficult childhood experiences” into “nothing anyone else says is true,” typing what could be clever stories and poems but with a remarkably irritating persistent commitment to adding and changing letters in words. Some of his letter, suffix, compound noun transcriptions are truly clever — but those are statistically ultra-rare ensconced as they are within non-rational uses of the ubiquitous trope. It’s such a pervasive device, Mr. Lennon truly sabotaged his own creativity. It’s just a hassle to read. And a book that is a hassle is not clever.

Some of the poems are treated better by Lennon, but it’s hard for them to stand out among the morass of petulant non-stories. By the time one gets to A Spaniard in the Works, John Lennon is truly angry at religion, society, and just about everything. Again, I’m not saying he’s not justified, but the petulance of the work contributes nothing worthwhile to the challenge of making religion, society, and humanity better — he’s just angry and basically throwing a sub-literate temper tantrum. Anyone who comes to these hoping for something resembling his lyrical work will be sorely disappointed. I’m not faulting Mr. Lennon for not doing in his prose what he did in his lyrics — I’m faulting him for being so childish about it. And I decry the publishers and pundits who laud it solely based on who constructed it — tsk, tsk, brownnosers.

Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys: The Songs That Tell Their Story, by Mark Dillon

Rating: 2 out of 5.

This is a good example, for me, of how the atmosphere around a book (how you learn about it, when you read it, those sorts of things) can significantly affect your reading of it. I wasn’t too keen on getting this book when I first saw it, a few other sources I had recommended it somewhat obliquely, I found a used copy cheap, and there it was. I know the subtitle should lead us to think it’s basically a history of the Beach Boys as a group, but the emphasis on the 50 songs also leads us to think it’s going to be about fifty of their most important/famous/best/whatever songs. I didn’t want yet another guy’s take on the story of the Beach Boys, but letting their songs tell the story, well, that notion won me over to getting it (plus the cheap copy on-line). But that’s not what this book is, sadly.

The author (and it is truly Mark Dillon telling the story of the Beach Boys, not the songs) tries to give us some half-hearted apology at the beginning about how he was limited in what songs he could include because all the people who responded to his pleas for personal insights and song experiences ended up slanted toward a few albums and some songs, missing some albums entirely (such as the great So Tough) and emphasizing Pet Sounds (and while it’s not bad to emphasize Pet Sounds, claiming to tell the Beach Boys story by skipping entire albums because of artificial limitations is nonsense). This leads to another of the misleading aspects of the book: it claims these famous and integral contributors to the BB story are reflecting on the songs. While Mr. Dillon does quote them for that particular song, their insights and reflections are sparse at best. Mr. Dillon’s version of the BB Story does most of the talking. This is not true for all 50 songs, but it is true for more than 40 of them. The insights from the people who were there are too thin, too short, too rare. Yes, Mike Love gives you some notions, and Blondie Chaplin gives you a new line or two, but it’s not nearly as much as the book wants you to think it is or how much you want it to be.

Concomitantly, Mr. Dillon gives us insights from a large number (I’d say “disproportionate”) of reflections from, well, fans. Fans that had/have their own bands in the 21st century, and some of them have even met Brian Wilson or other Beach Boys, but I don’t know them. I don’t know their bands. I don’t care about their fan responses to these songs. Once I graduated high school, I basically drew the line of my musical experiences: the bands now and before, no more. Surely I am missing out on much wonderful artistry in the 21st century, but having seen enough Grammy-award-related ads for today’s “musical artists,” I’m pretty sure the past is where it’s at. Feel free to send me a list of the great ones of today I am missing to disabuse me. (Disabuse, I say, not abuse.)

Returning to the focus at hand, I did not get this book to read profanity-laced adulations of the Beach Boys in meaningless, superlative terms, which is most of what we get from the “contemporary musicians/producers” upon which Mr. Dillon was dependent to construct this history. I don’t want to give you examples, because they are not worth recounting. I’m not saying I can come up with more lucid praise, but that’s why I’m not writing books about them (at least, not yet). The fan chapters offer nothing of value.

This book intentionally came out for the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys, knowing full well they were going to get together and go on tour and put out a new album. So instead of waiting for that rather significant element of “their story,” the book came out before that and immediately became out of date and incomplete. That decision made no sense to me, even as a cash grab for the 50th anniversary. Why not wait until it has happened so you can speak about it?

If you haven’t read any general histories of the Beach Boys, and if you know about these musician-like people who saltily praise the (real) musicians the Beach Boys, this may be a fine book to read. I came to it too late in my journey through the story of the Beach Boys to appreciate it or find much worthwhile in it. It does have, as I said, three or four good chapters (such as Mike Kowalski, Mark Linnet, Billy Hinsche) with fresh and engaging insights (Mike Kowalski was the longest-termed drummer for the BB) about the history of one of the greatest bands of all times (with possibly the saddest story of all time). Thus, I don’t know if I can recommend it: the aspects that entice, the insights from those who were there, are too few to be worth spending very much money. The songs do not tell their story, here, unless “their story” is one of chart positions and sales figures. Many chapters are replete with nauseating Wikipedia-like lists of data, none of which give us valuable insights into what makes the Beach Boys “the Beach Boys.” It only tells us English listeners in the 1960s and ’70s were more intelligent than American listeners, something we already knew. This history does give us a good sense, though, the people who initially look like “heroes” to the Beach Boys often end up as “villains.” The book gives Mike a fairly decent shake, which is nice as well.

Is this the Beach Boys book for you? Not if you are looking for meaningful insight into the actual songs. That contrivance is a misleading scheme for what the book is: Mark Dillon’s version of the Beach Boys Story besprinkled with rarely insightful and mostly irrelevant commentary from people of whom you may or not have heard. I honestly do not know if this book is for you, but if you can get a cheap copy on Amazon or somewhere, go for it. If you want a free one, stop on by and I’ll give you mine. I’m done with it.

That’s what I got through this past summer (though I admit I had started the Harrison biography before the summer began).  Below is a mostly complete list of the books I have sitting down there waiting for me to get to as soon as I can.  I don’t include this to brag about my Beach Boys/Beatles literary collection, as it is quite pitiful in comparison to what is out there and I know I am missing some of the most important works out there as I’ve already said, but this is here mainly to give you some other ideas on the diverse reading opportunities should you be interested in knowing more about two of the most important bands in (rock) history.

The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of American’s Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio, Keith Badman

The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America’s Band on Tour and On Stage, Jon Stebbins and Ian Rusten

I am Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson

Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, Mike Love

Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Peter Ames Carlin

Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader, ed. Kingsley Abbott

Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, Steven Gaines

The Beach Boys: America’s Band, Johnny Morgan

Beach Boys vs. Beatlemania: Rediscovering Sixties Music, G.A. DeForest

The Beatles

The Beatles, Hunter Davies

The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think that Can’t Be Thunk, Steven Baur and Michael Baur

The Lost Beatles Interviews, Geoffrey Giuliano

The British Invasion: The Music, The Times, The Era, Barry Miles

The Beatles Anthology, The Beatles and Derek Taylor

The Complete Beatles Songs: The Stories Behind Every Track Written by the Fab Four, Steve Turner

Tune In Vol. 1: The Beatles: All These Years, Mark Lewisohn

The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962-1970, Mark Lewisohn

The Beatles Day by Day: The Sixties as They Happened, Terry Burrows

John, Cynthia Lennon

Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, Ken Sharp

The Lives of John Lennon, Albert Goldman

Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music — The Definitive Life, Tim Riley

Paul McCartney: In His Own Words, ed. Paul Gambaccini

Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, Howard Sounes

Paul McCartney: A Life, Peter Ames Carlin

Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, Barry Miles

Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s, Tom Doyle

George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Olivia Harrison and Mark Holborn

Ringo: With a Little Help, Michael Seth Starr

On Sylvia Plath

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Emma Kenney

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932 to Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath. Her brother Warren was born roughly 3 years later in 1935. Plath grew up Winthrop, Massachusetts, located near Boston. Her father worked at Boston University in Boston until his health began to drastically decline leading to his death shortly after Plath’s eighth birthday. The man had thought he was dying of lung cancer, but he had actually died due to diabetes, something which could have been treated and managed with relative ease.

Shortly after the death of Otto Plath, Aurelia Plath moved Sylvia and Warren to Wellesley. This would be Plath’s home from the time she was ten until the time she left for college. After the move, Plath became an exceptional student, having all “A”s but especially excelling in her English courses. The girl’s first poem was published in The Boston Herald in 1941 after the death of Otto Plath when she was only eight. Plath eventually received a scholarship to an all-girls college called Smith College. The college was located relatively close to home, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She continued to write poetry during this stage of her life, though not much of it was published. Though Plath had the technical skill of a successful writer, she had yet to figure out what it was exactly she was trying to say. The stress of trying to maintain the exceptional grades she had gotten before college also affected the quality of the poems and stories Plath produced during these years of her life.

However, by 1953 Plath was well on the track to becoming a successful author. Her works were published in magazines and newspapers alike, such as The Christian Science Monitor and The Daily Hampshire Gazette. Eventually Plath’s writing earned her a guest editor position for a magazine in New York City over the summer. She stayed with a few other women at an all-women hotel in the city, which she wrote about in her novel The Bell Jar. That summer was incredibly difficult for the young woman, and it ultimately did her more harm than good. Plath had been hoping to be accepted into a writing program at Harvard and was devastated when she got the news she had been rejected. This, among other things, led to the woman being physically and mentally drained and eventually having a mental breakdown. Plath returned home in a much worse state than the one she had been in when she had left for New York City only a few months prior. She wrote she could barely sleep or write or even read, though her mother says one of the only things she did was read. Eventually, Plath decided to try to commit suicide. She left a note for her family telling them she was going for a walk, but in reality the girl took a glass of water and a bottle of sleeping pills into a crawl space in the house and attempted suicide. The young woman was found two days later still living but not in good health. She was admitted at McLean Hospital in Belmont where she was treated by Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher. Though it was hard, Plath would eventually recover and be in good enough shape to go back to Smith College for the spring semester.

Things began to look up after Plath returned to college. She met a man named Richard Sassoon, and the two eventually became lovers. Her grades were once again outstanding, despite everything she had experienced that past year. Plath reapplied for Harvard’s summer program, and this time the young woman was accepted into it. That summer she shared an apartment in Massachusetts with a woman named Nancy Hunter-Steiner, who was also in Harvard’s summer program. Plath returned to Smith College the following year, where she continued to excel. Her honors English thesis was superb, and after the woman graduated she received a scholarship to attend Cambridge in England the following year. Plath returned home for the summer and eventually ended things with Richard Sassoon, saying she preferred to see what kind of men England had to offer her.

Though Plath had been thrilled to be able to attend a university as highly renowned as Cambridge, the woman was in for a rude awakening when she arrived. Plath had not realized how hard it would be to be an American in the midst of British students. She spent her first few weeks in England simply sightseeing before she arrived at Cambridge for the school year. Her first disappointment was the fact her dorm was at the very back of the university. However, Plath soon fell in love with the campus and all it had to offer her. Plath soon realized the British education system was incredibly different from that of America and struggled to adjust to the new way of academics she was being forced to experience. Eventually the woman found a mentor and got used to the new system of college. She ultimately found she had an easier time at Cambridge than she did during all her years at Smith College in the United States. This caused Plath to decide to join something called the Amateur Dramatics Club, which was basically a small theater program for college kids at Cambridge. While she was participating in this club Plath received a small role as a clinically insane poet.

Eventually Sylvia Plath got back together with Richard Sassoon, who was staying in Paris at the time. The two spent their winter vacations together in Paris and other parts of Europe. However, shortly after Plath returned to Cambridge Sassoon wrote to her and requested they take a break in their relationship for a while. Plath soon fell into a horrible depression caused by this breakup and the fact she hated the harsh winter she was experiencing in England. On top of this depression, Plath was ill quite frequently that winter and even ended up with a splinter in her eye. Plath eventually decided to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Davy after it got to be too much for her to handle on her own. The young woman was furious at Sassoon for breaking up with her and was desperate to find someone who would love her at all.

After she left her appointment with Dr. Davy, Plath purchased a literary journal and read poems by a man named Ted Hughes. She quickly found out about a party being held for the poet at the Falcon Yard that night. Plath went to the party with a date, but she promptly ditched him and began looking for Ted. The two found each other, and Plath recited some of poems she had memorized only hours earlier. Hughes was impressed by this, and the two began dating soon after the party. Plath even went on spring break with him that year.

The next year Plath moved in with Hughes instead of staying on campus at Cambridge. Eventually, in 1956, the two married without informing Ted’s family. Plath continued to study at Cambridge until 1957 when the two decided to move to America. By this point, Hughes’s parents knew about the marriage, and Ted’s mother decided to have a party for the couple where the two made lots of new connections. They had both been continuously writing up to this point, and they both continued to do so after. They were given many new opportunities for people to read and experience their works.

Plath took a job teaching, but she found it so much harder than she had originally thought, and her depression began coming back again. She eventually quit her teaching job and went back to writing poetry, but things continued to get harder for her. Her health began to get bad again around Christmas, and she was bedridden for weeks. After that, she began fighting with Ted. It is rumored the man began beating her around this time period. Shortly after, the two had their first child named Frieda. Plath became pregnant again later, but that pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. Plath got pregnant a third time and give birth to a son. Plath and Ted eventually divorced and Plath moved away with the children. She continued to write frequently throughout this time until her death.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath used a gas oven to kill herself, first making sure to seal off the door between her and her children and make sure her neighbors weren’t home. Her death was determined to have been a contemplated suicide, with too much detail and thought having gone into it for it to have been a spur of the moment choice. Plath’s depression plays heavily into her image today, and leaves her one of America’s most famous poets.

Bibliography

Beckmann, Leipzig Anja. “Sylvia Plath (1932-1963).” Sylvia Plath Homepage. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2017. <http://www.sylviaplath.de/&gt;.

Steinberg, Peter K. “Biography.” Sylvia Plath. N.p., Dec. 2007. Web. 09 Feb. 2017. <http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html&gt;.

On Edgar Allan Poe

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Emma Kenney

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most well-known writers of the American Romanticism genre of all time. His poems and short stories incorporate many common Romanticism themes and concepts, such as the elevation of emotion over reasoning and nature over civilization. He used descriptive language and fantastical undertones to draw his readers in and earn him the title of one of America’s most famous poets.

Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts to two professional actors on January 19, 1809. By the time he turned three, his birth parents had passed away and he was taken in by the Allans in Richmond, Virginia. He began writing at a young age but was shamed for it by his foster father, who wanted him to take over the family business. This helped create the rocky relationship between Poe and his foster father, one that would only worsen over the years. Poe received education at one of the best boarding schools in the country and later was accepted into the University of Virginia. Here he met a girl named Sarah Royster, and soon the two were engaged. However, the young man had to drop out of the college a year into his education after his gambling got him into financial trouble. This was the final straw, and Poe and his foster parents had a large falling out that ended with the Allans refusing to help Poe pay off his debt or let him come back home to stay with them until he could pay it off himself. Soon after, Poe discovered Sarah had been cheating on him, and he called off his engagement with her, depressed and broken-hearted.

The man joined the army after this, and it was this year (1827) that his first volume of poetry was published. He published a few more volumes of poetry within the next two years, though they weren’t exactly successful. After his failed first attempt at poetry, Edgar Allan Poe began attending the United States Military Academy at West Point. Though he was an excellent student, Poe once again had to drop out of school because he was financially unable to support himself, and he couldn’t seem to handle the strict military duties that came with the Academy. He once again fought with his foster father, who had remarried after his foster mother passed away. Once again, Poe was told he was not allowed to come home and he would not be receiving any help financially. After this he moved in with his aunt and younger cousin in Maryland, having nowhere else to go.

Then Poe began writing and publishing short stories. He also began writings and editing for various magazines including the Broadway Journal in New York City. He spent the next ten years of his life doing this, during which he married his cousin, who was about 14 at the time. During these ten years Poe published some of his most famous works, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven.” He struggled to get by for a while, but after one of his short stories won a writing competition, Poe became a sensation almost over night. Poe’s foster father passed away during this time, creating even more resentment on the part of Poe when he left him out of the will entirely but included an illegitimate child in it instead.

Poe was a vicious critic; his reviews of books and other writings would eventually create so much drama he would be asked to leave the magazine or change his review style. Poe chose to leave. Some sources say his struggle with alcoholism played into the magazine’s decision to ask him to leave, but so far it hasn’t been proven for sure either way.

A few years after this his wife grew ill and passed away. Poe struggled greatly dealing with this; he became extremely depressed, and his alcoholism reached a new peak. He once again began to struggle financially, as he focused mainly on fueling his desire for alcohol. Eventually his extreme alcohol intake caused him to experience extremely poor health, and it eventually caused him to die of “congestion of the brain” on October 7, 1849.

After his death, one of his literary rivals was granted the task of writing his obituary. This rival purposefully strove to make Poe seem as horrible as possible, calling him not only an alcoholic but also an abuser of women and a deranged psychopath as well. This succeeded in damaging Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation for quite some time after his death. This same man wrote the first ever biography of Edgar Allan Poe, ruining his reputation after death even more. Eventually, however, the general public began reading the works of Poe again, and he finally achieved the renown commonly associated with him today.

Poe is a spectacular example of American Romanticism, which, as previously stated, is defined by characteristics such as the elevation of emotion of reason and the elevation of nature over civilization. It also commonly uses writing techniques such as using what could be considered almost excessive descriptive language.

One of the prime examples of this is his “The Tell-Tale Heart.” This story is about a man who gets a new neighbor. After a short period of time, the man begins to become paranoid, hating one of his neighbor’s eyeballs. He even goes so far as to name it “The Evil Eyeball.” This eye begins to drive the narrator madder and madder. Finally he comes to the conclusion he needs to kill his neighbor after both the eye and the beating of his neighbor’s heart continue to haunt his every hour. The narrator smothers him to death and takes out his heart. He then decides to chop the neighbor up and hide him under the floorboards. However, he still heard the beating of the heart. It drives him madder and madder yet again, until finally he can no longer take it and confesses the crime he committed.

This is a prime example of American Romanticism because right off the bat it elevates emotion over reason. The narrator’s obsession with the eye and heart are by no means reasonable. The beating of the heart after death is certainly emotionally based, as it is illogical to believe it could truly happen in real life. The entire story is about emotion itself; it shows how the emotion of guilt can eat away at a person even if he gets away with something, until finally the guilty person can no longer take it. It shows emotion is a driving force behind human actions. The narrator murders a man simply because he finds his eye annoying, symbolizing that humans will do terrible things and justify them as being okay because it got rid of a situation that was bringing them discomfort.

Overall, Poe is a wonderful example of American Romanticism, and he will most likely be a beloved American poet and short story author for many years to come.

“The Black Cat” Analysis

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Sarah Mertz Silva

At the beginning of the story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator states how he is not mad. He continues to explain how appalled he is by his own actions saying “these events have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me.” He then contradicts himself, however, in saying “I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.” He is very aware of his grossly violent actions, but he is ignorant to his own insanity. He describes what he acknowledges as terrible acts to be normal events of normal life, a sure sign of his own madness he is unable to see.

The narrator begins by describing his love for animals, pets in particular. He seems to live a normal, unsuspecting life. His wife is also an animal lover, and together they “had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.”

The narrator describes the black cat as “sagacious” and discusses how his wife jokingly spoke of the superstitions of black cats being “witches in disguise.” He says she was never serious about the superstition. This cat, Pluto, seems to be the center of his affection. For some time, this cat is most notably his closest companion, following him around throughout the day. It is a “disease” that appears to alter this companionship. He begins to abuse all of his pets and even his wife. For a time, however, he refrains from abusing his beloved black cat, Pluto, until in its old age it becomes “somewhat peevish.”

One night, the cat seems to avoid his owner, and intoxicated, the narrator grasps the cat by the throat. Consequently, the cat bites him. The narrator is infuriated, takes out a pen-knife, and violently cuts an eye out of the cat.

The narrator, though having claimed not to be mad, has clearly proven his madness at this point in the story. Perhaps he is unaware of his madness because he does not feel he is the one committing the violent acts: “I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame.” It is interesting however, that even in oblivion to his own insanity, he is obviously remorseful of his actions. He says, “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.” In the next paragraph, he describes the following morning when “reason returned.” His remorse is evident when he says “I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty,” and he proceeds in drinking away the memory of his previous actions. It is interesting to note, though, he is not fully remorseful, only half remorseful.

He blames his following actions on the soul’s natural tendency to “vex itself.” It appears the narrator is attempting to find any other justification of his actions besides being mad. He states perverseness is “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart,” meaning by his logic his feelings were natural, a connection to his first few words at the beginning of the story.

He then hangs the innocent black cat by a noose on the limb of a tree, claiming it was because he knew it loved him and because it had given him no reason to act out violently against it. He says, “I knew that in doing so I was committing a sin — a deadly sin….”

That night, the narrator’s house is caught aflame. It is difficult for everyone to escape, and the narrator suspects the fire must be linked to the atrocious deed of killing his cat. He proceeds to explain why he feels there is a connection, saying among the rubble of his house, a lone wall still stood, seemingly unaffected by the fire, and upon it was, “as if graven in bas relief,” the image of a black cat with a noose about its neck. His suspicion was the cat had been thrown into the home and compressed into the fresh plaster between the falling walls.

Again, the narrator’s feelings of remorse return, or so it seemed. “For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse.” Once again he describes this feeling as being only half remorse, however this time he describes it as seeming to be remorse, and in fact not remorse at all. His insanity seems to be overcoming him rapidly. The narrator then seeks to acquire a new pet, a cat, of similar appearance to replace his old cat Pluto.

The narrator is gazing upon a cat as it sits atop his furniture. In approaching it he notes its close resemblance to Pluto, with the exception of one trait. This new cat had a large splotch of white fur on its breast. The narrator touches the cat and the cat purrs and rubs against him. This cat became the narrator’s new companion, and his wife was happy with the cat as well. Again, over time the cat’s fondness of his owner becomes a nuisance. It is seen the narrator is still unaware of the cause of his feelings saying, “I know not how or why it was — its evident fondness of myself rather disgusted and annoyed.” He refrains from abusing the cat upon remembrance of his abuse toward Pluto. After weeks his hatred turns into complete loathing and disdain as he avoids the cat. His hatred for the cat increased in discovering the cat had been missing its eye similarly to Pluto.

According to the narrator, the cat grew even fonder of him. It is likely, however that due to his pure hatred for the cat, its normal actions would have become increasingly bothersome to him, as every minute thing made him angry. The cat was probably not acting any different than when the narrator first got him, but his hatred caused him to feel so.

It is the constant reminder of the white splotch on the cat’s breast that drives him mad. “Evil thoughts became my sole intimates — the darkest and most evil of thoughts,” he writes, and in the following paragraph he attempts to kill the cat with an axe. Upon his attempts, he is stopped by his wife, by whom he is infuriated and then he “buried the axe in her brain.”

For the first time, the narrator does not even speak of remorse. He felt more remorse for a cat than he did his own wife. Upon deliberation of where to hide the body, he does not once feel any “half-sentiments” as before. At this point, it is clear he has been consumed by his madness. He then decides to hide his wife within a wall. He undoes the brick, places her in, and places the brick back in as if nothing had changed. Any signs of remorse have completely disappeared as he says, “I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself — ‘Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain.’” The cat has disappeared for a while and the narrator is more than happy. “The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little.”

Days later, the police arrive at his home to investigate. Out of triumph, the narrator makes comments about the sturdiness of the walls, taps it with his cane, and out of the wall comes a loud cry. The police began to break open the wall from which the wife’s body fell, and atop the head of the body was the cat.

Guilt seems to be a common theme throughout the short story. After the narrator kills Pluto, his house catches on fire, and the image of the black cat appears in the walls of the rubble, an embodiment of his guilt. The new cat that appears is almost completely similar to his old cat Pluto, and in an even stranger coincidence, the new cat is missing an eye — a reminder of the narrator’s previous actions. The black cat seems to never disappear, as in the end when he returns to the narrator’s disapproval. The black cat could also be a symbol of guilt. Guilt constantly returns to the narrator, even though he does not feel it.

Obscurity of love vs. hatred is also a theme in “The Black Cat.” Love and hate consistently appear throughout the story but continue to be misconstrued in the narrator’s mind. A great contrast exists between his feelings toward Pluto and his new cat. The narrator’s love for Pluto is what drove him to committing the gory atrocities against his cat. With his new cat, it is his pure hatred that keeps him from abusing it. The narrator’s feelings of love and hatred contradict his actions.

Reflections on “Ode to the West Wind”

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Sydney Harris

This ode, written by Percy Shelley, is one that tells a story of wishful thinking. The speaker uses the many functions of the wind to convey the power it has. He speaks to the fact wind drives away the autumn leaves, places seeds in the earth, brings thunderstorms and the cyclical “death” of the natural world, and stirs up the seas and oceans. He explains these functions in a way trying to connect with the wind. He pleas to the wind for it to act in the way it does, but on him. He wishes, with the help of the powerful force of nature, to have his ideas and works spread out and dispersed throughout the world. He wants the wind to be as harsh and real in his life as it is in the winter months. He knows the West Wind of autumn is wild and rough but is always followed by spring, a time of beauty and growth. He wants the wind to blow away all of the negative things in his life and create a new spirit in him, like it does for the leaves of the winter or the waves of the ocean. He wishes to be moved into a new version of himself, to fulfill his full potential.

In the beginning of the first canto he addresses the wind, describing it like a breath of Autumn. He talks about it as a magician banishing evil, the way it blows away dead leaves. He then says it carries seeds to their places around the earth and leaves them they’re until Spring comes for them. The wind burying seeds in the ground is like a charioteer taking corpses to their grave. He thinks of the spring wind as blue and as the cause of all revival of nature. He says it blows like a clarion and all the seeds bloom, filling every “plain and hill” with “living hues and odours.” The last few lines depict the speaker describing it as a “Wild Spirit” that’s omnipresent. It’s the “Destroyer and Preserver,” as winter brings death but gives way to revival of spring. He ends saying “hear, oh, hear!”, wanting the wind to hear his unknown request.

The second canto is a continuation of his description of the West Wind. The clouds, in his words, are scattered through the sky like dead leaves in a stream.  The leaves fall from the trees like the clouds fall from the sky, all working together to balance our weather. This is all to indicate a storm that is coming. He uses the simile of clouds being like angels of rain and lightning. He then goes into a detailed description of what the West Wind is like during a storm. The thunderclouds, “locks of the approaching storm,” disperse through the West Wind or the “blue surface.” He says the thunderclouds to the West Wind are like the Mænad’s locks of hair are to the air. A Mænad was one of the fierce women who spent time with the Greek god Dionysus. Their hair was wild and crazy and that’s the point he used to connect the two. He then uses a melancholy metaphor to describe the power the West Wind has. He says it’s like a funereal song played as the past year comes to an end. As the storm comes, the thunder, lightning and rain will be like the tomb being rolled over the grave. He ends, again, asking the wind to hear him but we don’t exactly know what for.

In the third canto, he details the weird and strange things the West Wind does. The Mediterranean is awoken, making the wind and storm begin to come. This happens because the sea had been calm and still during the summer, while on vacation like the Romans. During the summer, the Mediterranean dreams and sees the “old palaces and towers” along Baiæ’s bay, overgrown and unkempt. The Atlantic then breaks itself into “chasms” for the West Wind. He uses all these words to say the wind disrupts the water, creating waves but is at the service and will of the West Wind and all its power. The speaker talks about how all the see plants hear the West Wind and become disheveled and go all over the place in fear and hurt themselves. The canto ends the same way the others have, with the speaker asking for the wind to hear him.

The fourth canto begins to reveal the request the speaker has for the West Wind, beginning with him wishing he was a “dead leaf” or a “swift cloud” the West Wind could carry or he wishes he was a wave that could be rocked by the West Wind’s “power” and “strength.” He has hopes of becoming free and as “uncontrollable” as the West Wind. The speaker will even settle with just having the same type of relationship he had with the wind when he was younger, when they were “comrades.” He reflects on when he was younger and was faster and stronger than the West Wind. He clarifies wanting to feel the same way he did in the past, youthful and strong, is the only reason for coming to the West Wind. He wants to be given the same treatment as the waves, leaves and clouds, saying “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Time has made life dull and hard for him along with his spirit, which is no longer “tameless, and swift, and proud” like the West Wind.

The last canto depicts the speaker asking to become an instrument. He wants the West Wind to turn him into a lyre. During his time, the æolian harp, a type of wind chime, was a popular instrument during the Romantic era. The harp is played by simply setting it in the wind, which is what the speaker longs for. The speaker says he wants to be used by the wind in whatever way the West Wind wants to use him. He wishes to be blown by the Wind like the branches are, leaves attached or not. His pride has been stripped of him like the leaves on the trees, and both are dying.

He then goes as far as to ask the “fierce” spirit of the West Wind to take over his soul and live in him. His thoughts are like the dead leaves and if the West Wind could control them, maybe instead of dead leaves, they can be something that dies but can grow again in the springtime. The speaker suggests the words of his poems are being blown around into the world as “sparks” and “ashes.” The speaker describes himself as the “unextinguished hearth” the sparks come from, a fire that is slowly dying but still there.

He ends, returning to his wish of being played like an instrument, referring to himself as a trumpet the wind should blow its prophecy through. His last line is “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” This simple question holds more weight than meets the eye. He needs the answer to be “yes” because he knows he can’t take much more of the torturous winter that is his life at that moment. 

This is composed in a set of separate sonnets brought together. It is formed so that one must continue reading to find out how the story ends. It leaves the reader on edge, going through everything in real time with the author. This has Romanticism seen all throughout it. Romanticism stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical art forms, and rebellion against social conventions. He provides the reader with the chance to envision what the wind is really like with all his analogies. He had been overtaken, he felt, by society and all that had happened to him and wanted the wind to free and renew him. It provides a sense of hope for things to come and is very optimistic.

From a Christian perspective, this is resonating with me due to personal struggles. In life, there are many ups and downs and as a Christian, it’s hard to believe God hears all my prayers. But, like the speaker had a hope, the faith like a mustard seed, and constant belief that better must come stays alive. God tells us, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:5, 6). In this verse we can be reassured God will never forsake us and if we continue to praise him in the bad times He will always see us through. This year has been a series of highs and lows for me, and in the bad times I often want to give up and question why God is testing me in the way He is. But, when I get to my lowest point, I step back and think, who am I to be feeling the way I do, and what kind of faith do I have to believe God can’t get me out of my little situation. Trust in God is imperative, especially in the bad times. Even if you don’t believe in God, simply keeping a positive mindset will get you so much farther in life.

In the Bible, the greatest example of faith and hope I know is Job. He had everything he could possibly want and more: family, money, and notoriety. He served God but he had everything; it was easy to. God let Satan attack Job to just show him how strong his servant was. He had literally everything stripped from him even to the point where Satan took away his health and Job was dying. He was in the hardest time in his life, the worst season or the harshest winter. He still believed in God’s plan and the hope that tomorrow will be better than the day before. In God’s timing, he renewed Job’s health and gave him what he had and so much more for his faith.

The speaker in the ode may not have gone through what Job did but he still showed faith and hope and that is recognized. I appreciate this poem and the reminder it gave me personally to do as God says in John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

The Great (and Good) Books

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Mortimer Adler

“A list of books should not be regarded as a challenge which you can meet only by finishing every item on it.  It should be regarded as an invitation which you can accept graciously by beginning wherever you feel most at home.” – Mortimer Adler

The late great Mortimer J. Adler, of whom I’m proud to be the most ardent living support, in likely his most popular yet least rightly understood book, How to Read a Book, concludes with an impressive litany of the Great Books, dolloped with a smattering (or smattered with a dolloping if you prefer) with a smaller list of (for him) contemporary Good Books that hadn’t existed long enough to fully warrant a place on the Great Books list.  As he himself noted in the excerpt above, while he encourages us to read them chronologically, he is perfectly fine with us not reading the entire list, for the key is reading books well, not just widely reading poorly (quality, not quantity as we put it).  The Great Books he recommends are listed numerically in mainly chronological order; the Good Books are enumerated second; the individual works indicated “especially” are Mr. Adler’s recommendations.  Mr. Adler originally included publishers and series that made these works available in his day, but as most of those publishers and series are long out of print, we’ll just ignore that part.

The Great Books

  1. Homer
    • Iliad
    • Odyssey
  2. The Old Testament
  3. Aeschylus
    • Tragedies (esp. House of Atreus, Prometheus Bound)
  4. Sophocles
    • Tragedies (esp. Oedipus the King, Antigone, Electra)
  5. Euripides
    • Tragedies (esp. Medea, Electra, Hippolytus, Bacchae)
  6. Herodotus
    • History (of the Persian Wars)
  7. Thucydides
    • History of the Peloponnesian War
  8. Hippocrates
    • Collections of Medical Writing
  9. Aristophanes
    • Comedies (esp. Lysistrata, Clouds, Birds, Frogs)
  10. Plato
    • Dialogues (esp. Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Lysis, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Theaetetus, Parmenides)
  11. Aristotle
    • Works (esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
  12. Euclid
    • Elements of Geometry
  13. Cicero
    • Orations
    • Republic
    • Laws
    • Tusculan Disputations
    • Offices
  14. Lucretius
    • Of the Nature of Things
  15. Virgil
    • Aeneid
  16. Horace
    • Odes and Epodes
    • The Art of Poetry
  17. Livy
    • History of Rome
  18. Ovid
    • Metamorphoses
  19. Quintillian
    • Institutes of Oratory
  20. Plutarch
    • Lives
  21. Tacitus
    • Dialogue on Oratory
    • Germania
  22. Nicomachus
    • Introduction to Arithmetic
  23. Epictetus
    • Discourses
  24. Lucian
    • Works (esp. The Way to Write History, The True History, Alexander the Oracle Monger, Charon, The Sale of Lives, The Fisherman, Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, Dialogues of the Dead)
  25. Marcus Aurelius
    • Meditations
  26. Galen
    • Of the Natural Faculties
  27. The New Testament
  28. St. Augustine
    • Of the Teacher
    • Confessions
    • City of God
  29. Volsunga Saga (Nibelungenlied)
  30. Song of Roland
  31. Burnt Njal (Icelandic saga)
  32. Maimonides
    • Guide for the Perplexed
  33. St. Thomas Aquinas
    • Of Being and Essence
    • Summa Contra Gentiles
    • Of the Governance of Rulers
    • Summa Theologica
    • Selected Writings
  34. Dante
    • The Divine Comedy
  35. Chaucer
    • The Canterbury Tales
  36. Thomas à Kempis
    • Of the Imitation of Christ
  37. Leonardo da Vinci
    • Notebooks
  38. Machiavelli
    • The Prince
  39. Erasmus
    • The Praise of Folly
    • Colloquies
  40. St. Thomas More
    • Utopia
  41. Rabelais
    • Gargantua and Pantagruel
  42. Calvin
    • Institutes of the Christian Religion
  43. Montaigne
    • Essays (esp. Of the Education of Children, Of Friendship, Of Cannibals, Of Solitude, Of Experience, Of Moderation, Of Books, Of Custom Upon Some Verses of Virgil, Apology for Raymond de Sebond)
  44. Cervantes
    • Don Quixote
  45. Edmund Spenser
    • The Faerie Queene
  46. Francis Bacon
    • The Advancement of Learning
    • The Novum Organum
    • The New Atlantis
  47. Shakespeare
    • Plays
  48. Galileo
    • Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
  49. Harvey
    • On the Motion of the Heart
  50. Grotius
    • The Law of War and Peace
  51. Hobbes
    • Elements of Philosophy
    • Leviathan
  52. Descartes
    • A Discourse on Method
    • Geometry
    • Principles of Philosophy
    • The Passions of the Soul
  53. Corneille
    • Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
  54. Milton
    • Areopagitica
    • Paradise Lost
    • Samson Agonistes
  55. Molière
    • Comedies (esp. The Miser, The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, Tradesman Turned Gentleman, The Imaginary Invalid, The Affected Ladies)
  56. Boyle
    • The Sceptical Chymist
  57. Spinoza
    • Political Treatises
    • Ethics
  58. Locke
    • Letter Concerning Toleration
    • Two Treatises of Civil Government
    • Essays Concerning Human Understanding
    • Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  59. Racine
    • Tragedies (esp. Andromache, Athaliah)
  60. Newton
    • Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
    • Opticks
  61. Leibnitz
    • Discourse on Metaphysica
    • New Essays Concerning Human Understanding
    • Monadology
  62. Defoe
    • Robinson Crusoe
    • Moll Flanders
  63. Swift
    • Battle of the Books
    • Tale of a Tub
    • Journal to Stella
    • Gulliver’s Travels
  64. Montesquieu
    • Persian Letters
    • Spirit of Laws
  65. Voltaire
    • Candide
    • Philosophical Dictionary
    • Toleration
  66. Berkeley
    • A New Theory of Vision
    • The Principles of Human Knowledge
  67. Fielding
    • Joseph Andrews
    • Tom Jones
  68. Hume
    • A Treatise of Human Nature
    • Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
    • History of England
  69. Rousseau
    • Émile
    • The Social Contract
    • Confessions
  70. Sterne
    • Tristram Shandy
  71. Adam Smith
    • The Theory of Moral Sentiments
    • The Wealth of Nations
  72. Blackstone
    • Commentaries on the Laws of England
  73. Kant
    • Critique of Pure Reason
    • Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
    • Critique of Practical Reason
    • Critique of Judgment
  74. Gibbon
    • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  75. Stendhal
    • The Red and the Black
  76. The Federalist Papers (along with The Articles of Confederation, The Constitution of the United States, and The Declaration of Independence)
  77. Bentham
    • Comment on the Commentaries
    • Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
  78. Goethe
    • Faust
    • Poetry and Truth
  79. Ricardo
    • The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
  80. Malthus
    • Essay on the Principles of Population
  81. Dalton
    • A New System of Chemical Philosophy
  82. Hegel
    • Phenomenology of Spirit
    • Science of Logic
    • Philosophy of Right
    • Philosophy of History
  83. Guizot
    • History of Civilization in Europe
  84. Faraday
    • Experimental Researches in Electricity
  85. Lobachevski
    • Theory of Parallels
  86. Comte
    • General View of Positivism
  87. Balzac
    • Works (esp. Le Père Goriot, Cousin Pons, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Betty, César Birotteau)
  88. Lyell
    • The Antiquity of Man
  89. J. S. Mill
    • System of Logic
    • Principles of Political Economy
    • On Liberty
    • Of Representative Government
    • Utilitarianism
    • Autobiography
  90. Darwin
    • The Origin of Species
  91. Thackerey
    • Works (esp. Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, The Virginians, Pendennis)
  92. Dickens
    • Works (esp. Pickwick Papers, Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities)
  93. Claude Bernard
    • Introduction to Experimental Medicine
  94. Boole
    • Laws of Thought
  95. Marx
    • Capital (along with The Communist Manifesto)
  96. Melville
    • Typee
    • Moby Dick
  97. Dostoevski
    • Crime and Punishment
    • The Idiot
    • The Brothers Karamazov
  98. Buckle
    • A History of Civilization in England
  99. Flaubert
    • Madame Bovary
  100. Galton
    • Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
  101. Riemann
    • The Hypotheses of Geometry
  102. Ibsen
    • Plays (esp. Peer Gynt, Brand, Hedda Gabler, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder)
  103. Tolstoi
    • War and Peace
    • Anna Karenina
    • What is Art?
  104. Dedekind
    • Theory of Numbers
  105. Wundt
    • Physiological Psychology
    • Outline of Psychology
  106. Mark Twain
    • Innocents Abroad
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
  107. Henry Adams
    • History of the United States
    • Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
    • The Education of Henry Adams
    • Degradation of the Democratic Dogma
  108. Charles Peirce
    • Chance, Love, and Logic
    • Collected Papers
  109. William Sumner
    • Folkways
  110. Oliver Wendell Holmes
    • The Common Law
    • Collected Legal Papers
  111. William James
    • Principles of Psychology
    • The Varieties of Religious Experience
    • Pragmatism
    • A Pluralistic Universe
    • Essays in Radical Empiricism
  112. Nietzsche
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • The Genealogy of Morals
    • The Will to Power
  113. Georg Cantor
    • Transfinite Numbers
  1. Pavlov
    • Conditioned Reflexes
  2. Poincaré
    • The Foundations of Science
  3. Freud
    • Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex
    • Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
    • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
    • Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
    • The Ego and the Id
    • Civilization and Its Discontents
  4. Thorstein Veblen
    • The Theory of the Leisure Class
    • The Higher Learning in America
    • The Place of Science in Modern Civilization
    • Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Arts
    • Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times
  5. Lenin
    • Imperialism
  6. Proust
    • Remembrance of Things Past
  7. G. B. Shaw
    • Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant
    • Man and Superman
    • Androcles and the Lion
  8. Boas
    • The Mind of Primitive Man
    • Anthropology and Modern Life
  9. Dewey
    • How We Think
    • Democracy and Education
    • Experience and Nature
    • The Quest for Certainty
    • Logic
  10. Bergson
    • Time and Free Will
    • Matter and Memory
    • Creative Evolution
    • Two Sources of Morality and Religion
  11. Whitehead
    • A Treatise on Universal Algebra
    • An Introduction to Mathematics
    • Science and the Modern World
    • Process and Reality
    • Adventures of Ideas
  12. Santayana
    • Scepticism and Animal Faith
    • Realm of Essence
    • Realm of Matter
    • Realm of Truth
  13. Russell
    • Principles of Mathematics
  14. Thomas Mann
    • The Magic Mountain
    • Joseph in Egypt
  15. Einstein
    • The Theory of Relativity
    • Sidelights on Relativity
    • Adventure of Scientific Thought
  16. Trotsky
    • The History of the Russian Revolution
  17. Joyce
    • Ulysses
  18. Maritain
    • Art and Scholasticism
    • Degrees of Knowledge
    • Freedom in the Modern World
    • True Humanism

Hot diggity, I’m excited just looking at those lists.  I hesitate to tell you how many (few) of these I’ve read so far.  People seem to think English teachers have read all the books in the world (strange how they never assume mathematics teachers have counted every number in the world).  I’ll be content (so far) with saying I’ve heard of almost all of the authors Mr. Adler recommends.  Of course, then come all the authors after World War 2….  Better get started on these.

If you need a break from reading, and sure we all do once in a while, turn the page for another list of sensory experiences that may tickle your fancy, as the kids say.

Two on Song of Myself: Discerning the Meaning of Meaningless Poems and Unentwining the Deadness from Being Alive

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Alice Minium

Whitman probably would not have considered himself a teacher, let alone the guru of words and wisdom that the modern world has made him out to be.

In his own time, Whitman was, by all accounts, the simplest of men. He was not stuffy or pretentious, as we are when we sit in our classrooms debating the intellectual finer points of whether or not Whitman might have been gay.

He probably would have laughed had he known entire classrooms of students would spend hours dissecting the meaning of his punctuation and his reasons for ending a line. “Who was the 29th bather?!” we ask wretchedly, clawing at our eyes and throwing our hands to the sky in exasperation.

The funny thing is that Whitman probably didn’t even know.

Poetry is transmutation, an incarnation of abstraction into the tangible plane of mind and linear ideas, and poetry by its nature does not bend to our linear laws, nor is it defined by them. The laws serve poetry in conveying its purpose, and the way they fall and are constructed so delicately infers to us, like fingerprints, traces of the soul of the poem, but they are not in essence the poem itself- only fragments. A poem is not its words, symbols, punctuation breaks, or any other syntactical components. A poem is an energy above, within, and without all of that.

The poem is what you hear between the lines, that which can only be implied in words — that which speaks directly to the soul, like sacred wind chimes, an ancient siren cry of summoning to our inner self that knows more than world, “Wake up.” That is the part of us that receives poetry, if we are receiving it properly.

 Much like music, which is not simply heard, it is utterly felt and inspires raw physiological and spiritual reactions within us, and draws out emotion endlessly like water from a well. Have you ever heard a song from your childhood, and tried not to feel anything as you listen? It is impossible.

Though we live mostly in mind (thanks to modern life) and to a small extent within the body, most of who and what we are is completely and utterly Soul.

Soul masters all of that, and mind can say, “Feel nothing,” but the Soul will not obey, as it cannot be extracted from its other manifestations. Soul is inherent in all things, the thread which flows within and between all entities, and we cannot escape it, for we are Soul. All of the universe is Soul.

It is to our Souls that Whitman speaks most directly and profoundly. It is our Souls upon which he impresses an indentation of exotic and primal laughter, and it is our Souls to whom Whitman sings. He flirts with our souls, mesmerizes our souls, challenges our souls, calls our souls into our bodies with his words like fast magnets zapping consciousness into our molecules and presence into our nucleotides and irrefutable magic into our moments. It is the Soul within us we find so entranced by the words of Whitman.

Whitman would not have called himself a teacher, for he laughed at the Men of Mind peddling words and playing Jenga with interlocking thoughts and dreams and transmutations endlessly, day after day, forever entranced with analysis and forgetting to live. Whitman would have said that it is better to play in the grass than to read a hundred books, or better to sing a song of joy than to study for hours and master the algorithms of matter and math.

He had this very Christ-like notion of drinking from the raw tap of human experience, a very Taoist ideal of this very moment and all that it contains being the infinite sum total of all things.

Such a mentality is the “Stop” at the end of the telegram; such fullness needs no motion. Yet through motion, and the interplay of opposites, smoke curls, flowers bloom … and the universe comes to know itself.

Every expression, every action, every entity, every tangible and intangible thing are simply the universe laughing, playing with herself, stretching her arms out, writing a poem in a thousand different languages and via a thousand different mediums.

Such is the myriad dimension and delirium of the canvas of life. Its nature cannot be known in mute, fixed laws. It is not mechanistic, dead, or inert. It cannot be known by grammatical structure or the arrangement of words within poetry.

It cannot be dissected by taking apart all the components of a radio, hoping to find music, or disentangling from the thoracic cavity all the organs of the body, hoping to find life. You will find only machines and matter there.

Life cannot be mapped, cannot be defined, cannot be extracted, cannot be indirectly known. You must know it yourself. You must meet it for yourself. You must hear it yourself, drink from its well yourself, and play with it yourself. Life cannot be taught, you must touch it yourself.

It is not earned, or learned, or acquired, and Whitman would have laughed at any who claimed him as teacher of elite sacred spiritual arts. Whitman’s spiritual truth was knowable to every human, and to every nonhuman despite their category, already.

Whitman’s spiritual truth was Being Alive. Whitman was, above all, truly the teacher of that. We can eviscerate and analyze his poetry for years yearning to tap the meaning from its component parts, but that is not where his teaching lies, and that is not how we will know it.

“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?/ Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems” (section 2: line 18-19).

We have felt so proud of our meanings, but the joke is that there’s nothing to discover or extract from them that we don’t already have — there is nothing we can ever find whose origin is not the same as our very own.

“Stop with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems.” Stop with me, and feel for yourself. Breathe for yourself. Touch for yourself. Drink for yourself. Taste it yourself.

Do you feel that? That is meaning. Do you hear that? That is the poem. And of that, above all, we can be our only teacher.

Two on Song of Myself: Stop Working and Look at a Flower

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Alice Minium

I. Machines.

I do not envy the modern lifestyle. Working a repetitive, soul-sucking job where humans are required to behave like machines makes me feel dead inside. As Whitman alludes to many times, there is no insignificant job, and in any job I can use my imagination and share goodwill with all the world.

However, modern society will absolutely make you feel like a machine, if you let it. If you inside your little box-house long enough, staring at your picture-box, and eating things out of boxes, and arranging all your ideas into boxes inside boxes into boxes. You will forget that things without boxes can exist. Humans were not made to live life out of boxes, and boxes are not our natural state. It chokes you, for a reason. You feel constrained, for a reason. You feel tired, for a reason. You forget that you can unplug the box any time.

At least, I forget.

I forget, sometimes, that I am not a machine. Everything I do and say is so task-like, preprogrammed, and empty. I have to entirely unplug myself from social convention to, as Whitman says in Section 5, line 3, “loose the stop from [my] throat.” How dangerous is such an act. How deviant it is to wildly abandon the groupthink, without hesitation or apology. Every day I find myself straddling the juxtaposition of these two opposing principles, awkwardly balancing a medium between the two, so I can be free and yet stereotypically functional within the world. Deep within, or really not so deep at all, I yearn to be wildly free. Yet one cannot be wildly free and still be nondescript about it. How dangerous it is to unplug oneself entirely. How fundamentally disruptive to modern society.

Whitman’s teachings are fundamentally disruptive to modern society.

The modern way does not “ask the sky to come down to my good will,/Scattering it freely forever” (14:18-19) nor “tenderly…use…curling grass” (10:12). To embrace the sky is absurd. Society regards the sky as an inert ceiling, not a door. The curling grass exists for lawns and is meant to be mowed, of course.

Not according to Whitman. In a highly controversial move, Whitman tells us in Section 5, line 3, “Loafe with me on the grass.” To loafe means to just kind of hang out without any objective at all. When was the last time someone told you to just go hang out aimlessly? We are more familiar with the scolding, “Work harder,” than with someone telling us to do the complete opposite of work. Work less, says Whitman.

The feeling of Song of Myself is songlike, and slow. It is rhythmic and unhurried, like a long summer’s day spent loafing in the grass, celebrating your own existence for exactly no reason at all.

In the modern world, we are discouraged from doing anything for no reason at all. Everything must be productive in some way. Everything must be busy, and fast. All of my life is fast. Even my mind is fast. Even when the noise and stimuli stop, still my mind is chattering away like a sick seizing ape bouncing neurons around, deluded with the importance of objects, drunk on the toxicity of Normal and Daytime. Better to be an animal, as Whitman frames so beautifully in Section 32, lines 3-6:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied with the mania of owning things.

We are erratic, thirsty, yet perpetually dehydrated beasts gone absolutely mad with the mania of owning things. Whitman makes an astounding proposition in Section 2, when he beautifully satirizes the fallibility of his own medium, poetry, which is revered and consumed by so many, who fuss over its mysteries, hoping to extract from it “the origin of all poems.” In line 20, he invites us, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”

In other words, how do you get where you are going? Stop.

II. Stop.

Can you imagine the implications if we were all to suddenly, stop? If we put down our books, abandoned our work, and decided to wildly, recklessly play? How ever could society function if we all just looked at flowers? How on earth could we ever produce a commodifiable good?!

Perhaps, instead, a better question, is why is the production of commodifiable goods the ultimate goal of society? Is that really the best we can do? Is productivity and efficiency and material output really the prime potential of the oh-so-great and sentient homo sapiens?

Do we not call ourselves “enlightened?” Do we not call the era of rapid philosophical development the Enlightenment, out of which, we are taught, sprang the modern material era in which we now live? And if that is so, and modern man is, unlike his planetary cohabitants, enlightened in his world of materialism, then I ask you, where is that light?

I do not see it.

I see a world that is hungry and sick in its soul. I see a world of consumers and producers. I see a world of souls hammered into commodifiable goods and dissected to extract their most profitable components.

I see minds like televisions that have been on mute for years, and don’t even remember they are capable of song, so they purchase a laugh track for $9.99 to distract them from the SILENCE that is ABSENCE that we have not heard in so long that we are terrified. We hear the sound of our own breath, and ask in horror WHAT IS THAT MONSTER. We hear the music of the mind and it is alien. It is raw and real, alien and un-plastic, the same electric ahhh that hums through all of nature, innervating every membrane of dimension into sensation and form, and we cringe at it, because we do not know it.

We cringe at it because, like an animal kept in a cage its whole life, we neither understand nor desire to know the world beyond the cage. We are penitent, pitiful pets of some sadistic extradimensional creatures who feed on fear and hatred and by god we keep them well-fed. How disgusted we are by anything that lives outside the cage. How fearful we are of those beasts. How wild they are. How uncontained. How unenlightened. How vibrantly and violently the electricity of Being Alive pulses through them like electric shock even to the blazing profusion of a growl or a shriek? How uncivilized their UTTER ALIVENESS.

Look into the eyes of your cashier clerk or picture of success and tell me we are not dead.

Do you regularly, as in Section 1, line 1, “celebrate [your]self”? How often do you do that every day? Do you, as in Section 1, line 4, “loafe and invite [your] soul”? Have you invited your soul to be in attendance today? Would you even know its address?

Look into your own soul, and tell me, do you even recognize it? Or is it a formidable foreign land to you, once whose labyrinths you have yet never to wander? Have you met yourself? If you did, would you like her? Have you yet to meet a flower? Have you met the acid sky, the spray-paint grass, even the soft warm woodness of your desk? Have you met it for what it is, stopped to feel it and only it and do no other thing, felt and breathed its every scent and color with the unjudging eager attention of a lover (Section 3: 20-21, 24:48)? Have you even met your own body so? Or do we know these things only to be Things, as extensions to be utilized for production, as inert meat and matter, COMMODIFIABLE GOOD? Where does commodifiable good end and Realness begin? Is it the physical objects in closest proximity for which we most greedily perspire? Is it with our bodies? Is it with our minds? Are any of these things even ours anymore?

In Section 30: 1-3, Walter reminds us:

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.

These questions Alice raises, and these precepts Walt proposes, are absurd and dangerous. Of course modern life is fulfilling. To hypothesize that it is not will create an error in the algorithm.

III. Play.

Let us dissect this hypothesis with the obstetric forceps of a surgeon and extract the cancer of fragmented meaning that so errantly has grown here. The cancer of inspiration can prove fatal to the organism, and is almost universally malignant to the capitalist-industrialist paradigm when left unchecked. Passion unbridled and a wild MOAN, an errant SHRIEK, an existential YAWN, a SITTING ON THE TABLE AT THE AIRPORT have been known to rapidly metastasize into the infectious WILD of a Being-Poem; and men will awaken to their own breath and love the taste, and they will laugh, and women will realize they are men, and men will realize they are cats, and children will giggle at the poem of this in the airport, and everyone will run around; and no one with a PriceTagNameTagVeryImportant will tell us to “stop,” and if they do, we will not hear them; or if we do, we won’t know how; because we have unstopped, and now unlive our lives in a single molecule of stretched-out simultaneous moment.

All of essence is available to us Forever And Ever Always Now in every flower and each breath (“All truths wait in all things,” says Section 30: Line 1), we need not wait. We need not painstakingly throttle life by the throat, choking it, dying to extract a droplet of Essence to haphazardly drip from its sponge-like skeleton for … we are so thirsty and the world is dead, and sick, and we meet ourselves at night in the blank white walls, and we meet the kiss of God in the sinews of our sweat within the grinding mechanical motion between Must and Pain; we feel Her So-Invasive Intimate Kiss, and it feels profane, it is so Everything, and I have stared at this screen for so long. My eyes burn, I stare and see nothing. My wild dendrites of yearning and yes are numb, and clipped, and freshly manicured for academic-industrial-workplace Exhaustion; drink this cup until you fulfill you unless you’ll drink it or die (or maybe you won’t, but Nobody’s lived to tell the tale). Is this not nonsense?

When the modus operandi of logical truth is actually nonsense, is absurdity not the only way to defy it? Is it not revolutionary to be absurd? Are Whitman’s truths not absurd by the standards of society?

“I exist as I am, that is enough/ If no other in the world be aware I sit content,” he declares in Section 20: line 25. Wait, what? What about all the things you need? What about all the things you have to do, all the modifications you need to make to your body, all the goals you need to accomplish, all the toys you need to buy? What about all the friends you need to impress, all the legitimacy you need to obtain through the recognition of other people? To say “I am enough,” is a counterculture act.

Please, the world will say, package up your aimless abstractions and deposit them in the Recycling for they are simply cluttering up productive space which could be occupied by an advert. You’re not good enough, be hungry, and purchase some accessories on your way out the door. Nobody has time for your abstractions, Alice. They are absurd, and you will be expelled from the belly of the capitalist organism like an acidic virus we must vomit up. You will destroy it from within.

Would such expulsion really be horrific? Is freedom from containment, in fact, the worst we fear? If that is why we are not wild, then, by all means, please expel me! If that is all we fear, why don’t we do the ridiculous things we always want, and sit on tables supposed to be chairs? Stop showing up? Check out completely? Look at a flower? Drop our tools? Forget our plans? Put down our phones and drink the sky? Would that really be so bad?

We live inside of paper plastic prop-up houses fabrications of fabrications of fabrications of fabrications of something that resembled a Real Thing once. Now it is “more convenient,” and dead, and made of Styrofoam. Mankind is dead, and our minds are made of Styrofoam. We don’t dislike it, because we don’t remember how. We are Styrofoam bubble-wrap brains that pop Reaction at pre-programmed synapse site. We simulate original emotion, but oh, it has been ages since we have felt a real thing. We numb the impossibly potent penetration of syringical injection of love and dying (events that command us to genuinely feel) with So Sorry Feed Me Baby Eat Me Like A Rich Food (consume another person). We have packaged even that into commodity.

In the crevices between the tectonics plates of moment, we feel the ache of dissonance on occasion. It grinds like Old, though we are Yet Young, and have forgotten. Ever since we picked up tools and found our “civilization,” we’ve forgotten how to delicately finger the velveteen skin of a single blade of baby grass. We have forgotten how to loafe. We have forgotten that we are happy; and that this is not a test, this is a game; that we are not mute, we are laughter; and all the world breathes with us in this music we need only to hit

play

play with me, stay with me, flowy lotus of nonprocedural juxtaposition of chaos and complexity utterly devoid of catechism drippingly infused with sex-sweet nectar of holographic need (only, now.).

Such is my prayer, my invitation, and such was Whitman’s.

The invitation begins, “Forget your plans.”

This invitation is to my own soul, my own soul only. This song is to you, my soul.

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. (19:17)

I am telling you, my soul. Hear my invitation, for I love you. I recognize your presence. I have not heard your voice in so long. I have told you my secrets. Now, I can do nothing but listen.