Much as I hate moving, a new home does bring hope for a new garden. Spade in hand, I survey my new domain, looking for a ripe spot to notch out a new plot. What I seek is fecundity, and then I plan to slice it down.

Where the grass grows the best is where my plants will too. I hate that. I’d rather try to make something work in the rocky no-man’s land behind the fence or along the garage. But the sun shines where the sun can, and the rain pools in places I can’t always control. So, cruel landlord that I am, I do what I must. The native shoots and leaves I’ll soon slay for the greater good of peppers and tomatoes and peas.

I wonder what the first settlers thought when they arrived in places like Kansas. After walking for weeks through Appalachian mountains, under forests thick enough to blot out the sky, then over the still-green hills of Iowa tumbling up from Mississippi and back down to Missouri. They must have thought they’d hit the Californian desert, that they’d gone too far and should put the Conestoga in reverse. This wouldn’t seem a place to plant a garden. Not to me.

Marilynne Robinson disinters these pioneers of the prairie in her novel Gilead.  It’s an interesting work – conceived as a memoir written by a dying Iowan preacher from the first half of the last century, penned to his young son who’ll soon be growing up without a dad. His forefathers first came to Kansas not to build a life, but out of a sense of altruism. A quick wave of migration flooded the western territory before the Civil War broke loose, as antebellum Jayhawks and Freelanders fought to stake claim in the virgin sod, to bring the new state into the Union on the side of the Abolition.

Under the circumstances, nothing was built to last.

Nor was much built with any permanence just up and over in Iowa, where the bulk of the novel takes place. The town, Gilead, is filled with people from somewhere else – New Englanders mostly, with a few Negroes who ran north and recent European immigrants thrown in. And they’re all willing to move again when trouble comes, when the drought arrives and the dirt starts to blow, when the wars cull their young, or when luck simply runs its course.  While here, they toiled at the ancient work of man – they subdued the black earth, bore babies, established a grid of order on the open land.  But when looking back at Gilead, they find that there wasn’t much that they had left behind.

This is the essential sorrow of the Midwest, and Robinson taps into it like the deep root of a prairie thistle. She welcomes us to the in-between country, or fly-over country as you’d call it now. Always an ephemeral place, a great swath of transition, defined by what it has not more than by what it has. You’ll know it as the place without forests, without mountains, without deserts, without coasts.

Yes, the fullness of life can be known in these parts, there is no reason why anything worth doing can’t be done on this land. Our Reverend looks over his sermons and finds he’s written as much as Augustine and Calvin, that he’s contributed to the scholarly conversation as thoughtfully as any man can. He’s experienced extremes of love and loss, of plenty and want, seen great virtue and heard all manner of confessions from his congregation. As he says, “There have been heroes here, saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth even if no one remembers it.”

Nothing is unknown to the people of Gilead, though it wouldn’t do to speak of it in polite company. Still, life is spread thin on this patch of the Earth’s flat crust. Even the wooden church where he preaches wasn’t meant to stand:

“They’ll tear it down once I pass away.”

“A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lance could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest.  There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me, I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.”

“Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it.”

This is the great conundrum of the plains: It’s just as good as anywhere else, but never the best. Caught between gratitude and yearning, stuck in a place that meets our needs but can never satisfy our wants, we are thankful for the blessings yet nagged by a sense of a better life somewhere over the next horizon. The very same drive that brought us here pulls us to move on again, to plant new gardens in new fields. We make a proud use of the present, but as for the past, it fades like Grandpa’s Kansan grave. Half-marked with a wooden cross, soon and sadly lost as another generation moves away.

There’s a pessimism here that I can’t believe in anymore.  I know it well, as a clean-scrubbed child of the 80s it lurked all around me.  Paranoia was in the air back then:  From what my little eyes could gather from a television rabbit-eared to Cleveland’s stations, it was all going to hell.

Our cities were crumbling, our small towns left derelict, and the cracks were showing in the stuccoed suburban retreats we all flew to by the 70s. Teens were offing themselves to the back-masked squeals of Judas Priest, satanic cults were taking over the preschools, and you could catch aids from a mosquito. Burning rivers, iron curtains and rusty belts. Nothing was as good as it was, and it was all about to get a lot worse.

For certain generations — for those who grew up nipping at the cup of post-war optimism, or chugging at the trough of boomer expectations, who watched things falls apart once they spawned kids of their own — I get it. Those were some bum years. Grimy, polluted, still clad in the sad polyester that refused to wear out. That’s the setting for No Country, 1980, the hostage and gas crisis era. Malaise.

McCarthy doesn’t have high hopes for what’s to come. No Country For Old Men could be a prequel to The Road. The old fella seems sure that the apocalypse is nigh, and all we can do is hunker down and wait for the sound of horsehoofs in the sky.  No country for old men is right.  The damn kids have taken over and they’re screwing it up. Blessed are the barren. Amen.

Cormac speaks to the fear right on page one:

He was nineteen.  And he told me that he had been planning on killing somebody for about as long as he could remember.  Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again.  Said he knew he was going to hell.  Told it to me out of his own mouth. I don’t know what to make of that.  I surely don’t.  I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wondering if maybe he was some new kind.  I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door.  He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all.  I really believe that he knew he was going to be in hell in fifteen minutes.  I believe that.  And I’ve thought about that a lot.  He was not hard to talk to.  Called me Sheriff.  But I didn’t know what to say to him.  What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul?

Wicked stuff, but I don’t think it holds. Things are looking better these days. Crime is down, longevity is up. Yes, we keep fighting wars, but the death count is dropping like bombs. There are random acts of violence to grab the headlines, but people that I meet are working towards something better, and seeing the good fruits of their labors. To borrow a phrase, the better angels of our nature have come out on top.

I hope McCarthy has a change of heart before he puts down the pen. There’s still time to see things differently, and he’s a fantastic writer. I love his smoosh-words, things like “sockfeet,” “shavingkit,” and “swivelchair,” and the way the dialogue floats between internal ruminations and slow-spoken conversations.

I’m also glad that the Coen Brothers put this to film. The book is almost custom-screenplayed for them: The soulless Anton Chigurh a dead-ringer for the dusty apocalyptic biker of Raising Arizona, the wizened westerner Sheriff Ed Tom Bell voicing over God’s truth like the stranger from The Big Lebowski. The book sounds like the Coen Brothers, when the Coen Brothers decide to take themselves seriously.

I’ll read some more of him eventually, but I’m in no hurry. There are many good days before me, many great opportunities with which to fill them. And of the reading of many books, there shall be no end.

I’ve never worked so hard to finish a book.

After reading William Morris’s The Well At World’s End, I can feel every aching step, every maddening mile of Prince Ralph’s epic quest to drink the magic draught and save the kingdom from the wiles of wicked men. I can feel the chafe of the bridle, the callous from the bit, my chair-bound behind as sore as if I’d been riding on his saddle, spent arms and weary legs wrapped tight around his armoured knighthood.

If this thing were assigned in some college lit class, it would have slid uncracked to the bottom of my backpack, lost before I hit the lunch-rush at the cafeteria. Of course, I’d look up a few things. Make a few notes on theme and imagery, regurgitate critical reception. Something to sound smart enough to slough through an essay on the exam.

But this wasn’t for school, wasn’t for something as silly as credit. No, this was for something sacred: This was for Book Club.  And the first rule of Book Club is that you read the book for Book Club. (Except when you don’t, but I’m too new to beg a free pass.)

Still, not my cup of tea.

In honesty, I don’t really know how to judge the book. I’ve never been a fantasy guy. Like hip hop, I don’t have a frame of reference to sift the good from the bad, the inventive from the ripped-off. Occasionally, I’ll dip my toe into some Sci-Fi.  That I get, Star Trek and the like, blasting modern conundrums a galaxy away, to better see the self at arm’s length, and with lasers. Phew! Phew!

Fantasy, well that’s a whole ‘nother leap of the imagination. Creating one’s own world from scratch, populating it with creatures, peoples, morals and social structures as you see fit. That’s a trick.

The author was suggested due to his influence on a few other writers: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. You may have heard of those guys. Morris palled around with them, a father-figure of a sort. A mentor perhaps.  The jury’s out as to how much influence he had on the next generation, but his words are still out there, wafting on the public domain. His name will likely pop up in the 3rd-pint round of a geekly discussion, sometime after debating Gandalf vs. Dumbledore.

So who am I to judge? William Morris was ahead of his time, and like young Prince Ralph, he blazed a trail to parts unknown.  Sadly he’ll go down as the Friendster of the Fantasy world, but at least he had the courage to get up and ride, to pen-up dreams of things unseen. A worthy quest indeed.

“Hey, buy this for me for Christmas.”

So my wife and I have this unspoken arrangement. We spend so much time trying to get Christmas together every year, finding nice things for distant relatives, putting together an impressive yet non-gluttonous pile of surprises for the kids, that we pretty much forget about each other until the blessed day is thrust upon us.  While running our last-minute errands we’ll see something and say, “buy this for me for Christmas” and toss it in the cart, knowing we’ll find it again miraculously gift-wrapped under the tree on Christmas morning.

A pair of jeans on the clearance rack at Target. Office supplies. A bottle of champagne. Whatever. You name it. And yes, it might even be the auto-biography of Belinda Carlisle, whom I found languishing and lonely at the grocery store in a close-out bin. She was wedged between Ricky Martin’s tell-all and Chicken Soup for the CEO’s Soul. Only $2.50 for the hard-covered inside scoop on the Go-Go’s?  Deal!

As you know, I like most anything about people making music (yes, even Gwyneth’s objectively awful Country Strong.) And while Carlisle was reliving the wild early-80′s LA punk scene it was a good read.  Those days were all about the music, the art, the fun of going to shows and being in the know about the latest greatest coolest rock ‘n roll music.  From Devo to David Lee, this girl partied with a lot of interesting kids, all trying to make it on the Sunset Strip.

Her life, way cooler than mine.

But then success hits ya and the wheels come off.  They always do in these things.  At which point it’s hard not to mock her relentlessly for the #richwhitegirlproblems.  Lines like “we were bourgeois on the outside, bohemian on the inside” (spoke as she wrestles with a possible move to southern France) are hard to get behind.

Oh dear, what to do, what to do.

But as the 12-steppers say, you’ve got to “identify and not compare.” Belinda’s just a sweet California girl with a mile-wide, coke-fed wild streak that never went away. I guess if you strip ‘er story of the success and the millions and the home in Provence and the international drug trafficking, there’s a lot there that rings true for any of us. Maybe. Who’s to know what a little fortune and fame would do. I’m just glad that she got it together. Eventually.

And that yes, once again, she’s got the beat.

So I joined a book club.  Like most good things in life, what we want and what we find we need are different things. Had I the chance to chose a book club from a menu of gatherings, I never would have jumped into one that likes to bite into the classics.  I would have kept it pop, kept it current. Maybe something focused on the confused mutterings of 30-something American boys who write to purge their own lonely maladjustment.  The sort of navel-gazers who wallow indefatigably in their inability to live up to the expectations of the 20th/21st century. You know, guys like me.

I would have been wrong and I would have been shortsighted. There’s a reason you should read what your professors once proposed on those forgotten reading lists. Of course, that list of books you should have read is longer than the day is long, the shadow cast by great writers darker than the night.  But if you take them one at a time, it’s not so bad. And the secret is that most writers are pretty modern after all.  The trappings of technology march on, but human nature slithers slowly.

Goethe’s Faust is based on the age-old tale of a man who hears that rhetorical question of Christ (“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”) and decides to find out for himself. So he makes a deal with the Devil and then things go rolling inexorably down hill.

So consider me surprised to find that such a black-and-white plot should set the stage for a tale layered thick with moral ambiguity. Although wrapped in Christian trappings, Goethe claimed no fealty to the cross. (Or, in his youth, to much of anything.) While it’s tempting to read the scholarly Faust as the hero, or even as Goethe himself, our protagonist might be just as much Mephistopheles.  When you put your words in the mouth of the devil — a devil who’s job it is to deceive — it’s tricky to untangle what the reader ought to believe.

The only clear moral principle is this: Never rest! Never be satisfied! Always act, and always do! That’s not something you’d find in the Bible. It’s opposite of Paul’s “content in all things” and the Our Father’s humble “give us this day our daily bread.” But it is what Goethe has God decree, what Faust strives for, what the Devil tries to trick him to forget.

I expected a fairy tale, but instead I found a work of poetry about appetite, ambition, love/lust/loss, and the proud-pawn state of a thoroughly modern man. There’s nothing dusty about that. Just ask David Lee Roth:

I found the simple life ain’t so simple
When i jumped out, on that road
I got no love, no love you’d call real
Ain’t got nobody, waitin’ at home.

I live my life like there’s no tomorrow
And all I’ve got, I had to steal
Least I don’t need to beg or borrow
Yes i’m livin’ at a pace that kills

I’m running with the Devil…

“Be the Dude”

Now there’s some internet-friendly, tweet-ready advice for ya.  Welcome to a line of laid-back thought claiming many disciples, inspiring Dude-A-Thons and Lebowski Fests around the country, and producing buckets of ephemera to guide you in cultivating your inner Dude.  Say what you will about the tenets of Dudeism, at least it’s an ethos.

While not a devotee myself — a true life of the Dude would be mind-numbingly boring — I’d recommend keeping some Dude on speed-dial to help balance out the constipating effects of modern life.  An hour or two with a Jeff Lebowski can do wonders for your constitution, all while keeping the mind limber.

Cathleen Falsani picks up on this new doctrine and tries to trace its roots back through the entire Coen canon, looking for a spiritual core to an oeuvre often dismissed as adolescently amoral.  She’s an interesting writer, working both sides of a big cultural divide, with stuff picked up by the conservative evangelical press and lefty outlets alike.  As she’s a ’92 Wheaton grad, I can’t help but think that I know something of her world, Wheaton College being one of the other “good” schools where my high school funneled their little achievers.

And as such, I’m pretty sure that this is not the book she meant to write.  Heavy on plot synopsis, too tidy in its lessons-learned conclusions, I get a feeling that the author started off the day with a thousand thoughts, only to have her editors whittle and polish it down to something with careful commercial appeal.  Something palatable to the sort of church-going reader who won’t reference an R-rated film without a disclaimer.  Someone who hasn’t seen enough of the films to frame their reference in the first place.

Any serious student of the Coen brothers will find this book a little lite, but she does have her insights.  Falsani lives in a tough spot as an author, and I feel for her.  Half of her potential audience would find the idea of receiving spiritual truth through a film to be nigh-blasphemous.  The other half can’t fathom that there’s an issue.  One man’s provocative is another’s pedestrian, and it takes a deft touch to address them all without coming off as either a punk or a prude.

But she’s right, you know.  There is plenty to learn from the Coen brother’s films and their mottled heroes — Jeff, Ulysses, Hi, Llewelyn, Ted, etc. –  all decent men tossed in over their heads, making mistakes, suffering consequences, but generally doing the best they can with what they’ve got.  Slow-growth karma, or as I like to see it, baby steps toward salvation.  Perhaps grace and redemption aren’t far behind.

Who knows, they’ve never shot a sequel.

Why do I read the books I read?  Got my reasons.  Three of ‘em:

There’s the stuff I read because I should (another turn through The Great Gatsby before that new film comes out), the stuff I pick up to keep up (Freak-o-nomics, Gladwell, et al.), and the stuff that makes its way to the back of the john due to some sort of personal connection.

I’ll never champion one category over another.  Gems can be found glittering in all, and it’s a mystic thing how the right book can find the right reader at the right time.  Oft heaven sent, me thinks.

Kick Butt touched down in category three.  I had the good luck to spend a little time with the author while my special lady was “on the market”, that bizarre combination of auction block and poker tournament that awaits as a final right of passage for grad students done good.  More than a few people I ran into mentioned that he’d recently published a novel, and a pretty good one at that.

I’d have to agree.  And I don’t even understand football.  At all.

Kick Butt, which follows a helluva season with the fictional Morgan University Knights, is sheared from Tom Wolfe’s starched-white cloth.  Think a less ambitious Man In Full with a little splash of Charlotte Simmons, tossed into the deep end of southern-style collegiate sports.

Yes, it’s kind of a big deal down there, where the culture-clash still simmers between antebellum royalty and carpet-bagging Yankees, between black and white, rich and poor.  ‘Tis football that blessedly binds them all.

And’s got me too?  There’s a great quote before Chapter 15 that points to the fact that the sports metaphor is now not only the indispensable crutch of daily conversation, it has metastasized into the central conceit of our American existence.  It is our shared cultural touchstone: what Homer was to the Ancients, the Church to the Middle Ages.  Sports are the shorthand for our noble quests, our battles between good and evil, between the self and a sacrifice to a higher call.  Go team!

Perhaps that’s why I found the whole thing so relatable, despite the opaque scoring mechanisms and inscrutable tactics employed on the field.   Did I mention I don’t have a scrap of smarts about football?

I only wish that it ran another hundred pages long.  There are plenty of  interesting second-string characters begging to get back on the field, and a lot of loose ends which I’d enjoy seeing tied up, or maybe just strung out a little more.

Perhaps there’s a sequel in the works?  A Kick Butter?

My favorite drug got the full-length treatment in Daniel Levitin’s science-lite best seller. I’d heard the guy interviewed a long time back, methinks on a podcast of Sound Opinions, but it was a pine-scented Christmas morning surprise to find his book in my hands.

A prog-rocker turned record-producer turned academic-researcher, Dr. Levitin isn’t one of small ambitions.  Not surprisingly his book takes on quite a bit too, with three topics spinning in heavy rotation:  music theory, scientific memoir, and ruminations on music and evolution.

The first cut would fascinate anyone who loves them tunes. For that alone, I’d short-list this book for everybody who picks up a mic, straps on a guitar, or sits behind a mixer. He spends a lot time at the intersection of music theory and perception, harmonizing what you remember from high school band with what you’ve absorbed from years of radio-listening experience.  If you ever wondered why a “G” on a telecaster sounds different from a “G” on a strat, this book’s for you.

The needle skips a bit on the biographical stuff, but if you worked with Watson & Crick you’d probably want to talk about it too.

Finally, he attempts to explain why music evolved as it has, and why it is so universal and so universally loved.  In doing so, he offers a rational, scientific explanation for oddities such as the lovely Liv Tyler:

Dr. Levitin asserts that the ability to master the complex mental and physical feats of coordination necessary to perform music may indicate a high level of reproductive fitness to a potential mate. And, as he puts it, “for the top rock stars, such as Mick Jagger, physical appearance doesn’t seem to be much of an issue.”

So there’s a little handy motivation for the next time your kid complains about practicing — making this an enjoyable and ultimately useful book.

Just finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur.  Twice.

It’s not that the prose was so poetic that I had to roll it around my tongue a little longer.  It’s not that the thoughts were so pithy that I had to cud-chew it another time to get it down.  There was no necessary reason to start back on page one after running my nose through the index.  (A good index, perhaps the only index ever where the film Dazed and Confused is followed by an entry for the indomitable dc Talk.)  No real reason at all, expect that it sat there, bashful and forlorn, on the back of the toilet.  And I was feeling lonely for old friends.

Klosterman and I go way back, having spent lots of quality time in both Akron and the Dakotas discussing the same records, reading the same magazines, and catching the same bands.  This relationship would be much more interesting if we’d ever met.  As far as I know, our circles never crossed, though there’s probably very few Kevin Bacon Degrees between us.

Despite these gaps of a few years and a few miles, I’m sure he would have fit right in, dueling with lubricated wits against my coterie of friendly savants.  These were mighty men of great wisdom.  Titans who once ruled over the whims of popular opinion, before the current age, before the Strokes heard Television and unleashed the Tyranny of the Hipster upon us all.

I miss those all-nighters in 24-hour diners analyzing the misheard mutterings of rockstars.  Eating The Dinosaur could have been plucked from any of those conversations:  Spinning theories going nowhere, but making the journey a more interesting place to be.

The cover of this cheese-ball, spooky-font, mass-market paperback shouted it loud: “The most influential science fiction novel of the 20th century!”

I call bullshit.

If you were so good, I woulda heard of you.  I’ve read my Wells, my Asimov, hunkered down with Herbert, done some galactic hitch-hiking, and even went through a phase of hiding away from lovely summer days with Spock and Kirk’s paperbacked adventures. They continued to go where no man has gone before.  It seemed safer to stay inside.

But now that WE‘s been read,  I was wrong.

Zamyatin rails against the inevitable abuses of the future utopian “One State” decades before Orwell and Huxley got a crack at it.  And he does so in Russian.  How’s that for cred?  (Ain’t no regime as cold as the Soviet regime.)  If your inner Tea Partier has run out of Rand, read this book before taking that third trip through Fountain Shrugged.  Like  Ayn, Zamyatin spends most of his time championing the individual.  Unlike Ayn, he manages to create two-dimensional characters in the process.  (I suppose that going for 3-D might have muddied the rhetorical waters too much.)  After a few snippy remarks at the homogenizing evils of Christianity, he even ties in a thread of the Moulin-Rouge Bohemian in his revolutionary solution:  Freedom, Beauty, Truth, Love!

And that’s where I hoped it would end.  Darn Russo-Pessimism had to get in the way.   But no spoilers here.  Go forth, mighty self-sufficient one, and read it for yourself.