The Other Boy Who Could Fly

John Leonard Pielmeier, Hook's Tale: Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written By Himself

First, his name isn’t Hook. James Cook, great-grandson of the explorer James Cook, is press-ganged into the Queen’s Navy, aged 14, ending his London childhood and Eton education forever. But rumors of treasure lead to mutiny, and Cook finds himself sailing under the Black Flag. Soon his ship crosses the line into a mysterious land where nobody, not even little boys dressed in tattered leaves, ever grows up.

American author John Leonard Pielmeier is probably best-known for his play, and later film adaptation, Agnes of God. Since that classic, he’s become an in-demand screenwriter, especially for adaptations of heavy, difficult literature. But he admits, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan first awakened his interest in reading, and in his first novel, he returns to Neverland, retelling the story from the forsaken antihero’s perspective.

Cook finds himself orphaned, expelled, and pressed in quick succession. A comforting life of middle-class London innocence surrenders to harsh sailors’ compromises. Under his captain’s Puritanical supervision, Cook toughens his skin, practices his Latin, and conquers his ignorance. Soon he’s a real sailor. Then the mutiny forces him to choose between honesty and survival. And, on a distant Neverland shore, he finds a castaway who remembers Cook’s long-lost father.

If Peter Pan is the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, James Cook is the Boy Who Has Adulthood Thrust Upon Him Violently. There’s a Luke Skywalker quality to Cook’s transition, but he often learns the wrong lessons. He abandons his post to discover more about his father. He nurses petty grudges and pursues vengeance so far, he inadvertently injures himself. He admits lying to achieve his ends—then demands we trust him, not Barrie, to tell the real story.

Peter Pan, meanwhile, proves himself capricious, controlling, and worse. Marooned by his shipmates, Cook meets Peter, and both are overjoyed to finally make friends their own age. But Cook doesn’t want to stay fourteen forever. He faces a monster so terrible, even Peter can’t stomach it, and in so doing, wins Tiger Lily’s heart. Peter, jealous that his friend doesn’t live in the eternal present, murders her. Or so Cook says.

John Leonard Pielmeier

Pielmeier strips Barrie’s Edwardian sensationalism. Cook repeatedly insists he’s no pirate, but an orphan caught in something beyond his control. He’s certainly not Blackbeard’s bo'sun. The Piccaninnies aren’t a stereotyped Plains Indian tribe, they’re a proud Polynesian nation, the Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini. And Neverland isn’t a haven of eternal innocent irresponsibility, it’s a land of Lotus-Eaters where all time gets compressed into Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

Repeatedly, Cook insists he’s no villain. Yet he’s exactly that, if accidentally: everywhere he goes, his presence disrupts the balance. Gentleman Starkey initiates the mutiny because he finds Cook’s treasure map. Peter and the Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini live in peaceful rapport until Cook interrupts their religious ceremony, breaks Tiger Lily’s prior engagement, and leaves Peter friendless. He even accidentally hastens the Wendy Darling’s kidnapping.

Critics have seen, in Barrie’s Peter Pan, an enactment of the Oedipal conflict, as Peter battles the piratical father-figure and must choose between three ideals of womanhood. I see, in Pielmeier’s Cook, a dark mirror of Campbell’s Heroic Journey metaphor. Pielmeier hits every marker: the Call to Adventure, the Threshold, the Road of Trials, the Temptress, even the Return. But unlike Campbell’s hero, at every opportunity, Cook makes the wrong choice.

Cook insists he’s innocent. But everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of broken souls and dead bodies. He insists upon his own honesty, and gives a detailed accounting of his actions, while he admits lying to achieve selfish ends. Though book-smart and crafty, he lacks wisdom, perhaps because his lifetime’s experiences don’t match his bodily appearance. Thus, instead of achieving enlightenment, he becomes driven by vengeance and rage.

Maria Tatar writes, of Barrie’s original play and novel, that the dominant theme is futility. The Lost Boys, Piccaninnies, and pirates pursue one another in a permanent clockwise pattern around the island, perpetually enacting time, though they never age. Pielmeier disrupts that: Cook enters a magic archipelago where time means nothing, but instead he brings change. He brings mortality into a land without age. But he never understands this.

Pielmeier isn’t the first author to rewrite Hook’s backstory. Besides Barrie himself, recent entries have included J.V. Hart, Christina Henry, and Dave Barry. However, I particularly like Pielmeier’s psychological depth and emotional complexity. Pielmeier’s Cook is a master schemer, but also a master of self-deception. He successfully complicates Barrie’s original story, but only at great cost to himself, which he clearly hasn’t begun to understand.

A Goddess's Guide to Folk Rock Stardom

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Seven
Ani DiFranco, Living In Clip

Ani DiFranco gained attention for her DIY music ethos in the 1990s, as probably the most successful musician to found her own label and release her own albums. That’s how I first encountered her. In the final fifteen years when record sales still mattered, her ability to control her own sound, marketing, and image control made her legendary. Frequently, this forward-thinking creative control overshadowed how profound her music actually was.

This recording showcases DiFranco’s uncompromising musicianship. Recorded over the previous two years, these songs display a performer notorious for her assertion that she lived to play before a live audience. Her ability to respond to audience energy, and the audience’s willingness to answer her cues, show a reciprocal relationship between both sides of the divide. Her intensely autobiographical lyrics clearly touch listeners through their immediate intimacy.

Though famous for her entrepreneurial ethic, DiFranco’s music was equally ambitious, a mix of acoustic austerity with indie rock drive. Though she never got much radio play, lacking connections to distribute payola, occasional songs like “32 Flavors” or “Untouchable Face” got airplay from radio programmers rebelling against the then-nascent ClearChannel monopolism. Her independence apparently rubbed off on gung-ho individualists, college students, and other freethinkers.

She certainly conveys this independence in her live recordings. Though self-identified as a folksinger (and in frequent rotation of venues like FolkAlley.com), her style combines folk introspection with punk clarity. She drives her own sound with just her voice and guitar, backed mostly by a rhythm section. She doesn’t invest in ornamentation or ensemble complexity—with exceptions, as she does front the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra on two tracks.

Ani DiFranco

But mostly, she carries her own weight onstage. She plays with a modified clawhammer strum, the same basic style used by Bob Dylan and John Lennon. (In interviews around this time, she described teaching herself guitar with a Beatles songbook.) Her evident love of playing comes across when she doesn’t stop strumming during stage banter. And banter she does: she uses a Lenny Bruce-style conversational rapport to establish, and respond to, her audience’s desires.

Despite her acoustic folk roots, DiFranco shows herself comfortable with innovation. Tracks like “Not So Soft” or “The Slant” utilize a hip-hop recitative style which punctuates her lyrical urgency. On other tracks, like “Sorry I Am” or “Fire Door,” she allows her sound operator to loop her vocals, permitting her to harmonize with herself, in a style other acoustic artists wouldn’t embrace for a decade after this album’s release.

DiFranco has often been the most vocal and strenuous critic of her own studio recordings, describing them as “sterile” or worse, despite serving as her own producer and arranger. This is often unfair, as anyone who’s heard albums like 1996’s Dilate can attest; she’s a masterful stylist who uses studio effects without overusing them. However, even her best studio recordings do have a certain lack of immediacy about them.

Not so this recording. Her mostly acoustic performances, with session drummer Andy Stochansky and bassist Sara Lee, showcase her power as a live performer. In an essay reprinted in the Utne Reader in 2002, DiFranco admitted she mostly made albums to publicize her live tours, largely the opposite of the then-accepted music business standard. She invested studio time to justify her passion for playing before a live audience.

Despite her personal lyrics, her writing is often intensely political too. DiFranco, an admitted pansexual agnostic, adopted opinions too liberal even for most mainline progressives back then, embracing her sexual inclusivity on songs like “Adam and Eve,” and confessing gender-based personal traumas with “Letter to a John” and “Tiptoe.” She was too aggressive even for most feminists: at her 1990s peak, she declined Lilith Fair, though she could’ve headlined, calling it too timid.
This landmark album pushed DiFranco into mainstream consciousness, drawing listeners’ attention to her muscular, unapologetic live performances. She dared audiences to join her introspective journey, and that largely self-selecting audience followed. Her mainstream acceptance followed, including larger venues and ten Grammy nominations in ten years. Though never a superstar, this album ushered in DiFranco’s moment of greatest artistic and commercial triumph.

DiFranco’s particular stretch of the 1990s produced several iconic women singer-songwriters, from fresh-faced ingenues like Fiona Apple to seasoned geniuses like Tori Amos. Like them, DiFranco saw her commercial star marginalized by the artistically anodyne stylings of the middle 2000s, and she’s returned to headlining the specialized circuit she once loved. She’s probably better for it. These pre-fame recordings display an artist most comfortable with intimacy and vision.

Dollar Store Jesus

Mitch Kruse with D.J. Williams, Street Smarts From Proverbs: How to Navigate Through Conflict to Community

The other day I reviewed a business book that had an underlying moral message. This time, it goes the other way: I have a Christian book that’s essentially an encomium to capitalism. And I have the same basic responses to both: they’re okay, provided you don’t push either to their logical extremes. Tempered with moderation and accountability, either could be uplifting and game-changing; unmoored from community, either could lead to self-sanctification and arrogance.

Reverend Mitch Kruse paid for his seminary education through proceeds from selling his Internet start-up to eBay. This duality, the transition from capitalist self-marketing to Christian humility, inflects this, his second book. He has a biblically solid exegesis, based on a fairly consistent conservative evangelical read of Proverbs and, to a lesser degree, other Scripture. But the emphasis is very first person singular. It’s about I, me, my relationship with God… which isn’t what Proverbs is about.

Kruse believes monthly rereadings of Proverbs will instruct open students in judgement, discretion, and restraint. This, for Kruse, makes a working definition of “wisdom,” a form of thinking in which faithful believers sublimate their human reason to God’s will. Because Proverbs has thirty-one chapters, reading one per day will increase opportunities for learning and self-correction. Through repetition, devoted readers will acquire the habits of right thinking and self-control which Proverbs makes available to open minds.

Pursuing this goal, Kruse is a master maker of lists and other mnemonic devices. The largest part of this book delves into what Kruse calls the Twelve Words, important themes which recur in Proverbs and define its overarching goal, Wisdom. These include Righteousness, Justice, Discipline, and Learning— words which mean something different in Biblical contexts than in conversational English. Kruse defines these terms using a mix of scholarship and anecdote, in the classic sermonist style.

My problem isn’t Kruse’s writing. He hews to a familiar homiletic style which I assume Christian writers must learn in seminary, because it recurs regularly. I might wish Kruse broke from a mold I find boring in Christian pop nonfiction, because I’ve seen it so often that my eyes skim the page, but that’s my personal problem. Rather, his choice of Proverbs, probably the most first-person-singular book of the Bible, leaves me scratching my head.

Mitch Kruse

Proverbs is part of what Hebrew scholars call Wisdom Literature, four books (seven in the Septuagint, called the Catholic Apocrypha) that differ from other Biblical books. Neither history, like the Torah, nor exhortations of the people, like the Prophets, Wisdom Literature mostly involves gnomic poems and sayings restraint, humility, and godliness. Unlike most Hebrew Scripture, Proverbs isn’t intended for the whole people; it’s specifically for kings or (like the case of Ecclesiastes) sons of kings.

That’s why mainline liturgical churches often avoid Proverbs in pulpit ministry. We can’t agree on how it applies to most believers today. We consider it inspired, and like all scripture, useful for instruction. But to call it controversial is underselling the situation. Kruse often has to perform theological gymnastics to make Proverbs yield the communitarian thesis he promises in his title, an approach that, I’ve noticed, doesn’t much include direct citations from Scripture, including Proverbs.

Thus we’re faced with a Christian book that seldom cites the principal Christian source, a communitarian book about hierarchies, a book about Hebrew Scripture that largely eschews the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Kruse trades primarily in contradictions, which I think even he doesn’t always see. His most recurring theme holds that Christians need to subjugate their will and intellect to God’s, yet h almost entirely emphasizes individual salvation, not what God would have us actually do.

My biggest problem turns on Kruse’s distribution of rewards. His anecdotes generally follow a reliable pattern: a person Kruse knows, or knows about, ventures into willfulness and self-seeking, which ends badly. (He particularly dreads substance abuse.) That person rediscovers God’s purpose, surrenders to divine will, and gets restored. This often ends with some earthly reward: a university degree and a family, lucrative speaking gigs, media stardom. Heavenly salvation, in Kruse’s theology, generally brings earthly rewards.

Kruse never says anything I find altogether wrong. He often shares meaningful, uplifting, theologically sound precepts. But with his emphasis on individual salvation and the journey from poverty to riches, literal or metaphorical, he’s essentially sharing a Christianized Horatio Alger story. Though I often like Kruse’s message, I cannot escape the reality that, throughout, he never stops thinking like a businessman. Christianity is, for Kruse, a transaction, where the faithful hope to make a profit.

The Trouble With “Isms”

John Oliver, the grumpy uncle
of pay-cable comedy

John Oliver, a man who’s described his accent as being like “a chimney sweep being put through a wood chipper,” has made Net Neutrality a personal pet issue. After pushing the issue once during the Obama administration, successfully, he came back to the issue again after President Trump appointed Ajit Pai chair of the FCC. For a polemicist famous for his wide-ranging interests, coming back to any issue is significant for Oliver.

For those unfamiliar with Net Neutrality, the concept is simple. Under current regulations, internet service providers have to make all web content equally available. Whether dialing up, say, an obscure blog by a struggling provincial writer (let’s just say), or the web’s most successful commerce sites, speed and accessibility shouldn’t vary. Service providers shouldn’t charge site owners for faster or more reliable consumer access.

Seems simple enough. I thought I supported the principle undividedly. And when a friend, an outspoken Libertarian who believes everything would improve if all top-level rules vanished tomorrow, claimed that Net Neutrality rules were forms of government micromanagement interfering with a system that worked just fine without bureaucratic interference. Let whomever charge whatever to whoever they want! It’s not government’s place to get involved.

To be clear, I don’t buy the anti-neutrality argument. If service providers could charge content providers for superior access, massive corporate systems like Facebook and Google, which between them control half the online advertising revenue for the entire earth, or mega-commerce sites like Amazon, could afford extortionate rates, while struggling artists and shoestring entrepreneurs would get shunted onto second-string connections and forgotten. That includes my friend, a strictly regional business owner.

Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon controls
half the Internet commerce in the world

(Full disclosure: this blog appears on a platform owned by Google. And my book reviews link to Amazon. I couldn’t afford this service if I had to pay out-of-pocket.)

But thinking about it, I realized: I’m protecting the very big against the very big. And so is my friend. As stated, half of all online ad revenue travels through two corporations and their subsidiaries. Google owns YouTube, Zagat, Picasa, and the Android operating system; Facebook owns Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp. Just for starters. I’m protecting the already massive from paying to get their product onto my computer screen.

Some Google subsidiaries, like Boston Dynamics, actually produce marketable product. But Google mostly sells ads on their search engine—ads that frustratingly often lead customers to something they already wanted to find. They’re already charging small operators, like those artists and entrepreneurs I mentioned, access to get seen by people like me. Same for Facebook: it’s primarily an ad vendor. And if you don’t buy these two companies’ ads, you probably won’t get seen.

So the Net isn’t Neutral right now.

Nearly a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote that, for most citizens, the difference between communism and capitalism is vanishingly small. The only choice is whether we prefer to be ruled by government bureaucrats, or corporate bureaucrats. That’s clearly happening here. On careful consideration, Net Neutrality is essentially protecting the very large corporations, who are imposing their own rules on smaller companies, rules that are proprietary and therefore both invisible and arcane.

So we’re faced with the choice between protectionism, which will ensure Google, Facebook, and to a lesser degree Amazon (which controls half of all Internet commerce) can charge small operators like me to get seen by anybody whatsoever; or Libertarianism, which… um… will make these companies pay Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter Spectrum to continue doing the same thing. On balance, neither choice really protects small operators like me.

G.K. Chesterton thinks your neutrality
rules are sweet and naive

I’ve chosen, at present, not to pay either Facebook or Google for increased visibility on this blog. This means I mainly get seen by people clicking through on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, and my daily hits seldom exceed 100 to 150. (Oh, who owns Twitter? It’s also a corporate umbrella; it just hasn’t grown nearly as fast.) I’ve chosen not to kiss corporate ass, and the price I’ve paid is vanishingly small readership. Sad trombone.

Both “isms” depend on the premise that, if we create the appropriately utopian regulatory system (too big? Too small? Any at all?), information will flow freely. Except we need only open our eyes to realize information isn’t flowing freely. The commercially accessible Internet, as it currently exists, is essentially a joint-stock partnership between Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg. There’s no sweet spot of appropriate regulation on the Internet. Because there’s no freedom for information to move on a platform that isn’t already free.

Business, Ethics, and the Risk of (Self-)Righteousness

Scott Sonenshein, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less—and Achieve More Than You Even Imagined

Professor Scott Sonenshein divides the the business world into two categories: chasers, who pursue more and better resources to do achieve their objectives, and stretchers, who make what they already have perform double duty and prove maximum return. Sonenshein, who teaches management at Rice University, uses language from business and behavioral economics to convey his message. I was shocked, however, to notice how he made a fundamentally moral point.

A popular mindset persists, Sonenshein writes, particularly among business professionals born into the wealthy class, or among people with very narrow, specialized educations. If we had more money, this mindset asserts, or better tools, or more people, or something, we’d crack the success code and become unbelievably successful. If only we acquire something new, we’ll overcome whatever impediment stops us achieving the success waiting below our superficial setbacks.

By contrast, successful businesses like Yuengling beer, Fastenal hardware, and others, practice thrift in resource management, utilizing existing resources in innovative ways, maximizing worker control over business decisions, eschewing frippery, and making the most of everything they own. Sonenshein calls this “frugality,” a word he admits has mixed connotations. But he’s clearly demonstrating familiarity with once-common ethical standards, what economists still call the Protestant work ethic.

Sonenshein doesn’t once cite religion or morality, either implied or explicit. However, when he breaks successful businesses down into bullet point lists of best practices, like “psychological ownership,” “embracing constraints,” “penny pinching,” and “treasure hunting” (to cite the takeaways from just chapter three), the ethical correspondences become rather transparent. Take responsibility for your choices, little Timmy! Work with what you have! Save now for bigger rewards later! Et cetera.

From the beginning, Sonenshein structures this book much like religious sermons. His points are self-contained, backed with pithy illustrations showing real-world applications. He asserts his point, cites his text, backs it with anecdotes, then reasserts his point. The structure appears altogether familiar to anybody versed in homiletics. It persists in religion, and translates into business books like this one, because it holds distractible audiences’ attention long enough to clinch brief points.

Scott Sonenshein

But again, Sonenshein never cites religion. He frequently quotes research from psychology and behavioral economics to demonstrate how scrutiny supports his principles. But if he’s proffering a business gospel, it’s a purely secularized one. Though Sonenshein comes from the same mold as religious capitalists like Norman Vincent Peale, Zig Ziglar, and Og Mandino, he never relies upon revealed religion. Earthly evidence, not God’s law, demonstrates this gospel’s moral truth.

Oops, did I mention Norman Vincent Peale? See, there’s where doubts creep in. I had mostly positive reactions to Sonenshein’s points until I remembered Peale. There’s a direct line between Peale’s forcibly optimistic theology, and Joel Osteen’s self-serving moralism. We could achieve earthly success by aligning our vision with God’s… but often, already successful capitalists have recourse to God to justify their own goodness. I’m rich because I deserve it!

This often leads to retrospective reasoning—what Duncan J. Watts calls “creeping determinism.” In finding already successful operations, then applying his learning heuristic to them, Sonenshein risks missing invisible factors steering his anecdotes. I cannot help recalling Jim Collins, who praised Fannie Mae and Circuit City scant years before they collapsed. In reading Sonenshein’s anecdotes, like hearing Christian sermons, it’s necessary to listen for the sermonizer’s unstated presumptions.

Please don’t mistake me. I generally support Sonenshein’s principles. I’ve reviewed previous business books and found them cheerfully self-abnegating, urging middle managers to sublimate themselves to bureaucratic hierarchies and treat themselves basely. Sonenshein encourages workers to stand upright, own their jobs, and always seek improvement… and he encourages employers to treat workers like free, autonomous partners. Though Sonenshein never embraces an “ism,” he corresponds with my personal Distributism.

I wanted to like Sonenshein’s principles because I generally support his ethics. His belief in thrift, in embracing a mindset of ethical management, and of getting outside oneself, is one I generally applaud, and strive to apply to myself (not always successfully). Though I don’t desire to control a multinational corporation, I wouldn’t mind leveraging my skills into local business success and financial independence. And I’d rather do it ethically.

But like any ethicist, Sonenshein requires readers to police themselves carefully. They must apply these principles moving forward, not looking backward. Financial success often inspires implicit self-righteousness, which business ethics can inadvertently foster. I’ll keep and reread Sonenshein, because I believe he’s well-founded. But I’ll read him with caution, because his framework conceals minefields I’m not sure even he realizes are there.