Broken Turtle

A City of Ghosts

2012-01-01T13:47:00.002-05:00

Several months ago the publisher of a local online literary magazine asked if I might consider producing a site map of places of literary interest. Initially I thought this might be a good idea. Because I had been developing a keen curiosity about the legacy of Wilmington’s history of jazz, and because I felt that literature and jazz seem to go well together because, at least, their histories were contemporary, I considered doing a site map that contained both.

I began by listing locations, first the homes where different authors, poets, and musicians had lived. Then I listed other locations like schools, clubs and other places of business like bookstores. After listing about a couple dozen sites, it dawned on me how unviable a site map of this type would be.

Site maps are made for tourists or interested persons as a tool, but I found there would be little or nothing to actually see. The home of jazz great Clifford Brown is still a vacant lot. The home of Alice Dunbar-Nelson had been replaced with an office building. I-95 runs through the block where the Wertenbakers had grown up. Ellerslie, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived, had been torn down decades ago. A plaque installed on the former home of James Whaler, Wilmington’s most successful 20th century poet, had been removed by the owner. The Wilmington location of Friends’ School, where nearly all successful early 20th century Wilmington authors had at attended least in part, had decades ago moved to an affluent suburb, leaving its former Wilmington location still a largely vacant lot. Many famous clubs, like the Club Baby Grand and The Spot, that made Wilmington’s jazz history so notable, have become the victims of “urban renewal.” The very street on which Daisy Winchester had her speakeasy doesn’t even exist anymore. For those few places that Wilmington’s literati frequented, the most well known –– if indeed “well known” is even applicable –– was the Greenwood Book Store, but I challenge anyone to tell me where it had been located.

In 1934 Wilmington author Henry Seidel Canby published The Age of Confidence (Farrar & Rinehart). In it Canby examines life in Wilmington during the turn of the 20th century. Locally, one can tell by his name he’s a part of a large and old family in Wilmington. Canby should know. In the book he gives thorough perspective on subjects still relevant today: family life, lifestyle, religion and literature and pop culture. Yet there’s a bigger story. It’s the story of a city at a turning point in history. It is a comment on the Progressive Era because he examines the age before it. It was an age of laissez faire, those values and sentiment still imbibing those flavors from old southern chivalry, steeped in the works of Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs. There’s little of Whitman and Poe if anything at all. Certainly there was a boho somewhere lurking in some cultural crevice of Wilmington reading Poe and Whitman, but for the majority who had ushered in the 20th century it was an “age of confidence.”

Canby wrote The Age of Confidence at a time after The Progressive Age had fallen into the pit of The Great War, and after the tawdry age of The Roaring 20s. The Great Depression was obstructing the careers of many emerging literati who first flourished thanks to the cultural boost provided by the Progressive Era.

At the onset of The Great Depression many Wilmington literati moved to New York City to continue their careers, surviving with pop novels and journalism. Canby never forgot his roots even though he was one who went to New York and found success. He founded The Saturday Review of Literature, which could be found on most newsstands. He wrote books about Thoreau and Whitman and was considered among the most preeminent of reviewers and cultural commentators toward the middle of the 20th century, and he was the father of Wilmington’s literati. His house is now someone’s personal property, unless its been turned into an apartment house, in which case it’s someone’s private property. The house belonging to Christopher Ward is nearby, but Ward did not leave Wilmington. He remained to write histories in retirement. Ward’s fiction was beginning to wither into the throes of the Depression. Wilmington poet James Whaler went away and became a professor, which is a profession that occupied Canby for many years. Even Canby’s wife, who is loosely portrayed in Canby’s only novel, Our House (1919, MacMillan) was a successful poet, having her work published in Scribner’s, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Review of Literature. Marion Canby’s poetry is collected in High Mowing (1932 Houghton Mifflin).

In Wilmington we had, at one time in the 1920s, more than a half dozen successful novelists living in or near Wilmington, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. All but Fitzgerald are now ghosts gathering dust on those library shelves where their work might be found.

The Progressive Era ended with the World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, but two aspects of its legacy continued in the 1920s. The first, which didn’t work, was Prohibition, and which helped launched the “Lost Generation.” The other was Women’s Suffrage, which did work. By the time Canby wrote The Age of Confidence, Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, where he and Christopher Ward had lived, was a ghost of its former self. While others of Wilmington’s literati ––Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charles and Peyton Wertenbaker, Anne Parrish and James Whaler –– left town, Canby’s book was no more than a reminder of a city that once was, and was filling up with ghosts.

As the 1930s developed, however, the power of the music being made on Wilmington’s eastside ushered in a new cultural era. Jazz was being heard and played and attracting the attention of the jazz world. Great jazz artists from Wilmington like Betty Roché, Clifford Brown and Lem Winchester would be propelled into the “big time.” This time it was not The Great Depression that ended an era, but some racist and faulty idea called “urban renewal.” The wholesale destruction of an entire section of
Wilmington nearly destroyed our city’s jazz community.

Here are the ghosts I still see in Wilmington, when I see someone carrying a case for a musical instrument, or a familiar figure standing on a doorstep in a building no longer there, or in a plate glass window where once a jazz club or bookstore or gallery once stood. This vision of ghosts is superimposed upon all the amnesia inflicted by those politicians and developers who think as little about how the changes they’re making of our city today will affect us all tomorrow as they think little about how the contribution from the past still haunts Wilmington. Then again, maybe I’m the only one who is haunted, but I’d rather be haunted than drowning in a sea of ignorance and amnesia.

Occupy Wall Street: the Space in the Spandrels

2011-10-17T09:18:00.003-04:00

We hear quite a bit about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in terms of a space: “opening a space for a conversation about the economy,” for example.

Everyone who has been trying to raise the alarm in the space of rational argument about the wholesale transfer of wealth and power upward in America for the last thirty years has failed to be heard. And now some hippies show up in a park beating on drums and everyone is talking about economic justice. How did they do that?

Many are puzzled about this term space. Spacey is how some have stereotyped the partisans of this movement. Maybe a way to understand this space is in terms of a spandrel.

A spandrel is an architectural term. An architect constructs a building with a combination of straight lines and curves, which don’t really mix that well, so he or she ends up with leftover space. What spans the space between, say, the curve of an arch and the square that boxes it in is a spandrel. It wasn’t exactly planned; it’s just an unavoidable feature of the structure. (Spandrels also exist in evolutionary biology: features that arise as side effects of adaptive processes and are accidentally useful in sustaining life, a thought that may pertain to my theme).*

photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran aka Carptrash 19:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC) These spandrel figures representing Astronomy (left) and Sculpture (right) were created by Bela Pratt for the Library of Congress Building around 1896.

Society, too, has a structure. It is constructed not of pillars, lintels, and arches but of culture, politics, the economy, and just about anything that relates people to one another. Some voices among the Occupiers suggest that those of us who have challenged the elite in the past are even part of this structure.

And that makes us defensive. After all, we’ve organized, struggled, and even thrown our bodies under the machine. We got the tread marks to prove it. But maybe it’s true that we are part of the structure, at least in the sense that society bears the marks of treading over us, too.

The structure we live in has been imprinted with adaptations that thwart whatever we do to oppose it, be it educating, organizing, writing poetry, or, for that matter, waging armed insurrection. A well-cited example is how the “commons,” those spaces where citizens could pass out flyers, rally, or put up a picket line, have shrunk as shopping malls have privatized the spaces between shops. But it is not merely the physical space that is disappearing. Just ten years ago tens of millions of folks rallied in the commons against the impending invasion of Iraq to no avail. All the political structures that might previously have been compelled to respond to protests on this scale had adapted, with the obvious help of corporate treasure, so they felt no need to respond. It was as if the space where those multitudes marched had been rendered space no more.

Somehow these Occupiers have found the spandrels.

This is important to me as a poet, because I have been thinking for some time that arguing has not been able break the spell that fear and powerlessness has on our society. I have been thinking that only poetry could counter this spell, working in the space of the heart rather than the brain. I may have found this space in the spandrels.

What happens in these spandrels?

Well, for one thing, people give testimony about what the economic collapse has meant to them and their families. It’s about a middle class Puerto Rican family living the American Dream, father a physician, daughters with degrees and 100,000-dollar debts, losing the home they had lived in for forty years when pop is fired. It’s about a single mother of two offered a four-dollar-per hour job. About an autoworker with twelve-years seniority whose plant has just been raised to the ground. Black, brown, white, and up to now, unheard. You can see some of this testimony in Dana Garrett’s video of the October 15 Occupy Delaware rally in Rodney Square.

For another thing, there is a democratic process with no leaders. Rallies are called General Assemblies. You’re lucky if there is a PA system. Sometimes they use a “human megaphone,” whereby a speaker utters information or speeches in three- to five-word segments that are then repeated by the crowd nearby. Totally ad hoc conveners follow a simple process of proposals, clarifications, concerns, amendments, straw polls, and votes. We old radicals, trade unionists, and peaceniks stand aside as this newer world’s in birth.

It has a kind of poetry of its own, scribbled in the spandrels of the system. There is a kind of faith that ninety-nine percent of the people really can and do count.

So what is the role of the poet in this? Occupy Delaware has an Arts, Culture & Education Committee. In its Face Book discussion group the committee mentions education about the banking crisis and injustices by corporations and the use of art to engage supporters and to educate people about Occupy Delaware.

Now, programmatic poetry is problematic to poets of the highly crafted poem, poetry composed and read in contemplation, poetry like that of Dylan Thomas, which I love. Perhaps the distinction between programmatic and contemplative poetry is the same as that posed by the late revolutionary poet, Tom McGrath regarding Tactical and Strategic Poetry. Tactical Poetry is tied to “some immediate thing” like a “strike.” Strategic poetry, on the other hand, is “a poetry in which the writer trusts himself enough to write about whatever comes along, with the assumption that what he is doing will be, in the long run, useful, consciousness raising or enriching.” To me, that means writers of tactical poems will be writing under a deadline, bringing whatever poetic gifts they have to the immediate task, trusting that an accessible message gains profundity in its timeliness, and, as McGrath warns, facing the fact that eventually “the events they were about have moved out from under them.” Sic transit gloria.

My own attempt at a tactical poem, “Global Solidarity” can be read here or heard at about 5:26 in Dana Garrett’s video, above. Almost immediately after is a stirring poem called “Freedom Fighter,” by Red Lip Poetry Salon’s Amy Eyre.

In the architecture of manipulation, exploitation, and violence, there are spandrels, the left over spaces. There find the poet’s workshop and stage.

*See David M Buss et al., “Adaptations, Exaptations, and Spandrels,” American Psychologist 53:5, 1998, pp. 533-48, cited in Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 227.

The Man Who Was an Early Mentor for Clifford Brown

2011-09-04T12:06:00.007-04:00

My friend Ken Anderson has been on me for some time about Sam Wooding, who for a time taught band at Wilmington's Howard High School in the 1940s. Before desegregation began its long process of integrating Wilmington's public schools, Howard High School was the all Black high school in northern New Castle county. Howard High School produced a number of well known and talented musicians, the major figures being Clifford Brown, Lem Winchester and Gerald Price. Clifford Brown had gone to Howard High School in the 1940s and he and my friend, Ken Anderson, were in the Howard High School band together and Sam Wooding was their band teacher. Ken was given the tuba to play and strongly suggests that Wooding may have given Clifford Brown the trumpet. However, Brownie had already adopted the trumpet on his own after giving the trombone a whirl, and probably picked up his first chops under Wooding's tutelage. So who was Sam Wooding?

Sam Wooding was born in Philadelphia on June 17, 1895. In the 1920s he formed a jazz band, performed some vaudeville gigs as well as a few venues in Harlem, notably at Small's Paradise. Soon he realized he could make more money for himself and his band, The Chocolate Dandies, by touring Europe during the 1920s. Among the early jazz greats in The Chocolate Dandies were Doc Cheatham, Tommy Ladnier and Gene Sedric. He recorded some sides for Parlophone and Pathé, and performed in clubs throughout Europe. One song he recorded, "J'ai Deux Amours," was heard by Josephine Baker, who made it one of her signature songs. There is also strong conjecture that the German composer Kurt Weill was influenced by Sam Wooding. The music Weill composed for The Three Penny Opera and other collaborations with Bertolt Brecht contains musical forms reminiscent to those heard from Wooding's arrangements.

In 1927, Wooding and The Chocolate Dandies toured South America and had some momentous gigs in Buenos Aires. One could contend that their influence there had some affect upon Argentina's tango musicians because tango music later merged with big band music, particularly during the Peronist era. Wooding's Chocolate Dandies returned to Europe for a spell in the late 1920s into the early 1930s, but the rise of Nazism eventually drove them out of Europe. The band eventually disbanded after returning to the United States in 1932, but not after reforming for a few years during which Sidney Bechet was a member.

Sam Wooding returned to school after leaving the music industry. He earned a Master's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, which eventually brought him to a teaching position at Howard High School in Wilmington sometime after 1942 by best estimation. He evidently remained at Howard through at least the late 1940s, leaving his mark upon some later notable musicians like Clifford Brown, which is where we began.

Sam Wooding moved in and out of the music industry afterwards until he died on August 1, 1985.

Levine gets the Butt of Sack

2011-08-15T09:44:00.001-04:00

Philip Levine, dubbed a “proletariat poet,” is the new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. There is perhaps a subtle political message in his appointment. Perhaps it means that someone, at least, is thinking about the equity in sweat that creates all wealth rather than the equity in credit default swaps that destroys it.

Early laureates Allen Tate (1943) and Robert Penn Warren (1944) both espoused the conservative Western canon and promoted the apolitical New Criticism. Louise Bogan (1945), poetry critic for The New Yorker, broke the gender barrier, but gently. Robert Hayden (1976) broke the color barrier, also gently.

Some appointments have supported free thought, at least in foreign despotisms. Joseph Brodsky, for example, had been expelled from the Soviet Union for alleged “social parasitism” in 1972. He emigrated to the U.S., won the 1987 Nobel Prize, and was appointed in 1991.

Levine’s elevation comes a little late for him; he’s 82. His experience in the Detroit factories goes back to the late ‘30s and Word War II period, and his descriptions of factory life sometimes seem in period-appropriate sepia tones. A while back, I picked up his What Work Is (1991) on a remaindered table for four bucks. Presumably, sales have picked up since the new honor.

Still, there is an intergenerational bond that makes Levine’s poetry resonate. When I began working at Chrysler, which employed me for three decades, I met folks who had been around for the great sit-down strikes of ’37, three decades before. And check out the overhead chain conveyer in Diego Rivera’s 1933 “Detroit Industry.” You’ll see the same design in today’s auto plants. Plus ça change. More importantly, Levine has a sense of what motivates workers beyond the money. No matter how lousy the job, work gives folks a sense of being.

Take his “Fear and Fame,” the opening poem in said What Work Is. It’s about a man who mixes a metal plating—or “pickling”—solution. We see him suiting up in protective gear, remembering the pedigree of the secret recipe he learned from the former pickling master (now “off to the bars on Vernor Highway/to drink himself to death”), descending into a pit where he mixed hydrochloric acid and other noxious potions, climbing out, undressing, observing his work mates at their jobs, and then suiting up again

. . . for the second time that night, stiffened

by the knowledge that to descend and rise up

from the other world merely once in eight hours is half

what it takes to be known among women and men.

The poem puts labor back into its human dimension, rescues it from what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” behind which human relationships and creative sweat hide when goods are exchanged.

As a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Levine was an early product of what has been called “The Program Era” (See Mark McGurl's book of that name, reflected on by my colleague Steven Leech in “Casualties from the Fast Track”). This era is characterized by MFA programs and writers retreats, generally under the sway, critics claim, of mainstream publishers and academia. Many, if not most of the U. S. Poet Laureates reflect this establishmentarian bias. All the same, some, like Levine’s Iowa Workshop mentor Robert Lowell, were great.

Anyway, I can relate to Levine. For one, I took poetry writing under his classmate, the late W.D. Snodgrass, at the University of Delaware. Even better, Robert Lowell judged an Academy of American Poets Prize I won at UD in 1963. But it’s more than the indirect personal connections; it’s his ambivalence. Elizabeth Lund, in her August 11 article in the Christian Science monitor, quotes Levine reflecting on the relationship between his factory work and his career:

It took me a long time to be able to write about it without snarling or snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward those who maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had touched and blessed me.

Sometimes I feel like I should have waited until time tempered me before I wrote Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, since I felt more “maimed and cheated” then, while now that Chrysler is shut down, I feel more “touched and blessed.” But, as I said in the in-text fiction disclaimer, “if the shoe fits, it’s your own damn fault.

Still, Levine’s latest honor is an opportunity to build momentum for transformative working class poetry. Hey, everybody, I’m an autoworker poet, look over here! Oh, well.

Next April, I’m hoping to bring poet Jim Daniels to Delaware. Raised in an autoworker family in Warren, Michigan, Daniels worked a short time in the auto plants and now has taught several decades at Carnegie Mellon. He has never stopped writing about the social, spiritual, political, and economic lives of workers, including, most recently, professors. See his Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry.

A few years back, I saw Philip Levine at the University of Delaware. In the copy of Selected Poems I bought, he wrote, “for Phillip from Philip, with hope for our poems.”

Well, congrats, Philip, with hope for more working class poets.

Note: a “butt of sack” (cask of sherry) was the traditional pay for the British Poet Laureate.

More on the Search for Delaware artist William D. White

2011-07-28T11:43:00.003-04:00

In February I posted a short article about the former Delaware artist William D. White. Since then there has been some movement in the effort by Delaware artist Nancy Carol Willis and myself to revive the life and work of this important yet largely little known artist. Two significant events have been the publication of an article in the latest issue of The Broadkill Review, published in Milton, Delaware, about the life and career of William D. White, which includes a wide selection of his art work. The article was published with the aim of finding more of White's work as well as to disseminate information about him. In order to supplement the information and display of White's art in The Broadkill Review, Nancy Carol Willis has designed a new website containing not only all the information in that article but additional materials including some that has since surfaced. The website is: www.williamdwhite.com.
The accompanying photo is the only known photograph of William D. White. In it he is standing in front of the mural he had painted while a member of Delaware's Federal Artists' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The photograph was published in 1936 in the Wilmington Sunday Star. The mural survives. It was originally painted for the U.S. Post Office in Dover, Delaware. The building now belongs to the Wesley United Methodist Church in Dover and can be viewed by the public, though folks at the the church should be consulted to be sure the building is not being used at the time of your visit. Other original examples of White's art can be found at Buena Vista Conference Center in New Castle County. Another of White's painting can be viewed at the Willard Hall Building on the campus of the University of Delaware.
The website that Nancy Carol Willis designed makes it easy for any one to post comments. It is our hope that comments might include information about where more of White's artwork can be found, with the further hope that one day we might be able to stage a larger public retrospective of this important Delaware artist's work.

The Attack on Civil Society: How Poets Respond

2011-05-22T18:59:00.001-04:00

Reprinted in slightly revised form from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 5 No. 2

Civil society is bizarrely heterogeneous, comprising everything from the Pagans Motorcycle Club to the now defunct non-profit ACORN to unions to poets. Nevertheless, it is the chorus of Liberty and Democracy and it is under attack, one voice at a time. Permit me to summarize a couple of the more recent examples, provide a little philosophical entertainment, and humbly suggest a role for poets.

The first is the November 2006 killing of Iraq War vet and Pagan member Derek Hale by Wilmington, Delaware Police. Investigating alleged drug dealing by the Pagans, a swat-type team of cops arrived at the home of a Pagan friend of Derek’s and found him sitting on the steps. Derek, for whom police had no arrest warrant, rose. Before he could comply with orders to take both hands out of his pockets, he was tased repeatedly. Then, as he lay on his side paralyzed and vomiting, and as a mother and her two children also on the steps looked on in horror, a policeman fired three fatal .40-caliber rounds into his chest. According to Attorney General Beau Biden’s report exonerating police, Derek was shot as he "continued to keep a hand in his pocket as if holding a weapon and was turning in a threatening manner toward an officer armed with an empty Taser."

Let’s not forget that folks have a right freely to associate with the Pagans, in spite of how they may offend middle-class sensibilities. I worked side-by-side with several Pagans at Chrysler and even considered a few my friends because they did their jobs, shared our collective burdens, and could be relied on for the union cause. I described the spiritual travails of an imaginary biker in my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, and I did not stint in describing the less savory activities of some bikers.

The second event was the destruction of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the nation-wide non-profit that specialized in empowering the poor through such activities as credit advocacy and voter registration. Readers may remember how several Federal Prosecutors were fired because they resisted Bush administration pressure to concoct bogus charges of voting fraud against the group.

However, it is easer to destroy a reputation than to prove an accusation. Thus, in 2009, a group of right wing operatives with hidden cameras began trolling ACORN offices to see if they could trick ACORN workers into seeming to wink at illegal activities. Highly edited videos of these visits were widely disseminated on-line and on Fox News, and in short order foundation funding dried up, and Congress—Democrats and Republicans cravenly alike—stripped ACORN of federal contracts. Subsequent investigations by several state’s attorneys and the federal GAO found no wrongdoing by ACORN regarding the insinuations of the video. A Federal court voided the stripping of ACORN’s funding as an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” But all that was too late. By November of 2010, ACORN was bankrupt and dead.

Also too late for Derek Hale, in December of 2010, Wilmington settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with Derek’s widow for $875,000. While Wilmington Police did not admit culpability, the deal certainly made their case look bad, as Wilmington News Journal editorialist Ron Williams demonstrated witheringly in recent columns.

Ironically, joining the ACLU in Derek’s widow’s case was Thomas Neuberger, leader of the Rutherford Institute, a Christian right-leaning civil liberties organization. Additionally, one of the most eloquent advocates in Derek Hale’s case is William Norman Grigg, who blogs at LewRockwell.com, a Ron Paul-type libertarian web site. Grigg ties the killing of Derek Hale to what he refers to as the “unitary, militarized, Homeland Security apparatus,” a component in the right-wing narrative that sees a slippery slope toward federal encroachments on state’s rights and the eventual deployment of UN forces in the USA.

It is well known how the corporate elite funds the right. Paradoxically, not only did the right defend the proletarian Derek Hale, but its very emblem is Joe the Plumber, leading a working-class charge against immigrants, gays, unions, affirmative action, taxes, Muslims, Big Government, and the latté-sipping elite who evince moral superiority to the proles but know nothing of their burdens.

No telling how much the involvement of Beau Biden, son of U.S. Vice-President Joe, had to do with tempering the voices of outrage over Derek Hale’s death. When Joe was a senator, he was able to sell Delaware on his proto-Patriot Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and his Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which latter was to make the world safe from bad loans.

Now for that philosophical entertainment: Slavoj Žižek, the leftist Slovenian Philosopher, has some words on the European anti-immigrant movement that might shed light on the paradox cited above. Says Žižek,

[I]t’s absolutely crucial how this anti-immigrant explosion is linked to the withdrawal of leftist politics, especially in the matters of economy and so on. It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that “No, no, no, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism” and so on. They don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. Do you know, the horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants? So you see, we, the leftists, we have no right, absolutely no right, to take this arrogant view of offended tolerant people who are horrored—no, we should ask the question, how we enabled what is going on. “Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe, Part II." Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. 18 October 2010. <http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/10/18/part_iislavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti_immigrant_politicians_on_the_rise_in_europe>.

What happened to ACORN demonstrates a great deal about “how we enabled what is going on.” ACORN had attempted to be a transmission line between the power of corporate foundations and government to the people at the base. When that line was snapped, instead of uniting to defend ACORN, terrified liberal politicians and civil society thought only of securing their own teat on the increasingly stingy corporate-government sow. Repeatedly, when reactionaries have led the charge, liberals have led the retreat.

So now, in various ways, the onslaught against democracy, economic justice, and civil society continues. Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and climate scientists have all been subjected to the same political warfare, a warfare that has escalated with the stripping of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other states.

A soldier, Bradley Manning, who may or may not have had something to do with leaking a video to Wikileaks showing an American helicopter machine-gunning civilians in Iraq is treated like an Arab terrorism suspect. Arab terrorism suspects continue to be treated like non-persons at Guantanamo. American Muslims are vilified in McCarthyite hearings in Congress. The poison spreads and fear abounds.

So, what do we poets have to do with all this? Promote Solidarity.

We already do, of course. By our very nature, we are motivated by Solidarity, “the conviction of which” according to Joseph Conrad, “knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, [. . . ] the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men [and women] to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Beyond expressing that mutual resonance of human experience, poets are reluctant, justifiably, to prescribe solutions to social problems. They also don’t like to take marching orders. But what’s wrong with suggesting that poets attune their antennae to the onslaught of repression creeping across civil society? To suggesting poets be more relevant to the nitty-gritty majority in our country, where ideas swirl in a messy, non-academic mix, where the social infrastructure is shredding, where prison is more likely than a diploma or a good job and where the repression that is overwhelming civil society is nothing new?

Tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going to Solidarity with Wisconsin rallies armed with new-lyrics labor songs like “On Wisconsin” (Fight for workers’ rights).

When I was the featured poet for the April Second Saturday Poets, I put out a special invitation for other poets to join me reading works on the theme of Solidarity. I even wrote a bit of agitprop verse about it that some of you already saw. It includes the lines,

Would you sing Solidarity in the Old Union Hall,

chicken dinners, picket lines, all for one and one for all?

Blood and sweat’s our gender, our race, of broken backs,

barricade of all nations, when capital attacks.

Pay your monthly dues and rise with the other guy.

Or would you, had you just one wish, if shared, lose one eye?

The rest of the poem was previously posted at the Broken Turtle Blog: Are You Stirred By Solidarity?

And on Friday, June 3, I’ll be sharing my verse in support of the 22^nd annual Soweto Festival, sponsored by the Delaware Committee for Racial Justice & Harmony and Delaware Artists for Racial Unity. I’ll be performing around 6 p.m. at the Artist’s Reception at the Gallery at Grace, Grace United Methodist Church, 900 N. Washington St., Wilmington, DE 19801. The affaire is a project of Delaware Pacem in Terris. See http://depaceminterris.pbworks.com.

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Spoiler Alert

2011-04-08T10:08:00.000-04:00

I’m kind of strange. I don’t care if you tell me the end of a movie, book or television show, even if it’s an ending with a twist. For me, it’s not the ending that’s important, but the story you travel to get there. After all, there are really only a finite number of plots. All genres have their standard story lines. What distinguishes a good story from a bad one is the journey, not just the ultimate destination.

In some cases, though, knowing the ending can put us at a singular disadvantage. Lately, I’ve been thinking the problem with history — especially in regards to progressive activism — is that we know the ending. We hear stories about the Founding Fathers, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the early union organizers, the Freedom Riders, etc and because we know they were victorious in the end, we assume those victories were inevitable. We think because we know the ending, our forebears somehow knew it too, and it was this secret knowledge that gave them the strength and courage to wage the battles they did. Unlike us, they could actually see that light at the end of the tunnel; they didn’t have to fumble around in the dark.

When the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, we know this act (along with a brutal war) helped found a nation, but at the time, they had no idea. For all they knew, they were signing their own death warrants. They hoped it would lead to something better, and they had the courage of their convictions, but there was no way they could be sure everything would work out in the end. In fact, they had every reason to believe it wouldn’t. I imagine it felt a little like jumping off a cliff.

Likewise, when abolitionists hid runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad, they risked their lives, reputations, and property to commit what was then a serious crime. They felt compelled to do the right thing, but they had no guarantees doing so would dismantle America’s peculiar institution. Slavery was pretty entrenched in this country. The Southern elites had a good racket going. They were rich and growing richer. Insane profits with a payroll percentage of way less than the “optimal” 20%. No way were a few rogue operators going to persuade them to stop.

It is tempting to be lulled into reading the history of this country as a frustratingly slow — though ultimately heroic — march towards a yet unattained but inevitable state of perfection. We believe perpetual progress is our birthright and that we are ordained by the universe to keep getting bigger and better. But the activists who came before us knew no such thing. You have to be willing to risk it all to do what is right and good even when the odds are stacked against you, even when you are almost certain to fail. Because many times you will fail, and the those few victories you do win will be tenuous. You have to keep fighting every day.

This country has gone dark and our enemies seem untouchable — but it’s been that way many times before. One annoying thing about history is that it keeps repeating itself. If you really think about it, are BP, Bank of America, the Koch brothers, and Fox News any more intimidating than the ruling monarch of a superpower, the antebellum Southern aristocracy, or the robber barons of the First Gilded Age? Activism has always been difficult and often futile. So many good works get thrown down a black hole. Why did Bernie Sanders make that speech? Why did those veterans chain themselves to the White House fence during a snowstorm? Why did all those people camp out in Madison? What good did it do?

There’s a character in my novel-in-progress, The Plague Child, named Father Anthony, who is an activist priest. The novel is set in an America of the future, and frankly, that future isn’t too rosy. The country is broke and barely holding together. There are huge uninhabitable Dead Zones. A few corporations control everything and sometimes declare war (yes, actual war with guns and everything) on each other. Violence, sickness and poverty are commonplace and most people are too busy with merely surviving to mount any sort of coherent resistance. Still: Father Anthony wages a battle for change he is almost certain to lose. But he’s no Don Quixote. He sees the world for what it is, and continues with his work. Another character says of him: “He sees everything so clearly, so starkly; he stares down the darkness and does not flinch. And yet: he persists in doing good.”

That is precisely the sort of courage we must have. We owe ourselves and those who came before us nothing less. Victory is far from certain and there is no guarantee of a happy ending. No matter what we do, there’s bound to be some rough sailing ahead. But if we give up and do nothing, we’ll deserve the ending we get.

Preface to 2nd Edition Autoplant

2011-04-01T11:52:00.002-04:00

On December 19, 2008, the last production shift at Newark, Delaware’s Chrysler Assembly Plant, scene of my 1992 Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, filed out, leaving behind their last Christmas cards, half-full coffee cups, production charts, cotton gloves, and dreams of sharing the American Dream.

The world where the imaginary Big Man, Gravy, Billy Goat, Warthog, and a fictional version of myself had worked, sweated, and turned from mutual torment to solidarity was gone.

Folks who have read or seen Autoplant may take it in different ways. Some may find it to be a cautionary tale about how some workers and students, deluded by 60’s revolutionary fantasies, disrupted industry and academia. Others may see it as some sort of a romance, a quest, complete with mythic characters, a dark night of the soul, and ultimate redemption. Still others may see an inspirational lesson in how ordinary folks, with all their fears and limitations, can apply the lessons of solidarity to improve their lives. However you see it, the issues that led to their actions (or delusions) are repeating themselves today in new forms. Thus, and since the old edition is sold-out, it seems appropriate to produce this second edition. Fair warning to the squeamish: you’ll find adult situations and crude shop-talk here, but as I say in the monologue, “if the shoe fits, it’s your own damn fault.”

Back when I wrote Autoplant, my concern was with how exploited labor produces spiritual alienation. Alienation—as in “inalienable rights”—means to make foreign or separate. Long story short: assembly lines separate us into little parts of production and only use little parts of our abilities, so we are alienated from our whole selves, spiritually carved up. And then the bosses separate us from the value of the product by taking out some to buy supplies and machines, which they control, keeping a chunk in profits*, and returning a portion to us in wages and benefits, about 8% of the price of the vehicle for autoworkers. Alienation is what gave me the nightmares of dismemberment that I recount in Autoplant.

Now, with deindustrialization, NAFTA, the Great Recession, and the firing of millions of us, we are even separated from the machines that were built with our labor. As the UAW anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin, describes it:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;

Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;

These days, instead of dreaming fretfully of infants chewed up in the jaws of a machine, I dream about Newark Assembly as a place of belonging, of harvest sharing, of that “solidarity forever” expressed in the last line of that verse above:

But the union makes us strong!

Ironically, my present employer, the University of Delaware, which played so prominently in Autoplant as the dream “gymnasium” from which I wandered to the nightmare of assembly line dismemberment, has purchased the Chrysler site. UD intends to use it as a new hub for high-tech research, business, and academics. New jobs are unlikely to be blue collar or even local, however, as tenants of such industrial parks tend to import their employees in-house and in any case will only be hiring those with technical and advanced degrees. Alternative purchasers, industrialists who might have re-hired Chrysler workers, were discouraged from bidding on the site.

You see, UD is a bit of a hermaphrodite enterprise: both public and private, depending on which gender suits it on any given occasion. For example, according to the News Journal (24 Oct 2009), “[i]n a footnote in the bankruptcy court filing, attorneys for Chrysler noted that other potential purchasers may have been reluctant to ‘take the risk’ of buying the property because UD had the possibility of gaining the land, under state law, through eminent domain and has publicly indicated a willingness to use such rights [of a public enterprise] to secure the property.’” Not only that, but UD is giving most demolition and re-construction contracts to out-of-state and non-union firms. UD argues that their Board requires that they take the low bid, typical of any private enterprise. Prevailing wage laws that would induce them to hire local union firms are only for public institutions.

The greater significance of UD’s shrewdness in nailing this deal is how replacing blue-collar with lab coat jobs is seen as part of the inevitable evolution of the global economy. Those jobs are gone forever, it’s time to get over it, start your own business, or retrain after some twenty or twenty-five years out of high school. You can do it all on your own lonesome. After all, ain’t individual responsibility the American Way? Now, many Chrysler workers are making it, but some just barely, and some have become economic evolution’s collateral damage. Personally, I’m doing OK. I retired in 2001 after thirty-one years, and now I’m “teaching more than a minutes worth of Shakespeare” at UD.

Time was when folks would admire us in our UAW-emblazoned jackets as men and women who worked hard, had fought the boss shoulder to shoulder, and had won a fair share of the wealth we created. We might not be genteel and sophisticated, but our solidarity was an inspiration to any regular working Jane or Joe who believed she or he could fight for a better deal.

Somewhere along the way, about the same time industrialists were shipping jobs overseas and investors began gambling on credit default swaps, solidarity became the big enemy. According to current fashion, if you combine your strength in unions to make the boss pay you a fair wage, then you are a thief and a socialist. We’re led to believe that any guy big biz pays more is merely taking from the guy big biz pays less. We’re led to believe workers should let the infallible market set their pay in the same mysterious way that hedge managers and oil barons do. And don’t blame the banksters for the economic melt down. Instead, blame Arabs, blacks, gays, feminazis, immigrants, ACORN, taxes, and unions, such as those representing government workers.

The month that I write this, March of 2011, the nation and the world is seeing what solidarity can do. In Egypt, men, women, middle class, poor, young, old, Muslim, Coptic Christian, socialist, and traditionalists combined to topple a dictator. In Wisconsin, teachers, sewer workers, pencil pushers, students, firemen, and cops are confronting an oil baron’s flunky, the Governor of the state, who has attempted to strip them of fundamental human rights.

Now, Autoplant is not a Bible for revolution; it has more to do with redemption. And while I wanted to let Americans know what hard work means, Autoplant was largely motivated by a desire to make sense of what I experienced at Chrysler, to laugh about it a little, to apply some of what I know about poetry, and to reclaim parts of myself I felt I was losing by working there. With this second edition, I am hoping that I, along with my UAW Chrysler sisters and brothers, can reclaim some of what we have lost since Newark Assembly was shut down.

Sparking a new revolutionary spirit wouldn’t be so bad, though.

*See “The Crisis at Chrysler 1979 at the beginning of chapter 3

Are You Stirred by Solidarity?

2011-03-19T16:48:00.001-04:00

Invitation to Read Poetry at Second Saturday
On the Theme of Solidarity
With Featured Poet Phillip Bannowsky

Poets, tell of Solidarity; what it is or what it’s not.
Is it the bell that laughs with every tongue, the storm that weeps with every drop?
The common hope for a brighter dawn,
or a contagious yawn?

Are you stirred by multitudes pulling tyrants down?
The hands, the shoes, the shouts, the risking all
for victory? Or do you check what scrapes your ass?
Would the fate of your 401(k), the price of your gas,
not to mention brown skins and head scarves more you appall
than all their hearts stopped in their mouths, their brains upon the ground?

When the earth tumbles to her knees
and shakes loose her seas
Do you open both your heart and wallet
Or just click the videos on Facebook “Like it.”

Do you upon the brink of personal release
like Bodhisattva pause recumbent
and with your finger in the grease
compassion choose for all the sentient?
Or do you cry, I’m all right, Jack, and snatch enlightenment?

Would you sing Solidarity in the Old Union Hall,
chicken dinners, picket lines, all for one and one for all?
Blood and sweat’s our gender, our race, of broken backs,
barricade of all nations, when capital attacks.
Pay your monthly dues and rise with the other guy.
Or would you, had you just one wish, if shared, lose one eye?

So poets, tell of Solidarity,
What it means, choose voluntarily:
If it’s the history of our species in every cell and myth,
Compassion, inspiration, or some kind comradeship.
Tell it for the ages, or tell it for the date,
April 9, at Shenanigans, 5 p.m. Don’t be late.

Second Saturday Poets, 2nd Saturday of every month at 5 p.m.
Shenanigans Irish Pub and Bar, 2nd and Market Sts., Wilmington, Delaware
Free Parking across Market

Finding the Ghost of William D. White

2011-02-23T13:03:00.002-05:00

She called him a ghost. A good term to use. What trauma, what injustice causes him to haunt us? His work remained, but it was hidden. Some of it was smashed.

Ghost is what happens to pariahs, after amnesia has run out of time and aliases are assigned to hide the evidence. A friend of mine, an artist, and I spent the day together as detectives hunting down the ghost of Delaware artist William D. White. My artist friend knew White when she was a girl. My father and White were friends from their days on the WPA.

The stories about William D. White are both spurious and legendary, anecdotal and difficult to trace. Yet, they persist. Stories of White railing against the extravagance of the local ruling class during the depths of the Great Depression, then turning around to buy up coats at the Goodwill, giving them away to Depression era homeless.

The mural that White painted for the Federal Artists Project (FAP) of the WPA was thought lost for years until recently rediscovered languishing in a building belonging to the Methodist Church in Dover. Much of White's works of art have been scattered in the effort to pay back corporate debt. A collection White painted about the mining industry has found a home in Arizona. Sometimes something spectacular by White comes along and just as rapidly disappears, haunting us. Sometimes one of his paintings pop up in plain sight and is misidentified and mishandled. They are that ghost calling out.

Between my artist friend and me, we've gathered a nice body of White's work. Finding information about White's life has proved daunting. People who knew him are gone. Yet our intent is to make an eventual public display of William D. White's art. He was arguably the best of the group of FAP artists, and an equal of Edward Loper who was also an early FAP artist.

Might it be said of William D. White on some future Antiques Road Show, that his work is rare. Because of professional differences with some of his peers and most agents of patronage, his work has become rare. The composition is tight. If more of White's work is found we'd be recognizing themes. Certainly he had an affinity with the poor working class and minorities. He liked painting children. His paintings today are most certainly worth more than White made when he was living.

If there's anyone out there with a bead on any of White's paintings, drawings or writings we'd like to hear from you. We also like to to hear any credible stories about William D. White as well.

Steven Leech's Literary Manifesto

2010-12-21T10:36:00.008-05:00

Because we believe this work is so important, we are offering this excerpt from The Wedgehorn Manifesto and a special opportunity to obtain a PDF copy free.
-Phillip Bannowsky, BT Blog Editor
About the Cover
On the cover is a map that accompanied the 1938 publication, A Guide to the First State. Produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, the map does not show I-95. You can almost see all the old roads on which flowed life in this part of Delaware in the late 1930s. Later, after World War II, came what we would call—in some neighborhoods—“Dupont Driveways,” those roads and highways that seemed only to lead to the various Dupont plants, laboratories, and offices that dotted the area. Even later, the great wealth of our post 1950s world flowed through Delaware on I-95 which resulted in the great suburban sprawl that began to cover northern New Castle County.
The addition I’ve made to this map is to illustrate the portion of land that was held in dispute because of the inexact science of geography and cartography in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mason may have made a chronometer that in Delaware literature is still ticking, but he wasn’t able to get Delaware’s unique border exact.
That piece of inexactness on the Maryland side of that border is called the Wedge. As an author I have exploited the Wedge’s potential for telling a story—a story which has included elements of Delaware’s literature. That sliver along Delaware’s arcing border with Pennsylvania has not inspired me. Much of it runs through “Chateau country.” A few remember it as the Horn.
What inspires me is that I’m always conscious that I’m walking the same streets in Wilmington as those that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Clifford Brown and Nikki Giovanni once walked, to name but a few of the illustrious. I still see the rooms they once occupied even though the buildings are gone. In some cases the rooms are still there. Dunbar-Nelson left a living legacy in Wilmington. I see in the same kind of way an artist would, but the paintings are in books, like Biggs’ Seven Days Whipping, where I see a unique vision from a part of my own neighborhood just south of Wilmington. In two of Charles Wertenbaker’s novels I see familiar scenes where stories have provided me a different perspective from those which I’ve been led to believe. Now I know where all those “Dupont Driveways” really lead. Some essential parts of Wilmington from the turn of the last century in novels by Henry Seidel Canby, Christopher Ward, and in one important story from Alice Dunbar-Nelson are saved in the annals of American literature. All of this, including the story of Wilmington’s artists and musicians and the sounds and sights from them that are still around us, inspires me. A little like Paul Herbert Fricke from Christopher Ward’s One Little Man, I see through this world into other worlds that are depicted from so near by through our local literature. I also remember how, in the 1950s, I had been entranced by the cultural presence in Arden and wondered why the community in which I lived, Richardson Park, where Delaware artist J. D. Chalfant once lived and work, couldn’t be more like what I perceived Arden to be.
I am inspired by the history and existence of these locations under the unique crown of the Wedge and the Horn. In concert with the towns of Newark and New Castle, there are greater stories to be told from these places, and stories help us to see.
To read more, obtain a free PDF copy of The Wedgehorn Manifesto at publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com.

Are We Making Progress in the Culture War?

2010-11-21T17:08:00.004-05:00

Since the midterm elections many with whom I've discussed the outcome have shared the dismay regarding the gains of the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. My response has been that at least in our northern part of Delaware we seemed to have had better sense. As the results came in, I examined the voting trends by consulting those maps of Delaware provided by various media that displayed the red and blue areas of our state. Delaware was pretty much divided into a blue northern part of the state with a rim of red that ran across the arc that borders us with Pennsylvania where the wealthy live in chateau country, and a mostly red southern portion of the state except for an enclave in the vicinity of Lewes and Rehoboth where there is a large population of retired well educated professional people and artists.

Seeing this blue enclave in a sea of red downstate where I have a growing circle of friends in the burgeoning cultural community was heartening. It made me wonder if our efforts in the northern portion of Delaware with regards to our cultural activity over the past thirty years has paid off.

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan was reelected, I kind of saw the handwriting on the wall and backed away from the intense direct political activity in which I'd been engaged and sought a kind of cultural rapprochement. Part of the reason was connected to personal survival, but the major reason was to broaden the struggle into a larger social arena. That initial wave of extreme right wing lunacy seemed to be riding the crest of cultural initiatives that I perceived to have reactionary content.

In short, direct political activity might be good for winning the minds of people, but cultural activity might be better to win their hearts.

In general, I concluded that cultural activity added social value that both is ineffably valuable to the quality of our lives and comes closer to inherent truths within our individual selves. While the corporate and banking ruling circles in our country were using the ascendancy of the right wing to impoverish us economically, I felt it important to add cultural value to provide cohesion to those inherent truths of who we are and who we've been, and based on these, who we could become.

Considering all this, my conclusions still insisted on taking the form of questions during the course of reassessing my previous cultural activity. As far back as the late 1970s, when I became involved with Wilmington's Black press, I gained an innate understanding of the cultural component of a community and the value for social cohesion it embraced. This had been an important element in our efforts to undermined the Marshall machine and to begin to elect Black candidates to city offices and to pave the way to electing Wilmington's first Black mayor. After 1984, and after the ruling circles in Delaware conspired to crush The Delaware Valley Star, my writing in the local Black press reflected issues related more to social and cultural ones, like the effects of the "drug war," along with matters of music, literature and other aspects of local cultural history, and the social and cultural need for the ruling circles to pay reparations for the damage incurred by slavery and the institutionalized racism that has followed. But, to return to the subject, would the Black community at large have voted for right wing lunatic fringe candidates? I think not!

Nevertheless, questions of my work on behalf of providing cultural value to our local community persist. Has my work contributed to at least some people thinking more deeply, clearly and more critically about our environment? Has my work, under the aegis of the Dreamstreets project, on behalf of local literary artists, both from the past and in the present, improved our social and cultural environment? Has my broadcasting work on behalf of our local literary history and community, as well as our history of jazz artists, had an effect on protecting our ignored cultural history from those right wing lunatic fringe elements who would wish to belittle that legacy in order to gain some cultural hegemony based on Delaware's tired old legacy of cultural mediocrity, which serves the interests of the ruling corporate and banking circles that seek to control our lives? Have any of those who have joined in on performing this kind of cultural activity contributed even some small modicum of difference? I'd like to think so, even in some minuscule, intangible way so that people in this part of Delaware can think more sensibly about the political decisions made in the voting booth.

Even if I'm giving myself too much credit regarding my role in social and cultural progress, what matters most is that whatever it takes to counter the intent of the lunatic fringe from negatively influencing our lives is helpful. I don't intend on stopping. Never give the bastards an inch because they will take a mile.

Comments to Fear/Sanity Comments

2010-11-09T15:01:00.004-05:00

To David:
I agree, and disagree. Yes, you deserve to be mad as hell that the world is as evil as it is, and that the Obama administration has meaningfully failed, and even betrayed, some of its campaign promises. But, what are you going to do, throw a tantrum? The pear is not ripe right now for revolution, even if you want one-- but only for sensationalist rebellion that hardens hearts to no good end. Acquiescence is not the only alternative. Old saying: Don't get mad, get even. Translation: Don't rage, get civil, and under that cover be crafty as a cheshire cat.

To Phillip Bannowsky:
All that I called the Fear/Sanity event was "good medicine," much humbler than "medicine for all that ails us," as you phrase it, which I don't claim. And yes, Stewart and Colbert are, finally, just centrist show-bizzers. But so what, if, as you say, it's up to the rest of us? I do not suggest we bow down before our tools, just the opposite. We should pick up all available tools to our purpose. These brilliant and sophisticated commedians are available instruments. I say avail.

To Anonymous:
You say he, Obama, needs to "start kicking some ass." I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're seeing the Fear/Sanity event (at least as I've portrayed it) as a self-defeating harmonizing with Obama's, as you put it, "transcendental coolness." Although I personally admire his professorial tone, I see how it fails in our anti-intellectual, wild west political culture. Picture Obama: "Now, class, let us all turn to page 34." So we do, except half of us tear page 34 out of the book, so we can't all be on the same page anymore. You're right, Obama is far too civil. But he is the President, and the rest of us are not. So, different rules. If little old me is going to kick ass in a land of already too many combat boots, it's going to have to be done with an old soft shoe.

Fear and Sanity

2010-11-03T13:37:00.004-04:00

What the?... Yes, my thought exactly on last weekend's Colbert/Stewart Fear/Sanity party on the Mall in Washington D.C. My wife and I attended-- attended?-- showed for the duration. And "show" is the operative term.

Well, it was the most populous D.C. event I've ever been to. I missed Obama's inauguration, but even the anti-Vietnam war Pentagon March of 1967 was out-populated. The train ride into town (we left our car on the outskirts) was so packed you could only have slid in more people horizontally against the ceiling. And yet the mood was fabulous. The crowd, mostly young people (My wife and I are in the old category now) laughed and joked, and frequently broke into song that infected the whole car, often songs from the '60's and '70's, songs popular decades before most of the singers were born. Who would have thought the spirit lives on?

When we got to the Mall we couldn't get on it-- too many people. We got only as far as the famously last-minute available batteries of port-o-potties. Spry youngsters climbed trees for a better view, but I doubt they saw more than head tops. So we never got to see-- or even hear-- the stage deal. All we got was: one another.

So I guess that was the point: it had to be, none other was available. We'd bothered to come to the Capitol for a show, and got one, ourselves. It was quite a party, and decked out with costumes and signs that were dedicatedly playful, politically a blearly crayon-scape, when political at all. Bear in mind the next day was Halloween, and the adult trick-or-treaters were testing out their equipment. Election Day to follow 3 days later. Who's your favorite ghoul? Vote with your candy.

Only later, at home, on TV, did we "see and hear" the official event. It was a pleasant and appropriate enough pop show, and after all it was finally just a theatrical event. Or, was it, despite itself? How can you ever, no matter how hard you try, not be everything you are? How can you not, even by brushing your teeth, tell the world what you care about? Jon Stewart made a terrific serious speech. My take is this: We are invited to enjoy the god-given right to be afraid, which implies the god-given imperative to be awake and alert; we are also invited to understand that sanity requires a no-pain no-gain grunt attitude, and that in our consumerist society sanity is not a luxury item, but one shelved next to the rice and beans.

But Jon Stewart already made this speech, and his was better than mine.

Did we do any good? I valued learning what I can only hope others learned also, that there are so many people of good will who "get it" that their numbers can crush you half to death in a wide open space, even in these politically ugly times. I valued seeing that this has not changed since 1967: Americans have the capacity to behave in a responsible and orderly way, even under stress and running amok. I almost feel sorry for the D.C. cops: they looked so bored.

The whole deal was good medicine, even if only in the sense that it did the patient no harm.

Preamble to the Contradiction

2010-10-26T14:17:00.005-04:00

Dear Christine O'Donnell, kindly follow my thought thither and hence. The bread on the waters will return to you.

WE THE PEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union? Wait a minute. Isn't more perfect a little like more pregnant? Of course, if you want to be pregnant, and become so, you are from day one beginning with a kind of perfection. Then, as you grow larger, you can be said to be becoming more perfect. So, okay, let us grant that, under some conditions, one may have degrees of perfection.

Well, I have just re-read the Constitution of the United States, and I am dismayed. If it were a house, it would be a log-cabin without thatch or mortaring. Open to the rain and wind. The fire would not keep much heat in. Founding Fathers, ha!, thank you? And yet. And yet I say yes thank you because all that rain and wind somehow built a mighty estate out of that log cabin. Our Founding Fathers, who were, among other things, monsters, somehow stumbled into securing for posterity significant blessings of Liberty. A more perfect pregnancy, conceived often in what most of us would rather not think about, but giving birth to significant Liberty.

And so, O'Donnell? Running for office here in Delaware? You and your fellow ultra-strict constructionists? Do you really want to go back and live in that log cabin? Don't you understand how well the evolution of constitutional meaning has served to ensure the domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and not only secure the blessings of liberty but of anti-biotics and central heating as well? Invention rights protection is in the Constitution. And these last two really do help during child-birth.

Okay, granted, philosophically and politically, there will always be conflicting interpretations of the Constitution. This is necessary. The framers are all dead, and the world we live in is one they couldn't know. And what they framed was the necessity of only their moment anyway. And that's my point: interpretation means that fundamentalism is impossible. In the beginning was the Word. The Word is a baby: you love it, but would you let it drive your truck?

Don't you understand that even though the moon does not love us, the tide it elicits has raised all our nation's boats? Lucky us: History has handed our Society the moon, in our constitutional evolution. Even rich white males are better off now, despite all the effluvial dispersals of wealth and rights to disenfranchised classes, than were their counterparts of 200 years ago. Everybody is winning. And women too. Hmm...

Which means, Christine O'Donnell, I just noticed something. You're a woman. Oops... Now, strictly speaking, strictly as in strictly constructionist, going back to a fundamentalist beginning, you strictly speaking as a woman had no right to vote, much less run for office. If you're such a political purist, shouldn't you be back home washing dishes, barefoot and pregnant? After all, by your own ideals, you're just a girl. Unless you're also a hypocrite who wants to ordain and establish whatever she can grab.

A Small Degree of Separation While Remembering Paul Apel

2010-09-29T13:59:00.005-04:00

When I was a youngster growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Richardson Park just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, I used to hang out on the corner with many of the other boys in the neighborhood, hair greased up in a pompadour wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with a switchblade tucked away under the zipper that tightened the cuff of its left sleeve, wearing khaki pants and Keds red ball sneakers playing the part in that otherwise apathetic stultifying America where "Door Gunner" Joe McCarthy and HUAC goons made sure I had no thoughts that might be construed as truly threatening or subversive. We thought we were rebels without a cause, and that was okay because no cause was better than having a cause. Having a cause meant you had to have knowledge as a basis upon which to think seriously about things.

Even with the role I played in order to fit in, I had a sinking feeling there was more to American culture than hanging out on the corner. My evidence could only be found in two places. One place was from the books my father kept, but this merely indicated the raw landscape. Mostly they were books about art and the pictures in them were like little windows into a world that I didn't see while standing on the corner. The other place took the form of a second floor apartment above Starr's Drug Store at the corner of which we hung out. In that apartment lived a man who was about ten or twelve years older than me. In some ways he was like the neighborhood beatnik, though he would have bristled at the comparison. He did have that bohemian aura however. In the late 1960s he was angry that he could no longer be trusted by those in the counter-culture because he was over 30 years old. He knew a lot about art, literature and modern music. He was comfortable and proficient discussing religion, psychology and –– for the times –– subjects as esoteric as cybernetics and media, like radio and television. For example, he first introduced me to Marshall McLuhan's ideas. He became a long time friend throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s when he move with his new wife to Cincinnati, Ohio. His name was Paul Apel.

Paul used to refer often to a friend of his from his own adolescence during the Second World War years while they were living in St. Augustine, Florida. That friend's name was Langston Moffett. Langston's father was also named Langston Moffett, but neither put a "junior"or "senior" after their names. The elder's father was Cleveland Moffett, an author who wrote at least one novel, Through the Wall, published in 1909. His son, Langston Moffett wrote the novel Devil by the Tail, published by Lippincott in 1947. It is largely a novel about binge drinking and may have closely been modeled on the author's own experiences. The novel's main character, Gordon Sullivan, had once been a Paris correspondent for a prominent New York newspaper during those "lost generation" years of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Langston Moffett had been a journalist for the Paris Herald in 1928 and 1929. His father, Cleveland Moffett, had also worked for the same paper when Langston was a child. During Langston's stint with the paper he caroused with notable literary figures from the United States, particularly F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They partied hardy at such Paris hangouts as the Ritz Bar, Chez Bricktop, and the Hotel Crillon. In an article Moffett wrote entitled "Paris: Fun and Frolic" for the Spring 1987 edition of the Lost Generation Journal, he provides a report of the continuation of Scott and Zelda's exploits right after they left Wilmington where they had been living.

In the early 1930s, Langston Moffett returned to the United States, and except for writing the novel cited above, turned to painting and eventually moved to St. Augustine and became a shaker and mover in what had been informally called "the lost art colony" in that city. It was there that the younger Langston Moffett and Paul Apel became friends.

Paul once told me a story, which I had subsequently forgot and about which Paul's widow Carolyn reminded me recently, about how he and Langston were working at a local radio station in St. Augustine –– probably WFOY –– during the Second World War. It had been possible for teenage boys to do radio in those days because the War had created a shortage of grown men. While doing radio there, the two kept hearing stories about this blind kid who was about the same age as Paul and Langston, who attended the nearby Florida School for the Deaf and Blind and who played a mean piano. They wanted to bring this kid on the air and broadcast his extraordinary talents, but the station's managers refused to allow them to bring him into the studios because he was Black and Jim Crow rule was the law of the land in the South. Evidently, however, after Paul and Langston left the station the managers relented. At the very least, Paul and Langston recognized this youngster's talents, which quickly became irresistible enough to give him a break. As it turned out, Paul Apel and Langston Moffett had played a small part in introducing to what would become a growing audience the gift and talents of the future Ray Charles.

These first small degrees of separation began to open the door to that world I had suspected was out there beyond the one imposed upon me by purveyors of mediocrity and pushers of suffocating parochialism, and it was as nearby as that apartment above the neighborhood drugstore where Paul Apel lived among books piled around, a small electric piano and sparse furnishings. Yet for me the world opened up. Here was someone who had known Ray Charles, and whose best friend's father caroused with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Who knows what may have become of me had I not known Paul Apel. If would have been easy for me to end up in prison, or a mental hospital with a future of homelessness ahead of me, given how our world has turned out since the 1960s. Paul encouraged my own artistic endeavors and enabled me to choose to go to college rather than join the Army, for example. In short, Paul Apel saved my life and at least I owe him this small tribute because those small degrees of separation that the world I wished to know was not that far away.

One Nation: from Discord, Action

2010-09-13T10:50:00.001-04:00

Can you create from discord, action?

I suspect that folks in the arts and literary community generally dislike the simplifications of politics, that discourse that reduces humanity—complex in its physical struggles and spiritual yearning—to geopolitical and theological categories. And I know from direct experience that many artists, like their fellow Americans, see their personal battles against the Great Recession going nowhere. So I would not be surprised if they turn in disgust from the degraded discourse of Tea Party racism and despair at the paralysis in economic policy. Well, judging from an extraordinary “maquette” for One Nation Working Together designed by Michael Murphy, that’s about to change.

At first glance it is a map of the United States with the word “One” plastered in the center, apparently a two-dimensional collage made from discordant scraps. However, click on the three dimensional view and the work rotates so that, as the artist describes it, “moments of discovery occur,” and we see the multifarious faces, tools, fauna, diversions, and emblems of America. As it resumes the shape of our country, there is a realization of the material basis of our national unity, sort of like the feeling of America we get from poet Walt Whitman’s praise of the commonplace.

Discovery or realization is not the end point of this sculpture, however; action is.

On October 2, 2010, hundreds of thousands of Americans will gather under the banner of One Nation Working Together at the Lincoln Memorial, overcoming their “superficial differences” as the organizers declare, to demand jobs, education, equality, and peace—in a phrase, to demand “the change we voted for.”

Initiated by the NAACP and SEIU, One Nation Working Together is now partnered with hundreds of labor, civil rights, peace, social justice, gender rights, and other organizations from across our nation. Participants are welcome to display their own placards and slogans.

Many are marching with “The Peace Table,” among them Delaware Pacem in Terris, which will provide a coach bus (at $25 per seat) leaving from Rodney Square at 8:00 a.m.

Others can ride for free with the Delaware State AFL-CIO, which has reserved 8 busses. To reserve a free seat, simply email the state AFL-CIO at de.aflcio@comcast.net, give them your name, email address, and cell phone number (if you have one), and tell them you want to go. Busses will leave from several locations around Delaware.

Artists like Michael Murphy show us the interaction between artistic vision and civic engagement. Take this opportunity to produce your own creations to reflect on this historic event and move people to action. Post them on your blogs, Facebook, and web pages, email them to friends, recite them at readings or act them out on streetcorners. Or Post them at Broken Turtle in Comments.

And then BE THERE 10-2-10!

To my unknown Muslim community

2010-08-24T09:00:00.004-04:00

While I am not a christian, I was raised in the christian cultural camp. I know its vocabulary and imagery and have lived intimately with christians my whole life. Therefore I know for a fact, and need not take it on faith, that the great majority of christians are good people leading peaceful constructive lives. I can read their collective face, and what evil I can see there I can isolate from the good.

It is in my personal nature to consider by extention that the great majority of muslim people are good, and leading peaceful and constructive lives also, despite the fact that in the 9/11 era virtually all terrorists have emerged from islamic belief and culture. But, because I am not a muslim and have had no intimacy with its culture, I do have to take my cherished assumption on faith. Your collective face is veiled to my eyes, I have no personal tool for isolating the evil from the good.

I can't be alone in my limitation. How common is this, here in my home in the U.S.A, in northern Delaware, or anywhere? I keep wondering, why are all the good muslims so quiet? They seem to be. Those wishing to build a muslim religious center blocks from ground zero in NYC can't not know the hurtful sensibility of the situation. Are they seeking to seed a healing glasnost in the heart of the west, or simply and cynically to keep their enemies closer? Or is it really just the luck of the real estate draw? I know that where I live the last decade has witnessed a ballooning muslim presence. They have a large community center just 2 miles from my front door. Them. Them is the problem. Not "they are," but "them is." Sometimes you can wind up alone in a limitation even if there are millions of you-- if you wind up being them.

Or, maybe the limitation is mine? The muslim community is talking, only I don't know how to hear it? Is a profound failure in the American media to blame? All too often good news isn't good enough to feed its appetite for sensationalism. If I could interview my hypothetical "you" on the street, here would be my question:

You are in my country by choice-- do you like us? Do you like what we are? Or do we disgust you and you just stay for the education and the work? Hey, if that's so, I understand. My italian immigrant grandparents didn't like it either, but back home in Italy, where society was decent, they couldn't find jobs. But their feelings never turned into hostility. Have yours? Or, are you like our own historical Pilgrims, who came to America to escape religious intolerance only to turn around and become intolerant of others at every turn? So, what will your contribution be to any future american greatness, good deeds despite all? Or yet one more growth-provoking lesson in hypocrisy?

Why do I talk to you as if you're a giant monolith? Because I can't see your face, whether that be my fault, my culture's, or yours. It's not fair to either of us, because the face is that unique part of the human body that shows the soul. And, politically speaking, you can see mine. Treasure any modesty you wish except that of your face.

I favor building the religious center near ground zero, granting transparency, simply because the rightness of doing so is the law of the land, constitutionally and morally. And even if we don't look moral to you on our surface, just below it most of us come out of a sense of justice in which we invest a profound faith. We allow ourselves-- and you-- to run wild because we trust ourselves to behave well when it counts, and because, as our Benjamin Franklin expressed, those who would give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither. I deserve your face in return for mine.

Remembering Robert Reynolds

2010-08-15T10:54:00.004-04:00

For those of us in our local literary community, among the most tragic of losses was the death of poet Robert Reynolds. In an environment where we tend to forget those poets and authors who have gone before us, I often think about Robert Reynolds. The first thing we remember about his poetry were those long lyrical lines containing a bit more meter than is usual, but Robert turned those lines into a lyrical music rarely conveyed by mere words. When I first met Robert back in the early to mid 1980s, he had evidently found a typewriter with a wide carriage that could accommodate a piece of paper fed into it sideways. In this way he could type out those long lines across the length of the page. He quickly found voice for those long lines, pulling the listeners into his images.

Robert’s poems were meant to be heard. Whenever he showed up during our Second Saturday Readings in Wilmington, whether during the open segment or during those times when he was the feature, his reading of his own work had the capacity to nearly enchant the listener, not with just the music of his words and his delivery of them but with the vivid quality of images they provoked. One could see in one’s mind’s eye the scenes he portrayed in his poems better than that found in many other good poems.

I don’t know the full circumstances of Robert’s death, nor do I really want to. I know he died long before he should have left us. This much I do know, and it’s relevant. With many poets, the force that compels the composition of poetry comes from a mixture of love and haunting. Most poets are haunted by those demons that compel us to strike out against them with words, and strangely enough words seem to be the most affective weapon against them. Robert was no different in those regards. Yet, sometimes life’s situations exacerbate those inner struggles with those demons. I do know that Robert’s apartment building, which was administered through public housing, had sustained a fire that was serious enough to rehouse the building’s residents. Knowing Robert as I had caused me to suspect the event sent him into an emotional tailspin. I’d been told that Robert’s death was at his own hand and that he had evidently destroyed all his poems along with his mortal coil.

Of his published work, the only examples known to have survived appeared in the local literary periodical Palengenesis. In the mid 1980s I had the occasion to record Robert reading a couple of his poems for the Dreamstreets radio program. To my knowledge this was the only recordings of him reading his work and can be found among the Dreamstreets archive linked from this site. During a memorial event held for Robert I made copies of this recording for those who wished to have them. The recording was played for those at this memorial event. Some in attendance wept while declaring they thought they’d never hear his voice again. It warmed my heart to know I had provided this small token.

But the story doesn’t end here.

Some weeks later a mutual friend of Robert’s and mine informed me that some months before Robert had given our friend an envelope full of his poems. Initially the announcement provided the prospect that his work had survived. However, this disclosure was made to me by our mutual friend after he had also been subjected to another inner city housing shuffle, this time by a mortgage predator who had forced our friend to make a frenzied move to another living arrangement. Articles in his house were divided among newer accommodations in his extended family. Other things were allowed to dribble into places unknown. In his new accommodations my friend looked for that envelope containing Robert’s poems in great earnest. After all, Robert was his friend as well. But the envelope could not be found. Maybe it’s around somewhere and will turn up, but as time goes by the chance of that becomes less likely. Perhaps in another frantic act of a being forced to forsake comfort and security, a more real demon than the ones with which many poets and artists struggle had had a role to play, a demon real enough to hasten the destruction of a poet and his work as well as a demon real enough to lull us into forgetting.

The Bottom of the Fox

2010-08-07T16:08:00.005-04:00

A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder
by Shaun D. Mullen
Fishy Business Press

In The Bottom of the Fox, local author and blogger Shaun Mullen (Kiko's House) has captured the ambivalent ambiance of the storied Poconos bioregion that just shoulders the piedmont where we Delawareans reside. What we learn from Mullen is that behind the tony resorts and meandering roads that grace those gentle green mountains is a world of in-bred isolation, territoriality, and violence. In the late seventies, Eddie Joubert wandered in. He was an entrepreneurial hippy and former Teamster who sought to bring the freewheeling spirit of the sixties to the Poconos by running a bar called The Bottom of the Fox and helping to organize The Delaware Water Gap Festival of the Arts. On November 28, 1981, while retrieving some beer from the Fox basement, he was brutally murdered with an axe.

Mullen does a great job tracing both the geologic and the social evolution of the Poconos as one of America’s earliest resorts. We learn about the various confrontations among the settlers who drove out the Indians, the politicians who sought to sell out the region’s beauty, and the subsequent waves of immigrants, including a bunch of hippy squatters who tried to take over some condemned properties.

Mullen also captures the spirit of a drop out culture that did not cop out. While Eddie Joubert had his vices, he was a warm-hearted soul who bonded with everyone from the local minister to the homeless veteran, and he boosted the economic and cultural well being of the society of his adopted home. Apparently, according to Mullen, as Joubert ranged easily among all the odd human fauna of the Gap, he came to know too much. The real powers in that community had too much to lose if Edie’s murder was investigated scrupulously, so the cops just chalked it up to some hippy getting himself killed in a drug deal involving outsiders.

Mullen has a strong suspicion about who killed Eddie, and I must confess I am not totally convinced about his conclusions. But solving the specifics of the crime is not the main point. It’s about young folks who were re-inventing the American Dream in the sixties and seventies. It’s about the underside of a smug establishment that marginalizes its visionaries as low-class bohemians. It’s a story we in Delaware know well.

Buy a copy from his site at www.bottomofthefox.com.

One dollar from the sale of each book goes to the Delaware Water Gap Festival of the Arts.

Is Change Impossible (Part 3)

2010-07-21T15:34:00.044-04:00

Coda: 16 Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Well, I thought I was done — until I wasn’t.

I think Bliss assumes, like many so-called rational people on the left, that social change is primarily an intellectual and political problem. Bliss writes of an anguish “no amount of scholarship can heal” as if it would be possible to study your way out of despair, but you can’t. The only way out of hopelessness is, oddly enough, hope itself.

Before I first read Bliss’ piece, I was working on a passage in my novel in which my main character, Morian, is having dinner with Lillian Ruby, the head of a huge biotech firm, probably one of the most powerful organizations in that world. Before detailing his version of the geopolitical history of the region, Ruby asks Morian what her political leanings are. She gives a noncommittal answer; the truth is she’s been politically inert for a long time, ever since she left the movement because of its lack of imagination. Ruby counters Morian’s lackluster response by quoting to her the last sentences she ever posted to a political forum: The revolution is coming, but if you keep looking where you’ve been looking, you will never see it. It dresses in colors you have never worn; it is written in a language you have yet to speak.

At first Morian pretends not to remember the post, but then she finally admits to Ruby the reaction to her post was far from positive. She was imagining possibilities at the edge of language, almost beyond the limits of human imagination. She couldn’t make her comrades understand, so she just gave up.

“I’m not surprised,” Lillian Ruby tells her. “Politics is the art of the possible. You wanted people to conceive of the beyond possible, which is usually the domain of religion.”

I was revising that particular section today when something hit me: in order to effect change, you must first believe in it. You have to have the courage to imagine 16 impossible things before breakfast. You have to have faith. To be successful, activism has to have a strong intellectual, political and spiritual foundation.

I essentially ended Part 2 of this series with a declaration of faith. I will continue to work for change because I believe I must and because I believe in my blood it is possible.

Now I realize “faith” and “spiritual” are loaded terms. You either think of Bible thumping fundamentalists or airy fairy New Agers. But it was no accident the Civil Rights movement was based, for a large part, in churches. That was the perfect place for many people to gain the fortitude to begin a journey towards the impossible, because moving towards what Obama called, a “more perfect union” in one of his better speeches, certainly seemed near impossible to many of them at the time.

The arts can serve a similar function. (And no, I don’t mean didactic pieces that preach mainly to the choir, although those can serve a purpose.) The arts can give us the inner resources to fight the impossible fight, by imagining the way to light, by reminding us the world is worth saving even when we think it’s doomed to hell, and by providing encouragement during those inevitable long, dark nights of the soul. If we are to actively build our future, we must have the courage and imagination to dream it first.

Is Change Impossible (Part 2)

2010-07-20T10:51:00.118-04:00

A continuation of Sunday's post...

Mastery of — or at least the ability to master — the extant technologies by which the Ruling Class maintains its power: A little over ten years ago, I looked into applying for an LPFM license with a couple of friends under the aegis of Dreamstreets Press. The idea was to build a radio station that would showcase the wide range of Wilmington’s cultural offerings, with an emphasis on local under-served communities. We planned to feature the work of local musicians, have interviews with visual and literary artists, do in-depth local news reporting and generally be a clearing house for the city.

We had a bit of a head start. I basically already owned everything to start a radio station except a transmitter. Our little group had several members with both deep roots in the community and audio production experience. We might have even been able to wrangle a little money from somewhere since funding for non-profits was hardly as tight as it is today. But unfortunately, the lower end of the FM band is rather crowded in this area, so no frequencies were available. I think the closest available frequency was somewhere south of Dover.

Why was a radio station so important? Because consistent access to the media is important. It’s the way you get your message heard — and unfortunately, progressives have fallen way behind in this area.

I’ll confess I have no idea as to how we might remedy this situation. Blogs, zines, books, websites, and podcasts are all well and good, but what we need is a TV station, indeed a whole network, since TV is the medium that is most readily available and popular. It is also the most expensive to produce well. Cheap TV looks cheap and the people will not be fooled.

The support of a major foreign power: I learned when I was a teenager that if I wanted something kind of iffy, that my parents might not want to give, that it was better to ask for it when outsiders (company, extended family) were present. Since my parents tended to avoid public displays of conflict, they usually gave in to avoid an argument — and with very few exceptions I got what I wanted. I took advantage of their efforts to save face.

Bliss asserts the specter of the former Soviet Union served a similar function for America’s capitalist ruling class. Since there was a strong, viable alternative lurking somewhere on the planet (they beat us into space after all) the robber barons couldn’t put their ugly butts on full display. The USSR might have been imperfect; they might have been oppressive and cruel, but we always had to show we were better than they were. We at least needed to look like we had the moral upper hand.

Now, Bliss maintains, for all practical purposes, socialism is dead and the new globalism has initiated a planet-wide race to the bottom, at least for most of us. Even in nominally Communist China, to get rich is glorious. Who cares if you wind up with some of the most polluted cities on the planet, thousands of people die in your mines or occasionally you are tempted to taint your products to maximize your profits? (It’s been a long time since I’ve read Marx, but I think that’s enough to have him spinning in his grave.)

Maybe nation states are no longer the true power. Corporations are. They have the money; they have the equipment; they have the jobs; they transcend borders and they can write their own rules. This is starkly apparent in the case of the BP oil disaster. Everyone yearns for the government to “do something”, but in reality there is only a limited amount the government can do. BP has the money, the equipment and the expertise. The government is very much at their mercy.

The time to have done something was before the drilling began, with strong regulation, oversight and planning. Of course then there would be the risk of BP taking its toys to play elsewhere, where perhaps the “small people” wouldn’t try to meddle as much. Even as Bobby Jindal tries to advocate for Louisiana’s endangered ecosystems, he doesn’t want drilling to end forever. It’s hard to slap the hand that feeds you.

These new world powers have given rise to an enemy just as ruthless. Al Queda in all its permutations is globalism’s darkest reflection. Despite all pretenses to the contrary, I wouldn’t call it a legitimate revolutionary movement because as far as I can see, it is completely nihilistic; it seeks to build nothing, only to destroy. It is the last desperate shout of the damned.

***

Yes, I know. It’s almost the Platonic form of depressing. But like I said, I refuse to give up. I also don’t want to discount the progress we’ve made so far. Obama has accomplished far more in his 18 months of office than he’s given credit for. However, I increasingly get the sinking feeling we are trying to patch up something fundamentally broken and that radical, paradigm shifting changes are needed if the human race is to survive.

The Gulf of Mexico oil gusher is an excellent case in point. Thankfully, at this writing, there is reason to hope. The oil has finally stopped flowing, but what about the oil already released? How long will it take the ocean to recover and will it ever recover completely? What will it mean if it doesn’t? And why were we going around poking holes where no human could go in the first place? How close are we to running out of oil and how much of the earth are we willing to rape to get it? What does a clean energy, post-petroleum economy even mean? A Prius in every garage — or something far deeper? What does the end of the easy oil age mean for agriculture, manufacturing, city planning, or medical science? Oil is in everything, you know, from the fresh tar coating on my parents’ driveway to the rather ingenious contraptions that allow me to stand and walk again. What will happen when there simply is no more?

The questions are endless. How long can the United States afford to spend the bulk of its resources remaking the world in its image and dreaming up new and exciting ways to kill people while it lets its own infrastructure rot? What will happen when it gets too expensive and dangerous to import basic goods from 12,000 miles away? What will happen when all those people in the world’s cheap labor markets finally stand up and say, Show us the money! Give us our due!

Bliss compares global capitalism to the Borg and maintains not only is resistance futile, but “rebellion is suicide”. I disagree. The challenges ahead are daunting, but not impossible. If I can imagine the dangers ahead, I can also imagine ways to conquer them — and imagine I must. I have no choice but to walk towards the future. So I write as if it matters, dream as if it matters, live as if it matters.

Because, in the end, it really does.

Is Change Impossible? (Part 1)

2010-07-17T14:14:00.003-04:00

About a week ago, I rewarded a productive day of writing with what was intended to be just a few minutes of mindless web surfing. After following a trail of links, I stumbled upon one of the saddest things I have ever read, Loren Bliss’ The Stolen Prerequisites of Liberation: Why Change is Impossible.

I’m not sure why Bliss’ piece affected me so deeply. Perhaps it was because I’d spent the day working on my novel Goodbye Jambalaya which is in large part about the geography of despair. Maybe it’s because I’ve often heard his hopelessness (and bitterness) echoed among several of my older activist friends. Anyway: it hit me hard enough to get saved into the PDF archive.

Bliss begins by thanking a couple of friends for their comments on previous posts and then gets down to explaining why he hasn’t posted anything for nearly a month. “Several people have wondered if I am sick — if my long silence is the result of illness. Indeed it is, but my affliction is neither viral nor bacteriological. It is instead political: the fact our collective powerlessness has become so obvious — and so depressing — there is little I can do beyond the proverbial wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Oh yeah, I thought, I’ve definitely been there before. Several times: right after the latest Iraq War started, when the public option was taken off the table in the health care debate, when President Obama decided he was going to expand the war in Afghanistan, when BP’s insatiable lust for profits (as well as our insatiable lust for fossil fuels) propelled them to tear a hole in the ocean floor, and for 85 days, 16 hours, and 25 minutes all we could do was watch it bleed.

On most of those issues, I thought I was a good active citizen. I kept myself informed; I voted; I wrote my congressman and senators; I wrote and published zines. In the case of Afghanistan, I even wrote the President — in longhand, since I read somewhere he’d be more likely to actually see my missive that way. “Do something truly audacious,” I implored him. “Stop a war.” But no go. All my efforts — as well as the efforts of several million others — were in vain.

Bliss asserts this state of powerlessness is more than a passing malaise, that indeed real change is impossible and the bad guys (the Ayn Rand capitalists) have won. Part of the reason for this is that the “four basic requirements” for “liberation from tyranny” no longer exist. These four basic requirements are: solidarity, a disciplined population, the ability to master the “extant technologies by which the Ruling Class maintains its power” and support from a major foreign power.

I estimate Loren Bliss to be at least 20 years older than I am (judging by the fact he’s retired and by his terminology, which seems dated. Who capitalizes “Ruling Class” anymore?) so presumably he has less time to try to live in a state of total despair. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to give up; it’s a matter of survival and sanity. So I do not take Bliss’ four prerequisites as gospel and refuse to believe the tools to build a better world have vanished forever. But his post did get me thinking — and in my next posts, I will use his four conditions as a framework to discuss why real change is so slow in coming.

***

Solidarity: By this Bliss means ideally ideological solidarity, or “at least the solidarity of a common list of grievances”. If you are going to effect change, you have to have enough people to agree on what needs changing first, and in America, getting to that crucial first step is quite a challenge.

I started attending demonstrations in the early 80’s way after the late 60’s/ early 70’s heyday. The one thing I was struck by was how scattered many of them felt; there was no solidarity of purpose. While we nominally might have been there to support one cause — divesting from South Africa, equal rights for women, etc — it was patently obvious to me (and I think anyone watching) that people were more interested in publicity for their own special interest group. Sometimes verbal altercations broke out between young and old, blacks and whites, anarchists and Democrats, gays and straights. It was depressing and sometimes flat out embarrassing. What does it say about your particular cause when you can’t get people to agree on it for a single afternoon?

I think that’s why I was foolish enough to think the anti-war demonstrations just before the second Iraq war would actually work. Not only were they huge, but, more importantly, they were focused. You really got the feeling of “we the people” because, amazingly, everyone in attendance was on the same page. It was exhilarating!

Part of the reason we have trouble coming together is that American society is incredibly diverse. But we are also intensely individualistic and selfish. I don’t mean to imply we are all personally selfish, as Americans have the ability to be quite generous when we want to be, but we live within a system that rewards selfishness — indeed thrives on it — and that’s bound to color our everyday dealings with one another.

Plus, many of us lack the knowledge and skills to be able to see the big picture. We don’t see what racism has to do with worker’s rights, has to do with women’s rights, has to do with early childhood education, has to do with universal health care, has to do with the environment. We almost never think about the long haul. Hell, often we can’t even remember what we did yesterday, and worse than that, in some cases we simply refuse to. (Hence the Tea Party people who can’t tell the difference between Hitler and Obama) If we lack the ability to think outside the box of our own heads, how can we expect to recognize what we may have in common with our neighbor?

A Disciplined Population: “Effective political action requires discipline and teamwork”, Bliss states. True enough — although Bliss seems to think Americans lost their best opportunity to learn true teamwork and discipline when we abolished the draft. I’m not sure I agree with him on this point, but I understand what he’s getting at.

Some sort of compulsory national service (though not necessarily military) might teach people that freedom means more than just doing what you want; it costs something; it demands you give your best in return. It also might serve to give all Americans the benefit of a common experience of serving their country and help them become more invested in the common good. For instance: if everyone’s son and daughter had to serve in the military, we’d probably start fewer wars. Certainly, more people would have been more skeptical in the run up to Iraq.

But back to the point of discipline: political action and governance is often tedious. Yes, it requires passion, but it also requires patience. Yes, there are demonstrations, civil disobedience, and grand speeches, but there is also database maintenance, teaching yourself Flash, fact checking, grant writing, copy editing, accurate bookkeeping, talking to people you might not like and the occasional wearing of uncomfortable clothes and shoes so people will take you seriously. It’s not all fun and games and is often a thankless job.

(to be continued...)

The Commie Bar of Beirut

2010-07-15T16:20:00.000-04:00

Reprinted from OpEdNews

It is part nostalgia, part irony, part history lesson, and part revolutionary space in the heart of the Caracas District of West Beirut, unobtrusively nestled in the ground floor of the “Yaacoubian Beelding.” Tagged by us Americans as “Commie Bar,” it is actually called Pub Naya or Abou Elie’s. Plastered across the walls or enshrined in glass cases are the artifacts of revolutionary communism: Kalashnikovs, bandoliers of ammunition, Russian uniforms, Cuban cigars, photos and posters of Sitting Bull, Che (many), Lenin (on cigarette packs, vases), Stalin, and Marx, as well as the images of numerous Lebanese icons such as Druze Chieftain and socialist mystic Kamal Jumblatt, the singer Fairuz, and former Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi, who was assassinated in 2007 in the wave of killings that began with Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s murder in 2005.

At http://www.flickr.com/photos/autoplant/sets/72157624351380045/ there is a slide show and short movie about the place.

It is about the size of your average kitchen. The booze is cheap: Almaza beer, Ksara wine, and plenty of Red Label, arak, and Bombay Safire. Patrons are always served plates of fruit (apples, plums, giant apricots, cherries), salted pumpkin seeds and other nuts, spiced olives, salted carrots, and some kind of white bean, which may pop out in the air as you attempt to squeeze off the husk, forcing you grab at it and knock your beer over onto your munchies. “Je suis désolé” will do if you don’t know Arabic. I don’t know how they make a profit.

You may have a political conversation with someone who speaks English while admiring the chic and avant-garde crowd that habituates the place. He may express satisfaction with the fall of the Soviet Union, which enables left wingers to operate without being accused of being spies. He may tell you that there may be trouble with Israel or Syria or both in September, a month many Lebanese are anxious about, when the Hariri Tribunal will render a report, especially if it blames Syria for Hariri’s assassination and Israel chooses such a traumatic moment to move against Lebanon over offshore gas and oil deposits along their mutual coastline.

A computer screen at the end of the bar loops photos of Che Guevara, George Hawi, and the Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. The Che’s are all familiar, from Alberto Korda’s ubiquitous icon to the glassy-eyed corpse on a table. George Hawi’s career included, apparently, meetings with everyone from Yassir Arafat to Haffaz Assad, the late leader of Syria. Hawi left the Communist Party in later years to focus on a more social democratic agglomeration called the Democratic Left Movement, which worked with the March 14 Alliance in opposition to Syrian dominance and the Iranian influence represented in Hezbollah.

Political Cartoonist Naji Al-Ali was an artist of the stature of William Hogarth, Thomas Nast, and Rius. Born in Lebanon’s Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, his lacerating irony flayed not only Israel, but all the Arab leaders who frothed in support of Palestinians while feathering their own nests, including the PLO. He invented as his signature a scruffy, barefooted little Palestinian boy called Handala, back always turned to the reader, with hands crossed behind him defiantly. Exiled from one nation to the next, Al-Ali was assassinated in 1987 in London either by an the PLO or Israeli Mossad or both―that’s how these things are usually recounted in this highly divided land.

Lebanon, for those who don’t know, is divided politically according to some dozen and a half official “confessions”―or religions―so that the President is always Maronite (Roman Catholicism with an Eastern Rite), the Prime Minister Sunni, and the Speaker Shi’a, with other portfolios going to Druze, Orthodox, regular Roman Catholics, Malachites, and several others you never heard of. Each is so weak, my interlocutor explains, that they each appeal to some greater nation outside the country to give them power (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, USA, Israel), but one has to pay for what one receives. Additionally, some 400,000 Palestinians Refugees live without citizenship rights in refugee camps all over Lebanon. Along with the 1975-1990 civil war among the country’s many confessions and militias―subsidized by several nations―, Lebanon suffered a brutal occupation by Israel from 1982 to 2000.

For all his merits as a strong center to Lebanon’s widening gyre, Rafik Hariri was a neoliberal crony capitalist and citizen of Saudi Arabia who did little for the poor Shi’a, while Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran did much. Many folks of different confessions still support Hezbollah as The Resistance against Israeli aggression. If they see Hezbollah through rosy glasses, so do many others view the martyred Hariri.

My friend at Abou Elie’s says if Lebanese scrapped the confessional system they could unite to defeat Israel and Syria. Only united could Viet Nam beat the U.S.; divided, Iraq will suffer war indefinitely, since the U.S. will accept a few thousand casualties annually as the price for Iraq’s resources.

A few years back my wife and I dropped by Abou Elie’s and found ourselves in the midst of the wildest party, singing, dancing, and celebrating freedom of the spirit and a hope for a liberating future. Now, says the manager, the neighbors are not so accommodating. Still, this tiny tongue-in-cheek museum represents a spark of hope for a Lebanon united around a secular, democratic socialist future that won’t have to pay anyone for its security and independence. Insha’Allah, God willing.

Wavin' World Cup Flags in Beirut and Palestinian Camps

2010-07-07T01:06:00.001-04:00

Reprinted from OpEdNews

As I get older, I will be stronger,

They’ll call me freedom, just like a wavin’ flag.

K’Naan, “Wavin’ Flag”

Traveling this summer in

Greece

and

Lebanon

, I have been on a news fast and have thus missed the day-to-day dogfights that substitute for significant events on cable TV. I have, however, been able to view a few of the perennial battles as they play out concretely in ordinary lives: the resistance to austerity in Greece, the plight of Palestinians in Beirut, and, everywhere, football (soccer to us Yanks).

All over Beirut, as in

Greece

, the flags of

Spain

France

Germany

Paraguay

Netherlands

, and―especially―Brazil fly in proud fanaticism. A conversation in Arabic converts to a universal Language of Sport. A joke about a Brazilian player named with the universally recognized word Kaká is obvious in the laughter.

We broke our news fast and switched on the TV when my wife and I reached our rooms in Beirut. “Wavin’ Flag,” K’Naan’s world cup anthem-slash-Coca Cola product placement video clip was playing on

Lebanon

’s Al Jaras channel. Wait a minute: This is not the same clip we’d seen playing on flat screens in taverns from Athens to Mykonos. Here sharing the stage with the Somali-Canadian rapper and poet K’Naan was Lebanese hottie Nancy Ajram, singing in Arabic before a phalanx of Bollywood dancers. And wait a minute: Is that girl behind Nancy wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, or just a checked scarf vaguely suggestive, a la Rachel Ray in the Dunkin Donuts ad dog fight? With a little research, I discover there is also an official Spanish version with David Bisbal, targeting the Latin American Market. All versions of K’Naan’s original lyrics have been slightly altered for Coca Cola.

The music of Beirut’s streets, however, is construction. The Saudis tear down historical housing for the middle and working classes on the promontory of Ras Beirut to build pricey hotels and apartments (and mosques) for the Middle Eastern elite, while

Iran

rebuilds homes destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2006 in southern Beirut’s Dahieh District for the more proletarian Shi’ites.

I had hoped to see Dahieh to research a novel I am working on, but Lebanese friends of all stripes tell me that suspicion about Israeli spies by Hezbollah, which dominates the district, make going there unwise. Also, the trust between the Lebanese in general and Hezbollah as the anti-Israeli resistance has been damaged badly since the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the Cedar Revolution that drove out Hezbollah’s ally

Syria

in 2008.

Still, we did get to see our friends in the Bourj al Barajneh Palestinian Refugee camp, where, as in the rest of the world, we saw in the narrow cinderblock alleys the wavin’ flags of many nations, plus those of Fateh and Hamas. When we arrived at the gate, a tiny doorway in an immense wall―a jigsaw puzzle of concrete, posters, and old paint―a truck was unloading Coca Cola.

Life has changed for our friends, this family of a woman who teaches at a kindergarten in Bourj al Barajneh. She also volunteers at Shatila, the camp where the Christian Falange, with Israeli assistance, massacred thousands in 1982. She has just received her bachelor’s diploma. Her mother told her she would never forgive her if she did not go to her graduation party, but she was broke and could not afford a dress. She got an advance from her employer to buy one, but then one of her teachers bought it for her, instead. Now her father says he would rather see her continue on to a masters degree than get married. She needs a laptop. She joined a massive march on June 27 to give Palestinians some citizenship rights in

Lebanon

, which forbids Palestinians from owning property or holding decent jobs. She is hopeful that the times are right for change, but Falange legislators oppose.

Her sister just had a second baby. Every time we come back to

Lebanon

, she says, she has another child. An uncle has driven all the way from

Denmark

to visit, his wife covered modestly in a peach ensemble, his daughter uncovered, chic, and blond.

Last time we were in the country, our friend’s brother had been in bed for two months, depressed with dismal hopes for employment, marriage, and a family of his own. Now, he has escaped. When Israeli bombs fell in 2006, he and his fiancée slipped into a crowd evacuating to

Cyprus

by boat. “Forgive me,” he asked his family, “if I cannot send money, for I will be an illegal.” And he is, in

Sweden

, and married. He did not tell his mother, or she would have stopped him.

Grandmother still lives in the ground floor, as do all the members of the first generation of Palestinians who were expelled from

Israel

in 1948. Keys to Palestinian homes hang on the walls. The third floors for the third generation are as far as they can go, if they cannot return to Palestine or otherwise escape.

Around a table laden with fatouche, hummos, baba ganouj, kibbe, and chicken mansaf, the discussion turned to football. Many in the camp support

Brazil

because of their excellence. When they lost to the

Netherlands

the night before, the Palestinians built a coffin and held a funeral procession through the camp, complete with breast beating and ululation. Many also support

Italy

, because as 1982 World Cup champions

Italy

dedicated their victory to the Palestinians who were under Israeli siege that year in

Lebanon

. Our friend the teacher says it is better to support

Brazil

than to choose for political reasons.

Night before last, Germany destroyed Argentina, and parades of Lebanese fans careened throughout downtime Beirut on top of cars, cheering, blaring horns, setting off fireworks, and wavin’ German flags.

Yesterday, our Independence Day, Shi’ite spiritual leader and some say moderating influence on Hezbollah Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah died, and the attention of

Lebanon

is drawn from images of global celebration to reminders of an unstable national history. Too,

Israel

is threatening war if

Lebanon

presses claims for a share in the natural gas off their mutual coastline. Among all sports celebrations and hospitable offerings, everyone assumes that Israel will again attack.

So as the corporate globalists play their anthems to the freedom to consume, and as Iraq, Afghanistan and even Palestine and Lebanon burn, let us remember a couple of K’Naan’s lyrics left out for Coke:

So many wars, settling scores,

Bringing us promises, leaving us poor.

The Hoax Nobody Noticed

2010-07-01T09:28:00.008-04:00

It was a hoax that I had perpetrated and it came from an overwhelming sense of frustration. It was shortly after I had finished writing the first edition of my novella, Poe’s Daughter, Pym’s Soul which was, in part, a piece of historical fiction about Poe’s visits to Delaware.

Two events occurred concurrently. One was my disappointment that my stories about Poe and his encounters with Delaware’s first literary figure John Lofland had such a weak public reception. My efforts had barely seemed worth the work I’d put into it, even though I earned $7,000 in fellowship grants from the Delaware State Arts Council for two of the stories. The second event was my discovery of an incident that occurred at Price’s Corner in 1903. I had stumbled upon it while doing research into Delaware’s Federal Writers’ Project papers at the University of Delaware library. The incident, only hinted at in a single page from an incomplete article, was the only lynching to have occurred in Delaware. I went to the microfilm archives to find out more. In the local daily newspaper I found the whole story. First, I was shocked to discover that my great grandfather had found the nearly dead girl who had been murdered. The event led to the arrest of George White, who was Black and even though he had not been formally charged, was incarcerated for his own protection in the New Castle County Workhouse, which used to stand in Price’s Corner. The other thing I discerned from a close reading of the newspaper articles of the time was the possibility that George White was innocent and the real killer was a stranger referred to as “The Avenging Cowboy,” who had conveniently shown up in time to incite a lynch mob. A sidebar article in the newspaper reported that he had been a part of several other similar incidents around the county, which led me to speculate that “The Avenging Cowboy” had been the real killer and that his modus operandi was to commit these crimes and then to frame an innocent victim. I thought about forming my research, which led only to speculative conclusions, into a novel. It was then that I said to myself, “Why bother? I’ll probably have to publish it myself in small numbers as I had with Poe’s Daughter, Pym’s Soul and afterward too few people will even want to read it to make my efforts worthwhile.”

However, the story was too juicy to give up on, so I perpetrated a hoax. I invented an unknown Delaware author, who I had discovered in much the same manner as I had discovered other little known but actual Delaware authors. I invented an author named “Tux Munce,” who had written a novel entitled Willow Run, which related the story of the lynching of George White and the activities of the real perpetrator who had got away with murder. Then I could turn around and report a shorter review of Tux Munce’s novel. A shorter piece would be more manageable. It would be short enough for people to read at a single short sitting, and it would be less costly to publish. This I did, published under the title, “Willow Run,” and told very few people I had invented “Tux Munce.”

I came clean with the hoax in a booklet, entitled The Secret Life of Tux Munce available elsewhere on this web site. In this booklet, I “used” Tux Munce to tell the story of some other events, like the story of how Upton Sinclair’s wife Meta, while the two where living the free love lifestyle in Arden, ran off to the bohemian scene in New York City with the American poet Harry Kemp. In later chapters of The Secret Life of Tux Munce, I mixed real life people who’d lived in Wilmington, like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, with lessor known but remarkable residents of the city, like Weeping Joe Smoleki, who had been written about in Wilmington author J. Saunders Redding's No Day of Triumph; and Three Gun Wilson who was Wilmington’s version of Eliot Ness of The Untouchables fame; Daisy Winchester who was a local speakeasy proprietor, cabaret singer and local radio personality; G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who wrote science fiction for Amazing Stories and who also sang as Crash Peyton on local radio as Wilmington’s answer to Bing Crosby. I mixed in characters from novels by local authors John Biggs, Christopher Ward and Charles Wertenbaker and had them interact with Tux Munce and actual people, like the Fitzgeralds. Tux Munce carried on his writing endeavors by publishing stories in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Wilmington Advocate, during which time Munce was secretly in love with Pauline Young, Dunbar-Nelson’s niece. In one of the stories, Munce encounters the Vodou loa Ghedé on the east side of Wilmington. For The Wilmington Suburban News, in the early 1950s Munce writes an article about Charles and Eleanor Bostwick, former residents of Kiamensi Gardens near Stanton, who were driven out of the county by local perpetrators of the Communist witch hunts during the HUAC/Joe McCarthy era. In his travels Munce interacted with the tango poets in Argentina and writes about it in another actual Wilmington publication called CANDID. Later he writes about his encounter with Zora Neale Hurston during a stopover in Haiti for another short lived Wilmington Black newspaper from the late 1940s called FRONT PAGE. I even inserted people I actually knew into the mix. Beside Pauline Young, who I knew, I inserted my grandfather, John Gasser, former Delaware State Senator Wilmer F. “Rudy” Williams, and Charley Stone, an elderly Black man from my youth who used to cut grass for some of my neighbors in Richardson Park.

Writing these stories had been some of the most enjoyable literary work I ‘d ever done. Drawing on both the literary works of authors who had worked in Delaware, combined with interesting characters they created, along with actual fascinating people, both famous and obscure, all within the context of our obfuscated local history was personally rewarding. As it’s turned out, that has been my only reward. Too bad I felt the need to cloak it in a hoax, but after all, it may have all really happened –– in another universe!

From Greece: Putting What's Ours Back

2010-06-22T07:10:00.006-04:00

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

Lord Byron, "Childe Harold"

Now I've seen it, our Western Root Temple, monument to reason, proportion, and the polis as an ideal of human culture: The Parthenon, its 4 by 17 Doric columns glowing in sunlight and floodlight 24-7 atop the Acropolis of Athens. And just as we've been trying in our own American experiment to perfect a democracy founded on empire, so modern Greece has struggled to redeem the empire's plunder of its heritage, exemplified in the so-called Elgin Marbles. In 1801, Lord Elgin conspired with the occupying Ottomans to loot the Parthenon's frieze, which now graces the walls of the British Museum, accompanying hoards of other imperial booty. The Parnathon Marbles, as they are more properly called, portray the Panatheniac Procession, a quadrennial festival glorious with lowing cattle led to the sacrifice, maidens bearing libations, musicians, and girls of noble birth carrying the safron-collored peplos, or shawl, to be place on the Goddess Athena's statue in the Erectheum (that's the one with the caryatids, columns in the shape of women).

The Brits argue that they have cared for the freize better than could have the Greeks, plagued by 20 decades of instability, poverty, and acidic smog. Let's chalk that up as a happy accident. The new Acropolis Museum is a state-of the-art repository. On the top floor are the remaining fragments of the Parthenon's pediments, friezes, and metopes combined with casts to replicate the original arrangement of the various high and low relief sculptures. In glass-walled and steel columned splendor, the works present themselves to the visitor in exact proportion to the original, which the visitor can gaze on where it sits aloft the Acropolis nearby.

Lord Elgin's was not the last insult Empire imposed on modern Greece. Like the Arabs, the Greeks were betrayed by the Brits after joining them against Turkey in WWI and then abandoned in their efforts to secure Ottoman precincts like Cyprus. Then there was the Great Depression, the Metaxis dictatorship, Nazi occupation, the post-WWII thwarted revolution and civil war, the military junta of 1967-73, and, finally, after an irrational exuberance of neoliberal growth, new disasters with the globalized Great Recession.

While tourists can still enjoy pampering and great food, the signs are there. 300 employees of the Metro were just fired, precipitating a series of one-day strikes, inconveniencing mildly the traveler compelled to take the bus or taxi from the airport.

At the eastern end of Avenue Ermou, which divides the city north from south, we encounter Avenue Persefonis, which is, indeed, a kind of ghostly incarnation from another world. It is a former industrial area, complete with giant oil tanks, brick factories, and towering chimneys, now illuminated in the red floodlamps of gentrification. The Athens Fringe Festival has taken over these formerly productive environs, now throbbing with disco beats and (always) English lyrics. Stylish young women emerge from the Metro or ride up rear seated, bare legged, and stilleto shod on motorcycles to sample the neo-Greek cuisine at Cafe Sardellis or Mamacas. For a festival weekend, however, the district is hardly mobbed.

A couple days later we are to see more signs of an economic collapse, this time in Crete. Some 20 kilometers the wrong way along the northern highway, we exit to get directions from one of the many hotels that surround the CretAquarium and nearby beaches. The area was deserted like a ghost town. Still, anyone contemplating a visit to Greece should not hesitate. The Euro is down, the bargains are up, and the chance of rain is zero.

Pundits stateside pontificate cheerily how Greece, like General Motors, made promises to their workers that they could not keep. For example, I am blogging from a comfortable government-run free internet cafe in Heraklion, complete with software and tech assistance. Greeks should have made provision for the day it would rain credit default swaps.

But the land that first envisioned the polis failed to adapt to worldwid corporate governance. They faild to surrender willingly their heritage of Parthenon Marbles and social democracy and dared to proclaim in strikes and the "Bring Them Home" campaign that they will not surrender.

Now, when do we Americans get our social contract back? Where is our culture that envisions an American polis?

Talks Too Much

2010-06-18T16:28:00.002-04:00

Last Saturday June 12 the 2nd Saturday Poets Reading (www.2ndsaturdaypoets.com) enjoyed as its featured reader Judy Kronenfeld, an accomplished professional writer and scholar from California. I clapped along with pretty much everyone else, yet privately was offended by frustration.

Commonly readers intro and outro their works, often to good effect, clarifying a theme, touching on a critical fact, concept or connnection, or brightening with humor. But please, how about let your poem stand up on its own two legs and do its own walking? Kronenfeld prefaced almost every poem with, "I just want to say one thing first," and then went on to say any number of additional things for minutes at a stretch, mostly more of the story of her life, leaving me wondering: if this extra story of your life is so worth my attention, how come it's not inside the poem? She mentioned at one point that she often edits her poetry as much as 30 times. Well, good. Too bad she didn't so edit her comments. She should have, since they were nearly half of the reading. I felt like shouting, "Stop competing with yourself and let me hear your poetry!"

I notice in her book, for sale at the reading (my wife bought a copy:"light lowering in diminished sevenths"--The Litchfield Review Press.) that the poems are dutifully in lines and stanzas surrounded by much paper space, and so, read by my eyes, seem a bit more like poetry than they had sounded. Out loud of course poems lose their paper spaces, and so the sense of preciousness and definition conferred thereby. Out loud a poem must work harder for its preciousness and definition. Kronenfeld's mostly don't. They rely mostly not on the cherishing of details, but on their careful accummulation, which is the mainstay of prose.

A local woman I know, also a writer and scholar, took issue with the 2nd Saturday Readings a few years back when it mixed poetry with prose. She claimed she could not readily switch her head over from poetry to prose and back again from one reader to the next. Her problem puzzled me at the time, but I'm finding some utility in it here. To my ears Kronenfeld, heard as poetry, is far too wordy, but as prose essay is comfortably compact. As soon as I switched my head over, about halfway through the reading, and pretended she was an essayist, I felt better.

For this listener it was a shame. Kronenfeld has much worth saying, and often says it very well indeed. But she talks too much, and good poets don't need to.

Grumbling and Ruminating Memoir

2010-06-04T14:02:00.005-04:00

Memoir makes me grumble. It is a form I have come to despise. It is to literature as infotainment is to news: focused on celebrity and dysfunction-of-the-month kitsch and easier to write about than the complexities of human events or the mysteries of the heart. It is suited to the over-corporatized literary marketplace with its emphasis on the velocity by which hysteria is disseminated more than the patience with which wisdom is contemplated. The audience, dulled by decades of TV, has lost the ability to imagine and thus “crave[s] the literal.” With such prejudices, I approached Memoir: A History, by Ben Yagoda, my colleague at the University of Delaware.

Yagoda is a full professor of journalism at UD and like a scholar with a nose for news, he combines taxonomy, history, analysis, and evaluation of the form with exposés and human interest anecdotes. From the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Yagoda places a particular emphasis on memory and its relationship to truth.

The taxonomy of American memoirs divides, says Yagoda with a coy reference to the fraudulent James Frey, into “a million little subgenres.”

There is “shtick lit,” for example, “perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it.” Beginning with Thoreau’s Walden, and continuing with Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House and Jack London’s People of the Abyss, the form engineered by these masters was followed by works of lesser bricoleurs whose “projects [. . . became] ever more stuntlike.” Ever more successful, too, apparently, considering Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which recounts Powell’s year of blogging about and cooking from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and which became a big movie with a shorter title and staring Meryl Streep. Yagoda always fills us in with the titles and casts of the films made from these sometimes otherwise inconsequential tomes.

Yet as I read on I began to notice how many of these works I had read and had contributed to my literary and personal consciousness, even such now forgotten bestsellers as See Here, Private Hargrove, Marion Hargrove’s memoir of pre-WWII basic training. See Here, along with Clarence Day’s Life With Father and Ruth McKenney’s My Sister Eileen, was an example of “light memoir,” which exemplified “the shared sense that the United States was the best place on earth, capable of overcoming any setbacks and fixing any flaws.” All of these were on my family bookshelf when I was a child.

As Yagoda traced the categories, I recognized more old friends. For instruction and vanity: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; third person: Education of Henry Adams; verse: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Robert Lowell’s Life Studies; slave narrative: Autobiography of Frederick Douglas; exposé: Charles Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast; 20th Century African American (and ghost-written): Autobiography of Malcom X; celebrity: Alexander King’s Mine Enemy Grows Older (which was also a recovery memoir); Holocaust: Elie Wiesel's Night; impersonated: Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (actually about Roman Polanski); fake: Go Ask Alice; and Indigenous communal memory: I, Rogoberta Menchú. I have happily avoided misery memoirs like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, the fraud Oprah fell for.

Yagoda conludes that the memoir makes for a lot of good literature that otherwise would not have been written. He even provides a scale to evaluate memoirs morally and literarily, which he schematized for us at a discussion of his work at the University of Delaware: subtract points for inaccuracies, trashing living people, political or moral agenda (ahem!), lack of corroboration, excessive dialogue (accuracy improbable), bad writing (up to 15 points), and failure to own up to fallibility. Add points for self-deprecation.

While I find that Memoir: A History succeeds in deepening our understanding of the genre and even justifying it, my inner subversive percolates to the surface to wonder how we can use this knowledge to overcome the atomization of humanity, inspire solidarity, and build a sustainable future.

I’ve gone on too long in a blog post to elaborate the answer. But thanks to Ben Yagoda, I am now grumbling about memoirs less and ruminating more.

I’d like to be forgotten. Wouldn’t you?

2010-05-21T15:41:00.004-04:00

At a recent poetry reading I attended near Wilmington, two poets who read during the open reading part of the event, as they often do, prefaced their reading with a few remarks. One poet, in his remarks, mentioned an estate which is now a park just north of Wilmington called Rockwood. Rockwood is the former home of one of Wilmington's early founders, William Shipley. There still stands in proximity of the Rockwood mansion a coach house. In that coach house it is reported that the early 20th century Delaware novelist John Biggs, Jr. wrote one or both of his novels, Demigods and Seven Days Whipping. It has also been reported that John P. Marquand, the only novelist born in Delaware to have earned a Pulitzer, lived in the same coach house for a spell. That report would have been a nice addition to remarks made about Rockwood, which may have filled in some of those empty places in our knowledge of the local literary community that preceded us.

At the same poetry reading event, another poet in her preparatory remarks mentioned Slaughter Beach in Sussex County. She reflected for a few moments about how the place got its name. Was it named after a person named Slaughter? Perhaps, if I recall correctly, she speculated whether a large number of animals were killed there. Actually, the reason for the name is far worse. It had been a location where local native Americans were massacred by European colonialist. The event is an important part of a story by John Loland, Delaware's first important literary author and poet. The story is "Ono-keo-co, or the Bandit of the Brandywine.” Of course, by the way we regard our past local writers and poets, the poet who read at this recent poetry reading can't be blamed for not knowing a work that's been out of print for nearly 150 years. But wouldn't it be nice to have access to these works from our predecessors? Wouldn't having a better idea of those on whose literary shoulders we stand in our local literary history enhance our appreciation of ourselves? Or maybe, and at this point probably, we and our work will be forgotten too. I'd like that. Or as the American novelist William S. Burroughs use to ask, in refrain, wouldn't you?

Digital Opiates and Paperback Palsy

2010-05-10T23:01:00.008-04:00

Guest Post from one of my students.

By Evan Acuña

They constituted an era filled with tension and tumult. Martin Luther King rose in the arms of the Civil Rights movement, only to later fall at the racist hands of hatred. A questionable battle sought to free the South Vietnamese people, but in the process created an America as divided as the foreign land it supposedly was trying to help. During the 1960’s the United States served as the home stadium for an active and principled youth that wasn’t afraid to get involved and make a scene. Social and political tension, along with the burgeoning Hippie movement, ensured that young, visionary voices were always ready to preach their messages.

Underpinning this youth revolution was a breadth of recent literature that reflected the restless ideals of young American marchers, demonstrators, and dreamers alike. There was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road of 1957; J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye of 1951; William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch of 1959. These books and others represented the pre-1960’s tension that erupted into what was arguably the most explosive decade of America’s history. They were vital components of the visionary zeitgeist that often guided the behaviors of American youth. Since the 1960’s, though, there has been a decline in the importance of this type of literature.

Surely revolutionary writers are still typing furiously for their causes, creating works for active, ardent audiences—but not nearly so many as before. Television, video games, and even the Internet, despite its myriad potential outlets for writers and thinkers, have all worked together to wrest influence from thought-provoking and challenging books. The role of popular literature as a visionary and influential medium has diminished since the 1960’s, its reduced importance stemming from the proliferation of electronic entertainment in American homes as well as from the increased corporate domination of the publishing industry.

From TV to the first video games to the advent of the Internet, electronic entertainment technologies have provided users with something that rich literature never could: instant gratification. This is an idea that children seem to grasp very well. A Game Boy, for instance, is more fun than a coloring book—‘nuff said. And children don’t just play with the Game Boy until they’re old enough to sit calmly and read a book—they play with the Game Boy until they’re old enough to use the Play Station, and then they use the Play Station until they get kicked out of the house or sent away to college (same thing, usually).

The effects of America’s quest for instant gratification have been clear. A quick look at any recent list of best-sellers affirms this. Sexy, sensationalistic thrillers top the charts with regularity. Works by John Grisham and Janet Evanovich typify the literary value found in today’s top sellers. Grisham and Evanocich are by no means poor writers, but their rapid fire releases of new full-length novels suggests that they might be more focused on quantity (read: money) than quality. The type of writing that Grisham and Evanovich create is only exacerbating the problem of literature’s decrease in visionary quality and influence. Grisham’s tales are thrilling to read on a dark night, Evanovich’s equally exciting in a dark bedroom. The two authors, and scores of copycats, are delivering the book world’s best interpretation of the instant gratification drug.

While an overbearing electronic entertainment industry has had a disconcerting impact on the modern bookstore’s inventory, television and its successors have not been the sole causes of current literature’s precarious position within the lives of Americans. The publishing industry has been continuously shifting since before the 1960’s, and the changing publishing climate has been another clear factor of literature’s diminished role in American society. Since before the 1960’s, publishing company ownership has steadily shifted from homegrown, family-run businesses to national conglomerates, and, in the process, the character of the industry has shifted as well.

Traditionally, many of the family-run publishing companies were descendant from old money. They had little need to publish books for profit, and so they often approached their trade more as a philanthropic act than as a business venture. As consolidation took over, though, publishing companies found themselves under the ownership of necessarily shrewd businesspeople. A new formula emerged to determine the worthiness of new books. According to this model, “publishable” now means bankable, marketable, sellable—and few publishers are left that can afford to care about quality. Couple this reality with a shrinking market for new books and it’s easy to see why hot sellers like Grisham and Evanovich have become darlings of the publishing industry.

To understand the falling significance of literature in American society is to understand many key differences between the 1960’s and today. Compare the riotous revolts against the war in Vietnam to the passive indifference with which most Americans regard the war in Iraq. Compare the inspiring words of Dylan singing for the greater good of humanity to the self-centered indulgence of Eminem. Fifty years after the rumblings began, the United States has lost a culture of visionary revolution to a wave of instant gratification. The displacement of inspirational literature by electronic entertainment and a publishing industry plagued by increasing corporate dominance have combined to create a national climate that is unsuitable to the mass appreciation of thought-provoking books, poetry, and prose—and without a population united by the common goals of contemporary literature, music, and other arts, the revolutionary spirit of the 1960’s is likely as burnt-out as many of its founders.

Jazz and Poverty

2010-05-04T09:30:00.004-04:00

In addition to my interest in uncovering Delaware’s literary past, I’m also interested in uncovering the story of jazz produced by Wilmington’s past musicians since the 1930s. Many know about the contributions of the legendary jazz trumpet player Clifford Brown, but fewer know about the contributions made by those like Lem Winchester, Betty Roché, Gerald Price and others both living and dead. All of the aforementioned have made a mark, to some greater or lesser extent, on the American jazz idiom.

For me the history of Delaware’s literary past is compatible with the history of Wilmington’s jazz. There are a couple of notable parallels regarding the two: the first is the influence they’ve had upon their respective segments of American culture and the other is the lack of respect they’ve received from purveyors of our local cultural establishment. While I firmly believe that the shabby treatment of our literary past has more to do with its content, which tends to deliver some unwelcome truths, the lack of curiosity about our local jazz heritage has more to do with ignorance driven by a kind of covert racism.

Wilmington is a small city of less than 100,000 people. Unlike larger cities that can accommodate its population of poverty, like Philadelphia, Boston or New York, by also containing large middle class and upper class populations, Wilmington’s large population of poor and lower middle class people is too easy to see. A visit to Wilmington’s downtown Market Street any day of the week will demonstrate my point. After the sun goes down on any night, including Friday and Saturday nights, the city’s a virtual ghost town. People from surrounding suburbs are hesitant to come into Wilmington for many reasons. Cultural venues featuring the performance of jazz are sparse, and the long standing 2nd Saturday Poetry Reading, which had been located in the city for over 20 years, has moved out to a suburban location which is inaccessible by public transportation. In fact, local public transportation basically doesn’t exist Saturday night in Wilmington and is inadequate between the city and surrounding suburbs the remainder of the week, which has had the affect of fueling Wilmington’s inability to pull itself out of poverty.

If I may be permitted my artist’s prerogative to invoke some vision of the greater truth, I see inner cities like Wilmington as the convenient dumping ground for a byproduct of capitalist accumulation. That byproduct is poverty. I firmly believe that the amount of poverty is an indication of the amount of wealth accumulated, hoarded and hidden away by the capitalist class for the last 150 or more years. The abject poverty found in the Third World, in failed states especially, is proportional to the amount of excessive wealth that is used as a resource to exploit, poison and threaten those millions living in poverty around the landfills and open sewers of Third World cities.

Back in Wilmington poverty runs deeper than the inability to find a good job (accessible only by inadequate public transportation), by the inability to get out from under housing provided by slumlords, and by an inner city where the illegal drug trade engenders excessive criminal activity. Poverty is more than merely economic. Poverty of the spirit accompanies the poverty of economics.

In a city where once clubs that hosted live jazz dotted its east side and downtown, there is only one club in a gentrified neighborhood on the western fringes of the city where live jazz is regularly performed. There is still a plethora of talented jazz artists in Wilmington that are grossly disproportional to available venues, but are only heard occasionally at venues sponsored by a local church or in a public park or private club. These events are spotty and the musicians are almost never paid. They play merely for something called the love of the music.

Having written literature for more than 50 years, I have come to firmly believe that creating a cultural product for free or little remuneration, much like nearly all of Wilmington’s hugely talented remaining jazz artists, is an indication of our cultural poverty, engendered by those grim reapers of the economic wealth we produce for them, which in turn could have produced a vital cultural wealth for the rest of us. It is easy for the capitalist to impoverish those like the local producers of jazz because they can initially dump the poverty they produce in a place, hidden behind a kind of insidious subconscious racism we have yet to deal with, and almost too easily, yet very conveniently, retreat, as the local 2nd Saturday Poetry Reading has done, into the suburbs. By the same turn, we can deny that such poverty, both economic and cultural, is important, because those who live and try to find a livelihood in the city which we can avoid visiting can easily be ignored simply because we don’t have to see them.

Art for Whose Sake?

2010-04-27T16:07:00.004-04:00

Okay, you've got art for art's sake, art for propaganda, and a slice of personal horn-blowing in between. What goes with this sandwich? The pickle we're in. My first need here is to define "propaganda." Remember Brenda Lee's ancient hit, "I'm Sorry?" I sure do, with love, but I also remember a line in it that I was raised on by my parental generation: "Mistakes are part of being young." Oh yeah? Well... yeah, actually. True enough. The young make lots of mistakes characteristically. What's not true is the implication: that older people don't, that when you "grow up" you grow out of making mistakes, so do as I say not as I do, blah blah blah. And that implication is the lie hiding behind the truth, because making mistakes is part of being older too. (My own experience is that the young tend to make varied experimental mistakes, whereas older people tend to make the same tired old mistakes over and over.) So propaganda is a lie hiding behind a truth.

Thanks to Steven Leech for the Laura Bush/Poetry story, which I missed at the time, and which is instructive-- in microcosm it was just yet one more ugly american assumption that the rest of the world is no more than a classroom of sing-along children (it's a small world after all, it's a...), and that implication is the lie. A lie that this time around got revealed. Propaganda by gently coerced default.

Phil Bannowsky touches this base as well. What's wrong with an overt message in art? Is the problem fundamental, or just a slippery slope issue wherein the message might overwhelm the medium and hammer us where a magic wand might weild more savvy weight? From another angle, is it even possible to open your mouth and not advertise? Is there a love-poem in creation that doesn't advertize me or mine above others in the marketplace of life?

I have never deliberately been a "political" poet in the sense of instrumentally serving a specific organized cause, but I have also never tried not to be, understanding that truth is not something that fits in a box. Or, to put it the other way around, if it does fit in a box, it's probably not the truth-- which is why art for art's sake is probably a lie, since it chooses to live in a box. And so, (at long last) I vote for advertising, provided it is honest. It is simply physically impossible at any moment to see the universe except from one place instead of from all the others. That doesn't mean the truth will sell or not hurt. It just means that if you don't want to live under a box-top, but under the sky, you've got to accept the weather, rain or shine.

Earl Turner's Ghost

2010-04-19T09:37:00.003-04:00

Last week I found myself re-reading The Turner Diaries after almost 25 years. I can't say I meant to. Something about the more extreme Tea Party rhetoric brought it to mind. And the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings is this month. I just wanted to check on a few quotes I thought I remembered and wound up reading the whole thing. Not the two most productive hours of my life, that's for sure.

The book was pretty much as I remembered it. (Although the electronic version I first started reading was heavily abridged, with some of the more detailed descriptions of illegal activity, such as the bombing of an FBI building, removed.) As with a lot of propaganda, Andrew Macdonald’s (aka William Pierce) writing is clunky and stilted. However, it gets almost gleefully gory towards the end when describing scenes of mass genocide. I still think the Diaries contains the most hateful passage in American letters: Earl Turner's fictional entry for August 1, 1993, the “Day of the Rope”, which relates in stomach churning detail the mass hangings of so-called “race criminals” in Los Angeles.

The Turner Diaries was written in the late 70’s and, for the most part, seems amazingly dated. Only two groups fuel Earl Turner’s righteous anger: Jews, who in spite of their inferior status, somehow manage to control everything from the banks to the dreaded Equality Police and Blacks, who function as their incompetent subhuman henchmen. There's only a passing mention of illegal immigrants, homosexuals and feminists. The mass media mostly ignore Earl Turner and his fellow guerilla patriots until its too late. There's no equivalent of the talk radio echo chamber or Fox News to stoke the fires and give free publicity.

On the other hand: there are plenty of screeds about Second Amendment Rights. In fact, it is the fictional Gun Raids of 1989 that precipitate Earl Turner’s descent into crime and terrorism.

Once again I wondered just what was it about this hastily written book that inspired so many people to try to live it, often with tragic consequences. After all, it’s only words — and not particularly eloquent ones at that.

***

I have a theory about evil. I believe we all have the capacity for it; it rests in us like some sleeper virus waiting for a trigger. In most of us, it stays asleep a good part of the time. Thankfully, very few of us are born without any capacity to resist it.

But sometimes our resistance falters, the virus stirs and begins to multiply. One of the things that can drop our resistance in a heartbeat is a life-changing trauma. For Earl Turner, it’s the raid on his apartment and his subsequent arrest. The arrest leads to the loss of his job and his stable, ordinary life as an electrical engineer with latent racist tendencies. For a while he is able to coast, taking contracting jobs with some local electronics firms, but soon his deepening involvement with the racist underground leads him to a place where he’s poised to pass the point of no return.

“Now everything is chaotic and uncertain,” he writes. “When I think about the future, I become depressed. It’s impossible to know what will happen, but it’s certain that I’ll never be able to go back to the quiet, orderly kind of life I had before.”

In other words, Earl Turner has lost his center and realizes he’s in danger of losing his sanity. He commits to writing the diary to regain his psychological footing, but also to rationalize the evil he’s done so far, to become “reconciled” to his new way of life. This fateful decision to reconcile allows the evil in Turner to really blossom. With each violent act, his tolerance for atrocity grows, until he becomes a person who can shoot people in cold blood and find solace in the death of thousands.

***

Our nation has gone through several life-changing traumas in this young century. The first, of course, was 9-11. What? You mean we’re not invincible? This was followed quickly by the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. You mean I can work my whole life, be a loyal employee and all, and lose everything in a day? Then, Katrina. We let a city drown while the whole world watched? And finally the housing bubble burst, which eventually led to the Great Recession we’re in now. That whole American Dream thing was one big lie?

To add to all the heartache, there is the sinking feeling things will never truly go back to the way they were. We can try to patch things up, but we all know they really won't be fixed. The changes needed now are so far outside of our consensus thinking that when we try to imagine the future, all we can see is a black hole.

There are plenty of people in this country who are hurting and looking for a way to quiet their pain. Some will merely squelch it with antidepressants; others will start looking for someone or something to blame. Maybe it’s the Socialist Republic of Obama bin Biden. Maybe it’s all those illegal immigrants who stubbornly refuse to speak English. Maybe it’s Obamacare. Maybe a few of them will listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck and be inspired to “do something” — or, God forbid, stumble on a link to the online version of The Turner Diaries and plan to blow something up. They say an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, but so is a shattered heart.

Earl Turner made a personal decision to descend into evil, but he never would have gotten that far without his fellow racist warriors to egg him on. Words have power — and when people are hurt, vulnerable and standing at the crossroads that power is infinitely multiplied.

Those who use violent or hateful language to “fire up the base” might as well be playing Russian Roulette. Most of the time you’ll escape with your life. But then again: there’s always that chance you’ll get the bullet.

Jack Bauer, Drop Your Weapon

2010-04-06T17:00:00.005-04:00

It’s official. Day 8 of the series 24 is going to be its last. The show’s ratings have dropped significantly among its key demographic (18-24); several key actors’ contracts are about to expire and the show’s writers and producers can’t come up with a compelling story arc for Day 9. Might as well end the show in good form rather than let it limp into irrelevance like the X-files. There are plans for a 24 movie sometime in the nebulous future, but when the last hour airs in May, for all practical purposes, 24 is done.

I came to 24 late in the game (Day 5) and watched the series inside out, catching up on earlier seasons by renting DVDs and downloading the occasional discounted episode from iTunes. My main reason for watching was to have something to talk about with my co-workers, the majority of which were rabid fans of the show. I continued watching (long after many of my colleagues had stopped) to see how the show’s writers would deal with a most difficult creative dilemma.

You see, until 2 seasons ago, 24 relied extensively on torture as a dramatic device. Then the infamous Abu Ghraib photos appeared. Suddenly, as many as two torture scenes per 43 minute episode didn’t look so good — especially since 24 was exported around the world. At one point officials from the US Army met with producers of the show and asked that they tone it down.

Torture in 24 land was soft core violence porn that had very little to do with torture in reality. Bad guys favored the low-tech bloodier forms: battery acid, pulling out of finger and toenails, sawing off of extremities. Good guys were partial to the high-tech stuff — designer drugs that produced mind-numbing (and tongue-loosening) pain and psychological humiliation — but if the situation demanded it, they could pull off the low-tech stuff as well as any master villain.

Torture in 24 was 100% effective; it always produced actionable intelligence that saved many lives. And while 24’s super agent Jack Bauer didn’t enjoy being cruel, he rationalized it as a necessary evil. After all, he was fighting a war.

So here was the writers’ challenge: to keep the show’s trademark tinderbox high tension while giving Jack Bauer more than a comic book conscience. Oh yes, and to find another device to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

The more thoughtful Jack Bauer first appeared in a special episode entitled Redemption which aired after a long hiatus due to the writers’ strike. In this episode Bauer is a fugitive hiding out at his friend’s orphanage and school in an African country that resembles a combination of Sierra Leone and Rwanda.

Jack is haunted by his past deeds of barbarous heroism and is a man with nothing important left to lose. His wife was killed long ago; his evil father and brother are dead and the latest love of his life lies catatonic in a bedroom in her father’s house. His daughter has stopped talking to him because he is a death magnet. And: by this time, Bauer has been a victim of torture. A couple seasons back he was tortured at the hands of the Chinese.

Someone arrives at the orphanage to serve Jack with a subpoena to appear before a Congressional committee. Bauer’s about to pack his bags and be on the road again when suddenly it looks like the orphanage might be in danger. The old Jack springs into action to save the children, but ultimately to accomplish that end, he has to give himself up to authorities.

The fan reaction, judging from various discussion boards, was mixed. While there was enough ass-kicking, explosions and car chases to please some people, and others were just glad Jack Bauer had returned, it unnerved some fans to be presented with a hero with doubts about his mission.

The following season had the requisite number of explosions, gunfights and terrorists, but it also featured storylines about the legality and morality of torture, questionable methods of investigation such as racial and religious profiling and the outsourcing of military operations to private security firms. Jack is exposed to a deadly designer virus and in one climatic scene near the end of the season, actually asks a Muslim cleric for absolution when it looks like death is near.

Fan reaction was uneven at best. A big complaint was that the show had gotten too preachy and political (as if it wasn’t political before) and that Jack had gotten wimpy. Even a terminally ill Jack would have been G.I. Joe to the end.

I thought last season was okay for what it was. Some of the dialog addressing hot potato topics was clunky, but then again the show was never known for its snappy wit. Besides: how subtle can you be when your main character is either shouting or speaking in a hoarse whisper? Sometimes the medium limits the message and you write yourself into a corner. I doubt I could have done better.

***

Whatever you may think of 24, if indeed you think about it at all, it does serve a purpose. Since we are not a nation of deep readers, TV is how most of us deal with national trauma. Something horrible happens and then the made for TV movie appears. You ease into your favorite couch, grab the remote, watch, process and move on.

24 is a 9-11 “do-over” show. (The Unit was another shorter-lived example.) It presents a world that is both more evolved and far more dangerous than our own. 24 has had two Black presidents and one woman president and is about to broker a peace deal with a country that closely resembles Iran. (Although after Monday’s episode, that deal might have been shot to hell.) However, there’s also been a mushroom cloud over LA. But Jack always thwarts the terrorists, the tech comes online in the nick of time and the millennium changing disasters are always averted. If only it were true.

Perhaps the fact 24 has lost its mojo means we no longer have as strong a need to relive, repackage and revise 9-11. Maybe we are finally getting closer to that time when we can rise from our easy chairs, gather up our grief and anger and move on.

A Day that Poetry Mattered

2010-04-04T14:42:00.002-04:00

For those of us who were introduced to the literary life during those scary years of the Cold War, on the cusp of the counter culture with its anti-Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movements, and all those other progressive movements which now define the national dialogue, we have been witness not to a New Morning in America but to an American nightmare. Its darkest time was in those days and weeks and months that followed the events of September 11th. Not only was the Iraq War the wrong war fought for essentially no reason, since nothing was found, but also because of the Bush's Administration's assault on our Constitutional protections. Lies had fed the crest of mass hysteria headlong into one big bad bill to pay and a pack of angry nations.

While that hysteria was being whipped to a froth, cooler heads prevailed among poets and others who lived the literary life. Is it any wonder? Even though we may lead the literary life, that doesn’t mean we don’t see through all their crap. And we don’t like being co-opted either, which is what Laura Bush, the First Lady, attempted to do on the eve of the Iraq War. Let me refresh some memories.

For February 2003, Mrs. Bush attempted to convene a White House symposium of poets and literati on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. Invitations went out and in return poets everywhere responded with anti-war poems. Her symposium was canceled. This is not the end of the story.

On February 17, 2003, during a blizzard, at the Lincoln Center in New York City, two thousand people convened for a reading. The event was billed as “Poems Not Fit For the White House” and its warning was of the consequences of the Bush Administration’s headlong rush to war. You’d be surprised who showed up.

Among those poets not particularly known to involve themselves or their work with a lot of political or even social issues were Sam Hamill, Sharon Olds, and a 97-year old Stanley Kunitz, who delivered one of the more moving poems presented during the event. Some poets couldn’t make the event because of the snowstorm and had others read for them. For example, Ellen McLaughlin read for Robert Pinsky, Kathleen Chalfant read for C.K. Williams, the actor Eli Wallach read for Robert Creeley, Wallace Shawn read for Mark Strand, and André Gregory read for W. S. Merwin. Arthur Miller, whose 1953 play The Crucible was an allegory of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt of suspected subversives throughout the early 1950s, was a participant. Anne Waldman, in keeping with the theme originally proposed by Laura Bush, read poems by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes, as well as her own poem “War Crime.”

The writing of poetry is not an “either/or” proposition. Just because a poet may also be an activist, or maybe only a proponent of a cause, does not make that poet incapable of writing poetry that is closer to writing poetry merely for the sake of poetry. Laura Bush evidently took it for granted that poets were either, at best, apolitical or, at least, without a conscience. She may have been surprised that such great crafters of poetry like W. S. Merwin and Stanley Kunitz also thought about issues crucial to the welfare of our national community.

Personally, I’ve been accused of using literature as propaganda. At times, I’ve thought this accusation to be unfair, because I had only felt the need to expose something important going on in the environment around us that needed exposing. I’ve always been upset when a good poet disassociated him or herself from a project with which I was involved because we weren’t restricting our endeavors to writing or promoting poetry only for poetry’s sake. A good poet can write both kinds of poetry within this kind of imposed dichotomy. And a good poet should never be afraid to let his or her conscience show, especially when it could benefit the welfare of all those we care about during times of crisis. Poetry does not only matter to the individual poet and his or her devotees. The real value of poetry is that it should matter to us all.

Who Pays the Piper

2010-03-29T15:46:00.012-04:00

A regular theme here at Broken Turtle is that corporate funding for the arts comes with strings. That is not to say that craft and inspiration can’t break free and project a progressive vision from time to time, one that speaks with an honest heart about a shameful outrage against an American city. Such was the accomplishment of Ten Months: The Wilmington Voices Project, a three-person show portraying the memories and lasting legacy of the 1968 rebellion/riots in Wilmington, Delaware and the ten-month occupation by the National Guard following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Conceived and Directed by Anne Marie Cammarato, the play will continue from March 31 through April 4 at the Delaware Theatre Company.

The work was not so much composed as harvested from memories and archives buried for forty years. The actors, Taïfa Harris, Erin Moon, and Ben Cherry, shift deftly among a host of characters: a white man who romanticizes Wilmington’s history from the Lenni Lenape to the DuPonts, a teenager rapping the words of Wilmington poet Devon Morrison, an aging African American man, wondering where his city went.

I do believe that such authenticity is a starting point for empowerment and change. But let me quote from a letter I published in today's News Journal to tell you what happened:

My enjoyment of Anne Marie Cammarato’s poignant exploration of painful memories in “10 Months: The Wilmington voices Project,” was dashed by the corporate propaganda inserted in the discussion following the show.

The Rodel Foundation-sponsored discourse led to a pitch for “Race to the Top,” which could rip up union contracts, fire principals and teachers wholesale at schools that serve the poor, and bribe cash-strapped school districts to surrender community control. The Rodel Foundatin, Eli Broad (ex-director of Notorious AIG) and their corporate partners have dominated education discussions in our state and marginalized less-powerful voices that might better advance community needs.

Diane Ravitch, assistant Secretary of Education for presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and formerly an advocate for such schemes, has now reversed herself in the face of their sobering results. Ravitch now concludes that high-stakes testing, “utopian” goals, “draconian” penalties, school closings, privatization and charter schools don’t work. She writes that “[t]he best predictor of low academic performance is poverty–not bad teachers.”

Today, it was announced that Delaware and Tennessee are two of the eventual 16 state winners of the “Race to the Top” competition and, along with it, $100 million in funds. Now, when government joins with communities to support their needs, that’s great. But when the government foists a corporate agenda on public education, that’s real tea party material. It remains to be seen, much in the same manner as the recent Health Care package just signed by President Obama, if the “Race to the Top” will more benefit the community or the corporations. There has certainly been very little real debate locally, other than a column I wrote, “So-called school reform serves corporate ends,” back in April 2008, and some recent remarks in Delaware Liberal blog.

Back to the arts, many folks say we should avoid overt messages. It’s amazing how corporate sponsors don’t seem to feel that way.

Brainwashed

2010-03-21T16:40:00.003-04:00

Earlier today I was watching CSPAN with my sister and my housemate. CSPAN were airing a countdown to the House Health Care Bill debate, showing the motley protest in front of the Capitol and taking calls.

One call especially caught my attention. The caller, who was opposed to the bill, declared: “Health care is a privilege, not a right.” He didn’t sound the least bit crazy. He was just stating what he felt was a natural born fact. In this world, the caller figured, some had and some didn’t. He didn’t happen to have health care at the moment, but he didn’t trust the government to do it right. If he got sick and died, he figured that was the way it was supposed to be. It was what he deserved.

“Poor deluded man,” my sister said. “Society’s really brainwashed him.”

“Did he really say health care is a privilege?” my housemate asked in disbelief. “Did he actually say that?”

“Why are Americans such idiots?” I lamented.

The caller was an easy guy to laugh at, but on the way home, I thought about it.

I have my own health care horror story of sorts. It’s quite a tale of woe, but I’ll give you the short version here. Almost exactly three years ago, I tried to push my car out of a snow drift. Afterwards, I felt a pain above my right knee. After the pain persisted for more than a week, I had the leg x-rayed. The doctor said I hadn’t broken anything and gave me some naproxen, saying whatever it was should clear up in a week.

It didn’t. Gradually, my body fell apart until it got to the point I could only get around with a walker. (Actually I probably should have used a wheelchair, but I stubbornly refused. Pride, you see.) I was in mind-numbing pain. But somehow I always managed to get my butt out of bed and go to work — even as my legs grew as twisted as the roots of an old oak tree.

It eventually took four surgeries over one year and six days to rebuild me. I avoided the surgeon’s knife for as long as I could. Part of the reason was because I’d never had surgery before and hadn’t spent much time in a hospital since the day I’d been born. But the main reason was because I was scared to take the time off of work and admit I was that broken.

Because once I admitted that, I was vulnerable and I knew it.

I’m better now, though not perfect. I walk with a cane and a rolling limp, but at least I’m not in pain. But my sickness cost me my job — and in a little over a month — my health insurance.

And even though I don’t want to admit it, there’s a part of me that believes, just like that CSPAN caller would, that somehow this is all my fault. It wasn’t just my body that failed; it was me. And my personal failure was a drag on everyone else’s premiums and so it was right I was kicked to the curb. Sickness is expensive, y’know, even evil, stifling sacred profits. I was the bad guy.

It’s hard to live in a country all your life and not be brainwashed — at least a little. Yes, I can be an American Idiot, too.

***

Right now Congress is debating the Health Care Bill. They’ve been at it for at least 90 minutes. (Or they could be done. I don’t know. It was too nerve-wracking to watch in real time. I’ll check the post-mortems in morning.) Hopefully, they will do the right thing and pass the bill. It’s far from perfect, but at least it’s in the right direction.

Someday in this country healthcare will no longer be a privilege; it will be a right that seems just as natural born as the status quo does today. And someday a serious illness will no longer make you feel like you are somehow less of a human being — and that you should be thankful for whatever little you get.

Giving It Up for the Future

2010-03-14T18:29:00.016-04:00

The late two-time Delaware Poet Laureate David Hudson died a bitter man back in 2003. There were many reasons for his bitterness, some legitimate and some fallacious. Fallacious or not, one of those sources of his bitterness stemmed from the notion that poetry could have a role in effecting our social and cultural environment. The fact that he stopped actively being a poet in his later years and turned to political activity was an indication of his frustrations. Politics has a better chance of affecting change than poetry. So much so had Hudson turned his back on poetry that nearly a quarter century after giving up on poetry, many were surprised that he had ever publicly made a name for himself as a poet. Of the few who had remembered he’d been Poet Laureate, there were those who absolutely hated David Hudson to the extent of publicly voicing glad tidings at his death. In the end the bitterness got spread around and the result on our social and cultural environment was to receive bitterness’ small dose of poison.

Like Hudson, I’ve given up writing poetry for many of the same kinds of reasons in favor of prose, which judging from the near total lack of sales of my literary art contributes to my own bitterness. My point here is that I’m really not bellyaching over my own failure as a literary artist. I’m just not writing fiction any longer for those who don’t appreciate my effort. I’m still writing fiction, however, and I’m writing it for the future, when probably none of us will be around anymore. It is the future, after I’m long gone, that my work may –– MAY –– find the kind of success for which I intended it today. Its relevancy may –– MAY –– be revealed in hindsight, but if it isn’t then my life’s work is just as dead as I will be, but its carcass will still collect dust on the library shelf until it also turns to dust.

Douglas Morea was quite correct in equating art and religion. The same sensitive nerve in us that’s touched by art, I suspect, is the same nerve that compels us to at least acknowledge our spiritual capacities. Another dimension of this nexus between, especially, poetry as a form of art and religious experience is its potential for prophecy; and by this I mean the capacity to reveal the visions of the world we see around us into some form of the truth about things and events so that more of us can perceive and understand our environment. If we dare to take our poetry and fiction to the people, then we’ve committed a social act. In spite of our individual conceits and fragile egos, when we write poetry for social consumption we’re doing more than just farting in the bathtub to enjoy the rich bouquet that bubbles to the surface from having digested some essence of the world we experience around us.

In the context of our own local literary history, I often wonder about the effect our literary artists have had on the community in which we live and breathe today. Had Delaware poet and journalist Elizabeth M. Chandler in her short but productive career, and to a certain extent John Lofland, not written literary art in the early 19th century revealing the plight of those held in bondage, might Delaware, officially a “slave state,” have instead joined the Confederacy and not been the gateway to freedom we became for those escaping slavery along the Underground Railroad? Had not George Alfred Townsend written The Entailed Hat after the Civil War, revealing the role played by Patty Cannon, serial killer and kidnapper of Black people in order to make money selling them into slavery, would the Ku Klux Klan have become even a stronger force in Delaware than it had? Had the late 19th century humorist Max Adeler’s vivid depiction of a brutal public whipping in New Castle of an elderly Black woman in Out of the Hurly-Burly been more widely accepted, might there have been a chance that Delaware would not have become the “Jim Crow” state it became up to the early 1960s? Might we have been spared the ugly public lynching that occurred at Price’s Corner in 1903, or might lynchings in Delaware have become epidemic as they had in so many other of our United States? Had not the writings of Alice Dunbar-Nelson inspired many of our local Black citizens to believe in their capacity for excellence, would we have produced a Clifford Brown or Louis Redding? Had not local early 20th century novelists Henry Seidel Canby, Christopher Ward, and Charles Wertenbaker shown us in their novels Wilmington’s cultural barrenness, might not those who followed them, including future Poet Laureates David Hudson and Jeanette Slocomb Edwards, have striven to engender a more rich cultural environment for the city?

And what about us, those of us who have been writing literary art over the last forty years? How will we have improved our community, socially and culturally? How might we be remembered? Or as some suggest, should our literary contributions even deserve to be remembered? Whether we like it or not, we’ve already made our contribution to the future because we’ve been making a contribution to the present all these years. And the final question, if our literary contribution is forgotten, what kind of social and cultural landscape will remain for future generations?

Following Following What Money

2010-03-07T13:17:00.002-05:00

As a poet of some accomplishment, I am poor and little known. Why? Personal history involving no public issue aside, I have simply failed to find an audience. That's show-biz for ya!

When it comes to public funding of the arts, I would love to be able to say I'm confused. But I'm not: instead I'm ambivalent. Would that I were confused, as then I'd be less responsible for my perplexity. Of course I want you to hand me money to write a poem! But, who pays the piper calls the tune. Then again, the tyranny of the marketplace didn't bother the Beatles or Gone with the Wind. But the government? Okay, we've got a good history on that in the USA in the 20th century, but will the luck hold? Oh sure, government for the people, but who are the people? If a writer cries out in the wilderness even over a loudspeaker, and still no one's listening, did he utter anything? And at public expense?

Hey, but why not think of art as religion? Instead of endowments maybe I should get a property tax break like the church, and say throw in franking priveleges too. After all, religion and art are sisters in spirituality. Which would-- oops!-- make government funding of the arts a violation of the separation of church and state? And I'd lose the right to endorse a candidate. Or if not, as a poor little-known poet I would have to compete with St. Patrick's Cathedral, claiming on my application form, "I declare my No. 2 pencil. I um, well... sorta write poems with it..."

Thank God We've Got a White President

2010-03-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

In response to "Between Barack and a Hard Place," I voted for Barack Obama for President, and would do so again today. He is a credit to his race-- as a white man myself I'm proud he's one of us, and of course as a black guy he's damn good too.

Yes, Obama has his work cut out for him: he must find a way to be "white" in some essential cultural sense, despite his visual image, which cannot hide behind his leveled American-English accent. Nor can he grow a comely beard like ugly Lincoln, or find strong sons, like FDR, to lift him legless over the gulf of polio.

Is hatred a fixed stone, or a wiley beast? As any President, Obama will have his array of enemies, and for the standard legion of reasons. And what do enemies do? Anything available. If religion, race or gender is available, have at it! Thus there is more racism than there are racists, more sexism that sexists, more narrow-mindedness than narrow-minded people. Most hatred is convenience, and President Obama is convenient.

Make a Party Outa Lovin'?

2010-03-04T10:34:00.003-05:00

Should we make a sport out of poetry? I smell morality issue in that question. Who was it-- Merle Somebody? -- forgive my ignorance-- singing an objection to making a "party out of lovin'?" Well, I do my best not to be any kind of snob, and so have no objection to any partying in the human race, provided all participants are self-possessed volunteers. The greatest sin an idealist can commit is to render the world down into his own image.

Let us grant for argument's sake that competitional poetry is a steaming crock. Well, what of it? There is no story till a shadow crosses the sunny valley. Even in an ivory tower the writer is a barn shoveler first and finally. No manure, no job. No job, no shoveler. Even Hercules was not above stable duty. I am talking high literature here, by the way.

And what of appealing to posterity? There is no way to know who among us will be among the select anointed a century hence. Even if all the computers do not crash, nor all the hard copies crumble from paper acid, to dream of literary immortality will still be to dream of having your head frozen in liquid nitrogen, on the chance the yet-unborn will have nothing better to do than revive you. I say lick your chops for supper instead, or for winning a slam.

Competition and Canonization

2010-02-28T17:54:00.023-05:00

With the possible exception of slam poetry events, I have never favored poetry competitions. I simply don’t believe poetry should be a sporting event. During those kinds of contest, the person who has won has usually done so by figuring out how to win, which has less to do with poetry than figuring out what the judge(s) want. Sometimes the winner is awarded a “sympathy” vote as a means to encourage someone who may have potential or dedication. In any case, competition produces only one thing, sometimes in abundance, which is simply “losers.” How many brag they came in second?

Even when an author or poet is attempting to get an award as a result of impressing a single judge, the only other outcome besides earning an award on merit alone is expecting a judge’s discriminating viewpoint or narrow criteria. I’ve always considered cooperation a better device than competition when it comes to building some kind of literary presence in a flagging cultural environment.

I’ve heard the term “all -inclusiveness” bandied about only to degenerate into internecine hierarchies which tend to get little done to get authors and poets published, or get them publicity outside certain insular circles.

Ultimately, all writers and poets, in spite of the protective and insecure ramparts of narcissism that enables them to feel safe, want it remembered that their work had some positive impact upon those around them. They may like the reassurance that 100 years from now their work will be subjected to discovery on some dusty library shelf or quaint corner bookstore; that their work will stand alone once more in some distant future. And “stand alone” is right -- alone and standing in someone’s temporal imagination.

I wouldn’t want to be the subject of that fate, not after all the work I’ve done. I would rather have been a part of something, to have had my work and the work of my contemporaries and those who came before me and those who’ll come after me part of something more tangible, more accessible, and more lasting. Something that was the product not of competition but of cooperation. Something like a local canon.

The Canon has begun to be subjected to globalization. The fiction of more international authors has been showing up, for example, in the pages of The New Yorker. Latin American authors like Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar have entered canonical consideration, as with the current excitement regarding the works of Roberto Bolaño, and Paco Ignacio Taibo for the more left leaning. As we become a more bilingual country, Spanish literary works become more relevant. In another area, science fiction has compiled a canon of works that is being slowly recognized by academia, and Black literature has always maintained a canon of literary works which struggles to find its role in the American canon of literature. It is the cross currents among these canonical works that we begin to understand better the story of the lives of people within the context of our social and cultural history.

The same role can be assigned to local or even regional canons of literature. Surely there is relevancy from these deep inner workings of American poets and authors who, while not achieving the same kind of success or the same kind of academic scrutiny, have proven their influence and contribution to those considered to have stood tall and alone in academic America’s literary landscape.

In a real sense, globalization has brought us a new spectacle. In the form of new literary works from diverse sources, our culture is displaying a greater effervescence. Like the head on a fresh cola or brew, each interlocking bubble is an entire canon, supportive of each other and expanding into a crackling of new knowledge and experience into a spray of that which refreshes. Pardon the metaphor but it cuts to the chase.

In the grand scheme of things, should the dynamic just described characterize the real world, then we ought to get in on the party. What we are and have been is one, or more, of those bubbles. We can contribute to the new effervescence by first becoming conscious of our local canon and supporting its consecration by academia, through constantly evolving public awareness, but also by mandate.

Institutions of public education are part of our government and we can use government to change and improve the situation. We can ask our state legislators to pass, and our governors to sign, laws that require local literature be taught in public schools of all levels. Perhaps in conjunction with a national effort that provides the extra jobs, local literature can be made more accessible to those who’ve created it over the years. Maybe it begins with us. Perhaps it’s waiting for the right time of our own making. Perhaps we should advocate a national effort at infrastructural rediscovery, beginning with our own literature and its place in our history.

Let's Put Our Heads Together

2010-02-22T12:05:00.004-05:00

Let us put our heads together, and see if we don’t find our shoulders put to the same wheel of progress. By “us” I mean all who consider themselves part of the progressive community, whether they are from the arts, organized labor, community organizations, the blogosphere, non-profits, or the rest of civil society. How put our heads together? Add your comments at Broken Turtle Blog.

Now, I’m not saying that the verbal fisticuffs at many local blogs don’t exhibit some vigorous thinking-on-one’s-feet, but the Broken Turtle Blog, with its well-crafted commentary on arts and politics, has some of the most thoughtful writing in the Delaware Valley, if I may toot our own horns. Sure, there is some high-quality word-smithing in some of the other blogs, not to mention in the News Journal, Delaware Today, Out and About, and some academic organs in our state. Hell, we on the blog team at Broken Turtle have written for most of these fine publications. But the Broken Turtle Blog takes on the topics those outlets cannot or will not touch, from the corporate domination of the arts, to the claustrophobic pettiness of Delaware’s culture, to the clueless snobbery of would-be progressives.

In four months, the Broken Turtle Team of Steven Leech, Phillip Bannowsky, Franetta McMillian, and Douglas Morea has broken new ground and struck some hidden veins of contention, some of gold and some that bleed.

For example, right from the start in Literary Anemia, Steven Leech challenged the homogenized national market in books with a call for a revival of local literature. Then he illustrated the theme with Discovering Local Cultural Mythology, where he unlocks the roman-a-clef Love’s Pilgrimage by the original muckraker Upton Sinclair, about how poet Harry Kemp ran off with Sinclair’s wife when they all lived in Arden, Delaware. Leech reviews Mark McGurl's new book, The Program Era in Casualties from the Fast Track, adding to McGurl's work his own take on the commoditization of art. Leech takes on the establishmentarian Brandywine Tradition in Why We Should and How We Can Preserve Our Local Literatures, Part One, about the families that have defined the limits in Delaware’s economic and cultural life for a century, and he follows up with Part Two, which deals with the one-time alternative source of literary funding, the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal. Leech follows up in Following What Money There Is to explain the continuing difficulties of re-establishing state support for artists after the privations of WWII and the degradations of McCarthyism from the 50s to today.

Phillip Bannowsky’s inaugural column announced Dreamstreets Archive, the impressive store of three decades of progressive literature and art in the Delaware Valley. He introduced his now continuing refrain about the responsibilities of artists, as members of civil society, to assert their citizenship in Toward an Ecology of Local Literature. The theme is expanded in Bannowsky’s critique of corporate control of arts funding in Arts and Civil Society on Maggie’s Farm. Bannowsky reprints his column from Op-Ed News on Avatar and the Destruction of Haiti to illustrate the limitations of corporate-dominated art when addressing solidarity with the indigenous of the earth or other planets.

Douglas Morea praises the Dreamstreets Archive in his spare but pithy Thanks and Good Goin'!, observing that “this visit to memory lane is more importantly a trip to the future.”

In Telling Stories, artist and critic Franetta McMillian attempts to answer the question, “How might progressives learn to tell better stories? For one thing,” she answers, “don’t be snobs.” In our latest column, Between Barack and a Hard Place, McMillian sympathizes with President Obama as a high-achieving African American held to a near perfect standard of the king’s English and suggests, “if Obama had affected the folksy, befuddled persona of say, George W. Bush, during his campaign, he would have never been elected.”

Progressives have to believe the wheel of life rolls toward peace and a cooperative commonwealth. Join your words to the common effort at the Broken Turtle Blog.

Between Barack and a Hard Place

2010-02-10T12:46:00.005-05:00

Last Saturday during the forced downtime of Snowmageddon Part 1, my mother and I were discussing President Obama’s recent woes. “Why don’t they just leave that man alone and let him do his job?” Mom asked. “How come they have to pick apart everything he says? Don’t they know he’s only human?"

“Well Mom,” I replied, “it’s because he’s President and not only that, he’s the first Black President, so of course they’re going to pick apart everything he says.”

She heartily agreed.

During her highly anticipated (and compensated) Tea Party keynote, Sarah Palin derisively referred to Obama as a “charismatic guy with a teleprompter” and a “law professor at a lectern” as if being charismatic and having a formidable intellect were somehow undesirable qualities to have in the leader of the free world.

But, ironically, these are precisely some of the qualities that make Obama such a perfect opponent for Palin and her compatriots — or indeed make him an opponent at all. Because if Obama had affected the folksy, befuddled persona of say, George W. Bush, during his campaign, he would have never been elected. Seriously. Think about it. If Obama (like Mary Poppins) hadn’t been nearly perfect in every way, if he hadn’t gone to Harvard, made Law Review, had an expert command of the English language, many voters would have never given him a second look.

Even though Obama doesn’t like to highlight his race, the fact that he is Black immediately places him under incredible scrutiny. Whether he likes it or not, his words are never entirely his own. When Barack Obama speaks, many Americans don’t see just a man speaking, they see a Black man speaking and his words are parsed with all the unspoken baggage that fact brings with it. He can’t, for instance, make a grammatical error, and have it just be an innocent (and maybe even an endearing) mistake. For some that error may just prove what they unconsciously have believed all along: that’s he’s Black, ignorant and therefore unfit for his office.

Being a Black woman who’s spent most of her life in extreme minority situations, I am quite familiar with that kind of pressure. From an early age, my parents taught me that it was not enough to merely be good; as the only Black kid in the school for much of my academic career, I had to be the best. So-called Black English and slang were discouraged even during casual family gatherings. If you didn’t learn how to properly read, speak and write the King’s English, the cruel White world was never going to give you a chance. If you dressed sloppily, had even a hair out of place, no one would bother trying to see your true potential. In short, you had to be perfect — just to have a crack at being human.

My lack of an obvious “ethnic” accent and command of standard English has allowed me to do some pretty amazing things like attend excellent schools, publish in an elite academic journal and do a two-hour telephone interview with a local skinhead with him never suspecting he was speaking with the enemy. It’s also gotten me labeled as uptight and elitist. (“You actually spell-check your e-mails?” a co-worker once asked me in disbelief.)

Similarly, President Obama’s considerable strengths cut both ways. The qualities that helped get him elected, namely his exceptional oratorical skills and quick mind, also get him labeled intellectual, elitist and out of touch with the people, even though before the sales of his books, Obama was a man of relatively modest means.

Recently Obama has been letting his hair down, speaking in his shirt sleeves, using more casual diction in his speeches in an effort to prove that yes, he hears us. But even this more populist Obama chooses his words deliberately and is keenly aware of the effect his language has on his image — which is as it should be. The President of the United States is not your beer buddy; he’s President and should carry himself as such. But I also suspect he knows — whether he likes to discuss it or not — that as a Black man his every word and deed are being watched and that even on a bad day, he has to give 120% just to break even.

Following What Money There Is

2010-02-07T15:39:00.005-05:00

In Delaware author Victor Thaddeus' unpublished novella "Leo Rex," from the late 1930s, there is buried in it the suggestion that there ought to be, and very well could be, a U. S. Department of Arts and Culture, which would enjoy equal status with the Departments of State, Treasury, Interior, Commerce, and War as part of the President's Cabinet. This was not a notion that Thaddeus held alone. Many, who, like Thaddeus, were members of the various Federal Arts, Writers’, Theater, and Musicians' Projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during FDR's Administration in the late 1930s, thought those projects might evolve into a new United States Department of Arts and Culture. After all, many developed countries have Ministries of Arts and Culture that serve in the highest echelons of government, including the former Soviet Union and Cuba. Why not in the United States, the most "developed" country on the planet?

While the FWP (Federal Writers' Project) did not accept works of fiction, Thaddeus' novella was accepted as a piece for a dramatic adaptation for the local Theater Project. All those in the various Projects, whether they painted murals, wrote, worked in the theater, or played a musical instrument, got paid for their work. It was a real living.

The various Projects never got the opportunity to evolve into a Department of Arts and Culture. The Second World War came along, supplanting the WPA and gobbling up a lot of budding artists, writers, and cultural workers into the Draft, and the idea of such a noble seat in the President's Cabinet evaporated.

After the War, soldiers came home war-weary to social problems endemic to peacetime conversion, to the launching of the "baby boom," and to a slowly growing social and political paranoia that would blossom into a Cold War that would bury any serious cultural endeavors in a heap of McCarthyite, HUAC-driven cultural conformity and emotional mass apathy. Television put people to sleep in what former FCC Chairman Newton Minow in 1961 would call a "vast wasteland." For many, Minow’s warning was a wake-up call to the plight of our country's cultural health.

In 1965 the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) was created by an act of Congress and in 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act was enacted, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was founded in 1970. Finally, after nearly a quarter century of mind-numbing 1950s cultural vacuity, some sort of public funding for the arts was established. Though not on the scale that the WPA had funded and supported the arts, the establishment of these institutions did coincide with the cultural flowering of the counter-culture. The multiple events may have sent nascent right-wingers of the day into a lather.

The Roe v. Wade decision from the Supreme Court in 1973 provided the opening wedge issue that galvanized the right wing for the culture wars that have been raging ever since. Things sprung into high gear in 1981 when Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish the NEA, but it gave right wingers like the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina the claim that they didn't want their tax money paying for public programming of the kind or content they disapproved. Incrementally, they made enough reductions in public funding for public broadcasting to lead to the interminable fund-raisers being broadcast on public radio and television today which drive many viewers and listeners back to that vapid vast wasteland.

Funding for the arts is a different matter. According to my experience and from what I've observed at close range from other arts organizations, public funding provides only enough money to place an organization into a fund raising-mode, so that the organization is spending valuable time and effort raising the remainder of the funds needed to produce artwork. For individual artists, of whatever discipline, public funding is usually a pittance, even with the largest awards. And it has been my experience, regardless of the quality of the writing itself, that one must be careful of what one writes about. What it all means is that for the individual artist, keep that day job, and for arts organizations, be prepared to put some arts projects on the back burner in order to spend time and effort scrounging around for patronage. This is a far cry from the kind of funding and support established during the New Deal.

For funding of artists, writers, thespians, musicians, and composers, as well as for organizations of and for artists of all kinds, a Brand New Deal is needed; maybe even one which some conservatives in "red states" or under the spell of the "Tea Party" can accept for whatever positive cultural contribution they can make to their constituents. Regardless of whatever reaction might come from the reactionaries, might this be a relevant issue for all artists, writers and poets, thespians, and music makers to adopt and make an effort to achieve? Or might it be better to keep that day job and spend that spare time leftover from the creation of artwork to go around begging for patronage from the fat cats?

Telling Stories

2010-01-31T18:13:00.004-05:00

Obama, and anyone else even the tiniest bit left of center, have had a tough time lately. Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts destroyed the Democrats’ so-called super-majority in the Senate putting already tenuous health care reform legislation on life support. So much for Ted Kennedy’s legacy. Then the Supreme Court decided that corporations, being the immortal fictitious superpersons that they are, are entitled to as much free speech as they can buy. Given the size of some of their coffers that’s quite a lot. Much more than Joe the Plumber or Betty the Waitress could afford.

I’m not exactly sure what those five Supreme Court justices were thinking, but the reasons for Scott Brown’s victory have been analyzed to death. Basically, Brown won because he told a better story while his lackluster opponent didn’t bother to tell a story at all. He presented himself as a man of the people, who drove an old pickup truck, who could show those corrupt do-nothing Washington insiders a thing or two. He promised to reign in government spending, lower taxes and kill the health care reform bill. Somehow this would produce jobs and security for everyone. Now you might argue that doesn’t make any sense, but Brown’s campaign told a story that made it feel right and people tend to vote with their guts more than their heads.

Progressives lack a cohesive and, more importantly, a compelling story. We tend to think speaking truth to power means providing people with the facts. If we only make the right information available, people will have no choice but to come to the logical and right conclusion. But speaking truth to power is more than spewing data; it is speaking the truth in a way people will hear it. They hear things like “public option” and fall asleep, but tell them you’re going to take away their “freedoms” and their ears perk up and their blood starts boiling.

How might progressives learn to tell better stories? For one thing, don’t be snobs. It’s amazing to me how many writers refuse to read some authors like Dan Brown or John Grisham on general principle. Well, why the hell not? It’s what people on the bus are reading. Don’t you want to be read?

The point is not to copy these authors word for word, or to flood the world with substandard literature (after all some stuff is popular because it’s actually good) but to discern the “rules” for constructing an engaging narrative for a general audience. People like to read about a black and white world. They like to read about people whose lives are more exciting than their own. They like snappy dialog without a whole lot of description. They like humor; they like pathos. They like good to triumph. They like a happy — or at least a fully resolved —ending.

More lessons in popular storycraft can be learned from watching top-rated TV shows, listening to the lyrics of country songs, etc. This is what holds peoples’ attention. Believe me, more people thought about the morality of torture watching Jack Bauer’s dark night of the soul on the last season of 24 than did reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side.

Watch and listen with an open mind — and learn the language that appeals to the masses. I once explained taxes to one of my more conservative colleagues in terms of tithing — and he got it. But I never would have come up with that analogy if I hadn’t taken the time to find out what tithing was.

Secondly, don’t be afraid to appeal to people’s emotions, specifically anger and fear. Anger and fear are mind killers for sure, but they also run deeper than blood. Many PSAs against health care reform play to people’s fear of change. You might not be able to keep your doctor. You will be forced to change health plans. You will lose what little security you have. Very few ads have spoken to the fear of having no health insurance at all. What if you break your arm, can’t pay rent for a couple of months and lose your apartment? What if you lose your job and your health insurance and you have Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure? What if you get cancer (Delaware still has one of the highest cancer rates in the nation) and lose your job and insurance? Should you be so afraid in the world’s lone superpower? Should you be so fearful in a nation that bills itself as the greatest country on earth?

See? Sure beats talking about the “public option.”

Avatar and the Destruction of Haiti

2010-01-16T11:08:00.006-05:00

Reprinted from OpEdNews.com

After the usual right-wing vapors over the anti-capitalist and pagan implications of David Cameron’s Avatar, rightist David Brooks has expropriated the left-wing critique of the film as a White Messiah fable. Echoing Haiti-born Ezili Dantò’s widely disseminated critiques of the film, Brooks castigates the film’s hypocrisy that, while it fulfills what he calls the “formula” of “loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex,” it is a “racial fantasy par excellence,” in the tradition of Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai. In such films, Brooks reminds us, “[n]atives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” The controversy has spread and is now the subject of an AP article by Jesse Washington.
More . . .

Why We Should and How We Can Preserve Our Local Literatures (part 2)

2010-01-03T07:39:00.002-05:00

I recently read Susan Cheever’s book American Bloomsbury about the Transcendentalist writers Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville and how they interacted with one another, including others, like their muse Margaret Fuller. Among those others on the fringes of their circle, the names Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe also turned up in Cheever’s book. Whitman holds some connections for local current literary artists. Whitman lived out his final years in nearby Camden, New Jersey, where he’s buried. About 25 years ago a number of local poets, myself included, were invited to read at the Whitman graveside after local poet Douglas Morea earned an award from the Whitman Society in Camden. Poe had already earned an honored place in the history of Delaware’s literature, having interacted with his local contemporaries John Lofland and Robert Montgomery Bird.

The story of these local connections to the web of America’s literary history are buried deep in books which are rarely consulted for the purpose of making these kinds of local connections. These connections do not hold the same status as our local art history as, for example, Howard Pyle’s connection with Felix Darley before him and with the Wyeths and the artists of the Brandywine Tradition after him. Darley, who lived and died in Claymont, Delaware, illustrated works by James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clement Clarke Moore, and Charles Dickens, thus finding for him an auxiliary place in America’s literary canon. This is a story that enjoys a firm place in the history of American art.

Our institutions of learning—our schools, colleges and universities—have an important role to play in preserving those legacies of our culture as well as in teaching them to succeeding generations. Yet, when it comes to filling in these local connections, educational institutions ignore what surrounds them in the communities in which they reside in favor of teaching about the greater figures who are easily served up in the lofty annals of the “canon.” In my opinion, this policy amounts to academic laziness justified by academic snobbery. Even though I am attempting here to shame academia at whatever level into changing their educational policies and I am trying to make the case for teaching elements of our local culture by whatever means I can present, I do not expect things will change. Why should they listen to some raving bumpkin like myself? Perhaps it’s time to take things into our own hands.

For those who wish to rediscover our local literatures, especially in those regions of the United States that have a history that is older than other regions and, therefore, closer to the origins of our earliest cultural history, here are some suggestions on how to continue the process of a kind of proletarian rediscovery of a nearly lost aspect of American literature.

A good first place to look is in the various state Tour Guides that were compiled in the 1930s under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA performed some very detailed research into many subjects on a state-by-state basis. The Tour Guides are especially valuable if one can find the original manuscripts that got boiled down for the writing of the final published versions. Usually, a state college or university or perhaps a state historical society has archived these manuscripts. Another good place to look is to look for masters or doctoral theses about local literary figures that gather dust in the libraries of local universities. Searching out the older members of a local literary community is also a good idea because old memories can often provide clues and leads that will lead to surprising corners of our local literary stories.

With a good concerted effort, we, as current literary artists and interested persons, can rediscover on whose literary shoulders we stand and why the ground beneath our literary feet is important to know, understand, and appreciate.

Why We Should and How We Can Preserve Our Local Literatures (part 1)

2009-12-20T13:56:00.002-05:00

I first learned about the literary works of Delaware artist Howard Pyle when I was in junior high school or maybe the higher grades of elementary school. Pyle’s literary works were designed for child readers, many of them retelling older stories about Robin Hood and King Arthur, but some were original stories. For a long time I was led to believe that Pyle was the only literary artist Delaware ever produced. Sometime during my high school or college years I heard about the Milford Bard just before I learned that his name was John Lofland. I was led to believe that his work had been mired in a kind of 19th century parochial literary obsolescence and for a long time I didn’t even bother to find out anything about him. The only thing I learned about Lofland was his reputation, which was promoted as unsavory, and that was outside of any exposure to him in school.

Now, 45 or 50 years later, I’m still on my journey of discovery of Delaware’s literary past—closer to the end of it, I hope, than its beginning. Along the way I’ve discerned why Pyle was promoted over Delaware’s many other literary artists. Pyle was safe. No one would question the world around them as might occur after reading the serious works of Lofland and nearly all the marginalized local literary artists who followed him.

My journey of discovery has been a delightful one for me, discovering that those who populate Delaware’s literary past did not work in isolation. The names of known American literary artists like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane—just for starters—kept popping up in direct connection with those from Delaware who I began to conclude had been unjustly obscured. My delight was peppered with dismay regarding not only the relative unavailability of their works, but the general ignorance of their works by those who should actually have known better, namely those charged with the course of studies for our various educational systems. We can’t depend on local newspapers and magazines to maintain awareness of this segment of our cultural heritage. Unlike visual art and musical and theatrical events, literature does not have the same kinds of social connections. The consumption of literature, with the possible exception of poetry readings, is usually limited by the boundaries of a single press run and consumed within the privacy of personal space.

The more we remove ourselves from formally learning about our literary history and the substance of the literary works that accompany that history, the more superficial and the more vulnerable our cultural identity becomes. We’ve already lost so much. An example can be provided by an adjacent cultural project of mine, that of recovering Wilmington’s rich jazz legacy. It’s generally acknowledged that Wilmington produced one of the greatest jazz musicians who ever to pick up a trumpet, namely Clifford Brown, who is actually a product of many who contributed to the legacy that made his success possible. There had been so much material that could have demonstrated this legacy that contributed to Wilmington’s place in the American history of jazz, but so much of this material was never considered important and, as a result, was relegated to the local landfill by those who saw no importance in saving things like recordings made for broadcast in local radio stations, publicity photographs, copies of articles and handbills and other ephemera that would have told a richer and more lasting story than the sketchy and uncorroborated one handed down to us.

Regarding literary history, here’s another example: I once had a casual conversation with an octogenarian poet in Wilmington, the former Delaware Poet Laureate David Hudson, about Wilmington poet James Whaler, his poetry and his connection to Hart Crane. Whaler’s work has been completely forgotten. Of his two books of really stunning poetry, only a single copy of Hale’s Pond, which was praised publicly by Louis Untermeyer, can be found in the annex of the University of Delaware’s Special Collections. Whaler’s Green River, which was enthusiastically reviewed by Hart Crane, is not to be found in either the Wilmington or University of Delaware libraries. Had I not had that conversation with Hudson, who died seven years ago, I would have known absolutely nothing about Whaler and would not have had the opportunity to rediscover his work in order to share what I had discovered.

The longer we proceed with not preserving aspects of our cultural legacy, the greater the chance of loosing them forever and the more disconnected we get from ourselves as a community.

Arts and Civil Society on Maggie’s Farm

2009-12-12T23:44:00.007-05:00

Reconnecting Individual Plight with Common Struggle

Well, he hands you a nickel,

He hands you a dime,

He asks you with a grin

If you're havin' a good time,

Then he fines you every time you slam the door.

(“Maggie’s Farm,” by Bob Dylan)

Civil Society, which includes nonprofits, unions, and artists, needs a common vision that reconnects individual plight with common struggle nationwide. I was reinforced in this conviction by three articles that appeared Tuesday in my local paper, the News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware.

The first deals with the dearth in funding for Delaware non-profits, as reported by Mary Kress Littlepage, author of “Philanthropy in the First State.” According to the report, state non-profits “lack the organization, financial stability and sufficient support from foundations, corporations and individuals to handle the state's growing needs.” If this is true in tiny Delaware, U.S. banking capital and home to half the nation’s corporations, it is replicated, I am sure, all across the United States of Maggie’s Farm.

The second, an AP story by Brett Zongker, describes President Obama’s salutary interest in the arts, evidenced by White House performances, arts workshops there, and an infusion of stimulus funds into the arts sector, which, according to the article, “employs nearly six million people at a hundred thousand nonprofit art groups.”

The last, seemingly unrelated to the other two, actually strikes the common theme: the atomized approach to the human condition that focuses on individual plight rather than social solutions to that plight.

The story touts a visit by celebrity scold Bill Cosby, who brought his personal responsibility message to inner-city youth at Wilmington’s West End Neighborhood House. Author of "Come on, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors," Cosby asserted in an interview that "[s]ome people seem to use the fact that racism exists to create an inertia of entropy,” adding that “[s]ome 'poverty pimps' want us to not move to become unstuck."

Now, it is a recurrent myth that Black leaders from Frederick Douglas to W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, and Al Sharpton trade responsibility for victimology.

Not so fast on connecting “the Cos” to that myth. Maybe he agrees with Frederick Douglass in how taking individual responsibility can turn folks from “victims to victors”: "He who would be free must strike the first blow."

Striking the first blow is not the recommendation of Littlepage’s nonprofit study, which was prompted by the Public Policy Institute, an affiliate of the state Chamber of Commerce. It prescribes “more robust leadership so the nonprofit community can speak with a stronger voice to donors and local governments.”

Don’t expect John Taylor, formerly of the News Journal and now Institute Executive Director, to invite anyone to challenge corporate wisdom at the follow-up forum scheduled at the University of Delaware March 22 and 23.

Neither in community service nor in the arts may one “strike the first blow” without untoward consequences, even when one’s weapons are mere words, unless one speaks with an empowering common vision and powerful allies.

For example, while the Obama administration may have signaled a revival of state support for the arts, Obama appointee Yosi Sergant was blown out of his National Endowment for Arts job when he suggested that artists address health care, education, and the environment, after Fox News mouth Glenn Beck belched.

Similarly, the nonprofit ACORN, which pushed charity too close to empowerment, was entrapped, framed, and slandered by Fox and then unconstitutionally stripped of its funding by the Democratic-controlled Congress. At this writing, the U.S. Eastern New York District Court has just issued an injunction against the funding cut-off.

In both cases, when conservatives led the charge against a civil society of empowerment, liberals led the retreat.

Civil society, according to the London School of Economics “refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action,” distinct from “the state, the family, and the market,” but whose relation to state, family, and market remains “complex, blurred and negotiated.” It is essential to the workings of democracy. Negotiation and uncoercion are key.

The problem is that civil society in the USA is atomized and obsessed with individual victimization, if you will, counseling a foreclosed homeowner here, protesting prison conditions there, advocating for individual identities of race or gender, or writing a pretty lyric about dreams of roses blossoming in the ordure. As we have seen, when civil society challenges power, then state and market will turn from negotiation to coercion, which negates both civil society and democracy.

So how do we revive “Hope,” now foundered on bank bailouts, militarism, and astroturf tea parties? How do we move to a common vision, a common struggle, and a successful grassroots movement?

One model is what I have observed working and writing in Ecuador, a model adopted in various ways throughout Latin America. Civil society—unions, left parties, NGOs, women, gays, charities, liberation churches, artists—have developed a common vision, an alternative to the “neoliberal” triumphalism of big banks, captive political parties, and free market individualism. In fits and starts, they have made dramatic advances recently across the continent, with the voices of the poor now heard, their needs addressed, and a flowering of people’s culture.

It is time for local artists and writers to rebuild their roots in the community and to fulfill their role in civil society. Get your nickels and dimes from Maggie if you can, but unite to demand power to the people.
Sunday, Dec. 13 Update:
The News Journal dropped the other shoe Sunday with three op-eds and an editorial on the non-profit crisis, "indicative" according to the editorial, "of a 20th century sense of entitlement to donors based more on stated needs. . . than. . . an ability to get the mission accomplished as efficiently as possible. " Not too much about the sense of entitlement to bailouts for banks after wrecking the economy or to tax cuts for corporations who have outsourced jobs and accelerated the needs addressed by non-profits beyond their capacity to "get the mission accomplished."

Toward an Ecology of Local Literature

2009-11-29T21:28:00.007-05:00

What does a behemoth publisher like Bertelsmann AG, the German firm that owns Bantam, Doubleday, and Random House, have in common with an agricultural giant like Cargill, Inc.? Besides the obvious, that they are both transnational corporations, they both replace local harvests with bio-engineered invasives.

Unlike “frankensoy” shipped from China, of course, literature in this digital age does not leave a long carbon trail, unless China is where it is printed. Hence, I do not object to disseminating the multicultural garden sprouting from the soils of every bioregion or under the feet of our migratory human race. It’s a vital part of thinking globally.

What I object to is the silence, the engineered inability to sense the here and now, to lift one’s nose and sniff the rot in the local breeze. What does a neighborhood smell like when a bank owns all the politicians and peddles bunko credit? What does the water feel like as it slowly heats the proverbial frog?

Non bio-engineered local writers may ask, “If we don’t submit to altering our genetic codes, how will we earn our daily bread?"

We know how the current publishing model promotes only block-busters and their imitators, how books by unknown authors get but a few months to justify space on the global book shelves before being remaindered to the dollar store or extinguished in the shredder.

How much less might a local writer find a market, with his provincial interests in, oh, say, some biker tased and gunned-down by cops as he rolls forward vomiting on a city stoop and the attorney general whose dad is the Vice-President of the United States saying it’s OK or some black chicken catchers at a downstate farm replaced by machines after they sue for years of stolen wages? What local business or multinational corporation headquartered here would bankroll that sharp nose?

What state grants would do more than keep a non-bioengineered native writer chasing a perpetually receding horizon?

Here’s what we do. Local progressives activist: read and promote local literature and use it as an organizing tool. Reformist non-profits on the sugar-tit of corporate grants: utilize local literature to generate a common vision and uncommon strength. Local writers: turn from all that “how” of writing you get with MFAs and workshops to the “what’s going on” you get when you turn on your senses and engage with your neighbors. Using both cyberspace and local space, meet, collaborate, and forge deep alliances.

When each local community sows its political and cultural seeds in its own soil, we’ll weed out the corporate invasive strains and reap literature that’s alive and change we can smell, taste, and see.

Casualties from the Fast Track

2009-11-12T15:17:00.007-05:00

I recently read Mark McGurl's new book, The Program Era, about the effect graduate level creative writing programs in a growing number of colleges and universities have had on the availability of new fiction in the American literary market place. While there have been a number a good reviews, most notably in The New Yorker and Rain Taxi, I'm not going to add my two cents regarding McGurl's excellent insights. I will only say that McGurl has confirmed what I, as an unknown and largely unpublished novelist, have already long ago concluded: that the best way to successful publication is to have that "MFA fast track."
After I wrote my first novel back in the 1970s, the only literary agent I could find to consider my work was one to whom I had to pay about $200. After a period of time, he (or someone in his employ) read my novel and sent it back with a report. While the report was generally a good one, he admitted that he couldn't "place" it. Later I saw this same literary agent being interviewed on a national television program. He had some really nice rings on his fingers and I realized I had probably paid for one of those rings. Then I got it. I realized I was the rube.
I've now written six novels and have self published four of them in very small numbers at my own expense. After trying to find an agent after writing my second novel, querying every agent I could find from various listings, I realized that finding a literary agent was as difficult as trying to find a prospective publisher used to be. First I suspected that the role of literary agents was to screen out the plethora of aspiring new novelists on behalf of a diminishing diverse yet concentrated publishing industry, one that was looking to make more profits while scaling back on its costs of production. In this regard, I also realized that picking from the pool of well-trained creative writers provided by the MFA programs was a way of being assured of finding potentially lucrative products. I found this process a cynical way for the publishing industry to get students to actually pay, through their tuition, for the process of finding potentially worthy works for publication –– yet another cost saving measure.
I know at least four other novelists in my immediate community who have written novels. None of them have been successful, and by that I mean have not made any money from their labor. I absolutely refuse to believe their works are unworthy of success. Another local novelist, who had the MFA fast track and published a couple of monetarily successful novels from a mainstream publisher, turned her back on the local literary community except to acquire a few sycophants before moving away. This defines the dynamic between the money making profit hungry publishing industry in collusion with canonical oriented academia as suggested by McGurl’s The Program Era, and aspiring, yet stranded, local or regional novelists and fiction writers. It is the reason I advocate a new resurgence of local or regional publishing enterprises: to infuse new full bodied substance into an anemic national literature from the places from where we find inspiration, from the places where literary artists have aspirations, and for those places that ought to be in touch, through artistic works of all kinds, with our local cultural, social and historic environments. Such are the parts that truly constitute the sum of our national cultural identity.

Thanks and Good Goin'!

2009-10-29T13:35:00.002-04:00

As an official member of the Broken Turtle enterprise, and as one who has participated as writer and sometime editor in Delaware regional literary traditions going back to the beginnings of the Dreamstreets event, I should be quite an insider. Yet I am aloof, and always have been of my own accord wayward in my attachments and thoughts. (The preface of a recent local publication describes me as a "curmudgeon.") So I felt startled and grateful when I recently revisited the host of old material now available here, work of my own and that of old cohorts, much wonderful stuff that I'd long since forgotten. Phil Bannowsky and Steven Leech have done a wonderful deed in pulling such dust back into life. I can only hope that others will be so startled as well. An irony of the information age is that while it pushes the printed word aside, it simultaneously offers language and literacy a new center stage. Kids coming up now find it natural, some of us old-timers are still adjusting to the repackaging of whatever we find sacred. So this visit to memory lane is more importantly a trip to the future. Not a native Delawarean, and a relative latecomer to the region, I cannot personally relate as deeply as some to the innuendos of the locality (I'm a New York City boy, sorry), but I have been struck particularly, over the last 30 or so years, by one aspect of the local tradition: it has one foot in scholarship, and the other in the spontaneous culture of individual body and mind-- there is much voice in so many voices.

Dreamstreets Archive

2009-10-17T00:41:00.012-04:00

The bane of the small regional literary magazine is that the audience is limited to the readership of a very short run. This not only denies the authors and artists who produced it access to their audience, but it also denies the audience a chance to participate in the cultural expression of their world, a world “rapidly paved over with asphalt and vested interests,” as the Dreamstreets editors put in on the front page of Dreamstreets 7 (Beltane, May 1989).

Thus, when Steven Leech and I were scanning the Dreamstreets archive to make it available in an electronic form, I became increasing excited and proud. This was thirty years of cultural artifacts, restored to the community from the middens of oblivion. Many of the artists and writers appearing in this archive are flourishing today, Dreamstreets having midwifed the birth of their artistic careers. And this is what I am proud of. Along with Steven Leech, Franetta McMillian, e. jean lanyon, Douglas Morea, Chris Oakley, and Dana Garrett in various terms, I served on the editorial board of Dreamstreets for many years until its final edition, #50, in 2006. Steven Leech had been the executive editor in every production since Betty Tew edited #2 after Dreamstreets was founded by John Hickey and a cohort of visionaries calling themselves the Eschaton Writers in 1977.

On that original staff were Peter Barrett, Lew Bennett. Julio Bezerra, Herb Connor, Candi Costis, Mark Delmerico, Bruce Frye, Terry Golstein, John Hickey, e. jean lanyon (who was often co-editor in earlier years), Betty McCaughey, David Moyer, David Robertson, Carl Schlatter, Susan Smith, Leslie Turner, Floyd van Riper, Ed Wesolowski, Tom Watkins, Jim Zingheim, and Carson Zollinger.

At last, we present the Dreamstreets Archive at www.dreamstreetsarchive.com, accessible in a link from Broken Turtle Blog. We will soon add a trove of audio and possibly video files to the archive, so it is a living instrument.

Among the numerous artists and writers who have graced Dreamstreets’ pages, many are Delaware Division of the Arts grant recipients, Poet Laureates, a few recently departed and immortalized in our pages, some immortals from our region’s past, and many brilliant flashes of poetic starlight that might have been missed by the residents of Delaware’s small—some would say impacted—universe.

These writers and artists are largely progressive in the broadest sense, giving voice to the voiceless and empowering the powerless, and that, of course, made the publishing of Dreamstreets “downwind from chateau country” all the more extraordinary. Dreamstreets is a source of justifiable pride for the brave little phalanx who with it took a stand.

Discovering Local Cultural Mythology

2009-10-11T14:48:00.005-04:00

One magical thing any kind of artwork does is to serve to mythologize place. Locally, for example, the Brandywine Tradition artists have provided a second sight of the countryside just north of Delaware's border allowing us to see the Brandywine Valley through their artistic sensibilities. We are fortunate to have these art works with us, which preserve this transformative vision of our local mythology for our community. Both literature and visual art have served to provide greater significance regarding place as well as for their accompanying time frames, freezing them within our imagination. However, there are comparable examples from local literature that are obscured by their relative unavailability. Re-acquainting ourselves with our local literature can be quite rewarding because of its transformative social and cultural value. However, we don't always need to find this process in literature from local authors, even if their books had once entered the national literary arena. Occasionally a long out-of-print and nearly forgotten novel provides a true story enhanced by the vision of a literary artist, as well as a true story about other literary artists who once lived among us in an unique place; that unique place is a town in northern Delaware called Arden.

For a period of time, in the years before World War I, the American author Upton Sinclair lived in Arden. He used the proceeds from his novel, Love's Pilgrimage, to build a house that still stands there. The work of American poet Harry Kemp attracted Sinclair, who invited Kemp to come and live for a spell. Kemp, who was Sinclair's contemporary, was known as a "tramp" poet. Kemp rode the rails in his day, hanging out with the "Wobblies," or members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and transforming his own vision of working and struggling against economic poverty in America into his poetry.

In 1922, Kemp published his novel, Tramping on Life, which is actually a roman-a-clef about his travels. The novel includes the episode of his life in Arden, which he calls "Eden," and his interaction with Sinclair, who becomes "Penton Baxter" and wife Meta, or "Hildreth Baxter." Incidentally, Arden's founder Frank Stephens becomes "Alfred Grahame" in Kemp's novel.

The philosophy behind Sinclair's novel, Love's Pilgrimage, in part a tome to the notion of "free love," was put to the test in Arden, and to make a long story short, Kemp, or "John Gregory" as he refers to himself, ends his visit with Sinclair by running off to New York with Sinclair's wife Meta in a blatant exercise in "free love." In New York they join that community of pre-World War I progressives made up of Emma Goldman (Emma Silverman), Lincoln Steffins (Carruthers Nefflin), John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O'Neill and Djuna Barnes, among others.

I don't know about anyone else, but every time I visit Wilmington I'm fully aware that I walk the same streets that once Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald walked. It's as if I share a tiny bit in common with these venerable literary figures. They are not the only ones. There are others, like Kemp and Sinclair, who have seen and transformed this place where I live into their own visions that augment the annals of American literature for the greater fulfillment of American culture. When I read the works of those who also took up space in this place I call home, I have a better idea of how to look at my surroundings today, and, as spooky as it sounds, I wonder how closely what they felt about what they saw resembles how I see and feel about what I see here every day.

Literary Anemia

2009-09-18T10:20:00.002-04:00

     I keep encountering these anecdotal reports about the reading habits of people in just about every country and how they differ from those same reading habits of people in the United States. In other countries there are more diverse titles readily available than here, people tend to read books containing more substantial subject matter, there is a better awareness and appreciation of a particular country’s national literature, people still read the works of poets and authors even after they’ve died, you’re more likely to find more waitresses and truck drivers reading books more closely resembling literature than pop fiction, and so on. One indication of this phenomenon is when, on occasion, I see film footage or photographs of sidewalks in other countries where books are displayed in profusion for sale, or I hear of international cities that have more bookstores than do our cities.
     I don’t see anything wrong with people reading the latest romance or vampire fad novel, or latest MFA formula novel on some national bestseller's list, but I wish there were a few more folks like me who find better books to read from a really good library, like the one at the University of Delaware, or good books that must be ordered because so few people know about them.
     Reading sensibilities, especially for literary art, really strike me as being anemic in my community here in my part of Delaware. I suspect the same is true in many parts of the United States. Yet I know we are surrounded by a rich presence of both past and current locally produced literature. It’s just that it’s invisible. I’m convinced we’re not alone in our affliction with literary anemia. This condition is, I’m almost certain, a national affliction.
     Perhaps ever since the advent of television, American literature has become the nearly exclusive playground of insular academia. Pop fiction has largely supplanted literature, but good literature is also deserving of public appreciation. The implied message is if one wants to be exposed to real literature, then go to college. For me, as one who would rather write literature than pop, hack, or pulp fiction, I find this situation unacceptable for any number of reasons, notwithstanding the belief that people deserve access to our national literature as a normal part of our cultural life.
     A good solution to this problem is to begin to rebuild our national literature by rediscovering our regional or local literature. Past literary artists from Delaware had connections to national figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Paul Laurence Dunbar, H.L. Mencken, Hart Crane, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name only a few. These connections can certainly enhance the appreciation of the literary lives of these notables as well as of the literary contributions of John Lofland, Robert Montgomery Bird, Victor Thaddeus, James Whaler and John Biggs, Jr., who were not only the formers' counterparts from Delaware but who shared influences with them and, in their own right, once garnered national literary reputations in their own times. The latter still have important things to tell us through their literature; their literature still holds up under literary criticism and their works can still enhance not only local literary and cultural environments but also better our understanding of our national literature. After all, isn’t one of the true meanings of literature its timelessness in the context of today’s social and cultural dilemmas?
     The way to begin the process is to first create an awareness of local and regional literature, pointing out all the crosscurrents and shared influences with notables from our national literature. This is what Delaware's Dreamstreets project attempted to do since 1977 with its many publications, radio and television broadcasts, and public readings. I firmly believe that some pleasant surprises will be discovered in some far-flung corners of our country that will result in filling out the portrait of who we are as a country. Beyond this, we need to make sure examples of past local literature remains in print, even if only in a local or regional market, maximizing the public’s access to it.
     Finally, we need to make sure our local literature is taught in schools and colleges so it can be better appreciated and understood. Perhaps, as a result, we’ll discover our national literature is not anemic, that we can build a marketplace for more literary art, and in the process, learn a little bit more about ourselves as a nation.