Connor Coyne

I find that the Wylie “Dummies” books are hit-or-miss; it really depends on the rigor and experience of the individual author and, to a lesser extent, the abstraction of the topic.  Consistent strong points are a layman’s approach to any subject; you really are getting an introduction that doesn’t require a strong background or special knowledge. Weak points to the “Dummies” books include spotty credentials among some authors and an editing process that often seems haphazard or rushed.  Given the abstraction of this subject — the entirety of an American decade — I was reluctant to buy this book. But seeing that it was the one obvious attempt to present the 60s as a whole, from politics to culture, I decided to give it a shot.  I’m glad that I did.

While not perfect, “The ’60s for Dummies” is a thorough, engaging, and well-edited addition to the Dummies series. I’m an armchair history nut, so I was mainly reading to fill in some gaps in my knowledge… I was surprised to find that there were many more than I thought. But the book will be equally useful to those who know the sixties as a vague rumor of tumult from the past, or as a special flicker that lights up in the eyes of our older brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents. Maybe you just like the music of the Beatles or that Motown Sound and you want to learn more about their time in the spotlight.

Central to the book’s success is its ambitious scope; it really takes in a lot of territory. Thematically organized, major sections deal with American politics, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and public reaction, social justice movements, and American culture.  In a book of this length, it isn’t possible to go to great depth on any topic, and yet I was impressed at the thoroughness of the review. Key to this is that the “60s” are treated as a period of change as opposed to a strict decade; this liberated the text to occasionally reach back into the 50s or forward to the 70s as necessary.  For example, the political chapter evokes the McCarthy Era of the 50s in talking about Richard Nixon’s rise to power, and the Vietnam War didn’t resolve until will into the 70s.  Not only does this overall approach mean that a lot of relevant information is efficiently packed into one book, but it really conveys the essence of the 60s without being preachy.  That is, the historical scope of the events of this decade speak for themselves, and the book gives them the space in which to do that.

Just as impressively, the book was well-written and edited. Given the divisiveness of the subject matter (including many issues that continue to divide American society today) it would be easy to lean visibly to the Left or the Right.  While there are moments where there are hints of an authorial bias, for the most part, events are presented in a balanced manner. That is, discretion is used in the choice of topics, but readers will be allowed to draw their own conclusions without feeling forced in a particular direction by the book itself. It focuses strictly on argument, action, and reaction. The text was well edited and proofread, sparing me the distracting typos and awkward sentences that often crop up in Dummies books.

I mentioned that the book wasn’t perfect.  Sometimes, when describing a momentous historical event, a push for dramatic flair disrupts the otherwise even-handed telling. For example, Woodstock is presented as the ideal of a hippie lovefest as opposed to the chaos of Altamont. Certainly, Woodstock has plenty of problems (and even a few tragedies) of its own. Additionally, while there is a sense of balance throughout in discussion the Antiwar movement, for example, or the second wave of women’s lib, there isn’t as thorough an examination of the backlash. It’s easy to see why; the social status quo is something we tend to take for granted, particularly when someone is rebelling against perceived injustice. Yet the attitudes of Nixon’s “silent majority” was an important aspect of the struggle of the 60s, and a closer look at their anxieties, attitudes, and biases would have lent greater depth to the discussion.

These quibbles shouldn’t keep you from buying and reading this book. The 60s were one of the most transformative decades of the last century, and possibly of all of American history.  If you view “The ’60s for Dummies” as an introduction to the subject — not the be-all and end-all — you’ll learn a lot about this fascinating time, and maybe even something about your own place in American history.

I had the opportunity this past week to go to Chicago for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, although I can’t claim I went entirely on the up-and-up.  About a month ago, I found out about the panel Midwest Gothic: Dark Fiction of the Heartland.  I’ve been describing my work as Midwestern Gothic since  2004, so I had to attend. Unfortunately, on the same day, tickets sold out, and since I had mostly hoped to attend that one panel, I didn’t feel too awful about crashing the party.

Other aspects of AWP, however, were open to the public, most significantly their annual book-fair. This is a huge event with hundreds of tables featuring publishers, presses, printers, writers, academic programs, and so forth. I ran into a lot of the writers I’ve met over the years, and was reminded that writing need not be as isolating a career as we often perceive it to be.

But in addition to Midwestern Gothicism and reconnecting with friends, the trip had a higher purpose.  After all, I’ve spent the last fourteen years living in America’s largest cities, but now I’m back in a medium-sized industrial town in mid-Michigan, and I’m still trying to accommodate myself to its artistic ecosystem.  This wasn’t a move that happened under pressure; I welcomed and embraced the change.  And yet I feel that Flint has to soberly assess its cultural status if it is to fully realize its remarkable creative potential. It needs to see advantages clearly, recognize the cost of utilizing them, and activate.

Well, that sounded pretty touchy-feely, didn’t it?   Okay, fine. Here, then, are three more substantial reflections I’ve had in Chicago this week, which I will seek to apply, personally and professionally, in Flint.  I’m sharing them here to give Flint artists some food for thought in their own careers:

FIRST: Without wading deep into the thorny issue of egoism (I personally think that artists without a healthy pride in their own work ought to consider other professions), one advantage that we often attach to populous cities, endowed cities, and organizations with artistic clout is the centrality of connection. That is, our relationships make the whole stronger than the sum of its parts.  But this goes beyond the simple process of trading names and endorsement; it is an aggressively positive dynamic established between active artists, because it involves a mutual assumption of worth and value.

So I put it to myself like this: In Flint, one needs to cheerfully defy the spirit of inertia, despair, apathy, pessimism.  In Flint, each artist needs to be a one-person joy factory, regardless of the work she is creating.

SECOND: As I’ve often argued, all over the country, there is a lot of talent in Flint. This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the city; when the auto-industry dried up, the institutions and foundations who had benefited from industry’s wealth had carefully managed their funds and we now have a multi-generational legacy of education in the arts. This is propagated through funders like the Ruth Mott Foundation, organizations like the Cultural Center, and higher education at Mott, U of M, Kettering, and so forth.  Additionally, as the city has deteriorated, it has drawn on its heritage to produce a wealth of guerrilla or underground art of startling legitimacy, seen in the musical legacy of recent years, in many of the downtown galleries and theater troupes, and so forth.  And yet… there is a temptation to let professional standards slip when one feels he is creating art only for himself. There is a temptation to do create something adequate instead of something exemplary, difficult, well conceived, and crafted, and impeccably executed.  Adequacy does not a vital arts scene make.  Djuna Barnes rarely thanked her benefactors because she felt she deserved the support she received. If we decide to be more polite than she was, we should nevertheless recognize that we are contributing something vital to our community. But by extension, such recognition implies that we are right to expect a lot of ourselves.

So I put it to myself like this: In Flint, don’t “settle.”  Demand more of yourself, and in exchange, demand and take more in terms of recognition.

THIRD: Finally, the debate about “little Flint,” the dying industrial town that is hemorrhaging people and money.  I can be explicit about this one: Flint is a big city, or more precisely, the cultural qualities that are essential and vital to big cities are all present in Flint. We fall into a trap when we confuse tangibles (like statistics) for intangibles like sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and so forth.  They impact each other, yes, but the latter are not quantifiable.  They are, rather, a mindset that responds to local opportunity, and as citizens, we cease to believe in such opportunities in the midst of a city’s collapse.  That a cultural collapse echoes the economic collapse is, however, a narrative sold (by design or accident) by the national media, by the suburbs, by despairing or bitter expats… in short, by those who don’t know firsthand what is happening here right now.

Here are a few useful analogies:

Flint has 102,000 people, but its Metro area has become increasingly diverse as a result of Flint’s exodus, and this larger  population has remained stable at about well over 400,000 people.  Points of comparison: At the height of the Classical period, the city of Athens had a population of 250,000, but only about 30,000 Attican men had civil and political rights. In its might, ancient Rome was bigger — it may have achieved a population of over a million — but by the Early Middle Ages this population of about 30,000, or roughly the size of Burton.  Even during these low-points Rome was still the center of the Catholic Church, and was the coveted prize of numerous empires over the centuries.  And within Michigan today, the Greater Flint area is still larger than Ann Arbor and the Tri-Cities, and is on-par with Lansing.  I am not saying this to put our neighbors down; I am just saying that population is a poor measure of cultural and artistic  productivity.

Now let’s take a look at Flint’s cultural capital and amenities.  In addition to the institutional support and guerrilla clout that I described above, we have their spatial equivalents: excellent facilities and an abundance of unused space. We have a population that is not only diverse, but which has become diverse through a trial by fire through such dark moments as the demolition of the St. John Street Neighborhood and such bright spots as the passing of the first ban on discriminatory housing compacts in a large U.S. city. And on the subject of history, Flint’s is outsized, playing in the big-leagues with giants like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and yes, even Chicago, by one essential equation: the things that have happened here, remembered today, and even happening here right now, have had profound implications for people living across the nation and the entire world.  Now only was Flint powerfully relevant to the larger world, but that relevancy has expanded and grown.

So I put it to myself like this: There is no reason why Flintites cannot embrace a cosmopolitan outlook.  Flintites can and must embrace a cosmopolitan outlook.

Now Is this all idle boosterism?  Deluded imagination?

Maybe someone other than me should post the verdict.

But these observations, made now, when I am living in Flint but having visited in Chicago, after having known Chicago, having known New York, having known successful writers and publishers in the urban engines of our American identity — I believe that these observations reflect a more, not less, objective perspective at our city. Embracing its strengths, and their call to greater passion and rigor in our own work, can only make our creative production more potent, more relevant, better, and livelier.

By extension, I think we need to stop worrying about when or if the damn city’s going to finally die, and invest all our energies in the brilliant things we can achieve with the time it has left.

Penguin’s annotated edition of Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, representing approximately half the entries of the more comprehensive Collected Ghost Stories, is a fitting introduction to one of the most famous British ghost storytellers.  This comes as a bit of a shock when reading the actual stories, however, for their perspective and narrative stylings are almost alien to what you’d find in more contemporary collections, whether these subscribe to the gory cult of horror or the more restrained evocation of suspense.

James’ style is a function of his background as much as of his time.  Prolific during the first two decades of the 20th century, James was first and foremost a medieval scholar, and highly respected at several posts at Cambridge and Eton. James’ medieval research became the foundation for his numerous ghost stories, which he typically shared with family at annual Christmas parties, and which he was eventually persuaded to publish.  While James’ scholarly work was influential at the time, his reputation today is most closely connected to these published tales of the supernatural.

Above, I described the ghost stories as feeling almost “alien,” although this is not the case in terms of subject matter.  Cursed artifacts and bloodlines, ghosts and demons, Satanic ritual, and haunted sites were common tropes of ghost stories long before and after James’ writing; the actual plots of his stories are, if anything, timeless.  It is their perspective, and with it a sort of unexpected rigor, that make these stories most distinctive.

For example, more than 200 years after the early Gothicists outlined a philosophical divide between terror (which withholds unpleasant information) and horror (which revels in its display), most writers of Gothic or horror literature still fall back on one of these two strategies.  They share an effectiveness in our close identification with the protagonist, achieved through their emotional vulnerability, a vivid description of their experience, and presumed proximity to the reader’s own perception. James is a great fan of nested narrators, and often a story is told by a scholar who has unearthed an account of an investigator who, himself, might be hearing a supernatural tale second-hand.  So we are reading an account of an account of an account.  In an almost stereotypical display of British “dryness,” emotions are suppressed with expressions of politeness and propriety, and seldom break beyond generalized expressions of anxiety, fear, apprehension, or relief.  In fact, in most of these stories, we only develop the most rudimentary understanding of any character, and even this is most clearly understood through our aquaintance with their their area of academic specialty.  It is, therefore, difficult to empathize with characters, and thus difficult to feel a sensation of “terror” or “horror.”

This emotional detachment will be problematic for many modern horror readers, who rely almost by instinctively on an author’s ability to evoke fear, and James’ work is dated, at least in that it restricts itself to a more intellectual, more ruminatory approach to the supernatural.  An underlying strategy is well illustrated in “Casting the Runes,” one of the more effective stories (and, incidentally, one of the few with sharply defined characters).  In “Runes,” a medieval critic and scholar is pitted against an real-life alchemist. The annotations note that this latter figure may have been inspired by Aleister Crowley, the erstwhile Marilyn Manson of his day. Even if this were not the case, there was a deep fascination with the occult among the British upper class at this time, and “Runes” aims to appeal to this fascination far more than to evoke delicious “fear.” Thus, James reveals and withholds information about the legitimacy of Karswell’s alchemy, and hones in on the symptoms of his curse and Dunning’s strategies to escape. Personalities, motivations, and even survival are discussed in an abbreviated way and as a secondary priority.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t creepy moments in many stories.  ”Runes,” itself, makes good use of suspense, as does “The Mezzotint,” “Number 13,” and “Mr. Humphrey’s and His Inheritance.” As for gristle and gore, there’s plenty to be found in “Young Hearts,”  ”Count Magnus,” and “Martin’s Close.”  The historical detail and precision which underlies each supernatural mystery is well established, and as a result, these stories unfold as (and can be enjoyed in the same manner as) a puzzle. Even here, you might be able to guess the plot’s final destination: after all, James’ borrowed tropes that were hundreds of years old, and they have been borrowed again and again down to the present day.  But the actual development of the stories are engaging nevertheless.

All things considered, the stories in Count Magnus are not particularly arresting, or mesmerizing, or affecting. They are, however, reliably intriguing… probably best read when you’re well-rested, mentally alert, and just as interested in the way a ghost story is structured as in the actual ghosts and their powers.

The Ghost Pirates is an interesting early case of polished, ambitious, evocative literature hiding in the guise of pulp horror. Some reviewers have likened William Hope Hodgson to both Joseph Conrad and H.P. Lovecraft, and both comparisons are apt. With titles like Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, Conrad expressed the confusion and peril of a hostile environment, the mystery, the potential for exploitation, and the psychic toll of a life lived in marginal, undelineated spaces. Such statements easily apply to The Ghost Pirates. As for Lovecraft, he was himself familiar with the novel, writing that “with its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.”

The story, taking superb advantage of “nested narration” (in which a character tells a story about a character telling a story) — one of Conrad’s own favorite techniques — begins with a sailor named Jessop taking a position aboard an allegedly “haunted” ship. As the story progresses, he recounts, with concern for discretion and with little emotion, the incremental attacks visited upon the ship. The word “incremental” is key; for a book that is relatively short and moves so quickly, revelation is always (agonizingly) just out of reach. This is effective storytelling and effective horror largely because it incorporates enticing details — about the ship, about the sailors, about the attacks — while forcing the reader to interpret everything else. Even the final moments, which seem to play out in grotesque slow-motion, offers us a visceral look at the horror without defining it.

If you like Lovecraft, or Conrad, or any horror writers who value that early Gothic emphasis on murky shadows and ambiguity, then you’ll probably enjoy The Ghost Pirates. This one can be enjoyed both for its powerful emotional effects as well as for the care and skill in its craft and composition.

This week I’ve noticed that it’s cold and the weather has been changing rapidly. That’s not particularly “good.” This is January. In a more typical year, I would have long since noticed that it was cold, and the weather would not be changing much… at least not until I was surprised by a January thaw a week or two from now. The fact that it was “cold” would have long since have ceased being noticed.

This has already been one of the mildest (if not the mildest) winter I’ve experienced. There was scarcely any snow until Thanksgiving, and temperatures have been lingering in the upper 30s and 40s ever since. Today is only the fifth or sixth “cold” day of the winter, and in this case, “cold” isn’t a breath-puffing eye-watering 0 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, but a nightly low in the mid-teens.

Global warming deniers get to trot out their placards every time it snows in January… I wonder if I should put up a sign every time the snow melts. If this weather keeps up, it would be visible pretty much year round.