Something special and small

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a leisurely reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I finished it last night which, being Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday, turned out to be perfect timing.

I did a blog event I called Chestertober a couple years ago but wasn’t able to follow it up last fall. I’m considering reviving it this year. If I can manage it, Orthodoxy will be one of the major books I mean to review. It was my introduction to Chesterton twenty years ago—I recall reading it during the summer of what must have been 2006—and proved genuinely revelatory. It’s frequently quoted for a reason. I could pull out a dozen passages per chapter, minimum, and comment on them at length and still find more to consider and work through on another reading.

For now, as part of observing and thinking about Good Friday, here are two that leapt out at me in the final chapter last night.

First, near the end, as Chesterton ties together the book’s arguments, he narrows his focus briefly from broad philosophical and cultural conflicts to the mischaracterization of Christianity as “something weak and diseased” and the character of Christ himself, who has often been portrayed as “a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly”:

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque”

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. . . . The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.

A brilliantly concise summary of the moralistic “be nice” Jesus manufactured out of a variety of ulterior motives and the man we actually encounter in the Gospels. The contrast is perhaps most striking if one returns to the Gospels after several years, or reads them straight through in a reader’s Bible—a topic I intend to write about one of these days—rather than parceling them out in discrete episodes or tidied up storybook versions. And the “extraordinary” quality of Christ is nowhere more apparent than in the events of Holy Week.

Second, and most personally moving to me, was the book’s penultimate paragraph. Having considered the way paganism, for all its strengths and admirable qualities, still left men in despair, the state to which Christianity’s critics threaten to return the world, Chesterton closes Orthodoxy with his most important point:

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.

I did not recall this passage from previous readings; it had not stuck out to me or stuck with me. That changed this time.

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

I’ve mentioned before the struggle that this winter and spring have been, of the insomnia and depression and paranoia and exhaustion. The melancholy of January grew so deep during our back-to-back weekends of ice and snow that I picked up Orthodoxy precisely because of its early passages on madness. Chesterton has a reputation for rescuing diseased minds from the brink and, though whatever I was going through wasn’t that severe, I reckoned I needed it. And it worked.

But to begin with madness—reaching for an old favorite as a comfort at a time when I felt like I was losing my mind—and to end with the above passage… that felt truly providential. Reading last night, I recognized myself from two months ago. Grief, melancholy, pessimism—these are my natural bent anyway but had somehow become “the fundamental thing.” Something had gone badly wrong. But far from mere description, this passage is also prescriptive. It can feel like this state lasts forever, but thanks to Christ these will only be temporary.

Already they have been lifting. Good Friday is a chance to remember that they will, if not now, be lifted forever. They’ve already been conquered, reduced to “something special and small.”

I hope this is an encouragement to y’all as it has been to me. If you haven’t read Orthodoxy, do so. I first picked it up because I had learned, somewhere, somehow, of Chesterton’s influence on CS Lewis. But I’ve read and reread it over the years on its own merits. Every time I enjoy my favorite parts again, and every time some part I had never noticed before touches something in me that I never knew needed help.

I shall not reply

In the summer of 1859, the New-York Tribune accused Robert E Lee of having three of his late father-in-law’s slaves, who had run away about a month before, caught and whipped, with Lee personally whipping a woman when the man administering the beating refused to. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was an anti-slavery paper and the accusation was made in an anonymous letter by a writer clearly unfamiliar with the provisions of Lee’s father-in-law’s will—of which Lee was the executor—and ended with a pointed political message. It was propaganda calculated to invite outrage—and provoke a response.

Lee’s only statement on the matter came in a letter to one of his sons: “The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply.”

One of the most annoying and unseemly aspects of online and social media culture is the endless calling-out of haters. Public figures of whatever level of fame, influence, and authority inevitably end up spotlighting and condemning their critics, which prompts fans to voice their support and dog-pile the enemy.

I’ve unfollowed a number of writers and thinkers I otherwise like precisely because of this. One popular evangelical literary scholar eventually made her presence on Instagram entirely about screenshotting hate mail and sharing it with a dismissive, above-it-all caption. An up-and-coming novelist on Substack has recently lashed out at a few people poking fun at her pretentions in a long essay describing them as anti-intellectuals and misogynists. I could multiply examples. The comments on these posts are always full of praise and affirmation, which is surely part of the point. It betrays a neediness and fragility I find not merely off-putting but embarrassing.

The technology doesn’t help, of course. The perverse incentives of social media demand response, immediately, and the knowledge that the fans will have your back against the haters only intensifies the pull toward the reply button. A mob can make anything feel righteous. Then follows the well-known dopamine rush of the zinger. And once the habit is formed, there’s no going back. You’ve fed the trolls. You’re ensnared, no better than the haters, slinging mud in the notes or reels or comments and basking in the praise of your yes-men. It’s this scene from “Community” all day, every day.

What I would like to see much, much more of is detachment. I shall not reply. Rather than acting like you’re above it all, rather than saying the criticism doesn’t matter, why not be above it all by ignoring it, not even mentioning it? Answer not a fool. That might mean letting the opinions of idiots stand but it wouldn’t degrade your own character. But as was clear even 2,000 years ago, most people would rather seem than be.

Lee understood this even in the newspaper era. There is some criticism not worth responding to, to which responding would only validate and encourage your critics by lowering yourself to their level. What must it have taken a man like him, of his background and character, facing such an accusation in such a difficult personal situation, not to reply? Discipline, for one thing, which the technology actively works to erode. He had avoided entanglement in journalistic controversies before and that habit didn’t fail him now. I doubt many of us could have made the same choice in 1859. I know even fewer could now.

2026 Local Author Expo recap

My table Saturday, with a cameo by the top of my son George’s head

The Greenville Library’s annual Local Author Expo took place this past Saturday. This was my first expo in a few years, and I was grateful to participate again.

The Library hosted us at the Hughes Main Library downtown. They did a good job of including a wide variety of work, including fantasy, mystery, children’s fiction, picture books, poetry, and non-fiction. Nearby were my friends Dana Caldwell, whose The Twelve Kingdoms, the first volume of an epic fantasy trilogy, my daughter is currently eating up, and Paul Michael Garrison, author of a pair of crime mysteries: Letters to the Editor and The Lies People Publish. I enjoyed catching up (and commiserating) with them.

The doors opened at 10:00 and once foot traffic picked up around 10:30 or 10:45 it stayed pretty busy, with plenty of people coming and going. I was surprised and pleased to meet a Substack follower who dropped by my table with his twin daughters. We talked about my books and the intertwined joys and travails of twin fatherhood, which was fun and gratifying. I also got to meet many strangers with a huge variety of backgrounds and interests—a retired cop who bought The Snipers and Dark Full of Enemies, a former Civil War reenactor whose second love is the Vikings, leader her to buy No Snakes in Iceland—and the friendliness of the crowd was as much of an encouragement as the sales I made.

Seeing and talking to readers in the flesh is also a good reminder that we’re made to enjoy each other’s company in real life. I spoke to a number of people who, to judge by the slogans on their shirts or the things they said, have opposed or simply quite different worldviews and opinions from me, but talking over a table of books was an opportunity to enjoy real community, united by courtesy and a shared love of stories. I’d certainly like more of that and less of the online hubbub. It’s a place to start, at least.

A great event, and I’d like to thank my three eldest, who helped me out at my table all three hours. They were not only a big help to me—putting cards and bookmarks inside each book sold, engaging the folks who stopped by with questions, and, in Sophie’s case, even stumping for her favorites of my stories—but it was fun to see them enjoy themselves at the tables of other authors.

They were especially taken with Emily Golus’s World of Vindor series and Sarah Dean’s Midnight Post and the Postbox Clock. I wasn’t able to stop by their tables during the expo, but the kids loved visiting with them. My parents also attended and my mom picked up a couple picture books for our younger kids: Finicky Frances, by Krista Leann, a book about picky eaters (a subject my mom knows all too well) and Adelina Aviator, by Jessica Vana (with nice illustrations by former Disney designer Adam Dix), about a girl who becomes a missionary pilot. Give all of their books a look.

This was a great event and I look forward to participating again—I hope with another book available! I spent much of my spring break last week starting a harsh final read-through of my manuscript for The Wanderer. Stay tuned for more, and I hope to see y’all there next year.

A really solid Tennessee excursion

Chickamauga: Cannon and monuments at the site of the Confederate breakthrough

Pardon the title. The kids put on Glenn Miller this morning during breakfast and I have “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” stuck in my head. That’s appropriate, though, because I’d already been planning to write about what we were doing five years ago right now: visiting Chattanooga. I wrote a review of one of the places we visited at the time: The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, which is right next door to the Tennessee Aquarium. The kids greatly enjoyed both. I notice now that I had promised to write more about my highlight of the trip later.

I suppose five years to the day is “later.” The highlight was a tour of the battlefield at Chickamauga.

The second bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the second bloodiest battle ever fought in north American occurred in September 1863 on the Georgia side of the state line just south of Chattanooga, part of the broader Union campaign to capture that city preparatory to invading Georgia and capturing the railroad hub at Atlanta. The battle began as a piecemeal, raggedy fight through dense forest along a broad front with a ridge at the Union’s back. The arrival of greater and greater numbers on both sides gradually allowed the battle to coalesce into a massive contest of frontal assaults.

The most dramatic moment of the battle came on the second day, when General James Longstreet hit a massive gap that had opened in the Union center with a sledgehammer blow of 10,000 men attacking in column. Eyewitnesses to the assault, who later described the massed Confederate troops pouring into the open fields of the Brotherton farm under streaming battle flags, were staggered by the sight. The attack broke the Union army, which fell back into the foothills and fought a series of heroic delaying actions as the army began its retreat to Chattanooga.

It was a massive victory for the Confederacy. The Confederate commander, the prickly, inscrutable Braxton Bragg, had a momentary lift in his reputation. The Union commander, William Rosecrans, whose confused orders resulted in the gap that Longstreet had blown apart, ended up resigning. His military career was over.

The losses were also massive. Four generals were killed, including Benjamin Hardin Helm, Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law. The Lincoln White House went into quiet, unpublicized mourning. And thousands of ordinary soldiers were killed and wounded—the casualties were second only to Gettysburg in the whole war and the heaviest by far in all of the Western Theatre—including someone whose last words I’ve written about here before: South Carolina Sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland, “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.”

It’s a huge, important, fascinating battle that is often overshadowed by Eastern Theatre battles like Gettysburg and Antietam or Union victories in the West like Vicksburg or Atlanta. For more, here’s a good short guide and an excellent animated map from American Battlefield Trust. For a book-length treatment, I’d recommend Peter Cozzens’s This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, which I read ahead of our visit.

The battle itself is significant and interesting, but visiting the battlefield meant much, much more to me.

The Civil War was the first historical event or period that I developed a serious interest in, somewhere about third or fourth grade. By fifth grade it obsessed me. I read everything I could get my hands on—fiction and non-fiction, Rifles for Watie and The Boys’ War among many others—and borrowed every Civil War documentary available at the Rabun County Library. For years I got multiple Civil War coffee table books and atlases for Christmas.

But growing up in northeast Georgia did not leave me a lot of options for seeing places from the Civil War. We only visited Atlanta by necessity and its battlefield has been buried under urban sprawl for decades. I did get to visit the Atlanta Cyclorama in its original location by the zoo—I could barely contain myself—but found it disheartening when the guide pointed out that the road running through the middle of the action is now Jimmy Carter Boulevard. (It occurs to me that this must be one of the roots of my interest in historic preservation.)

I learned of the Battle of Griswoldville from one of my library books, but I had no idea where that was and it was a pitiful Confederate defeat to boot. The seeds planted there would take twenty-odd years to sprout. But there was one other option in Georgia, a big one, that I knew about from our encyclopedias: Chickamauga.

The Battle of Chickamauga was big, it was a smashing Confederate victory, and it was fought in north Georgia! I begged to go, for a chance to see a real battlefield.

The problem is that “north Georgia” is a big place and, living in the mountains, it is not fast or easy to travel east-west. The few times I had been out that way—to Space Camp with my dad, or on church trips to camp—we had actually looped up into Tennessee to get to our destination. Places like Rome, Cartersville, or Chickamauga might as well have been on the moon. I don’t remember any specific answers I got from my questions about seeing Chickamauga, but the sense I remember is “We’ll see.” Meaning not for a long time, if ever.

But one person did promise me a visit: my granddad.

He was someone I could always talk to about my Civil War obsession. I barely remember any of those conversations, but I vividly recall him promising to take me to Chickamauga someday. The memory is still vivid because I could imagine the trip in one of his old trucks—the feel and smell of the seats, the road noise, the gas station snacks we’d certainly pick up (circus peanuts for him, Lance Gold-n-Chees for me), the talk with him we’d enjoy on the long drive.

We never got to make that trip, though. About that time, as I wrapped up elementary school and entered middle school, he was diagnosed with melanoma. He held on for a good while but, after Christmas 1997, declined quickly. He died March 13, 1998. 28 years ago today.

And five years ago today, on the 23rd anniversary of his death, I got to visit Chickamauga. I didn’t get to see the battlefield with him, but I did take my wife and three oldest kids, the dearest people in the world to me and the people I would most have liked him to meet. My oldest son, who was three and a half, at the time, is named after him.

That trip to Chattanooga, with its loop down to Chickamauga and Rock City—more on that in another five years, maybe—was a good trip all-around, but the best moment came there on the battlefield. We stopped the car to see the monument to my homestate. Georgia monuments on a lot of Eastern Theatre battlefields are pretty modest, usually a square granite column with the state seal. The one at Chickamauga, though, is a monument—almost ninety feet tall, surmounted by a bronze flagbearer and with lower pedestals commemorating Georgia’s infantry, cavalry, and artillerymen. It’s beautiful.

We got out of the car and the kids, with no idea yet of how much this visit, here, with them, meant to me, charged across the field to get a closer look. As I followed with Sarah and our youngest, my heart swelled, and I said a prayer of thanks: for them, for my homestate, that we could make this trip, and most of all for my granddad.

23 years is a long time, but it was worth the wait.

In dreams

I’ve taken on a somewhat wistful tone since the beginning of the year, at least partly because of feeling exhausted and downcast. Mercifully, I have improved a lot over the last few weeks—especially with regard to being able to sleep—but there’s still a good way to go. Being able to write again has helped. So has improved sleep. With that in mind, here’s a dream I had two nights ago:

After several odd dreams—including trying to liberate British POWs from a Japanese rowboat, something almost stereotypically predicable—my middle son, who is almost seven, and I stepped out of those dreamscapes onto a broad carpeted staircase on a completely imaginary campus of my college. At the top we walked into a large conference hall filled with tables, all crowded with school leadership. In the middle of the room, very close to us where we stood near the door, was my late grandmother, enthusiastically presenting a proposal for a new arts program.

My grandmother was a talented and prolific artist and so this was unsurprising. What I did note was that she looked much younger, probably around the age she was when I was born. What did not cross my mind at all in the dream was that she is no longer alive. (Knowing this within the dream has made it hard to talk to or interact with other relatives in other dreams.)

My son (named after her) and I just stood and listened. I appreciated how eloquently she was speaking to the movers and shakers at my school and was hopeful for the program she was describing.

And that was it. I woke up.

What’s curious about this dream is that, rather than deepening my sense of loss or sickheartedness, seeing my grandmother was a comfort. Purely and simply.

As I’ve written before, I dream a lot—what feels like all night, every night. (This has been a helpful measure of how much better I’m feeling; a month ago my dreams were completely jumbled fragments. Now they at least cohere into nonsense.) I’ve incorporated this into my fiction; I wouldn’t know how to understand my characters otherwise. Georgie Wax in particular—who, like my son, is also named for my grandmother—has the same sorts of dreams I do in Griswoldville, and in the end gets the same comfort from some of them. “O, what a foretaste,” he writes near the end.

I don’t know what such dreams mean, if anything—though I would like to think, as Georgie Wax does, that they are a booster shot of hope for the resurrection—but I am grateful for them when they come along.

Me and the Southern accent

Last month on his microblog, Alan Jacobs linked to this short Atlantic piece—now paywalled—about the slow extinction of the Southern accent. Quoting the author of the essay on the decline of distinctive Southern accents among the young and the eventual reality that the accents will only survive among the old in out-of-the-way places, Jacobs noted, “I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.”

Likewise and likewise. The regret is painful.

My speech, like Jacobs’s, is identifiably Southern to outsiders, but largely through syntax (e.g. double modals), vocabulary (e.g. y’all, fixing to), and peculiarities of emphasis (e.g. saying umbrella instead of umbrella). My accent, in terms of pronunciation, is limited to ineradicable features like the long I noted in that Atlantic essay, yod-dropping, hanging on to the H in wh- words, and the occasional dropped G. I have neither a drawl nor a twang.

This is a regret to me because I feel it severs me from previous generations and the place I come from in one of the most fundamental ways. We learn speech at our mother’s breast and from those closest to us, not only in terms of family but in physical proximity. Gradually losing that means losing a part of me that participates in them and in home.

And I cherish those accents—of which The Atlantic rightly notes there are many. I learned two kinds of Georgia accent growing up. My dad’s parents, natives of Clarke County and the Athens area, spoke a lot like Flannery O’Connor—a Savannah native with her own peculiarities of pronunciation—does in this recording, a soft, non-rhotic accent that outsiders read as genteel. My maternal grandparents, Rabun County natives, spoke in a strongly rhotic accent with heavy Appalachian features. Both of these are from “north Georgia,” broadly speaking, but couldn’t be more different. Southern accents have immense county-by-county variety.

Generation adds more variation. My parents’ accents, both still marked by their parents’ roots, nevertheless grew toward each other, and my own is a yet finer blend—dominated by my maternal side’s Appalachian terseness. It comes out when I try to say iron (arn) or Florida oranges (Flarda arnjes).

In old home movies I have a shrill, squeaky, very country little voice. I’m not sure when the most obvious marks of family and home began to fall away, but it must have been around middle or high school. Unlike the writer in The Atlantic, it was never intentional. I never wanted to blend in, was never ashamed of being Southern—far from it, I grew a sizable chip on my shoulder during an undergrad career surrounded by Yankees and Midwesterners who thought nothing of moving South and mocking the locals for saying umbrella—and, if anything, I wanted more of an accent than what I ended up with.

Faking it is not, I decided long ago, an option. Better to let it emerge occasionally, a nice surprise. (I’ve noticed myself, in the classroom, pronouncing opportunity without the R lately, a real surprise.) I try to comfort myself with examples of other provincials who unintentionally lost their accents—namely CS Lewis, a Belfast native who, quite unconsciously, slowly conformed to the speech of whomever surrounded him and ended up sounding like this.

But when I remember my grandparents’ voices, and talk to my parents and aunts and uncles and siblings, and think about those home movies, and then recall my own kids’ sweet speech—in which very little Southern remains—all I can do is regret. Time isn’t the only thing that gets away from us. And this, the Ubi sunt? sense of loss, is perhaps the only thing more Southern than the accent I used to have.

Easy to serve, difficult to please

This week I learned that a former department head at a college where I’ve taught adjunct classes off and on for a decade had died.

I first worked for her the semester my eldest was born. A colleague facing some unexpected surgery offered me a Western Civ II course at this other school and put me in touch with the department head there. She gave me the course on the spot, with just a few weeks to go before the spring semester. I had a hard time keeping up—I began that spring with five adjunct classes at two colleges, an ESL tutoring job for a German elementary student at Sarah’s school, and part-time work at a sporting goods store—but I was most grateful because we needed the money and the work was good. As so often, it was exactly what we needed when we needed it.

My department head didn’t have another class for me after that spring but said she would be in touch as the need arose. Lo and behold, as Sarah and I expected our second child two years later, she reached out with another spring class. I gratefully accepted. Again—just enough, when needed.

That summer I found out about a full-time position at Piedmont Tech and that’s where I’ve been ever since. When I let my department head at this other school know, she thanked me and wished me luck, and said to let her know if I ever needed anything. A generous offer, and she meant it. Over the next few years she’d check in regularly on LinkedIn—yes, LinkedIn can actually be helpful!—always encouraging me and letting me know that if I needed work all I had to do was ask.

I asked when Sarah and I found out we were expecting twins, children four and five. And my department head happily set me up with an online class, semester after semester until her retirement.

She will be missed. She not only played a willing role in God’s providential care for our family—something, as a fellow believer, she would have happily acknowledged—but was simply a good boss.

I’m old enough now to have lost several former bosses: my first boss, a family friend who managed the seafood restaurant where I kept the buffet line supplied with clean plates in middle school, and then her husband, an auctioneer and antiques appraiser who employed me for the year between college and grad school and where I learned a lot about old stuff—as well as how to properly load a moving truck. My department head joins them.

As I’ve reflected on this over the last couple days, their authority reminded me of Confucius’s concept of the junzi, the “superior” or “noble man,” a subject I once taught in an adjunct World History course for this department head: the superior man is “easy to serve but difficult to please.” A rare combination. They were gentle but demanding, graciously insisting on high standards of work, encouraging me to live up to my potential. It was never difficult to work for any of them but I always knew I could do better, and improved as I worked for them. I’m glad to say these are not the only such bosses I’ve had.

The internet is full of vindictive, cynical, hostile takes on the relationship between employer and employee, and it’s not hard to understand why so many people assume it must be adversarial. But I’ve been blessed to see a number of genuinely good bosses, including my current and former deans and department heads at my full-time work, and to cherish the memories of these who have passed away. Precisely by being a good boss they proved to be more. RIP.

Worn slap out

One of my favorite moments of serendipity when learning German in college was when our teacher introduced us to the word schlapp. This was a synonym, he said, for müde, “tired,” and unless I’m misremembering he pantomimed dangling limply like a puppet. Ich bin schlapp.

I say this was serendipitous because a common expression where I grew up is “worn slap out.” I have no idea if there’s any actual relation between the words, but the cognate, false or not, leapt out at me. The slap is an intensifying particle—I’m not just worn out, I’m worn slap out. I can take no more wear.

Well, I’m worn slap out.

I and the whole family had the flu over Christmas and, with the new semester, I’ve had a lot of residual exhaustion compounded by insomnia. As a result I’ve missed the last two weeks here, the longest I’ve gone without writing anything on the blog since 2020 or before. I’ve begun a few posts but haven’t gotten anywhere on them. I’m hoping to fix that in the coming weeks.

I saw my doctor earlier this week and I think I’m on track to manage and reverse the tiredness. A lot of it is simply the results of the good things going on in life right now—plenty of work, the kids God has blessed us with. But the flu and the two weekends of bad winter weather have built up a deficit I’m maybe just a bit too old to bounce back from like before.

So I’m still here, but may not achieve my former pace of blogging for a while. I appreciate those of y’all who I know check in regularly. Your readership means a lot.

I doublechecked schlapp this morning, by the way, as it’s been nigh on twenty years since that German class and I wondered if I could be misremembering. It is used as slang for tired but properly means “limp,” “flabby,” or even “nerveless.” All accurate, too. But hopefully not for long.

Elegy for the mass market paperback

Some of my oldest and most cherished mass market paperbacks

It’s been a busy week both recovering from last weekend’s ice-storm and two lost days of school and preparing for this weekend’s snow, but not so busy that I didn’t catch a tempest in the Substack teapot: the apparent extinction of the mass market paperback.

In actual fact, Publisher’s Weekly reported last month that the country’s largest book distributor had decided not to bother shipping mass market paperbacks anymore, citing a steep decline in sales over the last few decades and profit margins that were already thin. This will naturally have an effect on how many of them are available and where, but the news was being misunderstood on Substack as either 1) mass market paperbacks will no longer be produced by publishers at all or, more egregiously, 2) paperbacks in general are being discontinued.

In the middle of his hubbub a not insignificant number of voices were raised crying “Good riddance!” Mass market paperbacks, they said, are cheap, badly designed, have small print and margins so narrow your thumbs cover the words, and their spines fall apart almost immediately. A lot of the same people paired their condemnation of the mass market paperback with praise for the hardback.

The mass market paperback may not, in fact, be extinct quite yet, but I can’t tolerate hatred for it.

Let me start with the crassly material. Cheapness is a feature, not a bug. The hardback aficionados seem to forget the kids who want to read but can’t stomach getting only one book for $30 they worked hard for or saved until the day they could visit a good bookstore. The money is just a facilitator, not the point; How much reading will my $20 get me? is the question I asked over and over as a teenager. I still do paperback math in my head—for most modern hardbacks I could have gotten at least six mass market paperbacks back in the day.

As for flimsiness, that’s just the nature of paper and glue. Even the $20—and more and more often $22 or $25—trade paperbacks dominating bookstores today will eventually fall apart from rough use or shoddy binding. Even hardbacks are not bound like they used to be. In my experience, if one takes even a little care of one’s books—not getting them wet, not just throwing them around, not intentionally breaking the spine like a barbarian—they’ll last a long time, and a mass market paperback from a decent publisher will likely be as sturdy as any other size.

And regarding design, a small book will necessarily have smaller print. Adapt. And just how big are your thumbs?

So much for that. Why do I feel so strongly about this?

My affection for the mass market paperback runs deep. I was a country boy without a lot of spare cash for books, so from quite early on, when I got a book, I got a mass market paperback. Many of the books my parents ordered for me at a discount from the God’s World Book Club in elementary school—Rifles for Watie and Across Five Aprils come to mind, as well as things like World’s Strangest Baseball Stories—were mass market paperbacks. I still have many of these.

The Hallmark store on St Simons Island where my mom shopped for gifts and ornaments every summer had an entire wall of these books. It was here that I first found a copy of The Killer Angels, which I knew as the source of Gettysburg, my favorite movie. My parents bought it for me and I just about wore it out reading it in the condo, by the pool, even at supper while a Japanese hibachi chef lit onion volcanoes on fire. Look at the photo at the top of this post—that’s the same copy. Cheap, yes—$5.99 is printed on the spine—but still serviceable.

When I started reading seriously in high school, the mass market paperback made entire literatures available to me for five or six dollars apiece. Signet Classics, which was repackaging their line in nicely designed matte-finish covers as I finished high school and started college, became my go-to. I’d pick up as many as I could with my birthday money during summer trips to St Simons—by this time blessed with a Books-a-Million, which always had a huge inventory of them—or at the Greenville Barnes & Noble when I didn’t have to be in class and had a little money. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf and Sir Gawain, Ovid, Virgil, Boccaccio, Euripides, Malory, Shakespeare, O Henry, David Copperfield, The Song of Roland—just this partial list is an introduction to a whole civilization for about $50.

The most important of all of these was a Signet Classics mass market paperback of Inferno, translated by John Ciardi, which I got sometime in 2001, a quarter century ago. And I can precisely date another important mass market paperback acquisition thanks to Amazon, where my very first order was a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front—in a metallic bronze cover I can still picture—on February 8, 2000.

Again, these are two books that transformed my life and I got both for about $10. (Amazon records the price of my copy of All Quiet as $4.79.) But much more important than the cost effectiveness is what I got out of these books, and the memories I have of them.

I’ve already mentioned a few of these. I also remember reading Inferno on the bus as a high school junior, canto by canto and reading every one of Ciardi’s notes both to uncover more of this amazing book and to block out the chaos around me. I first read Sir Gawain in a single Sunday afternoon as a college freshman, and plowed through The Bonfire of the Vanities over several weeks of lunch in the campus snack shop the same year. I carried my copy of Raffel’s Beowulf in my jacket pocket as I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago. It was August and it got sweaty but it’s still here on my shelf. And of course there’s the drive to Atlanta in 2000 that I’ve mentioned before, when I read a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark” and realized I loved The Hobbit (purchased at Walmart) and would forever.

The mass market paperback met an important need for me at a specific time. Maturing as a reader, wanting to read a lot, but not having much money or space, and being limited to what was widely available in big bookstores, mass market paperbacks were an intermediate step between the $1 and $2 books in the Dover Thrift catalog I pored over in high school and the Penguin Classics I began collecting in college. Good books, readily available, in workmanlike binding, inexpensive—anything more strikes me as luxury.

I don’t begrudge anyone their hardback library—far from it—but I hate to see the mass market paperback impugned. It’s done humble and honorable service making entertainment and learning available to millions. I’m one of them.

I hope the mass market paperback’s death has been greatly exaggerated and that it will have many years left. But even if not, I’m grateful, and I’ll still enjoy mine.

In Dilbert memoriam

A childhood favorite. some of my interests have never changed.

I’m late to the game in memorializing Scott Adams, who died a week ago today, and can offer only a personal appreciation. I hadn’t kept up with him consistently for about twenty years and heard of him just often enough to be amused at what he was getting up to. When I heard of his terminal illness last year and his plans to seek assisted suicide, I was grieved.

But to begin in the proper place. I was a comics-loving kid and while I was aware of Dilbert, which came packaged with all my favorites in my grandparents’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Anderson Independent, I don’t know how often I actually read it. My fundamental sense of what comic strips were came from Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and—for one-panel high strangeness—The Far Side. These are still the three highest peaks in my estimation of the form. Dilbert was of a different world and valence than these, and its subjects and artwork probably didn’t immediately appeal.

But sometime in the mid-90s I got a new classmate at my small Christian school. I already owe one lifelong debt to Clint because he told me about this short story he had read at his previous school, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and accidentally introduced me to Poe, but he was also a huge fan of Dilbert. I remember him bringing a copy of Fugitive from the Cubicle Police—the politically correct title for what in the strip itself is referred to as the Cubicle Gestapo—to read between classes. His enthusiasm and the specific strips he shared with me from this book led me to look closer at Dilbert. It was soon a favorite.

It’s a testament to Adams’s genius that a couple of twelve-year olds could have found Dilbert’s workplace humor so funny. For us Dilbert was essentially fantasy literature, full of strange races and the vocabulary of forbidden tongues. I had no idea what HR was (those were the days) or what a consultant or software engineer did or what any of the office-specific jargon and tech lingo of the mid-90s actually meant, but we floated along on the vibes and characterization, inferring the meaning and import of jokes. Adams was very good at this. His skill with story, characterization, and the crucial timing of written humor meant our lack of experience of this world posed no obstacle to understanding—and laughing. We got the point even when we didn’t get the reference.

The chapter on office pranks was not especially helpful job preparation for a middle-schooler

Soon I had a respectable stack of Dilbert books, including one that worked as a key to Dilbert’s world and appealed to my Aristotelian love of taxonomy: Seven Years of Highly Defective People, a best-of sorted by character with notes by Adams in the margins. These were informative and funny and his personality came through clearly.

I got to know that better by signing up—again, this is still the mid or late 90s—for his e-mail newsletter, which automatically made me part of the DNRC: Dogbert’s New Ruling Class, the intellectual elite of his forthcoming new world order. Here Adams offered updates and commentary and responded to reader e-mails with a brimful serving of his wry snark. It was here, I think, or perhaps in The Joy of Work, one of his non-cartoon books on business culture, that I learned the word cynical.

I was in middle school by then (I remember reading The Dilbert Future on my first trip to Europe in 1998, not quite fourteen) and that’s a heady moment to be introduced to cynicism. Not that it wouldn’t naturally have occurred about that time, but I’m not sure learning that one could adopt a self-aware, sardonic, Olympian aloofness about one’s environment was helpful to me. I’m already bent, in Malacandran terms, in these directions anyway, and Dilbert encouraged me to adopt a more self-conscious and ironic posture strictly because it was funny. This cynicism was, ironically, quite naive.

Perhaps this would have been fine in a Sisyphean office environment, but at fourteen my environments were family, church, and school, fields where earnestness is actually warranted—most of the time. Because I learned cynicism as a way of humor about the same time I learned that, as a true believer, I would often be let down, I learned to use wry humor as a shield. I don’t think Dilbert did me any long-term damage but I’ve had to mature past these attitudes and habits.

Back to Adams himself and the DNRC. The Dilbert newsletter was probably my first experience of a writer opening up his mind to his readers. In addition to cartooning, the business world, and the vast intellectual superiority of his subscribers, Adams unironically flogged his vegetarian taco brand and his thought experiments—another phrase I learned from him. He shared a lot of the ideas he’d eventually package as God’s Debris. I may have been naive but I wasn’t suggestible and wouldn’t follow the funny man into woo-woo agnosticism. I had accidentally learned how to observe proper boundaries with people I liked but couldn’t agree with on the important stuff, a lesson I can take no credit for. It also won’t be the last appearance of grace in this story.

I kept up with Dilbert online through college—it was one of several strips I checked daily—but Adams himself, whom I admired as the off-kilter mind behind the cartoon, fell out of my awareness and I was content simply to read the strip. Somewhere between my undergrad and grad school years I lost the habit even of this, so it was a shock to run across it occasionally and see updates. Dilbert in polo and lanyard? That would have been unthinkable in 1998. (But guess what I wear to work every day.)

I have no opinion on Adams and politics. When he popped up on my radar over the last ten years saying contrarian things to the great consternation of a lot of people, I was unsurprised. Hadn’t y’all met him? He was a contrarian. If he hadn’t been, Dilbert would never have had the edge and absurdity that made it great. It would have been Cathy in a software company.

But to return to where I started, when Adams announced his imminent death from pancreatic cancer and his plans to end his own life, I was grieved. I remembered my mixed feelings about his dorm room-style philosophizing, his know-it-all pandeism, his air of superiority—in a word, his arrogance, a trait that attracts middle schoolers like a whirlpool attracts flotsam—and worried that his gifts would end in a final act of nihilism as dark as anything in Catbert’s HR department. What I did not do was hope or pray for him.

I am in no position to weigh the merit of Adams’s announcement of his conversion to Christianity just before he died last week. The various algorithms have tried to feed me a lot of videos—all with thumbnails of frantic, outraged people mugging in front of microphones—arguing yea or nay on his reasons. What I do know is that Adams was facing death, the ultimate argument-ender, and these podcasters are not, and that God is not willing that any should perish. In a history replete with sinners converting in the most miserable of conditions, how is God diminished by saving one more? What I felt when I learned of his decision, a Pascal’s Wager deathbed conversion, was relief and gratitude.

Again, these are my observations as an old fan who, after childhood, held Adams at arm’s length but always appreciated him. Dilbert’s peculiar sense of humor is a key middle-layer of the development of my own sensibilities, and Adams’s genius was the same as that that made Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side great—the ability to heighten the ordinary while keeping it familiar, to people his imaginary landscape with characters we recognize as our friends, family, coworkers, and ourselves, to make this hilarious, and to do it seemingly effortlessly. Also like Schulz, Watterson, and Larson, he was, for better or worse, uncompromising. That his complicated story and difficult personality ended with not just a turn toward grace but a casting of himself on God makes it all the more poignant.

Adams’s story seems to me one of eucatastrophe, of grace snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It is not a story Adams would have written. Is there any better end for the cynic than redemption?