Deborah Landau and the Trouble With Silence

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Seventeen
Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

I love a poem like midnight Brooklyn blues, following strange frenetic languages down unmarked streets, ordering off menus we cannot read. Meaning peeks between lines, bold but never loud, announcing transcendence in lacunae between heartbeats. Deborah Landau plays English like Gypsy violins, drawing profundities from moments that first seem like collisions. Only when we hear the completed tune do we recognize her full and resonant music.

In dark midwinter, Landau’s narrators battle crushing urban ennui, struggling to reconcile fragile self-figurations with New York’s harsh realities. Her voices, multiple, bounce off one another, forming a veritable Greek chorus of Gothamite despondency, the white noise of eight million voices wondering. Why am I alone, they ask. Who am I without you. What gives me hope that tomorrow will outshine my long straight line of yesterdays.

Landau’s long, cyclic, interlinking poems form cycles that propel themes across different voices, different forms, different cityscapes. Thus she only offers four very long poems in this book—or maybe fifty-three short, untitled poems—maybe many poems, only four titles. It gets very meta. Themes build across several pages, drawing in allusions, thickets of knowledge, winks at moments of shared recognition:

In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.
The day was going toward the narrow place the blank.
No matter how many glasses of gin
it will get dark on this platform of earth.
When with your milk and fruit
when with your wine
when with your little mirror and your book
you sit tableside in the candlelit clearing
when with your warm breath
are you sick
are you all done flirting
have you lost your appetites
no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.

With verse like this we cannot seek the story. We cannot long for through-lines and marching dogmatic chronicles. Landau instead urges us to immerse ourselves, align our rhythms with the questing voices in her poems. Like Philip Glass, she doesn’t thrust obvious themes at her audience; instead, we listen for the patterns. She trusts us enough to let us find the message, rather than demanding, schoolteacher-ish, the correct answer.

This means sometimes her poetic voice declares absolutely something untrue or beyond proof. She tells us the answer and waits for the question. (And it usually feels like “she”—though we shouldn’t mistake the plural threads entwining these verses for Landau herself, her language has a preponderantly feminine lilt.) Even when she says something seemingly true, Landau’s persona invites us to share with her the experience of doubt:

the trouble with silence
is the high square room
hymnless and the window
opening on a blank
the trouble with silence is creation
farewell the glistening mouth
the trouble with silence
oh mother
the trouble
the harmless pleasures
and the ones that come to harm
in the fields
in the central city
the trouble with silence
is none ever was

Though Landau writes a deeply introspective tenor, caroming among dozens, the specific urban landscape shines through. She populates her verse with snow-blanked parks, mumbling thirsty streets, bedtime incandescence keeping the struggling soul from blissful sleep. Reading Landau, one tastes the soot and hears boot leather on pavement. No otherworldly vagueness here: Landau writes about specific people in specific places.

Landau primarily writes free verse, the common coin of modern poetry. Not that she’s averse to formalism, though she seldom adopts schoolbook forms just because somebody thinks she should. More like, she invents forms (which include little rhyme, and that only indirectly) as she needs them, to reflect the voices striving to emerge from her work. She seems especially fond of couplets, perhaps reflecting the dual nature of herself as observing poet and observed voice:

I am writing this to do as right as possible by Richard
think back to the bed consider the bar

the fragrant medicinal flasks
I don’t care to drink anymore because when I drink

it makes me hopeless
Richard, are you going to come back

to the bar where you belong
or just leave me here

here is a flask
I’m tired of being metaphysical

Schoolteachers love to ask: who knows what the author is saying here? But Landau doesn’t “say” anything, not in the way English teachers mean. Her poetry is more of an invitation. She invites us to join her on a complex journey, one without any single destination. She invites us to join her getting lost in streets that reveal their secrets only to the attentive. She invites us to simply listen.

Christian Leadership in an Authoritarian World

James C. Galvin, I've Got Your Back: Biblical Principles for Leading and Following Well

American society has a leadership fetish. Schools, business books, and seminars offer to instill “leadership qualities.” Employers claim to want “natural leaders.” With so much leadership, why isn’t anything getting done? James Galvin suggests that we need to reclaim “leadership” from the business gurus and return to an older model. Unfortunately, I like his ideas much more than his approach.

Galvin takes a two-part teaching tack. In the first part, four college graduates facing abusive leadership work with a mentor. They explore what it means for Christians to live under worldly authority. Must they passively submit to every leader, as many scriptural interpretations suggest? Not so, their mentor replies; by becoming more astute followers, they prepare themselves for eventual leadership roles.

In the second, Galvin translates his narrative “parable” into a theologically based treatise on Christian leadership and followership. He expounds on how leaders abuse followers, and how “follower abuse” arises in modern technological society. His thesis in brief is that everyone follows someone, and that skillful followers make the best leaders. He underpins this with a mix of business acumen and scriptural foundation.

Galvin differs from other business consultants through his emphasis on narrative. Nearly three-quarters of this slim book (barely 200 pages) is a “parable,” a novella of characters similar to his intended audience learning the lessons Galvin hopes readers will take away. This emphasis makes sense. Many youth starting their careers are bombarded by talky academic advice; simply telling them a story probably reaches them more effectively.

Supposed gurus like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer present a very I-oriented world, where self-aggrandizement is our highest goal, and we achieve leadership to unlock our own potential. Galvin would rather have us lead for something. Whether to build our organization, improve our community, or serve God, Galvin presents leadership as a tool with a purpose. This makes a hearty antidote to today’s self-seeking culture.

This book suffers because Galvin uses characters to prove points; their challenges are circumscribed by Galvin’s message, their triumphs pat and weirdly concise. His characters don’t so much speak as discourse at one another. Galvin’s discursive passages run long, while his narrative examples run short. Characters spend entire chapters conferencing in the abstract, but their applications mostly run less than one page per character per chapter.

Not that Galvin says anything wrong. His spiritual take on individual roles and collective authority resonate with anyone who wonders what it means to be spiritual in today’s authoritarian world. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Obery Hendricks have written sagaciously on this topic. Galvin probably has a leg up on these more scholarly writers, in that he writes in plain English, not seminarian academese.

Unfortunately, Galvin isn’t an experienced storyteller. Not only do his characters speak in oddly complete paragraphs, explaining the author’s point in prose rather than dialog; he forgets important conventions of narrative. Characters hold forth in exceptionally well-developed peroration, tagged at the very end with “he said.” Galvin drops quotation marks and dialog attributions, forcing us to reread passages to understand what just happened.

Then, following his novella, Galvin restates his message in essay form. He reiterates everything we just read four students and their mentor discussing, sometimes verbatim. If Galvin could declare his points more briefly, in prose form, he should do so. This would free more page space for his characters to have nuanced encounters with leaders and followers, living out his principles in detail.

Jesus used parables to teach important spiritual lessons, which inspires Galvin’s narrative approach. But consider how Jesus told parables. He kept very short; even longer parables, like Lazarus and Dives, run only a few paragraphs. He focused on action and dialog, only explaining after he was done. When he needed to deliver a sermon, he delivered a sermon, not blurring the distinction between forms.

If Galvin delivered his essay portions as essays, then spent more time and detail on how his four students experience his principles, this would not only streamline his narrative. It would also allow readers, bombarded as we are today by self-appointed gurus, to see Galvin’s principles lived in real-seeming environments, not the friction-free neverlands self-help gurus apparently occupy.

Galvin makes solid points and backs them with robust evidence. Well done, James. But throughout the reading, his technique intruded on my learning experience. I wanted to like his ideas, but he never permitted me to do so. If he stopped talking about his principles, and showed us how they work, he would have had a more powerful book.

Sacred Vows to a Secular State

President Barack Obama

After NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed America’s unprecedented digital data mining operations last week, predictable accusations took flight. Congressman John Boehner and Senator Dianne Feinstein, hardly ideological coevals, both called Snowden a “traitor,” a world hardly supported by the constitutional definition of treason. But one particular expression has gained traction that reveals frightening assumptions under current national policy.

Pundits as diverse as Karen Finney and John Stossel have accused Snowden, who enjoyed top secret clearance, as having violated “sacred vows” to the government. Recycling the same language previously targeted at whistleblower Bradley Manning, who had similar clearance and identical moral qualms. These attitudes, and the legal bloodlust that have followed both whistleblowers, arise from an explicitly religious figuration of the American government.

Citizens taking oaths in America are required to take those vows on some sacred text. Even laying aside the question of religious affiliation, there is reliable evidence that correlating honesty with faith has measurable effect even on unbelievers. The controversy surrounding Representative Keith Ellison taking his oath of office on a Koran demonstrates how important the idea of vows having some external backing transcends sectarian differences.

But this is a far cry from saying that the government itself has religious import, or correlating whistleblowing with apostasy. Snowden and Manning both caught the government engaged in activity that was, at the very least, unethical, unseemly, and anti-democratic. Trying to bury these tipsters in quasi-liturgical language only compounds the transgression. Because even if America is a Christian nation (which this Christian doubts), the state is not God.

Edward Snowden

American society has grown accustomed to use of religious language in public life. We accept the blurry line between knowing when to stand or kneel in church, and knowing when to salute the flag or rise for the national anthem. And for good reason: while faith addresses relationships with God, religion addresses relationships with each other. Governmental pseudo-religion binds the community together. But official religious trappings do not make the state God.

The American military’s oath of enlistment requires soldiers to affirm “that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.... So help me God.” But even this oath has limits. History teaches that “just following orders” is not a legal defense. Enlisted soldiers under command have a legal requirement to refuse unlawful or unethical orders. God’s help does not cover malfeasance.

Consider the most common “sacred vows” citizens engage. Married couples enjoy certain legal privileges, particularly that citizens cannot be compelled to testify against their spouses, and spousal communications share the protected confidence of medical or clerical confessions. But this protection is not absolute. If your spouse commits a crime and you don’t report it, you’re an accessory. If your spouse intends to commit a crime, you’re legally required to prevent it.

Speaking of clerical confessions, many people, even priests, misunderstand what confessional confidence protects. If I approach my priest with a penitent heart, and confess my sins, intending to reconcile with God and abandon my wrongdoing, my confession is absolutely protected. If I approach my priest unrepentantly, declaring crimes in progress and my intention to continue, my confession has no protection. My priest is permitted, even obligated, to warn the law.

If this holds for spouses or parishioners, how much more so for governments. Straying husbands and struggling sinners may do painful damage to those they love, surely. But few individuals have the power to order drone strikes with little to no legal review. Your spouse doesn’t have a fleet of stealth bombers capable of dropping thermonuclear payloads. Citizens must hold governments to account simply because governments are so damn big.

Bradley Manning

Requiring citizens to shield crime behind “sacred vows” stinks of the hypocrisy that plagues the Catholic Church’s sex scandals. The Church uses its simple physical mass and holy purpose to squelch ordinary believers when they protest injustice. But the church cannot claim holiness while nurturing venality, as recent outrage has affirmed. The Church, like the government, must uphold its own ideals if it expects its vows to mean anything.

Nearly 3000 years ago, Samuel prophesied that any human king would inevitably demand the deference due only to God. In 1914, sociologist Émile Durkheim, an unbeliever himself, wrote that, as faith became increasingly distant from technological society, governments would accrue the forms of liturgy and holiness to themselves. With the pushback to today’s political scandals, we see both warnings come true. The final payout cannot advance free society.

War is Hell On Other Planets, Too

Jason Sheehan, A Private Little War

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War used space opera conventions to explore Haldeman’s Vietnam experience. Not only did the heroes cross measureless space to face an enemy they hadn’t seen; when they returned to Earth, the effects of relativity meant they returned to a world that had advanced centuries while they hadn’t aged. Its classic symbolism unpacked the implications of a war the combatants couldn’t understand.

I couldn’t help remembering Haldeman’s 1974 classic while reading Jason Sheehan’s debut novel, because Shehan does nothing, I mean nothing, that says this book needs to be science fiction. Sheehan serves a slumgullion of images salvaged from better-known authors: you’ll recognize Ernest Hemingway, Richard Hooker, and Tim O’Brien among others. He’s just leavened his blatant rip-off with Depression-era pulp sci-fi images, who knows why.

On distant Iaxo, Commander Ted Prinzi and Captain Kevin Carter are officers for Flyboy, Inc., a contract air force. They fly raids for the human government, which wants to seize swaths of land for human development. They hope to accomplish this by turning one group of indigs (natives) against another. But the mud-dwelling indigs refuse to die. So to cover its losses, Flyboy washes its hands of its pilots just as scrutiny turns to outrage.

I get Sheehan’s intent here. Blind kittens probably get Sheehan’s intent. His blatant parallels with America’s use of private proxies in foreign theatres (we’re looking at you, Blackwater) is admittedly timely as Barack Obama, the Drone Ranger, has unified left and right in outrage. The image of humans as alien invaders conveys Sheehan’s point appropriately; never mind that SG Redling did it better barely a month ago.

Sheehan says “Iaxo was a war without cliché.” Baloney. Start with the airplanes themselves: Captain Carter and his Flyboy pilots somehow fly alien skies in planes that would make sense over Verdun. Carter himself flies a Sopwith Camel, just like Snoopy. His men fly Fokkers and Junkers. Seriously. Biplanes with open cockpits. Sheehan attempts an explanation about public scrutiny and plausible deniability, which confuses more than it clarifies.

Carter and Prinzi march listlessly through the kinds of scenes readers recognize from other books. Sheehan’s story isn’t necessarily anti-war so much as anti-banality. Despite some long descriptions of combat missions, Sheehan, like Joseph Heller, spends his greatest time on the long, dispiriting spells between actions, and the ways pilots stave off boredom. His description of recreational strafing runs feels exactly like a key scene from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

Sadly, neither Carter nor Prinzi are as interesting as Yossarian or Private Joker. Their actions are so repetitive, so non-dimensional, they belong in a Sgt. Bilko episode, minus the humor. They confront every setback—corporate micromanagement, indig insurgency, combat death—with the same mix of Patton-esque cynicism and stony resolve. Even when Carter’s big secret explodes at the novel’s midpoint, his reaction never varies. These men desperately, fiercely need a beer.

War feels like something that happens to these characters, not something in which they participate. They don’t even show ambition enough for passive aggression. This slow, joyless novel desperately needs a Hawkeye Pierce to call bullshit. Without such initiative, the characters fail to give their story direction; it becomes a novel about passive people failing to pilot their own lives. Maybe that’s Sheehan’s point, but at 480 pages, ermahgerd, that’s long.

And again, why is it science fiction? The science, technology, and alien landscape have no impact on the story or characters. Despite its Iraq War trappings, Sheehan blends images from nearly every American war for the last 200 years. Joe Haldeman used sci-fi to examine war from new, amended angles. If Sheehan had set the story in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, it would make as much sense.

Sheehan wouldn’t need to serve in war, as Haldeman, O’Brien, and Heller all did, to write this book. Stephen Crane and Pat Barker didn’t serve. But they spoke with veterans, studied history, and verified their stories. Sheehan apparently memorized images and scenes from other books, reassembling them into a mess that broadly resembles every wartime book you’ve ever read. It doesn’t feel so much familiar as tired.

To imagine the experience of reading this book, remember every novel about cynical wartime banality you’ve ever read. Remember Catch-22, MASH, The Things They Carried, A Farewell to Arms. Now throw them in a blender with Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates, and spread the resulting jam across nearly 500 pages. It’s about that flavorless, and those 500 pages feel a lot longer.

Privacy For the Highest Bidder

President Barack Obama

The Obama administration has received much-deserved criticism for recent revelations of its data mining from Americans’ phone, internet, and other digital records. Americans expect a democratically elected government to show its people sufficient deference that it won’t seize their business transaction records without solid, demonstrable need. Obama, however, evidently believes himself so above reproach, he makes George W. look submissive and subtle.

“Privacy” has become the watchword for the digital generation. We cower in fear of “identity theft,” and demand that government and industry keep their noses out of our business. But such demands ring hollow considering how thoroughly we’ve surrendered our privacy to for-profit businesses, especially social media and digital retailers. Ideas, principles, and preferences we once shared only with our closest confidants now get broadcast digitally for nigh-universal consumption.

We must abandon the conceit that Google, Verizon, and other digital platforms are philanthropic charities. These companies exist to sell ads, create a sense of want you didn’t previously share, and direct your attention to some purchase to supposedly bandage your bleeding soul. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has faced criticism for submarining status updates that transgress his political views. As Frank Schaeffer puts it succinctly: “the big tech companies aren’t run by nice people.”

According to Sasha Issenberg, massive databases store your every transaction—every Bing search, YouTube subscription, Amazon purchase, or Facebook like. Every time you Google porn while logged into YouTube, it creates a digital footprint. Plus-one this essay, and it’ll go on your record. Your credit score, buying habits, any transaction that leaves a record, goes in these databases. This information gets collated, tranched, packaged, and auctioned in absolute secret.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Entrepreneurs built these databases to calculate your receptivity to specific ads, and ensure those ads go only to audiences likely to buy. Thus, if you “like” the TV show Defiance on Facebook, say, ads for the Defiance online RPG start intruding on unrelated websites. No longer must advertisers chunk thirty-second spots into the TV ether and pray for rain. They can assure one-to-one correlation between ad and audience, streamlining the money flow.

Once exclusive domain of for-profit business, political parties discovered these databases during the Bush administration. If you’ve felt, in recent election cycles, that direct mailings and phone calls spotlight your personal hot buttons with eerie specificity, you aren’t wrong. Purchase anything on plastic, or log onto any site that has your real name, or pay your church tithe by check, and parties can purchase such records of your interests and beliefs.

Nothing separates advertisers’ and political parties’ daily doings from Obama’s scandals, except that the administration didn’t pay for it. The administration only wants information you’ve already surrendered freely, from corporations that, if they didn’t give it to the government, would sell it at substantial mark-up. And if, like me, you get twitchy when you can’t check your Facebook feed or blog stats regularly, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

As Jonathan Franzen notes, “privacy” is an emotional resonance, not a principle. Before the Internet, you did business locally, where neighbors knew which plain-brown-wrapper magazines you bought, and when you bought drinks for somebody who wasn’t your spouse. Privacy, in the sense of keeping secrets from people who have the ability to judge your actions and hold you to account, is at an all-time high.

If digital privacy truly merits such public umbrage, we might ask whether our own actions haven’t created the vulnerability we now regret. Our modern digital conveniences make life temporarily simpler, but we’ve turned our lives into marketable commodities, over which we have no commercial control. To halt the state’s drift into information autocracy, let’s start by not giving our information to corporations who don’t have our best interests at heart.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos

Arguably, giving the administration information we’ve already surrendered may be better than leaving it to corporations. House Democrats face re-election in seventeen months, giving them a drop-dead deadline to hold President Obama accountable. Corporate CEOs have no small-d democratic safeguards over their terms, turning corporate autocrats like Mark Zuckerberg into the honey badger of modern capitalism: Zuckerberg don’t care. Zuckerberg don’t give a shit.

Don’t take me wrong. The administration’s apparent principle of treating citizens collectively as implicit terrorist suspects makes my skin crawl. Their approach besmirches the high-minded principles that got Obama re-elected seven months ago. But we citizens together have created the environment in which this administration operates. And if we really care enough to find this behavior offensive, let’s care enough to take our information back.

Selected Sources:

• Frank Schaeffer, Google, Microsoft and Facebook Are More of a Threat to Privacy Than the US Government
• Jonathan Franzen, "Imperial Bedroom," from How to Be Alone: Essays
• Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns