Sunday, May 18, 2008

I HAD EXPECTED A BOOK READING, BUT...

Book publishing has for a long time been seen as a sort of combination redemption/prestige act: a way of reforming reprobates through confession like St. Augustine or a way of certifying skill, like a college degree. The publisher was the go-between like a university, guiding and funding. No more. Today anyone gets into print and the ways of publishing are so accessible and inventive -- not even printed on paper -- that publishers, authors and consumers are at a loss to know what the new meaning of the act might be.

Yesterday at Barnes & Noble in Great Falls my publisher (U of Calgary Press) and I had scheduled a reading and book signing. In the old paradigm, this would have meant a famous writer, a swarm of admiring fans, and a novel. But the weather was terrific, there was a big air show, it’s graduation season, and no one came except the people I’d invited to do introductions: Dona Stebbins, the mayor of Great Falls; Leland Ground whom I had invited to give a blessing in Blackfeet; and my publisher, Donna Livingstone. A few others like the husbands of the two Donnas; Leland’s family; Norma Ashby; and some other former students who happened in by chance: Stan Juneau and his wife, Carol, who is a state legislator. Amazingly, it turned out that all those empty chairs were an advantage. This mix of people needed to talk to each other, both about Bob Scriver and about books and life and Blackfeet and... well, the new paradigm.

I see that in this version of “publishing” the focus is on the real lives of people, national borders mean little, the land itself is part of the community, and one of the things a publisher does is to network among media and people. It was remarkable that the people with power in this conversation were mostly older, highly experienced women who were used to working with potent men. They had taken the burden of what some men consider to be beneath them and now that has turned out to be the more important part of public life. (Okay, go ahead and invoke Hilary Clinton. Pretend Leland is Obama -- he’d like that!)

So after Leland did his blessing, I did my reading -- forgetting that I was supposed to be introduced by Dona Stebbins, who gracefully slipped herself into the conversation and did it anyway -- and then we did something that I’d call “idea jazz.” Someone would make a statement about Bob Scriver or art or life in general, someone else would pick that up and do a “riff” on the subject, then the next person, until there was a seamless multi-voiced piece of verbal music going on.

This used to happen occasionally in the Unitarian context and it’s one of the phenomena that just absolutely lifts me up by the hair roots when it happens. Forget the pattern we were supposed to follow! It turned out that Donna Livingstone had attended a Blackfeet “Horn” Ceremony (it’s about buffalo), so she and Leland clicked right away; Dona Stebbins and her husband are musicians and really understood those dynamics, Edward Cavell (Donna L’s husband) once dated Charlie Beil’s daughter (!!! Beil was one of the key figures in Bob’s beginnings) and Norma Ashby has been a long-time and passionate Bob Scriver supporter. (Bob loved this sort of idea session!) So we were explaining, asking, dreaming, elaborating together as fast as we could. I kept nudging things towards the idea of a culture tie between Calgary and GF equivalent to the electrical power tie-line between GF and Lethbridge.

Even urban and sophisticated people like Michael Blowhard and Tim have become increasingly disappointed and even enraged by the hegemony of Manhattan publishing where something originally a gentleman’s work, done with dignity and high standards, has been made into a profit machine like everything else. They've drained out the heart’s blood and strangled the authors, which ironically has only helped the little grass roots operations to see that their work was important and could be unique. Small printing “publishers” now abound everywhere, esp. if you count blogs which are a sort of daily publishing that is rapidly replacing newspapers. And if you look to video, as Tim has done, and frankly admit that we’re all learning how to make music/image/word compositions so that young people’s input is just as valuable as that of the old tweedy “club” editors, then suddenly the world doesn’t seem to be contracting after all -- indeed, expanding rather more rapidly that we can assimilate, which makes us underestimate what’s happening.

Even more exciting, national boundaries no longer count (I look for nations to take a Chinese view of this and put some hard pressure on the Internet in the near future), so one culture can be just as meaningful as another because we aren’t bound by a particular language or medium, and -- what’s most important of all, the real “cassowary” event -- is the formation of a new cultural ecology that includes everything that has happened in this galaxy so far. God is dead, hello Cosmos! (And if you want to call the Cosmos “God,” that’s your choice.) There is a future after all!

Well, I could read about all this in the New York Times (ha!) and on Manhattan-focused blogs (double ha), but to have it right here in “River City,” weaving together people I’ve known for half a century with others who say, “Oh, that’s so much like MY life,” even though we’ve just met --- well, the evidence is just too strong to be denied. Something is happening that has nothing to do with conventional politics, though it's affecting them as well. No one can figure out where the money is going to come from or how we’re going to survive until it does. We still don’t know how to educate people for their lives.

But if there’s anything I learned in the ministry and from Bob Scriver, it is the great counseling truth that “focus gives power.” The more a person or a society can get focus -- not a hokey mission statement someone developed with Magic Marker and newsprint taped to the walls -- but a from-the-heart understanding of what it means to be human on the prairie along the Rockies, the more powerful the idea becomes without anyone having to force anything. Whateveritis comes THROUGH us, not from our pushing.

The biggest risk is that the Status Quo might try to stamp out this gathering power, so it’s a good thing to be disguised as merely a little book reading on the first really fine Spring day, such good weather that no one attended except those who were somehow guided to be there. For all I know, one of Leland’s grandsons might catch fire and write a book or make a video that changes everything. Or it might be the Coburn family, who came after the reading and sat quietly talking about Bob Scriver, continuing the conversation even though they hadn’t been there earlier. They are a dance family, composing a celebration of Lewis & Clark in ballet terms. Last year’s Sacajawea/ballerina loved her first year of college in Purchase, N.Y., where two classes were academic and the rest was ballet. I asked to see her toes after that much en pointe and was pleased to see that modern tech materials have gotten to those classic pink satin slippers: silicon padding and restructured support are saving her Blackfeet toes.

While all this was happening, my poplars finally unfurled their leaves. Archibald Macleish, addressing the despair of his own times in J.B., said, “I would not stay here if I could...” meaning that he was tempted by suicide, “except for the little green leaves in the Spring and the wind on the water.” Today is gray and softly warm, good for planting the hollyhocks and nicotiana I bought in Great Falls.

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