Thinkin’ ’bout the blues and stuff

These are tough days for philosophers. When any hodad with a wireless connection can present himself / herself to the world as a pundit, who has times for well-educated deep thinkers who routinely spelunk to the depths of metaphysics?

So it’s nice to encounter a series of books in a series called Philosophy for Everyone. So far, there are two dozen entries in this series, including the two latest, devoted to the Blues and to Fashion.

Blues — Philosophy for Everyone (Wiley-Blackwell, $19.95) is a collection of fairly serious writings by philosophy professors who realize their job here isn’t to impress other scholars as much as it is to provide an open door to the dedicated idea grazers among us.

The blues are a perfect vehicle to connect academia with the blues enthusiasts who show up at concerts today — usually, pony-tailed tax attorneys. The book addresses a lot of the usual questions of the day in a tone that is inclusive and not condescending — a tough tightrope for a lot of academics to walk: Do white people have the right to sing the blues? What cathartic role does the blues play in our lives? Is rock’n’roll just the diluted and ripped-off blues?

We encounter some of the usual suspects — B.B. King among them — and reading about these great artists will make you appreciate them more, and probably want to blast their music through the neighborhood.

Not being as interested in fashion (Exhibit A, today’s attire — a Red Sox hoodie, a ball cap and paint-stained jeans), I didn’t expect as much from Fashion — Philosophy for Everyone (Wiley-Blackwell, $19.95), but was pleasantly surprised by all that I learned.

As always, there are elements of history in works of philosophy, so just digesting the role fashion has played in the human parade makes for fine reading.There are other books in the series, devoted to the varying philosophies of beer, food, wine, porn, cycling, climbing, hunting, dating and serial killers. One of the next on deck is about the philosophy of tattoos.

This is a refreshing series of books from some serious academics having a lot of fun. I think — reading philosophy makes you do that — that you should read these.

Let us now praise William Saroyan

Portrait of Saroyan as a young man

I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies of writers, which is probably why I’ve ended up writing them.

Back in Indiana recently, I made a trip to my favorite used bookstore, Caveat Emptor, in Bloomington. I didn’t know I was looking for a biography of William Saroyan, but I found it – thanks to the miracle of serendipity. God bless browsing.

A Daring Young Man is a decade old and is the work of John Leggett. He might be the guy who hooked me on literary biographies in the first place.

Years ago, he wrote Ross and Tom, a dual biography of two young writers killed by success. Ross Lockridge wrote Raintree County, then took himself out in the garage. Tom Heggen, who gave the world Mister Roberts, died of the deadly combination of too-many sleeping pills and a full bathtub.

I have long been haunted by that book, in part because Lockridge lived near us in Bloomington. He was a hometown boy who found success only to discover that the folks back home thought he wrote a dirty book.

But it wasn’t Leggett’s name that drew me to A Daring Young Man, though seeing he was the author caused me to fork over the $15 for the gently used book.

It was Saroyan.

Saroyan around the time I corresponded with him

I had a long-distance phone-and-letter friendship with Saroyan near the end of his life.

In an earlier incarnation, I was an editor at a magazine. I often sat around with my boss and brainstormed about people we’d want to write for us. One day, I pulled “Saroyan” from my ether. He’d been a favorite of my father and I liked the stories of his that I’d read.  My editor seemed surprised, since Saroyan was no longer fashionable, but said, “Go ahead. Can’t hurt to ask.”

So I wrote William Saroyan a letter and got a phone call in return.

At first, he seemed on edge. Why do you need new stories when you have so many of mine in your file?

I was baffled.

I sent stories. Long ago. Never got them back. He’d also written us many letters, none of which were answered.

Turns out he had, several generations of editors back. If we didn’t want to publish the stories, then we were morally obligated to return them.

I apologized profusely for the shovelhead who’d done my job some years before, then told Mr. Saroyan I’d do what I could. He was still full of huff and puff, but barked out his goodbyes. I told him I’d get right on it.

It took most of an afternoon, but I went through the dusty file cabinets in the archives, most of which had not been opened in more than a decade.

Eventually, I found them. Six stories in all, if memory serves. I mailed them off that afternoon, with a letter of apology.

A few days later, a different Saroyan called. Gone was the apocalyptic anger. Suddenly, I had a famous American writer effusively thanking me. I hadn’t felt ill of him because of his tirade the week before. Since  I was at that moment trying my hand at selling short stories – and having some success – I felt that we had been so clearly in the wrong by not keeping up our part of the transaction between writer and market.

The inscribed copy of "The Human Comedy"

He could’ve been about-damn-time curt with me, but he was not.

“So tell me about yourself,” he said. “Are you a writer?”

Me telling William Saroyan that I was a writer might be like a Little Leaguer telling Ted Williams, “Oh yeah, I play ball too.”

“I hope to be,” I told him.

Then began one of his stream-of-consciousness semi-poetic rants about writing and feeling and emotion and . . . and I wish I’d had a tape recorder then.

He kept me on the phone so long that I was late for a meeting. But I couldn’t very well cut him off. He was William Saroyan. My late father had a dozen Saroyan books, and had been reading him since he was in high school. How much I wished I could have gone home to tell him: “Dad, guess who I talked to today.” He’d been dead only a year and I was not yet over the feeling that I could still share with him.

Saroyan ended the call by saying he had some new stories, some stories that might be right for us. “If I send them, you promise they won’t get lost?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of them.”

He sent a couple of manuscripts by the end of the week. They were well thumbed copies, the ink smudged by handling at no doubt larger and more selective magazines.

Though my boss was not thrilled with the stories, I argued for them and won.

I remember the folly of trying to tell Saroyan to make a change. One of  the stories we bought was entirely dialogue. Since this called for open-quote close-quote in every paragraph, I suggested we just show the change of speakers by alternating from Roman to Italic text. There was a long pause on the phone, probably as he swallowed a couple of insults welling up for the pipsqueak on the other end.

“Let’s just leave it as it is, OK?”

Said nicely.

He called regularly, even when we didn’t have any editing to do. He wanted to know if I was married. He wanted to know whose writing I most admired. He wanted to know my plans for my life.

He sent me a hardcover of The Human Comedy, inscribed to me: “To say you are a rare editor (you answer letters) and I have got to be grateful (you found lost stories) and to wish you greater and greater days ahead (you will gather a grand past), I must make it Bill Saroyan.” He dated it January 24, 1976, and indicated he was in “Ithaca,” his fictional stand-in for his hometown of Fresno.

We published a few of his stories, but finally my editor overruled me on one and I had to break the news to Saroyan. Coward that I was, I did so via mail.

“Mr. Saroyan’s on the phone for you,” I heard a few days later.

I picked up, expecting the worst.

“Hey, Bill – don’t worry.” Here he was, calling to console me. I’d been so demonstrative in my letter of apology that he overcame his anger at the magazine to reassure me that the rejection had nothing to do with us.

I left the magazine soon after and went to graduate school for a vacation. I freelanced for a couple of small publications and reviewed his then-new book, Sons Come and Go. I sent him a copy of the piece and got a postcard back: “Thanks. Hope you are doing OK. Live well!  Bill.” And that was it.

A few years later, I read in the newspaper that he died.

I had collected several of his books, loving The Human Comedy (and being startled that he’d signed his name again at the end of the book, in pride of authorship) and especially his short stories: those in My Name is Aram, and his classics, such as “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” I never saw any of his famous plays, but did read the script of The Time of Your Life, for which he famously refused the Pulitzer Prize.

My sense was that, having caught him near the end of his life, he was reaching out to anyone who would listen, and I was a willing disciple.

Leggett’s book shows clearly how Saroyan’s youthful energy and confidence could intoxicate, then repel. He had an amazing capacity for joy and was compulsive about writing. It’s astonishing to realize just how much Saroyan got done. For anyone who’s spent time in the lonely trade, it’s hard enough to write one good thing now and then. Not everything Saroyan wrote was brilliant (no matter what he might have thought), but his yield was higher than most.

Reading Leggett’s book shows how quickly Saroyan’s energy could burn out his friendships. He began his publishing career when Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House, published the story collection The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Just as that book was riding high, Saroyan brought Cerf another story collection. And then another. Finally, when Saroyan wouldn’t listen to Cerf’s wise counsel about saturating the market, Saroyan found another publisher.

Saroyan in his last years

He conquered literature, drama and film (he won an Oscar for his Human Comedy screenplay). He also wrote a Top 10 song — “Come On-A My House,” recorded by Rosemary Clooney. He married (twice!) one of the most sought-after women of mid-century, Carol Marcus. He made thousands of friends, and seemed to have lost just as many. He was proud of his Armenian heritage and when he died, his ashes were planted both in his American home of Fresno, and in a place of honor in Armenia.

I’m not sure his name resonates much today. When I mention it to the serious literati in my life, they roll their eyes. The general knock against him is his sentimentality. Yet it’s hard not to be moved by the energy and ethusiasm of his work, even in this jaded kardashianed world. (Wonder how he would have felt about his fellow Armenians, the Kardashians, and their celebrity-without-reason. My belief is that, ethnic kinship aside, they would make him puke.)

Few writers celebrated the joys and mysteries of life better than Saroyan. Few days have passed in the years since I first read the opening of The Human Comedy, that I haven’t thought about the scene at the dawn of the book. The whole of the first chapter is devoted to a small boy’s wonder as he watches a train pass, and finds a hobo on the last freight car. The hobo sees the boy, and smiles, calling, “Goin’ home, Boy!”

That celebration of a small moment appears to me frequently. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist at heart. Maybe I’m just a sucker for things that make me feel.

Even at the end, in his books and in his conversations with young people — and I was young then — he never lost his enthusiasm and the joy he found in life.

“In the time of your life, live,” he wrote in the prologue to his greatest play. “In that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand . . .  In the time of your life, live — so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.”

How tragic that such “sentiment” has fallen out of fashion.

The Magic Medium

I was recently asked to speak to the staff of WTBU, the student-run radio station at Boston University. What follows are my notes for what I considered sort of a pep talk.

I love radio because it’s the ‘magic medium.’ In some ways, it’s the most intimate medium.

You really feel this when you listen with your ear buds – or headphones, for oldsters such as myself. It’s like inviting a stranger into your skull.

Radio is also under appreciated. We might ask someone about radio and they’d say, “Oh hell, I never listen to radio.” Then we’d ask to count the radios in their house, and there would be 16 of them. That’s the case in my house, at least.

Radio really put the mass in mass communication

Think about how communication began. We were a bunch of sweaty and unhygienic cave persons. We made sounds, but they were usually in response to something – perhaps when a mastodon boardchecked you on the way to the salad bar.

But then, one day, a cave person made that greatest of all discoveries. He or she made a sound that had a meaning. Suddenly, a sound could mean a thing.

“Unh!” suddenly meant much more than unh! Maybe it meant, “Have you seen my keys?” or “Are you sitting on the remote?”

What a liberating moment that must have been. Cue Richard Strauss. I’m having a 2001: A Space Odyssey flashback.

At another point, someone invented writing, and that freed us from limitations of time and space. Lots of scholars have written about that and imagined that moment. (I’m thinking Wilbur Schramm, Carl Sagan, and maybe some other dudes and dudettes.)

So ponder that moment your own bad self. Imagine it. Hell, go ahead and grok on it.

We were no longer limited to our signal fires – or as far away as our SHOUT could be heard

And that led, eventually, to radio.

Writer Edward Jay Whetmore called it “the magic medium.” True that, Brother Edd. (He likes the double D’s.)

I like to think that radio was as revolutionary socially as it was technologically.

Just think about it. For the first two-thirds of the 20^th century, we were an apartheid nation.

We don’t often use that term when talking about the United States, but that’s what we were.

We had separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools. And the United States Supreme Court said it was all right. Things could be separate, as long as they were equal.

Think about that era and the self-delusion of that time. I admire people who challenged the status quo.

Journalist Harry Golden  was one. He wrote about the civil rights movement in his odd little newspaper, The Carolina Israelite.  Satire was his primary weapon.

Golden came up with “plans” to resolve the racial issues in the South.

For example, he noticed that black people and white people could shop in the same store, but black people couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as white people. The problems occurred, he realized, when people sat down. So he suggested ripping out all the chairs in stores. He called this the Vertical Negro Plan.

He also noted that in communities where there was a lot of black-white animosity that white people didn’t object when an Indian person – someone dark-skinned but wearing a turban – moved into a white neighborhood. He suggested issuing turbans to all African Americans. He called this the Turban Plan.

He also noticed, in that separate water fountain era, that if the whites-only fountain had an out-of-order sign on it, white people had no problem drinking from the “colored” fountain. He called this the Out of Order Plan

That reminds me of the time Golden was visiting his son in Gainesville, Florida. He was taken to the emergency room for some reason and as he lay on the table, he looked up and saw three thermometers in a rack on the wall. They were labeled “white,” “colored” and “rectal.” This was a sign of hope, he eventually wrote. It was a sign of gradual integration. (It was also a sign that all assholes are alike.)

OK, so let’s get back to that foolish concept of a society that is “separate but equal.” You’ve got to admit it was easy to maintain. Set up different schools. Don’t rent to black people in this neighborhood. Write ordinances that tell us where black people sit on the bus . . . .

Those were Jim Crow laws. But there was something that didn’t obey Jim Crow laws: The air.

We can’t regulate the air, and radio travels through the air.

They couldn’t legislate what you listened to in your home.

At night, that weird thing happens. I’m not an engineer, so I can’t explain it technically. I just always thought of it as a magic time. After dark, suddenly you could hear voices from all over the place, voices you couldn’t hear during the day.

You could hear WLAC in Nashville all the way from Tallahassee to the Canadian border.

Imagine you’re Bob Zimmerman, a high school kid in Hibbing, Minnesota. There isn’t a single black person in town. But at night, up in your room, you hear the music of black America on WLAC. That makes you want to hear more and know more. And that eventually makes you want to become Bob Dylan.

And even earlier: Imagine you’re a black kid living in segregated St. Louis.  You listen to the ‘Grand Old Opry’ on WSM radio and hear the voices of the old, weird America. And though you’re black, you grow up steeped in the white traditions of country music.  That’s why —  when you grow up and become Chuck Berry  – all of those great rock’n’roll songs you write carry that narrative tradition borrowed from white country music.

Black America met White America through music, through  the music played on radio. Once we were all dancing to the same beat, Jim Crow laws didn’t have a chance.

The walls came tumbling down. Separate was inherently unequal.

So think of radio as the most subversive medium. It played a huge and often unheralded part in igniting a social revolution.

Radio also gave me my love of music.

Growing up when I did, when radio wasn’t stratified the way it is today, I could turn on the No. 1 AM station in Dallas and hear Frank Sinatra followed by James Brown followed by The Beatles followed by The Supremes followed by Dean Martin followed by Otis Redding . . . . and on.

Young people think I’m a crackhead when I tell them what radio was like when I was a kid. But I’m not making up this stuff.

It was anarchy, and we’ll never hear the likes of it again.

So the next time you sit down behind your engineering board or pull the microphone close and prepare to go on the air, just say this to yourself: “Radio changed the world. I work in radio.”

Some notes on Hunter S. Thompson

These two pieces were written at the request of Martin Flynn, the Irish writer and keeper of hstbooks.org. I just did “The Kathleen Dunn Show” on Wisconsin Public Radio, and some of these issues came up, so I thought it might be worth repeating them.

1. The Hunter S. Thompson / Raoul Duke Confusion:
A Man and His Mad-Dog Image

I was a reporter, and anyone who’s worked in that lonely trade knows the frustration. You know a story. You know what needs to be said. You just can’t find anyone to say it.

Hunter S. Thompson as a young man in Puerto Rico

You can’t make up a quote. Given the rules of journalism, you can’t do that shit. So you struggle and sometimes your story falls short.

However, in Gonzo journalism the rules – such as they are – are quite different.

Raoul Duke began appearing in Hunter S. Thompson’s writing back in the days when he was the sports editor of the Command Courier, the official newspaper of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. It was the late fifties and when Hunter couldn’t find a bystander or a source or an expert to say what he wanted, he quoted “Raoul Duke.”

Hunter, of course, was Raoul Duke.

Looking back on Hunter’s stories, you see quotes from people named Duke and Bloor and Squane, and they are all Hunter Thompson. He invented these people to say the things that needed to be said. It turned parts of his journalism into fiction, but he was fond of reminding his readers that there was often greater truth to be found in fiction.

Raoul Duke has a special place in this pantheon of phantoms. It was the name Hunter plucked from his past to use as his nom de plume when he wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for Rolling Stone. The work was serialized as the work of Duke in two issues in November 1971. (Hard to believe that that magnificent bit of prose is  forty years old.)

As a young reader, I was confused. Who was this Duke guy and why did he have his messages sent – as reported midway through one of the episodes – care of someone named Hunter S. Thompson?

The confusion continued with regard to Duke and Hunter. Where did one stop and the other begin?

Hunter as "Raoul Duke" -- by Ralph Steadman

All these years later, we know much more about Hunter and Duke and Las Vegas. Hunter was compulsive about documenting his life, in photographs and on tape.

Now that selections from his personal tape recordings have been made available to the public – in a handsome boxed set edition called The Gonzo Tapes – it’s possible to hear his dictated observations and comments as he lives the experience that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

He certainly doesn’t sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth madman running amuck in Las Vegas. If anything, he is the opposite – lucid, inquisitive, thoughtful, observant.

But in the writing, he took himself and amped up the madness lurking in his brain. And that’s when Duke emerged.

What happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. But Hunter took those events – and his personality – and heightened the reality. He once told me, “I warped a few things. It was an incredible feat of balance more than literature.” When published in book form, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was credited to “Hunter S. Thompson,” not Raoul Duke.

Problem was, readers thought the exaggerated caricature called Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson. Though they shared the same DNA, they were not identical twins.

The Duke caricature followed him the rest of his life. It was a role that the real man could easily adopt and play, pleasing his fans. On signal, he could perform as Duke. But he was not the same without an audience.

And so he was caught in the duality. He had created the Duke character, one of the great literary inventions of his time. It was a brilliant achievement. And it was also a burden. It might have been a trap. If he cast off the Duke persona, would his readers follow him? Or would it be like slitting the throat of the golden goose?

It was a problem he wrestled with, apparently without resolution, until the end of his life.

2. On Finding a Style: Can Anyone Write Gonzo Journalism Today?

It’s not hard for me to recall my life as a college freshman. When I was a young and impressionable writer, I fell under the spell of Hunter S. Thompson.

It was the early 1970s and after reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his presidential campaign coverage in Rolling Stone, I became a committed fan.

I worked for a small daily newspaper in the Midwest then, and we passed around the newsroom a tattered and disintegrating Fear and Loathing paperback and spoke of it as Holy Writ.

I once tried to write like him. I went to Naked City, Indiana, one of the Midwest’s largest nudist colonies, to cover the Mister and Miss Nude America contests.

It was a disturbing and weird day, ripe for the gonzo-journalism treatment, with pantsless grannies and nudist master sergeants weary of the voyeuristic mobs that came to watch strippers strut and body builders romp naked.

But after two long Saturdays struggling with the story, I came to this important conclusion: only one person could write like Hunter S. Thompson. And it wasn’t me.

As I said, I was young (17) and impressionable. I’m glad I figured that out then, rather than wasting a few years of this short life imitating someone else.

Since becoming a teacher, I’ve faced the same problem from the other side of the table. Young people, enamored of Thompson (or Vonnegut or Foster Wallace or Didion . . . fill in the blank) say they want to write like their hero. “You want to write gonzo?” I ask the Thompson fans. “Sure, go right ahead.” When they fail miserably, I tell them, “See, only one person could write like that and he’s dead.” Pause. “But only one person can write like you.”

Hunter S. Thompson may be the best friend a writing teacher can have. He gives us an example of writing with wit, grace and a unique style. And those who try to imitate that style soon learn how much work went into creation of those masterpieces of non-fiction writing. Through trying and failing to write gonzo, students learn how to unmask their own (pardon the redundancy) style.

So don’t write gonzo. Write what you write.

In another context and speaking of another great artist, Johnny Cash once wrote this:

There are those who do not imitate,
Who cannot imitate
But then there are those who emulate
At times, to expand further the light
Of an original glow.
Knowing that to imitate the living
Is mockery
And to imitate the dead
Is robbery

There are those
Who are beings complete unto themselves
Whole, undaunted, — a source
As leaves of grass, as stars
As mountains, alike, alike, alike,
Yet unalike
Each is complete and contained
And as each unalike star shines
Each ray of light is forever gone
To leave way for a new ray

Johnny was writing about Bob Dylan for the liner notes for Nashville Skyline, but these words might just as well have been written about Hunter.

Order Outlaw Journalist here. 
Hunter S. Thompson returns in my next book, Mile Marker Zero. Learn more here. 

A book to treasure — and to share

I’m one of those book psychos who alphabetizes everything and protects dust jackets with Mylar covers.

Karen Russell

But there are a couple books in my library that are not in such pristine condition — and I love them.

I’ve been thinking about Kinflicks a lot lately. It was a book that made you use words like “rollicking” to describe it. A big, lumpy, episodic novel, it was filled with white trash, decapitations, lovesick lesbians, fake boobs and family with a serious case of death addiction.

Look at it: the spine is broken, the pages dog-eared and like worn cotton in the hand, and a coffee circle graces the cover.

It is an appreciated book. I lent it to a dozen friends over the years and it helped create a bond and common language between us.

I’ve been thinking of it lately because Karen Russell‘s book Swamplandia (Knopf, $24.95) reminds me so much of Kinflicks.

Swamplandia is outrageous in all of the right ways. And one of those rich, engrossing novels you can’t stop reading but, paradoxically, don’t want to end.

Set in a faded adventure / nature park in South Florida, it’s a strictly mom and pop operation until the sainted mom dies.

Dad, the alligator-wrestling Indian chief (“Chief Bigtree”), carries on with the help of his devoted but hapless family, including Ava, the plucky and astonishingly literate teen-ager who narrates the book.

Russell is so great at creating atmosphere — you can smell the caked, dried alligator dung — and in building eccentric but entirely believable characters.

Like Lisa Alther, the author of that long-ago Kinflicks, Russell has virtually come out of nowhere and become a literary superstar. She had one well-reviewed book, of stories but this novel had the wit and confidence of a mature writer — yet Russell is still an infant in writer years.

This is one of those books to a pass around and share and discuss with friends. And if you’re worried about your nice hardcover getting disfigured, then here’s some good news: it just came out in paperback.

My local library — a love note

Cohasset is such a great little town. There’s a great public library and I take the boys there at least once a week. Jack is in a Young Writers’ Workshop there this summer.

It’s sweet, I tell you, sweet. Living here is like living inside a Norman Rockwell painting.

My friends out there who are book lovers — you need to check out the Paul Pratt Memorial Library. It’s worth a thousand mile drive.

It’s a beautiful library with an excellent collection and all. But they also have great deals on books for sale.

I think some of the wealthy denizens of Cohasset — and that might be the whole town, save for us, the Cohasset Hillbillies– go out and buy books, don’t read them, then donate them to the library for resale.

For a buck!

So I haunt the joint.

This is my haul for today:

• Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
• Manhunt by James Swanson (about the Lincoln Assassination and the search for the conspirators)
• The Given Day  by Dennis Lehane (his big historical novel about Boston)
• The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (because I need to read more Richard Ford)
• The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr (been a fan of his since The Alienist and this is a Doyle-sanctioned Sherlock Holmes story)
• Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker (A Jesse Stone novel. I always learn something from reading a Parker novel; the dude wrote as if he was charged  by the word)
• Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor (always preferred his monologues to his writing, but the prose is still fun to read)
• The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard (see note about Parker, above)
• Nineteenth Century Art by Ariane Ruskin (a big-ass picture book)
• America’s Railroads by Don Ball, Jr. (another big-ass picture book)

I would have gotten another Parker book, but I ran out of cash. By the time I went home and came back, someone had picked up that beauty.

A library is such a wonderful thing, and this one is so friendly. They even let Jack check out Mad magazines. Does it get any better than that?

Across the great divide

It was about a father and son traveling cross-country on a Harley Davidson, riding through the upper Midwest with a married couple following on their motorcycle. For Robert Pirsig, the trip was an opportunity to grow closer to his son, a young man on the brink of madness. But conversations are difficult at 70 miles per hour and so Pirsig turned inward.

His account of that trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was Pirsig’s meditation on parenthood, the nature of “quality,” and what C.P. Snow called “the two cultures” of science and the humanities. The companion for the trip (John, husband of the couple) was a perfect example of the latter. When a small rattle in the engine caused Pirsig to motion for a rest stop, he sat in the grass and began analyzing the problem, discussing possible solutions. As he talked his way through the diagnosis, John’s eyes glazed. He was on the “humanities” side of the line with no interest in ever crossing over.

I read that book when I was a teen-ager and it set an agenda for my adulthood. I saw myself in John, but wanted to be more like Robert. I’ve always admired people who traveled well in both worlds, but as I lurched into maturity and became a journalist, I recognized the defining characteristic of my tribe: We don’t do math. Yet we share with mathematicians the joy of solving problems, of fixing things.

In the intervening three decades, technology has changed that world and blurred the lines between those cultures. To succeed in my field today, technical skills with Web design and photo manipulation are in greater demand than traditional storytelling ability.

And so as we face this wondrous New World Order in which technology feeds every move, it troubles me that that there are new divisions.

In the mid-1990s, as my world moved from paper (where we proudly called ourselves “ink-stained wretches”), it seemed that culturally, we were headed the wrong direction. One of the great moments in American history came in the 1830s, with the democratization of the media. Until then, newspapers were the property of the privileged class. But the “penny papers” that arrived in the 1830s suddenly put information within the reach of damn near everybody. Symbolically, the cost of citizenship was one cent. Newspapers began carrying stories about the rest of us, not just presidents and wealthy merchants. Stories of drunkenness and marital brawls made the paper. People who couldn’t read suddenly had a reason to learn. These new stories tapped into that basic human need for dirt on the neighbors. The literacy rates skyrocketed.

In the mid-1990s, as newspapers started migrating information to the Web, I held up my hand and suggested pause. Back then, a computer cost $1,500, effectively pricing millions out of information that had been theirs for a quarter. I feared we were developing a class system of information-haves and information-have-nots.

I raised the issue and was immediately excoriated by critics and colleagues as a Luddite. The same thing happened a decade later when I argued in another essay that technology undercut serendipity. I suggested that when it’s so easy to find exactly what we are looking for, we miss all of those things we didn’t know we were looking for. The newspaper remains a brilliant invention for a number of reasons. Each turn of the page presents opportunities to learn something you didn’t know you were interested in. The problem with the Internet is that its efficiency – leading you immediately to what you want – undercuts the element of chance. It’s akin to browsing in a bookstore. Do we do that anymore, I wondered, when we can one-click on Amazon.com and find exactly what we want?

When that essay was picked up by the New York Times’s College site, it was – thanks to the Web – available everywhere on the globe. A few months after it appeared, I inserted my name and “serendipity” into a search engine and discovered all hell had broken loose in the blogosphere. The BBC did a story on the outrage suffered at my hands by technobloggers. My essay had infuriated techies and I was seen as one of those “humanities morons.” Cyber insults were flying and several bloggers speculated I was a knuckle-dragger who didn’t even have an e-mail address. So, of course, I e-mailed them. “I enjoyed your essay,” I began, “but you obviously know nothing about me.” I suggested that we talk about our different views of the world.

No response. Not one. None. Zilch. Nada.

And I thought: How sad. This great technology that can bring us closer together is driving us apart. I’d reached across the world to try to start a conversation with someone I’d never met, but he was more content to pound away on keys in his intellectual tower rather than talk to me.

That article led to an invitation to speak to a group of scientists at the World Technology Summit, where we discussed the lost art of serendipity and the role that happy accident – finding something you didn’t know you were looking for – has played in both art and science. It was the kind of exchange I wanted my original article to inspire.

But the difference was that we were all in a room, looking in each other’s eyes, having a conversation. How 20th Century of me.

Think about it: We write intimate details for a world of strangers to see on Facebook, but we don’t know our neighbor’s name. We “tweet” our most mundane activities on Twitter, yet recoil when a friendly stranger commits the sin of asking, “How’re you doing?” We pontificate ad nauseum in our little half acres of the Web, but don’t engage in any meaningful conversations with other living, breathing beings.

Facebook, My Space and other sites are called “social networking,” yet they drive people off to solitary hives behind computer keyboards, where they are anything but social. Facebook asks users to friend people they want to list on their sites as their “friends.” But are the real friends or only “Facebook Friends”?

Unfortunately, if we raise questions and look at the social impact of technology on our culture, we are immediately tossed into the don’t-get-it dustbins of mouthbreathers who “can’t accept technology.”

I accept it, understand it and embrace it. But as someone who’s spent four decades involved in the merchanting of news on this planet, I have some concerns. We live in an information-choked culture and when we allow search engines to do our thinking for us, we run the risk of building further moats to isolate us from the rest of humanity.

When I defend newspapers and lament their demise, critics assume it’s because I can’t deal with new technology. Not at all. In the new world order, you build your own “newspaper” online through news alerts sent to your mailbox. That practice has some serious social consequences.

Your news alerts breathlessly inform you of the grocery-store sightings of Kim Kardashian and new recruits for the alma mater’s football team. Steadily, those alerts will diminish your humanity. Will you put “starvation,” “injustice” and “racism” in your news alert? Will you ask your search engine to send you stories to ignite your moral outrage, or pique your curiosity about innovation?

We will be informed of the most recent Third World celebrity adoption, but we will know nothing of the suffering in our hometown. We will be kept abreast of fashion trends, but not to prejudice. It is possible to travel through this world, considering yourself well-informed, yet never confronted with information that might irritate, anger or upset you. One of the definitions of journalism has always been to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.” Yet we allow technology to numb us to others.

We bow before technology and allow it to lead when we should instead lead technology, using it to help us have productive and useful lives. But beyond that, we need to unlock technology’s potential to make us more human, to help us become more compassionate and social. Technology can help us embrace the flesh and blood rather than celebrate and perpetuate the synthetic humanity online.

We need to motion for a rest stop, and this time, we have something bigger than a motorcycle to fix.