A book looks to great minds of the past to illuminate the present

By Shepherd Bliss

Prompted by grief, fear, and anger, I have been trying to make meaning from events surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attack for over half a year. I have consumed hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, columns, analyses, and commentaries by journalists, pundits, political scientists, and others.

None has helped me discern meaning as much as The American Soul, a book written before that fateful day-and about events that took place before airplanes and skyscrapers even existed. Author Jacob Needleman, a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, paints a larger picture. Subtitled Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, this readable book has enabled me to imagine a positive postÐSept. 11 future for a renewed America.

An admirer of America, its traditions, and possibilities, Needleman ponders the greatness of Washington and Jefferson and honors Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Crazy Horse, and Martin Luther King Jr. He seeks to “neither revile nor to romanticize the actions and actors of America’s past.” But he adds, “Real reflection throws dazzling light on the disappointments, mistakes, failures and even crimes of America.” He laments “the disease of materialism” and “the affliction visited upon us by our successes.”

“Nations, as such, come and go,” Needleman observes. “Persia, Rome, Byzantium all sunk into the ocean of time.” Needleman calls Americans to recover “the inner meaning of democracy,” or lose it. He affirms America’s promises of freedom, equality, and social opportunity. Specific American virtues and their “shadows” are detailed: liberty, which can degenerate into self-gratification; independence, which can decline into individualism; practicality, which can regress into blind materialism; the rule of law, which can become an usurper; hard work, which can enslave; freedom of speech, which can deteriorate into empty talk.

Needleman cautions that unless we think about America in a new way, “it will be an outer empire alone, an empire only of money or military power or empty promises. And such an empire will soon die.” Perhaps that is what is happening now. The U.S. empire, at least as we have known it, may be declining, despite its current apparent military successes. Or as the ancient saying goes, “The king is dead. Long live the king!”

The vicious Sept. 11 attack caught most Americans by surprise. Others were not as surprised. Many nations had experienced such deadly attacks, sometimes even by the U.S. military. The U.S. government chose a full spectrum military response to the Sept. 11 crime, thus compounding the crisis. Its first targets were the violent al Qaida and the fundamentalist Taliban. After their apparent rout-in which mainly innocent civilians were killed-the United States has threatened to widen its attack to the “evil axis of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea,” even with first-strike nuclear weapons.

As the great American pacifist A. J. Muste observed after World War I, postwar problems can be greater for the victor than for the defeated. Full of its power, the United States has already expanded military activities in the Philippines and Colombia. Other countries at risk include Yemen, the Sudan, Georgia, and Somalia. How might the rest of the world feel as it hears about U.S. plans for nuclear attacks?

“Democracy is under attack in America,” declares Sebastopol City Council member Larry Robinson. “But the greatest threats are not from foreign terrorists.” They come from inside and from our own behavior. Needleman warns that “America needs the goodwill of the world for its survival.” Such goodwill is rapidly eroding as the U.S. military expands its deadly reach.

The United States may be acting like a wounded beast, particularly in its vengeful military responses to Sept. 11. The current administration seems to want to go it alone against perceived enemies. As the United States escalates its threats and attacks, it loses any moral claim, strengthens its so-called enemies, and becomes increasingly isolated in the world. The Bush administration may achieve what no one else has been able to do: unite the Arab and Muslim worlds against a common enemy.

Walt Whitman is an American hero whom Needleman praises, noting, “To Whitman, who was emerging as America’s greatest visionary poet, Lincoln incarnated the essence of American democracy: the harmonious blending of the mystical and the pragmatic within the individual soul.” Whitman wrote about the great ideas of America: independence, freedom, equality, the people, and the individual.

In his final chapter, “Toward a Community of Conscience,” Needleman turns to America’s future: “We need to discover how to look impartially at both the inner greatness that calls to us and the profound weaknesses that determine the life we actually live-with all its self-deception, arrogance, and betrayal.” Whereas some are quick to condemn America, others rush to excuse it and tolerate no faultfinding. We need to find a balanced posture from which to allow appropriate self-criticism and comments from outside.

Some may find this book too abstract, too critical, or even too hopeful. The author, after all, is a philosopher, not a historian or political scientist. The survival of American democracy requires the soul-searching that Needleman advocates.

The American Soul concludes with a call to “both raise our heads in the vision of authentic human dignity and lower our heads in the vision of authentic remorse.” With such a posture, we can step “into the future of the new America.”

From the April 18-24, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Introduction by Davina Baum

Books seep and surge into every aspect of life, as if they were liquid rather than solid. Like a slow-moving oil spill-with a more lively bouquet than black sludge-literature coats our feathers and anchors us to some place other than the ground, some place in the imagination.

But literature lives in other places than the mind. It lives in our fingers, in our eyes, in our ears.

This week’s April Lit feature seeks to explore the many aspects of books. From the criteria that lead us to pluck a book off the shelves-sight unseen-and take it to the register; to the transformation from the written word to the musical note; to the philosophical ruminations engendered by a historical biography, this is to remind you that a book is alive. Treat it well.

Best Looking, Best Selling: Are contemporary book covers fashion over function, or function as fashion?

Reading Music: Music and books perform a duet with ‘Songs Inspired by Literature’

Imagined Realities: Kevin Brockmeier’s ‘Things that Fall from the Sky’ reveals mysteries

Soul Searching: A book looks to great minds of the past to illuminate the present

War and Remembrance: Petaluma author captures the manic-depressive weirdness of WWII Hollywood

From the April 18-24, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Petaluma author captures the manic-depressive weirdness of WWII Hollywood

Charles Rubin’s earliest memory is of sitting in an old art decoÐstyle second-run movie house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was the 1950s, but the movie on the screen could have been some classic 1940s film-noir mystery or a Judy Garland musical or a big World War II crowd pleaser. As a boy, Rubin saw so many old movies it’s hard to pin this memory to a specific film, but the setting itself is the part he most vividly-and fondly-remembers.

“I literally grew up in movie houses in New York when I was young,” laughs Rubin, publisher and author (Hard Sell, Don’t Let Your Kids Kill You). “The movie theater is where my mom put us to keep us safe during the day. We’d bring a lunch and watch movie after movie-all of them old movies, even then. It was a wonderful thing for a young boy.”

Old movies-not to mention old theaters and old Hollywood itself-are at the heart of Rubin’s newly released novel, 4-F Blues (New Century; $14). A semisentimental but slightly offbeat adventure-thriller, 4-F Blues follows a Hollywood stuntman named Tom Driscoll, whose patriotic intentions after Pearl Harbor are thwarted by an irregular heartbeat that earns him a 4-F rating with the recruiters. Forced to remain on the bustling Hollywood home front doing stunts in the mediocre war films that were, in terms of their morale-building value, increasingly vital to the expanding war effort, Driscoll uncovers, through a series of violent events, a bizarre conspiracy to murder dozens of Hollywood’s top producers, directors, and movie stars. Rubin’s well-plotted novel is written in spare, straight-forward prose and is built around an intriguing idea loosely based on true-life events of World War II.

“When I decided to combine my interest in World War II with my love of Hollywood and old movies,” says Rubin, “it was partly because I didn’t want to write about actual battles and people getting killed and all that. I wanted to write a home-front novel. I’ve always been impressed by the way the country united during that time. Hollywood was a very patriotic force, and anti-American parties were aware of that.”

Like many Hollywood epics, Rubin’s book was years in the making. In fact, he completed a version of the book 20 years ago while living in London but threw away every copy when it failed to find an English publisher. Once back in the States, having married best-selling inspirational author Betty Bethards, Rubin felt the urged to rewrite the book from scratch and publish it under New Century Publishers, the book company he and Bethards started several years ago. Now that 4-F Blues is finally in print, Rubin hopes to see it go full circle and get made into a movie like the ones he grew up on.

“Disney is looking at it right now,” he says, “but who knows? I’m just glad the book is out, and that people seem to be enjoying it. That’s been my goal from the beginning.”

From the April 18-24, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Kevin Brockmeier’s ‘Things that Fall from the Sky’ reveals mysteries

By Davina Baum

What happened when Rumpelstiltskin’s name was guessed by the queen? In his own words, “I stamped explosively, burying my right leg to the waist beneath the floorboards. In trying to unearth myself, I took hold of my left foot, wrenching it so hard that I split down the center.” Thus were born the two halves of Rumplestiltskin, according to author Kevin Brockmeier. The bisected imp’s other half lives overseas; he himself emigrated to America.

This explanation falls somewhere in the middle of Brockmeier’s short story “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumplestiltskin,” part of a recently released collection titled Things that Fall from the Sky (Pantheon; $21.95). Half of Rumpelstiltskin is delivering a nonpartisan speech to a local women’s auxiliary organization on “The Birthrights of First-Born Children,” during which the faces in his audience “exchange knowing glances and subtle, pointed smiles.” During the question-and-answer session, the conversation veers off topic: “It’s all straw-to-gold this and fairy tale that,” and the women are naturally curious to know what happened to his other half.

The reader has already followed Half of Rumpelstiltskin as he wakes up, goes to work as a mannequin replacement at a local strip mall, eats lunch, goes to the drug store, and reads a Mad Libs letter from his other half (“When the words won’t come to me, I figure they must be yours. I miss you and ___(subject)___ ___(verb)___ (object)___.”). It’s absurd, yet logical. What, indeed, would have happened if someone (an imp, a person, no matter which) were split in two? On this medically impossible premise Brockmeier bases his story and follows it completely rationally. It should also be noted that poor Half of Rumpelstiltskin seems to have all his internal organs (or half of them) exposed to the elements. He dries his pancreas off after his shower.

This earnest, whimsical style infuses Brockmeier’s first collection of stories. Like Stephen Millhauser (Martin Dressler, In the Penny Arcade), Brockmeier brings lyricism, playfulness, and stunningly beautiful images to his stories. The subjects jump from a man obsessed with creating a new typeface-to the detriment of his marriage (“Small Degrees”)-to an anthropological study of the N., a religious people who have created a new version of the Gospels (“The Jesus Stories”).

The heartbreaking “These Hands” follows Lewis, a babysitter who is hopelessly in love-romantic love-with his 18-month-old charge, Caroline. “If I could,” he says, “I would work my way backward, paring away the years. . . . I would heave myself past adolescence and boyhood, past infancy and birth, into the first thin parcel of my flesh and the frail white trellis of my bones. I would be a massing of tissue, a clutch of cells, and I’d meet with her on the other side.” Like Half of Rumpelstiltskin-who, when asked what his one wish would be, says “bilateral symmetry”-Lewis is missing a key component in achieving personal fulfillment.

Other of Brockmeier’s characters face what can only be described as more traditional problems-under somewhat untraditional circumstances. In “The Ceiling” (winner of the 2002 O. Henry Award), a husband and wife face the dissolution of their marriage while a strange object slowly descends from the sky, flattening their town, their house, them. The story recalls the character interplay of Lorrie Moore and the freakishness of Stephen King but showcases, most of all, the imagination of Kevin Brockmeier.

From the April 18-24, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.