Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Book by Mary Roach

Non-fiction is a strange thing. (All right, fiction is probably a stranger thing.) New journalism has been around so long that it seems like the standard thing in popular writing. Every essayist worth ten minutes of attention embeds themselves in their subject, transcribes conversations verbatim, and writes in the first person. Really, you have to be something special to sustain a career and enter the zeitgeist.

The history of manuscripts and books goes that all that word stuff started with a big emphasis on religion and a smattering of math, engineering, and medicine. Then again, there were plays, which dramatized popular tales. It’s a question that you can ponder just how much people believed Oedipus Rex or The Iliad were true in a strict sense.

Way, way back, Herodotus was the father of history and lies, which tells you how quickly doubts crept into the critiques. For that matter, critics seem to have appeared about five minutes after the first words appeared on papyrus. So, what was a poor writer to do? Wait around for Daniel Defoe to invent fiction?

The answer was obvious: take a trip and write about your travels. If your audience hasn’t been there, well all the better. Record local legends as fact. Embellish, embellish, embellish. Mix in some high adventure. Don’t bother learning the local language. Maybe lose your notes and write from memory. Never forget that your viewpoint is one of superiority, perhaps benevolent.

We can laugh

at absurd descriptions of rhinos and monsters. We might cringe at remarkable displays of racism. But John Mandeville and Francisco Álvares and many others had major best sellers with their accounts of their travels in the Middle Ages. Readers may have grown a little pickier, but Richard Francis Burton and Mark Twain were still documenting travel adventures to great success centuries later.

My point here is that embedding yourself in the non-fiction story goes way back. We love to hear about discomforts endured and discoveries made. Mary Roach does this as well as anyone. You look over her shoulder. She turns and whispers in your ear. The two of you nod knowingly, perhaps sharing a brief chuckle.

Going back to the Middle Ages, the other obvious matter is that everyone thinks that they can pull this off. Anyone that has been inflicted with a photographic sideshow of a recent vacation might get by on good manners and personal investment in the presenter, but you know that you would never pay money to read about it. Writing non-fiction, even the kind that is good for a person, requires a never-ending awareness that your reader is only one quick glance away from checking the clock and wondering how much longer the current chapter can last.

Sure, Roach’s subjects may get us in the door (sex, death, Mars, etc.), but the magic is in the way she builds that relationship with the reader. Art is not in non-fiction writers embracing the tropes of fiction, but in recognizing the power of their subjects and bringing the reader into that same sense of wonder at this world of ours.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 193 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Valse de Balfa

Written by Will Bolfa
Performed by the Balfa Brothers

It took me a long time to come to the Balfa Brothers and it was a winding road. A lot of reasons stood in my way, but they kept falling by the wayside as other artists knocked down one roadblock after another.

Of course, it all started with the radio. The stations in the Midwest, like everywhere else, played pretty much everything from Motown to Led Zeppelin, sometime one after the other, so that seemed normal. I could tell that Doctor John sounded different, but it was not so different until you heard his other stuff. Mind you, this was long before I tasted gumbo or catfish or a po’boy.

I had little idea that some of those oldies that were occasionally played originated in New Orleans. Who knew that three saxophones was innovative ever? Fats Domino was cool because he was always being referenced on Happy Days.

Remember, this was before Ken Burns’ Jazz told us all that Jazz music started in New Orleans. Katrina had not happened. Mardi Gras was Louisiana. Abbott & Costello never made it to Mars, but landed in New Orleans during the festival and thought they had. College students went to Florida for spring break and post-college went to Mardi Gras.

Then, there was Anne Rice, so naturally New Orleans was Gothic. They had cool funerals with parades that made logical sense. They couldn’t bury people below ground, so they had crypts. Hmm, so they are living below sea level? Have to keep an eye on that.

Wait,

that music at the funerals sounds cool. Aaron Neville has an amazing voice. The Neville Brothers seem kind of amazing.

Hold the fort- what is this other thing people are talking about? Zydeco? Cool word. Buckwheat Zydeco? Oh, man- that is the thing- that is really it. I mean- doesn’t that seem to make sense of Doctor John and Little Richard and the Nevilles and everybody else?

Of course, this whole French thing… Oh, the people who settled Louisiana left Quebec and went down the Mississippi? Yes, that makes sense. It’s cold up there. They brought their music and mixed it with the Caribbean and African music coming into the city with the slave trade? Well, crap.

And that is the thing with enjoying art. A lot of great self-expression comes out of pain. Our humanity today is built on the struggles of those who came before us. We need to walk the paths of history just to know that Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and The Roots and all the rest are built on a century of mastery over current circumstances.

With all its songs of the world left behind, Cajun music sits next to Zydeco. Beausoleil, modern masters, toured heavily about the time that I first heard Buckwheat Zydeco and pointed the way to a strangely similar music driven by the violin. I heard one of my all time favorite songs and I wanted in.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 194 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.