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Two quintessential American salesmen and mirror opposites, Tim Arndt and Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman

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“And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing, he’s getting ready for the showHe’s going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.” — Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

Tim Arndt (1959-2024). All photos of Tim courtesy of Tim and Amy Arndt.

As I’m going in a sleepless gonzo-mode lately, I might not do justice to Cousin Tim Arndt or to spouse Amy Arndt’s power-packed obit of the extraordinary man who died of prostate cancer recently, at 64. It’s a revelation, the depth and myriad benevolence of Tim’s life. So, I hope this doesn’t seem too irreverent, as this is not an obit per se, and the ensuing analogy is meant to serve by contrast.

But as a culture vulture, I was struck by something in the sadness of Tim’s passing. In my house, we’re currently on a Better Call Saul-watching binge. Here’s the mirror reflection that caught my eye. It strikes me Tim’s life is the moral mirror-opposite of the title character. Tim started his professional career selling flip-style cellphones — close to the depicted the era when Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill starts re-inventing himself — selling “private” covert flip-style cell phones. And the TV series’ New Mexico setting ain’t far from Texas, so the cultural milieu isn’t too alien.

Jimmy McGill hustling private flip-style cell phones. The Georgia Straight

The big difference is how disgraced and disbarred lawyer Jimmy/Saul takes to selling cell-phones, for nefarious purposes. He has a born-salesman’s gift-for-gab, like Tim, but oh my, what Saul does with his gifts. Throughout the series he’s a salesman first and best, even when working as a lawyer.

What unfolds is a contemporary variation on the tragic American story of moral dissembling, through desperation, gravitating to the lure of free-market greed. He begins (with a lovely and upstanding blonde woman partner, like Tim), and he could’ve done so much good, and he knows it. We see this all grow like a cancer in him because Bob Odenkirk is a superb actor who reveals many shades of his character’s two-facedness. As Saul, he ends up exploiting his customers (initially retirees), and the system, as much as he can, eventually falling into the deadly cesspool of a Mexican drug cartel. He can’t help himself, his brilliant lawyer brother Chuck explains, dating from childhood, and consciously if compulsively continues to avoid the better angels of his nature.

Promotional image. Amazon.com

Activist Tim Arndt, by contrast, used the medium of Ma Bell for the sake of Mother Earth, as a springboard to profoundly protect and replenish the planet as a “climate change warrior,” and to help anyone who needed help. It seems that, like Saul, Tim couldn’t help himself, but to “do the right thing.” I shouldn’t make him out to be a saint but he seemed to be one of an empowering sort who “saw the potential in everyone and everything,” as his brother Steve commented. Saul sees the potential weakness in everyone.

Quoting Amy: “At Austin Energy, Tim was instrumental in the creation of the Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure (ECAD) Ordinance. He took his passion for combatting climate change to 360 Energy Savers, where he leveraged rebates to help lower utility bills for residents of Austin.
Tim purchased 1st Choice Energy in 2021. There, he continued to fight climate change and helped make Austin’s low to moderate-income families more comfortable by providing energy efficiency upgrades as part of Austin Energy’s Weatherization Assistance program.”

Widow Amy also notes that Tim would stop to help anyone with car trouble. Jimmy McGill’s beat-up 1998 Suzuki Esteem – rusted-out yellow with one red car door, would’ve needed Tim’s help. In fact, Jimmy is in an accident in the series pilot when two skateboarders try to scam him by purposely running into Jimmy’s car. Jimmy’s nearly broke at the time (working at a Cinnabon shop) and the punks-on-little-wheels demand $500 compensation for the “accident.” Jimmy points to his car as “a steaming pile of crap” to show how hard-up he is and says, “The only way this car is worth $500 is if there’s a $300 hooker in it!”

If Tim Arndt had been cast in the show at that point, Jimmy might’ve seen the erring of his ways, though probably continuing down his slippery slope. That ethical task is up to Jimmy’s girlfriend, the sharp-lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), who loves her pro bono work, in an almost morally preening way. She loves Jimmy, too, as his sounding board yet is strangely vulnerable to his “aw shucks” charms and deceptive bloviations. It’s a variation on a Macbethian love story, with the man as the infecting partner.

As Amy’s obit recounts in admiring detail, Tim Arndt was “The Ultimate Good Samaritan.” Jimmy’s version of “Goodman” Samaritan is to teach the young skateboarders how to scam better.

Girlfriend Kim Wexler (Reah Seehorn) listens to another explanation/vow from Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). Although high-minded, she has a weakness for his powers of persuasion and evasion. global.ca/news

Over time it became known that Tim had helped everyone in the neighborhood. If Tim could have been satirized at all, it might’ve been as a too-good-to-be-true do-gooder and tree-hugger, who might rankle some, but only as if we don’t need more of those in America. His tendency to be a found-objects “hoarder” might seem comical too, but all his gatherings were stashed in his garage (nicknamed “Vietnam” because of its devastated-looking chaos) which, with his special brand of genius, became a myriadic fix-it and repurpose shop for anyone who needed the once-again right stuff.

Among the more remarkable things Tim did was “returning BB King’s famous guitar Lucille to its rightful owner when it ended up in his possession,” as Amy recounts. (Please read Amy’s obit on Tim following this article — originally posted on her Facebook page — on more of what made him an extraordinary man.)

Tim Arndt, proud family man with (L-R) daughter Emily, spouse Amy, Tim, daughter-in-law Taylor, son Matthew.

Tim Arndt and Jimmy McGill embodied two versions of a quintessential American. Tim might have come as close as anyone with limited resources to being the ideal American, living to pursue justice, equality, and a measure of happiness for his own (the proud father of three) and anyone, and to help save the only planet we have to survive on. Though I didn’t know him well (he was a life-long Texan, I a Wisconsinite), Tim now feels like the brother I never had. In our shared Lynch genes, we even resemble each other. But he was probably a better man than me, than most.

Jimmy the Saul-man, with his own peculiar resourcefulness, was the every-man-for-himself American, the transactional con-man first brilliantly characterized in Melville’s The Confidence Man: His Masquerade from 1857), and agonizingly relevant today. Jimmy/Saul was a winning glad-hander, even capable of a flawed love, ever despoiled by the neediness of his greediness.

As for the way Tim loved, as Amy sweetly notes: “Tim was born in Dallas, Texas on Valentine’s Day in 1959. His mother Eileen almost named him Val, but thankfully, she chose Timothy James instead. Still, being born on Valentine’s Day meant Tim Arndt was born to exemplify love.”

May the Tim Arndts of the world inspire us, and may we be ever vigilant of the Saul Goodmans.

Tim and Amy.

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*Saul (Bob Odenkirk) may still be better known as the sleazy lawyer on Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul was a sort of prequel, telling the story of how Jimmy McGill came to be Saul Goodman. Odenkirk (only three years younger than dear Tim) has received six nominations for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series, marking his comic-tragic brilliance at embodying the conflicted yet chillingly mutating character.

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Tim Arndt’s obituary – the hardest thing I’ve ever written. What a guy!
By AMY ARNDT
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Timothy James Arndt, 64, died on January 22, 2024, after a 6-year battle with prostate cancer. Tim was the ultimate Good Samaritan, a climate change warrior, friend to many, and owner of the best laugh on the planet.
Tim was born in Dallas, Texas on Valentine’s Day in 1959. His mother Eileen almost named him Val, but thankfully, she chose Timothy James instead. Still,   being born on Valentine’s Day meant Tim Arndt was born to exemplify love.
Tim is survived by his wife Amy, the love of his life and pain in his ass, his son Matthew Arndt, daughter-in-law Taylor, daughter Stephanie Martinez-Arndt, and daughter Emily Rose Arndt. He is also survived by his brother Steve Arndt and wife Joy, brother TJ Arndt, and brother Mike Arndt. Other relatives include mother-in-law Judy Wilkins, father-in-law Glenn Underwood and wife Pam, sister-in-law Emily Montez and husband Rocky. Tim was predeceased by his mother, Dr. Eileen Lynch, and father Terry Arndt (unless you consult 23andMe, but that’s another story).
Tim attended W.T. White High School in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Walden  Preparatory School in 1976. When Tim’s grades didn’t quite cut the mustard, he used his charm and gift of gab to gain admission to the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas.
Tim’s career was always focused on helping people. His sales career began at Cellular One in San Antonio, TX, where he sold the original “brick” cell phones and the original flip phone which sold for over $2,500. He later worked at the Travis County Medical Society’s Medical Exchange, where he sold pagers and communications services to physicians. He was responsible for developing the training of thousands of Central Texans at the Customized Training division of Austin Community College. At Austin Energy, Tim was instrumental in the creation of the Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure (ECAD) Ordinance. He took his passion for combatting climate change to 360 Energy Savers, where he leveraged rebates to help lower utility bills for residents of Austin.
Tim purchased 1st Choice Energy in 2021. There, he continued to fight climate change and helped make Austin’s low to moderate-income families more comfortable by providing energy efficiency upgrades as part of Austin Energy’s Weatherization Assistance program.
Tim’s brother Steve wisely noted that Tim “saw potential in everyone and everything.” An altruistic hoarder, Tim’s garage was well known as “Vietnam,” because his collection of random objects looked more like a war zone than a garage full of dreams. We joked that if you needed something, Tim would ask, “What color?” because he likely had more than one of whatever it was you needed. He stopped to help anyone having car trouble. He refused to pass a lemonade stand without stopping to support a small business. One time Amy realized Tim had helped someone from every single home on their street. He considered people experiencing homelessness to be his neighbors, and he never judged a person for their circumstances. He simply helped them.
Tim’s laugh is almost as well-known as his good deeds. When the kids were little, if they got separated from Tim in a store, they never worried because they could find Tim by the sound of his bellowing laugh. Amy described Tim’s laugh as “a cross between a machine gun and Bert from Sesame Street.”
Tim could do so many things that we kept a list of “Things Tim Arndt Can Do.” The list included: taking almost anything apart and putting it back together, buying and fixing cars, building a treehouse out of recycled materials, and returning BB King’s guitar Lucille to its rightful owner when it ended up in his possession. He could dance the Jitterbug, cross-country ski, juggle, walk on stilts, safely hold bees in his mouth, and catch snakes and tarantulas. He could cook like nobody’s business, sew his firstborn son’s baby bedding (including bumpers), and create custom Halloween costumes, often at the very last minute. He could swim the length of a pool in one breath. He could even catch a fly with chopsticks.
Though Tim spent his life serving others, his family and friends were his greatest joy. He was often overheard telling someone on the phone, “I’m just lucky that I’m still madly in love with my wife.” He loved his Saturday morning ritual of talking to his brother Steve (and by way of speakerphone, Steve’s wife Joy). He was a caring role model for his little brother Mike. His Sunday morning breakfasts with his best friend Jon were his favorite start to the week. Nothing made him prouder than being a parent to Matthew, Stephanie, and Emily Rose. His legacy of love and good deeds lives on in his children, who all possess his best qualities.
Tim was a Yellow Dog Democrat to his core, working on numerous campaigns, block walking, phone banking, and helping register voters. One of his favorite things to tell people was, “The only part of my permanent record that I’m proud of is that I’ve never missed an election.” And it’s true; Tim voted religiously.
Speaking of religion, Tim was a cradle Catholic and lived the examples of a Christian life his entire life. However, when Tim’s cancer spread to his bones, he developed a skepticism about God and the afterlife. During this time Tim developed a friendship with Father Matt Boulter, the priest at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Austin. Tim concluded one of their last conversations by saying, “If you’re right, I’ll see you on the other side!” Then he laughed his giant laugh.
Tim’s family and friends believe that Tim’s work on earth gave him a VIP pass to the other side. While the world is a quieter place without Tim and his famous laugh, his memory will live on through his children, his countless good deeds, and the good deeds we can all do to honor him.
The family sends their unending appreciation and love to Tim’s medical team and caretakers. To the team at Texas Oncology: Dr Carlos Ruben de Celis, Colleen Adkins, PA-C, Dr. Louis Lux, Francesa Ciponi, LCSW, C-DBT, Vanessa Hohn, Senior Patient Services, and the many nurses and techs that Tim made laugh, thank you for your excellent care. Thank you to the team at Hospice Austin, especially Stephanie Beam, RN, and Cat Ross, CNA, whom Tim truly loved. Thank you to the incredible team at Christopher House, who cared for Tim so lovingly in his final days.
A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, March 23 at 2:30 at the Hancock Recreation Center in Austin. To honor Tim’s memory, please consider a donation to Hospice Austin, Christopher House, the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS), or a climate change organization of your choice. If donations are cost-prohibitive, please consider doing a kind deed in Tim’s honor.
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The film “The Whale” washes ashore a story of quiet desperation

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Brendan Fraser in “The Whale.” A24

After seeing the film The Whale, out newly on video (and various streaming services), it has lodged in my memory and psyche as powerfully as any recent film, including the much bigger and more commanding theater films like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, as excellent as those are.

This is the sort of small film that’s perfect for video viewing. It has to do with humanity on an intimate yet highly charged scale. And it deals with one of the least-acknowledged and discriminated-against minorities in our gradually and fitfully enlightened society.

That is, obese people, even morbidly obese, which is especially relevant in a state like Wisconsin, with its high percentage of overweight citizens. Beyond that, the central character is gay. I think you’ll understand, by the end, why Brendan Fraser won the best actor Oscar for 2022. Yes, he had to put on a lot of weight for the role, which can sometimes seem to beg to Academy Awards voters, and he’s courageously traveled 180 degrees from his early, ripped George of the Jungle image.

But it truly was the depths and the bubbling-right-on-the-surface humanity of his acting which made this performance special, courting greatness. He plays a huge man who never leaves his apartment and could likely never get down the flight of stairs to the parking lot. Fraser’s large blue eyes form welling pools of suffering; giving and yearning, deepened by the mass beneath them. As an obese Caucasian, he might suffer from a comparable discriminatory disdain by people who presume a person’s societal position is largely their fault, just as do so, most pointedly, many African-Americans.

So, Fraser, as Charlie, deals with his shame in various ways, including relying on a friend, Liz (Hong Chau, an Oscar nominee for the role), who is the sister of his deceased partner. She is an advisor, sounding board and enabler of his compulsive eating. You get a sense in this role of the complexity of her character, and in fact all four of the main characters in the story are richly layered.

Hong Chau as Liz in “The Whale”

Charlie teaches English online and blacks out his own video-chat window during lessons so his students can never see him. He’s significantly estranged from his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) because he left his marriage for a lover, upon admitting his gayness, when she was eight years old. For all his fights against gravity, reaching her might be his most uphill and wrenching battle. The daughter shows up and is intensely passive-aggressive in challenging and probing her father.

Sadie Sink as Ellie in “The Whale.”

Like all-too-many-suffering minorities, Charlie struggles with low self-esteem, perhaps even strains of self-hatred. What is extraordinary about him is his capacity to see the value in others, even at the most elemental level. This makes him a wonderful teacher who is striving for the greatest possible honesty in his students, even valuing it more than conventional proprieties of English writing or exposition.

I didn’t expect Melville’s Moby-Dick to be a key motif in the story, given that I am a Melvillian of sorts. But it turns out that an essay that daughter Ellie wrote about Moby-Dick, when she was in eighth grade, is something Charlie hangs onto, for her sake as much as his own. As much as I’ve read and studied the great novel, I gained a fresh interpretive insight from Ellie’s intuition into the story, which actually befits the biography of Melville. And Charlie values the essay personally as a kind of symbolic reflection upon him, something he anguishes over and yet draws a somber sustenance from. That is partly because his daughter wrote it, and accordingly he seems to sense that each of his remote English students is a child of his. And just maybe those words will be a lifeline for Charlie from drowning in his own abyss of pathos.

A fourth key character is a quiet wildcard, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young man who visits Charlie and appears to be a door-to-door missionary who might (or might not) help the profoundly isolated man toward a spiritual path of redemption and self-worth. The superb Samantha Morton also plays Charlie’s ex-wife, in an intense yet briefer role.

I, for one, disagree with some critics who glibly dismiss the film as “a landmark exercise in trolling” or “misery porn” — and notice the use of the fashionable slang terms to posture the critics’ “hipness.” It now seems increasingly that every perceived experience now has a “porn” underbelly to it, often as a droll punchline. We need to accept now that film is an inherently voyeuristic art form.

Another critic “hates” the film which, she notes, received a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Her big knockout zinger seems to be declaring unpersuasively that Charlie “peddles in toxic positivity,” a contrarian’s absurdly tortured phrase and notion. Rather, his “positivity” seems perhaps over the top, at times, but it is desperate, not unlike Ahab’s poor, nearly-drowned black cabin boy Pip, who at his direst moment, sees “God’s foot on the treadle of the loom.”

One promotional poster for “The Whale.” IMP Awards

At times, the film’s source as a play, by screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, shows up in small, melodramatic staginess. But no, you won’t find a strong element of modernist irony in The Whale, yet I’m thankful for that. Let’s not forget Moby-Dick’s subtitle, or, The Whale. It shouldn’t be too hard to discern the elusive, great white whale as the richer signifier of this film’s title than an obvious pejorative insult. In fact, this is a courageous film in this era of both unfettered, cruel bigotry and sometimes-stifling political correctness, America’s sad polarities. Another title variation might’ve been Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but to revive that would be simply saccharine.

Brendan Fraser in a critical moment in “The Whale.”

As a title and a symbol, The Whale rides the waves of a difficult life much better, from its unfathomable depths to its improbable breach at the end, which perhaps breaches “suspension of disbelief” reality, but so be it. This is where the story was striving towards, rather than a “happy” temporal ending.

***

As a video bonus, all the lead actors, Hunter and director Darren Aronofsky, provide more-insightful-than-normal reflections, in a “making of” side feature.

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Novelist Russell Banks strove to write smarter than himself. He succeeded, humbly, wisely and heart-wrenchingly.

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Russell Banks. Pinterest

In a nearly post-literary world it’s important, for the sake of our culture and society, to grab onto a great literary talent like a lifeline, like Queequeg’s wooden coffin rising from the whirlpool of death to save Ishmael. To ride the waves that “rolled for five thousand years,” to roll ever still, open to such wisdom and truth as Moby-Dick bequeathed us during the height of the American Renaissance in literature in the mid-1800s.

I’m writing with a certain urgency of spirit because Russell Banks died on January 3rd. He was, in my opinion and that of many others, arguably America’s greatest living fiction writer. Greatest living creative writer, period. Of course, such things are always arguable. But Banks is right at the crest of the mountaintop. Consider esteemed opinions:

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” – Cornel West

“if the United States were to adopt Japan’s admirable policy designating a few extraordinary individuals as living national treasures, Russell Banks would be my first nomination.” – Michael Cunningham

“Russell Banks is a writer in the grand tradition.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“Russell Banks as a novelist has always geared to illuminate the larger issues of human interaction society that too often dishonors human rights… Like John Brown, the protagonist of one of his novels, he rages against the curse of our time, not slavery now, but a violent nationalism which diminishes our humanity. He should be heeded, or whatever noble dream we had will be lost forever.” – Howard Zinn

Note the urgency of American historian Howard Zinn’s comment, how he speaks to Banks as a prophet and truth-teller for our times and the way we live, or ought to. But Banks is not a preacher. He allows us to see ourselves and our nation in all its complexity so we many judge for ourselves in the light of creative illumination, the kind that shows a way forward through the self-made brambles of our times.

That’s why it’s important to understand as Dr. West, the literary and social critic, commented again, that Banks is “not only one of our great novelists, but also a courageous and visionary citizen.” 1

I’d like to consider him both as a writer and an exemplary citizen and to first allow him to speak forthrightly. In his underappreciated nonfiction book-length essay Dreaming Up America. Banks proved deeply aware of how to “achieve our country,” as philosopher Richard Rorty put it, within reach of the ideals of our dream, such as it may be. But Banks is unflinching in his honest dissent, he hearkens to the provocative idea he once stated: “We became a nation of homicidal dreamers, murderous dreamers.”

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He continues: “I was trying to point indirectly to that age-old conflict between our material goals and the spiritual justifications that lie at the heart of the American dream, and also now at the heart of American history. That conflict has made us murderers, over and over again. Thus, the true American is a killer. The true American is a cynical, materialistic grabber on the one hand reaching for gold, yet he has an idealistic, even religious, sense of mission. When you tell yourself that big a lie, and you call it a dream, you’re going to end up committing acts of violence. It’s the nature of human psychology… And we have historically done exactly that, beginning in the 16th century when the Europeans first arrived off the coast of Florida…we were killing people and saying that we were doing it for some higher good. Not only that we also said we were doing it for their own good!” 2

He then speaks of nationalism as a kind of “secular religion, a substitute religion.”

“One of the healthiest and most important aspects of our American system of government is the separation of religion and state, the sharp distinction between our legal and political system on the one hand and her religious ideas and institutions on the other. One of the things this allows is great religious tolerance; but another thing it does is demystify national identity, to secularize it. This is a very good idea, something much to be desired, that the framers thoughtfully included international idea from the beginning.” 3

Then he addresses the nature and makeup of our beginning: “We began as an invention. We began as emerging, as emerged people. We’re essentially a Creole nation, a mixture, we have been that way since our very conception.” 4 Our democracy has continued by “embodying a conflict that is so destructive – and it is truly destructive – and also so creative.”

The creativity drove “the search for gold, the materialist impulse, and the search for freedom of religion.”  5

But it is our native inhabitants and our most forsaken inhabitants who have shown us the way, and suffered our folly. “The Native Americans were here before us…greeted us and taught us necessary skills for living in this new world.

“And the Africans, who were brought into this new world as the first immigrants that came after, but of the very seed of us that was and has always been in the mixture.” Without both groups we would be more like the Europeans, he says. Both groups give us much of the heft and texture of authentic identity that distinguishes America from the oppressive Old World it fled from.

“But ours has always been a racial obsession, since in my view the seed inside us has always been closer to the complex brew than it ever was to the picture we had of ourselves as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant northern Europeans…” 6

“I recognize that the way this country had was formed, and the way is still coming into being, is a powerful, combustible combination of energies. We would do well to recognize that we haven’t yet finished making ourselves, and that we can still take mindful control of that process. Our American history is taking us somewhere. We just don’t know where yet.” 7

This is a kind of thoughtful, tough-minded exhortation, but hardly leftist fire and brimstone. It points us toward hope, the refurbishing of our somewhat-tattered but rippling dream.

I first became aware of Banks somewhat belatedly as a graduate student in English, some years into my journalism career. So he struck me as not just a firebrand of my youthful ardor, but as a writer of innate and deeply honed wisdom regarding the human condition. The first book of his I read was Continental Drift, an exemplary story of the complexities of American immigration and identity. It proves to me today how timely his vision has always been, capturing the humanity behind our most vexing domestic policy today, besides gun control. Then came Affliction, a story of an ordinary American, a working-class man who seems to be losing his way, blighted by alcohol, almost shattering his existence, and yet who may have the dogged persistence of character that has helped define the best of America. Except this man slip-slides away, being too afflicted by the stuff that freedom-loving America enables. Your heart may bleed for Wade Whitehouse, with the pain of shared societal shame.

James Coburn (left) won an Academy award for best supporting actor as the tortured, abusive father of Nick Nolte in the film version of Russell Banks’s “Affliction.” Scribed

Then, though heart-breaking, came perhaps the book easiest to swallow because of its tender spiritual affirmation, as embodied in its title, The Sweet Hereafter. It universalized the individual American character, in the deeply symbolic children and in the suffering bus driver.

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Rule of the Bone followed, updating in the grand picaresque tradition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, with a brash youth as an American scalawag, yet intuitively connected to honesty and goodness, seemingly rare commodities in his defiant view, and utterly truth-dealing as Banks’s story reveals.

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What ensued was Cloudsplitter, most likely his greatest and most provocative reach for the bending arc of justice, which Martin Luther King articulated as a vision we aspire to but reach all too infrequently.

This was a profound, historically-informed reimagining of the legacy of radical abolitionist John Brown, perhaps the most controversial American patriot in our history. If you want to begin to understand the subject’s craggy mountaintop of complexity, I recommend this book (along with the biography of Brown that ensued some years later, John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds).

Written imaginatively from the point of view of Brown’s sympathetic but spiritually torn son Owen, Cloudsplitter allows us to follow the raging and curving depths of Brown’s river-running compulsion – visionary, deeply humane, yet just zealous enough for some to call him crazy and criminal, certainly in the times he lived and died. Not so coincidentally, Banks lived for decades just down the road from John Brown’s grave, in upper New York, along with those of 13 of the other men who were killed at the Harpers Ferry raid or executed afterwards.

Yes, Brown can be called a terrorist, and a “postmodern” writer, Bruce Olds, perhaps captured that aura more melodramatically than Banks. Alas, even most of the Black slaves Brown tried to liberate and marshal to his cause slunk away in fear of the nation’s mounting racial acrimony and desecration. But Brown was perhaps the most high-minded radical this country has ever known. Even in our day, it took Banks, a writer of uncommon courage and wisdom, to grapple this deeply with Brown’s bloody and sacred legacy.

As I commented in a review of the book: “One arrives as if waking from a long dream of America, risen from the nation’s subconscious. Owen and John Brown are archetypal men one may grow to love and perhaps fear, as does a son for a great, dominant father. As one grows to love and perhaps fear America itself, with its astonishing freedoms, its shifting moral ground and this devastating power.” 8

As Herman Melville wrote of Brown at the gallows, in the opening poem of his book of Civil War poems, he was “the meteor of the war… Hidden in the cap/ Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah!”

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Banks followed by bringing the American concept of radicalism up to date in The Darling, to that of one defying the nation’s great moral quandary of the 1960s, The Vietnam War. And he did so with a brilliant stroke, with a woman as heroine, giving us a new way for America to see itself, a forsaken Joan of Arc leading us not to victory but to shadowed righteousness, in a manner of character perhaps akin to Ralph Ellison’s social era-defining book Invisible Man.

Among Banks’s other daring and remarkable books was Lost Memory of Skin, about another kind of outcast, a young homeless man who’s an ex-convict, but may or may not be a guilty sex offender.

In his latest and apparently last novel, The Magic Kingdom from 2022, Banks explores the idealism of American society through a son-like observer not too unlike Owen Brown. Based on a much more obscure historical figure living in an early 20th century Shaker community, it probes the fraught ways that even our most self-exalted traditional communities deal with human power, frailty, mendacity, and love. Margaret Atwood aptly characterized it as confronting “our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.”

So, with Banks dead of cancer at 82, I yearn to hear from him, on his art form. Such a novelist of stature has come to understand the personal and human value of his preferred form, as Banks articulates in an insightful and humbled interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in 2011:

“Novels seem to create, for me—or allow the possibility of creating for me—an alternative universe that’s comprehensive and large enough to let me think in ways I can’t think otherwise. The tradition of the novel and, I think, the rigor and the discipline of the art force me to be smarter than I am any other time and force me to be more honest than I am at any other time and force me to be more attentive than I am at any other time. So in some ways, a novel allows me to be better than I am the rest of the time in my life, and I think that’s why I prefer to work in that large fictional form.” 8

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And yet, even in his short stories, continuing throughout his career, one senses how Banks’s fiction might transcend its teller, by distilling his characters’ lives through their incongruous acts, often of a person on the edge. The stories are “very telling of humanity’s crooked path, following perhaps the instinct to find succor or salvation in the past,” I wrote in reviewing his last collection A Permanent Member of the Family.

This instinct arose in “their yearning and risk, suffering and loss,” and the author’s “sage understanding of the deep corners of human nature.” 9

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1 Among Mr. Banks’s literary honors and awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, The John Dos Passo Award, O’Henry and Best American Short Story Awards; the inaugural Thornton Wilder Prize, The American Book Award; and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a Pulitzer-finalist twice, for Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift.  He was President of the International Parliament of Writers, and the founding past-President of Cities of Refuge North America.

2 Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America, Seven Stories Press, 2008, 116

3 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 116-117

4 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 121

5 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

6 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

7 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 127

8 Kevin Lynch “Abolitionist’s Story is as Dangerous as America,” The Capital Times. May 1, 1998, 13

9 Kevin Lynch, The Shepherd Express, Feb. 2, 2014, https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/books/family-stories/

 

Melville and Mumford: Two great writers and Jeremiahs for our times

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Courtesy Princeton University Press

 

Book Review: Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, by Aaron Sachs, Princeton University Press, 2022

Herman Melville’s fingers gripped tightly on the cold metal bar keeping him from plummeting deep into the sea. His lookout perch, high atop a whaling ship, provided a perspective on the earth’s watery curvature and much more, into fathoms below and upon the earth’s surface, reflected mysteriously in the glistening waves. His first biographer asserted that the “mariner and mystic” (and the literary renegade) in Melville allowed him to perceive so much that few could understand what he strove for in writing his strange, sea-soaked masterpiece Moby-Dick or, The Whale, in 1851.

The book opened arms to embrace all that a horizon-chasing lookout could see, and beyond. Yet, as time passed, along with the era of wind-propelled whaling, people forgot about Melville despite the mighty, fulminous wake he’d left behind. Until, that is, Raymond Weaver’s 1921 biography of the writer and a fresh dawning upon the profundity, the darkest realities, and beauties the former sailor had wrought.

After a century of more scholarship on Melville than any American writer, Aaron Sachs has found a fresh inlet into his seemingly bottomless depths as an intellectual diver, as a prophet of modern times.

He has done so by reviving a strikingly comparable figure, who helped project Melville’s genius into the 20th century. Lewis Mumford had a view perhaps as high and far as Melville’s, but not as a ship’s lookout. If anything, Mumford’s perspective was urban, say, from the heights of a skyscraper, even if he loved Nature with a passion. He was an urban planner, literary critic, historian, and a social philosopher. The two writers’ intellectual and spiritual connection blossomed in Mumford’s 1929 biography Herman Melville: A Study of his Life and Vision.

A handsome French edition of Mumford’s biography of Melville. Courtesy librarieforumdulivre.fr

As a Melvillian working on a novel about the man, I have read profusely about him, including a good handful of biographies, most of greater length. But to this day, I can’t say I’ve read one more finely and beautifully attuned to the man and the creative artist than Mumford’s.

In Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, Aaron Sachs places the two writers in high biographical counterpoint, in sunlit radiance that illuminates both and, regarding Melville, can stand alongside the brilliant and vast critical and biographical work of F.O. Matthiessen, D.H. Lawrence, Harold Bloom, Sterling Stuckey, Carolyn Karcher, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Wynn Kelly, C.L.R. James, Leslie Fiedler, Andrew Delbanco, Newton Arvin, Hershel Parker, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, and others.

Even aside from his prodigious scholarship and insight, Sachs stands upon painfully familiar grounds. So, we are blessed with fresh historical perspective on two writers courageous and gifted enough to enter the vagaries of American societal quicksand and remain aloft, aside from their periodic neglect.

Sachs alludes to today’s “dark times” when the greatest democracy in history is, as others already have, gravely threatened by an infecting fascist political impulse, that would drag us into the depths of authoritarianism, the opposite of each citizen’s active voice in a diverse society reflecting a global interconnection.

Melville fashioned a microcosm of the United States in the hearty, colorful crew of The Pequod, with the strength in its diversity, yet dared to show how readily they could be swept up in the bloodthirsty madness of eloquently transfixing Captain Ahab, a monomaniac who seized their collective spirit with his demagoguery of a whale, which sent all, save one, to their doom.

An 1870 portrait of Herman Melville by Joseph Eaton. Courtesy Towleroad Gay News

Whaling was a crucial global industry in mid-19th century, but Melville also deep probed America’s inland by illuminating the social impact of industrialization in the diptych-type short story, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” from 1855.

“Melville depicted a luxurious gentleman’s club in London and a Berkshire paper factory in which women did all the coarsest jobs,” Sachs writes. “Here, Melville was not only indicting the sacrifice of American manhood to all industrialism, but also echoing one of the themes he developed in (the autobiographical novel) Redburn, about the unconscious dependence of the leisure class on the skilled, competent labor of the scraping-by classes.” 1

Although Melville too-self-critically considered the book a knockoff job, Redburn provides rich ground for Sachs comparative analysis.

“Just as Mumford would several decades later, Melville reconnoitered here what modern cities he had access to, curious about how they shape people’s lives and how they compared to each other. In many ways, they seemed a lot like ships: sites of everyday trauma, often the result of brutally hierarchical relationships – but also sites of cosmopolitan fellowship, where eventually the sustain engagement with difference might help people rediscover a sense of commonality.” 2

Sachs continues, “Melville witnessed the worst kinds of degradation, viciousness, and apathy… people with different backgrounds and cultures…People of different classes and races would almost always be suspicious of each other. But he also saw, in every major city, the concrete possibilities of the great American experiment. At the Liverpool dock, he imagined what each ship might contribute to the United States. Such a vision, he thought, should be enough, ‘in the noble breast,’ to ‘forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…Our blood is the blood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one.’” 3

Such humane and exalted thought renders Melville historically timeless and gives our nation words to live by, even words to love by, the latter a theme Mumford explored deeply.

Some people these days deride such utterances as “nationalism.” That is myopic, ungenerous thinking, especially given Melville’s cosmopolitan worldliness. He maintained a belief in a nation that embraces the world and asserts that the nobility of America’s Democratic experiment has a place in every country and in every heart. Shouldn’t there be reason to at least hope for that? Democracy may not always succeed, perhaps by its nature, but is always there for the offing: “of the people, for the people, and by the people.”

Sachs also does justice to one of Melville’s most underappreciated works, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. The collection of often-beautiful, vivid and tough-minded poems assesses and evokes the Civil War experience, from the starkly indelible moment of John Brown’s hanging in “The Portent,” to a long “you-are-there” shadowing of the guerrilla exploits of a renegade Confederate officer in “The Scout Toward Aldie,” to the sublime reverie over a graveyard of fallen soldiers in “Shiloh.” Another, “Ball’s Bluff,” contrasts a town’s patriotic fervor, for its young men marching off to war, against the cold reality: How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime/ Would come to thin their shining throng?/ Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.

Melville then added a substantial prose “Supplement” which was intended to soften the poems’ “bitterness.” And, despite Melville’s celebration of American democracy elsewhere in his work, the supplement also looks hard at post-war America.

“Again and again, Melville acknowledged that America had never been Great, that the revolution had produced not a promising democratic republic but rather ‘an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.’
“And he emphasized that ‘those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistic iniquity, gladly we join the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.’ ”

“The problem was that some exultant Northerners seemed to take their victory as a sign of moral perfection. To Melville, the fight against slavery was a righteous one but it was ‘superior resources and crushing numbers,’ rather than righteousness, that determined the outcome. Indeed, Northerners had been complicit in the slave system from the beginning, both morally and economically.” 4

“The outcome of the war, Melville realized, had only intensified the scorn and suspicion between whites and Blacks in the South, so if white Northerners were to heap additional scorn and suspicion on white Southerners, the Black Southerners would probably pay the dearest price.”

Melville wrote: “Abstinence (from racial hypocrisy) is as obligatory as considerate care for our unfortunate fellow-men late in bonds.” 5

Melville’s unflinching wisdom foreshadows how Reconstruction would fall apart and lead to Jim Crow, lynching, The KKK, and the ongoing degradation of Black Americans, which continues to this day.

So where do we go from here? As Mumford wrote, and demonstrated through a long, prolific career, only “the perpetual rediscovery and reinterpretation of history” makes true progress possible; when we are actively “rethinking it, reevaluating it, reliving it in the mind,” the past stops controlling us and, in fact, becomes her best tool for “the creation and selection of new potentialities.” 6

Lewis Mumford made the cover of TIME magazine in April of 1938. Courtesy TIME.

This recalls one of my favorite quotes of the great 19th century American abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

In 2008, Douglass became another major historical figure deeply compared to Melville in: Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Potter. This worthy comparison traverses themes of “literary and cultural geographies,” “manhood and sexuality,” and “civil wars.” Richly recommended, yet far ranging as that book is, Sachs’ is a more enjoyable overall read, given that one author weaves the two writers’ contrapuntal historical dialog into a single narrative, a reading experience enhanced by Sachs’ fluent, often-lyrical writing skills while mining such profound wellsprings of American literature and thought.

One feels it a deeply inspired work in daring to contemplate two great writers a century apart from each other.

One of Mumford’s finest themes draws from Moby-Dick. In the 1950s he was writing in the context of the dangers of the atomic bomb, but the broader resonance remains true.

“The danger we face today was prophetically interpreted a century ago by Herman Melville…Captain Ahab drives the ship’s crew to destruction in a satanic effort to conquer the white whale. Toward that end, as his mad purpose approaches its climax, Ahab has a sudden moment of illumination and says to himself: ‘all my means are sane; my motives and object mad. ’ In some such terms, one may characterize the irrational application of science and technology today. But we have yet to find our moment of self-confrontation and illumination.” 7

What could be truer, when we still struggle to face how much human self-indulgence in science and technology overwhelmingly contributes to climate change, and the precipice we teeter upon, risking Earth’s survival as a livable planet?

Both Melville and Mumford were Jeremiahs in the best sense. Indeed, Sachs ends his book in their righteous spirit, exhorting readers beyond mere contemplation of all that these great writers presented.

“Can democracy offset the looming trauma of climate change, with its inherent threat to our sense of continuity?” Sachs asks. “Only, Mumford would say, if it’s a fully inclusive democracy that fosters gratitude and sacrifice, only if democratic participation involves embracing all ‘the small life-promoting occasions for love,’ as Mumford put it in 1951, after two decades of work on The Renewal of Life.

“We need to make lifebuoys for each other, whether in the form of international treaties, or social welfare programs, or offers of shelter, or poems for our children. We need to reach across every form of difference: only a less-traumatized, less-divided citizenry will be able to replace carboniferous capitalism.” 8

Up from the depths, the bloodshot eyes of Melville and Mumford would see no less.

___________

1 Aaron Sachs, Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, Princeton, 2022, 145

2 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 147

3 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 153

4 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 24

5 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 25

6 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 222

7 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 295

8 Sachs, Up from the Depths, 360

 

 

Bid bon voyage to the good ship Denis Sullivan. Will she ever return to her birthplace, Milwaukee?

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Our September 2016 departure from the Denis Sullivan’s dock, outside Discovery World on the Lake Michigan shore of Milwaukee. All photos by Kevin Lynch

We can absorb history in many ways, but it’s usually in a second-hand or secondary source way, like reading a book, or watching a documentary. Historically-attuned scholars and artists can surely illuminate the past with immeasurable brilliance and depth. The work of documentary-filmmaker supreme Ken Burns comes to mind, as do historians like Eric Foner, John Meacham, Shelby Foote, David S. Reynolds, Joseph Ellis, Sean Wilentz, David McCullough and others.

Yet for years, Milwaukee has been blessed with something even more vivid and experientially historical than those gifted people’s best efforts, even when they are talking as guest pundits on TV. I’m talking about a mainline to history as real as stepping aboard a tall sailing ship transporting you to the glory days of such vessels in the mid-1800s, the era of Moby-Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, and Typhoon. 1

In September of 2016, I was fortunate enough to take that step, off the Milwaukee harbor onto the city’s majestic flagship schooner S/V Denis Sullivan, for a Lake Michigan tour, which helped inspire this blog. It was motivated to do research for my novel about Herman Melville. I had visited an actual docked whaleship from the era, The Charles W. Morgan, in Mystic, Connecticut.

But I’d never actually sailed on a tall mast ship from that era, even if this one was a hybrid replica, built by volunteer Milwaukeeans – the world’s only re-creation of a 19th-century three-masted Great Lakes schooner. She was the flagship of both the state of Wisconsin and of the United Nations Environment Programme . .

And here you begin to get an inkling of our state’s loss, when the ship – stripped of it’s tall masts — departed on October 8 for Boston, and it’s ultimate destination, St. Croix, now sold to a company in the Virgin Islands – as reported superbly by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Reporter Chelsey Lewis, in the in-depth article linked to below.

Noted Milwaukee folksinger David HB Drake, a vocal opponent of the sale, had a suggestion, as he posted on his Facebook page: “OMG– The Denis Sullivan has been sold to Boston.

This for me is like the Braves being sold to Atlanta…unthinkable!
There was no warning or opportunity given to the very people who built her and volunteered these 30 years to keep her afloat in Milwaukee. Had there been, perhaps a citizens groups could have bought her and kept her here or at least formed a partnership with the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc to keep her in Wisconsin.”

However, that museum is currently in the midst of its own campaign to raise $1.5 million to put the USS Cobia, its World War II submarine, in dry dock, Lewis reports. The Manitowoc museum considered possibly serving as a home port for the ship, but not the home port.

Other organizations, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “were considering partnering with Discovery World to use the ship for programming around the newly designated Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, but they, too, could not take primary ownership of the boat.”

Lewis reported on a former crewmember, Michael Gaithier, who expressed bitterness:

The boat was treated like an unwanted stepchild … it was neglected and not taken care of in the way that most tall ships with most healthy organizations behind them in this country have been taken care of

Back in September 2016, sail boats breeze by the port side rigging of the Denis Sullivan with the Milwaukee skyline in the background.

For my part, as an appreciative memory, I’ll convey some of our experience on the schooner. In September of 2016, there we were, riding the waves with the huge sails billowing to and fro, as the wind took us.

Ann Peterson in the deck of the schooner Denis Sullivan in September of 2016.

The historical schooner cruise was a birthday gift to me from my companion, Ann Peterson. And it was the palpable, wind-in-your-face, and even intoxicatingly moving experience I’d hoped for, even it proved too much for the steadiness of Ann, who started out gamely, as the picture above shows. Yet as the good ship dipped and swayed in the slightly feisty waters just beyond the Milwaukee harbor breakwaters, she grew a little green in the gills, and her chipper smile faded.

That’s part of the physical reality of being on open waters on such a vessel, but there’s so much more. You begin to get a sense of how a person can release oneself from the  confining and aggravating patterns of workaday and quotidian problems and pitfalls, and from the looming shadows of psychological malaise that life’s tensions and burdens can impose.

This sort of voyage lacks the tony creature-comforts and luxuries of an expensive cruise. Rather it does transport you back to a much heartier distant time, when brave people traveled and worked much closer to the elements of water, sun and wind. In reflection, one may draw from this elemental immediacy some sense of the holistic importance of water, covering the vast majority of the globe, and the ecosystems it sustains on water and land.

These are things that a writer like Melville, despite (and because of) being a whaler in his early adulthood, proved quite aware of, for a man of his time. His masterpiece novel  reveals that he had profound regard and respect for the whale and its place in “the watery part of the world,” as narrator Ishmael pointedly calls it, in his very first reference to the oceans, in “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick. Or consider his gloriously attuned description of a great herd of nursing female whales in Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada.”  Such are some the educational aspects this vessel can pursue, though I’ve never taken an educational cruise on it, per se.

How resonant is the ship’s presence culturally? Well, for one example, renowned folk singer Pete Seeger recorded a song called “The Schooner Denis Sullivan” in 2001. 2

Here, Seeger sings his story-telling song a cappella:

Our 2016 cruise also allowed us to soak up the skyline of our modestly handsome city’s downtown, in ever-shifting contours, especially as the urban silhouette cuts itself against the increasing brilliance, then the warming glow of the setting sun in the West. (see photo sequence below). Looking upward, the towering, majestic sails overhead elicited a sort of poetry of rhythmic motion – sweeping, rippling, billowing and whispering.

The Milwaukee skyline from port side of the Denis Sullivan.

Back on the deck, one of the crew members pulled out a fiddle, as did one of the guests and the pair parlayed out a lively Irish-style reel. (Blog story with link to Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article continued, below photo sequence)

A crew member of the Denis Sullivan pulls out his fiddle to engage in a couple of Irish-style reels with a fiddle-playing passenger (not pictured).

 

Denis Sullivan Captain Carlos Canario at the schooner’s helm (gripping the steering wheel behind him) along Lake Michigan during our tour on the ship in 2016. Canario was the Relief Captain for Senior Captain Tiffany Krihwan, who has now departed and is now based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historically famous whaling town. t

In the tradition of Impressionist painters, see three views (above and below) of Milwaukee’s harbor and Hoan Bridge from the schooner Denis Sullivan, as the sun sets in the West.

An example of the sort of strange phenomenon one can experience out in the incalculable and evocative atmospheres of a Great Lake was this photo I took, from the Denis Sullivan. The ghostly spherical presence or optical effect hovers above the top of Summerfest’s Marcus Amphitheatre. I fancifully dub it “Sphere of sea god.”

***

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Reporter Chelsey Lewis admirably functions as a nautical and cultural historian in her comprehensive report on Milwaukee’s recent loss of the Denis Sullivan in the newspaper’s Sunday Life section. She provides an in-depth sounding, a voyage into the good ship’s past, present and future:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/travel/wisconsin/2022/10/27/how-milwaukee-built-and-lost-wisconsins-flagship-the-denis-sullivan/8198403001/.

The seeming tragedy is the story Ms. Lewis tells of the decision to sell, reportedly precipitated by the pandemic and the apparent failure to hire a new captain and first mate, after longtime ship Captain Tiffany Krihwan and her first mate were forced to leave by economic circumstances. Those included the shutting down of the ship for well over a year, along with Discovery World, to which it belonged. The reasons for the Denis Sullivan to be sold to another operation, World Ocean School, in, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, remain questionable, especially given that there was a potential buyer in Chicago who would’ve kept the ship based in Milwaukee. The Chicago outfit, Tall Ship Windy, was prepared to make an offer close to the market value, about $1 million, Lewis reports.

By contrast, it is also troubling that Discovery World’s representatives refused to divulge the actual price of the ship’s sale. However, the successful sale should also underscore how distinguished and rare the Milwaukee-built schooner is for historical value, among other things, and the cultural loss Milwaukee is incurring. The sale rationale came down to a decision as to what is “best for the boat,” including maintaining one of its primary purposes as an educational entity. Why such a function could not continue to be maintained in Milwaukee remains unclear, aside from financial woes the operation is still apparently recovering from, post-pandemic.

The schooner’s powerful presence had also helped attract cultural events to its Discovery World dock, such as the evening concert by the popular Milwaukee jazz group VIVO, which was going on when we returned to dock in 2016.

Saxophonist-flutist Warren Wiegratz performs with VIVO, in a dockside concert going on as the Denis Sullivan, in background, moored after our September 2016 voyage on the 19th-century style schooner.

But read the Journal-Sentinel article to judge for yourself on the whole story of the city’s loss of the ship.

Lewis’s story does finally latch on strong rays of hope. The World Ocean School purchased the Milwaukee ship to replace it’s own flagship, which is now docked up for a few years for refurbishing. There’s a possibility they could be open to selling the Denis Sullivan back to Milwaukee when their own ship is ready to sail again. It is after all, a Great Lakes-style schooner. Still, one must consider such circumstances could change as drastically as the ever-roaming tides of the oceans and those Great Lakes, in all their magnificent and mystifying vagaries.

This two-sequence photo of Madison photographer Katrin Talbot (taken a few years before my trip on the ship) in collaborative research work for this writer’s Melville’s novel, shows some of the scale of the schooner Denis Sullivan. Retrospectively, Katrin seems to bid the ship farewell.

____________

1 In the afore-mentioned titles, authors Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast), and Joseph Conrad (Typhoon) gave us first-hand accounts, or concocted creative ships of transport themselves, in often-poetic prose. These were all based on their actual nautical experiences.

The mid-1800s were haunted by captains courageous and crazed, mighty sea creatures, countless sailors and whalers (drowned and survived), “widow’s walk” wives, and others who directly engaged in, or experienced, the drama and danger of 19th-century sea commerce, romance, and warfare (see Melville’s White-Jacket and Billy Budd, both set on warships).

2. Denis Sullivan Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sullivan_(schooner))

 

 

The Atlantic’s own editor-in-chief explains why it is my favorite magazine

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The cover of the print edition of the November 2022 The Atlantic. Courtesy The Atlantic

Not long ago, I said to a friend who, like most people today, does most of his reading online, that The Atlantic is the last magazine I would still subscribe to, if all others fell to the wayside by choice or circumstance.

I don’t normally tout publications per se in this blog, but The Atlantic has been my favorite for quite a long time, and now it’s editor has written a piece in the November issue that helps to explain why it is worthy of being a person’s favorite.

Much of this has to do with the publication’s storied history, having been born as an abolitionist magazine shortly before the Civil War. But current editor Jeffrey Goldberg opens his piece called “The American Idea” with an 1861 letter from Julia Ward Howe, expressing her melancholy and insecurities to the editor at the time. The editor, James T. Fields, was wise enough not to touch the copy of the poem she submitted with her letter. He gave it a title and published “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the first page of the February 1862 edition. “(Howe received, in return, a $5 freelance fee and immortality.)”, Goldberg adds drolly.

He goes on to point out that The Atlantic, in its 166th year of continuous publication, also published for the first time, “Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the first chapters of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, and Rachel Carson’s meditations on the oceans, and Einstein’s denunciation of atomic weapons, and so on, ad infinitum.”

Further, The Atlantic‘s founding mission statement (reproduced in Goldberg’s article) was signed by various luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who appeared in the first issue; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came up with The Atlantic‘s name; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become the magazine’s Civil War correspondent; Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), America’s most popular author at the time.

Goldberg’s only expressed regret about that time is that, given that Moby-Dick is his favorite American novel, that  Melville never found a way to contribute. That would be my sentiment exactly regarding Melville, who ended up publishing short pieces for Harpers, another long-time American magazine.

I have many reasons why the current magazine is my favorite, partly for it’s intelligence, it’s allegiance to no group, party or clique, and its cultural and political range. “We always try very hard to be interesting. That is a prerequisite,” Goldberg explains.

They succeed, too, which is why, even though some stories are long “thumbsuckers,” they almost invariably hold my interest and, if I don’t finish them, it’s my failing.

Here is Goldberg’s introductory article in the latest issue in full: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/165th-anniversary-atlantic-magazine-founding/671523/

p.s. As for your blogger, I submitted an article once — about Wisconsin guitar innovator Les Paul, Bob Dylan and Michael Bloomfield — to The Atlantic and, though chagrined, I was honored to receive a personalized, hand-written “no thank you” note from an editor from the magazine. The article was eventually published in NoDepression.com. Here’s the note. which I valued enough to frame.

________________

 

Guitarist Andrew Trim reaches for the moon on “Retroreflector”

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Album cover courtesy bandcamp.com

Review: Andrew Trim Retroreflector (Float Free)

Andrew Trim will perform at an album release event, at 7 p.m. July 27, Anodyne Coffee Roasters, 224 West Bruce Street, Milwaukee, WI 53204. 

With his somewhat curious album title, Retroreflector, one wonders what guitarist Andrew Trim is reflecting on retrospectively. The slyly infectious groove his quartet lays down on the title tune leads you Pied Piper-like behind textural footsteps sketched out with deftly articulated power chords.

To me, this backwards-glancing album title lands upon Hendrix, as in “slight return,” a la “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the coda to his masterpiece Electric Ladyland. Yet Trim is not leaning too heavily on the Hendrix mystique; rather he’s beginning to carve out his own space inhabited by both pugnacious power chording and poetry.

Speaking of poetry, the second tune, “Swirl,” evoked for me one of my favorite poems, Herman Melville’s “Shiloh,” a politically-pointed reflection on a graveyard of perpetually sleeping Civil War soldiers. Trim endows his more ambiguous subject matter with a certain grace, even if that poem was never specifically associated. A tentative melancholy is buoyed by lyrical wonder. “Shiloh” the poem almost sneaks up on its tragedy with the tender attentiveness: skimming lightly, wheeling still/ the swallows fly low/space over the field and clouded days, the force field of Shiloh –/ over the field were April rain/ Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain…” Melville deftly evokes the men on death’s doorstep. Trim’s theme seems to melt in the air as it picks out atmospheric spots, as if circling bird paths. Then guest guitarist Dave Miller injects a rough counterpoint, evoking the dire conflict contained in each stolen life six feet under – “… Through the pause of night/ that followed the Sunday fight/ around the church of Shiloh –/ the church so lone, the log-built one, / that echoed to many a parting groan…” The poem quickly inserts a painfully poignant statement about the politics of the war between brethren.

I hope other listeners find enough in Trim’s artistry to pursue this, if not other poetic or artistic analogues. This veteran Milwaukee guitarist as developed into one of the most original instrumental voices in Milwaukee, one deeply infused with a latter-day, anti-sainthood of psychedelia.

Guitarist-composer Andrew Trim. Courtesy bandcamp.com

And throughout, I detect a wide range of possible other influences, perhaps most striking Bill Frisell’s haunted pastoral jazz style, on “Lullabye.” The limpid, arcane melody sounds like a question sung out loud, in pure sound. On “Eclipse Plans” I sense some of Jeff Beck’s exquisitely executed guitar distortion. Elsewhere, consider Pat Metheny’s bright-beaming electronica or, by contrast, the driven Black-rock of the guitar-led trio Harriet Tubman. Such associations reflect the impressive range of Trim’s sonic vocabulary.

Also, in ensemble, Retroreflector is sustained superbly by Trim’s bandmates: Dan Pierson on keyboards and synthesizers, Barry Paul Clark on bass, and Nick Lang on drums.

Ultimately Trim’s exploratory work, for its tough harmonic brio, also reaches for his own brand of beauty, that which dwells in the deep cavern between raw, unmined sound and sunlit silhouettes.

____________

This review was originally published in slightly shorter form, in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/retroreflector-by-andrew-trim/

Andrew Trim recently posted a meme on Facebook (below) which aptly characterizes his venture on Retroreflector: “Reach for the moon: A door opens into a smaller room.”

I suspect something extraordinary, perhaps even sacred, may dwell in that enclosure. Such are the revelations of committed creativity.Image

The wonders and wiles of animals running wild in the artist’s imagination

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Nova Czarnecki, “Return to Me, ” oil painting,  $4500

Heretofore, I’ve refrained from reviewing an art show that I am participating in. However, I’ll simply announce, with a bit of comment, this is the last week to see Feather, Fur, Scale and Tail at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St. Milwaukee. The show runs through Saturday, June 18. This delightful celebration and exploration of animals is ingenious, diverse, colorful and textural, and rich in symbolism and beauty. Yet it is not without acknowledging the darkness that shadows the animal world from within, and from without, the perpetual threat of humans. 

It includes one of a series of pastel and ink drawings I have made, inspired by Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick. The one on exhibit depicts a scene in the first of the novel’s three climactic chapters, “The Chase-The First Day.” The image is titled “Ishmael Intuits the End from the Crows Nest.” The book’s narrator Ishmael is visible in the far background, at the top of the ship, as the whaling boat with Captain Ahab and Ishmael’s friend, first harpoonist Queequeg, approach The White Whale in the foreground. 

Kevin Lynch, “Ishmael Intuits the End from the Crow’s Nest.” pastel and ink. Not for Sale 

But the show is filled with excellent work: from the lovely gestural simplicity of a blackbird sitting on a branch in Carol Rode-Curley’s watercolor-like pastel, “Resting Raven,” to John-Mark Klapperich’s complex visual jokes — wall assemblages of metal objects transformed into animals. Among the most vivid actual encounters with an animal is “Sweet Pea,” Mary Lee Agnew’s photo capturing the ever-elusive fox, with ears so large you imagine him a winged mythical creature, caught for a fleeting moment, amid wind-blown leaps of prairie grass. (All pictured below)

More myth (as in artful truth-telling) seems to reside in, for me, a true highlight — Nova Czarnecki’s large (48” x 60”) oil painting “Return to Me” (at top). This seems a  (self?) portrait of an earth mother dwelling in watery depths and attracting creatures from the air, the land and the very currents wherein she sits with a mystical regality.

Most works are for sale, and are visible online. or in the gallery. Here’s a link to the online viewing, with gallery hours and information: https://jazzgallerycenterforarts.org/gallery-exhibits/2022/5/14/feather-fur-scale-and-tail

Carol Rode-Curley, “Resting Raven,” pastel, $300

John-Mark Klapperich, “Patina Sprockets,” assemblage sculpture, Not for Sale

Mary Lee Agnew, “Sweet Pea,” photography, $150

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Kevernacular will exhibit a “Moby-Dick”-themed pastel at a new art exhibit at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, opening reception Saturday 5 to 7 p.m.

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“Thar she blows!” the cry comes from high up in the crow’s nest. “Thar she blows, a hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Feminizing all whales is part of the romance of the high seas. This she is really a he, the great White Whale who’s hunted monomaniacally by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s profoundly precient and symbolically pregnant masterpiece, Moby-Dick or, The Whale.

Those who’ve read this blog over the years may be aware of the precipitous esteem I hold for this extraordinary book. It has inspired me to write a novel about its author, somewhat forestalled by a myriad of circumstances, but forthcoming in due time.
This is a book that an artist of some repute whom I know aptly characterized as “the first postmodern novel” — published in 1851! It might also be the most critically commented-upon work of fiction in modern history, and the most widely referenced in popular culture, certainly among books that are not often actually read.

It has also inspired the visual artist in me.

So I’ve undertaken a series of pastel drawings with Moby Dick as my motif. And one of the perhaps more successful of these will soon be on display in an art exhibit at the Jazz Gallery Center for the arts.
The exhibit is announced in this poster, though one correction the opening reception’s time has een changed to 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday:

The exhibit will include Linocut Print | Sculpture | Comic-Book Illustration | Photography | Assemblage Box-Making | Encaustic | Pastels | Screen Print | Painting | Digital Drawing 

This event has brought me to the realization I should have a digital copy of this pastel professionally made. My apologies for the poorly depicted image at top. But you get the idea from my hand-held photo. I hope it strikes your fancy or interest enough to visit the opening or ensuing gallery days of this promising show.

Here’s an image of another artwork in the show, a block print by Jay Arpin.

Thank you,

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch)

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Letter (from a Milwaukee jail of my mind), to Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, on the state of our nation and her own psyche

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The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, DC. Courtesy The Travel Channel
E-mail from Louisa-Loveridge Gallas on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 17, 2021:
Dear friends.
I’m sending on a link to this famous Vietnam speech by MLK I go back to on MLK day, so pivotal in his career. Stunning that he was assassinated a year to the day after. And so brave as he found that he angered and disappointed a number of activists and allies for his stance against the war who felt he should stick to civil rights in the approach and focus he had been taking.
Also I’d like think out loud with you. In a very different way and historical context, I just want to add I am beginning to experience that Biden is being attacked at times, in ways I find irresponsible, for speaking out eloquently and clearly for the moral high road of history in his Georgia speech. I refer not only by Republicans but to comments by prominent Democrats like David Axelrod, Obama’s consultant, on CNN; NYT commentators like Maureen Dowd, and even top legislators like Nancy Pelosi. To name a few. Cheap shots, reaching for a way to insult on minor points, calling out strong opinions disagreed with as unbridled ‘rhetoric’ to name a few.
Of course reasonable, fact-based analysis has to go forward. May everyone be generous and informed as we precede with our critiques even in informal conversation. I know I’m not alone in witnessing that these are perilous times where a compassionate approach to each other and in the political realm is at risk in the zeitgeist of the need to one up, demean too easily and thoughtlessly These are such times of anxiety that inflame disagreements and difference; or enhance compassion fatigue.
I certainly don’t count myself out. I’ve been writing some pretty snarky op Ed comments. And make an occasional fevered phone call, as I did to Axelrod’s office. My fur can rise along with a hiss if a friend or relative isn’t on the same page with my take on all the complexities we are living within. I fail. I’m working on myself. I welcome any thoughts you may have to help me along and no pressure to respond, of course, as so many influences and responsibilities call upon us.
So them’s my thoughts and a link to his speech.
Take care. Be safe.
Sincerely,
Louisa *

Full speech text:  King speech

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Dear Louisa,

How I love your caring, your awareness, your intelligence, your passion, and activist voice. And your brave, insightful analogue between Rev. King and President Biden.
Holy moly (forgive my dated boomer utterance), we all need some empathy and psychological guidance and salve, these days. Perhaps, take some deep, slow breaths, dear friend. Take a long walk beside the empowering tide of our Great Lake, or deep into the woods. Listen to the “conference of the birds,” the way they sing to, and advise, each other. Of danger, yes. They live stressed lives, as vulnerable creatures. And yet, they sing.
If only we could truly fly. Yet we can, in our mind, and drag our lagging, embittered, mudbound spirit aloft, which brings to mind a magnificent Herman Melville quote, from the last paragraph of  Moby-Dick, Chapter 96 “The Try-Works”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
flickr.com 
Only slightly less poetic is Robert F. Kennedy‘s speech in Indianapolis, after annoucing the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day after the tragic event. This video is a part of the speech but very worthy. Robert Kennedy is one of my heroes, more so than JFK.
I read the speech (2 pages) during a troubled, virtually sleepless last night, in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. 1 This is a priceless paperback, to me.
Kennedy quotes his favorite poet Aeschylus, from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy continues: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be whites or they be black.”
I ponder and treasure those thoughts, and rededicate myself to living up to them, to the degree I am able.
(BTW, Bobby Kennedy also had a wit comparable to brother Jack, with fine comic timing — hear his Ball State U speech, following this one on youtube.)
 

Then there’s those who would score “cheap political points” against President Biden, as you protest, Louisa — be they leftist, liberal, centrist, never-Trumpers or far-right Trumpsters.
Biden has only been any office one year, and has laid out perhaps the most ambitious vision and agenda since Lyndon Johnson‘s The Great Society. Yes, he needs to show — and effect — more fight and passion, but he’s getting there, I think. DINO Sens. Manchin and Sinema still sit on the fence like a couple of owls, saying “Who me?” as the 60-vote filibuster looms like the Sword of Damocles, over vastly important social initiatives that are very popular with Americans.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are slithering around from state to state, contriving new voter suppression laws. We need a federal oversight law on voting rights, especially to protect the rights and access of people of color and other disenfrachised citizens.
I am, for the moment, disheartened by all the clamoring special-interest factions of the Democratic Party, each of whom has profoundly legitimate concerns, perhaps most presently voting rights, and a woman’s right to determine her own body. But also the looming apocalypse of climate change… and more, of course.
But a lot of things can happen between now and November’s mid-term elections.

Dear Louisa, as Rev. King says, concluding the sacred but tough-minded speech you quote (echoing Frederick Douglass‘s famous thoughts about “struggle”):

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. The choice is ours. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I believe many tears, sweat and, yes, blood, will commingle with that mighty stream. We are psychically stained by John Kennedy’s blood, from 1963, and by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin’s blood, in 1968, and so many since.

No more, I pray and cry. May America’s profusion of inward-pointed guns desist!

But justice is a hardy soul, I believe. She can swim like a sleek yet powerful fish, or trudge, like a woman or man, long distances, in protest and dissent, which many politicans hear, if loud and pointed enough.

Robert Kennedy quotes Algerian-French author-philosopher Albert Camus as much as anyone in this Make Gentle the Life of This World collection. Camus, I believe, was then addressing the people of Germany, under the Third Reich.

Yet how his words ring on today — when Fascist demagogury and governments sprout weedlike over Mother Earth and here at home — like a great thunderous bell, clanged by mythical Quasimodo in Camus’s Paris, or his very real fellow ringer in Philadelphia, so that the big-shouldered Liberty Bill cracked. 2

Camus wrote:

“This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”

Ringing for truth, justice and love,

Kevin

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* Louisa Loveridge-Gallas is an acclaimed poet, body-mind counseler, op-Ed writer, music lover, and activist. She’s working on a new chapbook of socially-motivated poems, and on a “jazz novel,” set in Madison, Wisonsin. She’s a former long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and now resides in Michigan. 
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas. Courtesy Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
1 Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, 1998, Broadway Books, 42-43
2 The crack ocurred on the Philadelphia bell’s very first test ring in 1752, shipped from a French foundry (those French!), and it was clearly a flawed casting — like the great nation it signifies.
To me, now, the crack now resembles King’s waters of justice rolling down, the mighy stream. 
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