Tag: Literature

FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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FROM SYMBOLS TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. This is one volume that has perplexed and confounded me ever since I picked it up in 1983 in Dupont Circle. Part of my difficulty is in her compression of symbol and ritual, and another part in her use of African tribal anthropology to illustrate some theory. What I take away from this is that there are conventions in any society that enhance or facilitate actions that benefit both the individuals and the collectivity. When the experiences of individuals are paramount, there is little way of expressing them across the collectivity; when the collectivity is paramount, the individual may be crushed. Divide this individual/collectivity plane by another she calls grid/group and you get what I see in the collectivity as the faith community (group) or the totalitarian/bureaucratic regime (grid). Here, in the grid, the empowered individual may be the elite leader who moves people as pawns, while in the group, the individual may be … the mystic? If I interpret her right, groups may form at the fringe of society, while grids instead become the majority or norm. Whew!
  • David Burnie: Light. An Eyewitness Science illustrated book, this one gives me a clearer concept of scientific thought on light itself. Apart from a timeline of discoveries from the time the Quaker movement emerged up to the present, the bits leave me wondering just what I might incorporate into the idea of metaphor … and how.
  • A. Monroe Aurand Jr.: Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans. Pamphlet.
  • Plain magazine. Nine issues Rachel received on Cushing Street. Lovely periodical that would likely have been better as a blog, if only they weren’t so neo-Luddite! Yes, I remain fond of hot type and all. The Barnesville connection made the issues especially pertinent to me as I reflect on the moves that landed me here.
  • Charles E. Fager: A Man Who Made a Difference: The Life of David H. Scull. This biography of a 20th century Friend made an interesting counterpoint to the Plain strand, although perhaps just as economically distant from the modern mainstream. Scull was able to do much of his far-reaching work within socially conscious organizations because of the freedom his small company gave him, thanks in part to his equally committed business partner. But that road, demonstrated by the cusp of the computer revolution in printing, Scull’s business, has changed everything. What are the alternatives for young Friends today?
  • E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Like Muddling Toward Frugality (above), this classic is both dated and visionary. The devastation of globalization – on American wages, for starters – and the emergence of the Internet throw many of his strategies into disarray, yet the underpinning arguments of wrong focus and limited resources remain intriguing and relevant.

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OF SPRAWLING SYMPHONIES AND MUDDLING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. OK, the first one’s not a book, apart from the liner notes. But it’s still a major undertaking:

  • Gunter Wand conducts Bruckner, the nine symphonies: Listening to these in sequence close together discloses how little the composer grew from the first to last work. They become bombastic fanfares over wavering strings, and heavy footed. Only in No. 8 does he use harps, and then three of them. Despite all of the religious impulse others find in these works, I find them postured, with a vengeful, magisterial deity rather than the blissful radiance I feel in worship. While I have 3, 7, and 9 on vinyl, I am surprised how much of the others I recognize, at least in certain passages. So this has been an instructive exercise, especially in its unintended conjunction with Augustine.
  • Warren Johnson: Meddling Toward Frugality. An interesting 1978 volume from Sierra Club Books that is in many ways dated, especially in its expectations of decentralization and increasing local control, much of his overall thesis remains intriguing. His failure to anticipate the impact of globalization, computerization, and the wealth shift to the wealthiest Americans skewers his predictions, yet his expectations of lower worker income is bearing out (despite higher productivity!). His interpretation of muddling as positive, and demonstrated in both corporate and political decision-making, is illuminating. On a more personal note, I appreciate his interpretation of the Eden story as yet one more layer of wisdom: “The Biblical legend of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden seems clearly to describe the invention of agriculture. The tree of knowledge was the knowledge of agriculture: ‘The tree was good for food,’ and the woman took the first step – ‘She took the fruit thereof and did eat’ (Genesis 3:60). The penalty was the expulsion from the Garden [of the hunter-gatherer society] and ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). Most important, it was irreducible. Once the knowledge had been gained and populations had risen above the carrying capacity of the hunter and gatherer, there was no turning back. The expulsion from the Garden was final. … Mankind would henceforth live in an intimate relationship with the soil.”

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FROM THICH NHAT HANH TO AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddha Mind, Buddha Body and Call Me by My True Name. The first, subtitled “Walking Toward Enlightenment,” lays out classic Buddhist teaching regarding human thought processes – something with interesting parallels to what I’m considering in the Quaker experience – as well as some good passages on seeds that may be applicable to my examination of the metaphor of The Seed. The collected poems, however, strike me as amateurish – first drafts, apparently all from single-day attempts – rather than deeply profound. Both volumes, all the same, treasured gifts.
  • Russell Banks: The Darling. A tale of a Weatherman member who goes underground and then flees to Africa, where she becomes the wife of a Liberian civil minister before getting caught up in the civil wars that bring the tyrant Charles Taylor to power. Masterful plotting, moving across past and present, and a range of meticulous reporting that includes not just politics and history but also ethnology and, especially, chimpanzee survival issues. Having read two Banks’ novels, now, I now move him to my list of favorites. But how many of his 22 or more volumes do I tackle?
  • Augustine of Hippo: City of God. Revisiting this political science course assignment, I am surprised how little I remember of his argument but am also impressed by my previous underlining and comments. Even so, a few of his points remained in my mind, especially the part about faith standing apart from rewards (even though Augustine eventually presses the heavenly rewards argument). His criticism of the pagans is solid and his argument that a society and government failing to uphold justice are no commonwealth at all – that is, are invalid. But he falls into the trap of predestination and despite his claims to the contrary, cannot support his claims we are free to do good. This time around, I see his extensive framing of a theology based on Original Sin of Eve as a faulty, and see no need for so many pages examining faithful and fallen angels, at least in terms of a polity. His statements about serving victorious forces, seeing their victory as God’s providence, and about just war are quite troublesome, while his descriptions of the City of God are logically thin – unsupported claims, essentially. Crucially for me is his error is linking the Word to Jesus alone: “the only begotten Word of God” – this, despite his close examination earlier of the schools of philosophy following from Pythagoras and Plato. I see this, ultimately, as a formulation of Catholic Orthodoxy far more than as any political blueprint.

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DISCOVERING JONATHAN LETHEM AND NICHOLSON BAKER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Looking back, I was surprised to find that somewhere along the line, I’d stopped making entries in my Books Read list. Curiously, this was a period in which I discovered two writers who leaped to the top of my favorite living novelists esteem, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker, two incredibly versatile writers who (fortunately) cannot be pigeonholed. Since this span of reading includes about a dozen of their volumes (half of them from the public library), I won’t try to summarize the works – they deserve long entries on their own – but I will note that The Everlasting Story of Nory opens with something I’d long argued for fiction: for the first 50 pages, there is seemingly no conflict at play, which somehow heightens the tension all the more. And I love the way Baker can handle a sentence of 250 to 300 words, a rarity in our era. Lethem, meanwhile, can construct a fat novel – and how – with insight, imagination, and flair.

These encounters – joined with Andre Dubus and Russell Banks – came as a relief after a stretch in which I wasn’t finding anybody in the current scene who was moving me the way, say, Kerouac, Kesey, or Vonnegut had back when I was in college. (Or even Brautigan, right after.) What a relief! And maybe, as I would hope, my standards have risen.

This period also includes discovering my most detested contemporary novelist, who will go unnamed. Tossing a string of senselessly murdered bodies in our direction does nothing to raise my sense of humanity. Quite the opposite. And with his professions of religious faith, I find no excuse for such nihilism. Nory, by contrast, delivers on all counts.

I also read Ernest Hebert’s Live Free or Die and Spoonwood, with their requisite New Hampshire perspectives. (His work is anchored in the distinctive Monadnock region of the Granite State.)

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, with its portrayals of the Plymouth Brethren in England, also led to the father’s marvelous illustrations of tide pool life, something I’m now pursuing every summer.

Kay Davis Coltrane’s Centre Friends: The Legacy of the Meeting on the Hill is a fat, thoroughly illustrated history of the Quaker congregation my Hodgson ancestors helped settle in North Carolina in the 1750s. Wonderful work.

Also, I reread Julian Barnes’ Proust’s Parrot and Proust’s Madame Bovary, and Tuesday’s With Morey.

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FROM MOTHERS IN FLIGHT TO THE GREAT HEREAFTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Rosie Jackson: Mothers Who Leave. Published in 1994, this consideration of British and American mothers attempts to balance the predominant view that mothers who leave their children in a divorce are somehow abnormal, morally deficient, irresponsible, or self-centered. Drawn more from literature and pop culture (especially Hollywood) than from social science research.
  • Dawn Powell: The Wicked Pavilion. World War II-era novel set on a star-crossed romance that keeps returning to a “musty” French restaurant in Manhattan. New Yorker-flavored style, with a good dose of dry humor. Also, her novel, The Golden Spur, set in and around a Greenwich Village tavern.
  • Thomas P. Slaughter: The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition. Not read closely, but rather as a quick overview. Am not impressed with the author’s interpretation of Quaker faith as such, especially in its origins, but his focus, understanding, and specialty are naturally on Woolman per se.
  • Sarah Dunant:  The Birth of Venus, A historical novel set in Florence at the end of the Medici reign and during the time of the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, at the end of the 1400s. An interesting counterpoint of papal opposition within the Catholic church in Italy a few years before Luther and Calvin to the north. Told from the point of view of a woman who is married off to a homosexual. Wikipedia confirms the prevalence of homosexuality in Florence and the destructiveness of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and explains that the widespread outbreak of pox, otherwise known as the French Pox, was syphilis.
  • Charles Olson: Selected Writings. A revisit to essays and poems, especially those related to Gloucester. Olson’s debt to Pound is quite obvious, though I find little memorable here. Still, a palate-cleanser. Curiously, his MAXIMUS poems are a blend of prose poems and lyrical.
  • The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2 (1934-1939 (unfinished on my return to the office). Apparently, I read part of this long ago, though I remember nothing. This time, I’m fascinated by her working with Otto Rank and her descriptions of his personality. Of course, much of the masculine/feminine debate is very dated. I would very much like to hear from the other sides of her subjects, since she is so confident in her opinions.
  • Quaker Life, March/April 2009. Wonderful issue focusing on Friends and Their Pastors, including a piece by me.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald:  The Great Gatsby. An enjoyable read, obvious if one considers the longevity of the work. But also quite flawed, first in overall structure, and second in some erratic shift in point of view: some scenes are elaborately described even though there was no way for the first-person narrator to have knowledge of them, much less detailed dialogue. In the end, I have little interior sense of any of the characters, apart from their gyrations in regard to wealth – including the narrator, and am left with little sympathy for them or their condition. I can understand the initial attraction of the big lavish parties, but that quickly becomes a screen for the underlying vacuity.
  • Henry Miller: Nexus (The Rosy Crucifixion). Not really a novel, this work is more a series of confessions and speculations. The subjects and style are something I once would have perceived as profound and worthy of pursuit, though they now strike me more as pretentious, confused babbling. The Christmas section, however, starting on page 72 is a refreshing alternative to the usual happy-happy sort of holiday memories one is usually served. This, like the Nin, is another example of writers and other artists living in the poverty of a self-proclaimed higher existence of Their Art; in this case, aspiring to The Novel.
  • Vanity Fair, April 2009. Issue devoted to the Vanishing American Dream, hedge fund collapses, Bernie Madoff’s victims, and so on. Not one of the most compelling collections, despite its timeliness.
  • Stack of Columbia Journalism Review issues, 2007-2008. Sherry’s gift to my reading pile … but all the pieces on the changing field and the desperation afloat left no encouragement. In addition, so much simply felt dated, even at a year’s remove.
  • Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer. Along with Joyce, puts Kerouac in perspective. Alas.
  • Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America and Selected Stories. A master.
  • Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter. Yes, another master.

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FROM A PAPER DOLL TO BALLS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Robert B. Parker: Paper Doll. By quoting Emerson and placing the scene of the crime “right in Louisburg Square” in Boston’s Beacon Hill, both on Page 2, Parker had my full attention. A delightful read, and fast – despite my usual distaste for genre writing of any kind. A fine tonic after Moore’s laborious scaffolding, especially.
  • James P. Carse: The Religious Case Against Belief. A perplexing argument that belief relates to belief systems that actually inhibit the sense of wonder that is at the heart of religion. He sees religion more as long-term culture, each one filled with varied and evolving responses. In addition, open-ended poetry is at the heart of religion, unlike belief, which has answers even before any question is raised. His discussion on Page 65 leads me to the Forbidden Fruit as the first law. The freedom to violate it leads us to trial-and-error knowledge. Without that opening, we would have a static – rather than dynamic – state of existence. The New Adam, in effect, would be returned to a state of wonder and awe, rather than a confining “belief system.” The full freedom of relationship, in other words, rather than subservience.
  • Michael Ray Taylor: Cave Passages: Roaming the Underground Wilderness. An obvious companion to The Mole People and my Southern Indiana experiences. Makes me realize that no matter how fascinated I am by karst formations perceived from above ground, I have no desire for the cold, clammy, and downright wet – and often claustrophobic, jagged, and muddy – conditions underground.
  • Wilmer A. Cooper: Growing Up Plain: The Journey of a Public Friend. Rooted in places and people I’ve known, this account provides a candid dimension of the difficulties placed upon children growing up in Ohio Wilburite families in the years when the one-room schoolhouses were being closed down. A good counterpoint to the rosier versions told by William Taber. One bonus is in the appendices, which include John Brady’s history and two OYM Disciplines.
  • Stephen D. Edington: The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides. Here a Unitarian minister in Nashua really stretches to make his all-too-shallow case. Not only does he repeat himself, but he seems to be ignorant of many key incidents in the lives of these players. Apart from Snyder and Whalen, and perhaps activists like Ferlinghetti, hedonism could be seen to be the operating principle, rather than religious quest.
  • Lester C. Thurow: The Zero Sum Society. Another critique of conventional economics, this one was first published in 1980, which leaves it in a curious situation. Since it is addressed to a series of political stalemates preventing long-term economic reform, much of his analysis feels dated, especially the concerns about inflation or income security. (These days, we’re looking at the possibility of real deflation and negotiated pay cuts.) On the other hand, the failure to solve these problems back then have led us, in part, into the disastrous situation the Obama Administration is now facing. He sees energy reform as the central problem. Thurow’s argument, of course, is the question of which segment of society will most bear the brunt (and the economic costs) of any change.
  • Richard Adams: Watership Down. The British rabbit novel I was supposed to read my senior year of college. So rabbits talk? And one of their favorite sayings is that a cloud doesn’t like to be alone? Disturbing.
  • Patricia Foster, ed.:  Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. In contrast to Minding the Light, this collection puts the focus on the corporeal – perhaps quite fitting for someone recovering from surgery! Actually, a remarkable collection. I can’t imagine men writing about our bodies and our varied struggles with them – including issues of being overweight or skinny, illness (especially cancer), or aging.
  • Nanci Kincaid: Balls. A fast-moving 396-page novel from the viewpoint of the women in the shadows of football, especially Dixie, who becomes the wife of Mac, the central coach in the story. Humorous and quite disturbing as it looks at the disintegration of marriage and the male obsession with success.

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FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE OBAMA ERA TO ETHICS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Vanity Fair, March 2009. The annual Hollywood issue is supplemented with “The Obama Era Begins” – and “Historic Portraits of Washington’s New Establishment” by Annie Leibowitz.
  • Money, Special Report: Rescue Your Retirement. Too little, too late. They’re talking about people who make hundreds of thousands a year – and can put like sums aside.
  • Terry Eagleton: After Theory. I’m not quite sure what to make of this one, an office freebie. I was expecting something related to literary theory, rather than an attack on “cultural theory” and “postmodernism.” Still, working from a Marxist perspective, he crosses over into theological and philosophical issues, so it fits into that stream of thought in this mini-sabbatical.
  • Jonathan B. Tucker: Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. Jonathan, of course, stayed with us for a week of the Obama primary campaign. Very well written, especially considering its technical nature.
  • Carlos Baker: Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Jessica’s copy, at her insistence. A good follow to Ives’ admiration. Am especially intrigued by what might have developed had Emerson linked his sense of overarching Reason with Logos and then Christ, rather than simply a universal goodness that instead evolved (the Unitarian evolution).

Curious bits with local twists for me: Father Samuel Moody, Emerson’s great-great-grandfather, famous preacher of Mount Agamenticus, Maine.

The Wesleyan Academy at Newmarket NH.

Indian name for Mount Washington was Agiocochook, as used by Thoreau.

“The God who made New Hampshire / Taunted the lofty land with little men” – Thoreau, “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing.”

The Old Man, the Great Stone Face, “that grave old Sphinx” (Thoreau).

Emerson: “I acknowledge (with surprise that I could never forget) the debt of myself and my brothers to that old religion which in those years, still dwelt like a Sabbath peace in the country population of New England, which taught privation, self-denial, and sorrow.” (on the death of Dr. Ezra Ripley)

Passenger rail service to Concord, Mass., began June 17, 1844.

Emerson was irritated by Shaker “dunce-dance,” “with buildings ostentatiously neat,” as if entering a “hospital ward of invalids afflicted with priapism.”

“… our Concord River which is narrow and slow and shallow.”

Emerson had always shown a fondness for Maine, even including the snowbank near Berwick into which his sleigh-stage had inadvertently dumped its passengers back in 1842.

Department of Interior Secretary James Harlan, “a grim Iowa Methodist” according to Walt Whitman. (Harlans originally a Quaker family connected to my own ancestors.)

In 1852, John Albee, a 19-year-old senior at Phillips Andover Academy, came to Concord to interview Emerson and met a man whose name sounded like Thorough or Thurro. (Note the accented syllable, being the first.)

  • Samuel Butler: Erewhon. A satire of the assumptions of civilized society – especially Victorian England and its established church – as well as those of Utopian enterprises, this slow-moving narrative was an amusing read. Consider its Musical Bank (echoing both the Church of England and the chambers of high finance) or the College of Unreason as two examples. (Another of my college-era collection, this time passed on to Jessica.)
  •  G.E. Moore: Principia Ethica. “What is GOOD?” is the premise for this work from my college-assignment collection. We never discussed it, though, and I never took the ethics course. Perhaps inadvertently, the definition of the Highest Good works best in theological terms.

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FROM CELIA THAXTER TO CHARLES IVES, WITH ANTIQUITY IN BETWEEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Celia Thaxter:  An Island Garden. A delightful book. The Childe Hassam illustrations are classic, and my favorite parts of the text are her descriptions of the sea and island life. Of course, the gardening advice is no slouch, either, especially with her passionate details of battling slugs.
  • Jennifer Toth: The Mole People. A daring demonstration of enterprise reporting by a Los Angeles Times correspondent in New York, detailing the rise of homeless people in the 1980s who retreated to the depths of the city, including those of the subways and railroads. Her investigations ultimately placed her life in danger. A remarkable alternative to my freewheeling, playful Subway Hitchhikers perspective.
  • Antonia Fraser: Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. After all of my Quaker histories and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, this biography provides a third leg for triangulating the upheaval that shaped the Society of Friends. I now see the Protectorate as a subset of the Interregnum, one in conflict with both Parliamentary rights and the political power of the Army (including its Leveller and Digger voices). Fraser’s description of the origins of the New Model Army as “godly men” hints that its span may have had several incarnations; also, John Lilburne’s role within this period, as a vocal dissident, leaves me concluding that Cromwell’s failure to extend the vote for the House of Commons to all free Englishmen (or at least all of the Army, who had fought for its freedom) was the central fatal flaw of the revolution, especially as Cromwell floundered in his attempts to rule with a greatly muzzled Parliament. From Fraser’s perspective, the Quakers were generally just one of the many sects flourishing at the time, and the Nayler trial by Parliament, while troubling in its legal foundation and execution, was not the pivotal event seen by Douglas Gwyn and others. In the end, Fraser is long-winded. What I would now like to see is a definitive treatment of Lilburne, another of the New Model, and yet another on the General Baptists of the era.
  •  James Joyce:  Ulysses. Such a troubling, disjointed work! On one hand, it points straight to Kerouac and William Burroughs in its free-flowing association. Despite many imaginative and wonderful lines and, especially, puns, it’s hard to follow the characters through this single-day pursuit, or to have any sympathy for any of them.
  • Jack Miles: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. This ex-Jesuit’s examination builds on his earlier biography of God, and his conclusion that, for various reasons, the God of Israel can no longer deliver his end of the covenant. Miles approaches Jesus exclusively as God Incarnate, rather than any of the alternatives I’ve perceived, and sees the Crucifixion as essentially a self-suicide by God – an offering of appeasement for his failure. Indeed, Miles sees Jesus as repeatedly evading questions about the free Jewish state promised in Isaiah, especially, and calls Jesus an “ironic Messiah.”
  • The Confessions of St. Augustine. His conceit of addressing these to God, as in prayer, even though the deity already knows all the details and more, provides an intimacy for the general reader to whom the work is actually aimed. Of course, Augustine’s ultimate denunciation of the turns that led him to his life in the Church – in fact, his appreciation of those steps – taints the work for me. Too much self-piety, in the end, with all of his destructive role in leading Christianity into the “dark night of the apostasy.” On the other hand, much of this is also a day book for reflection: not the way I handled the volume this time, but perhaps at a later date.
  • Charles Ives:  Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. The essays regarding the Concord Sonata and its Transcendentalist inspirations are provocative and insightful. His political writings, however, can be embarrassing, except for the sense of the Emersonian influences Ives is attempting to apply – his naïve faith in a Majority (the People) over an elite Minority (the Non-People) is all the more telling in that Ives (and, for that matter, classical music itself) will never appeal to the Majority in America!

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