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I wrote a while back about my feeling that the complexity of technology is accelerating so rapidly that we can’t even understand how little we understand about it anymore, so I was interested to read this essay by John C. Orr over at The Kenyon Review, called “Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams.” (The book for which this blog is named.)

As Orr points out, Adams

… glimpsed in the dawning twentieth century…a version of technological sublimity, the sense of awe and terror in the face of new inventions. …Adams was essentially in the first generation to experience what has been called the technology gap, in that he was born into a world in 1838 where the most advanced technology was easily understandable and relatively easy to replicate. [W]hat we often fail to recognize amid the witty urbanity of The Education is the profound frustration he felt at not being able to understand the technology that was transforming his world. In response, he set out to educate himself about the new horizons that modern science was opening….

But what separates us from Henry Adams is the ease with which most of us adapt to new technology without having the slightest inkling of how it works. By and large, we have neither the initiative nor the leisure of a Henry Adams to spend hours trying to understand it. Thus, that gap in our understanding causes us only momentary frustration if we experience any at all.

[A]s he predicted, the curve of acceleration continues. He stared owl-eyed at the dynamo; I occasionally stare owl-eyed at my flash drive, and the sense of a new force of occult power inhabits me every time I pray to my computer to save the file that I have been toiling over just as Adams prayed to the supersensual force of the dynamo.

Anything that can be done to heal this “gap” seems worthwhile. Recently the provost of a large state university wrote in a newsletter that extra money would be diverted to help liberal arts scholars in a world—and campus—devoted to the technological:

The members of our faculty most in need of discretionary funding are humanists and artists in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Fine and Applied Arts. The Humanities/Arts Flexible Scholarship Support Program will make available to these faculty members $1,000 in research funding per faculty member per year….

But the money appears to be earmarked for particular uses:

As Arden Bement, the director of the National Science Foundation indicated recently, the future leadership of our nation will depend on our ability to solve critical problems facing our society. The solutions of these problems can only be found at the intersections of engineering and sciences with the arts and humanities.

Those particular intersections will, of course, be important in matters big and small, as well as in matters that I imagine few Americans who’ve grown up since the 1950s thought we’d be talking about now, such as how to feed our people. (Michael Pollan’s piece in the Times magazine this week was an open letter addressed to the future President-Elect and was titled “Farmer in Chief.”)

But are all—even the most important—puzzles at the intersection of Engineering and Arts, of Science and Humanities? The future leadership of our nation, as the provost puts it, will be saddled with billions, maybe trillions, in debt. They’ll need to find ways out of difficult wars glibly started. They’ll have to decide what constitutes ethics for a country under pressures it hasn’t seen since it became a world power. Most of these critical problems, it seems to me, will require great minds, not new technologies or their explications. In America we’ll need Lincolns, not just Fords.

I’ve been re-reading Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare this week. Maybe it’s masochism after all the other bad news. The book is an account of the three years Miller spent traveling around America when he’d returned in 1939 after an expatriate decade in France. The jacket copy says, “Miller’s bad dream of the forties is still with us. He saw a nation of big business and little men, mass media at once soporific and violent, giant industries …polluting the environment, of credit buying, cheap cars and gadgets ad infinitum, of misinformation and prejudice—a spiritual and aesthetic vacuum.”

It’s an odd, uneven book, often self-indulgent, and Miller tries hard to be shocking, amoral, and ecstatic. Sometimes he sounds unhinged or like a child. (“I see no reason why I should lose my balance because a madman named Hitler goes on a rampage…. A great scourge never appears unless there is a reason for it…. Those who believe that the only way to eliminate those personifications of evil is to destroy them, let them destroy…. I don’t believe in that kind of destruction.”)

But he has it right when he says, “We have everything—everything it takes to make people happy. We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become the great shining example of the world; we could radiate peace, joy, power, benevolence. But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can’t seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless.”

You know who is fearless, radiant, content, and happy these days? Lt. General Henry Obering, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, who as I write is on C-SPAN briefing the press about a successful anti-missile missile test, one of those critical intersections between engineering and humanity.

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Today I’m pleased to post an interview with Ron Tanner, President of the Board of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), the professional organization for creative writers around the world. Ron is a writer and teacher of writing, as you might expect, whose work has appeared in journals such as New Letters, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and Story Quarterly and in the anthologies Best of the West (W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), The Pushcart Prize XIV (Pushcart Press, 1990), and 20 Under 30 (Scribner, 1986). His 2003 collection A Bed of Nails (BkMk Press) was selected by Janet Burroway for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.

I met Ron through MySpace a while back and was intrigued by the variety of his interests, from playing drums professionally to old-house rehabbing to recording oral narratives in the Marshall Islands. (I offered to let him fly me out to the islands to help, but he declined.) He graciously agreed to this interview even as he readies for the upcoming AWP conference in Chicago.

***

Welcome, Ron. Tell me, how’s a drummer in the Nevada casino circuit who tunes his bottom tom-tom lower in pitch than normal rise to power as head of the board of a professional organization for writers, with 30,000 individual members and 475 institutions?

The AWP board is composed of writers in mid-career who have had considerable administrative experience. The board’s charge is to advance AWP’s mission to help writers and writing programs. A few years ago, as I surveyed the horizon and considered when I’d step down as chair of my department, I thought I might lend a hand at AWP. So I ran and was elected to the AWP Board. From there, I worked my way up to the presidency by taking on increasing responsibility. It worked out great because I became president just as I ended my nine-year chairmanship of my department.

In the past it’s certainly been a kind of cliché that writers would have the sort of varied resume that you (and I) have. But on your website you give a lot of free, good advice to aspiring writers, and you seem to focus on young people and the choice to do (or not) an MFA. What about all the older writers who, like your friend, “made a meager living, burned up a couple of marriages, and then, when he was 43, surprisingly, miraculously…sold his novel ”? I guess I’m wondering how you reconcile your own meandering path with that of the early professionalization represented by the AWP.

The early professionalization we see among our younger colleagues in writing is a product of American mainstream culture, which has increasingly emphasized specialization and professionalization. That’s why so many undergrads (prodded by their well-meaning but ill-advised parents) think that an undergrad degree should lead to a profession. Actually, an undergrad degree should make you ready for the world. Period. That is, it should make you a more thoughtful, articulate, and humane individual. Most History majors don’t become historians, right? Most Philosophy majors don’t become philosophers. Most English majors don’t become English.

It’s true that grad school is mainly about professionalization. That doesn’t mean that any grad program, like the M.F.A, can guarantee a job. It simply guarantees that it will help students approach the field in a professional manner. It is then up to the students to make the most of their talents and opportunities.

I must admit I am envious of how many writers get so early a start nowadays—and the many great programs and contests and opportunities available to them. AWP reflects this new, enriched world of writing and we’re certainly happy to help any writer get a chance, no matter what his or her age or background. It just so happens that more writers are getting an early start because the resources are in place to make that possible. That simply wasn’t the case when you and I started.

That said, I worry about a careerist mentality—or pressure—that compels younger writers to feel hounded and older writers to feel discouraged.

Have you noticed increasing numbers of artists crossing forms recently? That is, drummers who write, writers who paint, sculptors who do interpretive dance? I seem to have, though I can’t vouch for their proficiency in more than one form.

Yes, I agree, it seems we’re seeing more interdisciplinarity among artists, probably because art is increasingly a multimedia enterprise. I’ve started illustrating some of my writing, for example. I’m not much of an artist but am competent enough to have fun at it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but the publishing world didn’t welcome. Now there’s room for illustrated novels, thanks to the rising popularity of manga and graphic novels. It’s all a product of an increasingly technologized global culture.

What can the AWP do for the likes of us? As you know, I’m a member, but with those dues I could buy my little boys new pirate outfits with swords sturdy enough to run me through.

AWP is the nation’s primary advocate for writers of all kinds, both in and outside the academy. The AWP Chronicle, published six times a year, keeps the membership in touch with issues in the field, especially issues in teaching. The AWP job list is a comprehensive catalogue of academic and non-academic openings, which we update every few months, as a service to our members. The AWP website is more than 1,000 pages deep. It has forums, links, and articles about writing and the writing scene. It contains the 40-year archive of Chronicle articles, for example.

The AWP award series, which now offers $2,000 to each winner, publishes a novel, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, and a book of nonfiction every year. The Intro Award series publishes student writing. The AWP online Guide to Writing Programs is free and a tremendous resources to students and program directors, offering a survey of every writing program in the country. The AWP conference brings together 8,000 writers to share their work and discuss their interests and ideas. And AWP is a vigorous lobbyist for writing in the schools, high standards in teaching, and the rights of faculty.

What about adjunct faculty? I know a guy….

AWP is a staunch advocate for better treatment of adjunct faculty. In the main, adjunct faculty are being exploited because they work long hours for less pay and have no job security and few rights or privileges. A recent AAUP study shows that, nationally, tenure-track hires now comprise only 37% of full-time faculty at colleges and universities, whereas in the 1970s tenure-track hires comprised 57% of the faculty. Nationally, part-time hires now comprise 65% of higher-ed faculty.

AWP understands that colleges and universities are having a tough time and we’re sympathetic to their dilemma. But we don’t believe that increasing the number of adjunct hires is the answer.

Considering how writers act when they’re around each other, is there really any call for us to get together en masse at yearly AWP conventions?

Writers should spend more time, not less, in each other’s company. Networking—in the best sense of the word—is vitally important for us. We need to compare notes and talk about issues and ideas that inform our lives as writers. We learn from each other. Also we need the good company. In short, we need to share quality time in a mutually-supportive community of like-minded peers. Most participants of the conference feel that it has been an invigorating and illuminating experience, and many feel that once a year is not enough.

I don’t know. I’d be thrilled to see some people just once a year. I guess you’ll be checking on each of us individually at AWP Chicago? Lunches, tuck-ins at night?

I wish. We have an incredibly accomplished staff that does all the heavy-lifting at the annual AWP conference. But they are overworked, and so increasingly we Board members have taken on duties to help them. Mostly we’re responsible for meeting and greeting guest speakers and ensuring that the hundreds of panels get underway on time and in good order. That means that our time is mostly booked every day and night. So I don’t get much opportunity to unwind or hang out at the conference. But I enjoy helping make it run well.

Until recently you were chair of the Writing Department at Loyola University. With all this admin duty, you still find time to teach?

I was chair for nine years, taking the department through three changes of identity. I just stepped down this year, as I took on the presidency of AWP. Being chair was eye-opening and educational in more ways than I have time to articulate. Anyone who becomes an administrator learns fairly quickly that the world is a complicated place—much more complicated than many faculty want to believe. Issues of funding, for example. Resources always remain finite even as our dreams entertain the infinite.

I think you just wrote the title for a new story: “The Dreaming Chair Entertains the Infinite.”

Being an administrator in a university is not so different from being a politician. There are competing constituencies to contend with and wildly varying expectations to negotiate. I learned a lot.

As for teaching, I didn’t do much—one course per semester. Now I’m teaching three a semester. Administrative work is necessary and can do much good. But, on a day-to-day basis, teaching has it beat hands-down.

Tell us about your Marshall Islands Project. I’m interested that you mention a novel on the MI in your bio for Bed of Nails, published in 2003, but the grant year for the MI project seems to have been 2007. How did your interest in writing about that place predate your project visit?

I lived in the Marshall Islands as a teenager. It changed my life. My father, along with a crowd of other engineers, programmers and physicists, worked for the military at their top-secret missile research center in the Marshall Islands. The missile test site is still going, on an island called Kwajalein. There’s plenty about it on the Internet, if anybody cares to look.

When I lived there, I was struck by the cultural divide between Americans and Marshallese. They lived on one island, we on another. Over the years, I thought a lot about them and how they have been treated by global powers, handed from the Spanish to the Germans, then to the Japanese and finally to the Americans. The Marshallese didn’t get their independence until 1986.

I visited the Marshalls in the 1990s and did some research for a novel, which took me 10 years to write. It’s a complicated topic, American influence in the Marshall Islands. Don’t forget, we conducted 67 nuclear tests out there from 1946-58.

Like people of most developing countries, they have a lot of challenges. The average life expectancy is 60 years; one out of three adults has diabetes; the average age of the population is 18 years—it used to be 16. That’s why I called my novel “A Nation of Children.”

I’m no scientist, no engineer—I didn’t see what I could do to help in the Marshalls. But then I said to myself, I’m a writer, I can teach writing to just about anybody. That might be helpful. And I know how to build websites. That might be helpful too. So I came up with the idea to teach Marshallese college students how to gather stories from their elders and post these on a website that the students would build. It took a while to find funding, but eventually I won a grant from the National Park Service, which supports cultural preservation in the Marshall Islands.

I had to put my life on hold and leave my wife and my university for a semester. But it was worth it. The students and I interviewed 28 Marshallese elders and preserved their stories on the Story Project website, which is now complete except for the translations, which are still coming in. The Story Project site is a twenty-first century model of cultural preservation, everything digitized and universally accessible. This is especially important given that predictions put the Marshall Islands under water within 50 years.

Is the novel done? Are you shopping it? And what of the memoir mentioned on your bio at Loyola, the one about the house?

My novel about the Marshall Islands needs revision, a bit more plot one publisher tells me. I’ve finished another novel, about Baltimore, which also needs revision before I let my agent see it. The memoir—called “Renovation: A Love Story”—is the story of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I buying an abandoned frat house and bringing it back from the brink of ruin. A feature about it appeared in THIS OLD HOUSE magazine in January 2008, and then the magazine put the story on the Internet, where it was one of the most-read house stories for three weeks. All told, about 1.5 million people saw the story. We got tons of email. My agent is trying to sell that book. Also I’ve just put together a second collection of stories, which I’m sending around.

You live in, love, and pour your vital energies into some Baltimorean version of Animal House?

Everybody told us we were crazy to take on a 4500 square-foot wreck of a house, especially since we knew nothing about doing that kind of work. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And Jill and I are crazy about old houses. I built a website to showcase all we did with the house. It was an adventure.

Let me turn to your published work. The Mid-American Review calls your collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, “an exercise in eclecticism,” in part because it “could, basically, be cut into two different parts: stories, and the stories from the futuristic revolutionary war.” Janet Burroway, who chose it for the G.S. Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, says, “At first I felt that this was actually two collections, one concerned with life as we know it and one as we fear it will be—but came to believe the worlds are perfectly married ….” How did you intend it all to work?

It took me years to make that collection sensible. It nearly won a number of contests, including the Flannery O’Connor. But editors kept telling me that the collection didn’t “hang together.” I thought, Who said a collection must hang together? It’s a collection! Nowadays publishers feel such pressure to package the goods with a single theme. It’s about marketing, not the writing.

I must have re-arranged the stories half a dozen times. Finally, I interspersed the revolutionary militia stories throughout because I realized that, in a collection, most readers would appreciate that other-world in incremental doses. Then, as you proceed through the book, that other-worldly vision grows and gain clarity. Most readers have responded well to that. I was grateful that Ms. Burroway understood what I was trying to do, as did the Towson Literature Prize committee, which gave the book an award.

As I read I thought of a similar split in the stories of T.C. Boyle—call it realism versus fabulism. But you seem to offer less possible salvation than he does, even more uncertainty for the characters’ futures. Your stories suggest a kind of terminal illness of human bodies, bodies politic, of the spirit, of the environment. Yet you seem like an engaged, even sunny guy. Is there anything to say about worldview as it represents in fiction as opposed to who we are when we walk around?

I find few writers bleaker than the brilliant but apparently nihilistic Mr. Boyle. The revolutionary militia stories you refer to were actually chapters from an illustrated novel, “Kiss Me, Stranger,” which I finished recently and am shopping around. The book is more hopeful than the individual stories suggest. Granted, there’s no happy ending. But that’s what makes life interesting. At bottom, “Kiss Me, Stranger” is about survival. We do prevail, though by fits and starts.

Your sympathies seem to lie with those who are lonely, alone, those who know that others have an advantage over them. Again, they seemed trapped.

Yeah, we’re a lonely lot, I’m afraid. That’s why community matters. We do our best work in community, though it’s difficult for many of us to find one or to fit into one. I wouldn’t characterize the problem as a “trap” so much as a dilemma. The dilemma creates friction or tension and our efforts to deal with this create movement in our lives—that’s why it’s good material for stories.

The stories in Bed of Nails have many cultural referents: Ruth, Cassandra, Hermes, Mussolini. The futuristic stories in particular seem wistful of some past we readers know, but because the stories are set in destroyed worlds where context has been obliterated, the cultural references seem like little more than shiny bits in a dump. The characters are always picking garbage, ferrying garbage to sea for dumping, trying to recycle and make do with their lots. One could read a story such as “Garbage” or lines such as, “I fear their disappointment when they realize we’re going nowhere” as self-referential. What role do you think art/writing itself plays in stories about a world where mere existence is about all the characters can manage?

Most of us are not heroes. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives holding things together and, if we’re lucky, making some advances. We’re so thoroughly distracted by the landfill of pop culture, it’s remarkable we get anything done. Americans produce a lot of garbage, both literally and figuratively. Too much garbage. As a teacher, you know how difficult it is keeping students focused on the things that matter. But that difficulty extends to grown-ups too. I’ve never seen grown-ups so busy, so distracted.

Art takes a measure of this distraction, clarifies it, and gives us some distance from the white noise, however briefly. Sometimes it’s enough (in art) to clarify the challenge of living in the twenty-first century and to show how some of us are dealing with it. That doesn’t mean we’re “winning” or rescuing children from burning buildings. Still, there is value in seeing others resist the seductive distractions of our culture. There is value too in seeing others (in stories and novels) making advances against overwhelming odds.

Who else do you read and admire? That cultural mashup in your stories—“Fly Me to the Moon,” the shoes of Imelda Marcos (sort of), the slogan “Yield to the Young” that’s reminiscent of, say, the Khmer Rouge—reminds me of Barthelme, for instance.

As a younger writer, I greatly admired Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., so they certainly had an influence. Also Don DeLillo, especially in White Noise, which I think resides among the great American novels.

You’ve mentioned two novels, a new collection of stories, and a memoir that you’re shopping or readying to do so. What are you working on now?

The Baltimore novel. I’ll revise that one this year and see what happens. Having lived in the city for 16 years, I feel ready to give it a try in fiction.

Thanks very much, Ron!

For more information, check out one of Ron’s websites, or contact him at rtanner@Loyola.edu.

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I was in a diner in a nearby town recently, the kind of place where The Beatles on my t-shirt were a band of suspicious foreigners. The dry-rotting building had multiple levels filled with Naugahyde booths and tables with mismatched chairs. It’s known for pie.

The engineers were there. I suspect there are only a dozen civil engineers in the world, and here eight of them were. They stood in line to order, deeply tanned, all-American guys wearing dusty calfskin work boots, dark blue jeans with belts, collared shirts and baseball caps over baseball haircuts. They all had cells and PDAs and used them while they waited. It was clear who was in charge—he and his second-hand man were the most voluble. The ones in the middle spoke deferentially to their bosses but freely with one another, and the kid at the bottom watched silently. They were working on a project for the university.

They sat at the long table next to mine with plastic baskets of sandwiches, chips and garlic pickle slices, and munched purposefully. After a while their elder said something about Iraq, and they discussed the crazy amount of money to be made there. Their voices drawled sleepily like airline pilots’, and they paused to wipe mustard off the corners of their mouths with paper napkins and to sip Coca-Cola. Two women sat down nearby. The engineers went quiet, for the same reason they’d have held the door open for them. Then another man joined the women and they looked at each other and turned back to their conversation.

They had a job to do, but they weren’t going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but they intended to get back to it. The work they described took neither nature nor the human into account. You were either with them or against them, and they’d be astonished if you were against them.

I dawdled over my sandwich, reading a volume of poetry, and they looked my way a few times. They were too polite to say anything while I was still there, of course, even to each other, but the kid registered their glances and took an extra-large bite. He put it in his cheek and worked at it like a squirrel, smacking his lips a little in my general direction.

I thought of James Dickey describing working in a business and how

…every day I used to take a book of poems with me just to touch, every now and then, or as a reminder of the world where I lived most as I wished to. And I remember also the very distinct sense of danger I felt when carrying the book…the distinct and delicious sense of subversiveness and danger in carrying a book…as if it were a bomb, here in this place that had no need of it, that would be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, that would finally destroy it by its enormous weight of organized indifference….

The engineers got up to leave, and as they ambled out, each loomed for just a second in my light while he tried to read what I was reading. It was a collection by William Carlos Williams.

I looked up, and their faces were puzzled, curious, suspicious. They might have caught just a title or two—“The Flower,” “For A Low Voice,”—but no more. These things lacked utility and a guy probably shouldn’t think about them, but they did.

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Our friends at Featherproof Books, one of the most innovative new presses going, have a grand deal for you: They’ve made one of my short stories into a chapbook, and you can have “The Stork” for free. All you need to do is download it, print it, fold it, and enjoy! I hope you’ll share the link with all those you love, hate, or feel indifferent about.

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An adjunct’s sabbatical, that is, which means I’ll be staying in the teaching harness until I drop but taking a few days off from this blog to make a revision deadline for my book. Please check in next week, when I’ll have colorful stories about the (5-minute) sabbatical I took in France (the one in my head).

By the way, here’s an opportunity in the National Parks for some of our friends eligible for real sabbatical leaves. I knew I should have been a botanist.

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We went to a lecture last night by Leonard S. Marcus, author, critic, and children’s book historian, who’d told a group in an earlier session with quiet amusement that “independent scholar” finally offered a title for what he’d been doing all along. His books include a biography of Margaret Wise Brown (author of Goodnight Moon) and most recently Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. The head of the Center for Children’s Books, which co-hosted the lecture, said Marcus’s work is one of the main reasons children’s literature is being taken seriously in academe.

Marcus’s talk, “A New Deal for the Nursery,” was on one of his previous books, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became An American Icon Along the Way. In it he tells a great story about how the Western Printing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, changed the way American children read.

Children’s books had never been given much attention by mainstream publishers or critics. Western eventually went into business with Simon & Schuster, Disney, and others to produce various Golden Books, and had offices in New York. Their innovation was making beautiful little books to be sold in dimestores to the masses. The books, starting with Poky Little Puppy, the best-selling picture book of all time, cost only a quarter when other children’s books, such as Make Way for Ducklings, sold for two dollars in bookstores, which could be intimidating for some consumers and didn’t exist in many towns.

Many American fathers were away from home when Golden Books started in 1942, the first full year of American involvement in the war. Eleanor Roosevelt had told parents to read to their kids as way to comfort them and help them learn, and readily-available, cheap books made that possible. Golden gathered a group of writers and artists that included Russian and Eastern European émigrés (such as Feodor Rojankovsky), progressive educators (such as Lucy Sprague Mitchell, friend of John Dewey and student of William James), and enough defectors from Walt Disney’s shop that Golden began to be called the East Coast “Disney Studios in exile.” Many of the books were about the modern world and showed modern families and working people at their jobs, as in The Taxi That Hurried.

A battle for the hearts and minds of American kids occurred along the way. Anne Carol Moore, for instance, the New York Public Library’s first children’s librarian and an important critic who helped initiate the Newbery and Caldecott awards, disliked and distrusted Golden books for their popularity and populism, and thought them more like despicable comic books than appropriate children’s literature. But Golden had found a way to bypass critics with attractive displays and affordability, and the company thrived. Eventually they made so much money that when Walt Disney, who had put most of his money into his films, wanted to build a theme park in Southern California, he got startup funds from Western/Golden and ABC, who’d been televising his shows. By the mid-’70s, other publishers had figured out how to do what Golden did—mostly with paperbacks, not hardcovers—and Golden’s influence began to wane.

I’ve bought a lot of Golden books over the years and still have many of them here in the house, from Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble on Diamond Island, a Big Little Book that cost 39 cents in 1967 (how cool were those things, with their hard covers and perfect size for little hands?), to the Richard Scarry books, to a recent Golden Guide on birds that Starbuck picked out for himself. (O! Where are the supermarket volumes of the Golden Book Encyclopedia of my youth?) I still love their pacing, layout (as in Scarry, where the words of “Mealtime” are shown associatively, not alphabetically) and gorgeous illustrations that sparked an early interest in fine art.

Children’s literature clearly has an effect on its readers, and more scholars and writers are looking into it. More than a decade ago, Herbert Kohl wrote Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, which asks if most children’s lit ignores stories of cooperative action and implicitly reinforces systems such as colonialism. The latest issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Adam Gopnick that revisits (and refutes) that argument. And Mark Sarvas, blogger and novelist, had a hand in bringing to an American publisher Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy, about which one reader wrote, “What have Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Barthes, Baudelaire, Freud, Bataille and Bachelard got in common? Give up? They all appear in this book.”

I too take the power of children’s literature very seriously. My wife and I shape our sons without them knowing it by filling the house with books we’ve loved since childhood, new books chosen to our sensibilities, and books our sons pick excitedly for themselves. I even allow Crazy Larry’s gifts to find their way on to the shelves, knowing he picked them because they disturbed him as a child and he’s never gotten past that. Starbuck has the most curious expression as he leafs through a book Larry sent him as an exercise in consciousness: One Monster After Another, Mercer Mayer’s classic full of Wild-‘n-Windy Typhoonigators sucking up whole Blue Oceans of Bubbly-Goo. At least, that’s what Starbuck says the book is about. I’m too scared to look.

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I have something in the new issue of Brevity, the premiere online journal of concise literary nonfiction, if you’re interested.

And though the good people of my youth had a saying that went, “The only thing more worthless than a writer talking about his work is teats on a boar hog,” you can check Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog this week or next for my brief guest-post called “Sabi and Dying.”

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The fall semester was only two weeks old, and we’d already worked through Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. But my students and I didn’t know each other well yet, and I was aware when I assigned Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” that the add/drop date hadn’t passed.

Undergrads often hate “Bartleby,” a weird story about an aging lawyer who has an infestation in his office: a copyist who won’t work yet won’t leave because, he says, “I prefer not to.” In fact he says little else, no matter how the lawyer reasons, pleads, threatens, or cajoles. Students get frustrated with the archaic language, fail to see the humor, and demand to know why the lawyer doesn’t just call the police and be done with it. (It’s a good question, and the story carries its own answer.) Bartleby himself is described like the walking dead or a ghost, but he’s not Poe-uncanny, just discomfiting. He’s a blank and refuses to provide any answers, for the lawyer or for readers.

That Tuesday morning my wife and I watched with you as the Towers collapsed in real time on our TVs. We can’t help but think of our own particulars even as others die at a distance: I’d proposed to my wife a year earlier on the Staten Island Ferry with the Twin Towers filling the sky behind her with light, and now she was six weeks pregnant, with no way to know how the world meant now. There was an awful disconnect in these thoughts.

That night I dreaded teaching the next day. I had nothing to say, especially about short stories written 150 years earlier. I remember seeing an ad, blown off the side of a bus, lying in the debris. Ben Stiller mugged goofily for his new movie, his face surrounded by ashen rubble and twisted vehicles, and I felt sure that stories had become useless—at best, false comfort; at worst, desecration.

An e-mail that night from the administration asked us to talk with classes about what had happened and to remind students of resources if they felt overwhelmed. But in my morning class on 9/12, students told me they were sick of having to discuss the event, though they were still visibly shaken, stunned, sullen, and tearful. Not much was known then, as I recall. Weren’t there rumors of some surviving the towers’ collapse? Had the name bin Laden been uttered? What did this mean? In the struggle for metaphor there had been comparisons to Pearl Harbor, and one student shook and cried “Cowards!”

I wasn’t thinking, just responding, and said whoever they were, they were mass murderers, but was it an act of cowardice to strap yourself into a jumbo jet laden with 24,000 gallons of aviation fuel and fly it into a skyscraper? It’s a measure of my own alienation that I worried for my little adjunct job with that comment until Susan Sontag wrote in the September 24th issue of The New Yorker, “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Most of us wanted to believe in the hope for normalcy, I think, and when I asked if they wanted to talk about Melville, my students surprised me and said yes. We discussed the story’s setting in Manhattan, and someone said it was weird that our lawyer-narrator had walked around Trinity Church in his angst, when it had been reported that one of the Tower’s radio masts had fallen into Trinity Churchyard and stuck there like a spear. We looked at period photos I’d brought of The Tombs, where Bartleby is held, and some by Jacob Riis a few years later, and noted their hard sadness. Students’ usual anger over the story’s difficulties was muted to puzzlement that it couldn’t be reasoned through, explained away, or solved.

I explained a few of the story’s similarities with Moby Dick, published a couple of years earlier, which I referred to as the weirdness of the whale. The novel is also about fear of an unknowable Other, whether it’s a monstrous white whale, a monomaniacal ship’s captain, or a headhunting bedmate, and Hegel’s line, “Each consciousness pursues the death of the other,” came to mind. Both story and novel look deeply into what may be our first terror: the “awful lonesomeness” of discovering that the world and its people are not ourselves and that we cannot control or often even understand them. In that distance and mutual unintelligibility—or much worse, in the blankness of the face of the salty or social deep—we’re left thinking individually, “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Melville’s own biography adds to the melancholy, since this great genius was snubbed by critics and public, and his own family thought him mad.

But true art, I believe, often provides the hope of rescue, even if it merely takes the form of more awareness or reduced simplicity. One may never know why things happen, what it means to be led to death by someone holding a grudge, for which he believes a fair settlement is the lives of all aboard. But the writer’s art—naming the things of the world, detailing its processes, providing the experience of having lived in perplexing or terrifying times—buoys us up. In Moby Dick, Ishmael performs an incredibly detailed anatomy both of the cetacean mammal called a whale and of life and death on the Pequod. He gives us all the stuff of the world, such as “outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen:

400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.

“Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading,” he admits; “not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.” In “Bartleby” too the reader is flooded with concrete sensory details, from the description of Turkey, “a short, pursy Englishman…somewhere not far from sixty,” whose face “blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals,” to the Spitzenberg apples and “small, flat, round, and very spicy” ginger-cakes sold in stalls near the Custom House and Post Office.

“No ideas but in things,” W.C. Williams says in “A Sort of a Song":

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Abstractions, such as “madness,” “cowardliness,” and “weird” keep us from the one understanding we can attain, limited as it is. Ishmael says, “For now, since by many prolonged experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect of the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country….”

Details are a triumph, and their telling our greatest art. Abstractions mean everything and therefore nothing; specifics lead to storytelling, some small escape from our fatal encounter with the world’s otherness. When Ishmael recounts finding himself the lone survivor of the Pequod’s sinking, saved by the weird detail of an empty coffin, of all things, that pops to the surface, he quotes Job, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The lawyer survives lonesome Bartleby, whom he has come to resemble, and is moved to try to construct a story about Bartleby’s past that will explain what has happened. Even he admits it’s inadequate, but like other rites for the dead it helps the living become more human by sharing what we all must face. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” he cries in empathy for us all.

Does it help to know, now, the names of Mohamed Atta and his gang, the type and configuration of the airplanes? The precise cause of the buildings’ collapse? We’d mourn our dead anyway and rage at those others who would presume to control our lives. But the stories that emerge from the specifics help, and like the narrator-protagonists in Melville’s fiction we’ll tell them again and again, compulsively, revising them for complexity, trying to enhance meaning.

My class was a mess that day, but I thought I might be able to find something to say in meetings to come about literature’s attempt to reconcile people and stones. As Melville writes in Moby Dick, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

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The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will fire up Wednesday morning, though “it might take a month or two to ramp up the proton energies to five trillion electron volts—as high as the machine will go before shutting down for the winter—and collide them.” A few unscientific minds have suggested the world will end when our physicist friends throw the switch. It’s simply not true, and if it is, you’ll never be able to call me on it. Plus I’ll never have to make that dental appointment.

Here’s a very good explanation of the process by a team member, whom you may remember playing keyboards in the background of the video for the UK hit “Things Can Only Get Better.” Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor?

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Have you had the experience recently of your physician turning her computer screen toward you and googling something she needs to know? I have, twice in a month, and I have to say, it was a little disconcerting.

I thought the natural order was that patients, hungry for any scrap of information about their health, googled and read up on medical topics so they could ask dumb questions of their doctors. The doctors, playing their parts, were supposed to say in stentorian tones, “No, that’s a common misconception. You must have been reading the Wikipedia entry for dysbaric osteonecrosis!” After all, don’t they teach things in med school that you can’t learn in the first dozen hits of an online search?

But both my family doctor and a neurosurgeon (I’m fine) googled things for me as I sat with them recently and looked on. The brain surgeon in particular thought Wikipedia is great. He said he makes his interns use it when they ask questions, and then he proceeded to give me an hour of basic instruction on Internet use. (He also said doctors don’t have to be very smart, they just need good memories, and admitted he had no idea what many of the medical terms meant on the Wiki entry he was looking up.) Hey, I am the Internet, pal, I wanted to tell him, but he had knives and loves to use them.

I use Google, Wikipedia, and other first-responder tools all the time, but I do know my way around a library and have enough research experience to have a feel for when a source is adequate. For instance, I needed to remind myself today which year women’s suffrage was enacted—an important fact to get right but one that’s easy to check (and crosscheck, if you want).

On the other hand, I wanted the lyrics to a song called “Make Believe” from the early ‘20s. It wasn’t all that important to my book, but I wanted it. Felt that need? It’s like the hunger for air during a breath-hold. Not only could I not find it easily online, I fell down that familiar well of context—who wrote the lyrics, what else he penned, who he worked with, what sorts of things he wrote about, etc. And I never could pin down the difference between “Make Believe” and something called “Make Believe and Smile,” leaving me wondering if the latter was the extended title, or something else entirely, or just a mistake. Any time there’s a hitch like this, I slow way, way down, even for something trivial, and get myself to the shelves (or change it to something I know).

But you should hear English TAs on the subject of Wikipedia. Hoo-ah. We must fight it with all means at our disposal, by which they mean verbally denouncing all open-content sources to the rhet classes they’re teaching. Then they ban it from the research and writing process. One young guy was so disturbed by the various drafts that he tracked over time for the entry on Auburn University that he couldn’t speak of them calmly, and couldn’t shut off, so on several occasions he finished with his class and came into his group office raging at anyone who would listen.

After my experience with the doctors, I’ve felt less self-conscious about my constant but measured use of online sources including Wikipedia. I noted today that in the August 2008 issue of American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, several people weigh in on its use, including the editor, a feature writer, and professional librarian readers. They’re all in favor of it, especially as a “centerpiece around which to teach searching and critical reading skills, as well as evaluation of a resource’s content,” as the author of the article “Dissecting the Web Through Wikipedia” says. Adam Bennington asks us to

Embrace the enemy: In the end, students are going to use Wikipedia anyway. If they don’t access it from school, they will look at it from home or another library. If they don’t cite it directly in a paper, they will probably have at least looked at an entry, and it may wind up influencing them. Librarians and other educators may as well capitalize on the opportunity to use the resource as a teaching example as well as to make the profession and its skills more relevant to students…. Evaluating resources they find through Google or Wikipedia will be critical when using that information to make decisions.

Let’s get this thing going then. I want my doctors to have the best possible skills for diagnosing by Wikipedia.

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