The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • An Argument of Definition: A Definition of Argument; or, The Light Without the Light Within

    Have you ever read something and thought, I am not alone – there’s someone else here on the island with me. Someone has been speaking to me, and for me; I just maybe have not been listening in the right places. Personal essays are “arguments”; they are not “creative non-fiction.” On the contrary, the research papers are “non-creative non-fiction.” Yet whenever we write, we create. Creative non-fiction is a misnomer. All the world is an argument. Who wants to read an impersonal essay? What is an impersonal essay? One written by a machine? A bureaucratic procedure bulletin? There is no such thing as objectivity; everything we say and do, our every utterance, the clothes we wear, our music, how we cut our hair, betrays our beliefs, assumptions, values.

    The time is 8 in the morning. Let’s qualify that claim; it’s 8 in the morning somewhere. But I’m writing in the Web, the country where it’s always light out, or light in. In any case, the sun rose in the east quite early this morning, though I’ve no proof of that, not even empirical proof, since we’ve cloud cover again, and anyway I was asleep at the time, whatever time it was. I was awakened by my neighbor who is lately up at does, as e. e. cummings said, pounding away on the deck of the ark he’s building. I should qualify too that since we are north of the 45th parallel, it’s not quite accurate to say that the sun rose in the east. We’re almost to the summer solstice, when the sun here rises in the northeastern sky. Of course, if we were standing on the moon looking down, this idea of the rising sun would be a curious notion indeed.

    All non-fiction is a fiction of a particular community arguing to explain itself to itself in an inexplicable world. You’ve only to listen to any conversation for five minutes, Beckett said, to note inherent chaos. Beckett wrote fiction, primarily, and his fiction was also an argument aimed at explaining the inexplicable. And he did a pretty good job of it, too. Here he is, at the beginning of his novel Molloy (1951) , explaining what it means to be a writer (or a student, perhaps):

    “There’s this man who comes every week…He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money…When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week’s. They are marked with signs I don’t understand. Anyway I don’t read them. When I’ve done nothing he gives me nothing, he scolds me. Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know.”

    Things are falling apart in the Humanities. But the Humanities have been in crisis ever since the 1970’s, and for a century before, as evidenced by Ihab Hassan’s anthology Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution (1971). Everyone is starting to wear their pants rolled. No one is certain which person to use anymore. No matter what we may be doing, at any given moment, Basho said, it has a bearing on our everlasting life. In his preface to Liberations, Hassan said, “For more than a century now, the Humanities have suffered from a certain piety which even Revolution does not escape. True liberations engage some deeper energy, quiddity, or humor of life.” What should we be doing at any given moment? This is a question only the Humanities can answer. Then again, it’s a question only the Humanities could ask.

  • Books on Tee-Shirts: More on the Reading Crisis

    In Ken Auletta’s “Publish or Perish,” about the sale of books in print copy versus electronic format (New Yorker, April 26), Steve Jobs is shown unwrapping the iPad as a reversal of Apple’s stated position two years earlier, when Jobs said, according to Auletta, that “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore” (p. 24). It’s an interesting claim, one that might be supported by comparing movie products to audience viewing habits, for it doesn’t seem to matter how good or bad a movie is, people will still go to see it. Case in point, I travelled through “Hot Tub Time Machine” the other night, the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of a martial arts film I was invited to view years ago in Hollywood. The film was in the editing stage and a number of prospective investors had been invited to view it. After the viewing there was a discussion, and asked what he thought of the film, one viewer said, “Maybe we could cut it up and sell guitar picks.” The comment suggests an advantage of print books over electronic books; paper can be recycled for a variety of uses, but what to you do with a disaster in electronic format? You can hit the delete key, but your $9.99 evaporates like cotton candy without the stickiness.

    Jobs had gone on to say, in support of his claim that people don’t read anymore, again, according to Auletta, that “Forty per cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year” (p. 24). It’s interesting evidence. What does it mean to read less than a book? And even if we knew, since what Jobs is really talking about isn’t reading books but the sales of books, what difference does it make if the reader finished the book purchased? Too, if sixty percent of people in the U.S. read two or more books in a year, does the evidence support that “people don’t read anymore”? Reading statistics supporting evidence of a decline in reading can be found in the CQ Researcher report of Feb. 22, 2008, “Reading Crisis,” and in Caleb Crain’s December 24, 2007 New Yorker article “Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?” Crain’s article is listed in the CQR bibliography. Discussion regarding the decline in reading, drops in book sales, newspapers eliminating book reviews, and, indeed, the disappearance of newspapers (which we had some fun with in our post “What we will miss when newspapers disappear”), has since grown and continues to grow, but much of the discussion is about revenue as much as it is about reading. Increasingly the discussion focuses on price point and price elasticity of demand. At the same time, it may be that newspapers had simply grown too fat, ignored their audience, and that the decline in book sales may be the evidence of another bubble, for the price of new, hardback books may have reached a tipping point of price absurdity. And Auletta’s article suggests that electronic format is about price at least as much as it is about reading. For the general interest reader, and particularly for the beginning or returning reader, the decision to read or not may also be about anti-trust, for deciding what to read is as important as deciding what it’s worth.

    The other night, in a discussion about literature, we talked about movies. Why, someone asked, do we so readily go to see a movie, that, after all, begins, presumably, with a written script, while we avoid going to read a book? It’s a great question, for we don’t ask our spouse or date, “Hey, you want to read a book with me tonight?” A movie is an experience most viewers share, and the experience of viewing a movie in a packed house is different from watching the same film with a few folks spread out in an otherwise empty theatre. Movies are viewed in the dark, books in the light. Movie going is a social event; reading is a solitary affair – reading on-line seems to blur the distinction. Imagine a world where a television commercial is a trailer for an upcoming book: “In book stores this summer!” Then imagine long lines of book purchasers waiting to get their hardback copy signed by the travelling star; but did they all read the book? Or did they walk out half way thru. What 40% made the purchase? They may have already been non-readers, purchasing not a book to read, but a tee-shirt to prove they’d been to the concert and touched the star. And Jobs may have been interested in electronic book publishing all along, but why play his hand too soon? Why not catch Amazon and Google by surprise? It’s about the scoop, the hype, the cover. Hold still; I’m trying to read your shirt.

  • On the Noise of Argument, where John Cage meets Seneca; or, There is No Silence – Bound to Sound

    There is no silence, Seneca argues in his “On Noise.” Our ears are held hostage to the confusion of random noises, the shout in the street, or the whispers of demons when we are trying to fall asleep. Our head is a house of bondage to sounds. We can not turn off the noise.

    We are also bound to the noise of argument, the clashing of claims, the slashing evidences, and the war of warrants rumbling unseen like underground swells whose sounds reach the surface in shocks of recognition. Our proposals ring with self-interest. Our argument reveals what we value, where what we value is simply what we want, and where, paradoxically, what we want is not necessarily what is good for us. We ask for proof, but what is accepted as proof varies by community and shifts over time. We are like Doubting Thomas, led by our cultured incredulity to insist on touching the wounds, because we are afraid of metaphor, but that’s all we have – language is metaphor, no matter how cleverly we disguise it in objective, disciplined prose. We fear it because metaphor is magic: “This [bread] is my body.”

    To argue or not to argue, that is always the question, for walking away in hope for peace in silence and solitude we run into Hamlet’s wall, for we can enjoy the infinite space of a nutshell only if that space is not full of our own personal nightmares.

    All of life appears to be a single, linked argument, and argument is noise. We can’t turn it off, or even down, but even if we could, we ignore argument at our own peril, to our own detriment. But to listen to it 7×24 is deafening, where deafness isn’t the absence of sound, but sound’s surfeit, a flood of noise that crests the wall of reason.

    We turn to the experts for advice. Passionless, but full of fraternal ethos, the academics put forth their peer-reviewed journals, works cited, but the syllabus is the argument in the marketplace, the rubric their evidence, and the classroom their warrant. We pick our topic as if choosing a weapon, and begin our argument with an either or fallacy. The either or fallacy is the sergeant-at-arms in our contemporary house of sound-bondage: you are conservative, proceed to room 108, where you will find your beliefs folded nicely in the bureau drawers; you are liberal, your stuff is stacked neatly in room 209. Safely in our academic room for the night, we are lulled by a false sense of security, but we can’t get to sleep, for we can’t avoid the first person.

    We were told not to use the first person, and in that way we could escape our impressionistic impulses, but “This is incorrect,” Seneca says. “There is no such thing as ‘peaceful stillness’ except where reason has been lulled to rest. Night does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even when people are asleep they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.”

    A sudden pause as I’m reading Seneca’s “On Noise.” Was that a pun, that “sound mind”? For it expresses the point I am trying to make exactly. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” John Cage said in his “The Future of Music: Credo” (1937). But Cage was never bothered by the noise: “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”

    So to, our reading and listening of arguments: when we ignore the argument, we find it annoying, but listening to it carefully, we find that silence is denotative, noise connotative. One can easily imagine Cage living over Seneca’s bathhouse. In “Experimental Music” (1957), Cage suggests we should pay more attention to those arguments we did not intend: “…those who have accepted the sounds they do not intend – now realize that the score, the requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness, is not an accurate representation of how things are.” Ah, yes, for if we can’t accurately describe how things are, we can’t move on to how things should be.

  • Remembering Grubbs

    In 1968, I bought my first car, a 1956 Chevy, for 75 dollars, from my friend Gary Grubbs, who had been drafted. Gary went up to Fort Ord for Basic, came home and married his girlfriend, Kathy (he had also dated my sister Peggy for a spell in high school), then went up to Fort Lewis for AIT. Then he shipped out for Vietnam.

    He was wounded and sent to Japan for some R&R. We exchanged a couple of letters. He told me about the rains and how hard it was to keep his rifle clean. I told him I had a chance to join the Guard, and asked if he thought that was better than waiting to get drafted. He said the Army sucks either way. I didn’t hear from him for a time, then came the news he had stepped on a land mine, and was coming home in a body bag. He was 20 years old.

    His picture was in the influential article “One Week’s Dead,” in Life Magazine. The week was May 28 – June 3, 1969. Here’s a link to the article. You can page down and see Gary’s picture. His name is spelled Garey, and his hometown is listed as Denver, but I knew him as Gary and his hometown as Lawndale. He had a great sense of humor, and his smile in the Life photo shows it.

    Today is another Memorial Day, 40 plus years since Gary’s last one, and I just finished reading a paper written by one of my students, an Iraq veteran. The description and narration in the paper are clear and concise, the details shiny and telling; the dust and smells and heat and noise seep out of the writing. But there is no sensationalism, no politics or pity, no moral to the story, which tells of a single, isolated event. Every detail shows, every spark of dialog tells. Nothing is wasted; no word is wasted.

  • Losing Forrester Behind the Window

    What does one say about the movie critic disappointed that “Jaws” was a terrible romantic comedy? A good movie is a movie that achieves its goals; that the critic may not value those goals doesn’t seem relevant. Writing about “Finding Forrester” (2000) in the New York Times, for example, Stephen Holden hated it for its Hollywood formulas and false depictions of life, but since when has Hollywood valued real life? Holden writes, “Forrester appears to have had no life at all for the past four decades. (But if that’s the case, what on earth could he be writing about?).” This critical comment may say more about Stephen Holden’s imagination than it does about the movie. And Holden doesn’t even get some of the details correct: “When not pounding away at the typewriter, he [Forrester] spends his time peering through binoculars at a neighborhood basketball game in the playground below.” While Forrester does watch the games, he’s primarily a bird watcher when at the window with his binoculars. And Holden makes much of a J. D. Salinger comparison, but if Salinger was in the movie, I must have been out getting popcorn when he appeared.

    Roger Ebert was more generous, and approaches the film on its own terms: “The movie contains at least two insights into writing that are right on target. The first is William’s advice to Jamal that he give up waiting for inspiration and just start writing. My own way of phrasing this rule is: The Muse visits during composition, not before. The other accurate insight is a subtle one. An early shot pans across the books next to Jamal’s bed, and we see that his reading tastes are wide, good and various. All of the books are battered, except one, the paperback of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which looks brand new and has no creases on its spine. That’s the book everyone buys but nobody reads.”

    Emanuel Levy, writing in Variety, called the script “extremely old fashioned.” Of course! That’s what the makers were after, yet Laura Miller, in Salon, calls it a “farrago,” and dislikes it for not being the movie she wants it to be. But at least she doesn’t mention J. D. Salinger. Laura doesn’t like the ambiguity of references to writing we are unable to read so we can’t know if it’s any good or even what it’s about; plus, Laura says, “the movie is hellbent on getting the author out of the house and, by extension, away from his typewriter. That’s just another way of saying that writers would be warm, loyal and otherwise terrific people — if only they’d quit writing.” She may be on to something there. One of my favorite Forrester quotes comes when William is pacing with his drink while Jamal tentatively gets started on the typewriter: “Punch the keys!” William yells. Writing is physical, William seems to be saying, a paradox, but the body does scream to get away from the typewriter – perhaps that’s where so much of the tension in writing comes from.

    David Walker, writing in Van Sant’s home town alternative (to the Oregonian) newspaper, Willamette Week, predicted Oscar success. While Oscar apparently slept through the movie, “Finding Forrester” did win several more obscure awards.

    What does “Finding Forrester,” as full as it is of pathos about writing, have to say about writing that holds ethos? One of my favorite quotes comes from William: “A lot of writers know the rules about writing, but they don’t know how to write.” The same might be said of movie directors and movie critics: a lot of them know the rules of making movies, but those rules don’t always turn into satisfying movies if the movie isn’t the movie the critic wanted to see. The goals of “Finding Forrester” are clear in its music score, particularly the ending IZ medley of “Over the Rainbow” with “It’s a Wonderful World.” When Jamal steps into William’s apartment, and when he steps into Mallor, the private school that recruits him for his scores on tests and on the basketball court, he knows he’s not in the Kansas that has been his Bronx anymore. And we know Oz is not a real place, but we hold our disbelief in suspension, and, if nothing else, enjoy the score – the real score, that is, and to appreciate that we need to know something about Bill Frisell, the truly wonderfully eclectic jazz guitarist (Eric, Eric’s drum teacher Joe Janiga, and I saw him with drummer Jack DeJohnette at the Aladdin a few years back).

    I also met the “Finding Forrester” director, Gus Van Sant, one year at the Portland Art Museum. My friend William invited me to share tickets he had to a Van Sant reception. I had thought William said the reception was being put on by the AFL-CIO. What in the world would the AFL-CIO be doing feting Gus Van Sant, I wondered. They weren’t, and William enjoyed quite the laugh at my expense. It was, of course, the ACLU hosting the reception. Anyway, we went up and introduced ourselves to Gus and chatted with him for a spell, a quiet, unassuming, and fairly open guy. He was interested in hearing about the work William was doing for the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) at the time. This was long before “Finding Forrester.”

    Anyway, back to “Finding Forrester” and what it might have to say about writing. There are few shadows in “Finding Forrester.” Apart from the stark contrasts of black and white, albeit Hollywood style (the two teachers, Mr. Crawford and William; Claire and Jamal, and their respective homes; the two schools; Jamal and his team nemesis), there’s the window – as image, metaphor, symbol, of medium, of looking through without noticing the glass (if there’s a reference to Salinger anywhere in the movie, the window is probably it). Forrester continually, obsessively, cleans the window of his apartment throughout the movie. The window is a metaphor for writing. Jamal and his basketball buddies call William “the Window.” The writer. And the writer disappears behind the window into the work, behind the scenes.

  • The Rubrish of Poetry: Taming the Beast; or, Crossing the Rubric-con

    There were reasons the rubicund-faced nuns ruddled our papers with red ink, for the rubric is all over red, and poetry full of rubricalities. Consider the Shakespearean sonnet: the rubric calls for 14 lines of iambic pentameter divided into three quatrains with a rhyming scheme of abab, cdcd, and efef, ending in a couplet rhymed gg. Poetry is rubric, and rubric tames the beast of language.

    If language is a beast to be tamed, the poetry rubric is the whip and chair, and rubrics go deeper under the skin of poetry than the rules of any sonnet. In his 1961 introduction to Contemporary American Poetry, Donald Hall said, “For thirty years an orthodoxy ruled American poetry. It derived from the authority of T. S. Eliot and the new critics; it exerted itself through the literary quarterlies and the universities. It asked for a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit. The last few years have broken the control of this orthodoxy.” But Hall makes it clear that he does not want to line up the old poets and blindfold them in front of a firing squad: “We do not want merely to substitute one orthodoxy for another.” Is it quaint now to read the avant-garde of the early sixties? Is poetry ruled by reigns reduced to rubrics, as Marxist thought is reduced to slogans?

    Hall said that “the colloquial side of American literature – the side which valued ‘experience’ more than ‘civilization’ – was neglected by the younger poets. Melville said that the whaleboats of the Pacific had been his Harvard and his Yale College.” In the sixties, the state colleges, commuter schools filled with students who plumbed, waited, and painted moonlighting were the whaleboats of the Pacific – well, dinghies, anyway. But the 60’s overcame the fears of the 50’s. Hall drops the F bomb, suggesting a rubric of fear and secrecy: “Sometimes it seems that the influence of Senator McCarthy was stronger than that of Jung.” Then, toward a new rubric, written by William Carlos Williams: vernacular, empirical, physical. But then Hall disses the Beats. One wonders what the fear and secrecy is now, for the rubric often still seems to call for poems that Hall said “existed to prevent meaning.”

    We cross the rubric to, as Wallace Stevens says in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Throw away the lights, the definitions, / And say of what you see in the dark…Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand / Between you and the shapes you take / When the crust of shape has been destroyed.” The crust of shape is rubric, and the rubric stands between the writer and an untamed language, between the writer and what might be discovered without rubric: “You as you are? You are yourself. / The blue guitar surprises you.” The rubric fades away, sheds its skin for a “new skin for the old ceremony,” as Leonard Cohen said, a new rubric for the old ideas, for the rubric is to tame the beast, written, of course, in red. The rubric is a con; the beast gets the tamer in the end, every time. But at least the tamer got into the ring with it. And that is poetry, the rubric of the ring.

  • Not the Rubric Itself, but Ideas about the Rubric

    HTMLGIANT recently posted an interesting poetry rubric, evaluative criteria for students writing poems. One would think forcing a student to write a poem would be punishment enough, but grading the effort seems a bit excessive. In fairness to the teacher, maybe the rubric made more sense to the students in the class, or it might have been some sort of administrative mandate.

    I was reminded of an old grading illustration. Here’s the scenario: art class – draw a picture of your house. Little Mary, who loves art, digs in with the crayons, drawing a tiny house below an enormous, blistering red-orange sun in a pink sky. The teacher walks by and asks “What’s that?,” pointing to the sun. “The sun,” Mary replies hopefully. “Oh, but is the sun really that big?” teacher asks, and slaps a C minus bigger than Mary’s house onto her work of art. The scenario is repeated the following art class when Mary downsizes her sun and upgrades her house. Teacher’s response: “Much better, Mary, but that sun is still too big.” The teacher draws a small B minus in the center of Mary’s sun. Mary’s next effort conforms to the teacher’s expectations: a tiny yellow dot in the sky just above the roof of a house that reaches to the top edge of the paper. Grade: A minus.

    Thus Mary learns not art, but that to succeed in school means conforming to the teacher’s notion of reality, a notion that is at odds with Mary’s empirical knowledge, for the sun is, of course, bigger than any house. But in fairness to this teacher, maybe the lesson was perspective. But must every perspective be a fixed point of view?

    Buckminster Fuller describes the effects of the art class scenario in “Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies”: “I am quite confident that humanity is born with its total intellectual capability already on inventory and that human beings do not add anything to any other human being in the way of faculties and capacities. What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed, so that by the time that most people are mature they have lost use of many of their innate capabilities. My long-time hope is that we may soon begin to realize what we are doing and may alter the ‘education’ process in such a way as only to help the new life to demonstrate some of its very powerful innate capabilities.”

    Here’s the “Period 9 Poetry Rubric”: “Title, 2 points; Stanza Breaks, 1 point; Line Breaks, 1 point; Concluding Lines, 3 points; So What? 3 points; Imagery, 3 points; Things not Ideas, 2 points.”

    I was inspired to try my hand at a poem in response to the rubric. I made a few changes to the one I posted in comments at HTMLGIANT, so it’s a work in progress. Not sure that’s allowed under the rubric:

    After the Title

    After the title,

    there’s not much more.

    The stanzas break,

    and lines fall apart

    to the concluding

    so what?

    (“…the white chickens…

    a red wheel barrow…”;

    “Not Ideas about the Thing

    but the Thing Itself”)

    The poem total

    never enough.

    Postscript, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue. “I’ll pay as much attention to your text / And rubric in such things as would a gnat.”

  • Alice in the World Wide Web

    Poets have their canon, physicists their string, general interest readers their New Yorker, Sartre’s Self-Taught Men their alphabetized reading lists, not so desperate housewives their Pioneer Woman. Does the reader in the Web look for a clean well-lighted place, a site of one’s own? What do you want to read today?

    Alice asks the Cheshire Cat “which way I ought to go from here.” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

    How do we decide what to read? Can literature tell us what to read, what we should read? Martin Gardner, in The Annotated Alice (1960), says that “The Cat’s answer expresses very precisely the eternal cleavage between science and ethics. As Kemeny [A Philosopher Looks at Science, 1959], makes clear, science cannot tell us where to go, but after this decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there.” What other grounds?

    Librarians at Alexandria knew how many scrolls were on hand. How many scrolls we now have online is a more difficult question. Ulrich indicates they’ve more than 300,000 “periodicals of all types – academic and scholarly journals, Open Access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more from around the world.” Add to those, millions of blogs, scores of white papers, piles of procedure bulletins, egrets of email, spools of spam, pop-ups of poems, Hosannas of EBSCOHosts!

    Why do you want to read today?

  • Bukowski for President! David Biespiel and Poets for Democracy

    from New York Times article, September 3, 1917

    Pablo Neruda is perhaps the greatest example of a people’s poet, and he gained popularity through both his poetry and his public service. In the US, Langston Hughes was a people’s poet, writing in a vernacular that spoke to, for, and of democratic values. From his poem “Democracy” (1949): “Democracy will not come / Today, this year / Nor ever / Through compromise and fear.” Hughes’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1953, during the McCarthy era of harassment, certainly demonstrated this belief, and sealed his fate as poet and citizen, the kind of poet David Biespiel, in the May, 2010 issue of Poetry seems to be calling. Hughes was both poet and public figure, and the activities encouraged one another.

    Biespiel’s call for poets to engage in the Democratic process of public discourse, service, and persuasion borrows its title from the Woody Guthrie song “This Land is Our Land.” Guthrie, like Hughes, spoke in a vernacular for and of his community. How many of the poets Biespiel addresses write in a vernacular that qualifies as a democratic language, in words that speak to, for, and of a community, in words that everyone understands? This would seem to be an important prerequisite for public discourse. Biespiel goes outside the US for his primary example, Vaclav Havel, whose “literary background…increase[ed] the moral authority he summoned in his civic and political life.” But Biespiel mentions Wendell Berry’s 1975 “The Specialization of Poetry,” reminding us of our favorite Buckminster Fuller theme: specialization leads to extinction. In short, today’s poets may be too narrow, not well-rounded enough in background, experience, or temperament to answer Biespiel’s calling, and they may be nearly extinct on the public discourse front.

    In any case, one of Biespiel’s reasons for his claim that poets are best positioned to speak to democratic ideals, that “poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities,” is “poetry’s ancient predisposition for moral persuasion,” but we are not convinced that poets are any better equipped than the average citizen to persuade. But that is both the risk and the opportunity – and that being the case, poets had better say what’s on their minds, but not because they are any better equipped than the rest of us. “We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity,” Louis Menand said in the close to his The Metaphysical Club. “Democracy is an experiment,” Menand concludes, “and it is in the nature of experiments sometimes to fail.” It’s that possibility of failure that gives poets the best reason to come out of whatever literary closet they happen to be writing in and develop a truly public voice to accompany their poetic vision and voice.

    Meantime, we were thinking of what an all-time administration of poets might look like, and we came up with this draft (not all positions have been filled): President, Charles Bukowski; Vice-president, Marianne Moore; Secretary of State, Langston Hughes; Secretary of Commerce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Secretary of Labor, Bob Dylan; Secretary of Homeland Security, e. e. cummings; Presidential speechwriter and press secretary, William Faulkner; Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Plath; Attorney General, Wallace Stevens…. You get the idea. It’s not exactly what Biespiel was talking about, but try it with the poets you know. Maybe we’ll provoke a response.

  • From a Buick 6 to a Luxury RV: Crazy Road

    Hollywood steers us down the romance of the road in Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges Best Actor effort about a Hank Williams descendant continuing to follow his bliss of hard gigs and one night stands into late middle age roads, his only constant partners a bottle, guitar, and car. This romantic view of the road is peculiarly American, with its roots in Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road, the Lewis and Clark Trail, and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.

    In Bernard-Henri Levy’s (2006) American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, the popular French intellectual figured out his method early and easily: “The method would be as simple as the questions and concerns were complex. The road, essentially” (pp. 13-14). Few American writers have escaped paying a road toll. One of the first to feature roads, Hamlin Garland in Main-Travelled Roads (1891), did not romanticize the road trip. In his epigraph, he makes sure we understand that the road “is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear [sic] with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it; but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long and wearyful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life, it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.”

    A precursor to the Naturalist writers, writers who would try to tell it like it is, Garland reflects back on his roads in this 1922 preface to a new edition of his book: “The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.”

    This poverty of the road is now camouflaged in neon signs, fast food outlets, strip malls. Gone are most of the Jesus Saves signs, and in their place U-Pick fruit signs, gas stations the size of baseball diamonds, rest-stops the Joads could have lived in. The road blinds and seduces: blinding white headlights and mesmerizing red taillights; corridors of an automobile economy. The camouflage is what makes it possible for a writer like Larry McMurtry to write a book called Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways (2000). McMurtry writes in his preface: “My son, James, a touring musician who sees, from ground level, a great deal of America in the line of duty, says that when it isn’t his turn to drive the van he likes to sit for long stretches, looking out the window. ‘There’s just so much to see,’ he says, and he’s right. There’s just so much to see.” But where does McMurtry begin his road trips? “…in Duluth, Minnesota, at the north end of the long and lonesome 35.” Could it be the road is the only place left some of us can be alone anymore? For to be truly alone, we must be surrounded by others we can not touch nor hear. The road is a crazy place.

  • Get Your Chops Back: Good Writing and Bad

    How do we learn to distinguish good writing from bad? 

    In today’s popular culture and business world, we often hear and find evidence that the average adult spends little time reading. A CQ Researcher report of Feb. 22, 2008 titled “Reading Crisis?” showed that “only 31 percent of college graduates were proficient in reading prose in 2003, a 23 percent decline since 1992. Among students in graduate programs or holding advanced degrees, the drop in proficiency was 20 percent.”

    It’s hard to find time to read and write, and people who neither read nor write have more time to work and play – arguably the primary values of our age. But do we ignore reading and writing to our detriment? They are developmental skills. They require practice. They are skills that atrophy quickly if unused regularly. We lose our chops when the books collect dust. Writing, in particular, is hard work, and most of us don’t suffer from graphomania, while reading material foreign to our everyday vocabulary and experience seems arcane and frustrating. Add to this our desire for instant gratification and we find ourselves living in a community of non-readers.

    The Audit Bureau of Circulations has reported that of the top 100 magazines by circulation in the U.S. today, most are hobby, entertainment, or popular culture, special interest magazines. Only two in the top 100, The New Yorker and National Geographic, might be considered to have a general interest purpose combined with writing that will get your reading chops back. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with popular magazines, but to point out that the reading experience of the average adult in our communities is anemic, and the reading deficit results in a writing void, and an inability to distinguish good writing from bad.

    But what is good writing? If by good writing we mean writing that achieves its purpose, almost any writing might be considered good. But reading material that exploits and panders to the tastes of an audience captive in a comfort zone gets us nowhere. An excellent B movie is one only an ardent B movie fan can appreciate. But is an academic article, blind peer reviewed then buried in a journal with a circulation of 300 (and most of those from institutions) any different? Writing that achieves a purpose that is too narrow is like a plant that is grown in a pot. It can be lovely, but its growth will be stunted.