Beach Reads

I note this week when Connie and I were last home with my parents, we turned on an addictive little TV series called Surface. The best I can tell it that it had something to do with swimming dragons that grew rather large and conquered a flooded world, except for the nice one, that bonded with a teenager. A mother's thumbs-down review: "what do we learn from this?"

Mom's lecture explains all about why I'm never fated to carry a lusty blockbuster to the beach - a bestseller, say, by Harlan Coben, who's profiled this month in the Atlantic. What Coben produces is down to economics and schedule; it's not literary, not even mystery. The genre is thriller; designer paperbacks for airport racks.

Formulaic action drives a plot that purportedly launches excited readers on a roller coaster ride. I glanced at one in the store: short sentences, copious dialogue, few paragraphs, small chapters. He begins assembly of this year's model in January, completes manufacture in October; spends surplus time visiting Costco's directing product placement and auditing sales. Earns millions; displays a blue collar attitude - bully for him and his success. Samuel Johnson, after all, said anyone not writing for money is a fool.

As soon as an artist sells her creation, it's not art, it's commodity; I'm told the true artist creates for self only. I write weekly essays. There's no sales or readers to track; well, there might be a half dozen. There's one link to a famous blog (thanks Mad Priest). The local rag prints my rant to the editor once a month. Ergo, I must be an artist? --more likely just the fool.

Woody Allen says everything our parents told us was good for us turned out to be bad: red meat, sun, clean your plate; Dr. Spock, apparently, was teaching them in his little book about how to kill us, slowly, after they're gone; the perfect crime. Since it's encoded upon my dna like an allergy, to read for pleasure is sinful, it's discomforting to choose the books to tote in the beach bag. I break out.

There are strict rules to restore calm. Books are seasonal. Winter's for gulags, Russians, the linguistic philosophy I can't grasp (though not to understand it proves its point about language).

Autumn's theology - auspicious beginnings, new energy, like starting school.

Summer?

A pitcher of Lincoln on the front porch washes down like a cool lemonade. (This year: Team of Rivals, by Goodwin). I've always wondered why is it that America, after Lincoln, transformed itself from a country where anyone regardless of origin, can raise their station through hard work, on a level playing field, his cherished ideal, to one where the advantages and protection lies with those corporate interests that already possess the wealth. (Age of Betrayal, The Triumph of Money in America, by Jack Beatty, could make the trip.)

These tomes don't cover my address my usual far more gloomy obsessions. They're about fine tuning democracy; what constitutes natural rights and happiness; measuring the common good against private interest. The kind of down home American issues we can wrestle with and not schism. Too light for winter; yet not too heavy to travel to the beach.

Take vouchers: I note the state of California is opening a shop-around education web site that contains stats on after-school activities, drop-out rates, music and arts programs, etc. Should citizens back public schools for the common good or opt out for competitive private, or home, schooling, in their own best interest, if in doing so, it further hastens the decline of the common good of public schools? The NY TImes reports Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels views "privatization not as an ideological or partisan matter but as a strictly practical one." What's wrong with that? I instinctively sense something is but I might be convinced otherwise through the power of persuasive argument.

Tony Blair's rise to power was fueled by a concentration on small things; class size, hospital wait lists, trains running on time. In my section of Virginia, traffic fits such a bill. Should the taxes of mostly rural residents pay for pollution-conscious public transportation utilized exclusively by commuters to ride to a city that farmers will never visit? Most folks, around these parts, so far, say no.

Is all this the political equivalent of the theological Little Way? If I can't create affordable public housing, can I at least privately provide shelter to the person in front of me? If I can't resolve the large national issues, can I just cut down on daily annoyance? With sense of liberalism faltering, I could take Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times for inspiration, or better yet, Henry Mayer's superb All on Fire, a bio of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Ah, it's high summer, the heck with politics, let the good times roll. Maybe I'll take Jeffrey Kripal's history of Esalen along. Seems to fit - meditate on the Zen of tantric sex in a spring-fed hot tub; expand mind, body and soul. Woody let on once, though, that he didn't inhale; if he did, he said, he ripen, then rot.

Since I'm genetically incapable of Coben-ization, there is another sort of happiness, of which to turn, likely mother-proof. In last month's Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, from a 1951 reprint, wrote: "One of our former companions, a Spaniard who lived in a Franco concentration camp for years, and spent his youth in civil war, said that what this country, this United States lacked, was joy. He was expressing a Catholic truth that our prosperous America has lost sight of. That is, it is only in suffering, only in the Cross, the symbol of suffering, that we find joy," and dear reader, it is only I, a true mother's son, that, at long last, can find true happiness through the Joy of Suffering on a long weekend at the beach.

So I'm incapable of what passes as normal happiness. I'll be laying on a beach blanket with friggin' Abe Lincoln. I'd rather ingest some Coben, but what do we learn from this? Thanks, ma.