Campbell Editorial - Book Reviews

A living myth is told and retold as the centuries pass. Poets, painters, musicians are nourished by its imagery, and in each retelling something is added from the collective attitudes, conscious and unconscious, of the time and from the individual vision of the artist.” – Helen M. Luke in “The Laughter at the Heart of things.”

As I read Helen M. Luke’s analysis of the myth of the ring as viewed by Richard Wagner in The Ring of the Nibelungen (known as the four-part “Ring Series”) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I was struck by the fact this story is now part of our world view. Whether we learned of the myth through the original source materials, Wagner’s musical dramas, Tolkien’s books, or the feature film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, the story lives inside us as though it actually happened.

Tolkien expressed contempt for Wagner’s version of the old Norse myth drawn from the 13th century Icelandic Volsung Saga. Yet most critics believe Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungen (consisting of “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung”), composed between 1848 and 1874, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written between 1937 and 1949, are different interpretations of the same myth, and that Tolkien was also influenced by Wagner. Myths often have as many interpretations as history as though they refer to actual events.

Listen to the discussions about J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and you will hear people talking about Harry, Snape, Dumbledore and Voldemort in the same way they speak of celebrities, world leaders and newsmakers who come into their lives television, concerts and the Internet. All of these people, fictional or actual, are larger than life. While novel readers and film audiences know there is a difference between Tolkien’s characters and Rowling’s characters on one hand and well-known people within our culture, all of them are part of our shared story.

Earlier generations were impacted by Star Trek and Star Wars events and characters just as strongly. We know the difference between fictional characters aren’t read and that real people aren’t fictional, but it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same. While even the most fanatical fans don’t expect to see Captain Kirk, Spock, Frodo or Hagrid searching for salad greens in the produce department at Kroger or addressing Congress about the state of the galaxy, the worlds of those characters is part of our lives as though it’s a living and breathing reality.

Most authors don’t write with the expectation that their stories will impact readers with such force that the characters will suddenly take on independent lives of their own. At best, authors hope their stories and characters will seem real while their books are being read. For a reader, there’s nothing better than plunging into a good story, becoming enchanted by it, and following it with the fervor they follow family dramas and the biggest news stories of the day.

Yet some stories catch our fancy and stay with us long after we put the book down or leave the theater. Those are the stories we seek because they take us on flights of fancy, display new worlds before our mind’s eye, and take us on physical and emotional journeys that expand our lives and enrich our imaginations. Ask any reader what his or her favorite books are, and s/he will tell you about good guys and bad guys and things that go bump in the night and awesome landscapes that are just as much a part of his or her life as co-workers, neighbors and family.

As readers, finding such novels is part of a never-ending quest for a real page turner of a story we will never forget because it lives inside us and evolves every time we read it, talk about it and think about it. As readers, we love our living fiction.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours." --James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

Trying to define the blues takes you away from the blues.

Mark Winborn acknowledges this dilemma in the introduction to Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey, and then successfully explores the origins, scope, function, themes, performers, healing and imaginal nature of the blues experience. Setting the stage, he quotes from the Reverend Emmett Dickinson’s 1930 recorded sermon “Is There Harm in Singing the Blues?”

There’s so-called preachers all over this land

Are talking about the man or woman who sings the blues

You don’t know the meaning of the blues

The blues is only an outward voice to that inward feeling

Dickinson imagines the blues began with Adam singing “I didn’t know my burden was so hard.” Bluesmen, whom Winborn sees somewhat in the role of shamans, invite the audience to listen, participate, and be potentially changed—or even healed—by the sounds, symbols and ancient themes that flow out of the words and music of a performance.

The performer’s emotions usually arise out of his burden. When the bluesman’s sorrow and depression rise up from the void and hit the air, Winborn suggests that the singer and the listener shift out of ordinary consciousness into a “perceiving consciousness” of inner knowing outside the everyday realm of logic and the five senses.

In exploring this shift into “blues consciousness,” Winborn draws on Erich Neumann’s theory of unitary reality of the knowledge that the ego-complex can process and the felt knowledge of intuition and feelings that it cannot process. We cannot logically and directly categorize, analyze and describe the nature of the information flowing from performer to listener and back again during a performance any more than we can describe the blues itself.

Fortunately, we don’t have to apply ordinary consciousness to the task. The bluesman and his performance serve as an intermediary between the deep source of knowledge about the foundations of life and ourselves. “The themes associated with the blues,” writes Winborn, “are the building blocks of human experience: love, sex, work, travel, gambling, abandonment, loss of autonomy, addiction, adultery, relationship, trust, jealousy, joy, betrayal, and death.”

Author Ursula Le Guin has said that fantasy and mythic stories speak to us “unconscious to unconscious.” In his 1967 inquiry into the nature of man, Man in Search of Himself, physicist Jean E. Charon writes that inasmuch as the material in the unconscious is in archetypal form, works of art communicate it via an innate knowledge shared by artist and viewer in a language which “awakes unconscious resonances in each of us.” Winborn’s “Archetypal Manifestations of the Blues” and “Blues Play: Performers and Performance” chapters strike a similar chord.

From Deep Blues, readers new to the blues learn where the blues came from, how and why they became important, and the characteristics of both the poetry and the music. Readers familiar with the blues may feel an on-going déjà vu that takes them back to every B. B. King, Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters song they ever heard. Winborn supplements his insights with a rich selection of blues lyrics from a variety of artists.

“The blues is about maintaining a close relationship to one’s emotional life; becoming more intimately acquainted with one’s emotions and embracing what is painful, but also embracing what is ultimately enriching and meaningful,” Winborn writes in the book’s conclusion. His insights come not only from well-focused research and his work as a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, but from a lifetime of listening to the blues. Without taking us away from the blues, Deep Blues illuminates the scope, depth and source of the “outward voice to that inward feeling.”

About My Reviews

The imperial federal government has unconstitutionally mandated that on-line reviewers must say where they get the books. Reviews are essentially a journalism function, outside the purview of the Federal Trade Commission. Nonetheless. . .

I get most of them at the bookstore or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and other online sites. Like you, I pay for these books.

I get other books via mail and e-mail from small presses and authors who have asked if I’d be interested in reviewing the books. These books are free. My only obligation is to read them and then write a review.

In either case, a large percentage of my reviews are of small press books simply because–as a small press author–I see that we have an uphill battle getting any publicity whatsoever when contrasted with the authors from big publishers with big promotion budgets. My reviews are skewed more toward the positive because (a) I am not a book critic, and (b) I tend to read books I think I will enjoy rather than working for a newspaper or magazine that requires me to read books that I might otherwise have no interest in.

I am not compensated for any of my reviews. Some say the free book, when there’s one involved, is compensation. Most of the people who say that (including the feds) have no clue how many hours of work it takes to read a book and then write a review. Suffice it to say, the monetary value of the book is far less than the amount a freelance writer would bill a client if he were receiving true compensation for his time.

I enjoy reading and I enjoy posting reviews about books I like. That’s the long and the short of it.

2011 Free Review Copies: Razor’s Revenge, Snare, kiDNApped, Snakes, Adagio & Lamentation, When the de la Cruz Family Danced, Telling the Difference, Soul Stories Deep Blues

Like the mentors and magical helpers who guide seekers through unknown worlds, author Elizabeth Clark-Stern captures readers in her well-woven net of spell-binding words and hauls us on board a book of dreams.

In “Soul Stories” we discover two novellas about two young girls—each with an absent mother and a strong father—who must find within themselves the wisdom and courage to understand the harsh realities of the adult world. Each girl has a wonderful guide. In “Safari to Mara,” Mara rides a zebra named Lo Lo into her future. In “Aria of the Horned Toad,” Beatrice rides a toad named Custard into her present.

In the heat of the African plains, Mara finds solace in the land that cradles the Masai. In the heat of central Texas, Beatrice finds solace in a river of dreams that flows unseen through the streets of Austin. Mara feels abandoned. Beatrice feels unwanted. Their souls cry out to be filled with love in Africa where going on safari might mean watching cruel nature take its course and in Austin where coming home at dusk might mean staring at a mother’s empty chair at the dinner table.

In “Safari to Mara,” Clark-Stern immerses readers in a dazzling landscape of predators and prey where life and death manifest as an infinite dance. It’s a lot for Mara to absorb and comprehend. In “Aria of the Horned Toad,” she serves readers a thirst-quenching eye-opener of well-shaken reality and make-believe. It’s a difficult puzzle for Beatrice to put together.

In her Masai world, Mara is on the cusp of womanhood where she is expected to prepare for marriage. She has other ideas. She seeks a future wide enough for larger dreams. In her Austin neighborhood, circumstances force Beatrice to shoulder adult-level responsibilities before she is done being a child. She is willing to do what’s required of her, though she seeks a here-and-now where children can be loved and safe.

These extraordinary stories are for dreamers and for those who want to become dreamers. They speak to the pure child in us. They can be read to children on dark and stormy nights and spun into tall tales around summer campfires where the dark forest around us encourages us to believe the veil between reality and dream is thin veil.

Wherever they are read, told and re-told, the disparate yet similar stories in “Soul Stories” are a joy to the ear that hears the spell-binding words and to the mind’s eye that sees Clark-Stern’s beautiful, deeply moving worlds.