#davidboles — Public Fediverse posts

The Occupied Space from The Empty Space

There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook's The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/26/the-occupied-space-from-the-empty-space/

The Occupied Space from The Empty Space

There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook's The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/26/the-occupied-space-from-the-empty-space/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

The Oldest Ceremony in the World

On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus's sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man's feet. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/03/the-oldest-ceremony-in-the-world/

The Oldest Ceremony in the World

On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus's sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man's feet. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/03/the-oldest-ceremony-in-the-world/

The Oldest Ceremony in the World

On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus's sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man's feet. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/03/the-oldest-ceremony-in-the-world/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/31/stop-applauding-the-forced-apology/

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/31/stop-applauding-the-forced-apology/

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/31/stop-applauding-the-forced-apology/

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/31/stop-applauding-the-forced-apology/

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

The book’s central claim is that relational seeing is a competence: a real, trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements rather than to elements considered separately, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. I develop the claim across ten case studies that range from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life shelves to Michael Faraday’s iron-filing diagrams of magnetic field lines, from phyllotactic spirals in plant growth to Renaissance counterpoint, from the human microbiome to Anni Albers’s woven textiles, from mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors to Charles Sanders Peirce’s three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. The case studies share a structure: a trained perceiver attends to relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure the elements together produce.

The book is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The Scientific Aesthetic developed the theoretical framework for what I called the originating-act test, distinguishing acts of art and science from the craft activities that follow them. RelationShaping takes the relational dimension of that earlier argument and develops it into a sustained examination of one specific perceptual capacity across a wider range of human practice than the first book could cover. The two volumes can be read independently. They make a single argument together, and the order of publication is the order of the argument’s development.

The argument is not a recent one for me. I started a blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network in 2007. The blog has been working on the questions this book gathers for almost twenty years, and many of the book’s arguments began as blog posts whose claims I refined, tested against new examples, and pushed further across that span. The new book is the culmination of long work, the gathering of two decades of writing into a single sustained argument that the blog form, by its nature, could not quite hold.

The closing chapters of RelationShaping extend the framework into harder territory. Chapter Eight examines the trained-perception competence in domains where it has not been institutionally named, including the recovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hubble Deep Field, and the contested Sappho papyri. The next chapter addresses the methodological problem of attending to relations that have not yet been discovered, drawing on microbiome and connectome research, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the substantial scholarly traditions of Indigenous knowledge integration. The book closes with Chapter Ten, titled “The Severed Field,” which addresses the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure.

Chapter Ten is the chapter that made the book hard to write, and the chapter that makes the book necessary right now. The trained eye depends on conditions that are political, not merely epistemic. The classroom where a student learns to read counterpoint exists because public funding for music education exists. A museum where a young painter can spend weeks in front of a Morandi exists because the public funding that maintains museum collections exists. The graduate seminar where a future scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledge learns the methodology for ethical engagement exists because public funding for humanities research exists. Forests where botanists learn to read mycorrhizal networks exist because public funding for forest conservation exists. None of those institutional preconditions is independent of the political settlement that funds and protects them. The settlement turns against the institutions; the institutions thin; the conditions for the acquisition of trained perception thin with them; and the next generation of trained perceivers does not appear.

This is what Chapter Ten attempts to articulate. The substantive argument about relational seeing as a trainable competence would have been correct in any historical period. The urgency of articulating it right now belongs specifically to this moment, when the institutional preconditions for the competence are under organized political pressure to dissolve.

The book makes no claim that political pressure is the only force at work, or that institutional contraction has only one cause. The contraction has many causes, including economic restructuring, demographic change, the erosion of forms of community that once supported sustained attention, and the substitution of cheaper automated processes for human practitioners. Political pressure is one cause among several, and it is the cause most directly susceptible to political response.

What the book hopes to offer the reader is a vocabulary. With the vocabulary in hand, a reader may notice the trained eye in the people who still have it, may understand what those people are doing differently, may in some specific case ask to become an apprentice. In other cases, the reader may recognize that the political pressure on the institutions that train such perceivers is not pressure those perceivers can resist alone. They will need allies. The book is one attempt to make the case for being one of those allies.

I want to be honest about the limits of what the book undertakes. The book undertakes a specific task: it names the competence, documents it across a wider range of domains than is usually recognized, and articulates what is being lost when the conditions for its acquisition stop holding. The book makes no proposal for restoring the institutions whose contraction it documents, and no claim that naming the loss is sufficient to reverse it. Naming is the first step the book attempts, on the conviction that a loss without a name cannot be addressed in any organized way. The book gives the loss a name. What follows from the naming is for the reader to decide.

RelationShaping: Field Studies is available now in print, in ebook, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com, along with its companion volume The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The book was difficult to write under the present conditions; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, and equally dishonest to claim that the difficulty makes the book unnecessary. The argument exists, the case needs making, and the book makes the case.

#amazon #bolesBlogs #book #davidBoles #faraday #fieldStudies #kdp #morandi #philosophy #phyllotactic #politics #relation #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic

The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

The book’s central claim is that relational seeing is a competence: a real, trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements rather than to elements considered separately, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. I develop the claim across ten case studies that range from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life shelves to Michael Faraday’s iron-filing diagrams of magnetic field lines, from phyllotactic spirals in plant growth to Renaissance counterpoint, from the human microbiome to Anni Albers’s woven textiles, from mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors to Charles Sanders Peirce’s three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. The case studies share a structure: a trained perceiver attends to relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure the elements together produce.

The book is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The Scientific Aesthetic developed the theoretical framework for what I called the originating-act test, distinguishing acts of art and science from the craft activities that follow them. RelationShaping takes the relational dimension of that earlier argument and develops it into a sustained examination of one specific perceptual capacity across a wider range of human practice than the first book could cover. The two volumes can be read independently. They make a single argument together, and the order of publication is the order of the argument’s development.

The argument is not a recent one for me. I started a blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network in 2007. The blog has been working on the questions this book gathers for almost twenty years, and many of the book’s arguments began as blog posts whose claims I refined, tested against new examples, and pushed further across that span. The new book is the culmination of long work, the gathering of two decades of writing into a single sustained argument that the blog form, by its nature, could not quite hold.

The closing chapters of RelationShaping extend the framework into harder territory. Chapter Eight examines the trained-perception competence in domains where it has not been institutionally named, including the recovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hubble Deep Field, and the contested Sappho papyri. The next chapter addresses the methodological problem of attending to relations that have not yet been discovered, drawing on microbiome and connectome research, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the substantial scholarly traditions of Indigenous knowledge integration. The book closes with Chapter Ten, titled “The Severed Field,” which addresses the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure.

Chapter Ten is the chapter that made the book hard to write, and the chapter that makes the book necessary right now. The trained eye depends on conditions that are political, not merely epistemic. The classroom where a student learns to read counterpoint exists because public funding for music education exists. A museum where a young painter can spend weeks in front of a Morandi exists because the public funding that maintains museum collections exists. The graduate seminar where a future scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledge learns the methodology for ethical engagement exists because public funding for humanities research exists. Forests where botanists learn to read mycorrhizal networks exist because public funding for forest conservation exists. None of those institutional preconditions is independent of the political settlement that funds and protects them. The settlement turns against the institutions; the institutions thin; the conditions for the acquisition of trained perception thin with them; and the next generation of trained perceivers does not appear.

This is what Chapter Ten attempts to articulate. The substantive argument about relational seeing as a trainable competence would have been correct in any historical period. The urgency of articulating it right now belongs specifically to this moment, when the institutional preconditions for the competence are under organized political pressure to dissolve.

The book makes no claim that political pressure is the only force at work, or that institutional contraction has only one cause. The contraction has many causes, including economic restructuring, demographic change, the erosion of forms of community that once supported sustained attention, and the substitution of cheaper automated processes for human practitioners. Political pressure is one cause among several, and it is the cause most directly susceptible to political response.

What the book hopes to offer the reader is a vocabulary. With the vocabulary in hand, a reader may notice the trained eye in the people who still have it, may understand what those people are doing differently, may in some specific case ask to become an apprentice. In other cases, the reader may recognize that the political pressure on the institutions that train such perceivers is not pressure those perceivers can resist alone. They will need allies. The book is one attempt to make the case for being one of those allies.

I want to be honest about the limits of what the book undertakes. The book undertakes a specific task: it names the competence, documents it across a wider range of domains than is usually recognized, and articulates what is being lost when the conditions for its acquisition stop holding. The book makes no proposal for restoring the institutions whose contraction it documents, and no claim that naming the loss is sufficient to reverse it. Naming is the first step the book attempts, on the conviction that a loss without a name cannot be addressed in any organized way. The book gives the loss a name. What follows from the naming is for the reader to decide.

RelationShaping: Field Studies is available now in print, in ebook, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com, along with its companion volume The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The book was difficult to write under the present conditions; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, and equally dishonest to claim that the difficulty makes the book unnecessary. The argument exists, the case needs making, and the book makes the case.

#amazon #bolesBlogs #book #davidBoles #faraday #fieldStudies #kdp #morandi #philosophy #phyllotactic #politics #relation #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

#aristotle #art #audiobook #bach #bolesBooks #davidBoles #discovery #eiffelTower #imitation #inspiration #kindle #mozart #music #operatingTheory #paperback #paris #photography #science #scientificAesthetic #scientist

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

#aristotle #art #audiobook #bach #bolesBooks #davidBoles #discovery #eiffelTower #imitation #inspiration #kindle #mozart #music #operatingTheory #paperback #paris #photography #science #scientificAesthetic #scientist

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

The piece is called The Apothecary of Mantua: A Musical Drama in Two Acts. It is now available as a book.

Let me sit with that sentence for a moment, because the marketing copy people at every other publishing house would tell me to cut it. “A musical now available as a book” is a paradox. Musicals are performed. Books are read. A musical that is a book is either a cast recording liner notes expanded to absurdity or it is something else entirely, which is what this is.

This is a reading edition of a complete dramatic work. Book and lyrics by me. Score to be written by someone else. The someone else is, for the moment, a hypothetical someone whose name I do not yet know, but whose phone number I hope to be given in the next six months. More on that in a moment.

What is in the book

The published volume contains the full libretto across two acts and twenty scenes. Act One runs nine scenes, Act Two runs eleven. Tommaso Vesperi wakes on a Tuesday morning in early autumn 1537, opens his shop on Via del Cigno, and by that evening has sold a vial of poison to a young Veronese nobleman who leaves forty ducats on the counter and disappears into a plague of his own making. In Act Two, everything arrives at once. A morning Watch presence crosses the piazza. A sixteenth-century statute on the books punishes the sale of mortal drugs with death. Tommaso has a decision to make about whether to run, and if he does not run, what to do with the forty ducats before the Watch Captain crosses his threshold.

The libretto itself runs about a hundred pages of the paperback. The rest of the volume is apparatus. There is a production bible covering historical setting, character backstory, relationships, timeline, world-building, and scene-by-scene structural outline. Following that, a composer’s reference with meter assignments per character, a rhyme family inventory, scene-by-scene musical specifications, voice-and-orchestra split architecture, and a duration summary. Then a production and staging section for directors and designers. And four scholarly essays on Mantua in 1537, on the apothecary trade and Paracelsian medicine, on the Mantuan Jewish community in the early Cinquecento, and on Shakespeare’s minor source character.

The total is 338 pages. I am saying this because the scope matters to how you should think about the piece. A typical acting edition of a musical libretto is sixty to ninety pages, cue script dimensions, cheap paper, minimal apparatus. The Apothecary of Mantua takes a different posture. It is a scholarly reading edition that happens to contain a performable musical, or, depending on how you squint at it, a performable musical that happens to travel with four hundred pages of scholarship.

Why publish a musical as a book

The practical answer is that the piece needs to exist in a durable form before a composer sets it, and books are the most durable form we have invented. Composers who want to score the work need a physical copy to read, mark up, argue with, and carry to the piano. Directors who want to produce it need the production bible. Conservatories that want to assign it as a teaching text for dramatic writing or for scholarly research on the source and period need the essays. The book form serves all three audiences.

The philosophical answer is that I have been running David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1975, when I was ten years old and got paid for an article in a Lincoln newspaper, and the house was founded on the premise that writers should own the means of production. I do not wait for permission to publish the things I write. The Apothecary of Mantua is the latest demonstration of that premise and it will not be the last.

Critics outside the operation sometimes push on the 1975 founding date. They say a ten-year-old with a check from a newspaper is not a publishing house. My response is that a publishing house is what you do next after your first check. What I did next was decide that my writing would continue, that it would be paid for, and that the infrastructure to deliver it to readers would be mine rather than rented from someone else’s imagination. Fifty-one years later, David Boles Books has published a catalog I can barely track on a good day, and the Apothecary is the newest title on the list.

What happens now

The book is on Amazon in paperback for $19.99. The Kindle edition is $9.99. There is a letter-size download edition for composers who want to print it at home and mark it up with a pencil. All three editions are available through BolesBooks.com.

And here is where I would like to address any composers who may be reading this. You exist. I know you exist because BolesBooks.com gets traffic from music conservatories and I know what kind of person goes looking for a 338-page scholarly reading edition of a musical drama at two in the morning on a Tuesday. That person is a composer between commissions who is restless and scrolling and wondering whether the next project might have already been written and might be waiting to be found.

If you are that composer, this one wants you. Four hundred and twenty-nine years of silence is a long tuning note, and Tommaso Vesperi has been waiting all this time for someone with a score in their head to walk into the shop and ask him what the apothecary of Mantua sounds like in the key of his own voice. I would be delighted to talk with you about setting it. Reach out through BolesBooks.com and we will find an hour to talk about what you hear when you read the first scene.

A new old musical. Now available in book form. The composer seat is still open. A tortoise still hangs from the rafters of the shop. Forty ducats still sit on the counter. And somewhere in the plague rolls of 1527 there is a woman named Fiammetta whose orchestral theme is waiting for the first chord that will make her real again.

Come and write it.

#apothecary #book #broadway #community #composer #davidBoles #love #lyrics #musical #poison #publication #romeoAndJuliet #score #shakespeare #storytelling #writing

A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

The piece is called The Apothecary of Mantua: A Musical Drama in Two Acts. It is now available as a book.

Let me sit with that sentence for a moment, because the marketing copy people at every other publishing house would tell me to cut it. “A musical now available as a book” is a paradox. Musicals are performed. Books are read. A musical that is a book is either a cast recording liner notes expanded to absurdity or it is something else entirely, which is what this is.

This is a reading edition of a complete dramatic work. Book and lyrics by me. Score to be written by someone else. The someone else is, for the moment, a hypothetical someone whose name I do not yet know, but whose phone number I hope to be given in the next six months. More on that in a moment.

What is in the book

The published volume contains the full libretto across two acts and twenty scenes. Act One runs nine scenes, Act Two runs eleven. Tommaso Vesperi wakes on a Tuesday morning in early autumn 1537, opens his shop on Via del Cigno, and by that evening has sold a vial of poison to a young Veronese nobleman who leaves forty ducats on the counter and disappears into a plague of his own making. In Act Two, everything arrives at once. A morning Watch presence crosses the piazza. A sixteenth-century statute on the books punishes the sale of mortal drugs with death. Tommaso has a decision to make about whether to run, and if he does not run, what to do with the forty ducats before the Watch Captain crosses his threshold.

The libretto itself runs about a hundred pages of the paperback. The rest of the volume is apparatus. There is a production bible covering historical setting, character backstory, relationships, timeline, world-building, and scene-by-scene structural outline. Following that, a composer’s reference with meter assignments per character, a rhyme family inventory, scene-by-scene musical specifications, voice-and-orchestra split architecture, and a duration summary. Then a production and staging section for directors and designers. And four scholarly essays on Mantua in 1537, on the apothecary trade and Paracelsian medicine, on the Mantuan Jewish community in the early Cinquecento, and on Shakespeare’s minor source character.

The total is 338 pages. I am saying this because the scope matters to how you should think about the piece. A typical acting edition of a musical libretto is sixty to ninety pages, cue script dimensions, cheap paper, minimal apparatus. The Apothecary of Mantua takes a different posture. It is a scholarly reading edition that happens to contain a performable musical, or, depending on how you squint at it, a performable musical that happens to travel with four hundred pages of scholarship.

Why publish a musical as a book

The practical answer is that the piece needs to exist in a durable form before a composer sets it, and books are the most durable form we have invented. Composers who want to score the work need a physical copy to read, mark up, argue with, and carry to the piano. Directors who want to produce it need the production bible. Conservatories that want to assign it as a teaching text for dramatic writing or for scholarly research on the source and period need the essays. The book form serves all three audiences.

The philosophical answer is that I have been running David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1975, when I was ten years old and got paid for an article in a Lincoln newspaper, and the house was founded on the premise that writers should own the means of production. I do not wait for permission to publish the things I write. The Apothecary of Mantua is the latest demonstration of that premise and it will not be the last.

Critics outside the operation sometimes push on the 1975 founding date. They say a ten-year-old with a check from a newspaper is not a publishing house. My response is that a publishing house is what you do next after your first check. What I did next was decide that my writing would continue, that it would be paid for, and that the infrastructure to deliver it to readers would be mine rather than rented from someone else’s imagination. Fifty-one years later, David Boles Books has published a catalog I can barely track on a good day, and the Apothecary is the newest title on the list.

What happens now

The book is on Amazon in paperback for $19.99. The Kindle edition is $9.99. There is a letter-size download edition for composers who want to print it at home and mark it up with a pencil. All three editions are available through BolesBooks.com.

And here is where I would like to address any composers who may be reading this. You exist. I know you exist because BolesBooks.com gets traffic from music conservatories and I know what kind of person goes looking for a 338-page scholarly reading edition of a musical drama at two in the morning on a Tuesday. That person is a composer between commissions who is restless and scrolling and wondering whether the next project might have already been written and might be waiting to be found.

If you are that composer, this one wants you. Four hundred and twenty-nine years of silence is a long tuning note, and Tommaso Vesperi has been waiting all this time for someone with a score in their head to walk into the shop and ask him what the apothecary of Mantua sounds like in the key of his own voice. I would be delighted to talk with you about setting it. Reach out through BolesBooks.com and we will find an hour to talk about what you hear when you read the first scene.

A new old musical. Now available in book form. The composer seat is still open. A tortoise still hangs from the rafters of the shop. Forty ducats still sit on the counter. And somewhere in the plague rolls of 1527 there is a woman named Fiammetta whose orchestral theme is waiting for the first chord that will make her real again.

Come and write it.

#apothecary #book #broadway #community #composer #davidBoles #love #lyrics #musical #poison #publication #romeoAndJuliet #score #shakespeare #storytelling #writing