Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

Here’s an anecdote from the difficult times shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, with the moral of the tale right up front.

The early stages of the post-9/11 rendition program began what would be a multiyear battle between the FBI and the CIA over who would take the lead in investigating the terror attacks. It would also bring to the surface how little regard the Bush White House had for anything vaguely resembling a law enforcement approach to the perpetrators of 9/11. As the Taliban regime crumbled and US troops poured into Afghanistan, scores of al Qaeda operatives began retreating across the border into Pakistan. In November, Pakistani forces picked up al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh Libi, who allegedly ran the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan where the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called Twentieth Hijacker, were both trained. The Pakistanis handed Libi over to FBI agents stationed at Bagram Air Base for questioning. The FBI saw the prisoner as a potentially valuable source of intel on al Qaeda and a possible witness against Moussaoui. New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan told his agents in Afghanistan to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’” Libi’s interrogators described him as cooperative and “genuinely friendly” and said that he had agreed to give them information on Reid in return for promises to protect his family.

The FBI treated the situation like a criminal procedure, where suspects had rights, and deals with informants were struck for access to bigger fish.

However, just as the FBI believed it was making headway with Libi, CIA operatives, on orders from [CIA Station Chief] Cofer Black, showed up at Bagram and demanded to take him into their custody. The FBI agents objected to the CIA taking him, but the White House overruled them. “You know where you are going,” one of the CIA operatives told Libi as he took him from the FBI. “Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her.”

Lovely.

The CIA flew Libi to the USS Bataan in the Arabian Sea, which was also housing the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, who had been picked up in Afghanistan, and other foreign fighters. From there, Libi was transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured by Egyptian agents. Libi’s interrogation focused on a goal that would become a centerpiece of the rendition and torture program: proving an Iraq connection to 9/11. Once he was in CIA custody, interrogators pummeled Libi with questions attempting to link the attacks and al Qaeda to Iraq. Even after the interrogators working Libi over had reported that they had broken him and that he was “compliant,” Cheney’s office directly intervened and ordered that he continue to be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. “After real macho interrogation -- this is enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids -- he admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together. He admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together on WMDs,” former senior FBI interrogator Ali Soufan told PBS’s Frontline. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cast serious doubt on Libi’s claims at the time, observing in a classified intelligence report that he “lacks specific details” on alleged Iraqi involvement, asserting that it was “likely this individual is intentionally misleading” his interrogators. Noting that he had been “undergoing debriefs for several weeks,” the DIA analysis concluded the Libi may have been “describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Despite such doubts, Libi’s “confession” would later be given to Secretary of State Powell when he made the administration’s fraudulent case at the United Nations for the Iraq War. In that speech Powell would say, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.” Later, after these claims were proven false, Libi, according to Soufan, admitted he had lied. “I gave you what you want[ed] to hear,” he said. “I want[ed] the torture to stop. I gave you anything you want[ed] to hear.”

What’s remarkable to me is that, from the very beginning, this was more about cruelty and lies than it ever was about the truth. Some will argue that President Bush’s decision to treat things like war instead of police investigation gave him the legal right to treat his prisoners differently, and that perhaps may be true -- but treating them like garbage is never a good idea and, as New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan would have likely known at the time, is counterproductive.

Scahill’s book is filled with anecdotes like this, more or less chronologically detailing America’s slide into legal fictions that supported policies torture and targeted assassination. Another anecdote is about the targeted drone killing of an al Qaeda operative who happened to be in a car with an American citizen -- Ahmed Hijazi -- who was also killed in the attack.

The targeted assassination of US citizens away from the declared battlefield of Afghanistan sparked outrage from civil liberties and human rights groups. It was the first publicly confirmed targeted killing by the United States outside a battlefield since Gerald Ford implemented a ban on political assassinations in 1976. “If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law,” declared Amnesty International in a letter to President Bush. “The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions in any circumstances, and that any US officials found to be involved in such actions will be brought to justice.”

Yeah. So much for that. 

Far from issuing such a statement, the Bush administration not only owned the operation but pushed back hard, asserting its right under US law to kill people it designated as terrorists in any country, even if they were US citizens. “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News a week after the attack. “The president has given broad authority to U.S. officials in a variety of circumstances to do what they need to do to protect the country. We’re in a new kind of war, and we’ve made very clear that it is important that this new kind of war be fought on different battlefields.” She added, “It’s broad authority.”

The targeted killing didn’t just grab the attention of human rights groups. “To the extent you do more and more of this, it begins to look like it is policy,” said the CIA’s former general counsel, Jeffrey Smith. If used regularly, such attacks would “suggest that it’s acceptable behavior to assassinate people. … Assassianation as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.

In addition to launching a new kind of war in Yemen and the surrounding region, the drone strike that killed Hijazi would prove to be a precedent for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who nearly a decade later asserted the right of the US government to kill another US citizen in Yemen.

That, of course, was Anwar al-Awlaki (and his teenage son), but the broader point is one we see time and time again in history. The power of the U.S. president is nebulously defined. What one president asserts, and is not stopped from doing, becomes precedent, and is used by future presidents. It becomes, de facto, the power of the president, almost regardless of what the Constitution does or does not say about it.

But here, the Bush administration at least tried to concoct a legal construct to justify these actions. Broadly speaking, that was treating terrorism as a war rather than the crime that it had traditionally been viewed as. That opened up tons of nebulous options under the legal war powers of the U.S. president. 

I found this analysis and dissection fascinating.

Within the US laws governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the US code, of federal law, sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. The terms “covert” action and “clandestine” operations are often thrown around as though they mean the same thing. They do not. “Covert action” is a doctrinal and legal term that, broadly speaking, refers to an activity whose sponsorship is meant to be a secret. It is meant to provide the United States with “plausible deniability.” Such operations are extremely risky -- not just in terms of the operational danger, but because they often involve secret US agents conducting operations inside the borders of a sovereign country without alerting its government. If the operation is exposed or disrupted, the potential for scandal is very real. The legal definition of covert action, according to Title 50, is “An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence the political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”

Wait. Put a pin in that. That’s legal?

A covert action requires a presidential finding and for the White House to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” 

Evidently so. With a briefing to Congress.

The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Iran-Contra. Those operations were passionately supported by [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld. Although they no doubt regretted the fact that Iran-Contra became public and stirred controversy, they did not regard the operation itself as a scandal but rather as a model for how the United States should conduct its dirty business.

Okay. So that’s covert action. Do it in secret, but let your overseers know before you do it. Because, you know, according to the Constitution, Congress has oversight authority over the Executive Branch.

Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not conceal its sponsor, the US government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “Traditional Military Activities” and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under US law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the US role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

You can probably see where this is going.

From where Rumsfeld and Cheney were sitting, the United States was at war, and the world was a battlefield. Therefore, hostilities were “anticipated” in every country on earth, necessitating dozens if not hundreds of potential “Traditional Military Activities” across the globe. Cheney and Rumsfeld realized that by using JSOC -- a black-ops force whose activities arguably straddled both Title 10 and Title 50 -- they could operate in the crevice separating US military and intelligence law. Much of JSOC’s operations could be classified under military doctrine as “Preparing the Battlespace,” which is defined by the US Special Operations Command as “the umbrella term for all activities conducted prior to D-Day, H-Hour to plan and prepare for potential follow-on military operations … in likely or potential areas of employment, to train and prepare for follow-on military operations.” Such activities could be conducted as Advance Force Operations (AFOs), which are “military operations conducted by forces which precede the main elements into the area of operations to prepare for follow-on operations.” Unlike CIA operations, AFOs can be carried out with minimal external oversight -- for a significant period of time -- prior to an “overt” hostility, or for a “contingency” that may or may not occur.

Did you follow all that? If we operate under the laws of clandestine operations, we don’t have to tell Congress anything, and if we call everything we do “preparing the battlespace,” we can do anything we want for as long as we want.

The congressional intelligence committees viewed this logic as a workaround to oversight and reporting laws, charging that the Defense Department wanted to liberally deploy its increasingly formidable intelligence capabilities abroad under the pretense of operational planning for future military hostilities, without granting the intelligence committees their due oversight.

I don’t doubt it. One of the things that is amazing to me is all the legal shenanigans that the Bush administration went through in order to accomplish their goals. They spent a lot of time looking for “legal” justifications for their actions. In some ways, that makes it seem like the years after September 11 were much simpler times. One wonders if current administrations would even try to crawl through as many hoops.

Which brings us back to Anwar al-Awlaki.

In early 2013, a US Department of Justice “white paper” surfaced that laid out the “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen.” The government lawyers who wrote the sixteen-page document asserted that the government need not possess specific intelligence indicating that an American citizen is actively engaged in a particular or active terror plot in order to be cleared for targeted killing. Instead, the paper argued that a determination from a “well-informed high level administration official” that a target represents an “imminent threat” to the United States is a sufficient basis to order the killing of an American citizen. But, the Justice Department’s lawyers sought to alter the definition of “imminent,” advocating what they called a “broader concept of imminence.” They wrote, “The condition that an operational leaders present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.” The government lawyers argued that waiting for a targeted killing of a suspect “until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself.” They asserted that such an operation constitutes “a lawful killing in self-defense” and is “not an assassination.”

Again, the need for legal justification -- this time in the Obama administration -- is laudable. But it is also laughable. Don’t like that pesky word ‘imminent’? Then let’s just redefine it to mean exactly its opposite. Big Brother would be so proud! And yes, let’s talk of the United States “defending itself.” Killing that American who hasn’t done anything yet is necessary to keep the United States safe -- so long as a “well-informed high level administration official” says so. Right?

But it goes even farther than that.

In late 2012, the ACLU and the New York Times sought information on the legal rationale for the kill program [of the Obama administration], specifically the strikes that had killed three US citizens -- among them sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In January 2013, a federal judge ruled on the request. In her decision, Judge Colleen McMahon appeared frustrated with the White House’s lack of transparency, writing that the Freedom of Information Act requests raised “serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not men.” She charged that the Obama administration “has engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing to any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions.” She added, “More fulsome disclosure of the legal reasoning on which the Administration relies to justify the targeted killing of individuals, including United States citizens, far from any recognizable ‘hot’ field of battle, would allow for intelligent discussion and assessment of a tactic that (like torture before it) remains hotly debated. It might also help the public understand the scope of the ill-defined yet vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise.”

These are all great points. But unfortunately, it seems, the judge’s hands were tied.

Ultimately, Judge McMahon blocked the release of the documents. Citing her legal concerns about the state of transparency with regard to the kill program, she wrote:

“This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules -- a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allows the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

Not Big Brother, evidently, but Captain Yossarian, or more precisely, General Dreedle or whoever is at the top of that chain of command who can put such powers of paradox into motion. Many of us now live in a country where, evidently, it is legal for the government to murder its citizens without any form of due process, and it is legal for the government to refuse to defend and describe why and how it has the power to do that. Talk about the imperial presidency!

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The World of the Druids by Miranda J. Green

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Incomprehensible.

I’ve just read an entire book about druids and I have no idea what druids are.

Neither, it seems, does the rest of the world or even the people who call themselves druids.

Ancient druids may have existed, but were already dying out when the Romans stumbled across them and started writing about them.

Mythical druids exist in Irish folklore, but it is folklore written by Christian missionaries who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with them. 

And modern druids…well, modern druids basically do anything they want in order to feel closer to their ancient spirits.

What about the Dungeons & Dragons druids? I seem to remember that they could kick some serious ass. 

Maybe we should throw them into the mix and muddy the waters even more.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Women by T. C. Boyle

This is a really challenging novel.

For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.

This, and many paragraphs like it, and the title, The Women, would make one think that the protagonists and narrators of this novel are the women who circled around this man named Frank, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. But they are not. Instead of speaking in their voices -- something I think would have made the novel far more interesting -- Boyle decides to drape the narrative in confusing and successive layers of maleness.

In the Introduction to Part One we are introduced to the real narrator of the text we are reading -- a (fictional?) Japanese student of Wright’s named Tadashi Sato, who is laying out this manuscript in an attempt to outline the contours of Wright’s genius and the effect it had (necessarily?) on the women in his life. But Sato is not the only voice we will need to contend with.

There will be complaints, of course -- I can foresee that. This is an imperfect process, what with the interposition of the years, the vagaries of memory, the re-creation of scenes the accuracy of which no one now living can affirm or deny. And too, I’ve had to rely on my co-author and translator (the young Irish American Seamus O’Flaherty, who is husband to my granddaughter, Noriko, and whose as yet unpublished translations of Fukazawa and Shimizu are, I understand, quite novel), many of whose locutions seem, I must confess, rather odd in the final analysis.

Are you following that? This is, evidently, a document written in Japanese by one man, and translated into English by another, with, as we will come to discover, both the author and the translator popping up regularly in a series of footnotes and commentaries as the story unfolds.

And -- on top of that -- the story is told in reverse, with each part taking us backward in time to an earlier and earlier relationship of Wright’s.

It leaves one thinking constantly: What on earth is Boyle trying to accomplish with this? Why hide these women behind some many layers?

From the Introduction to Part Two:

In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O’Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies’ Heat (not what you might think -- its subject is women’s track and field, and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise -- this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I’m sure you’ll agree, O’Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai! -- the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.

Here Boyle is just taunting the reader. Are we too stupid to realize that this is not really a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, nor even a novel about its purported premise: “Was [Wright] the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?” Given many of the reviews I read online about the novel, I would wager that the answer is yes, as most of those try to approach the work as some kind of biography of Wright or some kind of analysis of his genius.

In Part Three Sato comments in a footnote about Daisy Hartnett, a woman he falls in love with and whom Wright eventually banishes from their community at Taliesin, reading a work by Swedish writer Ellen Key.

This is a feminist text, a gloss on Ibsen and his female characters. Women, Ibsen felt -- certain liberated women, at any rate -- were less regimented by society and more a natural force than men. Of course, while we make no claims here to be feminists or sociologists or anything of the like, I can say that Daisy Hartnett was certainly a natural force, and I too much constrained by expectation -- and by Wrieto-San -- to fully grasp it. Oh Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Where are your creamy white thighs and your butterfly mouth now?

And then, a few paragraphs later, oddly, impossibly it seems to me, from Daisy’s point of view:

The world was in desperate need of Ellen Key -- not simply these pigheaded farmers and their prudish wives, but the world at large. People -- women, especially -- absolutely must learn to think for themselves instead of blindly following the dictates of a patriarchal society that would deny them not only the right to vote but the right to love in their own instinctual way. She had a fleeting fantasy of herself as a sort of Joan of Arc of erotoplastics, wielding a radiant sword and cutting them all down to size, and then, though she was exhausted and the house was as cold as an igloo, she turned back to the book in her lap and there it was, right before her, in Ellen Key’s native tongue: till alska, to love. To love. There was no higher purpose in life, no greater duty -- why couldn’t they understand that?

Indeed. Why can’t they? Sato. Wright. His worshippers. The patriarchal worshippers of genius. Why can’t any of them understand?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Another one of those Russian novels written about the time the serfs were emancipated and the changes coming to Russian society.

It’s a story, that much I can follow, but whatever larger points it’s trying to make are lost on me because I’m so far removed from that time and place.

Bazarov is the nihilist in the story, the man who believes in nothing that he can not directly observe, and he dies in the end from an infection he gets from dissecting a corpse. 

Arkady is his devotee who strays from this philosophy, gets married, and lives happily ever after.

What do you think that means?

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Journalism of Willa Cather, Volume 1

In my Googling, I stumbled across The Willa Cather Archive.

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a collaboration between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, with additional support from the The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

For a Cather devotee like me, it’s like a candy store. I went to its “Writings” tab and started downloading everything I found there. This volume -- The Journalism of Willa Cather, Volume 1 -- is a collection of those downloaded materials: as many of the items found at https://cather.unl.edu/writings/journalism that would fit into a 3-ring binder. Almost all of it is Cather’s early writing for the Nebraska State Journal as a kind of theater and social critic, starting with her November 5, 1893 "One Way of Putting It" column:

The church was crowded; hundreds of men and women were sitting in front of the minister who stood under the twisted brass chandeliers and spoke of the brotherhood of man. He looked over the well dressed, well educated audience and his interest quickened under the pleasant knowledge that he was being appreciated. His white face flushed and his thin lips trembled with enthusiasm, enthusiasm over the beauty of the women in the audience, the grandeur of the voluntary by Haydn that died from the great moaning pipes of the organ, and over his own eloquence and conscious power. He grew earnest over man’s eternal brotherhood, he spread his hands in eloquent gestures. As he quoted an extract from Browning he took a white hot house rose from the cut glass rose bowl beside him and shook the water gently from its leaves. He laid the fleshy white petals against his nostrils with evident satisfaction, then dropped it again into the water. Rich, melodious words dropped from his tongue, and his voice had in it a sympathetic quiver born of excitement and the grandeur of his subject. At last he closed with five of the grandest lines that Shakespeare ever wrote and sat down among the palms and drew toward him a silver pitcher of ice water, and the thunder of the pipe organ took up the strain and went on preaching of the brotherhood of man.

That’s the very first paragraph, and in it you can see a writer beginning to flex her muscles, trying to capture a scene. And, with the next juxtaposed section, to make a point:

In a bare, barn-like room with a low ceiling and grated windows sit 300 convicts in stripes. Before them stands the little white-haired chaplain speaking in a trembling voice, telling them of the brotherhood of man. They smile indulgently at him, they have their own ideas about fraternalism. He thanks God for the blessing of life, and they wonder if life is a thing to be thankful for. There is a tremor in the old man’s voice as he speaks to them. He is very artful in his discourse; he tells them something to set them laughing first, and dreary, lifeless laughter it is that echoes through the empty cell rooms and dies away in the iron corridor. Then he tells them he is going to leave them, he who has worked among them for ten years. His lips tremble a little but he says bravely:

“You are getting so much better, boys, that they are going to get you a taller chaplain than I, one who can reach further and do more good.”

Even the darkest faces look lovingly at him, and some of the younger men wipe their eyes with their hands. The old chaplain is not as strong for the ordeal as he thought himself, he murmured a few broken words of benediction, and the men marched out with that swinging gait which is peculiar to this brotherhood of crime who are surely God’s younger, less favored sons, not the heirs of promise.

The brotherhood of man -- something evidently better discussed in polite company. 

As I went through these vignettes, I marked those that seemed to touch me in some way, to impart something more than just the flexing descriptions of scene and character.

From December 17, 1893:

It is not a very great while till Christmas now. One begins to feel the restlessness and secrecy in the air, and to smell the cedar and see the holly gleaming in the windows. Almost every one I meet has a bundle and is hurrying home to hide it. The toy shops are filled with people buying things for the children they love. It seems to me that I too must be buying and hiding away something for a child I used to love and I wonder what it shall be. It has been a long time since I have seen her, and I do not even know if they keep Christmas in her country, but I must send her something because I am lonely and think of her, and I wish in some way to get near again to the only love I have ever known which was never darkened by pain or misunderstanding. I must get something and hide it away where no one can see. No matter what it is, she will like it, for she is not like other children. They will grow old and forget and cease to love, but her childhood is eternal. Perhaps it will be only a few flowers, and on Christmas eve, when other people are filling the stockings while the children sleep, I will slip out to you, who are asleep too, and I will put the flowers in the snow over your grave, little one, and perhaps their fragrance will creep down to you somehow, and you will dream of other flowers that I gave you in other days down in our own country where we were both happy, Perhaps, too, since they say the stars shine brighter on Christmas night, perhaps through the frozen earth that shuts you from me, the light of those we used to know and name will reach you, and you will remember, and know that I do not forget.

Wow. Not sure if Cather is writing about a personal loss there, or if she is aping one in order to recognize and honor it as it must have been for others in her community, but wow, it really shows you how well she could write about the empty spaces that are eventually all that remain between people.

And, from January 28, 1894:

If it took Ruskin six months to interpret Turner’s “Garden of the Hesperides,” surely a person who is totally ignorant of the technical laws of art may be allowed several weeks to struggle with the Lansing drop curtain. I have been suffering acutely from that curtain for two long years, and sometimes I have longed for artistic knowledge, that I might understand and appreciate it better, but recently an artist told me that I was enviable because of my ignorance, that art could not help one with that curtain, for the more one knew of other pictures the less they knew of that. I begin to believe his statement, for I have found art books as powerless to help me with the anatomy as classical lexicons are to throw light upon that abominable Latin. “Somnium Fons Vitales.” I wonder how many people have been able to translate it? Lincoln is full of colleges and ought to contain a good deal of classical learning, but the lore of this generation has not got as far as “Vitales.” Most freshmen try to construe that Latin. The world looks very bright to a freshman and he has the fond complacency to try anything from discovering a new element to translating the Iliad in blank verse. He goes to the theater saturated with Horace and he gazes on that mystic sentence and tries to read it. When he fails he is chagrined. He swears that when he is a senior he will translate those words. But when he is a senior he does not look at it any more. By that time he has learned the lesson of his own littleness and his own helplessness. He knows then that genius is something more than eternal patience after all, and that even were he the proverbial patience on a monument he would never write a Hamlet nor discover a new plant nor construe the Latin of the Lansing drop curtain. He does out into the world to live his life and leaves the task to mightier men than he.

What a wonderful example of Cather’s unique voice -- sarcastic and educated.

And there are even peeks at one of Cather’s great themes -- the price that artists must pay in order to create great art. This, from February 11, 1894:

The Gerry Society have been at it again. This time they have stopped Essie Graham, the street waif in “Under the City Lamps,” from acting. The girl is thirteen years old and is fond of acting and in good health, and the manager of “City Lamps” fails to see any reason or reasonableness in the society’s action. It is a pity that the kindhearted Gerry folks do not extend their noble efforts and forbid authors to write and musicians to play before they are fifteen years old. If the society had its way there would be no actors at all in a generation or two. The greatest part of an actress’ education must be completed before she is fifteen. The society claim that it is cruel for a child to be put to the strain of acting every night when she ought to be at home and in bed. Of course it is cruel, most art is cruel, and very few artists have time to sleep much in this world, though we trust they rest very peacefully in the next. It is very kind of the world to try to lighten the burden of genius, but it can’t be done. Genius means relentless labor and passionate excitement from the hour one is born until the hour one dies. It means that a man must live the passions and sorrows of a hundred lives. Great actresses cannot be brought up upon what Kipling calls the “sheltered life-system.” They must have abundant knowledge of good and evil even if they become not at all as gods.

And, from March 25, 1894, a description of how the artistic stakes are raised even higher by the critics who unfortunately define the only landscape on which art can be offered to the masses:

The curse of every school and phase of modern art is the guild of drawing room critics; critics who sneer at the great and powerful, and adore the clever and the dainty. They refuse to read any thing more stimulating than Howells’ parlor farces, and to hear any play more moving than “the Rivals.” This race of critics has declared Ruskin and Wagner and Turner and Modjeska blase and have taken unto themselves new gods in the very airy and fragile shapes of Whistler and Jerome K. Jerome and De Koven and Julia Marlowe. They take the books that look well on their tables; the music that is not too loud for their parlors; the pictures that hang well on their walls; the actresses who most gracefully adorn their receptions, and say, “This is art, and these are artists; everything else is overdrawn, coarse, stagey, unnatural.” It is no new phase of criticism for people with a poverty of emotion and imagination to say that everything more pronounced is overdrawn and unnatural. Whatever they cannot feel they claim is beyond the range of human feeling, and whatever they have not experienced they claim is beyond the limit of human experience. These critics have had a wonderful effect upon the authors and playwrights of the Nineteenth century. A playwright cannot write without presenting emotions any more than a painter can paint without laying colors. The world in which playwrights are born has no emotions; it furnishes its parlors in dull grays and cold blues and has society and guests to match. Following the creed of realism, the playwright can no longer create knights and ladies, but tells of things that are. Artists of every nation have escaped from the chilling atmosphere of their own world, and have gone to the so-called crust of society for types which at least have the all redeeming virtue of sincerity. The greatest play that has been written to amuse society is “Camille;” the greatest book that has been written to instruct it is “Anna Kerenina.” One would think Mephistopheles’ sides would ache with merriment over the satire of it.

I’m not so sure about Mephistopheles’ sides, but my heart both aches and swells with these glimpses into an artist’s mind and sensibility in the very process of their formation.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.