Evolution of a blurb

Posted on March 20, 2017 by anthonychaney

I signed a book contract and announced the news a few days later at a party. I suppose I should have known that someone at the party would ask me what the book was about.

Oh, I suppose I did expect it. Maybe I even prepared a little. But it might as well have come as a complete surprise since I made such a mess of it. An answer of sorts spilled out, awkward and halting – all over the place — and a sharp friend who thinks fast on her feet said, “Man, you need to work on your elevator pitch.”

No doubt she was right. The elevator pitch is Marketing 101. If you have a book, a screenplay, a creative project of some kind, and are entering into a marketplace glutted with such items, you must be able to say what your project is about to someone on an elevator as the two of you ride from one floor to the next. Whether or not you can do that, and do so in a way that the eyes of the person in the elevator don’t immediately begin to glaze over, speaks to the basic viability of your project.

Here’s the problem: throughout the process, from writing the first few notes to proofing the last pages for the publisher, nothing has made me go tongue-tied faster than being asked the “about” question. Because the book was developed out of my doctoral thesis, some of this may amount to dissertation committee PTSD. One of the members of that committee, never sympathetic to my topic, or maybe just providing what he saw as the academic version of tough love, kept asking me, from as many directions as he could manage, what the hell was the point? Who was Gregory Bateson and why is he significant? Here’s one construction that became very familiar to me: “How would the world be different if Bateson had just stayed home and tended his garden?” Nothing I said in answer seemed to satisfy him, and his dissatisfaction fed my anxieties and doubts.

I went to songwriter’s workshop once, and the facilitator, a professional songwriter, said that she liked songwriting as a creative outlet because the risk was so low. If you write a song and it’s no good, what did you lose, a few hours, a couple of days? She felt sorry for her friends who were book writers. If you try to write a book that eventually fails to find a publisher, or that even if published fails to connect, what did you lose? A few years? A decade?

With this risk of colossal waste as a backdrop, I would often pause to interrogate my motivations for pursuing the project at all. What was it about, really? All the most important things, it seemed. Climate change. Fear of climate change, despair over it. The seeming inability to do anything that didn’t somehow make the problem worse. What’s in store for my children? And are we really alone in the world? If I had answered my committee member’s questions this way, it wouldn’t have strengthened my case with him. Yes, Bateson was one of the first ones to speak of global warming to a lay audience. But he didn’t discover the greenhouse effect; he just read about it once in a science journal and happened to mention it to a group of hippies and radicals in London in 1967. This wasn’t the sort of significance the committee member was insisting upon, which is to say, this wasn’t the kind of significance that warranted a book-length work.

At the party, at some point in my botched rambling, I mentioned that Bateson had once been married to Margaret Mead. “Oh, he was married to Margaret Mead!” the friend concerned about my elevator pitch broke in. “That’s your in. You should have started with that.” Grab people’s attention with something that they know, in other words; don’t scare them off with unknown stuff. Many more people have heard of Margaret Mead than they have of Gregory Bateson.

It occurred to me later that her response had something in common with that of my committee member. If I’d been doing a dissertation on Mead, the questions about significance would have likely been different. Of course, he knew of Margaret Mead. He’d never heard of Bateson.

I once came across an article in the New York Times where the writer referred to Bateson as “one of the lost giants of twentieth century intellectual history.” I was excited at first, thought about showing it to the committee member. But then I realized it wouldn’t have cut much mustard with him because the writer who made the claim was not particularly significant. I would need a whole dossier of such claims, and I would need to work them into the dissertation. Certainly, that could be done — quite a hefty dossier could be put together — but this wasn’t what the project was about.

If not that, though, then what?

Here’s the good news: lately, it’s gotten easier. I’m beginning to think that a boiled-down and stand-alone articulation of an answer to the about question was not wholly possible until well past the end of the writing, after the book contract was signed, after the editorial work was done, and all the parties – editorial, marketing, and myself – had settled on a title: Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness. Sometimes I’d sit down and an answer would come out all of a sudden. I began to collect those notes in a file. Sometimes I’d imagine them in the form of a gambit, the first few sentences of an elevator pitch. Other times they’d take the form of book jacket blurb. Here’s one of them:

Conventional science could readily explain why things fell apart. But what held things together? What explained, in other words, the mystery of form? In the years after World War II, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson proposed a fundamental reorientation of the life sciences, away from the old myths of linear force and around the new postwar concepts of circulating information.

Writing these words, especially the last sentence, was followed by a feeling of deep contentment. Yes, this was it. This was both very significant and a fair articulation of what I’d discovered. Yet still so dense! Would this make sense to anyone who hadn’t been absorbed in the material for years? Would it make the sort of immediate sense that was necessary on an elevator or book jacket? Here’s another example from the note file:

In the years after World War II, anthropologist Gregory Bateson participated in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, where a group of mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists laid the theoretical foundation for the information age. “Runaway” was the term they used for what happened when a computer met a paradox in its programming. Bateson applied this concept to the life sciences and called the paradox the “double bind.”

This one was less fluid than the first and did nothing to reduce the density. Its strengths were the attention it paid to the keywords in the title: runaway, double bind. It was hard to imagine how these terms might be defined and connected more concisely than in these two sentences. Double bind was the important concept. In an important sense, the book was about the career of that idea. Bateson coined this term in 1956 in a paper that speculated that schizophrenia might be seen not as a disease coming from inside the victim’s body but some pathology of communication in the victim’s relational field. In the victim’s environment, in other words. My book ends in 1967 when Bateson evoked the double bind in the way it’s typically used today in the discourse of environmental crisis. There it’s used to describe how humanity is caught up in an environmental dilemma, how that dilemma seems to get worse, and how its conditions seem to accelerate the more human beings try to extricate themselves from it. It was in connection to this in London that Bateson mentioned the greenhouse effect.

I was pleased by the way the two sentences connected runaway to double bind. Yet the meanings they conveyed were still obscure. They didn’t provide the sort of immediate understanding that was necessary on an elevator. Knitted brows were preferable to glazed eyes but only slightly.

Another thing I noticed was how often methodology crept into my descriptions. Here’s an example, from an imagined book jacket blurb:

The widespread consciousness that emerged in the 1960s of a human ecology out of balance was, writes author Anthony Chaney, “a learning that hurt.” That hurt remains today and obscures our ability to contemplate actual conditions. Chaney addresses current apprehensions with a story about the thought and life of anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson.

It was good to be able to articulate my method. Anything can be borne, if you can tell a story about it. This paraphrase of a quote from Hannah Arendt, I think, had been a guiding sentiment for me throughout the project. It was hard to confront climate change — it was just too painful. But like many realities that must be faced, a lot of the discomfort is wrapped up in the avoidance. On the other side of avoidance, much of the pain falls away. Narrative was the avenue for getting past that first obstacle, and its path allowed a prolonged gaze. Bateson himself had never been the point. The Bateson story was the avenue to the point: to face at length a topic that called out to be faced and yet was surrounded by obstacles.

Rather than bring methodology to light, I thought I might carry methodology into the pitch/blurb itself. Ignore the concepts. Any attempt to explain them in shorthand would only create confusion. So let them stand as they are. Rather, introduce the main character of the story, and then boil the story down. Maybe something like this:

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has been called a lost giant of twentieth century intellectual history. In the years following World War II, Bateson was among the group of mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists who laid the theoretical foundations of the information age. In Palo Alto in 1956, he introduced the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. By the sixties he was in Hawaii studying dolphin communication. Bateson’s discipline-hopping made the experts wary, but he found an audience open to his ideas in a generation of rebellious youth. To a gathering of counterculturalists and revolutionaries in London during the Summer of Love, Bateson was the first to warn of a “greenhouse effect” that could lead to a climate in runaway. Surrounded by voices calling for liberation of all kinds, Bateson spoke of limitation and dependence. But he also offered an affirming new picture of human beings and their place in the world — as ecologies knit together in a fabric of meaning “which we might as well call Mind.”

Discourse Community, The Big Night, and Fernandez-Armesto

Posted on February 4, 2017 by anthonychaney

I wasn’t expecting to teach a Comp/Rhet course this semester, or ever again actually, but I’m teaching one. Over the many years since I taught a writing course, I’ve done a good deal of writing but not much thinking about how to teach it. Now having been introduced to the new syllabus, I can see that I’ll have to make some adjustments. The English department I’m working for requires attention be paid to a host of meta-concerns, and these are the topics to be read about, taught, and discussed in class. The concept of “discourse community” is one example. We are to convey to our students how these communities are plural and how they are differentiated by the vocabulary and formal conventions in the way participants communicate. The general approach to the course was characterized for me this way: “In biology class they talk about biology. In writing class let’s talk about writing.”

I had to take a moment with that. The last time I taught writing, almost a decade ago, it seems like I was always trying to avoid talking about writing. Rather I was trying to get students so interested in something other than writing that they would then be compelled to resort to writing in order to satisfy that interest. I took a moment with the alternate approach, but just a moment. My indirect approach of long ago didn’t automatically produce stellar writers, not by a long shot. I’m open to trying something different.

I’m intrigued, too, by the institutional goals that this writing syllabus reflects. We serve an urban population of diverse students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend university. Students like this can be hard to retain not only because a university environment is alien to them, but because there are so many other conditions, material and cultural, stacked up against their staying in. One writing project on the syllabus requires students to enter into a discourse community “to which they do not belong” and to produce a piece of writing that adheres to its rhetorical conventions. For many of these students, academia itself is foremost among the alien discourse communities that they are being encouraged to join. It’s also one that, let’s face it, may hold little appeal to students in our current cultural climate, where the utility of education beyond vocational training is suspect. It’s also one that joining may feel to them — with regard to the members of the non-academic discourse communities to which they presently belong — something like a betrayal. In the street sense of the term, the academy isn’t a place that’s quite “real.”

Pondering these concepts and plotting out how to apply and shape them into a day-to-day course of study, I kept thinking of a scene from one of my favorite movies, The Big Night. It is a film about two Italian immigrants, restaurateurs who are struggling to succeed in one of the boroughs of New York. One brother, Secondo, is eager to change his life, to seize the opportunity and to rise economically. The other brother, Primo, is an artist of the fine cuisine that has been passed down to him over generations. Like fine art, it’s the sort of food that the common American has to acquire a taste for, and so their little restaurant is barely hanging on. Secondo loves his brother, but wants him to loosen up his standards a little. Primo wants to conserve and protect those standards.

In particular, the scene I had in mind is the climactic one. On the corner down the street is another restaurant, a wildly successful one, owned by another immigrant. This older man, Pascal, has been there longer than the brothers. Pascal serves his vulgar American customers heaping bowls of spaghetti and meatballs and envelops them in a dolce vita party atmosphere. His food is not in the same class as Primo’s. But Pascal is more a salesmen than he is a chef, and he’s selling himself, his winning personality. Primo despises Pascal: “He should be in prison for the food he serves.” Secondo agrees with his brother in principle, but also admires Pascal’s success, and this mixture of disdain and envy finds expression in the affair Secondo is having with Pascal’s wife. All of this comes to a head at the end in a confrontation between Secondo and Pascal. My brother is a great artist, Secondo says to Pascal, and in comparison, “You are nothing.” Pascal, with some dignity, responds, “I am a business man. I am whatever I need to be whenever I need to be it.”

The movie wants us to see Pascal as the villain, mostly, but I wondered if he might be seen as a hero, an artist himself, an artist of fluidity. He may be shallow, but he’s not afraid of change. He’s not afraid of entering into any number of situations – any number of discourse communities, if you will — and making the best of the (economic) opportunities they afford. He’s not like Primo, a delicate orchid, beautiful but dependent upon a specialized environment; he’s a weed, tough and ugly, capable of flourishing anywhere. Doesn’t change does require this sort of experimentation with fluidity, a loosening up of things that were fixed, especially when you are learning a language, and especially in the competitive atmosphere of the market? And isn’t education – when it really happens – a process of change? Our job wasn’t to train our students to be delicate flowers capable of blooming only in in protected environments but to be bold, brave, wide-ranging weeds.

I didn’t like the way this metaphor was going. The flower/weed comparison put me too much in mind of “creative destruction” and “disruptive innovation,” concepts championed by the meta-Pascals whose job is selling the salesmen.

In his recent book, A Foot in the River, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto argues that what makes humankind differ from the animals is not, as has often been assumed, culture. We know now that many animals are cultural, too, which is to say, they pass down information and behavior in extra-genetic ways. They teach, they learn; it isn’t all instinct. Rather, what makes humankind distinct, says Fernandez-Armesto, is its degree of cultural divergence, which is vast compared to any other species. In fact, human societies suffer from a sort of acceleration of cultural divergence. One consequence, I suppose, is that we will have many jobs in our lives; we must be continual learners of new languages, new discourses; ever mobile, ever flexible, never devoted to any particular locale, or to any particular anything, at least not for long. This is the future that today’s post-secondary educators are told to prepare their students for: the mad race to outrun the systems of automation that are coming to take our means of livelihood. The design of the writing class aligned with that directive.

If this is what makes us human, is it anything to celebrate? I doubt someone like Wendell Berry would think so. His overarching theme is that of affectionate devotion to one practice, one art, and to the kind of learning that can only come from the inherited stewardship of a particular piece of land. This would require, Fernandez-Armesto’s argument seems to suggest, a willed remoteness. Those most long-lasting, which is to say, most durable of human societies are not those Eurasian societies that have risen and fallen over thousands of years but, Fernandez-Armesto points out, “the San or Bushmen of Africa, the Australian aboriginals” or some “rarely encountered forest peoples” (222). Exposure to cultural diversity drives further cultural divergence, and if a society lacks that runaway divergence, it is a consequence of being so far off the beaten track. The accelerating condition that we are so familiar with may be accounted for, finally, by natural history, to the fact that there are so many more of us than ever before and to the fact, in turn, that our exposure to each other is ever greater. Natural history, the multiplication of human beings on the face of the earth — these are matters that have long given thoughtful people grave pause over long-term human prospects. I think of the film Koyaanisqatsi and how its time-lapse camera techniques so chillingly captured this mad acceleration and made it seem like some kind of spreading disease. Near its finale is a sequence of what appears to be a slow-motion explosion that never quite comes to an end.

The chilled feeling is familiar to the ecologically aware. “The pace precipitates panic,” as Fernandez-Armesto put it. Fear and panic ward us off from pondering matters of environmental crisis and has inspired a multitude of dystopian books and films. Fernandez-Armesto, with a few others at Oxford in the early seventies, were pioneers in what is today called environmental history – “historical ecology,” they called it — but Fernandez-Armesto himself doesn’t share in the assumption of decline and decay that so often accompanies ecological consciousness. Durability – we might say, sustainability – should not be our measure of success, he writes in another book. Better to take part in “a sort of cosmic binge – a daring self-indulgence of the urge to civilize.” Success is measured, in other words, by civilization itself, defined as what can be shaped and constructed out of our continuous struggle against nature. Why make some homeostatic harmony with nature our ideal when “it will all surely perish anyway” (Civilizations, 34)?

I suppose it will if we behave as if it will.

I strayed too far. I let my associations get the better of me. This may have something to do with the times. “What can we do?” my 13-year-old daughter asked, anxious about the outcome of the late election, and the actions taken by the incoming administration during its first week. We can improve our minds, I thought to answer. We can read serious books, old ones, new ones. Train ourselves to engage in the conversations of serious learned people. We can study languages. Chinese, yes, but why not also Latin and ancient Greek? This course of study, the humanities – not engineering — may be the best preparation for a future whose threats to stability are accelerating and largely unknown.

That’s not easy, of course. This is a mode of resistance, resistance to the general flow. It came to me that here is where the two ends of the Primo-Pascal spectrum meet. Acquiring a taste for Primo’s fine food requires that flexibility that learning requires, and the result is to become something new, an aficionado of fine cuisine. This conclusion seems facile, too pat. But convincing students not to be afraid of the change that real learning will result in seems half the battle sometimes. I know that because I know how I have avoided change and because I know how learning has changed me.

McKenzie, Robinson, and a January drive

Posted on January 13, 2017 by anthonychaney

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Three items that came with the beginning of the year are resonating these last few days. The first involved burying my mother. She died in November, and on the third of January, we held a memorial brunch for family and friends and then a brief graveside service at the cemetery in Alexander, Texas, a little town eighty miles southwest of Fort Worth, where my father and his parents are buried. One of her requests was that a portion of her ashes be spread over the graves of her own parents, who are buried another hour’s drive further in the same direction, outside the town of Mullin, where she’d grown up, raised by an aunt, and where her father had operated a filling station. So after the service at the Alexander graveside, a bunch of us caravanned to the Mullin cemetery. It was a breezy day, nippier than was forecast, but the sky was mostly clear, blue and brilliant behind the charcoal-colored bark and dark green glittering leaves of the live oaks and the yellow winter grass.

The vistas I witnessed along this midday drive — big skies and flat earth, stark and plain, lonely and little-populated — came back to me a few days later when I watched the move, Hell or High Water, a modern-day western with Ben Foster and Chris Pine as the outlaws and Jeff Bridges as the old ranger on their trail. Director David McKenzie makes much of use of these landscapes, but he’s careful to include other sights, too. The outlaws and their pursurers do a lot passing through small towns, and not one of these passages goes by without some illustration of economic despair: boarded up businesses along the main road and the squares, “For Sale” and “Closing Down” signs, angry graffiti on cinder block walls. McKenzie is plying this theme: one hundred and fifty years ago the Anglos had won this territory in violent struggle from the Comanches, the “Lords of the Plains,” a phrase repeated numerous times. Now the Anglos have themselves been conquered, this time by globalization and the vagaries of the fossil fuels industry. McKenzie’s heroes resist with brazen acts of violence; they rob the cash trays of several regional bank branches, one after another, like the raiding parties of old. McKenzie lays his genre tale against a climate of desperation; everyone is depressed, hostile, anxious; all the townspeople are heavily armed and eager to discharge their weapons as if to refute the fact of their powerlessness. On our drive, we passed through many small towns, too, and saw the blight, the defeat, and unless I’m over-imagining, also felt the hostility.

This brings me to the third item of resonance. I’ve been working my way through Marilynne Robinson’s most recent collection of essays, The Givenness of Things. She writes a good deal about the current resurgence of tribalism here and abroad. Robinson was writing before the presidential campaign of 2016, but she saw clearly “the excitements that stir when certain lines are seen as important because they can be rather clearly drawn.” What she calls “excitements” here, elsewhere she names more bluntly fear — fear of losing out to others in the struggle for economic dominance. This fear is unreasoning, Robinson argues, both because it’s blind to the country’s real cultural strengths and history and because economic dominance itself is an empty goal. This isn’t anything new, of course, but simply, she writes, “humankind going about its mad business as if it simply cannot remember the harm it did itself yesterday.” The winner of the election was a nominee who enflamed the fear Robinson speaks of, who encouraged Americans in the “mad business” of tribal thinking, and whose trophy wife, golden penthouse, island enclave, and vulgarian manner are flashing sirens to the emptiness of placing economic dominance above all.

Robinson’s essays, in this and in her other collections, are often defenses of the lost Calvinism of her Presbyterian-Congregationalist tradition. Like the characters in Hell or High Water, she’s looking back a hundred and fifty years, too, when Americans were swayed by the sort of base Calvinism that would make a sentiment like the one in Lincoln’s second inaugural address not merely intelligible but the expression of “indubitable truth,” that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, and that all of us are culpable and held responsible for injustices far and near. The events of this year provide further evidence that, as Robinson puts it, the American Civil War, “has really not ended yet.” Both cemeteries where I stood that day were festooned with confederate battle flags, as were, more disturbingly, not a few of the residential porches, driveways, and front yards of the houses we passed along the way. These porches, driveways, and front yards were not golden. Mostly they were littered with the detritus of poverty or the abandonment of keeping up appearances. They may have been raised up in angry pride, but taken alongside what surrounded them, they flew like the flags of ships in distress.