Waging Heavy Peace, by Neil Young

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Neil Young has a reputation as a loner, a rock star selfish with his muse (though generous with his time and talents--when the cause is worthy). He comes across as an eccentric recluse, famously reluctant to give interviews and willing to sink resources into various projects, like Lionel trains and dorky films.

So for appreciators of both the man and his music, Waging Heavy Peace is a bit of a treat. The book is not the tell-all autobiography for gossip hounds, nor is it the Literary Masterpiece that some writing critics would prefer. I know many folks who go to a Neil Young concert and delight in those cherished between-songs conversational moments, no matter how brief or rambling, and understand that they may not hear a single spoken word if the man doesn't feel like it. For people like them, this book is well worth the cost of admission. Young opens his heart on these pages.

What I took away from the book is that Young is not the self-centered fellow many rock fans think he is. Yes, he tends to listen to the muse at the expense of his personal relationships--this is the musician who bailed on Stephen Stills mid-tour and ditched Crazy Horse for Pearl Jam, after all. Yes, he invests incredible amounts of time in high-aiming projects like LincVolt and Pono. But like all artists, believe it or not, he is not a solo act.

Musicians, writers, painters, dramatists: we all rely on our communities. Sometimes that means our artistic peers. Young shows us that his community, while very music-centric, extends beyond music. Waging Heavy Peace is as much about his friends as it is about him. He is his friends, in that his friends seem to have shaped his existence on this earth. He turns to them when he feels down, when the muse washes over him, when he needs to eat breakfast. Young likes to talk about all the cars he has owned, but behind the wheel of each of them sits a friend--each car runs more on memories than it does gasoline.

I know many people tend to idealize successful artists--hell, I know I do. We think of them as self-made men and women, driven by their passions and talent and carried to the top by no one. Young simply, poignantly, reminds us that community is the important aspect in human endeavors, artistic or otherwise. While personal accumulation of wealth and objects and fame have their place, the human experience is more about the way we spend our lives than the money we have to spend on it. It's about who we spend it with.

Eleven days before the next presidential election here in the United States, I think we will soon cast our symbolic votes for the decision we make every day. What kind of culture do we want to foster: one that leaves each person scrabbling for a piece of the pie, or one that relies on friendships and support and community? Both have the potential to make a person wealthy. Love, or money: what is the currency of our future?

I have a feeling Mr. Young, for one, would choose love. I would too.

Under Mountains, by Rachel Sermanni

It's time for Alone at the Microphone to deviate once more from books to talk about a remarkable musician. I've done it only twice before, I think -- both times for Neil Young albums. This one is a little bit different, though I'll say this songwriter is as talented as Neil Young was at her age.

You probably have not heard of Rachel Sermanni, especially if you are one of my Stateside readers. She's beginning to splash the waters in Europe, and I'm one of the lucky ones who fell in love with her music before the release of Under Mountains, her new full-length album. We went to see Elvis Costello perform in Sligo, Ireland, just about a year ago. The spritely young Scottish woman opened for Costello, and in this writer's opinion, she stole the show from the veteran. A small group of female violinists backed Sermanni (who sings and plays a stellar folk guitar), and after the concert we picked up her first four-song EP outside. The recordings are great, though they are far from a representative sample of this lady's capabilities (even considering the jazzy edge to "Pablo's City").

Then Sermanni released a much stronger EP in early 2012. In March, she put on a solo show in Dublin, at Whelan's Upstairs, which is the kind of place where you'd be proud to say "I saw her when." She showed off her impressive range -- of volume, soulfulness, fingerwork, songwriting styles, and hilarious between-songs chatter. (And Rachel, if you should read this: I hope that someday you release the song called something like "I Have a Girl." Also, the burger van song.)

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Under Mountains finally came out last month, and my hopes soared. Would this be the diverse album I'd been yearning for? Several of the songs were already released on the EPs, so the new songs would make or break the album as a coherent work rather than just a collection of tracks from a talented songwriter. (At any rate, the artwork is beautiful. Not enough artists put energy into album covers.)

Perfect timing: a drive through the Black Range in the Gila Forest of southern New Mexico awaited me. On a hunch, I put the CD in the car and withstood its temptation until Hillsboro had fallen away behind me and the swerving road climbed ahead.

Straight away, the record plays with the juxtaposition of sounds. "Breathe Easy" reveals a songwriter unafraid of empty space, where the listener hangs suspended between bass notes as in a thick hammock. Then "Bones" jumps in with a soulful edge, reminding the listener not to get too comfortable here; the unexpected lurks like a deer in the road around each switchback. I heard this song when Sermanni was backed by the ladies -- it was the one that made me say "whoa" -- and I could not be more tickled to hear it included here.

"Waltz" is one of those songs deep for its simplicity and simple for its depth. It's beautiful. I just wished that Sermanni had not chosen to make the song a duet, or that she had chosen a male singer with a voice to complement and challenge her own. I've heard Neil Young sing with Josh Groban (no thank you), and I've heard Neil Young sing with Dave Matthews (drooling with awe). Just because you have two unique or talented voices doesn't mean that the result is always a success. Perhaps Sermanni doesn't recognize her strength as a vocalist. She needs to, and then she needs to be selective in who she braids her voice with.

As the elevation soars into the Range, the entire terrain transforms around the highway. Clinging scrub brushes, ragweed, and spindly cacti abdicate to soaring red ponderosa pines. And amid the pines stands a single peach tree, the accidental growth from a traveler's discarded pit. That's when the whimsical and surreal "Ever Since The Chocolate" submitted to one of Sermanni's most powerful songs, "The Fog." It's got tension and suspense in the music, and deft interplay with the lyrics.

"Little Prayer" provides a breather, kind of like Young's "Til the Morning Comes" following "Southern Man" on After the Gold Rush. Then "Sea Oh See" (a self-proclaimed "pirate song") egged me forward. The peak of the Black Range sneaked up on me, as it often does, announcing itself only because the car was suddenly rolling downhill rather than climbing ever upward. Right near here, I once saw a mountain lion; this time, the animals were hiding, and the unsettling soaring of "Sleep" gave way to the descending bass line that rolled downhill with me.

Eventually, the precarious cliffs mellow out into deeper forest paths, and here I saw a flock of wild turkeys in the road. I slowed down to admire the sheer size of these birds who roam the woods heedless of being eaten, and "Marshmallow Unicorn" serenaded us like I picture in the epiphany scene in an indie film.

The rest of the album may not have the variety in tone that the first two-thirds or so has, though it's no weaker for that. Each of the final pieces -- "Black Current," "Eggshells," and "To A Fox" -- has its own musical magic. These are no filler songs to flesh out a CD, but the proof that this songwriter has the chops to write beautiful and evocative pieces. These ones may never be chart-topping singles, but those aren't typically the songs I like anyway. I've always appreciated an album that feels like a novel rather than a collection, and these songs provide the perfect denouement.

They also gave me time to contemplate Sermanni's style. Under Mountains is unified by certain threads running through many songs, ideas like dreaming and waking, dancing and loving, naming and moving. But more than the common words and themes, this album is unified by its opposite and complementary parts. Just like Sermanni's soulful voice bounding forth from a tiny 20-year-old body, her music comes alive in its cognizance of yin and yang. She sings often of soul and skin, of sky and stone, only they come together as one rather than clashing as oil and water.

Her music is ether and earth. It is never one or the other. It is always one and both.

As the eerie and uplifting "To A Fox" wound down (is the fox Rachel Sermanni's totem? her guide? her muse?) the road dropped suddenly from the trees back to the hills and the dust. The speed limit soared, the road straightened out before me, and I ejected the disc. Driving over a granite monolith, I had breathed in the sky. Returned to earth, I knew I had brought the ether back with me.

Caliban's War, by James S. A. Corey

I may not be the first to say this, but Corey's series The Expanse (and particularly this summer's installment Caliban's War) is the very definition of post-9/11 literature.

Of course, some obvious books are post-9/11 because they deal with the effects of that day directly (like Don DeLillo's Falling Man) or indirectly (like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Caliban's War is a tougher book to pinpoint because it doesn't even mention the United States or twenty-first century terrorism, which it shouldn't, being set in the remote future and all. At the time of the book's events, there's too much recent history for an event in our present-day to bear much weight. It would be like you consciously dictating your life based on the Jamestown settlement. Of course, it affects our world today. But you're not thinking about how it does so.

I'm convinced, though, that if The Expanse were published twelve or fifteen years ago, it would have been a vastly different story -- or it wouldn't have received the attention it's getting now.

Up to World War II, conflict was simple: we understood nations like England and Germany. Even in Vietnam and with the Cold War, the threat might have been less bordered, but we could still call it Other, and in so doing we could perceive if not exactly understand it.

9/11 gave Americans our first taste of a threat we truly could not comprehend. Those who directly committed the acts against us were dead, so we could not bring them to justice. Whatever weight the conspiracy theories held, we could not begin to think that We, rather than Other, were culpable, so we dismiss them. We had to put faces on the threats in ways we could understand: individuals and nations. And, yes, as a nation we experienced catharsis when Osama bin Laden died. We breathed a little easier when Saddam Hussein was disposed and Iraq began following a different path, no matter what our individual beliefs about the war were.

But the real threat that 9/11 exposed was not bin Laden and it was not Iraq and it was not Afghanistan and it was not the Taliban. It wasn't even terrorism, not exactly, though we've tried our best to squeeze our hands around that wet sponge. The threat is one we don't know how to combat because we cannot comprehend it. Because of 9/11, we take our shoes off at the airport and we live under the constant and real possibility of indefinite detention. Those are the new facts, regardless of political beliefs or personal inclinations.

As humans, we feel the need to act when our survival-as-we-know-it is threatened. So we act, even if our actions are directed at the wrong source. Even if our actions are ineffective or counterproductive. We act, so that we feel like we stand a chance.

One definition of post-9/11 is the recognition that we may be acting against a bogeyman -- that we may not be willing to face or able to comprehend the threats to our existence because they are much more unrecognizable than Other. Or sometimes, the threats may be much more recognizable and closer to home than Other, which frightens us more than any foreign intrusion could. The key to survival in our worldview has become more than outgunning our enemies. It means either understanding that we may never understand the threats to our existence, or transferring those ghostly threats onto tangible avatars.

Those are our choices, and they play out in Caliban's War. I'm trying not to give spoilers to the book, for which you're welcome. But go read it, and then think about how your own understanding of the novel would have been different in August of 2001. (Then go brush up on The Tempest and see what you conclude about the title of the book. Corey ain't no dummy.)

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

This book worked as one heck of a transition for me -- the last book I picked up while living in Ireland, the one I started while grounded in Europe, read the entire trans-Atlantic flight, and finished with my feet back on American turf. It was recommended by my favorite Irish bookseller (tip o' the brim to you, E) and it circles around my favorite sport. How could I go wrong?

I couldn't. The novel is fantastic -- one of those books that makes me happy to be a reader and a writer.

Part of my general motivation for writing is that I want to be a doer. The old adage goes that those who can, do, and those who can't, teach. I fear being "just" a teacher, especially an academic -- never mind that some of the most inspirational and impressive folks in my life have been teachers and scholars. The burning in my brains is to create, to contribute original material -- not to work with the creations of others.

I will never knock teachers (by which I mean those who teach, not necessarily always the same as those individuals hired by our schools and universities). The effort that true teachers put forth every day, even in those so-called summer vacations, shames many of the best of us. Thinking that they lack some essential trait of doing, though, is perhaps understandable. Teachers have to know the theory, the whats and the whys and the hows; but if they had the ability, wouldn't they be putting their talents into practice?

The Art of Fielding is full of this juxtaposition of teaching and doing. Its main characters are all doers (ballplayers and lovers) and teachers (academics and coaches). They are each defined by what they do and teach -- or fail to do and teach. Some of them struggle to harmonize their deep knowledge and understanding, and their yearning for more than their God-given portion of talent. (I think particularly of Schwartz, the baseball captain who sacrifices his own athletic and law-school goals to further the baseball career of his friend and teammate.)

The way I read the novel, what Schwartz realizes is that coaching is not a role to succumb to. Not when he's so good at it. Sure, some people who can't do teach. But the really good teachers? For them, that is doing. Teaching is as difficult to do well as playing baseball or writing a book or loving another human being. When teaching becomes more than the mere conveyance of information -- when it helps learners develop the framework to think and act on higher levels for themselves -- it requires a true set of abilities.

Those who can, do. And those who can, teach well.

(I almost wrote about the comparison of baseball to aikido. I'd never thought about it. But the way Harbach writes about baseball is often reminiscent of what little I understand of the gentle martial art. I've had baseball on the brain since I was seven. Anyone who can make me think of the game differently is doing something effectively.)

Emma, by Jane Austen

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Emma is a comedy; it could very well be a tragedy, and its heroine is a hair's breadth away from being immensely unlikeable. I'm convinced that we only enjoy the young woman because we see that she is not selfish in her meddling. She wants only to bring happiness to other people, primarily by pairing them together. If there were a shred of malice or hope of gain in her behavior, she would be utterly despicable.

That doesn't mean she ought to meddle, though. It works well for a story rife with misunderstandings and conjectures rooted in half-truths. Ultimately, I think Emma learns not to meddle in the affairs of other people's happiness; such tinkering never leads to success of its own doing, and it nearly leads to social disaster all around.

Oh, if only more folks would learn not to interfere with the pursuit of happiness.

Giving advice is one thing, even if unasked-for. But dictating the course of life for another capable human being is, in my view, worse than caging a bird; at least the caged bird doesn't have the illusion of a world open with possibilities. Emma got me thinking quite a bit about the meddlesome nature of so many people in this world, particularly those connected to some individuals I know. (Apologies now for the vagueness of the rest of this post. I don't want to single anyone out by name or situation, because I don't know who reads this blog.)

I get that steering another's ship must be awfully tempting, if you think you know best. Especially if you think the ship's captain doesn't know what she's doing. And maybe you really do know best; maybe the ship really would sink if the captain were at the helm.

But that doesn't make commandeering the craft the right thing to do.

I have no deep insights here, no resounding conclusion. Everything further I can think to say on the subject sounds like a cheesy parenting proverb: You are your own person. Only you can discover your own happiness. But corniness doesn't diminish the truth of the sentiment. I just get really sad when I see how certain controlling individuals attempt to dictate the right or best path of another person's life. And I get to feeling incredibly powerless at my inability to free such people from their cages.

It wouldn't be so bad if all meddlesome-type people were as harmless as Emma. Sadly, the world is not a Jane Austen comedy.

Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler

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So I bought a round-trip ticket on the Chandler train. Can you blame me? The guy tells good stories.

And that's what I've been thinking about -- stories. Or, more specifically, story. When I finished The Big Sleep, I wrote a post about novels having plot. Normally, when I finish a blog post, I release the thoughts I've had on a particular, and they release me. But not this time. Something has been nibbling at the edges of my mind. Something about how some folks sneer at "plot," but still love a good "story"; and how these concepts matter to books like Chandler's.

The confusion -- and this isn't just in my mind, I think -- lies in the distinction between plot and story. In the Venn diagram of these concepts, I think there's a fairly substantial Cecilia. (Plenty of people will disagree with me; whaddya gonna do?) That overlap is "what happens" in a given novel.

I tend to forget that, while plot and story have a lot of parallels, they don't require each other. Vaguely and loosely put, plot is what happens externally, and story what happens internally. My routine visit to the grocery store has a plot; I can tell you precisely what happened and in what order, complete with reasoning and motive and all that jazz, but there's no story. Likewise, I could change my life by staring at the unrelenting sun through my window; nothing happens except that I (or maybe my readers, if I'm a character) undergo some shift in how I (or my readers) understand the world.

When the Modernists eschewed plot, many of them still clung to story -- to the change or refusal to change, largely independent of neat-and-tidy outside factors that to them were absolutely unlike real life. To me, that's as interesting as a novel with all action and no internal change on anyone's part. (Not very interesting at all.) I think most enduring stories exist in that Cecilia, those stretches of storytelling where the tracks of plot and story run side-by-side. (Like train tracks! And the story runs over them like a locomotive! Metaphors are fun.)

So when I said before that Chandler's books require an element of plot, I meant it. But unlike many other detective tales, the story of novels like Farewell, My Lovely is why we come back again and again. Once we know the answer to the puzzle, we're not ruined for re-readings. And Marlowe's story can shine through because it doesn't get too bogged down in plot -- we never find out what those five words are, the doctor really was just coincidental, we don't get an arrest and a trial and a neat-and-tidy conclusion.

I don't care, though. What happens plot-wise is still critical to the novel, but I don't come to Chandler to solve logic games. I come to learn about myself, to see my own world in a new way, to better understand where the monsters really are. (This novel is one of those where the reader changes as much as the protagonist -- I love when that happens.)

When I close the book, my heart is broken and my confidence shaken. Only a proper Cecilia has that kind of power.

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

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I read an article this week (available here -- yes, it's from 2009, which in my mind is like two months ago) whose author, Lev Grossman, made the claim that "If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot." I give Grossman some cred for acknowledging the apparent prevalence of strong plot elements in contemporary stories, and I really appreciate his concise summary of the Modernists of the early 20th century. Those are the writers largely responsible for the idea that "good literature" should be somewhat difficult to read, and its plot should be far from primary (if there at all). Those are also the writers in whose shadow every genre writer, every commercial writer, every plot-conscious author has written for the last hundred years or so.

Yes, plot is making a comeback of sorts, in that it's pushing aside much of that highbrow "literary" fiction. But doesn't something have to go away in the first place in order to make a true comeback?

Sure, the Modernists contributed to the 20th century some of its greatest literature. But they didn't contribute its only great literature. Plot-based (not necessarily to mean plot-centric) fiction was still there through it all. It mutated and evolved as much as any other type of storytelling in the last century; it gave us modern fantasy, science fiction, and the hard-boiled detective.

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, the first of his Philip Marlowe novels, is one of the great books of that century rife with good books. It's a mystery, so of course plot is critical. But can the Modernist-influenced among us truly sneer at it simply for having a plot?

It's not a great novel because it has a plot; it's not even the plot that makes the novel memorable. I would argue that Chandler's style, his voice, those elements oh-so-important to the Modernist gang, are what make his stories great. He feeds us the Los Angeles of the 1930s and makes it Marlowe's own, simply through his use of the language. Marlowe is blunt, straightforward, and yet also lyrical. His descriptions make the world, make it pop from the page as much as Anne Shirley's descriptions make Anne of Green Gables so cherished.

Yet a book full of a detective's wise-cracks without a plot -- without a sphere for the shamus to move around in and make his own -- would be a pretty hobbled effort at storytelling. The plot may not be central here, but it sure is necessary. Isn't that true for most stories? For most readers?

I have to say that plot's always been important to readers as a whole. Some folks decided in the early 20th century (and, sure, with good reason) to eschew plot, and it was a worthy experiment. But plot's not making a comeback so much as the elevation of plot-less storytelling appears to be declining. The task that awaits the 21st century's best writers is not to fall into the trap that plot is everything: plot must be populated with real characters and with language that goes pop! in the reader's imagination.

And readers must shoulder their share of the burden: they must demand quality not just in what happens, but in how it happens. In that combination, rather than in some Modernist ideal, might rest the key of classic writing. After all, what is the Great Novel of the Century if no one cares to read it in the next century?