Telling Stories

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

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)

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)

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

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

     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

          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.