A chance encounter with a summary of Paul Elie’s new book, Reinventing Bach, pulled me in the way a snippet of familiar music can grab one’s attention. Full disclosure might be in order here: I’m not a musician, nor was I raised in a musical family. Most of the music criticism I’ve read has been about jazz. My exposure to classical music has been scattershot and self-directed, spurred on by fleeing an atrocious rock station during my college years. What followed was the low-budget analog equivalent to today’s disc ripping: borrowing LPs from the library and taping them on cassettes. (Indeed, in this era of digital downloading, ripping discs is already old-fashioned.)

This bit of personal history is germane to Reinventing Bach, which weaves the evolution of musical trends and technology through a long meditation on Bach’s life and the power and timelessness of his works. In doing so the author also acquaints the reader with people important to the stories of Bach’s music: Albert Schweitzer, who hauled a zinc-lined piano-organ hybrid to the Congo so he could practice music while practicing medicine; Pablo Casals, who found Bach’s cello suites and made them his own; Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski, who together brought us Fantasia; quirky Glenn Gould, the technophile who re-popularized Bach even as rock-n-roll took center stage; and the charismatic Yo-Yo Ma, who may seem faultless but isn’t beyond leaving his $2.5 million 1733 Stradivarius cello in the trunk of a cab.

Elie orchestrates all this in a thoroughly engaging way. His descriptions of music, which can be as difficult as describing color, are fresh and free of cliché. His biographies, and there are many more than noted above, are fascinating, if sometimes brief (though I think he spends too much time with Glenn Gould). As he makes clear, Bach is, still, everywhere. Movie and TV soundtracks. Holiday ceremonies. Technology launches. The Berlin Wall as it fell. The Muppet Show. Disaster memorials. Richard Powers novels. The Simpsons. Papal elections and presidential swearings-in.

And award-winning commercials. I always study a book’s notes, acknowledgments, and bibliography for interesting tidbits and further avenues of exploration, and Reinventing Bach didn’t disappoint. Included are those YouTube videos I mentioned. For starters, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_CDLBTJD4M

-Jake Vail, Reference

It seems Timothy Egan’s National Book Award-winning Dust Bowl book, The Worst Hard Time, soon may warrant a sequel. Ken Burns’s new Dust Bowl borrowed much from Egan, but it borrowed even more from Lawrence’s own Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at KU. The ad for Burns’s Dust Bowl said, “Experience the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history that nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.” That the first part of that awkward ad copy is now accepted as truth is directly attributable to Worster’s groundbreaking (ha!) 1979 book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. In it Worster explains our role, that of plowing up the prairie, in the making of the Dirty Thirties. One of the first in the burgeoning field of environmental history, his book went on to win the Bancroft Prize.

This September KU celebrated Worster with a day-long gathering of his ex-students, “Nature’s Historians” who shared presentations and personal stories of studying with the man some called “The Don.” I sat in on the afternoon talks, and by my count eight out of nine presenters mentioned how important Worster’s Dust Bowl was on their thinking and educational direction. Later, I dusted off my copy and read it with new eyes. Not surprisingly, where Egan and Burns tell a good story, Worster digs deeper, asking hard questions and finding profound truths that westerners (and, one hopes, eastern policymakers) ponder still.

Dust Bowl was Worster’s warm-up to Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, published in 1985 and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. 1985, it turns out, was also the last year that we experienced cooling trends—this October was the 332^nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. Studies such as Rivers of Empire tend to look at the Columbia, at California, or, especially, at the Colorado River. As I write, though, there’s concern about barge traffic on the Mississippi River, which may have to be curtailed due to low water levels. Though well thought-out and exhaustively researched, as usual, John McPhee’s essays on dams on the Mississippi in The Control of Nature and on barging in Uncommon Carriers both completely missed the boat on that disastrous possibility. – Jake Vail, Reference

Browsing the library’s New Arrivals shelves sometime later I found The Wild Life of Our Bodies, which included a chapter entitled “The pronghorn principle and what our guts flee.” It mentioned the work of Byers, so I picked it up. Written by a North Carolina professor named Rob Dunn, a scientist with a sense of humor, it takes the systems view of, well, me. And you. Says Dunn:

“There are more bacterial cells on you right now than there ever were bison on the Great Plains, more microbial cells, in fact, than human cells.”

In The Holistic Orchard, Michael Phillips reports on the recent finding that trees are sheathed in microbes. Turns out we are, too. We are but microbe mobile homes, and the more we look the more we find, entire invisible and dynamic ecosystems on us and in us.

Dunn often talks about the human microbiome as though it is a prairie; principles of health thus parallel those of grasssland ecology. His aforementioned “pronghorn principle” is this: pronghorn speed is a result of invisible predators, invisible because extinct—they lived in the Pleistocene. You can see where he’s headed: Just as the pronghorn’s prairie has drastically changed, so has our microbiome. This is why, suggests Dunn, allergy rates are skyrocketing, along with asthma, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, IBD, and MS. Regaining our health depends on ecosystem restoration, and that’s where things get interesting. Pronghorn coevolved with the American cheetah; our gut bacteria coevolved with worms—which, like the cheetah, aren’t there anymore.

To restore balance, he says, we need to bring back intestinal parasites.

Enter a brand-new book, An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. Longer, more serious, rigorous, and often first-hand, Velasquez-Manoff takes the pronghorn principle and runs with it. In so doing, he expands upon the fascinating paradox of hygiene that harms—the widespread use of modern broad-spectrum antibiotics—and delves deep into theories of restoration ecology in the human gut. If you can stomach holistic, deep-time theories of inner ecosystem restoration, chew on these books a while. As Velasquez-Manoff points out, what you digest can literally change your mind—and hence the title of this review, from scientist Betty Diamond. - Jake Vail, Reference

I’ve failed at attempts at remembering when I first encountered Hughes’s writing, but I do know that I’ve always liked his forthright style and extremely wide-ranging perspective on how art fits into and shapes the world.  He was one of those authors I paid attention to, even if I didn’t read all his works cover to cover.  (I just had to go back and change that sentence from present to past tense. I hate that.)  At the last Friends of the Library book sale I scored a copy of The Shock of the New, Hughes’s excellent examination of the rise and fall of modern art, for a whopping $1.  The eyebrows went up on the gentleman totaling my purchases—he knew that I’d found a deal.

Hughes didn’t only write about art—his history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, was a best seller in 1987, and he has written about cities, such as Barcelona, and what turned out to be his final book, Rome. I bought the latter as a gift and looked through it before I sent it along—definitely another one for the “to read” list.  He also wrote The Culture of Complaint, which a few years back helped cement a friendship: when an acquaintance asked for it at the reference desk, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.

If there’s one Hughes book worth skipping, it’s his autobiography, Things I Don’t Know.  Probably my favorite is American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America.  An odd subtitle, “epic history” describing something just five centuries old, and coming from a guy who knew his Ionic from his Corinthian, but it is epic in his telling.  American Visions has a fat section on “The Wilderness and the West,” one of my interests, and the cover is Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” which ties into a related interest, land art.  (Along those lines, check out Spiral Jetta, about an art student’s road trip to land art sites, and my nominee for cleverest book title of the last five years.)

In honor of Mr. Hughes, I’ll mention a couple artsy things your public library is up to:  First, in celebration of Banned Books Week (at the end of September) and in cooperation with the Lawrence Arts Center, we’re announcing a call for Banned Books Trading Cards.

And be sure to read this important news about public art and the library renovation. – Jake, Reference

Anne Matthews provides an easy-to-read and entertaining look at the early years of the Buffalo Commons in her still-relevant 1992 book, Where the Buffalo Roam. The Poppers still tour the Plains, and I confess to being something of a groupie. I first heard them in a Salina barn in 1990, and more recently in Manhattan in 2004 (when ex-Governor Hayden confessed to being wrong, and joined the Poppers’ camp), and in Salina a year and a half ago. They—and yours truly in a passing cameo—also appear in an excellent DVD about American bison called Facing the Storm.

Well, the Poppers are news again, launching an excellent piece by Wil Hylton in the July issue of Harper’s, called “Broken Heartland: The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains.” Several things about the article grabbed me: The lovely photographs by Terry Evans. The description of Larry Haverfield (who should be recognized as a hero for his part in the return of the black-footed ferret to Kansas). Texas Tech professor Kevin Mulligan (see below). The section about the Kansas Farmers Union Convention, which I witnessed, and the subsequent scene when Land Institute president Wes Jackson says, “Ten thousand years we’ve been waiting for that.”

(Dr. Jackson’s latest, Consulting the Genius of the Place, is an engaging excursion, worth the trip.)

Two other things persuaded me to buy Harper’s–which you don’t need to do if you come to the library: “A Letter from Brownbackistan” by Thomas Frank, who takes a fresh look at What’s the Matter with Kansas; and the cover. Look closer: see that thick clot of wind turbines stretching across the horizon? In Hylton’s piece, Kevin Mulligan rails against them: “You drive and you drive, and there’s endless machinery as far as you can see, in every direction? That scares me.” I’m with him. A few years ago I took a long roadtrip south and west, and encountered lots of wind farms and 18-wheelers hauling big blades across remote areas. I could see it coming, and now there’s no turning back.

In discussing the Buffalo Commons, the Poppers often refer to historian Elwyn Robinson’s concept of “The Too-Much Mistake”: too much infrastructure for the state to support; too many people for the land to support. And now, just as we get word that the SLT is a go, comes cantankerous ol’ James Howard Kunstler with a book called Too Much Magic—as in magical thinking, what he also calls the Jiminy Cricket syndrome: belief that wishing makes it so. Since I read The Long Emergency and heard Mr. Kunstler in that same Salina barn a few years ago, I see him as a stern but well-meaning Zen priest, quick with the bamboo cane. (The fact that he’s bald and dresses in black just reinforces the image.) Examine your assumptions, he says. You assume endless cheap oil and a stable climate? So sorry.

A new trafficway? SMACK!

Read the book. – Jake, Reference

In a recent interview, Burtynsky had this bit of shocking news:

“I just came back from a conference on the future of photography… One of the curators of a museum in Switzerland had invited students from any art school, anywhere in the world to submit work to be included in a survey of photography of the new generation. The one thing that was consistent in 1,200 submissions was that not one of the students was showing anything that had to do with spontaneity. Spontaneity was gone completely.

…It was all very staged and all very deliberate—not photography as the act of seeing the world or reacting to seeing the world…”

*

This is but a preamble to a sandy county almanac of sorts, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, by Carl Safina. Safina’s book has little to do with photography but everything to do with water and seeing and reacting to the world. I checked it out when it was nominated for Orion magazine’s 2012 Book Award, and Safina won me over within the first two pages. Then he won Orion’s award.

Carl Safina is a biologist and advocate; Lazy Point is on the eastern tip of Long Island. He’s founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute and author of six books, including The Voyage of the Turtle and The Eye of the Albatross. As it happened, right after immersing myself in Safina’s aquatic adventures, I snorkeled with a sea turtle and looked an albatross in the eye. That alone is enough for a lifetime, and Safina often does that kind of thing before breakfast. Since my experiences I’ve thought a lot about how even here among the amber waves we’re tied to the ocean’s currents, whether it’s via the fish we eat, or the oil we can’t live without that occasionally spills and spews out of control, or our plastic making its way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – unless its journey is interrupted by, for example, the digestive tract of a sea turtle.

Despite constantly witnessing such bio-calamities, Safina is far more poet than preacher. Whether he is walking on the beach, swimming among coral reefs, or exploring the changing ecosystems of regions Arctic and Antarctic, he tells it like it is, with empathy and an impressive understanding of what’s going on around him. Unlike that new generation of photographers, he sees much and his reactions, as witnessed through his books, remain as focused and sublime as an albatross’s eye. “The future is by no means doomed,” he says. “I’m continually struck by how much beauty and vitality the world still holds.”

Picture that.

- Jake, Reference