From Greece: Putting What's Ours Back

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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.