Little Lords

The Is Not Baseball Book

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To say baseball provides a pleasant distraction, or escape, is trite. Sports, art, music, literature, philosophy and the mystical elements of religion all imagine a “good place,” or eu- topos. Baseball, for example, is played in an ancient symbol for paradise: an enclosed park, or garden.

Scholia, the Greek word for leisure is our word for school. Education is not training for work, but preparation for leisure. The dignified labor of baseball suggests that we might judge a person not by what they do for a living, but by how they spend their free time.

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All Are Not publications are available to read online. They can also be purchased as print- on- demand paperbacks at the cost of printing (without a publisher’s markup). Contact Are Not Books at: editor@arenotbooks.com

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Rust City Renovation

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The so-called “Rust Belt” cities have become a favorite subject for city planners, architects, and business apologists.

This book examines the problem of economic decline in these former industrial and manufacturing towns, but not from the perspective of potential investors, business leaders, city management, bureaucrats, or government officials. Instead, we concern ourselves with the residents and citizens of these cities.

Rust City Renovation is organized around a preference for liberty over jobs, and an “excessive” democratic participation — co-evolution and collectivity outside the bounds of easy governability, manipulation, and control.

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The Tree of the World

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Variously represented as the Garden of Eden, the Ka’bah, a pillar of fire, any one of several holy mountains, Golgotha, the Bodhi Tree, the center of a mandala, an altar, the human body, and the earth’s navel, the world tree is a pan-cultural symbol. Its meaning is found in the metaphysical principle of creation and manifestation.

From a strictly contemporary point of view, the tree of the world is a historically anachronistic trope; it’s central to several ideologically suspect (religious) myths.

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Saints and Guides

Saints & Guides

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Secular guidance for a godless era:

Sun Ra’s music was influenced by a careful study of the mechanics of preaching. He lived like a monk, and expected discipline from his collaborators.

“It’s about the music,” he said. According to Ra, we are music, and the music our lives play is our ambassador to the Creator. We’d better be sure it’s good, because the cosmos will discard us if we’re out of tune.

“Why does the earth not fall,” Sun Ra asks? “How can we walk upon it?” “If we each play our part, it will be the music that holds it up.”

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A Distant Ecclesiology

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What is evangelicalism? And what are its historical sources and current cultural legacies? If evangelicalism has become too monotonously purified or sterile, it may be in a position to provide its own correctives.

In many religious traditions, a god or ultimate source of authority is symbolically and playfully banished in order to regain its transcendent power over people (compare to Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World,chapter 8).

In a similar way, contemporary critical and artistic approaches to spiritual reductionisms and fundamentalist pieties, when done well, can be both culturally worthwhile and spiritiually beneficial.

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Protestant Erotics

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A “Protestant erotic” describes the desire to have religious truth without religious ritual, dogma, doxa (opinion), or ideology; metaphysics without tradition.

In the contemporary era, all religions have become “Protestant” in that they are capable of self-awareness as religions. Christian mysticism is comparable to Buddhist, Taoist, and Sufi mysticisms.

We are left with a choice between an anti-modern traditionalism and an after-modern non-essentialism. Once we’ve chosen, another Protestant erotic describes the inevitable desire for the one we can’t have—an awareness of belief’s remainder.

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Wisdom Like Style Is

Wisdom (Like Style, Is)

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Charles Olson: “I take it that wisdom, like style, is the man—that it is not extricable in any sort of statement of itself.”

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