John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces": Audiobook Review

 

""Oh my God!""

Where does A Confederacy of Dunces rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Up there more for the energy of the plot and the depth of characters and the skill of the telling than Barrett Whitener's performance. I grew to like it, but it has its challenges.

What did you like best about this story?

The twisted relationship with correspondent "The Minx", as well as the "Oh my God!" bursts regularly from our bloated protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly at every outrage he witnesses.

Which character – as performed by Barrett Whitener – was your favorite?

George, the prissy foil who turns confidante to Ignatius in a skillfully paced conversation that shows off the talent of John Kennedy Toole. Toole builds up both interlocutors so that the naivete of one and the conniving of the other get switched and jumbled as well as run parallel. JKT handles the tone of each of his lowlife participants deftly, from New Orleans.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Hotdogs and Pigtails

Any additional comments?

Burma Jones is not easy to convey "live"; Whitener began the novel sounding in the omniscient narrator's voice as far too neutral and robotic. The women are shown with varying degrees of success, and the registers of different N.O.L.A. dialects and timbres is no easy task to keep moving here. The plot does go into a lot of side stories, building slowly, but the value of "A Confederacy of Dunces" rests in the care JKT takes to portray each figure. (Audible US 2/16/17)

Birthplace of America

Continuing our foray into curious museums and arcane legends, a chance opening of the AAA guide's first page for Minnesota A-Z revealed Alexandria's Runestone Museum. As with the "Welsh Indian" Prince Madog and the Mandan tribe lore raised in my previous entry (and note how this Kensington MN website from the site of its discovery manages to tie the Norse to the Mandan), so with the Kensington Runestone on display. You can click on these two links to read the assertions; while most scholars appear to dismiss the claims of a medieval inscription of runes dug up by a settler in a 1898 field, a few mavericks--as well as local proponents, which as with a few Welsh holdouts for Madoc understandably--still champion the slab as evidence of pre-Columbian, post-Vinland, Norse exploration. This led to the bold slogan "Birthplace of America" and the hoisting of 28-feet-tall Big Ole (even if Vikings per se by 1362 were passé) at the 1964 World's Fair for the state's claim to fame.

We wandered the museum, with a modest but of course insistent argument on a brief video about the veracity of the runestone (and I wonder why not subject it to sophisticated dating techniques to gauge the rate of erosion to estimate the date of its carving?), as well as a diligently assembled selection of artifacts from native to Scandinavian to contemporary, in a small city where a Grumman plant ensured some prosperity, and where, from the main street with its 3-M plant, better times appeared to have continued than in similar locations of this size and placement across the Midwest. There was an inspirational story about a boy who called "Information Please" and who as a man learned of the operator who dispensed him folksy advice. One display you won't find at any grand Art Institute. 

The elderly woman at the entrance kept talking (I even found out she was 3/4 Norwegian and 1/4 German), and we made our polite exit. The weather worsened as we listened to Dos Passos, and found his colleague's home town not far away. Adjoining Sauk Centre's Chamber of Commerce, the humble and forlorn Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center Museum seemed unchanged, or unvisited, since around 1974. But we lingered there, as the evidence from his map, notes, and research on his later novel Cass Timberlane documented Lewis' devotion to careful storytelling. We wondered if anyone still reads Main Street, Babbitt, or Elmer Gantry (let alone Dodsworth and Arrowsmith; Cass and her many other companions after the rise of Lewis attest to his slow decline, even as he kept producing a book a year or so). We left a few dollars in the kitty, and I hoped people remember Lewis and keep his stories alive. I listened to his best novels on audio not long ago; soon Layne and I would listen to Barbara Caruso's nearly twenty hours of Main Street, after we'd finish USA and then Babbitt.

Driving up "America's Original Main Street," it looks as if any other small town of a century ago. Handsome trees, even if bare by now so far north. Elegant houses among dignified smaller ones. The Main Street theatre had been subdivided into a multiplex; a corner once holding a cafe geared at the tourist trade was closed for good, or bad. We filled up for gas (if not at Sinclair, with its dinosaur logo), and headed back to the inevitable interstate which had bypassed this and so many main streets.

Down we went, as I glimpsed the modern (as of the 1950s) spire of St. John's Abbey to the right over a ridge of trees. We were in J.F. Powers' territory in St. Cloud a few miles to the left. I thought of his clerical fiction set around the imaginary dioceses of Ostergothenberg and Great Plains, and how Powers struggled to fit in, after the Church had changed so much in his lifetime, and in mine, too. I was delighted to find him represented on the famous Minnesota authors' poster at the Lewis center. It had a priest, Fr. Urban, in front of a golf tee, with a flag in front of his cassocked self, standing proud.

Lots of traffic as dusk drifted from the gloomy day, and we stayed at the Hyatt Regency downtown. Layne had always wanted to visit half of the Twin Cities, and she'd gotten a deal to get us out of the room by the interstate. The one we got in Minneapolis was enormous, as if half of our home. But, as in pricier places, ironically it did not cater to budget travelers: no microwave, no way to boil water.

We had a bite at Brit's, a theme pub a few steps (if cold ones for us) from the hotel. A woman ordered a Corona Light at the next table, but I opted for a St. Paul-made Summit IPA, with a rich floral scent. Around us, the city seemed prosperous, and I think the convention coming in was for urologists. Men and a few women, all dressed like doctors might be off-duty but still spiffy, chatted and huddled. We walked down Nicollet Mall, made famous by Mary Tyler Moore even if we failed to spot her statue. The news room of the local network affiliate had a window so we could peer in from the street. Being in its hometown, Target served as our stock-up for food. The store filled with women in Muslim garb, as this city draws many from Somalia (and many from the Hmong). So passed another ordinary night.

The next day, after a pleasant detour to the front of the Walker, passing many fit and wholesome young people walking about the city, we opted for the exhibits at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. A handsome interior, it showed off its material in a spacious setting. However, some awful contemporary art detracted from a fine mix from earlier periods. Not much stood out, but I admired Rodin's sculpture of "The Cathedral." Its folded hands symbolized the transition from the sacred to the secular, if you ask me, as the site where we pursue our inner search. We had a hard time figuring our way out, but a walk through Stevens Park brought us back to the downtown center smoothly, if past what one might call sketchier denizens of the streets. We went then to the Skyways over the Mall, subject of Replacements fame for Layne, and shopped for some souvenirs, and popcorn balls at Candyland (three branches alone in the vicinity) to take to a Johnston Center couple a few hours on.

First, we ate a fine meal at Sea Change, in the Tyrone Guthrie Theater by the Mississippi River. The Summit Stout complemented a fish dinner. Green glass-enclosed space, which by day or before plays must have been packed, now almost empty. We tried to see the sight of a stone bridge from the fifth story of the theater, but we were thwarted by a no-nonsense security guard (if suited rather than uniformed) who told us when Layne pleaded that we had sixty seconds. We glanced around, then left.

The Mill Museum next door looked intriguing. "City of Carbohydrates!" boasted a retro poster, on the imposing, atmospheric site of Gold Medal flour. I wondered where they made that brand now. We stopped to see the couple, who lamented losses in the purple state that night and nationally, that night.

Stuck in traffic, it being a city or two, it took us a long while to get through the next day. No fun museum, for despite attempts, nothing around the stretch between St. Paul and Chicago seemed open. The day dawned drearily, more rain, and a caffeine stop by Layne found us in the pretty small town (#15 of America's Top 20, a municipal site crows) of Menomonie. We visited by chance a Christian-themed coffeehouse in an old church basement. The sign said donations for java and rolls were requested, but promised if one could not afford the price, an honor system prevailed. Posters in the corridors showed the missionary work the church supported in Asia. A student from the UW campus pored over her books in a corner. Another woman greeted us as we exited the warm, cozy hideaway.

My AAA guidebook detailed the attractions of Baraboo's Circus Museum (recommended by our Minneapolis hosts) but again, off-season was on. The waterparks of the heavily promoted Wisconsin Dells had long closed after summer. Even the vegetarian restaurant with lots of ratings on Yelp was shut up. So, lunch was at Moosejaw, a giant pizzeria. At least the waitress and bartender were genial. I sampled the Wisconsin Dells stout made there but decided on their Hazel's Nutty Brown Ale, an intense flavor and aroma. One went a long way, but the blend was hearty and satisfying, even if the two older couples who came in, accents as heavy as everyone else at the place (except a brooding man with a mustache, walrus white, who told the waitress he hailed from Indiana), asked for Bud Light in bottles. Despite their gaucherie, the bartender generously offered them samples of draughts.

We left Lake Dalton and determined to hit Milwaukee, or its edge, next. We did, but in the dark, nothing of the state could be enjoyed. We stopped for gas in Warrens, attracted by billboards for cranberries. They colored many bogs, but no stores were open to sell any. At the frigid gas station, women inside in hunting gear matched the men, separately, who pulled in to fill up. I did too, but the clerk at the register came out, after I'd gone to the bathroom inside. She asked if I had paid first.

Layne saw cranberries in moonshine at that register. Inquiring about this as a purchase, she was told that the woman had no idea what it'd be used for, and besides, she did not like cranberries. So, no go.

Cheese stores gave us a last chance in the dark but stuck on endless interstate traffic at rush hour along Lake Michigan, passing an enormous Amazon warehouse under construction before the border, we crossed from America's Dairyland into the Land of Lincoln, with tolls to pay to boot. We finally made it to suburban Glencoe, north of Chicago, where our hosts gave us a room for the next two nights. We were happy to have a house to stay in, and overlooking a golf course, it certainly was no Jamestown ND or Wall SD. The next morning, a driving tour around the city showed us its architectural diversity, from the remnants of 1893's White City to Soldier Field to Grant's Park, Loyola to Hyde Park, the site of Cabrini Green to the sight of Sears Tower, the U. of C. to Michigan Ave. where we disembarked into the immense Art Institute of Chicago. Even in mid-week, early November, it was crammed with fellow visitors. No idea what it was like during any sunny summer.

There, the Seurat park on Sunday afternoon and the Hopper Nighthawks halted many (American Gothic was on loan, as well as the Mary Cassatt) but I admired the flickering white Breton headdresses and flickering candles of the late 19c. scene in Gaston La Touche's "Pardon in Brittany"

Lunch down the street at The Gage reminded me of a truly urban atmosphere. Most people dining looked as if executives, and the feel of London or Manhattan in a less touristed venue permeated it. The two women next to us talked of Ireland, including Adare which we knew, but their accents seemed to waver. At first I pegged them as emigrants, but as I eavesdropped, they seemed Yanks. I had a great fish platter and a noteworthy Temperance Smuttytown Cherry Stout, a superb brew.

Back at the museum, Layne and I noticed the odd juxtaposition of a linear, defined and even defiant depiction: Louis Anquetin's "An Elegant Woman at the Élysée-Montmartre (Élégante à l’Élysée-Montmartre)" Odd is how the background women are drawn as if by Toulouse-Lautrec imitation.

News of Kim Kardashian's Photoshopped rear already threatened to overtake the election news, as a male gaze at John Singer Sargent's "Study of a Girl" reminded me. I wondered if S-S's comely lass was as much a scandal over a century ago as the image that, for a few tiresome days, dominated FB. Speaking of photos, Layne's necessity to work on the phone slowed us down but at least we perched at a photography special exhibit about urbanism in New York, Chicago, and L.A. I wish, however, the academic po-mo blather was replaced by helpful contexts and descriptions non-curators might write. This occludes what it purports to interpret. If less highbrow mediation was present, and simpler text appended, an educated but dare I say "average" (not to mention international) audience would benefit.

Such was the case when the next day we left Chicago--finally, being waylaid by Google Maps and interstate construction to turn off into the less salubrious South Side with chanting crowd at the stoplight, plastic drums playing for a handout we were in no mood to dispense, and more tolls--into the Hoosier State. The night before, we saw a local play about Newton's battle with Robert Hooke, "Isaac's Eye"; I was impressed that different actors could chalk letters on a board in the same capitals. Newton's affectless genius, the mystery of the woman whom he may have had a connection with (apropos I recall that I read that Newton somehow apparently is one of the very few who can be said to have died a virgin), and the experiment that leads to the play's title made for a memorable plotline.

So, the following morning, I was reflecting, no pun intended, on the powers of the mind to figure out so much in the universe, visible and otherwise to our perceptions, and my comparative weakness in calculating, say, how to get from Chicago via GPS to Grand Rapids without all those damned tolls. We passed South Bend, which looked from the turnpike another set of retail malls and apartments, although surely Notre Dame graced the woods south a mile or two. In Elkhart, we visited the Midwest Museum of American Art. This converted 1920s bank building again showed the one-time splendor that a book like Babbitt sent up so well. The newspaper edifice confidently calls itself the Truth. Now, across from a 1920s music hall theatre seating two thousand, a collection with local art and a Grandma Moses, a Grant Wood, a Norman Rockwell, and a fine Reg Marsh (whose drawings enriched USA and who I since learned married the daughter of the neighbors in Long Island of a young Tom Merton, and who befriended him as a student at Columbia) made for a worthwhile hour. So did the Western art, the landscapes, and the whimsical pottery made by the local Overbeck sisters.

The city now bustles with making RV's, one of the few auto industries not yet offshored. The brewpub at Iechyd Da ("good health" in Welsh and I felt I deserved a free pint for knowing that before walking in) was nearly full despite fplks being still on some time clock somewhere. All those Winnebago workers, maybe. As we parked, the sky filled with shrieks of crows, a true murder. I'd never heard them so loud, or seen so many flocks rear up over the trees. I had a chocolate-infused stout, and Layne confessed the pretzel was the best she'd ever had. A hearty place I'd happily revisit.

But we headed for more abstemious territory. Layne wanted to head out of Elkhart to Shipshawana. There is one of the largest Amish settlements, and this was news to me. We soon entered roads where buggies clopped along, even if the S+S Sales parking lot had Amish in vans and pickups loading up too. Inside, as if an "Amish Costco," lots of foodstuffs, emphasis on the "City of Carbohydrates." Cash only, and I heard the German dialect from the moment I entered the bathroom to find three lads chattering. Teen boys wore grey knit caps, and young and older women modest garb. Older men, naturally, had beards. This was the first time I'd encountered this culture, although a student recently, I recall, from my online course had tried to visit the Amish in Pennsylvania for her field trip project. She was refused a chance to attend a service, so she reported on a museum. There was a similar one too near the store, Menno-Hof, and in the dusk as we passed it and farms, I again wondered at how the Amish regarded us interlopers, and how they worked out who drove and who did not. Distinctions rivalling Satmar and Breslov, while the outsiders see Hasidim as clad the same, and acting the same.

At the border, chilly, we filled up and passed at dark into the Wolverine State. Eventually we found our next hosts, emigres from au courant liberal Silverlake, now working for art foundations in the lively city of Grand Rapids. It sponsors the juried and popular competition Artprize annually, and its Grand Rapids Art Museum affirms its prominence as a creative center. One defying the expectation that only progressives fund the arts. Food and drink abound, old furniture factories turn lofts, and the bottle of Founder's Bourbon infused stout made me wonder what the tap version must be like, for it leapt out with flavor, as well as a small sip alas of their IPA. Our two nights spent in a Victorian 1880 manse (at least to us) in the Heritage Hill district, the fact our hosts could walk to work, and their splendid dwelling reminded us of what real estate can be outside the stratospheric West Coast cities.

So did a drive to nearby--as in a few minutes--farmland where we sampled a flight of dry ciders at Sietsema Orchards. Amazing that outside of Ada, such vistas await, even if they are encroached upon by gated subdivisions and giant homes behind the strands of birch surrounding the countryside, once you get past the endless enormity of the Amway headquarters. For, money supports Grand Rapids, and the arts, and where it comes from, admittedly, leads to compromises to further the creative class. To me, that old conundrum bedevilling Carnegie libraries or the Huntington, and I doubt if any recipients turn down a Ford Foundation grant based on Henry's antisemitism or ties to the Nazi regime. I wish we lived in a nation more supportive of the fine and liberal arts, but as we'd find in Bentonville AR, we face compromise when an unethical patron constructs a palatial shrine to the more refined treasures often less privileged creators produce, as we patronize a billionaire's largess.

On recommendation, as a grant had been applied for to our host's attention, we learned about our next destination on our serendipitous journey. It was around freezing, so we needed to keep moving south. Outside Jackson, we found its five eerie tiers intact to visit within that prison, which when founded in the 1930s was the nation's largest, meant to be a productive, self-sustaining, and profitable farm on the "Austin" system and not a "Pennsylvania"-style incarceration bent on self-examination in solitary cells. The cells were single at Jackson, but the work allowed men few chances for true privacy. We were the only ones there. An electric hum nagged far above from wires along the distant ceiling.

Cell Block 7 stands as asbestos prevents it from affordably being torn down within a functioning enclosure full of identical cellblocks that dwarf the capacity to comprehend. From a window ajar facing them, we peeked down at prisoners walking or marching across the grounds. A staff member pointed to a stain five tiers below, where one inmate had either jumped or had been pushed. The blood never came out of the linoleum. One graffito on a postboard in a cell said it all: "I hate you."

We left to traverse Ohio, stopping only for gas at Beaverdam. I do not count a state visit unless our feet touch the ground and commerce has been conducted, by the way. The Buckeye State passed without much to distinguish it, but as we neared Dayton and crossed at pale red sunset the long iron bridge over the wide Ohio River at Cincinnati, the hills started and fall color returned, a tawny hue that would accompany us as we began the LA Radio Theater dramatization of Babbitt and took that Midwestern tale all the way through Arkansas. Even into Oklahoma, we kept pace with autumn's hue.

Photo: This big statue has since been moved across the street, his back to the lake, but here is Big Ole in the 1960s on the main drag of Alexandria, Minnesota. Is Runestone Museum visible on the right?

Peter Marshall's "Demanding the Impossible": Book Review

Seven hundred pages of fine print, and another hundred of footnotes (in 2010's revised edition) narrate thousands of years over which people have longed for the right to make their own decisions, live as best they choose among each others' mutual assistance and communal support, and to conduct their livelihoods and relationships as they please, free of coercion, top-down dominance, or imposed government or creed. If leaders are chosen, if organizations are established, then these are entered freely and exited at will.

This sums up anarchism's principled versions. It seems from early on, philosophers, priests, bosses, legislators, politicians, and generals all have feared such a movement. Peter Marshall's immense survey shows the results, parading steadily the greatest names in the centuries who've tried to make theory into practice. The Introduction begins with great quotes from some of its exponents, and prefaces in Part I anarchism as it is in theory. While "the river of anarchy" changes with each version, the essence of freedom attracts a few each generation to plunge into what, by the heady rhetoric recurring, appear inviting waters of liberation, personally and socially. For, society for most advocates remains, even if the State withers away. The former is sought freely; the latter isn't chosen. "Society and the State" and "Freedom and Equality" articulate this in Marshall's introduction.

In Part II, the forerunners of anarchism, Taoism and Buddhism, surprisingly show how ancient this impulse is. Feared by Plato if somewhat anticipated by the pre-Socratic Greeks, its impulses survived into early and medieval Christianity, among such as dissenters, heretics, guilds, and rebels against Rome--and against Luther, tellingly. By the English Revolution, we see the short rise of Levellers and Diggers, and the brief establishment of Gerard Winstanley's commune--and then his about-face later in life, as he turned away from his earlier rebellious stance. Inconsistency, as Marshall patiently notes, characterizes many who in the French Renaissance and Enlightenment and also, as with Burke in the British Enlightenment, toyed with models for radical change without truly supporting them.

By Part III, French, German, British, and American libertarians emerge. Not quite anarchist for the term was not yet in common usage, but such as Tom Paine presage if imperfectly, for many sought the protection of a Jeffersonian State, however limited, along a federalist or decentralized system, the dreams of the later 18th century, as revolution sparked the possibility for change and no more kings. Partial anarchists, as it were, abound among Rousseau, Emerson, Swift, Mill, Morris, or Fourier, et al.

In Part IV, we finally reach the heart of the book. Classic anarchist thinkers begin with the passionate example of William Godwin, the lover of order. Next comes the near-Nietzschian Max Stirner, the conscious egoist, who as many would angered Marx. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's intricate theories reveal the philosopher of poverty. Two Russians pair off: Michael Bakunin as the fanatic of freedom, full of inconsistencies as many theorists seem to be in this century. Peter Kropotkin, the revolutionary evolutionist, tries to tame the theories with a study of geography and science to fit anarchism within a natural determinism, akin to many world-changing paradigms of the nineteenth century. So does, on a smaller scale, the fierce Elisée Reclus: the geographer of liberty. For all but Reclus in this long part, Marshall offers a grand sweep of their life and thought before entering topics such as their ethical views, political attitudes, thoughts on the State or human nature, to clarify particular ideas in depth.

The twentieth century's Errico Malatesta, the electrician of revolution, sparks a new current: the energy of the will, not of nature, as a way to transform human drives towards peaceful (again a contentious point among many, as the fall of the Paris Commune and the rise of WWI split many) goals. Marshall seems to sympathize with those who reject war or violence, as these are coercive means to achieve the end of the end of class antagonism, national boundaries, and capitalist rule.

Leo Tolstoy, the count of peace, gets sympathetic treatment, and various American individualists and anti-State Communists such as Lysander Spooner (who finally takes up a question I'd been asking ever since I read Locke to ask: who signed us up to the social contract established by the "consent of the governed" centuries ago?), Voltairine de Cleyre, Benjamin Tucker, and Alexander Berkman but they're all skimmed over too hastily, in admittedly a very lengthy book as it is. Sasha B's companion, Emma Goldman as "the most dangerous woman" earns a brisk, lively study, as Marshall scans her ambiguous position between understanding and condoning the use of violence to achieve liberation. 

German Communists, notably the brave martyr to the cause in the aftermath of 1919's failed Munich soviet, Gustav Landauer, follow suit, and then Mohandas Gandhi, who counters brutality as "the gentle revolutionary"; a strength of Marshall's treatment is that he firmly if gently calls out Gandhi for devolving from leader to guru with a cult of personality, or chides in part V, "Anarchism in action," those in France, Italy, and Spain who capitulated to compromise, as with the CNT-FAI, and so lost the momentum of the social revolution, during Spain's war against fascism--and Stalinism. Still, then as now, some accommodation with party politics appears inevitable for many radicals, to advance situations amenable to elusive goals of autonomy and mutual aid beyond unions or regions.

Russia and the Ukraine, with Makhno's early attempt, similar to Spain's at a sustained anarchist society during war, offer cautionary tales, as do repeated situations in Northern Europe, the United States, and especially Latin America, when attempts at progress were stymied by unions, violence, agitation, and crackdowns. Mexico and Cuba repeat the same story as the USSR and Spain, where anti-statist traditions were lured or pressed into capitulation by crafty cadres led by brutal despots.

While these chapters inevitably and rather dully in parts tell some of the same narrative the earlier chapters on leading anarchists had, depending on the nation, glimpses at such movements as French Situationists, British punks, American Wobblies, and German agitators show how the 20c managed in a few nations to survive its heyday 1880-1930 and a few progressives lived long enough to see the 1960s and inspire younger activists. The downside of this in India, where the Sarvodaya movement was co-opted by a very clever politician who used it for his own party advancement, is also telling.

After a hasty look at Asia (many regions get a rapid glance, and this tends to be names-and-dates and unions-full-of-initials types of coverage, of uneven interest compared to earlier biographical narrative), Marshall shifts in part VI to modern anarchism, with the New Left and the counterculture. This lively section looks at Situationists, Kabouters, Provos, and Greens along with anarchists themselves, as by the 1960s, a loose collective rather than unions or platforms drives many experiments. One of these, concocted on the New Right as anarcho-capitalism, merits blunt critique.

Modern libertarians and anarchists gain briefer mention; Murray Bookchin and his ecology of freedom meets an in-depth challenge as Marshall takes on this former and then future Marxist who bridled at the "lifestyle" rather than "social" anarchists as insufficiently committed. Marshall's passion emerges here and makes this part of the book lively and spirited. Similarly, his reprise as Part VII of the book's contents, as he reviews the big thinkers who established the legacy of anarchism, its ends and means, and the relevance of anarchism, along with an epilogue, shows how difficult it is for the author to let go of this vast topic. He examines the strengths and weaknesses, he tackles the applicability of this ideal to our "post-scarcity" economy after the heady utopian dreams of the 60s have given way to environmental damage, job loss, unfettered capitalism, and a commodity culture.

Again, in the last sections there is some repetition, and certain material gets included a third time, for overlap of thinkers, regions, and recent events may be inevitable. A history of a big idea causes the weight of a big book. But anyone who's read shorter works such as Colin Ward's Anarchy: A Very Short Introduction or the newer A Living Spirit of Revolt by Ziga Vodovnik will welcome Marshall. 

P.S. This massive work might be read on a Kindle so note-taking can be eased. As the print copy and bulk necessitate a very small font, readers may prefer a dual version. I found the index and notes easier to consult in book fashion, but the highlighting made an e-book appealing. A few typos remained, and the margins of a Kindle version meant that 40% of the text was end-material, but the portability of this meant I could finally finish what I'd been making my way through in print, slowly...
(Amazon US 6-10-14)

[His conclusions anticipate anthropologist David Graeber's post-millennial OWS activism, reviewed well by Christopher Shea at the Chronicle of Higher Education; Kalefa Sanneh at The New Yorker; Greg Downey at Resilience, and Eli Cook at Raritan, which burst forth a year after this edition.]

John MacGregor's "Propinquity": Book Review

This takes place in Australia starting around forty years ago. Clive Lean relates nearly all of the story firsthand, yet his school chum Julian Lake's early portion comes via an omniscient narrative from the outback. John MacGregor conveys Clive's tale from an exuberant sensibility open to irony and levity. By contrast, Julian's snippet comes in a straightforward, unaffected tone: this does, however, make you wonder why this portion departed from the first-person perspective dominating Propinquity.

Originally published in 1986, it's now re-issued as an e-book by the author, who requested my review.  (There remain typos and misspellings; not sure if this is due to transfer to Kindle format or if they were in the printed edition. The author has reported to have revised the e-book since my review.) I liked Clive's schoolboy glimpses of countercultural fervor and political naivete; the author's own subsequent work to assist others abroad, his journalistic coverage of abuses in East Timor and among his homeland's politicians may be predicted from this novel. A lot of Australian-specific references that eluded me, but the general plot however uncanny remains clear.

Clive deals with the ups and downs of his father's garden equipment business while Julian wanders into a seeker's quest. Part two introduces Eustace Harkin, a WWII vet on the down and out, to Clive. A surprising transaction follows, enabling Clive to leave Australia to study medicine at Oxford. At Oxford, he falls in with friends (the Vishenkar group) who experiment with psychedelics. (Meanwhile, Gilberte, their classmate, is a bodyguard for the Italian president, unfortunately Aldo Moro; Alistair, another classmate is in Baby Doc's Haiti, during the era of contras and CIA blowback: their itineraries eventually intersect with the main plot neatly if a bit predictably.) In transit through London, Clive meets Sam Goode; her familial ties to the "Royal Peculiar" status of Westminster Abbey picked up (for me) the pace. This will be sustained by quite a memorable place for a tryst.

Berengaria, not a figure likely to ring any reader's bells, but Richard the Lionheart's peripatetic and bold queen from Navarre, comes to light in Sam's recital. Then, the novel unlocks the Abbey's secrets. Kabir, a Vedic teacher, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gnostics intertwine with Sam's "spellbinding" tale to Clive ca. 1200. The nature of fiction, as in real life, requires this emerges "as told to" in long conversations. (The Benedictine monks as far as I know were removed from the Abbey about forty years before 1599, but I am unsure if this date was shifted forward by MacGregor--or Sam--for the novel's own purposes.)

How students' medical expertise merges with medieval evidence merges in the book's second half. It moves as expected, an entertaining story mixed with a clever, erudite "what-if" premise. Given the dramatic findings, there's an understated tone of acceptance that either betrays the author's own attitude, or the characters' sangfroid in a chiller climate than Australia to the startling revelations. However, a madcap abduction later restores vigor, and earns "eleven minutes of national prime time." It ends in a modest resolution, open-ended while keeping the mysteries uncovered open to possibility.
(Amazon US 7-23-13; the author informs me the typos have been fixed since I read a review copy.)

Umberto Eco's "Inventing the Enemy": Book Review

Eco explains "occasional writings" as its proper subtitle: he had no interest on the topics herein at first, but being commissioned or encouraged to contribute these pieces as essays, he reflected more on them out of necessity. Over the past decade, so they emerged to entertain himself and his audience as "an exercise in baroque rhetoric." Like that style, its ornamentation may intrigue some and lull others.

Any reader coming to Eco not for the first time expects erudition and range. His medievalism engages us in many entries. The titular one considers how his native Italy lacks enemies for the past sixty years, and how this undermines a national identity. So, enemies if not real must be invented, against which a people test their self-worth. Eco uses an array of classical, medieval, and fascist examples to prove this point, as well as Shakespeare, Sartre, and Orwell. He conveys with well-chosen excerpts, as throughout this collection, the lively spirit of rhetorical and intellectual excess.

"Absolute and Relative" takes on the present pope as well as Nicholas of Cusa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Lenin and Aquinas. These enliven the more bookish analyses of logic he applies. Fire in "The Beauty of the Flame" uses its metaphorical themes, with a dutiful citation from Bachelard before going back to hellfire, heavenly light, alchemy, luminosity, destruction, ekpyrosis, and even Joycean epiphany. This exemplifies Eco's range efficiently.

So does "Treasure Hunting," allowing him another romp into medieval relics displayed all over the Christian world. As with fellow scholar Piero Camporesi, a wonderfully eclectic investigator of odd lore, Umberto Eco in his tribute to this "gourmet of lists" as well as tastes and smells finds a fitting subject. Same for the stolid but offbeat "No Embyros in Paradise," to find what Thomas Aquinas thinks (as opposed to Catholic orthodoxy today!) about stem cells, embryos, abortion, and "the so-called right to life." Eco finds, no surprise, that the Angelic Doctor differed from the modern Church in when ensoulment entered the fetus.

Victor Hugo's "sublime excess" and that of the gothic (the original version!) novel slots Eco into the grotesque adroitly. Even if I lacked knowledge (as often in this wide-ranging book) the source texts quoted often at wonderful length and astute choice, Eco's pleasure is infectious. "Censorship and Silence" takes a more serious turn, if Italy's "television showgirls" can pass as that via the term "valina" or "veline." He moves this discussion into current fears of censorship, and the ethical problem of how in a media-drenched world "to return to silence."

"Imaginary Astronomies" benefits by its charts and maps; how the earth and sky were charted by our ancestors segues into Jules Verne and science fiction and finally "true history." A "spurious review" titled "Living by Proverbs" follows as the first of three pieces of "real entertainment." The next on "sentimental digressions on early times" expounds (tediously at times for my tastes) on "anagnorisis" or "the change from ignorance to knowledge." These two felt fustier if perhaps intentionally so, more a drawing-room exercise by a wit. But, they preface my favorite, hauntingly and disorientingly composed of seventeen real excerpts from 1920-30s Italian reviews of James Joyce's "Ulysses" by fascist critics.

The penultimate essay looks at why utopia is lost and its islands never found, in visual and textual illustrations. The last, from December 2010, combines two articles on WikiLeaks as a "false scandal"--one that becomes public but which was known widely and whispered about in private long before. While subsequent events perhaps show the power of the authorities bent on taking its mastermind down, Eco leaves us with another smart remark: "technology moves like a crayfish, in other words, backwards." That is, compromised spies and duplicitous diplomats may have to retreat from electronic databases and networked communiques to the days of "meetings in the steam room of a Turkish bath, or messages left in the alcove by some Mata Hari."

Richard Dixon translates these assorted essays with vigor. It's fun to learn so much from 222 fast-paced, smart, and thoughtful pages. Intellectuals can have a blast too, and Umberto Eco in his lectures and discussions teaches us how to look fresh at the world of the past as well as the foibles that literature and history and philosophy (and theology and alchemy and astronomy) dutifully investigate, satirize, and pontificate upon. (Amazon US 7/23/12)

George Saunders' "Tenth of December": Book Review

Any story George Saunders writes, I'll read. This fourth collection begins with typical toughness mixed with sadness. Mortality and fright return over and over, in landscapes familiar and laboratories unrecognizable--for now. "Victory Lap" gets it off to a stern start with a sassy ballerina-teen and a geode. "Sticks" is much shorter than some in this volume, nearly a vignette about Dad leaving a Santa suit draped "over a kind of crucifix." The next, "Puppy" gives you a sense, if you know Saunders, that it will not end well by its very title. "The cruelty and ignorance just radiated from her fat face, with its little smear of lipstick," as one mother's summed up. This shows Saunders, doggedly watching how his neighbors might act, around his native upstate downscale New York.

 "Escape from Spiderhead" terrifies more than amuses. A shame reducer and verbal stimulant get tested on lab-rat humans, as sex and what seems like love unfold at nearly novella length for the understandably confused narrator. As with many of George Saunders' eerie reports from a near-future corporate realm, neologisms and innovation combine with poignancy and satire. As he's matured, his daring approach has blended into a subtler shift towards tenderness beneath. He hasn't lost his imagination, but he improves upon even the talent of his first collections when he mixes emotion into the ingredients, more than lesser writers who heap on the what-ifs too thickly. Speculative fiction meets domestic anxiety, from a deadpan satirist increasingly skilled at evoking tenderness amidst death and hallucination.

"Sometimes science sucks," as one character concludes. As a geological engineer turned writer, certainly Saunders possesses a knowledge of business and know-how other MFA-schooled products may lack. (See my review of "In Persuasion Nation") He has always mingled the bureaucratic-speak with pop-psych bromides deftly. "Exhortation" sends up the managerial memo lapsing into tell-all e-mail, appropriately. "Al Roosten" about to be introduced by a MC cheerleader too old for braids who in turn promotes herself "as someone who does feng shui for a living" contains its own ready-made humor, "LaffKidsOffCrack" the charity du jour that makes the protagonist feel, amidst bumps and grinds, that he was "deaf to the charity in this." Saunders shows the awkward, forced conviviality of such events, inflated just right. It reminds me of Babbitt meets Pynchon, somehow.

"Home" follows the decay of a relationship, complicated by baby. Court-martial proves a lesser infraction for a returned veteran compared to what life at home and under the sheriff's eye--and Ma--has for him. The more deadpan, mind-numbed, demotic phrasing of everyday downscale folks again finds Saunders applying his ear to the way people talk when tired out and unable to process, full of proverbs, the obvious observations, the phrases from TV: "Not on my watch," or "People tend to focus on the negative."

With "My Chivalric Fiasco," TorchLightNight starts with a "voluntary fling" admission and moves to a pigpen with fake pigs and a tilting bed, with the narrator "the only currently working person in our family." A fake-medieval tone intervenes thanks to a 100 mg of KnightLyfe, and this allows Saunders to enjoy the Renaissance Faire scenario and diction that giddily and disturbingly ensues for "Improv."

Appropriately, the first sentence of "Tenth of December" has a "pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms" hulking about in Dad's white coat. Beavers are to be scrutinized. But, strangeness from the woods ensues, of course. It's more of an action-oriented, psychologically concerned story for Saunders, and in its length it extends into a family saga in miniature, pushing his direction homeward away from the managerial blather and drugged predicaments of his previous characters. Slightly more conventional in intent for all its oddness, it may signal Saunders' desire to leave the lab and cubicle behind for nature's homeland insecurities, with its own terror. (Amazon US 10-24-12; my ARC differs from the published version, apparently. See NYT 1-6-13:  "George Saunders Just Wrote the Best Book You'll Read This Year")

Katie Hickman's "Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon": Book Review

One of the first accounts by a Westerner who visited (as of the mid-80s, although this is not specified) the then-less accessible eastern reaches, Katie Hickman's travelogue proceeds in expected fashion. That is, she's a competent travel writer and her integration of the remarks of earlier visitors helps give background for her own Raj-reminiscent trek. Oxford educated, from a diplomatic family, with an international upbringing, she does exude the air of privilege. She and her companion, photographer Tom Owen Edmunds (with 250 rolls of film), gain quickly via Calcutta connections the sponsorship of the Bhutanese royal clan that allows them all the time they need and lots of horses to make the arduous trip.

The lateral east-west road, due to landslides and construction, is out between Jakar and Mongar. The pair and their guides must go by horse over a long stretch. However, this crucial part of the itinerary lacks excitement. Perhaps those more enamored of horses may find it more enticing, but for me, it did not keep my interest.

Also, the tone Hickman adopts can grate. She twice puts down the annoyingly brusque Westerners on a group tour who cross their path. While their "unmistakable plumage" of garish windbreakers and their rude insistence on taking photos of monks where it is not allowed may merit critique, she seems oblivious to her own entitlement and the professional and social connections she and Tom enjoy, compared to the everyday tourist consigned to a package tour--besides, any tourist in Bhutan must go in the company of guides and and an approved itinerary--which only the royal intervention overruled and extended without limits in Katie and Tom's case.

Late in this tale, all the same, two incidents enliven it. One horribly, as leeches infest the pair and one bite makes her bleed profusely from the back of her head as she attempts, in a memorably graphic scene, to sit at the foot of a beady-eyed lama in a dramatically situated temple. Trying, damp and twitchy with imagined or real leech bites to sleep near him that night, musicians and chanters blare. Tom says: "It's like sleeping inside a grand piano."

A bit later, as they find the Bragpa (aka Brokpa) yak-herders of Mera and Sakteng, lots of inebriation and celebration reward them off-road. Like many travelers, the chronology and scenery seem to take the viewer out of now. "Mera had the easy earthy intimacy of a medieval tavern. But Sakteng was a Childe Harold's tower, a darkling place, deep and mysterious as legend." (186)

Hickman to her credit differentiates between a traveller's reveries of anticipation, the possibility ahead of enchantment that drives one on, and the "grumblings of the camel men" (60) who must accompany and cater to the romantic and testy whims of those who hire the locals. You don't get much sense of the Bhutanese who wait on her and meet her, and this report relies much more on the perspective of an intelligent Englishwoman and her wry companion who seek to get under their own skin, to hear the heartbeat that isolation and endurance intensify.

For longer reports from about the same relatively "pre-modern" (the road connected, but not yet electricity, TV, phones, or the internet) period in the eastern region, see Jamie Zeppa's
Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan (reviewed by me May 2012) and Ken Haigh's Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan (reviewed Dec. 2012). Both teachers of English from Canada, Zeppa and Haigh nearly overlap in place and time with Hickman, but their stints allow them a deeper insight into this area. This counters the brief glimpses and the few photos Edmunds includes here that can't offer much depth or context.

Hickman's (first published in 1988) book ends very suddenly. Almost as quickly as the pair and their retinue burst into the Bragpa's villages, they realize that they must return. At that moment, Hickman concludes. (Amazon US 1-4-13)

Michael Aris' "Views of Medieval Bhutan": Book Review

The adjective's elastic here, as this Himalayan scholar (who died of cancer in 1999 in Britain while his wife, Aung San Suu Kyi, was under control of the junta in Burma for many years) admits. Still, most Westerners further comparisons to "feudal" dzongs and "medieval" customs such as archery or monarchic and monastic devotion when they encounter Bhutan firsthand, or via photos or books. This handsome 1982 edition features an introduction by Tibetan expert Aris, who tutored the Bhutanese royal family for six years when the nation was opening up to modernization, and in less dense form than his other academic publications, he sets out the careful contexts that Samuel Davis, (1760-1819), captured in his journal and by his skilled drawings. A surveyor and draftsman for the Bengal Army, he accompanied Warren Hastings on the second British embassy, in 1783, to the kingdom.

These elegant depictions attest to the only foreign artist "of distinction" to show Bhutan, and the first outsider to paint scenes from these mountains. Aris notes that his fellow Englishman's "legacy played no part in the development of those imaginary utopias which the west continues to locate in the trans-Himalayan region." (11) Aris annotates and excerpts Davis' journal, and nods to its secular, and largely un-Romantic tone, also a part of the naturalistic art he brings to the plates reproduced here. "If sublime and romantic qualities are sometimes found expressed in his art this is surely because Davis, like most of us, was constitutionally incapable of reacting otherwise to certain combinations of mountains, light, fortresses and forests." 

It's intriguing to see how, at Punakha Dzong, Davis includes in his study of "one of the most ancient and considerable of the Rajah's castles" an analysis of its weak point. However formidably walled, its single entrance, he reasons, weakens it: "The best way of forcing admission might be by breaking open the gate with a petard." (50) He sees the subjection of the lower classes (and all women) to the rulers secular and religious, and wishes to free the peasants from the restrictions which a "monk tax" and fealty to a celibate, corrupt regime force in a manner he compares to Rome. He evinces a sympathy for the poor, and he scrutinizes the rituals of their bickering rulers closely. Certainly the considerable exoticism of this remote and then-nearly unknown realm in Davis' steady hand and pen balances with a cool appraisal of its strategic and military value to the Raj and his employer, the Crown. 

His companion and supervisor, Samuel Turner, suggested that after four months waiting in Bhutan, the Tibetan refusal of Davis to continue to that nation with the expedition that Tibetan suspicion of the pen and ink skills of Davis led to his exclusion from the mission. For more on this and the earlier venture into this region, see (reviewed by me Nov. 2012) The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet by Kate Teltscher. Davis returned to India, to collaborate with Sir William Jones, who made the breakthrough connection between Sanskrit and Indo-European languages, and Davis became a Director of the East India Company and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He kept up his draftsmanship, and the fifty-nine examples Aris presents commemorate the considerable talent this West Indies-born Briton brought, at 23, to Bhutan. (1-6-13 to Amazon US)

Michel Peissel's "Mustang: The Forbidden Kingdom": Book Review

As a child, I learned about this thumb-shaped projection of an independent, feudal principality in Nepal that stuck into the Chinese-occupied Tibetan frontier. Michel Peissel, a French-born, English-raised explorer, wrote for National Geographic his account, as the first Westerner allowed to visit this tiny realm in 1964. Since Mustang for me meant in the late 1960s the fantastic Ford model, and secondarily a horse as I grew up, I wondered about connections--there aren't any.

Mustang derives here from Lo Mantang, the walled capital of a thousand people that at this time (since Nepal's Maoists took over in 2008, it's no more) continued medieval European equivalents into the modern era. Peissel, the first European who slept within its confines, takes two months to wander the land, looking for clues as to the origins of its kings in neglected chronicles. It took him two weeks to hike to the kingdom of Lo from Nepal, and few of its intelligent but isolated inhabitants had ever seen a "long nose" foreigner before.

His colloquial Tibetan, gleaned from a grammar abroad and then years of study, affords this Oxford-educated, Harvard Business School dropout a chance to enter the country, after a prime minister's assassination in similarly cautious Bhutan (he wrote about trekking across it in 1970's "Lords and Lamas") foils his plan to stay there. He longs to go deeper into the peaks and plateaus. Lo sits in the "great Himalayan breach" north of Annapurna and Dhalulagiri ranges, facing the funneled winds that bake it up to 90 in the day but freeze it at night. Given Tibet's capitulation, he cannot enter that territory, but he comes as close as possible. Mustang itself, patrolled by Khampas fighting a guerrilla war (see Peissel's later "The Secret War in Tibet") against the communists, proves an edgy outpost.

Even though he does not mention he's a diplomat's son, his negotiations enable him to elude trouble. He and his Tibetan comrade, Tashi, manage to figure out the background of the dynasty that hosts them, and parallels between medieval mindsets of Peissel's ancestors and those of the Lobas he gets to know during his residence can be insightful. He tends as in his later books to boost the advantages of the primitive over the jet-set, but he offers a patient view of the advantages the rest of us forget.

"The fortlike appearance of Kag spoke of a more valiant and warlike race, expressing in the majesty of geometrical sturdiness a taste more robust and less over-richly refined." (69) This as he broaches the divide between Hindu Nepal's "sickly mystery" and enters "the land of Lamas and Buddhism." Later, he spends a restless sleep in a Khampa "samar" war camp, and after Tashi confides his beliefs in spirits, Peissel ruminates. His uneasiness dominates his reflections, with no distractions in the tent, and medieval devils at night seem as real as a similarly outmoded God might in the day to protect him from avalanches and robbers. The next morning, "I had learned the meaning of fear as a direct product of faith. The fear of God, the fear of demons, the fear of famine, of cold, of fire, and of war. In Tibet faith equals fear; this inspires hope and religion." (83)

He continues: "It is faith free of doubt and questioning, it is the capacity to believe in the supernatural as a reality that is the foundation stone of a society of the medieval type. In such a society the incredible is believed, the unusual is not questioned, and the amazing is regarded as commonplace. I was now in the world of the 1,086 Tibetan demons that haunt man and beast and that are realities to the peasants and to Tashi, as they would have to be for me if I was to share the life and culture of Mustang." (84)

Peissel does fall hard for this little enclave, and his affection infuses this account. While he tires at the elevation and fatigue seems to do him in on his later forays away from the capital into the caves (I wanted to learn more about them, as at Yara, and the villages he passed through rather abruptly), it's a valuable reminder of what we miss as we evolve. "In fact we in the modern world all become half blind and half deaf from necessity if we are to admire beauty." (225) He observes how the Taj Mahal so photogenic is next to a "monstrous steel bridge," and how only the careful camera can rescue some places we admire from, say, the fate of the Acropolis, seen by him behind a chicken-wire fence.

The book (subtitled in its 1992 reprint "A Lost Tibetan Kingdom" or "The Forbidden Kingdom" in the edition I read from 1967) tends to rush the latter portion of his stay. He must have taken enormous amounts of notes. For a month's stay and two weeks trek in, it's a substantial report, although the rest of Lo outside the walls of Lo Mantang gets rushed and Peissel's health and stamina may have weakened his attention. Like an earlier, multinational English resident-author in or near these mountains Marco Pallis in Peaks and Lamas (see my March 2011 review), Peissel undergoes a subtle but telling change by the end. He is given a Buddhist name by a lama, Shelkagari, in his fragile state, and his awareness for all his Westernized skepticism appears to alter, after the title he inherits "Crystal Clear Mountain." (11-30-12 to Amazon US)

Michel Peissel's "Lords and Lamas": Book Review

Subtitled "A Solitary Expedition across the Secret Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan," this 1970 account of this renowned explorer's September 1968 trek over four hundred miles of footpaths reveals the realm at a crucial moment of transition from a feudal, medieval society to one finishing the first span of an east-west highway that will change the nation irrevocably. India's fear, in the Cold War, of Chinese threats south of Tibet caused them to fund a paved road to connect the shorter ones coming up steep valleys from India. Peissel, after six failed attempts to get royal and bureaucratic approval, finally is allowed in the country at this moment. Bhutan admits him as its first traveler to carry in foreign currency, and he resolves once inside to follow Captain Robert Boileau Pemberton's 1838 route across the six ranges and passes dividing the center of the difficult to traverse land.

As with this French-born, English-raised scholar-adventurer's 1967 report from a similar land, the nearby principality of Mustang, where he went with another breakthrough journey when he could not get into Bhutan back in 1964, Peissel emphasizes the comparisons with a peasant European past dominated by lords and clergy. Like Mustang, he finds Bhutan more in the company of its lords rather than its lamas. His knowledge of Tibetan enables him to more or less communicate well, and his guide Tensing forges ahead to lead the challenging way. He takes 650 lbs of luggage and over a hundred cartons of cigarettes, and he gives out fountain pens to win over lamas and lords on the way.

Peissel's testiness erupts. He rants against the West he loves and hates as much as parts of the East in equal doses. These qualities endear him to me, but others may find him boastful or irritable. He in Mustang and Bhutan opens up best as he connects the vanished customs of Europe with those still surviving fifty-odd years ago in the last feudal enclaves on the planet. He explains how not hereditary but acquired merit achieves status for many lords of the Law, those who rule the mountain fortresses alongside monastic figures, in the traditional Bhutanese model that places the administrative center and religious functions together, in great walled towers, in each district. It's a feudal democracy, he tries to show, in that peasants keep freedom while they must contribute labor and taxes to the state, and this equates even favorably, he surmises, with the harmony there recalling the medieval mentality and economy of Europe.

Wealth lacking, in what was then a barter economy, Peissel determines that "prestige and privilege are the true difference" between men. Rank is crucial, but a peasant can rise to be Lord of the Law if not the king. Each generation, therefore, could advance by an individual's own ambition. He also shows the more disturbing side of the old regime. "Zaps" as hostages or descendents of prisoners of war were made by the whip to dance at Tongsu, and twice he sees prisoners in chains at dzongs. Peissel muses on the efficacy of punishment carried out in public vs. locking up inmates as we do. 

He notes how those he meets may be as excited to buy modern machinery and consumer goods as he is to leave them behind for a tent beyond that ever-expanding road, where at its end a human pace and not a jet or jeep still determines how the rugged landscape unfolds before him. At Wangdu Photrang, the frontier opens: "Beyond it stretched the immensity of our planet reduced to the dimensions of man, to the pace of his feet and the size of his body." (65) Living in Tibet or Bhutan in "permanent uncertainty," furthermore, he reasons, beats the relentless scheduling of the West. The hinges, tools, and fashion, too, shows how technology may evolve parallel in many items and gadgets to adapt to a terrain similar to Switzerland, even though no contact was made between the two regions.

The adventure over thirty-one days, as with that in Mustang, unfolds unevenly. While this book is much shorter than that on Mustang, it shares a slow build-up in a Hindu land first, tangles with meddling officials that delay his departure, and an itinerary that due to his problems accumulating with altitude and fatigue weeks on end shorten in the descriptions and pace the entry into the most faraway hamlets of another daunting place off the map. The harrowing Ruto-La pass at 12,600 feet signals a decline in many ways as the endless trudge wears him down mentally and physically, and one closes this wondering how much Peissel left out from weariness or despair on the last stages across the eastern ridges and gorges that he saw as the first European since Pemberton in 1838. (Amazon US 12-5-12)

Cory MacLauchlin's "Butterfly in the Typewriter": Book Review

As an admirer of "A Confederacy of Dunces" when it appeared (in mass-market Grove paperback for me), the little I found that was marketed back then about John Kennedy Toole tended towards the tortured artist. Walker Percy's promotion of his fellow Southern Catholic (if, being obviously of Irish descent, cradle and not convert) helped launch Toole's novel as if he was a figure as odd as Ignatius J. Reilly, his memorably offensive and irascibly brilliant protagonist. Toole's suicide in 1969 at 31, and the long delay before the novel was championed and won the Pulitzer in 1981, became associated with Toole's failure to get his novel published.

Cory MacLauchlin corrects this misattribution. He separates the novel's fate in publishing from that of its author three years later. He handles the coverage of Toole in the "popular media" and places it against the legacy that his mother took on of protecting her son's reputation. He notes the sympathy of the critics who found in Toole's tragedy a ready myth. He removes blame from Simon and Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb; he does not speculate as many have about Toole's alleged homosexuality. Necessarily, he patiently delves into the mental illness which perhaps, left undiagnosed, hastened Toole's inability to cope. Confronted with his demanding mother Thelma and his namesake father's own decline, Toole could not endure the future. He came back from Puerto Rico where he had taught Army draftees. The freedom he had in New York City during grad school, in traveling, in teaching, was contrasted with his family and his responsibility. He looked at his parents; he left after his Christmas break from teaching. The road trip through the South appears mysterious. But, two months later as Mardi Gras came and went, apparently on the way back towards New Orleans, he ended his life.

As a fellow English instructor at a perhaps less-heralded institution (as am I),  MacLauchlin finds a match in Toole. Those of us who teach others how to read and write better in modest classrooms understand the challenges and the satire inherent in these daily duties. (As an aside, it shows how talented Toole was--without finishing a Ph.D. at Columbia, he was offered a professorship, at 22, at Hunter College.) The correspondence and the mimicry about his earnest or hapless peers recall Flannery O'Connor (even if he did not enter her house alas, on his last journey, contrary to rumor); the academic send-ups of his medievalist colleague Bobby Byrne who teaches Boethius to every class, even frosh comp, certainly shows how Toole found ready humor and a model for Byrne and his New Orleans misfits who populated his fiction, his work, and his leisure in his hometown.

Toole could be cruel; MacLauchlin quotes, for instance, from a letter to his parents insulting two "haystacks": the "gray-white, sandy, freckled, powdery" skins and awful dinner from the skeletal, "appalling" parents of his fellow instructor. McCauchlin notes how sustaining Ignatius Reilly took a tool on the novelist. His own arrogance as he balanced military assignments and mundane teaching with investing so much energy into what became far too late a cult novel demonstrates the uneasy relationships he had with others, male and female, and the frustrations with modern life endured by him and his colleagues and creations.

The biographer takes the novelist on his own terms. Drawn from five years of archival research and enhanced by many photos, this merges a straightforward account of his restless life with his swerves between confidence and despair. As a "self-marginalized intellectual," Toole seems to have inherited some of his parents' ambition (his father for school, his mother for the stage) along with the thwarting of early promise. Raised in the off-beat New Orleans scene, Tulane, boho and Beats-era New York, and Army life in Puerto Rico shaped him. The novel he started in 1963 drew his friends and experiences into his fiction. Inextricably, its fate overshadowed his own journey, paranoia grew, and he ended his suffering on a back road,  at the end of March 1969, outside Biloxi.

MacLauchlin tells the story efficiently, if at times with his own overly effusive prose championing his subject. After all, the absurd and caricatured in Toole's vision about a fat man in his native city obsessed with the decline of humanity since the Middle Ages lends itself to its own eccentricity. That inventive quirk is why we remember Toole and his preening, overbearing, and defiantly literate creations today. (Amazon US 4-20-12 in slightly shorter form; 4-23-12 PopMatters; author's website)

Ronald Hutton's "Blood & Mistletoe": Book Review

As the leading social historian of pagan movements today, Professor Hutton explores how the Druids, from the scant literary accounts left by their foes and by the few material traces left by themselves, have been interpreted over 2,000 years. He focuses upon their appropriation as cultural symbols, for better or worse, by the English, Welsh, and Scots. They have presented these ancient practitioners of wisdom and magic as demonic, romantic, proto-Protestant, anti-Catholic, death-obsessed, and/or socialist.

This broad array of categories demonstrates both the scope of the research necessary to uncover such traces in the British imagination, and the skill with which Dr. Hutton applies his understanding of historical bias and wish fulfillment to all who seek to claim or condemn the Druids as ancestors of the island’s three major nations.

Frequently, Professor Hutton notes how he had to condense an already massive study. This expands his popular 2007 study, and the endnotes, small print, and the elevated tone (leavened by humor as with his other books) do not detract from its readability for an audience committed to the advanced degree of both sympathy and distance which the author brings to his project.

He has gained in past work the cooperation of those who, as neo-Pagans, his own research has helped to challenge in terms of their own “origin myths.” Professor Hutton should earn again the respect of those open minds within the pagan community for his honesty, acumen, and fairness.

Blood & Mistletoe reminds us of the manner in which historians carry into the past their own present preoccupations. As a case study in the reconstruction of a barely-glimpsed group for whom linguistic or archeological evidence remains notoriously perplexing, the way in which scholars as well as seekers have labored to recreate the Druids in the images of their own ages and mentalities serves as its own testament to history’s inherent bias.

As soon as the Druids were introduced by such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus to their Roman audience, the priest(esse)s were caricatured as wise magicians (mistletoe) or barbarian butchers (blood). As with the Scottish highlanders or Native Americans cleared off their lands only then to be celebrated by their colonial conquerors, so, Professor Hutton demonstrates, the Druids were romanticized by the Romans after they had been castigated as savages. The evidence for an Iron Age Druid as selected from surviving later Celtic texts combined with archeological data, Dr. Hutton asserts, becomes warped by “the instincts, attitudes, context, and loyalties” of the interpreter.

Tracking the next 16 centuries, Dr. Hutton surveys the building of the legend. Historians, he explains, tend to follow a “hard” approach that favors a bold intervention by a person who shakes up the world, or a “soft” one that follows the cultural, political, and social shifts whose dramatic results may be delayed until the right person comes along. For this tale, William Stukeley follows the latter definition. His attempts to interpret the stone circles and monuments that puzzled the British ensured his popularity. He began by claiming a less Christian framework for their construction, but his increasing piety then led him to shift his argument. Either way, his influence persists even today among certain—if decidedly “alternative”—adepts.

Iolo Morganwg, the name assumed by Edward Williams later in the 18th century, follows Stukeley. The chapter on his checkered career as a “wayward genius” as determined to forge a future for the Welsh who resisted Anglicization and British imperial control shimmer with insight. It displays Professor Hutton’s command of complexity, for Iolo’s mission confounded a nation. Morganwg tainted the medieval Welsh-language sources he claimed to discover and edit. He ensured that the culturally threatened Welsh people would be trapped in their recovery of their own history as one in which truth and falsehood had been intermingled by him over decades, in ways so intricate that it took many years and considerable scholarship by experts to correct for some of the forgeries he crafted as claims of archaic Welsh rituals, legends, and occult practices.

However, from his entry into the historical record, Morganwg also inspired his fellow men and women to reclaim the practices of the Druids as they imagined them to have been carried out long ago. The traditions, albeit invented ones, have energized Welsh-language culture ever since. These also influenced the Georgian and Romantic poets and scholars who across Western Europe as well as in Scotland and England struggled to build frameworks based on Celtic and Scandinavian myth, the classic texts, and the Bible “in which to contain the early European past.”

When science emerged with Darwin to undermine biblical models of progress, antiquarians and then archeologists rushed in. By their own cultural assumptions via “explanatory models” stamped by their own time and place, they intruded heavily upon the same limited, fragile, evidence.

For nearly a century and a half, English figures of white-clad Druids (assembled as spiritual practitioners and as mutual support societies) have concocted their own ceremonies, fashions, and origins, based on Stukeley, Morganwg, and the nearly as challenging countercultural characters from long before the hippie era, first the formidably eccentric William Price and later the Universal Bond as headed by the intransigent George Watson MacGregor Reid. Price and Reid intriguingly shared a determination to legalize cremation, one of the many byways that this book reveals as it delves into the underbrush of British popular culture and social change from progressive and dissident forces. From the 1920s onward, the spiritualist and then New Age movements also overlapped with those who called themselves Druids, harbingers of change.

The familiar processions chanting around Stonehenge and similar Stone Age sites, as Dr. Hutton shows in English Victorian and early 20th century commemorations, have become less the radical, secular, or early countercultural protests they appeared to traditional Christians and more, by the advent of the rock-and-roll era, a sign of British tradition against modernity.

Full of anachronism, nevertheless these Druids came to stand for an enduring summer solstice tradition of their own. This modern invention on June 21st has persisted, on if often off, since the 1860s.

Even as the Bible was discredited and Darwin deified by many who shared the leftist mindsets of many Druid adherents, problems persisted among those who claimed to correct earlier misinterpretations. Popular perceptions a hundred years ago settled upon a romantic, Celtic visualization; secular scientists looked not to the Bible itself but to the same Middle Eastern roots for a civilization that dispersed its lore across the world, all the way to pre-Roman Britain. Professor Hutton incorporates his own knowledge of recent scholarship and his schooling with some leading scholars who proclaimed this model of diffusion from a far-off land of knowledge.

This section bogged down with intricate debates among archeologists, but even at its densest, the range of sources and energy brought to this project displays the professor’s sharp mind and generous spirit. The novelty of the Druids whose archives he scours appears to have lessened, despite the charges kept alive by a few reactionary Christians of their murderous sacrifices of babies, prisoners, and criminals.

I admit with surprise that recent film treatments such as The Wicker Man were not analyzed, and as the professor admits, nearly nothing seems oddly to remain extant of memoirs or accounts by the common folks who joined the Druid organizations in the past few centuries. However, this is already a substantial, long, and very detailed book.

Finally, Professor Hutton shows the mingling of those who speak for and then as the Druids—Stukeley, Morganwg, Reid foremost—as also those who make up its rogues’ gallery. Mingled deceit and honesty persists in this clever trio. They all provoked controversy and then shunned the limelight once public opinion fanned by prejudice or ridicule turned against them. Later, it edged toward them, attesting to their own adroit manipulation of a certain kind of media magic.

Secrecy endures as the ultimate legacy of this mysterious movement, then as now. Professor Hutton has uncovered and shared with us all he is able to in a book of 500 learned but accessible pages. It should remain the definitive source, not on the Druids about whom we know so few facts, but on those who claim in their homelands to remain true to their enigmatic but compelling spirit, thousands of years later. (Featured May 10, 2011 at the New York Journal of Books)

Rob Young's "Electric Eden": Book Review

What Becomes of the Oaken Hearted? Rob Young’s quest spans the last century’s search for pastoral evocations and folk recreations of a British quest to summon its lingering “ghost memories”. Over 600 pages, narrated with verve and ease, this editor at The Wire music magazine conjures up the contradictions of sound technology harnessed to rural moods, and an urban audience longing for antiquarian lore. In a nation built along Roman roads, the lure of open space limits the adventurer. In a land so long civilized among landscapes tamed, modern freedom seekers turn to the imaginary tale, the mythological ritual as liberating paths. For the British listener, nostalgia and fulfillment lurk in a golden age before machines, yet one which plugs into electricity, and exotic instruments and moods, to convey a retelling of the elusive past.

He begins with the “inward exodus” by singer Vashti Bunyan, whose 1968-69 trek away from London by horse-drawn caravan up finally into Gaelic-speaking Scotland symbolizes this era’s idealism. Young’s discography lengthens as hippies crowd out folksingers; Bunyan’s search brings her to Donovan, producer Joe Boyd, and his clients The Incredible String Band, who epitomize the fashions and styles she imagined but did not know. In “the dual landscape/ dreamscape of Britain’s interior”, rock met and blurred and blended with folk.

The preliminary section, “Music from Neverland”, efficiently explains the contexts for this Aquarian Age. Young charts the contributions of Cecil Sharp and Francis Child as song and ballad and dance collectors. Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams enriched classical forms with folk melodies drawn from the last remnants of the oral tradition, its untutored composers from the peasantry. Invented characters as composer Peter Warlock and bard Ewan MacColl enliven this stage. Tension arises between music of a people as Child and Sharp had compiled vs. music from the people as favored by interpreters of the proletariat, often Marxist and radical themselves, in the industrial, trade-unionized post-WWII decades.

This period ends as Bob Dylan enters. He preferred his own words to those in archives, field recordings, or transcribed lyrics. This Americanized approach clashed with MacColl’s class-conscious fidelity to the oral tradition. By the end of 1962, when Dylan visited England’s folkies, revolution looms. But, unlike the uprising predicted by 60 years of diligent researchers, leftist agitators, and earnest re-creators, British Eden would be electrified. The cultural rebellion “would take place not on the streets, but in the head.”

Dylan met fellow guitarist-singer Martin Carthy. Carthy’s renditions of “Lord Franklin” and “Scarborough Fair” impressed Dylan so much that he reworked them for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Girl from the North Country”.  In 1965, Simon & Garfunkel, after learning the song from Carthy, copyrighted their version (with no credit to Carthy) of what had been a tune nobody had taken credit for authoring, “Scarborough Fair”. Such American ambitions, clashing with the anonymity in which many folksongs had been passed down, reworked, and tinkered with, edged many British singers and songwriters away from jazz and the blues into a more indigenous, yet eclectic, compositional style.

As Dylan and the British Invasion emerged, beatniks returned from abroad with a North African oud or Balkan bouzouki. The DADGAD tuning of Davy Graham’s guitar, the modal music of Bert Jansch, and the coffeehouse stylings incorporating electrification entered folk. Early Music masters David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood revived old instruments that enriched what had been sparer tunes often passed down a capella. While “pop” derives from mass spectacles manufactured for the Roman urban populi, Young reminds us, volk derives from the Germanic peasantry, villagers and vagrants bearing songs from the wood, the forest, the barbaric heath where rituals endured and perplexed their heirs.

Shirley Collins defines for Young the essence of “an ideal folk voice, sounding as though it was grappling with the words for the very first time, and yet equally as though it was so inured to the pain and suffering so often portrayed in the songs that it had insulated itself from them”. Symbolically, Collins no longer worked with American folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax by the Summer of Love. Her new producer, via Elektra Records, arrived to run London’s UFO club. During 1967, Joe Boyd hosted Pink Floyd (producing their “Arnold Layne” single) and lysergic luminaries, accompanied by acid-rock lightshows. Nearby if not always blended into this heady milieu, folk-rock fermented.

Boyd had already produced The Incredible String Band. He continued with Fairport Convention, as jazz, jug-band, and rock-schooled rhythm sections joined with a sprightly sets of singers and guitarists. For Pentangle, their “aerated play of light” fragmented into “a sonic mirage” with “a curly line between a courtly medievalism and the enlightened foolery of Haight-Ashbury”.  Vocalist Jacqui McShee, acoustic guitarists Jansch and John Renbourn created above Danny Thompson’s string bass and Terry Cox’s brushed drums a typical tune which patters “like butterflies trapped in a balsa-wood box”.

Boyd’s Fairport played their first gig in May 1967 and two months later opened for Pink Floyd at UFO, before cutting the first of four increasingly daring records. They often covered Dylan and followed an eerie parallel. After Dylan’s motorcycle accident required The Band to retreat to Big Pink and regroup as a rooted ensemble, so Fairport faced a fatal van crash. Survivors recouped to refine their sound.

They departed from their genial West Coast harmonies. “A Sailor’s Life” from Unhalfbricking featured the first recorded use of sticks with drums to back up a folk tune. Dave Mattacks earned percussive credits on countless sessions. His “funky plod” provided “the ideal foil for the mushy instrumental palette of English electric folk, propelling its accordions, fiddles, abrasive guitars and astringent harmonies forward without denying their bulk and grit”.

Liege and Lief, under the influence of venerable folk interpreter A. L. “Bert” Lloyd, transferred the century’s leftist, proletariat, song tradition to the flower children. While Pentangle’s members grew up with folk transmitted on the BBC and taught in classrooms, Fairport matured with skiffle and Elvis. Richard Thompson’s and Simon Nicol fuzzed their guitars, over Sandy Denny’s ethereal voice, Dave Swarbrick’s slashing fiddle and Ashley Hutchings’ thumping bass guitar. Fairport, at the center of this book and this tale, epitomized the late-60s evolution.

These musicians fueled the next decade of folk-rock. But their heyday rushed by. Advertising copy for 1969s Liege promoted it as “documenting a (very brief) era”. Even during “A Sailor’s Life”, Young asserts that Denny tired of folk’s limits; she went solo after Liege. Young explains her neediness and her search for companionship as she pursued a singer-songwriter pop-folk muse whose comforts eluded her.

Hutchings also left then, hastening backwards to ‘70s sonic fidelity, if that makes sense for his leadership—in its first and boldest two of many incarnations—of a plugged-in Steeleye Span, grounded in archived ballads and decked in burnished apparel.  Their first two albums “are textured with a loamy, atavistic grit.” Tellingly, while Mattacks played on their debut, their follow-up left out drums but added Martin Carthy’s power chords distorted across a “massive Fender amplifier”, to mesmerizing and exhilarating effect on Please to See the King. But, the fireworks dimmed. Hutchings left to revive with his new wife Shirley Collins and then The Albion Band an “English country music” reviving Morris dance and performance, delivered in acoustic intimacy as intricately plotted and researched presentations.

Another of Boyd’s protégés, Nick Drake, shared this gentler, erudite approach. Young takes us, as with Denny, cautiously along as we watch the demise of another talented troubadour, soon reduced to a “withdrawn, solipsistic, shrunken seer”.  John Martyn’s existential pain earns a chapter, as his Echoplexed guitar, full of distortion, adapts free-jazz and dub techniques to his “boiling electric lyre”.

West Coast psychedelia celebrated summer meadows, but for the British, this could be a brief picnic. “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a lot of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games off the coast of Big Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment”.

The period 1967-71 earns the most entries in the appended discography arranged by timeline. Its highlights, as with Pentangle, Fairport, and Steeleye, flickered and flared rapidly. Pioneers of folk-rock expansion, Boyd’s first clients The Incredible String Band, concocted a “global village” world music sustaining an ecumenical if acid-driven vision quest. But their records, for all their “very cellular” song structures and shape-shifting scope, could not sustain a career, given the heady vistas and drug-driven nature of their ambitions. After the bonfires collapse, as Young asks: “What becomes of the oaken-hearted?”

The book’s cover shows a semi-acoustic band, Heron, in a Berkshire field the summer of 1970. A piano nestles in a meadow, as pastel-shirted, long-haired musicians sit and play. Pye Records miked them to “capture the ambiance of the great outdoors.”  Booms surround them. This depicts an “electric Eden” created by an idealistic, disenchanted middle-class whose dreams and (lack of) ambitions mirrored Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson’s 1986 film of two unemployed actors fleeing to the Lake District in 1969.

Weariness pervades the songs of Drake and Martyn. Folk’s early-‘70s singer-songwriters woke to a comedown. Tiring of their past, Young argues, glam emerged with David Bowie and Marc Bolan as these gnomic performers reinvented themselves for the future, turning away from “warped Victoriana”. The riots of 1968 followed “Strawberry Fields” and an endless summer filled with “vertiginous trippiness and crooked-mirror Anglicana”. Mr. Fox, trained folk archivists and musicians, briefly kept the firmest hold on electric pastoralia that followed Steeleye and Fairport’s ascent. 

Fittingly, all three were guided by the enduring “Bert” Lloyd, whose book Folk Song in England (1967) was the first commission for Hipgnosis. They gave Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin “classic” rock album covers, while Young excels at explaining how urban-pastoral sepia tension seeps into artwork gracing Fairport’s Unhalfbricking, Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, and the album Denny sang on, Led Zeppelin’s fourth.

A Shattering of the Rosy Lens

Magic and the supernatural beckoned bands away from confessional ballads towards often twee and fey attempts (Young possesses admirable patience as he sums up their efforts) to channel invented forces. Young pinpoints currents joining Wicca and folk as artificial energies. This does not diminish their organic power. “The Cruel Mother” may be sung with different lyrics by various voices, but she “will continue to be haunted by the guilt-inducing spectre of her child, because, whether sung by a Highland crofter, an acoustic duo in a folk club, an electric rock band at an outdoor festival or in a home studio with an electronic ambient backing track, the song itself is undead, a ghost that refuses to be forgotten”.

Festivals link neatly with Young’s survey of the British inheritance of the commons; unlike Greil Marcus’ over-determined Lipstick Traces, Young constructs his argument modestly and carefully. He shows how anti-authoritarian responses transmitted over the centuries persisted in debates over access to land. The ecologically-aware Glastonbury Fayre and its charity donations outlived the massive freak-outs which doomed the Isle of Wight’s festival. Disenchanted city dwellers tried to create, if for a weekend, alternative communities. New Age and environmental causes benefited greatly from cross-promotion.

Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. The ‘70s bring economic recession and political gloom; later chapters convey this strain in the realm. Arthurian and medievalist films flourished in the first half of the decade. The Wicker Man (the original version) still haunts with its imperious pagan revival. But, as Monty Python’s Camelot collapsed into stage sets of canvas and plywood, the English fascination with a manufactured soft-focus past ended.

Musically and culturally, the rise to prominence lasted only a few years. After 1972, Steeleye Span in another incarnation had, as with similarly successful musicians, outgrown the small folk music circuit. They opted for glossier, amplified stadium rock, while Richard and Linda Thompson spent the decade struggling “with a sense of hard-won knowledge, a literal dis-illusionment, a shattering of the rosy lens. It was as if the music permitted a wallowing in an imaginative world of filth from which Sufism might elevate and insulate them”. The String Band departed for Scientology, while Young passes over intriguingly if quickly such micro-genres as the Jesus People’s incorporations of operatic or mystical folk.

Young delves into the underground, but when its musicians emerge to Top 40 success, they fade from view. As a boy, I first heard Sandy Denny as a guest on “The Battle of Evermore” on Led Zeppelin’s new, fourth LP. I discovered via a dim recollection of Denny her folk-rock lineage much later. I imagine for fans of Ireland’s Horslips (mentioned once), Scotland’s Runrig, or England’s The Oyster Band (both unmentioned) as these bands merged traditional folk into louder rock, the impulses to track back to British “visionary music” trickled down from the top of the charts rather than up through cult releases.

Similar shortcomings arise when The Kinks get one sentence for the title track from 1968’s concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Surely this LP encapsulates the sylvan chronicling and macabre components of British invention that define Young’s project. Jethro Tull’s “kitchen prose and gutter rhymes” may earn contempt from folk purists, but their ditties opened ears to search out venerable melodies. Pink Floyd explored experimental pastoral electronics in their later-‘60s and early-‘70s albums, but Young understates their popular impact.

In this massive compendium, I found some slips. Donovan’s songs here and there are jumbled as to what appeared where. “A twelfth-century Saxon church” is a misnomer. Robert O’Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran filmed fishermen off an Irish rather than a Scottish island. Marshall McLuhan, while he taught for a time in the US, should be identified as Canadian rather than American.  Irish-born Chicago police chief Francis O’Neill’s Music of Ireland “bible” contains 1,850 pieces of music but it was not published in 1850. It debuted in 1903. Young’s black-and-white illustrations (at least in the proof copy) often strain the eye; many telling details reduce to thumbnail-sized reproductions of LP covers.

One album cover for Young depicts the downward spiral of ‘70s folk-rock. Steeleye Span’s fortunes crashed in the year punk hit, 1976. Their Rocket Cottage in free fall (its hideous art as fatal portent) frames a quirky semi-fictionalized chapter where Young allows a skewed sensibility freer rein. Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. While Young ignores Robyn Hitchcock, who with and after The Soft Boys applied hallucinogenic, hyper-natural lyrics to rambling folk tunes wired with new-wave vibrations, he does champion admirably another survivor of these end of the ‘70s mash-ups, Julian Cope.

Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian gazetteer near the millennium surveys his native landscape aligned with soundscapes of “attritional and introspective rock.” Young tells how “Cope sings, speaks and writes in the voice of the heathen—the aboriginal ‘people of the heath’ who worshipped the earth as a mother goddess”. In this “alternative, humane heritage movement”, room for the dissenter must be built: “no poetry without heretics”. Cope and his monumental concerns seek to separate the pagan substrata from the non-Christian detritus. Delightful as the hobby-horse set can be, cobbling together patchworks of tunes and dress, Cope seeks what he hears as “mysterious and tortuous” beneath these motley fabrics.

Kate Bush floats past steampunk, David Sylvain into alchemy, while Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis finds solitude. Their connections appear tenuous. For all I know The Skids and Big Country merited worthy analysis. What goes missing is in-depth discussion of contemporary electric folk. Young never cites Britta Sweers’ 2005 study. He neglects Gaelic-influenced bands. Scotland fades early, while Ireland earns diminishing returns, typified by the odd absence of Mark J. Prendergast’s 1990 history of its folk and rock, The Isle of Noises.  Nic Jones and June Tabor, John Tams and Home Service, Fairport’s Cropredy reunions, fanzines and the Net, the Free Reed label, the revival of English dance bands: such topics may or may not earn but a sentence. Inclusions of bands and musicians add often only lists of names.

Later chapters, reflecting instead Young’s own tastes rather than providing a comprehensive survey of post-‘70s trends, may appeal to fans lured here by personalities from the video era. The sounds do not linger as long on the page, and readers who aren’t listeners may struggle to figure out the sonic appeal of the poetic songwriters profiled. Young displays the private, personal evolution of a few malcontents, as they drift away from the new-wave charts and MTV publicity to burrow into uneasy moods. These tunes seem to resist Young’s capture in print. The tradition of backwards sight as a forward direction for cultural and musical progression among these self-marginalized seers endures.

Martyn Bates exemplifies this complex contemporary stance, inheriting the legacy of those with whom this narrative commenced. After singing in the post-punk duo Eyeless in Gaza—which included avant-folk—he released in 1994 Murder Ballads (Drift). He paired with Mick Harris, drummer for thrash-metal exponents Napalm Death. Harris and Bates sought, as had earlier hippies and folksingers, a quieter if no less disturbing way to conjure darker tones. Bates later worked with Max Eastley, cohort of Pentangle’s John Renbourn and of Donovan. And, with the latter paisley pop star, we return to the destination Vashti Bunyan sought. Donovan had opened up his land bought in the Isle of Skye for artists and musicians to settle. By the time Bunyan reached Skye, traipsing north across Britain by horse-drawn caravan, a year and a half had passed. Donovan had long left what was now his half-deserted fiefdom, for Los Angeles.

Young concludes with a sobering message. Misfits and a few progressives still gravitate towards the volatility of unconventional folk. Its dream of rural self-sufficiency, for an overpopulated and suburbanized island nation, cannot sustain itself. Wilderness shrinks. Sixty million Britons may long for their national symbol, their own enclosed garden. Yet this collective dream must endure. Young proclaims that “to preserve the sense of enchantment with British landscape that is hard-wired into the nation’s psyche it will become even more important to screen out modernity, to not quite see what is actually there, but to distort through the antiquarian eye and the mental scrying glass”.

This enchanting and engaging, if uneven, contribution to cultural musical history deserves to grow dog-eared. It will be opened by a contemporary reader turned informed listener, rather than shut up by an antiquarian.

(PopMatters featured April 21, 2011; in shorter and altered form on Amazon US & Lunch.com)