For Money or Love?

I sit here tonight, putting off washing the dishes as I think about the book I just finished, The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz. In some ways, I have an awful lot in common with Joan, the protagonist of the book - I'd rather be reading or writing, but I'll get up here in a minute to clean the kitchen.

Joan is a 14-year-old girl who loves school and reading novels, but after her mother died, she's forced into the role of housekeeper for her father and three older brothers on a small farm. The work is unending, and it's hard, and Schlitz does a great job of showing us just what would have been involved for a woman keeping up a farm household in 1911. I felt overwhelming empathy for Joan when she narrowly escapes losing an eye after a cow kicked her, and yet the men of the household expect her to get supper together, even while her stitches are still fresh. At least they concede to eat a cold supper.

But it's not the work that's the worst part of her situation - what's worse is that she is struggling along in an environment in which no one ever expresses any love or concern for her or satisfaction with her work. In fact, Joan's father holds her responsible for her mother's death, and he's just completely intolerable. When he burns Joan's beloved novels to punish her for impertinence, Joan runs away from home to look for a position as a hired girl in the city (Baltimore, in this case).

Joan is lucky enough to get a position quickly with a well-to-do Jewish family, the Rosenbachs. In their household, she does the cleaning and helps the old woman who has been with the family forever with cooking. Joan thinks she's especially lucky because the Rosenbachs send out their laundry - no more washing clothes. And she's going to earn $6 per week!

It's not long before Joan realizes that, even without the laundry, there's still a huge amount of work, and a lot of it is heavy work, like rolling up the rugs and carrying them downstairs to hang over the line and beat them clean. That's the first truth I gleaned from the book; sure, the Rosenbachs had electricity and running water, but to paraphrase with a bad pun, housework, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Maybe she's no longer scrubbing the privy clean, but some other task is going to replace the one that was removed. As the Shabbos goy (Gentile worker who does tasks during the Sabbath), Joan seems to have as much work, if not more, with the Rosenbachs than she did at home.

One might argue that even if the workload is the same, Joan has a much better situation with the Rosenbachs than she had at home, for at least she's away from her hateful father. Throughout the story, though, there are numerous entries (the story is written as Joan's diary) that describe when Joan has been reminded of the social differences between herself and the Rosenbachs -- she is, after all, only the hired girl. Joan is not to associate with the Rosenbach's children (she does, of course). She is not to talk back or listen in on conversations or "meddle." Mrs. Rosenbach, especially, treats Joan with a certain degree of contempt; she is not unkind, unlike Joan's father, but she is superior, taking it as her right at one point to tell Joan she needs to work on her "deportment" so that she seems more like a hired girl.

That raises an interesting set of questions in my mind. Is it worthwhile to allow yourself to be demeaned, as long as you are getting money? I guess Joan is better off as a hired girl, because although Mrs. Rosenbach is as overbearing in some ways as Joan's father is, at least there is Mr. Rosenbach, who allows Joan free access to his library -- as long as she doesn't stay up past midnight so that she oversleeps in the mornings and is late to her work. 

The work/social differences are not the only theme, or even the most important theme, in the novel, but each of us reads a story within our own context, right? I don't know -- maybe I'm in a weird mood because this was the first week back at school, and it's kind of hard to go from days when I was my own boss back into having to keep someone else's schedule. Seems like the older I get, the harder it becomes to do that.....

Am I Too Picky?

Wednesday night, I finished my first book for this year - Rebel Mechanics by Shanna Swendson. This was a book my daughter recommended to me. She really liked it. Me....not so much. It was all right, and at the end, the story picked up and was satisfying, but it certainly didn't catch me up and make me live in that fictional world. As I was doing my Goodreads rating and my Amazon review, it occurred to me that I may have become too picky in my evaluation of reading materials.

A quick synopsis of the plot - this is alternative history, and the premise is that the first American revolution failed, leaving the colonies under British rule. One twist is that there is a ruling class that has magical abilities. A group of non-magical "rebel mechanics" is using their brains to invent machines that can do the things the "magisters" use magic to do. The hope is the machines will make a second, successful revolution possible. Verity Newton finds herself straddling the two worlds; she works as a governess in a magical household, but she is recruited by the rebels as a spy.

The premise for the story is pretty decent (although I could do without the "magic" bit - why does everyone these days use magic as a plot element. Just makes things SOOOOO convenient - need something to happen? Oh, they have MAGIC!). I liked the characters all right, though I wasn't really enamored of anyone in the story; Verity's boss, Lord Henry, is the closest I came to being truly interested in a character. He's living a double life, and although we could figure that out really early in the story, it's satisfying enough when the big reveal comes as to why he's doing it.

So it's not necessarily the story being poorly-conceived that bugs me about this book. The thing that bothered me most about was that it seemed to me the author was punching all the buttons to make the book "popular" with its young adult audience. Let's see...we need a girl who's sort of an outcast....how about a smart, bookish girl whose father doesn't really want her around? Gotta have some kind of paranormal element - ooooh, there's the magic! Check. Steampunk is really popular right now, and the rebels build machines, soooooooo--let's make sure everyone realizes this is a steampunk story by stopping the story momentarily to describe the rebels' clothing as eclectic (one of the key elements of steampunk culture). Let's see....we need a love triangle.....Hey, we'll make Verity be torn between the two social classes. We'll have Alec, the hot young rebel who is a brilliant mechanic and who is instantly attracted to Verity, and we'll have Lord Henry (of course), since he's this complex, mysterious character with an important secret. But of course, he's a "forbidden" love because he's her employer and her social superior.....Ooooooh, even better!! Betrayal by friends? Check. Girl needs a mysterious secret of her own that threatens her position in society....hmmmm......let's make Verity a half-breed--half magic, half non-magic. Girl saves the day? Check. Mean girl who puts down the main character every chance she gets? Check.

Even as I'm writing this, I feel that I'm being a little harsh. The book wasn't that bad, just sort of formulaic, and what's wrong with giving your audience what they want? I guess the thing that bothers me is the literary equivalent of worrying that my daughter is drinking too much sugary root beer and eating too much fast-food pizza. She's a voracious reader, but I have a hunch most of what she is reading is similar to Rebel Mechanics (especially since she thought this was so good she should recommend it to me). I can't at all get her to read young adult novels (like the ones by Ann Turnbull) that are substantive and involving and make you care about the characters and that don't rely on things like magic to build the plot.

Bleah! What a nagging old woman I sound like! "You young people are going to rot your (brain/teeth) if you don't stop (reading/drinking) all that (formula fiction/root beer)!"

But then.....I pick up something like the book I'm reading now (The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz), and within 16 pages, I am completely invested in this character and the problems of her life. Honestly, I nearly teared up this morning (see, that says something - I HAD to read some this morning to know what happened after I left off reading last night) when I read the part about Joan picking up and cuddling the doll her mother (who is now dead) made for her. My heart just aches for this poor young girl who is working like a slave in a household full of brothers who are not cruel (I guess), but are just uncaring.

Maybe I can convince my daughter to read it....she owes me one, right?

It Was an Interesting Year in Books (Reading Challenge 2105)

What was I doing at midnight, you ask? Popping a bottle of bubbly? Celebrating the end of the old year and welcoming the new with friends? Why, no...I was snuggled in bed, finishing the last few pages of The Shivering Sands by Victoria Holt to cap off my 2015 reading challenge!

I read a whopping 16 books this year, which I suppose I should be ashamed to admit, since it's such a low number. But it was a really interesting set of books, thanks to a couple of reading challenges I decided to take on this year. The first was a Monthly Motif challenge, which I sort of ending up dropping after a couple of months because I had become more interested in Book Riot's "Read Harder" challenge. The idea of the challenge was to

inspire you to pick up books that represent experiences and places and cultures that might be different from your own. We encourage you to push yourself, to take advantage of this challenge as a way to explore topics or formats or genres that you otherwise wouldn’t try.

I don't know if I was as aggressive in pushing myself as I ought to have been, but I did read some books I definitely would not have read if not for the reading challenge. It was an experience I enjoyed, so much so that I plan to search out the 2016 "Read Harder" challenge and see about incorporating it into my reading plans for this coming year.

In the spirit of that challenge, I'm going to add a new category to my normal list: The Book That Pushed Me. For this category, the book needs to be one that is either not of a genre I normally read, one that is about a culture significantly different from my own, or one that challenges my perspective on things in a significant way. There could be several that meet this criterion for this year, including Looking for Alaska by John Green, which I took as a rather eye-opening look into popular teen culture (if not a realistic portrait of teen culture, at least a portrait of teen culture that is really  popular with teens). Beloved by Toni Morrison challenged me to acknowledge the complete disruption of "normal" life that slavery forced on African-Americans, and Anpao by Jamake Highwater was an interesting compilation of Native American worldview myths. But the winner in this category for 2014 was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, not just because it was an introduction to African culture, language, and mindset, but also because it made me consider the interaction between "foreign" cultures and colonial/"missionary" cultures. (That's a blog post that never got written... :/ It wasn't a very good year for blogging.)

Best Discovery - Strangely enough, the book I most enjoyed this year was Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. That may be in part because it had information about keelboats and steamboats that related directly to the time period in my own novels (another blog post that didn't get written), but I also had forgotten how funny Mark Twain can be. (He also made some racial remarks that would have been fodder for internet censure in today's environment...) I enjoyed the mix between his journalistic descriptions, his social commentary, and his personal stories. The story about the death of his brother in a steamboat explosion was understated but still packed some hefty emotional punch.

Saddest Disappointment - The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. One of my friends absolutely loves this book and has read it multiple times. This is a good example of how individual taste in books is. I couldn't see the appeal. I personally didn't like any of the four sisters enough to get emotionally invested in their story, and I thought Kingsolver dragged the story on way past where it needed to go. (I'm sorry I didn't like your favorite, Pat!)

Biggest Accomplishment - Although I didn't care for it (or maybe because of that...), I thought reading The Poisonwood Bible was my biggest reading accomplishment for the year. It was the longest book I read all year. I did have another big accomplishment during the year--I finished the first draft of my third novel - the whole manuscript was written in one year! If you knew the crazy number of things crammed in to my life, you would understand why I consider that my biggest accomplishment for 2015, ha ha ha!

Books I Thought Wouldn’t Be Much But Were Actually Good -  Honestly,I expected Life on the Mississippi to be dry, nineteenth-century writing that I needed to plow through to get background information for my novels. But I was wrong, really wrong. I actually laughed out loud several times. 

Favorite Historical Fiction - Because I was challenging myself to read outside my normal genre, I didn't read as much historical fiction as I normally do. This year, the only books I read that were strictly historical fiction were Nancy Dane's A Reasonable Doubt (about the Reconstruction period in the South) and The Poisonwood Bible, which comes out on top of another category, mainly because I didn't know anything at all about the history of Congo.

Biggest Reading Failure - One of the categories on the Read Harder challenge was to read a romance novel, so I thought I would make it interesting and read an Amish romance, since they are very popular and would be about another culture I'm not all that familiar with. I chose The Covenant by Beverly Lewis. Normally, I have a three-chapter rule; I make myself read three chapters before I decide not to read a book. Sad to say, I didn't make it that far in this book. During the prologue--the prologue--I decided I can't stand this book. Too much "telling," too many stereotypes. I put it away and moved on to something else, but then I decided maybe I wasn't being fair, so I tried again. This time I got through the first chapter and a half, but my reaction was the same. I can't stand this book. I may force myself to try one more time in the coming year, but ugh.

Favorite Classic - One thing I'm kind of proud of this year is that I read several books that could be considered "classics," such as Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's hard to say, but I guess The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein was my favorite read this year from the books that could be considered "classic." (And now my husband can be happy because I've finally read one of his favorite books!)

Favorite Love Story - I did go on a self-serving detour this summer in which I read both of my own novels, and of course, they were my favorite love stories, but to avoid being self-serving now, I'll say The Shivering Sands by Victoria Holt was my favorite. I'll admit there were plenty of flaws in the story and that the love story wasn't really the main focus of the novel, but it was one of those love stories in which the couple is faced with all sorts of obstacles that you just know they will eventually overcome. I actually thought there was kind of an interesting layer to this novel that I might blog about sometime--I've seen several reviews that talk about Napier as being an "abusive" husband. I wonder, though, if the abuse is in the perspective we as the reader are given on his behavior. But those are musings for another time.

I'm happy to say I don't really have any nominees for the category of Books I Thought Would Be Amazing But Were Only So-So. Although everything on my list probably will be on the Once is Enough (Books I will probably never read again) list, I was well-satisfied with everything I read this year. I do want to acknowledge the books I read that didn't fit any of the categories above, because they are all worthy of reading:

• Mama's Song by Gayle Jennings
• Elements of Deception by Mary Schaffer
• Joyland by Stephen King (I can't believe I actually read a Stephen King book, albeit a very mild one!)
• 100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings

Now I'm off to research the 2016 "Read Harder" challenge. I think I know what the first book on this year's list will be, though--I need to do my first complete read-through of that first draft of my WIP. And my daughter has suggested a book to me, so I might try to read it this weekend before she has to take it back to the school library. Oh, so many books, so little time......

The "Guilty Pleasure," Marlow-Style

This story began when I needed to do a quick consistency check for a couple of characters who are the major players in my third novel. Both characters are introduced in my first novel, His Promise True, so my intention was to simply read the sections which feature those two characters, just to make sure I wasn't giving them personality transplants or anything like that.

At some point, "I'll just read those paragraphs with these characters" became "I'm reading this entire book." It's actually the first time I've read the book as a book, meaning I'm not doing any editing, which is a completely different type of reading. I also hadn't looked at the book at all since it was published in 2013, because I've been putting my scarce time for writing/reading into finishing the second novel and starting the third. So it feels like it was time to visit Maggie and John David again.

I'm pleased to report I haven't been cringing every few pages, wondering why I made the choices I did in the final edit that was published. However, it also hasn't been a completely positive experience, and that's mainly because of the guilt I feel about reading my own book (again) when there are so many good books waiting in the to-be-read list (42 on my Goodreads list alone). It's taken me more than a month to read the book, which is less than 300 pages, and that bothers me too. My only excuse on that front is the past month included finals week and the beginning of blueberry season on the farm, so I'm too tired at night to read more than a couple of pages. Every time I log in to Goodreads, I'm taunted by the fact that my "currently reading" status is blank (because it would just be too weird to publicly announce on a site like Goodreads that I'm reading my own book).

Really, though, I don't know that I should feel so guilty. One of the adages one hears over and over about writing is, "Write what you like to read." That's exactly what I did. What I like are historical books, especially books about pioneers, with a strong, interesting female character whose skin I can slip into for a while and a male love interest who is human, meaning his flaws are real-to-life and not some kind of plot device. I like for these characters to struggle and face obstacles, but to ultimately have a happy ending.

I developed this literary taste as a teen reading Janice Holt Giles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Loula Grace Erdman, Margaret Leighton, and Elizabeth George Speare, among others. It's stayed pretty constant as I've grown to be a middle-ager. The problem is, I'm having trouble finding those kinds of books now. Historical fiction, especially pioneer stories, is just not what agents and publishers are looking for. I guess if I want to read that kind of story, I have to write it myself, ha ha.

I'm going to give myself a little bit of a break this time, and say that His Promise True counts as the "guilty pleasure" book on my book challenge for this year. The problem is....His Promise True leads right in to A Permanent Home...am I allowed TWO guilty pleasures???

(I'm being serious right now - if anyone has suggestions for historical novels that fit the description above, I'd love to check them out. It doesn't even have to be a pioneer story...but I do really want historical more than contemporary.)

A Definite Generation Gap

As promised, I'm reporting back on the Avett Brothers concert from last weekend. But the concert brought up something unexpected, so I'll switch gears in the middle of this post - hope you won't mind.

The concert itself allayed my fears for now. It was actually a very unexpected experience, very different from the first concert I went to in September. The venue was the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, a lovely old building on the National Register of Historic Places (a plaque downstairs said it was completed in 1923). I explored a little before the concert and found a cool fez collection.

The unexpected part was that the concert was general admission seating, no assigned seats, in a big old basketball gym that seats about 4,000 people. What that meant was we were able to sit much closer than we had anticipated, and actually, we were able to walk up and stand with the crowd in front of the stage. When I've been to events with celebrities before, I always joke that the stars were about "an inch tall" (or less) because I have to sit so far back they look tiny. For this concert, I was able to get close enough (I didn't try to get to the front row, though) to see the band members as actual people. I suppose that sounds stupid, but trust me, it's one thing to see their faces on a jumbo-tron (as at the concert in September) and quite another to be able to distinguish facial expressions in person. I didn't quite have the nerve to stay with the crowd in front of the stage for the whole concert; for one thing, I felt I shouldn't just abandon the people I came with, ha ha, and they didn't want to stand up front. If I had been alone, I probably would have stayed in that crowd; it was a nice, polite crowd, united in their enjoyment of the music.

But none of that really has anything to do with what I was so worried about in my last post, that the Brothers are becoming commodified. Or maybe it does, because there were several moments when the concert seemed intimate, like the crowd and the band were sharing something. One of my favorite moments (which also happened to be while I was standing in the crowd up front) was at the end of "At the Beach." Seth ad-libbed several little riffs (the guy has impressive falsetto, btw), and the crowd repeated them back. It became almost like a game, with Seth altering the "words," the rhythm, and the melody like he was trying in a friendly way to trip us up (as I recall, it didn't work). And the final song before the encore, "I and Love and You," was really, really nice. The gestures I feared were "canned" didn't happen in this concert, and once again, the band seemed to be giving full effort into the show. So I'm going to push those worries way into the back of my mind.

The thing that most struck me as something to talk about from this concert didn't actually have anything to do with the band. We made this a family trip to the concert, taking our college-age son and our daughter, who is a high school sophomore. It was the first real rock concert for both of them. Our son disappeared into the crowd in front of the stage and we didn't see him again until the concert was over. Our daughter stayed with us in the seats. Part of that may be because she's only 5-2 and wouldn't have been able to see anything if she had been in the crowd, but she also didn't want to be so close to the other people. Now, don't get me wrong - she enjoyed the concert. When they started in on "Distraction #74," she screamed (in my ear), and she did it again when Seth came to the front with just his guitar for "The Ballad of Love and Hate" (probably her favorite of their songs). But after the concert had been going for about an hour, I came back from standing with the down-front crowd, and saw this:

WHAT??? She was TEXTING during an Avett Brothers concert???? I asked her who she was texting, and she said she was talking to a couple of her friends, one of which is an Avett Brothers fan. She said she was telling them about which songs the band was playing.

At the time, I just shook my head and turned back to the stage to enjoy the music. But later, I got to thinking about it, and I wondered if this is a sign of a huge difference in our generations. For my generation, being AT the concert and participating and singing along and standing in a crowd of like-minded fans is the reason a person pays the price of a ticket. For my daughter's generation, is the experience only real when it is shared on social media? I saw a lot of cellphones aimed at the stage, recording the performance for later playback - or for publishing to YouTube. Now, I'm personally glad for those videos on YouTube, but I do know from years of trying to record my kids' performances in the halftime performances for their high school band that you can't really watch and be in the moment when you are recording something at the same time. Being in the moment - that's the key thing. I've gradually come to see it's more important to be mindful and truly live the moment rather than to only halfway live the moment in a quest to preserve it so I can re-live it later. Lately, I've decided to take a quick snapshot of my kid and then put the camera down and actually watch the performance as it happens in front of me, live.

Maybe my daughter would have been more engaged with the concert if "her people" had been there to share it with her. Or maybe they all would have been live-Tweeting or posting selfies with the stage and the band in the background....is that a bad thing? Maybe that's just their new method of being "in the moment."

For Love or Money?

(I actually started writing this post about a month ago, so please forgive the outdated reference to the time change.)

I feel a little melancholy this morning. One reason may be that it's a gray, misty morning the second day into Daylight Savings Time. But the thing that really seemed to trigger my melancholy was seeing a new email message pop up in my account, one from the Avett Brothers. I joked with myself - "Oh, they are sending me a message!"- though I knew very well it was a message alerting me to a pre-sale for tickets to concerts in my area.

It wasn't until a little later, when I was driving to work in the gray, misty morning that the melancholy really set in, when a sort of melancholy song by the Avett Brothers ("All My Mistakes") came on. And it occurred to me that the band whose music I so love has become a commodity, a brand, sending marketing emails just like Best Buy and Hancock Fabrics.

Now don't get me wrong - I totally understand why it has happened. The music is how these guys make a living and support their families, and I don't begrudge them being able to do that. I also realize that if not for commodification, I would never have discovered these guys and had all the pleasure their music has brought me. So I feel a bit like a hypocrite to even start to analyze their "brand" (but I'm going to do it, anyway, ha ha).

I show a PBS Frontline video called The Merchants of Cool in some of my classes. One of the points made in the video is that popular culture is always on the hunt for something "cool," which generally (to me) seems to come down to something authentic, something that hasn't been packaged by the big companies and sold to us as "cool." The video points out that while a lot of us are satisfied with the "cool" sold to us, sometimes we hunger for real "cool," something that hasn't yet been touched by the finger of corporate America.

The career path of the Avett Brothers could be a case study for an updated version of this video. The band started with two brothers playing acoustic music as a side project to their main gig of being in a rock band. You can't get much more authentic than that - brothers sneaking off to play the music they love, not the music that will "sell." The story gets even better - they met and auditioned their bass player in a parking lot. That was followed by years of building audiences for their music, one concert at a time. They earned a reputation for themselves as having a killer live show, and they put out five studio albums, three live albums, and two EPs on the independent record label Ramseur Records before their album Emotionalism caught the eye (ear?) of mega-producer Rick Rubin. To make a long story shorter, they signed with Rubin and since then have put out three major-label albums.They now play to audiences in the thousands and are one of the top draws at the big music festivals like Bonnaroo. They are going to be musical guests on one of David Letterman's final shows. Their story is the dream for anyone who aspires to be a performer.

Yet, I fear that success has come at a cost. One of the songs from an early Avett Brothers album articulated what some view as the band's mission statement:

They may pay us off in fame
But that is not why we came
And if it compromises truth, then we will go

As far as I can tell, the brothers have tried to stay true to their pledge to present truth as they see it; some of the songs on their last album, like "Good to You" and "Part from Me," are almost painfully honest glimpses into the cost chasing success can take on a relationship. I believe the band also tries to be true to their roots in their live shows. I went to a concert back in September of last year, and the impression that stuck with me is that those guys worked HARD for two and a half hours to entertain the crowd. They sang 27 songs, including five or six encores, and there was no "dead" time or dull "let us catch our breath" moments; they were "on" in every way for the whole show.

And yet....I sense commodification is weaving its fingers around them, insidiously, of course. For a few days after the concert, I had withdrawals (ha ha), so I tried hunting up footage on YouTube (the band has also been very smart in their generous use of online video). As I found concert footage, I began to notice some of the moments from the show I saw live were also reappearing in videos taken at other shows. Seth doing the solo at the end of "Kick Drum Heart" and throwing his arm into the air dramatically following a hard chord. Scott running/skipping around the stage during that same solo and coming up to give Seth a chop-massage on the back while Seth was shredding. A lineup of the band members doing a little waltzing sway to "Down with the Shine."

Why should that bother me? Hey, as a teacher, I have certain little gimmick phrases I use in the lecture on a particular topic semester after semester - if something works, keep it. But I couldn't help feeling a little - I don't know, taken for a ride, maybe? - to find out what I thought was the enthusiasm of the moment in the concert was more like a script. And now I'm getting marketing messages in my email.

I suppose what makes me melancholy is something else from The Merchants of Cool. The narrator makes the point that once marketers find something genuinely "cool," they exploit it, mass-produce it, sell it, until they kill it and it's no longer "cool." Then they move on to the next "cool" thing. One of the Avett Brothers' songs, "Famous Flower of Manhattan," has what I consider the perfect line to describe this:

And people don't ever let you down
Forever find a way to kill whatever life they've found

I guess that's what I'm afraid of - that the merchants of cool will take these brothers and their sincere, honest songs and use them up until nothing real is left and they are just a brand. I've seen it happen to other artists - I used to love Brad Paisley's music, and now I can't stand to listen to his recent stuff because it just seems to be more of the same old "popular" crap that is country music these days. I can't stand it to think that might happen to my precious Brothers.

It's not inevitable, I remind myself. There are artists who have been part of the big music machine and yet stayed true to themselves, and these brothers seem to be pretty grounded. And, darn it, I don't have to be such a rhetorical critic, reading deep meanings into every little thing (ha ha). I'm going tomorrow night to do some more field research - the band is going to be within three hours of home, so I'm bookending this hard year on the job with a concert in September and one in May. I'll see what I can observe, and maybe I'll report back. In the meantime, here's the song that got me started on all this:

When Does Violence Go "Too Far"?

In 25 years of teaching speech, there have been only two speeches that I wish I hadn't heard, not because the speeches were all that bad, but because the subject matter really disturbed me. In both cases, the problem was violence. The first speech was a detailed discussion of different methods of torture throughout history, and the second was a persuasive speech against wearing fur in which the student used a video of small animals being skinned alive because it's easier to skin them when they are struggling. (Still haunts me....) I don't know if I'm hyper-sensitive to violence because I have such an empathetic mind (I think I talked about that in a recent post), but certain types of violence really, really bother me.

I came across a couple of passages of such violence while reading Nancy Dane's latest novel, A Reasonable Doubt, over the weekend. The novel is a continuation of Dane's series about the Civil War in Arkansas; this book picks up the lives of the characters several years later, during the period of Reconstruction. It's a violent period of time. Government is corrupt, especially local government, and tempers flare over injustice. Local officials are murdered in both Johnson County (the setting for the story) and Pope County (the neighboring county). Ms. Dane does meticulous research for her novels, so I'm sure these murders happened, along with the popular designation of "bloody Clarksville" for the town in the novel. The defeated former Confederate soldiers are frustrated in their efforts to have any measure of control in politics or business, and frequently, that frustration boils to the surface in violence of some kind - whether it is simply threatening someone or actually shooting and killing someone.

But there were two specific acts of violence in the story that disturbed me. (SPOILER ALERT!!!) The first is when two very corrupt officials come out to levy an exorbitant tax on Bill Tanner's (the hero of the story) sawmill operation. Bill is understandably upset, and he attacks one of the officials, knocking him to the ground and beating/kicking him. (I hope I have those details right; I've loaned my copy of the novel to a friend who is reading them aloud to her husband.) The other official pulls out a derringer and grazes Bill's arm. What comes next is the part that bothers me. Bill grabs the official, pulls him over to the fire, and brands him with the poker. Then, for good measure, he also brands the other official (the one he had beaten/kicked before - named Harvey, for later reference).

The second incident comes at the end of the book. Abigail (Bill's love interest) is being threatened by Harvey, who also claims to have kidnapped her son. Harvey wants Bill's stash of money from the sawmill business, and it's clear he is a pretty nasty character who will do whatever it takes to get the money. After a bit of a chase scene, Abigail and Harvey end up by the chopping block, where Abigail grabs the axe and disables Harvey with a couple of chops to his arm and leg. He's not really a threat to her at that point, but Abigail raises the axe again, and as Harvey is pleading for his life, sinks it into his skull.

OK. Both of those acts are pretty high on the "bother me" scale, I guess because the victim of the violence is suffering and pleading. But what really bothered me, more than the violence itself, was the attitude of the characters toward committing the violence. Keep in mind that the two characters who did the branding (Bill) and the skull-smashing (Abigail) are the protagonists of the story. Those acts are pretty despicable things for protagonists to have done, even to nasty antagonists. When I read the scene about the branding, I expected Bill to be somewhat remorseful after the fact, realizing that his temper and his frustration got the best of him and that he needed to listen to his better nature and keep his violent tendencies in check. But that's not what happened. Instead, Bill tells Abigail he should have killed Harvey instead of simply branding him. Bill's attitude is that the best way to deal with a problem like Harvey is the "final solution" - to eliminate the problem by ensuring Harvey can never bother him again. At no point does Bill show any remorse. Even when he's on trial for assaulting Harvey, Bill isn't sorry for what he's done, only that he may have to go to jail for what he's done. In Dane's earlier novels, I liked Bill. I don't think I like him very much anymore.

Bill's attitude rubs off on Abigail. When she witnesses the branding incident from the kitchen window, she is appalled and for some time resists her growing attraction to Bill. How can she love a man who is so readily and easily so violent? But when her own "moment of truth" comes and she's standing over a wounded man who is pleading for his life, she adopts Bill's solution to the problem - she brings the axe down so Harvey will no longer be a threat.

Sure, Harvey is a nasty character who kidnapped and threatened Abigail and her son and who was trying to steal Bill's hard-earned money. Did he deserve what he got? Maybe. Probably. But I just find it hard to relate to protagonists who choose to view and dispense violence as the best solution to their problems.