I had a pleasant and thoughtful exchange with artist, author, and poet Matthew Pungitore. We discussed the tough issues facing writers today, including the decline in reading, the nature of art, what motivates my writing, and what writers can do to bring back young readers.
Matthew has a gift for posing thoughtful questions and follow-up questions that encourage a candid and open airing of inner thoughts.
I was intrigued by a recent article in Psycheon middlebrow works of art. Philosophers Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg make a strong case that while the term middlebrow is generally considered a put-down, it should instead be viewed as a worthy objective for all artists:
“Unlike the avant-garde, which may appeal only to a rarefied audience, middlebrow works pursue a broad audience, requiring only a minimal acquaintance with the medium or genre. And unlike most straightforwardly pop works, which can reach a mass audience by being weightlessly undemanding, middlebrow works aspire to at least some forms of artistic achievement typical of high art, such as thematic depth, formal ambition, intricate narrative structure, philosophical richness, linguistic inventiveness, and so on.”
That sounds like Robert E. Howard to me. Forced by economic necessity to write fiction with mass appeal, he frequently infused his stories with poetic beauty and thoughtful opinions.
As David Smith observes in his magnificent Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography:
“His work is shot through with a relentless awareness of time, hurtfully so. This tragic appreciation is exhibited as powerfully in his writing as his acute awareness of the body — the weight of time, its passage and its cost to us. He grew up, of course, listening to recollections of the immediate past, frontier tales in which “the past is never past,” in Faulkner’s famous phrase.” p. 191.
Like the highbrow William Faulkner, Robert E. Howard the middlebrow wrote out of a distinctive Southern experience, inspired by Texan tall tales and family narratives of wars, blood feuds, and duels waged to defend honor. Like Flannery O’Connor, also a highbrow, Howard critiqued modern society from a Southern mindset. In “Tower of the Elephant,” Howard not only mesmerizes us with young Conan’s attempt to steal a fabled treasure, but also interjects a sharp rebuke on the modern decline of good manners:
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
That sounds like something O’Connor might’ve penned if she’d been a man.
Howard also exceeded the boundaries of pulp fiction in “Red Nails,” a rousing adventure tale that skewers societies that have succumbed to corruption and self-destruction. The degeneration triggered by wealth was a running theme in his stories, no doubt inspired by the misery caused by the sudden wealth of the Texas oil boom, which he witnessed first hand. Stories such as “Red Nails” echoed the Agrarian critique of industrialized society from I’ll Take My Stand.
It was Robert E. Howard’s ability to combine mass appeal and shrewd insight that makes his works so enduring. As his friend H.P. Lovecraft put it:
“Scarcely anybody else in the pulp field had quite the driving zest and spontaneity of R. E. H. He put himself into everything he wrote—even when he made outward concessions to pulp standards…”
Thomas Jefferson tried to warn us about big cities, but we ignored him. Now modern science confirms Jefferson’s concerns. From Newsweek:
Humans are not well adapted to live in modern cities—and this may be having a big impact on our health and wellbeing.
This is the claim of evolutionary scientists from Loughborough University, England and the University of Zurich, Switzerland who say “rapid industrialization” has reshaped human habits so dramatically that our biology may no longer be able to keep up.
“For most of human history, our biology was shaped by natural environments, but industrialization has rapidly transformed the world around us—faster than our bodies can adapt,” Danny Longman, senior lecturer in human evolutionary physiology at Loughborough, told Newsweek.
Jefferson regarded densely populated cities as threats to human health and happiness, as well as being detrimental to the morals and liberties of citizens. He saw big cities as a threat to the agrarian, self-sufficient lifestyle he saw as fundamental to a republic. City mobs, warned Jefferson, not only spread disease, as he witnessed in the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1800, but contributed to alienation from nature and other citizens.
Again, science confirms Jefferson’s fears. From the Newsweek article:
“Day-to-day, chronic background noise, crowds, traffic, digital overstimulation and limited access to natural spaces keep the stress response system switched on. This elevates anxiety, worsens sleep and impairs concentration. Over time, these constant stressors contribute to mental-health problems, cardiovascular strain, cognitive impairment, immune dysregulation and reduced reproductive health,” Longman explained.
What’s the solution? Cities aren’t going away, but we can mitigate the harm they do by making our surroundings more natural and conducive to socializing and proper exercise. Pedestrian-friendly walkways and nature trails are a great start. And each of us must open our eyes to who and what we really are.
It’s been 90 years today since the death of Robert E. Howard, one of the greatest fantasy authors who ever lived. Long ignored by scholars, his fiction is esteemed more than ever now that we’re finally appreciating its depth and artistry. Howard had much to say about the rise and fall of civilization, as well as the underlying nature of humanity that persists despite the circumstances and fashions of the hour.
His fans admire Howard’s vision of the lone hero who fights honorably in a world that often disdains honor, nobility, or courage. It takes courage to open one’s eyes to the world as it is and dare to live well. He affirms that stance in one of Conan the Barbarian’s most famous speeches:
“I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. “
Let’s raise a tankard of cheap wine to his memory.
I was hooked in quickly by this conversation featuring astrophysicist Adam Frank, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, and biologist Michael Levin. Barrett, the neuroscientist, had this to say:
“I’m not sure that materialism is actually the culprit here. … For a long time, the main alternatives to traditional realism were idealism. This is the idea that reality is all in your head. Empiricism is the idea that we can only study what we can sense and we shouldn’t even be making metaphysical um assumptions. But there is a third option which is the idea that there is a single reality, but that reality exists in relation to some perspective. So it’s inherently perspectival. And this is the notion of relational realism. It’s the belief that reality consists of the relations between interacting signals that can constrain or enhance one another.”
And I absolutely agree. All life is interrelated. We cannot understand reality until we grasp the complex interactions between biological organisms and their environments. Those interactions shape how living beings function, evolve, and adapt in a changing world. Rather than the universe being created for humans, humans are just one of millions of living things shaped by the environment. This insight is validated by common ancestry, as our shared DNA demonstrates, and our dependance on the biosphere for our survival and well-being.
Forrest Carter is an underappreciated writer of the Old West. But Carter’s work has received notice. His book The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales was the inspiration for the classic Western starring Clint Eastwood. AndLarry McMurtry, who gave us Lonesome Dove, said this about Carter’s novels: “Compelling. Can surely stand comparison with the best novels of Indian life.”
You might wonder why someone who writes about man’s place in nature would publish so many stories set in outer space. My latest published story, “At The Edge of the Crater, “ takes place on the grim but fascinating asteroid 16 Psyche. While I do celebrate nature, I do not idealize it.
A vital step in understanding ourselves is to recognize both our nobility and fragility, and most important, to see our world for what it is, a dazzling and gorgeous home that is both refuge and battlefield. We are, at our core, “bad-weather animals,” in Robert Ardrey’s famous phrase. We are fighters and survivors.
Yet in that fight, we are not alone. We are individuals but we are also social beings, creatures who are “fulfilled only in the natural associations built upon common experience, upon the ties of blood and friendship, common enterprise, resistance to common enemies, and a common faith, ” as Mel Bradford described us. Survival is a struggle, but we don’t have to wage it alone.
Space is the perfect backdrop to focus our attention on human characters caught in that struggle. In “At the Edge of the Crater,” the severe setting magnifies the brave, foolhardy, and tenacious protagonist as he discovers who he is and what he is made of.
Here’s the message we need on Earth Day: The more we know about ourselves and our home, the more we must recognize that the only planet that can sustain us is the one we evolved on. From Arwen Nicholson and Raphaelle Haywood:
“We are complex lifeforms with complex needs. We are entirely dependent on other organisms for all our food and the very air we breathe. The collapse of Earth’s ecosystems is the collapse of our life-support systems. Replicating everything Earth offers us on another planet, on timescales of a few human lifespans, is simply impossible.”
Science fiction fantasy, from Star Trek to Star Wars, assumes we can flit about the universe and make ourselves at home any darn place we please. But as Nicholson and Haywood explain, that’s impossible.
The notion of humans as intergalactic cosmopolitans arose from the current mindset of radical individualism, which sees humans as discrete beings who thrive when the restraints of society and tradition are severed. But what really happens when we lose our connections to people and places is an uprooted alienation not just from others, but ourselves. That’s what’s driving the simmering rage and mutual antagonism of modern politics and culture.
This Earth Day, let’s take the time to renew our connections to our roots. Time is running out–because there is no Planet B.
This video went viral with 1.4 million views in less than a week. David Holt is a four-time Grammy winner who plays traditional mountain music and tells old Southern folk tales. You may have seen him in “David Holt’s State of Music,” which is produced by theWill and Deni McIntyre Foundation.
This song is an original by him. It’s a tribute to the old-time drovers of the early 1800s who worked the Old Charleston Road, driving livestock from Tennessee and North Carolina to Charleston.
If you’ve ever wondered where the cowboy traditions of the Old West originated, look no further. They started in the South. Herding culture, adopted from Celtic ancestors, gave rise to the Southern ethos of individual honor, a love of the land, and a warrior’s instinct to defend both.
