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A LINE ETCHED IN STONE

The Warring Camps of Modern Literary Culture—and A Way To Tell Who’s Who

By Jim Broderick

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For decades—perhaps even centuries—lovers of literature have been separated into various warring camps. These include (but are not limited to) traditionalists vs. modernists; anglophiles vs. internationalists; genre lovers vs. genre-crossers; sentimentalists vs. ironists; narrativists vs. non-linear-ists; and even hardbacks vs. paperbacks. And, of course, the list could go on and on. Every few years brings a new movement, and its shiniest proponent, and of course a countervailing backlash against that movement (e.g., consider the current imbroglio for and against memoir-as-only-marginally-truthful representation).

But I’ve got a new bellwether that I’m going to start using to divide all the literary-minded people I know. From now on, when I’m at a cocktail party, academic seminar, doctor’s waiting room, or in line at the Dunkin’ Donuts, I’m going to start asking people the question that will, for me, supercede all other literary sensibilities and barometers of taste:
So what do you think of Dow Mossman?
Right. That’s the new dividing line in modern literary culture. Try it for yourself. It’s absolutely foolproof. You’ll discover more about those literate people you’ve been hanging out with than in-depth discussion of any dozen Oprah books will reveal. For I’ve determined that it’s absolutely impossible to be neutral about Dow Mossman.

Most likely you’ll get one of three answers. The first (and most common) will be: “I don’t recognize the name.” OK. That’s a fair response, and not cause for dismissive eye-rolling. Most people (myself included) have, until recently, been completely oblivious to the existence of Dow Mossman. Visit Official Site(I discovered his book only after recently watching the documentary film by Mark Moskowitz entitled Stone Reader—a film that engendered a mini-Renaissance of interest in the Cedar Rapids-based Mossman and his lone literary salvo.)

But the real fun begins when you find someone who is familiar with Mossman’s work. Well, “familiar” is too soft for what happens when you encounter Mossman’s magnum opus (OK: his only opus), The Stones of Summer. To have read this work is to undergo something beyond the common experience of reading. Mossman’s words leave an imprint on the mind like a branding iron seers a cattle’s rump. But the bovine metaphor is, upon reflection, too sedate, even though this book takes place mostly in the Middle-American agricultural heartland.

So let’s try a different nature metaphor. You don’t leaf through The Stones of Summer. You are carried through a rushing river of verbal whitewater, wondering if there are large jutting rocks that might harm you (there are; many). You’re not sure if you are having fun flailing about in the torrent—or simply screaming out of anxiety, but you do feel, well, different than you usually do.

But not everybody wants to feel that way. I clicked on Mossman’s book on Amazon.com to read the differing reviews, and that’s when I began to get a taste of how thoroughly un-neutral his readers were. “What a monumental waste of time,” wrote one reviewer. Other reviewers were less kind: “Awful,” “Disturbed,” “Boring,” and “Impenetrable,” were common epithets. One reviewer went so far as to label Mossman a “psychotic” (and further imply that anyone who likes The Stones of Summer shares in that diagnosis).

I haven’t seen anything like this kind of hostility among avid readers toward a work of literature since Thomas Pynchon’s most recent, thoroughly-exhausting novel Against the Day (but it’s harder to come out publicly against Pynchon. The peer pressure to canonize him—and I happen to belong to that church, so I know whereof I speak—is extreme.)

And speaking of extreme, don’t get accidentally wedged in between two lovers of The Stones of Summer, for they’ll crush you with their mutual zeal for the book. Many of the Amazon reviewers claimed without fear of calumny or contradiction that Mossman’s book is the greatest novel ever written. Some reviewers seemed genuinely breathless in their ill-fated quest to articulate the book’s richness. The people who love this book have made it their mission to evangelize in the streets for the hermitic and little-known Mossman.

And both sides are absolutely convinced that the people who disagree with them are crazy. Mossman’s fans think he’s a literary messiah, and they’ll brook no disagreement. His detractors think he’s an undisciplined product of a 60’s-MFA culture that prized weirdness over sense.

Who’s right? Well, as with all matters of artistic taste, there really is no absolute verdict. But if you ask me, one of these two camps has got Mossman perfectly pegged. He is, without doubt, what one of the aforementioned groups says he is.

I’m keeping my opinion to myself, however. If I were to reveal it, half of you reading this would find me grossly misguided, and half of you would want to buy me a drink for having the courage to endorse your opinion. Half’s not bad, but I’m not secure enough to go through life being thought crazy by every other person I meet.

Published: April 7, 2008
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WHAT HISTORY NOTES

A review of ‘Evening in the Palace of Reason:
Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment’ by James R. Gaines

By Jim Broderick

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The more one listens to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and learns of his personal life, the more one feels comfortable embracing an historical hypothetical: Bach would have made one hell of a writer.

Think about it. Bach had all the qualities that attend the best writers of any era: a good ear, a punishing work ethic, an abiding faith in the invisible connection between art and life, and (to borrow William Zinsser’s phrase), an obsessive pride in the smallest details of his craft.

Perhaps that’s why so many writers are themselves drawn to the music of Bach. There are compelling qualities in his music that one can enumerate, from a mathematical construction to an evanescent beauty. But there’s something else—the sense of an artist rising to a challenge, a palpable feeling of someone who is creating because he’s been dared (by man or God) to create. Think of your favorite Bach piece, whatever it is, and try not to imagine the expression on Johann’s face as he inked note after note on his rough-hewn parchment. When I hear Bach I also see him, hunched aggressively over his writing desk with his game face on, daring the fates to provide him with even more complex musical challenges. There’s such a sense of satisfaction and, well, triumph, in Bach’s works, that I can almost imagine him pumping his fist after penning one of the Sarabands from his unaccompanied Cello suites, or the Credo from his magisterial Mass in B-Minor.

That complex nexus of creation, writerliness, and defiance lies at the heart of a book that itself exhibits some measure of those qualities, the informative and entertaining Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines.

Taking as his jumping off point an actual encounter between the ruler of Prussia during the latter part of Bach’s life and the great composer himself, Gaines weaves an historical tapestry that showcases the artistic and political ideology of the time. And though Frederick II ostensibly occupies half the narrative, it is Bach who steals the book. No surprise there. Most people today know little if anything of Frederick the Great, or the once-fearsome Prussian empire. But Bach—like all authentic creators—has remained essential.

And Gaines is no hack himself. A former editor of Newsweek and the Saturday Review, and managing editor of People, Life and Time, Gaines knows a thing or two about creating under pressure. With obvious passion for his subject, and a popular writer’s sense of fun, Gaines brings to life the staid “Old Bach” of music appreciation classes, showing us not a docile Lamb of God but a raging old lion, unable to keep from pushing the boundaries in an art he inherited and then practically exhausted.

To his great credit, Gaines’ narrative never descends into “Dummies Guide”-type generalities about such a complex subject as the satisfactions of musical counterpoint. Yet Gaines is aware that people read nonfiction to learn things, and he’s gratifyingly helpful to the reader in getting one’s arms around the central mystery at the heart of his book, in a language wedded to the spirit of his subject:
The beauty of music, of course, what sets it apart from virtually every other human endeavor, is that it does not need the language of ideas; it requires no explanation and offers none, as much as it may say. Perhaps that is why music coming from a world where the invisible was palpable, where great cosmic forces played their part everywhere and everyday, could so deeply move audiences so far from Bach’s time.
That’s a passage I think Old Bach would have been pleased to write.

Evening in the Palace of Reason is filled with such clear-eyed but impassioned writing, reminding one of the inarticulable qualities of Art (yet mastering the tricky business of articulating them). I don’t know if Gaines pumped his fist when he finished writing the book. More likely, he did what I did when I came to the end of this inspiring story: slip in a CD of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and start working on my next writing assignment.

Published: May 15, 2007
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