Let's Put Our Heads Together

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.

Literary Anemia

     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.