Richard Rodriguez on Religion, Atheism and Politics

SOMETIMES I wonder why the words -- especially the personal essays -- of Richard Rodriguez hit me so directly. He is a gay Latino born in the '40s, a devout if conflicted Catholic, and on many issues a political or social conservative. My origins and allegiances are very different and coincide with none of those categories (I have long thought of myself, for instance, as a Protestant agnostic on religious matters.)

Part of my connection to Rodriguez's work, I think, is that he writes so well about California, a major concern for The Misread City. But mainly, our mismatched alliance comes simply from the power of great writing, and deep thinking. I'm always curious what he has to say, even when we (frequently) disagree.

His elegant new book Darling is on religion after 9/11, and it's his first in a decade. It's my favorite work of his going back even longer.

Here is my Salon interview with Richard Rodriguez.

Rick Moody and the Wingdale Community Singers

HERE at The Misread City, we’re longtime fans of Rick Moody’s novels (The Ice Storm), short stories (Demonology) and music writing (collected in On Celestial Music and posted generally on The Rumpus.) His admirers include Lydia Millett, Michael Chabon and fellow Puritan Thomas Pynchon.

But we’ve only recently caught up with Moody’s folk/modernist band the Wingdale Community Singers, whose latest album, Night, Sleep, Death, splices their music with (among other things) the poetry of Walt Whitman. Moody sings and plays guitar in a band that also includes Hannah Marcus and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol.

We spoke to Moody about Skip James, his Taylor guitar, Saint Augustine, Brooklyn, Bob Dylan, the sounds in his head, and what the band means to a writer like him.

Let’s start out with some sense of your favorite artists within this country/folk tradition you guys seem to be plying. Who are a few who shaped your approach?

I think it has been revealed over the years that the guy all three of us love in equal measure is Leonard Cohen. Once you get past him, we diverge slightly. Hannah Marcus is really in an Old Time/Irish music kind of way, these days, and can tell you everything about Alice Gerrard or whoever is the hot new fiddler. Dave Grubbs knows a lot about innovative and experimental music, but has lately been doing guitar transcriptions of Gesualdo. He also loves, as I do, Skip James, and often seems to have such a breadth of early recorded music under his belt that one is surprised by his learning. But then he is a very brilliant guy. I probably have more mundane taste by comparison, in that I also like some well-known music in these areas. The Harry Smith anthology. Johnny Cash. John Fahey. Martin Carthy. Fairport Convention. Even Simon and Garfunkel. That guy from Minnesota. And I am not averse to contemporary acoustic music, either, if it is played with the requisite level of dread. Sam Amidon, for me, really gets to the dread sometimes. Jolie Holland. The Be-Good Tanyas.

We assume that a novelist who is in a band is some kind of showoff, charlatan, dilettante, or opportunist – it’s like the way Letterman used to be able to say “actor-singer” and we’d all bust into derisive laughter. Where did this come from?

Do you mean why is it so funny? I dunno! I always played music, lifelong, took voice lessons as a kid and so on. So for me it’s not a footnote in my life, but very central to my life. I just happen not to be as good at it as I am good at novel-writing. I understand this rubs people the wrong way, and I kept my musical interests under wraps for a long while. But I think creativity is sort of a general condition, not a genre-specific condition, and after a while it seemed stupid to me to pretend that I hadn’t given a lot of my life to music. I recommend not dismissing this work out of hand because of my writing, but I also recommend against listening to these records as the work of Rick Moody the novelist. This is the work of a band, with a very group-centered approach, and it’s a band that has been together a long time now (ten years). We know who we are and how we work together, and the individual identities are not as important in the Wingdales as they are outside of the Wingdales.

 

You’ve written that being in a band – and especially, singing harmony -- has improved your novel writing. Has it done anything to your music writing?

I’m a lot better music writer these days because I actually have experience in the studio and onstage. So I can, in fact, write from songwriting experience, and recording experience. Before I only wrote from listening experience, which, however passionate, is different from trying to write and play the stuff.  I am not a sophisticated musician—I will never score parts on a staff—but I am not a total idiot either, and that, I expect, makes me a better music-writer.

Your band has found an oddly resonant space halfway between the Carter Family and Richard and Linda Thompson. How does fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman fit into this?

Whitman is not the only guest lyricist on the new album. Andy Warhol is source material for Hannah’s song “So What?,” and Augustine of Hippo is cannibalized for “No Rest,” and one song is made entirely out of fortune cookie fortunes. The point was to disrupt the confessional lyric a little bit. We are trying not to be singer-songwriters in the usual way, we are trying to be songwriters in the more broad sense of the thing. Whitman is obviously a great touchstone of Brooklyn identity, and we are from Brooklyn, and we are all big readers, so Whitman is not a stretch. He’s someone we love, as we love Lightnin’ Hopkins or Karen Dalton. And why shouldn’t his songs be set to music? They happen to be very hard to set, because of scansion issues, but that’s part of why it was fun.

These days, nobody wants to be among those who booed Dylan at Newport. But is there something valuable and irreplaceable about acoustic instruments? (I’m aware that there is an organ or something on this new record and an electric guitar on some of the earlier stuff.)

Well, here, I’ll say an unpopular thing. I don’t think those Dylan gigs with The Band were so great. I understand it was a brilliant gesture, and I like the electric guitar as much as the next guy, but I think the acoustic Dylan is more masterful in some ways. On the 1966 authorized boot, I thought the “Visions of Johanna” recording was way better than the electric stuff.  For me, it’s about how much you can strip away. The more you strip away, the more emotionally resonant the material is. (See,Good As I Been To You, e.g.) This is true on a lot of punk recordings too. I think Suicide, for example, is an extremely emotionally resonant band, and there’s obviously nothing acoustic about that music. The fact is, the more musicians are on the stage, the harder it is to have everyone pulling toward the meaning of the song. When there’s only one personthere, then you definitely have a shot. The acoustic instruments are valid because they are really quiet, and they leave a lot of room for singer and song. This seems good to me. But those Billy Bragg albums where he plays solo electric are good. The late John Fahey recordings on electric are good. And very minimal. For me acoustic music is minimal music, and that’s what I like. 

What kind of guitar do you play and how important is it to you? Do you have any kind of models for your guitar playing?

I play a Taylor acoustic with onboard electronics, so I can plug it in. But I also have a Canadian acoustic that my brother-in-law got for me last year, a cut-rate affair with no particular legend attached, that should bebad, but which is extremely good, with excellent resonance in the lower strings. I really love it a lot. (Its name is Tex.) I am not a gear hound, at all, because I came from punk rock days, when people banged the shit out of their gear, or used really substandard gear. If I think it’s really about the song, then obviously I’m not going to give a shit about the guitar. I have a Mexican Telecaster, but it will not do what I want it to do, at all. I would like to get a Rickenbacker and will some day. My models for guitar playing would be people like Alex Chilton and Chris Stamey, who are rudimentary, but sort of ecstatic at the same time. I love Tom Verlaine too. Or Sonny Sharrock. But I will never be a player like that. For me it’s just about sketching out the chords and letting the band do what needs to be done around me.

You come from a tradition, at least in part, associated with hostility to music and the arts in general: The Puritans are famous for ripping the singers’ benches out of churches – leaving only “bare ruined choirs” – smashing the stained-glass windows, etc. How do you find yourself a musician 500 years later? Do you ever want to smash everybody’s instruments – Pete Townshend-style -- in rehearsal?

I think acoustic music in general, and especially in some of its idioms—gospel, blues, folk—are not immune to a church interior. I think God, if not the fire-and-brimstone God, then some other more sympathetic God, is not antithetical to acoustic music of the kind that we play. Melancholy is kind of numinous. But as for wanting to smash my guitar, SURE. I definitely identify with Pete Townshend’s feeling that there were sounds in his head that he couldn’t get down in song. I feel that way a lot.

Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites

OVER the last year or two, I've given myself a crash course on social criticism -- wonderfully grim and eloquent books by Bell, Ehrenreich, both Packers (Vance and George) and various "mass culture" theorists of the '50s. I hope to get into some of them over the next few months.

One of the best of them is Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: American After the Meritocracy. I'm often stirred or intrigued by a book, but it's not often that one really changes the way I think. Hayes's book, which looks at the meritocracy that followed the WASP establishment, is one of a very short list. He considers how a system that supposedly rewarded talent and intelligence helped lead us into the Enron debacle, the mishandled Middle Eastern Wars, the Great Recession, baseball's steroid scandal and the mess that is the Catholic church.

I should say that the premise of this book very much goes against my grain: I've thought over the years that belief in a meritocracy was what my family had instead of religion or a sense of ethnicity. But reading Hayes argument and reflecting on how nasty the 21st century has been made things look different. (The book has recently been released in paperback.)

If you still have bitter memories of Judith Miller, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, the cardinals who looked the other way during the pedophile scandal, and so on, Twilight of the Elites will help you make some sense of it all. They're the new "best and brightest," and just as fatuous and dangerous as Halberstam's gang that got us into the Vietnam War.

HERE is a Salon Q+A with the author by my friend David Daley.

The Runaways: Queens of Noise

THESE days I am digging Queens of Noise, the new book by Evelyn McDonnell, onetime Village Voice rock critic now settled in Los Angeles. The book, subtitled The Real Story of the Runaways, looks at the ‘70s LA punk/hard-rock band best remembered, probably, for a teenaged Joan Jett, the song "Cherry Bomb," and some pretty amazing feathered hair.

I’ve admired McDonnell’s work for two decades now, and have since gotten to know her a bit, and for a year taught more-or-less alongside her at Loyola Marymount University, where she is a professor of journalism.

Here’s my conversation with McDonnell about Queens of Noise, which she will discuss at Book Soup on Wednesday.

What drew you to the story of the Runaways?

It's a great rock'n'roll story that had only been told in parts, and seemed well past due for a complete treatment.  I also saw it as a narrative that's bigger than music: It's a coming of age story about young women crossing boundaries and expressing themselves — their sexuality, their anger, their rebellion, their fears — in ways that hadn't really been done before. There were girl bands before the Runaways, but none of them had the kind of exposure (so to speak) and global experiences that these musicians did, at a pretty young age. It's also a peek into a fascinating, rich time and place: Southern California in the mid-'70s. There are all the elements of a great story, period, in Queens: tragedy, comedy, mystery, drama, sex, drugs, crime, etc. With an awesome, under-appreciated soundtrack.  As a woman just a few years younger than the Runaways, with my own California roots, and a deep love of music, I also personally related to their saga.

You describe the band members as creatures of the Sprawl. Give us a sense of what early-70s Southern California – the world that made the Runaways – was like.

 This was a period when the California dream epitomized by the Beach Boys was wearing thin — fault lines were rupturing. Decades of incredible population and economic growth had slowed precipitously; there was Watts, Manson, smog, overspeculation, etc. The members of the Runaways lived miles apart from each other in this car-dependent Exopolis. They were suburban girls, from the Valley, Orange County, Long Beach. But LA also had Hollywood, which was not just a place of Tinseltown fantasies: it was a bohemian mecca for all the outcasts and weirdos, for the queer kids and the runaways (small and big R). It was a place for experimentation (with drugs and sex), for hedonism, for liberation and libidos, and for exploitation. It was a place to escape those suburbs, and it's where the Runaways came together.

How much access did you get to the musicians and to band manager Kim Fowley? Did all the major characters speak to you?

Kim Fowley, Jackie Fox, and Vicki Blue gave me quite a bit of time explicitly for the book. I also interviewed Joan and Lita, once each, for the book. Cherie would not do an interview for the book, but I had interviewed her a couple of times for the Sandy West thesis/article that was the root of the book. I never interviewed Sandy before she died but I talked to her family. I also had interviewed Joan and Lita for other articles over the years, and I was able to draw on that material, some of it never published before. Plus all the other interviews listed in the back.

Within the first few chapters of the book, you write about the debate between architecture scholar Reyner Banham and art critic Peter Plagens on the nature of LA, and get into the work of Joan Didion, William Gibson, and others. What’s the right amount of context in a book like this?

As I said, I saw this as more than just the story of one band: I also saw it as an important, emblematic piece of cultural, social and feminist history. Those contextual pages are a tiny sliver of the book. I think they give the book a bigger, broader meaning and perspective, but some critics seem to feel you can't take a band like the Runaways that seriously. It's an anti-intellectualism that seems strange to me as a fan of Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Jon Savage, but is rampant in rock-critic criticism.

How do the Runaways fit into the history of women in rock?

They were clearly pioneers, in terms of the scope of their accomplishments at their age and in a relatively short period of time: five albums, multiple national and international tours, magazine covers and hit records (in some countries). Obviously, there were girl vocal groups that preceded and outsold them. And there were other bands where women played instruments — some great ones, like Fanny and Isis. But the Runaways achieved a level of at least notoriety, and also genuine success, that had eluded other bands. Obviously, some of that was based on the fact that they were not shy in their sexual presentation, and in that sense, their legacy is mixed.

Looking back, almost four decades later, what is the band's long-term influence or legacy?

Because of Joan's and Lita's subsequent success, the Runaways have been taken more seriously in retrospect than they were during their brief career. Whereas some of the early female punks repudiated them, later generations — from Riot Grrrls to the Donnas to Miley Cyrus — have been more sympathetic to the barriers they faced and how they faced them. They were a key transitional figure in the evolution of both punk and hair metal, particularly in Los Angeles. They were friends with and peers of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. But although those bands were clearly just as Svengali-driven and gimmicky, they always get taken more seriously. I think the Runaways' legacy is up there with those bands, and deserves to be acknowledged.

Rachel Kushner and Laura Owens

RECENTLY I spoke to novelist Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers is far and away among the most celebrated novels of the year, and artist Laura Owens, whose recent show of recent paintings in her own Boyle Heights space reminds us why she became the youngest artist to have a career retrospective at the MOCA.

The two -- longtime friends and aesthetic allies -- talked about their own work, their respect for each other, and their hopes for the future. The story, HERE, is from Pasadena magazine, now helmed by my former LA Times editor, the mighty Maria Russo.

The Web, Jaron Lanier and the Disappearing Middle Class

TODAY I have a long and I hope substantial Q+A with web visionary-turned-skeptic Jaron Lanier. Here it is. We get into some ideas that reflect on my investigation of the fate of the creative class in the 21st century, including the growth of a tiny digital plutocracy at the expense of the imperiled middle class.

The piece is provoked by his powerful and odd new book, Who Owns the Future?

Prog Rock Tales

YOU would have to look long and hard to find someone who felt less warmly about the movement known as progressive rock as your humble blogger. (If the genre was bad in its original appearance, it seemed doubly awful in its ‘80s AOR rebirth.) I expect a lot of us who came of age in the years after punk feel the same way, and preferred the concision of college radio or “modern rock” acts like R.E.M. and Elvis Costello to endless prog symphonies. (Of course, I will make an exception here for the bizarre genius of Robert Fripp.)

 

Why, then, can’t I put down this new book, Yes is the Answer , a collection of writers on prog? I’m still not sure, but I love its combination of humor and critical seriousness. The book is edited by longtime LA writer Marc Weingarten – an old friend whose music journalism I read in the '90s -- and Tyson Cornell, who once booked authors at Book Soup and now runs Rare Bird Lit. 

The years between Sgt. Pepper’s and those first Clash and Pistols singles were a strange disorienting time for rock music. Glam found one way out of that puzzle, and prog took another road. Was all that heavy, high-pitched silliness worth it?

In any case, Yes is the Answer includes writer/producer Seth Greenland on The Nice, novelist Matthew Specktor on Yes, Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding) on the prog scene of Canterbury, UK, Rick Moody on Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jim DeRogatis on Genesis, music writer Margaret Wappler on getting laid to King Crimson, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier on how failed sex is a lot like a Styx concert, writer/bassist Jim Greer on Guided by Voices' debt to prog, and many other sharp, counter-intuitive pieces. 

Overall, it's way more fun than it has any business being.

Keep your eyes peeled for events around town. For now, here is my conversation with Weingarten.

Why did this seem like the right time for a book on this once-mighty musical form? Is there a prog revival going on, like when Yes returned with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and Rush and Asia were rockin’ the suburbs? 

I think there are a lot of bands out there who secretly love prog but don't want to admit it - they have no cultural cover, so to speak, because this is the last rock subgenre that hasn't been reclaimed by hipsters.  So, we thought it was a good a time as any to point out that there's a lot of great music here, made at a time of pretty outrageous and often overreaching experimentation. Which is also part of the charm of prog - how crazily ambitious it was.  I love the idea of bands writing hour-long suites and traveling with orchestras - it speaks to a kind of silly grandeur that I think is lacking in indie rock  - you see it in contemporary metal, I suppose.  

Most of your contributors are -- like you and me -- Xers who came of age with post-punk or alt-rock. We’re a generation, then, for whom prog became a punch line or a bad memory. What undercut prog’s world domination back then? 

Because Prog was almost exclusively a British phenomenon, it was completely stomped by Punk Rock, because Punk in England was really a tsunami.  It was time for Prog to go, anyway - it had gotten really overblown and quite awful.  I don't think any of our contributors would argue that Relayer is better than London's Calling, but we all have a soft spot for Prog.  

How did you and your co-editor come up with your contributors? There are a few well-known rock critics like Jim DeRogatis, but mostly this is literary folk.

We didnt want this to be a wonky, "Robert Fripp created Frippertronics in 1979," facts-and-figures book. We didn't see the point of that, especially with a genre like Prog, which is so rooted in adolescence, and cherished memories of early drug experiences, arena shows and gatefold album analysis.  It seemed like a good idea to have non-music writers have a fresh go at it.  

I count two women among all the contributors, and suspect this is NOT the fault of the editors. Could it be that prog has traditionally been a guy thing, and as some of your essayists suggest, a pre-adolescent guy thing?

Totally young dude thing. One hundred percent! 

Do you have a favorite prog band or album? Anything involving Phil Collins?

Well, Phil Collins is an incredible drummer - and I do love all the Gabriel-era Genesis stuff. I guess King Crimson's Red is my favorite album - a noisy, dark and disturbing record. So unlike most Prog, in other words! 

Boston and "The Fading Smile"

BACK in the '90s, when I was at my most ravenous about learning about poetry, I read a number of very fine memoirs about poets. Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth (with its unforgettable portrait of Delmore Schwartz) was one, Donald Hall's Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (Dylan Thomas!) is another. Both are classics, but my favorite may be Peter Davison's The Fading Smile, set in Boston/Cambridge in the late '50s as American poetry was going through an important transformation.

Only a few hours remain in National Poetry Month, but I'll put aside my instinct to mock these official cultural holidays and discuss Davison's wonderfully distilled memoir-of-sorts for a moment.

The Fading Smile's subtitle is "Poets in Boston, 1955-1960, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath," and it's largely a series of profiles of the poets who flourished, competed and quarreled at a time when Frost was fading from the scene but holding forth on the outskirts of Harvard. Besides the poets above, it looks at Richard Wilbur (the most Apollonian of the bunch), the minister's son W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton (!!), Plath (who Davison, a poet and important poetry editor, briefly dated before she fell into the burly arms of Ted Hughes), feminist "daughter-in-law" Adrienne Rich, the overlooked ad-man poet L.E. Sissman, and Stanley Kunitz (a generation older than the rest but just as tormented.)

Lowell of course acts as a cross between a maven who brings everyone together and a sort of Mad Hatter. Like many of the poets here, he went through a metamorphosis during this period, and his late-'50s work helps inaugurate a wilder, more visceral, less European, less New Critic-driven poetry that came to be called Confessional.

Of course, each figure had his or her own trajectory, as Davison's portraits make clear. He mostly stays out of the way of the action, except when his appearances are useful, resisting the urge to settle scores of make himself into the book's hero.

Part of what I like, too, are the well-chosen selections from each poet's work, and the sense of literary context that it all adds up to. That is, there was a back-and-forth between this scene with developments in the UK -- several of them put in brief stints in England -- as well as the Beat action in San Francisco.

I'll just close by recommending this book -- so soon after the tragedy of the Boston Marathon -- to anyone who cares about American literature. And now, go read some poetry.

British History and Texas Music

A SHORT, insightful new book about the making of the modern world – told in microcosm – has just come from the pen of a noted indie rocker.

Here at The Misread City, we’ve been impressed with the melancholy genius of Matt Kadane since the first record, What Fun Life Was, from his old band, Dallas slowcore quartet Bedhead. Like the group that followed, The New Year, Bedhead was defined by melodic songwriting and intricate, understated guitar playing – VU’s hushed third record, with a bit of Sonic Youth and New Order, a hint of Texas twang, and almost no effects. (I wrote about The New Year for the LA Times in 2008, and the video for their song "Disease" appears near the end of this post.)

Turns out Kadane (who led both groups with his bearded brother Bubba) spent much of his musical career getting a doctorate at Brown; these days he teaches history at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York.

In any case, Kadane’s new book is The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist. This is the kind of history we like – lucid, free of jargon and with a clear narrative and analytical direction. (Full disclosure: The Watchful Clothier appears on Yale University Press, the house on which I will publish my own work on the perils of the creative class, sometime next year.) It takes off from some ideas of one of our favorite historians, Christopher Hill. whose book on English radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down, inspired song sung by Billy Bragg song. (The Watchful Clothier, for what it's worth, includes an endorsement from the important historian Joyce Appleby, though it awaits its treatment by a British pop artist.)

What follows is my Q and A, conducted by email, with the historian and indie rocker. I ask Kadane about both sides of his amphibious identity.

Protestantism and the market economy are two of the key forces in the modern West, and have been specially joined at least since Max Weber and maybe since the Puritans. How did your "watchful clothier" seem like the right lens though which to gaze at these big issues?

The clothier, Joseph Ryder, lived in eighteenth-century Leeds where he ran a small business.  Leeds was one of the great cities of the industrial revolution and was undergoing big changes during Ryder's life, which ended in 1768, right around the time that industrialization was noticeably beginning.  But already while he was in his active years, the population was growing at an unprecedented rate, more and more people were becoming wage laborers, the cloth that the town produced was heading to markets further and further afield, and all these things played a major role in laying the framework for modern capitalism.  Ryder was, at the same time, a deeply pious and traditional Protestant and wrote a two and a half million word diary to document his religious life.  So he lived at the intersection of these big religious and material forces, and he's an ideal case study for seeing how they interacted.

Today, Protestantism and capitalism seem pretty comfortable with each other -- in many parts of the American South and Midwest, for instance, they both stand triumphant, with arms joined. But in the 18th century you chronicle, they seem to be in some serious tension with each other, don't they?

I agree that they now they seem designed for each other.  Mega-churches meet all the basic definitions of big business.  There are also, to be fair, subplots that complicate the story, more selfless social activists within the various denominations, and so on.  But the way things largely stand today is pretty different from how they were envisioned in the centuries closer to the Reformation.   Sermons back then railed against acquisitiveness, successful parishioners wrung their hands even when they balked at the idea of maximizing profits.  What complicates this image is that the Puritan ethos was also partly responsible for a new more relentless mode of striving in the world.  For reasons that I think Max Weber was basically the first to see, and however much the argument may need to be modified, Protestantism at its most scrupulous, at its most unguided by external authority, and in the right economic setting could encourage secular ambition as a way to overcome anxiety about salvation.

The nature of Christianity changed during this period, as Newton took hold and the Enlightenment reinforced the prestige science and rationalism. "A watchful God had become a watchmaker," you write. What happened and how was it felt at the time?

Christianity in the eighteenth century is hard to describe without qualification.  This is, after all, the age of the first great awakening.  But if traditional Christianity in western Europe was reasserting itself, this was in large part because it was also changing in the hands of rationalists, who may have been a minority of the population but who for that very reason were also radically vocal.  In the eyes of these anti-traditionalists, Jesus was often seen as a mere man, God was conceptualized as a sort of mathematician who designed a universe according to such sublime laws that it could run itself without Providential intervention, and the notion that humans are fundamentally depraved no longer seemed tenable.  Religious figures who were coming to think this way were also especially successful by the later eighteenth century in getting their message across to the emerging industrialists.  Churches throughout the north of England that had more or less been Calvinist at the beginning of the century were actively looking for religious radicals, particularly Unitarians, to start leading the flock.  Historians have more or less known that this was happening, but what has been missing from the story is the sort of parishioner's first hand account that Ryder offers.

Ryder recorded in his diary something like 5,000 sermons that he heard preached throughout Yorkshire, and what this record shows are two really interesting things.  One is that the new religious outlook, with its emphasis on the dignity of humans and the humanity of Jesus, had a natural affinity with emerging commercial self-interest.  Puritanism could also encourage economic striving to overcome anxiety about salvation, but it had a much stricter definition of what counted as economic excess.  And it's much easier to be fully self-interested if, for example, you actually believe that you're worthwhile rather than utterly depraved as Puritans thought.    So to accommodate the remarkable wealth that industrialists were generating, the religion of so many of these people had to soften on certain points.  A more rationalist religion was more compatible with more materially rational expectations.  But then the other thing that Ryder shows is that this religious and cultural shift could unsettle more conservative parishioners, who nevertheless stuck it out with some of the chapels that were basically turning the old Puritan ethos upside down.  Ryder went to his grave feeling like the ministers who were telling him to love himself a little more were actually getting Christianity wrong.  So I think you have to see religious change in the Enlightenment for the incredibly complicated process that it was.  But once you do see that, then the reason that the cultural effort to decriminalize self-interest was so concerted becomes intelligible--and this really was a decades long effort on the part of opinion makers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and others.  It was hard to convince people, the very sorts of industrious people who Smith theorized could make the nation unprecedentedly rich, that the traditional Christian take on wealth was exactly wrong.  Trying to transform self-interest from a vice into a virtue was such a massive cultural project for people like Adam Smith because people like Ryder, however poised they were to bolster the wealth of the nation by virtue of their industry and enterprise, were committed to a sort of morality that Smith and others saw as antithetical to capitalism.

What surprised you the most in your research as you dove into Ryder's life and times?

That he was actually interesting.  I recognized right away that his diary was an incredible source, and I knew I had to try to do something with it, but I was put off by his perspective.  I had originally been much more interested in the radicals.  But I didn't just grow to like him, which is in any case not a necessary condition for writing about someone.  I grew interested in how torn he was.  He equivocates about everything, not just commerce.  He could come across rioters and feel for them, but only if they were rioting from need and in reaction to unfair laws.  He had a deep sense of social propriety but could still feel sympathy for a maligned woman who showed up at his house drunk one night looking for spiritual advice.  He dressed down his household workers who helped him make cloth and afterwards confided to his diary that he was just as undisciplined in his youth and should think twice before feeling superior.  Those same workers were often orphans who he seems to have been attached to in at least of couple of cases, in no small part because he and his wife tried but failed to have children of their own.  And then that wife, a woman he never actually names in his diary, was an object of serious ambivalence.  When they married just a few months after the woman he was really in love with got away, he found her less exciting than his diary.  A few years into the marriage they had grown emotionally attached, and he was devastated when she died before her fortieth birthday and he had to go on alone for another decade and a half.  By all accounts people also liked him.  Maybe not surprisingly.  Ambivalent people see things from at least two angles, and that can make them much more empathetic beings than the dogmatists.

Which historical school or method are you most indebted to, and why is is important to you?

When I was an undergraduate I had a picture of Foucault on the wall beside my desk, still such a great picture from the interview he did in Vanity Fair in '83, not long before he died.  I don't see him in the same exalted way, but one thing I took from him I still believe:  doing history can usefully denature the present.  You get the same insight in Marx, another big influence.  Nietzsche too.  But Foucault also made me think that a key part of the story was the early modern past, especially in western Europe.  In graduate school I fell more under the influence of people like Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and others who more or less assert the importance of culture as a motive force even while staying tuned in to the material.  And when trying to describe culture I've learned not just from Clifford Geertz but from the major figures in semiotics who I avidly read as an undergraduate, from practitioners of microhistory like Carlo Ginzburg, from the British Marxists historians, especially Thompson, Hill, and Hobsbawm, that last of whom, despite his flaws, was particularly inspiring as one of my own teachers in graduate school.  A number of historians have also directly taught me the importance of archival research.  Margaret Jacob stands at the top of that list.  Her energy and curiosity in the archives are legendary, and she has had major insights about the enlightenment and the causes of industrialization because of her willingness to undertake some pretty unromantic labor.  I could say the same about my undergraduate mentor William Taylor, one of the great colonial Latin Americanists, whose footnotes will make you tremble.  Really I could say the same about two other guys who I worked with in graduate school, Tim Harris and Phil Benedict.  When you approach history as a philosophy student, as I did when I first began graduate school, there's a real temptation to be theoretical at the expense of contemporaries' experience.  I'm grateful to the theorists who can so clearly lay out the big questions.  But if I hadn't been encouraged by these historians I've just named, and they're not the only ones, then I don't think I'd have anything remotely useful to say about what happened in the past.

For a musician or music fan, there must be a double resonance to studying northern English industrial cities like Leeds or Manchester. Not only did they experience what you call "the birth pangs of modern capitalism" more acutely than anywhere else, these cities have produced more than their share of great rock music -- Gang of Four, Mekons, Joy Division, Smiths, Stone Roses, many more. Do you see any relation between those early-modern social forces and the culture that emerged much later?

I guess I don't see much of a relationship when it comes to religion.  In the centuries that separate these bands from the people I look at in the book there's a good case to be made that Christianity has almost died in Britain.  With the economy there may be more of a connection.  These bands are to de-industrialization what Ryder was to pre-industrialization.  And without the industrial revolution, Manchester and Leeds would still likely be small towns with little of the context--gritty urban decay, university life, radical class politics, and so on--that helped define those bands and their sound, especially when their music was recorded by Martin Hannett.  It's a great question, and I wish I had a better answer.

Congratulations to Matt Kadane the historian -- what is next for Matt Kadane the indie rock star?

The New Year is two-thirds finished with a new record.  The basic tracks are done and in the case of a few songs we're further along.  My brother and I also have a new band with David Bazan and Will Johnson called Overseas.  We just finished mastering the first record, which is set to come out at the beginning of June, followed by some shows in August on the east coast, west coast, and in Texas.  I'm excited to play music again.