AUGUST & SEPTEMBER 2012

Forgetting History

By slm young

The spring issue of American Scholar seems to be swimming with ideas of memory and forgetting—that dangerous combination of what too many of us do because it is easier than remembering and reporting, remembering and telling, remembering and doing something to change what might happen if the thing that was done is forgotten. In his Editor’s Note titled “Memory and Forgetting,” Robert Wilson focuses his attention on the problem of how distant and intangible violence seems to Americans, even though our country is so often participating in war.  This fact, that we do not truly understand violence, but only abstractly can imagine it, has an obvious connection to the concepts of memory and forgetting—if we do not understand violence, if we have not experienced it, then it is simpler to support it.  For it does not seem heinous if we never see the faces of the men and women and children we are responsible for displacing, or maiming, or killing.

Recently I came across a piece of news that was disturbing because of what its details illuminated to me: we are forgetful.  Apparently, when a significantly newsworthy story breaks that has its roots in something that happened before the Millennials’ memories remember, there is an echo in the Twitterverse, an onslaught of questions that ask about the event and why it should matter to them.  One example is the recent death of Rodney King, which elicited questions of “Who is Rodney King?” Other examples are the appearance of Paul McCartney at the Grammys, which brought on tweets such as, “Who is this and why is he on the Grammys?” and probably my very favorite, which happened on the anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic: “Wait. I thought Titanic was just some dumb movie. That really happened?”

I cannot pretend to ignore the possibility that this problem has always been the case—that the younger generation remembers less than the older generations that came before—but what stands out as particularly different is that this forgetting is now documented and made public because of the technology so frequently used by the Millennial generation.  As a member of Generation X, I came of age before internet, email, and cell phones were in the classroom.  I had to remember because I couldn’t rely on Google to find the answer for me when, or if, I needed it.  Technology, in a real way, has allowed each of us to extend our brains outside ourselves.  Memory has become an external experience rather than an internal, empathetic one; an experience we must feel to understand.  And if memory is outside ourselves, if memory is as technical and unfeeling as a YouTube video or a search on Bing, then how are we to ever fully understand the experience of another?

Additionally, this problem seems extreme because the things and people that are being forgotten are cultural icons.  I don’t mean to sound like someone’s mother when I say this, but who in the hell doesn’t know who the Beatles are?  In addition to his recent Grammy appearance, Paul McCartney was chosen as the closing act of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. Obviously, a choice made because he is, as much as the Queen of England is, royalty, but also because the Olympic stage is a worldwide stage, and Paul McCartney is someone who would and should be recognizable to everyone and who could work to bring together peoples from around the globe.  And while he may not be the same as the mop-headed man-boy he was when he sang “I wanna hold your hand,” he is still, clearly, Paul McCartney, and if there was any doubt, it seems as soon as he opened his mouth to sing, recognition should have come.

But it didn’t.

Of course, we as people do not remember everything, so why should I believe that as a society we should be any different? Why should I believe that it is important to remember who Rodney King was when he was alive, or what Paul McCartney has done to merit his appearance at the Grammys, or the fact that when man believes he is infallible, almost always there is a reminder that he is not, as in the case of the RMS Titanic? Because who we are and where we came from is important.  Because remembering only part of the story keeps us from understanding the full impact of the story’s power.  Because as my freshman high school history teacher had pasted across his bulletin board, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”  Forgetting is stagnation.  Isn’t this why we write nonfiction?  Not to wallow in the sins of our pasts, or to glorify our accomplishments, but to learn from what has happened?  To place in context that which we do not understand in order to see it more clearly?

Writers of nonfiction—whether it be reportage, memoir, essay, or some quirky combination—have a responsibility to keep us from forgetting.  And this responsibility, to show us, up close and personal, what it is like to be someone else, what it is like to be a victim, a survivor, a woman, a teacher, what it is like to be on the front lines of Afghanistan, as Neil Shea does in his piece, “A Gathering Menace” from the issue of American Scholar that I mentioned earlier, or what it is like to experience a breakdown both in the psychological and spiritual sense, as F. Scott Fitzgerald shows in his Crack-Up essays, these are all vital in our education as responsible and worthy human beings. Understanding and empathy are perhaps the best tools we have against cruelty and violence. It seems to me it is the only way to survive in a world where the outrage is too often about the wrong thing.

This is why truth in nonfiction is so often challenged and discussed, and why it is so essential. Lying about terrible things happening to you, embellishing the truth to sell books or get attention, making the path you’ve walked seem more difficult than it has been—this kind of deceit diminishes the power of the words that are written and spoken by those who have walked the hard path, who have lived through atrocities and find the courage, somehow, to tell their stories.

Creative nonfiction at its best allows its readers to internalize memory, and as a result, we learn empathy.  When we read a story and inhabit the world of its writer, we can begin to understand, and this understanding is the responsibility of both readers and writers.  It matters very little how much or how well we remember, if we do nothing with the memory.  The stories—of violence, of outrage, of victimization, of love and connection and forgiveness, of family and strangers, of separation and coming apart and also of coming back together—they all need to be told, if any of us are to have a chance of understanding each other any better.

CURIOSITIES

TRAVEL AND OTHER FASCINATIONS

by Matthew C. Mackey

June 1-3 Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer, France

Richard Aldington Society and Imagism Conference

The first night there was a Thursday. I came in on a train from Paris to Arles and then a hot, dusty bus ride to Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer for the Richard Aldington Society and Imagism conference. It was nice to have an air-conditioned room after the trip. Saintes-Marie was hot, settled in the Caramague region of southern France and leaning against the cold Mediterranean. I could hear the waves crashing on the jetties as I smoked on the balcony.

My French isn’t so good, and ordering a drink that first night, a bottle of local red, proved comical. I stayed with fellow conference members at the Thalacap Hotel, a nice place with a tender view. I kept thinking of all the people I’d like to bring here as I poured glass after glass. I was co-writing a paper about the Ezra Pound controversy with my friend Jeni Stewart, who also runs Burlesque Press. Of course “writing” meant we talked for long hours about his political views, his literary prowess, and the reconciliation of the two over booze before waiting until the pressure of a deadline sparked our diligence. We were interested in the confluence between the ideology and the art. We drank a lot of wine and muddled our way through. Our presentation was the following Saturday.

I wandered around when I first got into town with a head full of wine and found the only bar still open at 11:00 o’clock at night. I followed the sound of glass clanking and laughter for a few blocks before the neon sign of La Bodega drew me off the street like a cross on a church steeple. There, I ran into my old friend Justin, who was also presenting at the conference. I hadn’t seen him in a few years, but kept up correspondences online. We talked about his work a little, reminisced about our time in Italy, and drank whisky and beer before a stranger offered to share his bottle of white wine with us if we taught him some English. As a student, he learned all our best expressions. Finally, he sang to us and bid us goodnight before stumbling home.

The conference members met for a brief reception the next day at Katherine Aldington’s house. Katherine Aldington was the daughter of the British writer, Richard Aldington, who married Hilda Doolittle and helped start the Imagist movement in the early part of the twentieth century. We toasted to Katherine’s memory, drank copious amounts of wine, ate dinner, suffered the wrath of mosquito country, and shipped ourselves back to the hotel where a few of us scrounged up more wine and made our way to the beach. It’s a strange thing discussing the relevancy of people like Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, the Imagists, etc. on the shore of the Mediterranean at night while strangers swam naked and our thin blood drummed through our bodies.

I went to a bullfight the day of our presentation. Jeni and I had just delivered our paper, and I stepped outside for a cigarette. Across the street at Les Arenes, a sign read:

Tradition Taurine du Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer

La Course Carmaguaise

16h:30

5€ Général Entrée

I’d never been to a bullfight. In the south of France the tradition isn’t to kill the bull, just piss it off I guess. It went like this. A certain number of objects called “attributes” are attached to the bull’s crown, and it is the duty of the “raseteurs” to fetch them of the bull’s head. The bull doesn’t die, but  nonetheless, people shouted when the raseteurs pulled of the attributes one by one, and they roared and laughed when the bull jumped out of the ring. I drank my beer and watched, not knowing exactly how to react.

After the presentations, some of us wondered through town, trying to understand menus and signs as we walked past. Justin, Galateia, Jeni, and Xristos, met Fernando and I smoking on the corner, and we decided to have dinner at La Brasserie Belvedere. I ate Steak Chaval. We toasted to our health and drank beer and wine. We left for the beach, having bought more wine and a bottle of Grand Marnier, and the salt air blowing off the Med emboldened us. Still more friends came, and we were glad to see the familiar faces of Jeff and Courtney as we poured wine into plastic cups and smoked our unfiltered cigarettes.  The moon was low on the horizon, reflecting in clean, rolling splinters off the dark water.

The next morning we walked to the docks and took a boat out into the wind tossed sea, finding our way up the little Rhône where we stopped for lunch at Le Close de la Barque, a small ranch only accessible by river or a 30 mile trek down dirt roads outside of Saintes-Marie.  We ate fresh mussels in garlic and oil, bull roast and rice, and had custard for dessert. We drank sangria with friends and recited poetry into the quiet fields and pastures.

We parted the next morning with wine and song still sunk in our veins and headed to Arles, where some of us caught a train to Barcelona, others for Paris, and still some for Marseilles. Jeni and I were pointed toward Spain, and I rolled my time in Saintes-Marie around my head like a grain of sand beneath a tongue.

Barcelona June 4-8^th 2012

The Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museu

Uno

We got in to Barcelona late Monday night. Wine and tapas made for a quiet first meal along the esplanade. I sat on the Rambla de Catalunya, watching people there take their paseo, or after dinner walk. I wondered who was a stranger like myself and who made their homes in the city.  I was tired from a long train ride, and I could tell my friend Jeni was just as exhausted. It was nice to have another magazine writer in company, and it was great to have a friend to share the travels.

Dos

After a late breakfast, Jeni and I made our way down La Rambla, a promenade that stretches from Placa de Catalunya all the way to the Mediterranean. La Rambla was lined with street performers, kiosks, tourist shops, merchants, caricature and portrait artists, and gelaterias. Our heads were on swivels, and my ears, out of tune to Spanish, ached for understanding. I wanted to talk to everyone, to be a part of their lives, to let them know that I existed. Jeni spoke Spanish very well, and I was impressed by the level of fluency she maintained even when some of the people spoke Catalan. By the time, we sat down for dinner it was already too late for the unfinished church and the Picasso Museum, so instead we raised our glasses to our friends back home and around the world.

Tres

We made our way straight for The Sagrada Familia, watching little children squeal, cry, and shout as we passed schools and playgrounds. Looming in the distance, I could see the spires from Gaudi’s design teething up the skyline. In 1883, work began on the church, and it still has yet to be completed. Antonio Guadi (which is where the English word “gaudy” derives from), a Catalan architect, designed and implemented the project as one of the first unions of religion and modern art. The church was dedicated as an UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2010 was sanctified and declared a minor basilica by Pope Benedict XVI. It is clear from the exterior of the church that there is hardly another building that creates such an acute awareness of humanity’s constant wrestle with the mysteries of the spiritual, which may be symbolic of its continual progress, never quite finished.

The Museu Picasso is the ultimate expression of the city’s strong ties to the artist. Picasso moved with his family to Barcelona in 1895, and from there began his illustrious career as a painter, visiting and living in the city throughout his life.  I had studied, albeit briefly, Picasso’s work, but my experience didn’t extend much further than textbooks and Google images.  Standing there in front of the work, and watching his career take shape and form, was unsettling. I’m not a painter, but the force in which Picasso’s work struck me, and the fierceness of his vision created an impulse to “see” better or at least differently. For me, Picasso’s paintings, his sketches, his studies, sculptures, and artistic meanderings challenged the particular way in which I interacted with the world. Like listening to the city around me speak a different tongue, being in the Picasso I left the museum, not fully understanding, but more aware somehow of something deep and important, yet inarticulate.

From the museum we headed south, again towards the Mediterranean, where we were baptized with a great congregation of strangers in the cool waters, burning our tongues with salt, and washing our eyes with light.

June 8-11

San Sebastián

Basque country

We spent five hours on a high speed train from Barcelona, zooming through Spanish country side, looking at old rundown farm villages and sprawling metropolitan centers. For the most part, the landscape held a serene voice, like a strange bucolic poem, echoing out of my mind. I was delirious. Travel can be exhausting, and I was feeling the call for rest when I stepped foot off the train in San Sebastián.  I needed a room. The Hostal Bahia was more than accommodating, and we found inexpensive lodgings for a few nights.

Here the inheritance of tradition and legacy is best found, not in a museum or church, but in the eyes of the people who live there. A friendly smile, albeit tired from use at all the dumb tourists like myself, was one of the best monuments to life I’ve found in a while. I started this leg of the trip with a severe burn from the beach and a pit in my stomach I most likely developed from the diet change. But, I was in a forgotten, tiny city that washed over me in the gray-golden dusk.

Surrounded by the foothills of the Pyrenees, San Sebastián, otherwise known as Donostia, lays its head at the Bay of Biscay. It is a warm and friendly place, only twenty kilometers from the French border. The area is dominated by a rich Basque heritage and general sense of happiness. My favorite part was the txakoli and the pintxos. Everyone was going round in the streets, and I ran into a half mad French man with his wife from Venezuela. He told me a joke about how a Canadian, a Brit, and an American called everyone jaguars in South America. He laughed a hoarse smoker’s laugh I understood. We traded cigarettes, and he told me all about bullfighting where he came from. Dinner in San Sebastián is a roving experience. Similar to tapas in Barcelona, pintxos are little servings of strange concoctions, mostly on bread and ranging from cured ham and anchovies to prawn salad and little mysterious croquettes.  Starting in one bar and perusing an assortment of delectables, then moving to another bar offering equal variety, all the while sipping the crisp, local sparkling wine, txakoli, created  a sense of place and movement, as if I could take a small portion of each stop and sew it into my consciousness: a piecemeal evening.

It was nice to relax for a few days after the busy streets of Barcelona, knowing that in a few days, we’d be in Madrid, devouring the heart of Spain, soaking up the Spanish capital. In San Sebastián we had no agenda, and it was nice to walk leisurely through the streets of a quieter town. Everywhere I went I could hear the soft scattering of the tide over Playa de la Concha, and filled my lungs with the Atlantic’s rich breath. I wondered if I would ever feel as bravely insignificant as I did just listening and breathing to an entire world. I thought about my friends back home, and how the earth I stood on eventually touched the bay, which ran into the ocean, finally crashing on the shores of America, and still the shores slowly forming the earth over hundreds of miles to my small-town, Ohio, and from there to the rest of the great states, where my loved ones made their homes.

I walked the streets falling in love with faces, wondering what this young girl was laughing at, why this old man folded his hands the way he did. Had he always worn glasses? Would the girl wearing her bright blue scarf fall in love with me? What color are the bartender’s eyes, and why did he get that haircut? How long has that young mother been a mother? Was her mother a young mother too? I didn’t recognize anyone, but I saw everyone in those faces. I noticed everyone’s doppelganger. That one was an old roommate. That one was a guy I knew one summer in Italy. That other face was my boss. I was flooded with romantic notions of friendship and intimacy. Time doesn’t stop in San Sebastián, but space does. It’s as if I could stand in one of my mad dreams like a lunatic saint, occupying a rare delineation from concrete and tangible. I was a myth in the territory between folly and security. I was hyper-present. Maybe travel causes an acute awareness of position.  Maybe it was the feeling of unfamiliar that causes the familiar to be so sharpened in my mind. Regardless, I knew that some great dichotomy I once knew had failed, and the thing that made the place alien also made it transcendent.

June 12-16^th

Madrid, Spain

I was mangy wandering the city. I was hungry and tired, and there were so many people and birds and shops and cafes and buildings my eyes couldn’t stop falling onto this window or that precipice or those eyes or that scooter or that…

Eventually one needs to stop and make a home somewhere. For me, that was Madrid. Arrangements were made, and I found myself sharing a nice two bed apartment with my friend Jeni, complete with kitchenette. I could buy groceries. I could do laundry. I could sleep or work. I could just be. While the city went about the noisy business of life, I went about mine. Jeni and I decided to stay in, make a meal, and watch TV. I thought to myself, “This is what people who live here do when they’re tired, so what the hell. Give me rest.” It was a good first meal, spaghetti, salad, and Kellogg’s chocolate bars for dessert. I slept soundly.

The next day, I slept in and milled about the apartment for hours, not fully ready to throw myself into the frantic nature of exploration, where each thing is a new discovery, every walk a new frontier, but Madrid knew I was there. She waited. Jeni and I decided to lug ourselves at least to a coffee shop to check our email, connect with worried parents, say hello to friends, and monitor the steady suck on our bank accounts. We must have looked like tourists as we saddled up to the bar for café con leches, our laptops tucked under our arms. I didn’t say much. I still don’t know Spanish. Jeni understood everything, and I challenged everything.

“What did he say?”

“He said it’s five euros and 75 cents.”

“Really?”

“Yes, look right there on the menu.” Eyes rolling.

Nothing felt real. It was like trying to read or speak in a dream. Jeni was getting irritated by my questions. I was getting irritated by my lack of understanding. I take a lot of things for granted back home. Communication is one of them.

We went out for Mexican food that night and ate at a little place called La Panza es Primero in the Chueca area of Madrid, the gay section of the city. The food was styled after the cuisine in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. To a foodie like Jeni, it was incredible. To a starving mad coyote like myself, it was amazing. We drank margaritas and went out into the night. I was after something in Madrid and every lovely face I watched from the bar spoke to me of what “home” might mean. I wondered if people were the same in every place. I wondered who I would fall in love with and who would fall in love with me as I drank dark, red wine.

After waking in a stupor, my head floating somewhere between the burning sunlight and the tilted horizon, I grabbed a pen and made my way out for postcards. There’s no return address for these sorts of things. I sat in a corner of the café sucking down water and coffee, hoping the sun would slowly fade. The air-conditioning made me feel a little better.

There is a carousel right outside of the grocery store, wrought in a turn of the century art deco exuberance. The horses and mermaids were gilded in rubies and the lions had braided reins of gold. I spent some time watching a few kids squeal and holler as the thing lit up. A ragtime melody plinked and tuned its way out from some hidden speakers, and the machine slowly cranked its way around in a never ending wheel, one rider constantly chasing the next.  A little boy made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and shot as his older brother instinctively dodged the invisible bullets. Some mothers talked in Spanish, keeping an eye on their cowboys and Indians. I thought of my family.

I met Jeni back at the apartment and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk for lunch. I’ve also taken peanut butter for granted. I was full of crazy mind junk, and kept narrating my life as we walked through the burning white streets of windy Madrid. I felt like I understood my context in history and geography. I’m sure the peanut butter was working like magic in my system, and I’m pretty sure the milk had soured before I drank it. Whatever propelled me through the streets like a lunatic, I was glad for it. Each time I passed a face, I knew exactly who it was and what our relationship was. I wasn’t dreaming. I knew this was all fact somehow and somehow unrecognized. It was as if I’d been living in that space my entire life and everyone was there with me. For a few brief hours I climbed up hills, walked over streets, darted through crowds, and moved with a fierce and graceful mind. I couldn’t stop. Jeni had become irritated with me because it was hot as hell, and we had missed several turns, and we had walked a very long time.

We were going to the Hammam, a Turkish bath, this one actually leftover from the Romans. I’d never been to a Hammam, and Jeni convinced me it had healing properties. As we entered the Hammam, two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen welcomed us whispering Spanish. Again, I had no idea what they were saying, but I would have done anything they asked. The incense, burning, saturated the entire building with lavender, rose, amber, and sandalwood. After the long, frantic walk, the silence and peace of the bath were intoxicating. I changed into my bathing suit and headed down a winding stone staircase into the pit of the bath house. Here there were three pools, a warm water pool, a hot water pool, and a small, cold water plunge. A person is supposed to mingle between the three, letting the relaxing warmth and heat detoxify and de-stress as the plunge reinvigorates the body and the mind. And although, there were probably fifteen people down there, you couldn’t but hear water, pouring, running, washing. Young lovers were there with hope in their young lover eyes. I felt guilty every time I swam by, ruining their solitude with my bald head and round belly. I must have looked like an old man to them, and maybe, somehow, I had become one.

After the Hammam, we left to buy alpargatas, handmade shoes, famous in Spain. I paid ten euros. They didn’t fit. I’ll gift them to someone. Jeni had bought potatoes at the market, and decided to make potato soup, which was fine with me. By this time, I was stark raving mad with hunger. I had no idea what possessed me earlier, but now I was again at the mercy of biology. I needed to eat. We stayed in that night, eating unseasoned potato soup, drinking wine, and watching more TV. We were both getting tired of the road.

The next day, we had two goals. First, Jeni wanted to show me the Parqe del Retiro Madrid, a wonderful city park that boasts over 320 acres of landscapes, statues, and further curiosities. The park was hot. The temperatures in Madrid can reach well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t think it was that hot, but we stuck to shade and drank as much water as possible. The heat may have been appropriate anyway because somewhere in the mess of the park there was a statue. I’m told it’s one of only two statues of its kind in the world. It was a statue of the devil, or Angel Caído, the fallen angel. The statue depicted an angel, wings outstretched, mouth opened in terror, being dragged into hell. I’m not sure if that’s the way it happened. I like to think that before God and the rest of the angels moved into heaven, there was a party. Lucifer and a few others got really drunk and passed out in hell. Upon there waking, God and everyone had left, and Lucifer had no idea where they went, so he and his boys went back to hell for more bop, booze, sex, and kicks. Meanwhile in heaven, all the other angels were sitting on cushions and sipping tea and telling everyone how nice the other’s hair was and some angels were playing music, but it had no soul. I’d like to see that statue of the devil, raising a glass in hell, with friends in arms.

We found the Crystal Palace, an expansive glass house, erected in 1881. There is a lake in front of the Palace and we watched ducks and turtles mill about.  The park was cooling off a bit and we found rest in some shade near a creek. From there we made our way through the streets one more time to the magical Reina Sofia Museum. The promised Picasso painting Guernica lay in wait for our visit. The whole museum was brilliant. I can’t begin to describe the many halls I walked down with masterworks hanging and speaking of history, culture, and humanity, but when I came across Guernica I was immediately humbled. The painting is in protest of the bombing of Guernica by Italian and German warplanes at the behest of Spanish nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. Again, I had no idea how to react, speak, move. It was gripping.

Our time in Madrid was coming to a close. Our last night, we ate paella negra, squid prepared with rice in its own ink. Delicious.  Jeni and I continued drinking wine and debating our different philosophies about life. We made friends with David and Sergio. They’re musicians and were sad to hear we wouldn’t be around to see their gig. Jeni and I ended up at the famous watering hole, Café Gijon, where greats like Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali used to frequent. We drank flaming coffees and made our way back to the room, and slumped into our beds. Morning was not far off, and we had to make our way to the airport for Athens. Home was still a long ways off, and I was eager to get back on the road. My dreams that night were disjointed and haunting as I slept with the museum’s transcendent images and the ephemeral quality of my own experiences rattling together in my brain.

June 17^th-23^rd

Athens and Crete

Athens & the Acropolis

Dogs roamed the streets of Athens.  In the heat, they slept on the sidewalks, under park benches, on the stairs of the Parthenon. With temperatures reaching close to the hundred degree mark, the beasts lay wherever they could find shade. When darkness slowly crept over the city, they shook out their dusty coats and once again picked up their old dog ways. I listened to them howl and prowl in the midnight alleys from rooftop bars.

Constant movement, lack of rest, lack of understanding had created an arid atmosphere in my spirit. I too, like those wild dogs of Greece, wanted to find some means of survival, and at times, we all must find a small measure of shade and sleep, and wait for the coolness of night to heal our burning skin. Sipping white, Grecian wine, smoking cigarettes, I wondered, while the Parthenon lit up that first night, If time changes people or if place does and how coming to Greece was changing me.

Like most children, I grew up entertaining the fantasy of swordfights, monsters, damsels, magic, cleverness, as my little brother and I ran the woods behind my house swinging sticks at each other. The first long novel I read was Clash of the Titans. The mechanical owl, Bubo,  I still have a fondness for. I was fascinated by the heroes and heroines of ancient Greece. I can remember watching on nights my parents left me and my little brother at home TV shows, like The Adventures of Hercules, and Xena, Warrior Princess. They were terrible shows, but to see those personalities of legend come to life was exhilarating. Then, as I got older and began my studies in literature, I had classic allusions to tackle, and foundations to build. I once again found myself swept over the Grecian frontier. And when I started to look into philosophy, I had to unknot long lineages of western thought, tracing their sources to Greek discourse.  Finally, I stood on the ground that once Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Pythagoras stood on, the very home of Zeus and Hades, Aphrodite, Eros, and Olympia, the birthplace of Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, and the beginnings of the great Odyssey.

Jeni and I had been on our feet for the better part of a month, and we took that first day to rest in the shade for a while. We ate ice cream and wandered under the enormous palms of the National Gardens. Jeni drank her preferred white wine as the sun began to set the western hills on fire, and I swallowed the stone of experience, the heavy, hard truth of time and place with many Jack and Cokes.  The next day, we made our way to the Acropolis, walking down bleached streets lined with merchants selling tourists anything from hats to leather jackets to shirts that say, “I heart Greece.” Jeni and I must have walked for days in the dog heat of tourist alley. Finally, we climbed up the steep winding paths upward toward the ancient citadel, the same path that has led millions of people through centuries to stand in utter humility at the monumental Propylea. Here on the rocky peak, the temple of Athena, the Erechtheum, and on the southern slope, the Theater of Dionysius  lay in ruin for longer than western civilization has dreamed of their secrets.

With camera in hand, I meandered the stony trails, feeling like Indiana Jones in the city of Tanis, looking for lost Ark of the Covenant. We could see The Temple of Olympian Zeus across the slope of the hill to the southeast side of where the Acropolis stood next to the National Gardens. With only pillars remaining, the temple is an imagined palace. The realization of each edifice was constructed in our minds from the crossbeams and columns that crisscrossed the pale sky.  I too imagined where the priestess of the temple would have walked, where her servants would have slept with their holy dreams. “Who would wander the grounds at night?” I thought. “What would they be prowling for?” I immediately felt connected in the chain link of time. I felt the strain from time immemorial pulling on all the links that connected to me. It was almost too much to take in.  My place in the world, my philosophy, linked through centuries and ultimately passing through this city, this kernel of geography, this ever blooming flower of the west.

Crete & Knossos

We flew out of Athens and watched the islands of Greece fracture out in the blue Aegean beneath us. Olympic Air was more than accommodating, offering full beverage service, including wine and beer without extra charge. Jeni and I helped ourselves.  It was a short flight and just as long a taxi ride to our hotel on the sea.

While Athens may have been under the heritage of the Mycenae civilization, Knossos was a center of Minoan culture, just south of Iraklion, the great Minoan port. Here, as Odysseus says, “Minos reigned when nine years old, he that held converse with great Zeus, and was father of my father, great-hearted Deucalion.” And here, the mysterious labyrinth and the terrifying Minotaur are forever entombed in legend and ruin.

Jeni had been to Knossos before. She was a fountain of information, and she helped bring the rubble and stone of the palace to life. Famous bull leaping frescoes hung on the restored walls. Bull leaping was a common and dangerous practice in ancient Crete. In fact, Jeni tells me, the number of deaths from bull leaping may have led to the legend of the Minotaur and his demand for sacrifices.

I traced the lines of a secret labyrinth as I walked the well-marked paths around the excavation and waited in long queues to see the throne room or the cistern.  I was unraveling myself like Ariadne’s thread, but I couldn’t tell if I was making way towards the center or trying to find a way out. Traveling for such an extended amount of time is revelatory, and being in the fabled home of King Minos was like existing in a physical allegory.

It was hard not to see myself in these myths. I was pulled in. This is where Icharus and Dedalus were held prisoner before their infamous flight over the sea. Would I be Dedalus craftily making wings of freedom or would I be Icharus and fly too close to the sun? There was also the heroic Theseus and the horrific Minotaur, fighting to bitter end. I wondered about the epic battles that were playing out within myself.

We left the ruins of Knossos, and headed into Iraklion, quiet and pensive. We ate dinner, talked over wine, eventually breaking the silence with “What’d ya think?” and “Did you see this or that?” It was nice to mull over the experience with a friend even if I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I realized that there was a lot of experiences I couldn’t articulate or understand at the moment. It might take me years, centuries, millennia to understand what it’s taken the world just as long to piece together.

We decided to get tattoos in Iraklion. Jeni had gotten Bastet, the Egyptian goddess she had wanted for a while, on her wrist, and I struggled with what would make sense of all this experience. I’m not sure if I’ll ever unlock the mysteries of what has happened in my life, but on my left arm, I now have a key.

June 24-29

Paris, France

It took me thirty years to see La Ville-Lumière. For many of us, Paris exists in our minds, similar to the recent Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris. I’ve been told that I too romanticize people, places, ideas, so on. Maybe I do. I think it’s a good habit. Even as I read the sign in the apartment complex, “Il ya des rats dans le bâtiment,” I thought, “yeah, but they’re Parisian rats.” I know, I know. Over-romanticizing leads to delusions or something. That’s what I’m told. Maybe it’s jazz or literature or philosophy or burlesque or wine or _____________, but Paris has and always will occupy a romantic place in our collective consciousness.

We taxied our way into the City of lights late the first night. Paris was our last stop on our grand tour of Europe, and we were keen on settling in for the next few days. After six flights of winding stairs, schlepping our luggage, which at this point had seemingly doubled in mass,  and an exhausting 6:00 am flight-all-day-moving-and-waiting-standing-and-yawning, we were ready for wine, something very cliché and French sounding.

Jeni and I ordered our first full Parisian meal in a little bistro just down the block from our flat. We were staying in the 19^th Arrondissement, the northwest section of Paris. We ate at Le Conservatoire. I ordered escargot, red wine, and a croquet monsieur, which is a hot ham and cheese sandwich. In this case, the cheese was a decidedly perfect Gruyère. I didn’t expect anything less from France.

The night ended with a constant drizzle and through accident we had a coffee in an Indian restaurant. I was out of cigarettes and so headed out into the wet-gray, Jeni reluctantly following my nicotine withdrawal. To get out of the rain, after paying 7.80 € for a pack of Marlboro Lights, we ducked into the quiet restaurant, lured by the warmth. We slugged off the rest of our fatigue with the espresso and headed back to our flat, hoping to find Paris in a sunnier disposition.

The next day, I made a stand at McDonald’s. I know, “But, you’re in Paris! Why would you go to a McDonald’s of all places?” There is one thing that can be said of Europe and the States in terms of a superlative comparison. Europe is not the best place to find the convenience and ease of wifi. Something else I took for granted as an American. Sure, wifi exists, but it is just isn’t as “everywhere” as it is in the States, and I had work to do. Jeni found a much more suitable location for her breakfast, and I chased down a hash brown with a cup of coffee. A few hours later, Jeni came back to round me up, and we both headed out into the heart of Paris.

We plucked our way down to the Seine, and after about an hour we could see just the top of the Eiffel Tower prowling in the distance to our right, and to our left, the grand entrance to the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris. First on our list was the famous gothic masterpiece. I was beside myself with wonder as Jeni and I walked past the statue of Charlemagne who still keeps vigil over the city.

Notre-Dame began in the medieval age, dating back to 1162-1163, and on December 12 of this year, Paris will begin to celebrate the cathedral’s 850^th birthday with festivities and symposiums lasting until November 24^th, 2013. It is impressive to say the least. Architecturally speaking it is one of the most important buildings existing today as it bridges nearly a millennium of structural design art. The line to enter was massive, so we resigned ourselves to tracing Notre-Dame’s shadow around its flying buttresses and stunning apse as the high afternoon sun silhouetted the infamous dangling gargoyles.

From there we went to find Shakespeare and Company. Actually, we went to find food, but found the bookstore instead. Shakespeare and Company was a crucial place for artists, philosophers, musicians, and writers to gather in Paris, and included such notables as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, and many others, such as Allen Ginsberg, Anäis Nin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Henry Miller have rested their heads on the shop’s famous pillows and slept between the bookshelves. I bought a copy of Henri Micheaux’s Stroke by Stroke, a phenomenal book of poetry and image. Every book purchased comes with a souvenir bookmark and stamped first page. Even though I knew I was just passing through, I still felt like I belonged in the upper room playing piano or flipping through collections as rich as the bookshop’s history, but I could have been over-romanticizing again.

After we left Shakespeare and company, we headed west, following our stomachs into the streets. We ate at a little restaurant off a side street. Jeni and I were trying to avoid the touristy meals, but figured since Paris, on average, brings in roughly 15 million visitors a year, we’d have to compromise. It was a terrific meal. For an appetizer, we ate frog legs. Jeni got the mussels and I had onion soup. We ate egg and spinach crêpes and had ourselves espresso for dessert.

It took us nearly two hours to walk the usual 4.4 kilometers to the Eiffel Tower, but we followed the Seine along the Quai d’Orsay, stopping to snap photos, to peek in street vendors’ shops, or just to view Paris leaning in the powder rose of the setting sun. The tower jutted up like a tongue past the toothy buildings. My feet hurt, but I was determined to stand in front of this imposing symbol. Paris had been a dream for me, and the Tower was fundamentally linked to that dream. I had only been traveling for a month this trip, but I felt like I had been trying to understand something, some truth of unknown consequence for a long time, as if I needed to know the context in which I fit into the world.  I kept repeating to myself, “This is mine now. This is mine. I’m here and this is mine.” I drank dark, red wine to get my feet back on solid ground.

The mornings in Paris are a deluge of sound and movement. Thousands of residents and thousands of visitors amble to the boulangeries desperate for pain au chocolat, baguettes, and croissants to eat on their never ending commutes to wherever it is they are going. Nearly every morning, I ate a croissant with my coffee on my own commute.

We headed west into the eighteenth arrondissement, the Basilique du Sacre Coeur as our destination. It took us a good amount of time walking, and we were pretty well beat by the time we got to the steps of the church in the Montmartre area of Paris. There, men from Senegal talked me into buying a bracelet, which was tied and blessed on my wrist as the young man talked to me of the future and his fears. Jeni was not amused by their persistence and even less amused that I left her to her own devices. We walked up the stairs in silence. The cathedral stands on the highest point in Paris, and from the doorway, a panoramic vista of the city lay in front of us, sprawled out like an ancient garden, folding into the history of its own color. After an unknown amount of time passed, we descended.

The famous windmill at the Moulin Rouge caught our attention as we moved deeper into the red light district. We were enchanted by the blushing cabaret. “The Gallop” from Jaques Offenbach’s famous Orpheus in the Underworld is the tune most associated with the can-can, and I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Founded roughly the same time as the Eiffel Tower during the peak of La Belle Epoch by Joseph Oller, Moulin Rouge still embodies the optimism of the early 20^th century. We didn’t see a show, but I promised myself the next time I’m in Paris, I’d spend more time tramping around Montmartre, getting to know the salt of the earth.

Our last destination on our last day was Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery where the talented, inspiring, and often expatriated were laid to rest. The cemetery is the largest in Paris and is supposedly the world’s most visited burial ground. It’s located in the 20^th arrondissement, so we decided to snake across the city on the metro. We entered in the main entrance from Boulevard de Ménilmontant and walked straight up to the imposing Monument to the dead. Père Lachaise was opened on May 21^st 1804, exactly two hundred and eight years before I began my trip through Europe, and I was finishing my month of exploration in a graveyard. Still, I searched. I found the graves of Georges Méliès, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Molière, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde. It was a tiny homage at the end of a tiny pilgrimage. We left in need of wine and food, realizing that “ephemeral” and “eternal” are eventually the same word.

POSTSCRIPT

The next morning, we threw ourselves on a train headed for London. I slept most of the trip as we rode under the waters of the English Channel. I was headed to Scotland for the residency portion of my MFA program in poetry. Jeni had her own endeavors to accomplish, and so we parted after a long, last train from London to Edinburgh. I watched her walk into the first taxi out of the train station, both of us waving. We knew full well that it was inevitable, and we both knew we’d be happy to see each other again. It was cold. I put on a scarf and told the taxi driver to take me to the Golf Tavern on Barclay Terrace. It was a pub I’d never been too, but knew about from my previous summer in Edinburgh. I wanted a drink. I wanted to forget, and I wanted to remember. I wanted to write about everything, but I knew if I did, I’d start missing something.

They Cut Out Their Own Arts!

A comment on the recent firing of UNO’s Bill Lavender

and the situation of arts programs in academia

by Matthew C. Mackey

When the rumors of budget cuts start proliferating the gossip in the corners of faculty offices and whispers of “eliminations” start blowing down the halls of schools, the first to gird their loins are those professors and students in the creative arts programs. While most budget cuts target low income programs, such as arts, music, and creative writing to focus on math and sciences, the lack of art and art funding is a growing crisis in the academic community.

If the problem persists, eventually most schools and academies following this model will be without art programs entirely, or those programs will be reduced to novelties. Perhaps, when the economy swings out of the current recession, we will see more arts programs back on the menu. However, there are inherent consequences to this thinking.

First, the behavior of education administrators sends a cultural message. By targeting arts programs during budget cuts, institutions send the message that programs involving the arts, and subsequently artistic endeavors, are less valuable than the pursuit of the math and science fields. As a culture, we esteem undertakings only in relation to their monetary outcomes. It is obvious that the present economy is a burden on any institution, but what we cut from our schools says just as much as what we keep in.

Secondly, we are conditioning students and individuals to think in more quantitative terms rather than in qualitative terms. If a student’s schooling is primarily in the sciences, then a logical result is a student who is taught to think primarily scientifically. How is it possible to round a stone if we only work with one side?

And last, the idea of autonomic development is in question. An individual, especially in education, should be given full opportunity to make an educated decision about his or her own existence as well as his or her pursuits. If institutions fail to provide a means or avenue for personal actualization, then the institution has effectively taken the students’ autonomy by refusing them the choice. Unfortunately, this practice of cutting the arts is too highly acceptable among administrators and bureaucrats. Education, however, is not big business.

Bill Lavender

In a recent decision by the board of the University of New Orleans, Bill Lavender, director of the university’s popular Low-Residency MFA, was terminated as another example of the tendency to put arts programs under suspect when budget cuts start to dig into an institution’s financial accounts. Furthermore, the UNO Press, an international publication of literary works, which Lavender also supervised, has been put under hiatus. Lavender has been praised for his visionary work both in the Low-Res program and with UNO Press. The school was subjected to almost 9 million dollars in budget cuts from the state, but students and faculty alike have made protests and inquiries into the ethical decisions of University President Peter Fos, and national attention and outcry has accumulated in such venues as Facebook, change.org, Occupy NOLA, Publisher’s Weekly, Poetry Foundation, and many more. It is clear that the school has taken another cut, not as a fiscal loss, but rather as a blow to their reputation as many see the decision as an insult to students as well as the artistic community.

As a result, Eastern Kentucky University, partners with the UNO’s international residency, has severed ties with the program. In a letter distributed to students and faculty, Derek Nikitas, director of EKU’s Bluegrass Writers Studio, issued the following statement:

As some of you may already know from Facebook chatter, Bill Lavender’s position at the University of New Orleans has been suddenly eliminated. This surprise and frankly rather shocking development appears to have come as the result of some incredibly drastic emergency budget cuts at the University of New Orleans. These cuts were designed to keep the university solvent against incredibly hostile state budget cuts. Nonetheless, the administration in charge of Mr. Lavender’s dismissal is understandably fielding criticism from the general creative writing academic community as a result of its decision.

This new development has forced those of us at the Bluegrass Writers Studio to make a difficult but ultimately liberating decision. We will dissolve our relationship with the University of New Orleans effective immediately.

Nikitas lists several reasons for the decision, including UNO’s instability and turmoil, as well as EKU’s lack of faith in the future of the program and a moral imperative not to support UNO’s decision to eliminate Bill Lavender. It is still unclear as to the future of the UNO Low-Res MFA program, and many are skeptical of the program without the direction of Lavender. Professor Barb Johnson has taken over, and The UNO Press is slated for restructuring. The University plans to keep the hiatus for the Press brief, but it is apparent that both extensions of Lavender’s hard and successful work will undergo changes, and the effects of business model ethics in higher education will be felt at UNO for quite a while.

What follows are the voices of students commenting on their experiences in the Low-Res program and with Lavender.

Last year, on a quest to find a creative writing program, I signed up to participate in the University of New Orleans’ Writing Workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland. The intensive four-week program introduced me to novelists, poets, screenwriters, playwrights and essayists from around the world. We spent the month writing, reading and exploring beautiful Scotland, and I came home energized, ready to invest in a graduate program.

My summer in Edinburgh had such a positive impact on me that I made major changes in my life in order to enroll in the program and pursue a career in writing. I applied to the Low Residency MFA Program with an emphasis in creative nonfiction.

Last month I completed my first official semester as a full-time graduate student again in Edinburgh with plans to spend the next residency in Cork, Ireland.

Shortly after the residency ended, we received word that UNO would be terminating Bill Lavender’s position as Director of the Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing Program and Director of UNO Press, leaving the program and UNO press in the hands of an unnamed faculty member. It was Bill’s reputable and creative program that I was so attracted to – spending each residency in a foreign country and taking courses from writers all over the country.

His success leading the UNO Press also impressed me, and I wanted to be a part of such a talented group and in an environment of supportive faculty and fellow writers. The university’s decision to terminate Bill’s position has left other students and myself baffled and dubious that the Low-Residency program will continue to be as strong under any other director, and I am now considering other programs.

Whether or not I continue at UNO, I am grateful to have been a part of the last two summers in Bill’s program. I am certainly changed because of it. The university’s failure to recognize his immeasurable value leaves me with very little confidence in the institution. His termination is a loss to the students, the publishing community, and the Louisiana education system, especially UNO. Lizzie Nichols is a first year student in the Low-Res program at the University of New Orleans with an emphasis on Creative Nonfiction. Her works as a playwright have been solicited by playhouses in Louisiana, Georgia, and Ohio.

Todd Trulock is a student in the UNO Low Res MFA program. He specializes in experimental writing.

As an MFA student at Eastern Kentucky University, my only experience with the UNO Low-Res program was with the summer residency in Edinburgh. I am forever grateful to EKU’s Dr. Young Smith and UNO’s Bill Lavender for creating this community of artists.

Bill’s commitment to fostering emerging writers is immeasurable. From attracting talented professors to run workshops to bringing in agents and publishers to organizing readings, excursions, and simple bonding time, Bill Lavender makes this program what it is. I have no doubt that without Bill, the UNO Low-Res program will atrophy. Before I left Scotland, I told Bill how excited I was about next year’s residency in Ireland. Knowing that may not happen unless the powers that be overturn their decision is upsetting to say the least. Joey Mau is currently enrolled in the creative writing MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University. His short story, “This is Our North Dakota,” will be featured in the literary journal Mount Hope. The author notes “This story would not have existed without the summer residency in Edinburgh. Written in one of the fiction workshops, the story is proof of the inspired world Bill Lavender has produced.”

One thing I wonder: did the administration consider the impact of the sudden removal of the director of the Low Residency Program on that program’s reputation? It seems impossible to believe that they would not have, but their response to the outcry following Bill Lavender’s termination seems to indicate that they did not.

I know, personally, that I would not have applied to the University of New Orleans if I had not heard glowing recommendations for the program from a friend who had participated in the program. Will I make a similar recommendation in the future?

If you had asked me prior to Bill Lavender’s termination, I would have said “of course!” Now, though? The University of New Orleans will have to work very hard to earn back my confidence. Word of mouth is an important method for drawing in a higher quality of applicant and for garnering accolades and awards. I believe that this fiasco is likely to hurt the program far more than the administration realizes. John Shinholser is a current student in the Low-Res MFA program at the University of New Orleans.

 

Aisha Soto is a play-writing student in the Low Res MFA program at the University of New Orleans. She is an adjunct professor at a community college in Florida.

I wish it wasn’t so cliché to say that someone has “changed your life,” because that is exactly what Bill Lavender has done for me through my association with the low-res MFA. There is no doubt about it– thanks to Bill, I am a better writer, a better reader, and, overall, a more focused individual.

Anyone who writes (or should I say, anyone who struggles to write) knows that half the battle is just making yourself sit down and work. I had always known this, and always attempted to devote myself to the craft, but once I took a poetry workshop with Bill, and he introduced us to his system of semester-long procedures, it was as if a switch was flipped for me, and everything finally clicked (oops, more clichés! my apologies!).

Bill challenges his students, and in turn, they create great work. He is, without a doubt, one of the most helpful, erudite, creative individuals I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, let alone the privilege of getting to work with. While pursuing my master’s degree I have realized that while undergrad is mostly the regurgitation of an opinion, grad school is the precise formation of your own. That is where Bill’s guidance shines. He will urge you to think for yourself, to come to a conclusion, and to be able to trace how you got there. Most of the time, you arrive without even knowing it. That’s the beauty of a brilliant professor.Now he has been taken away from us, for not one sufficient reason, and we are left devastated. Andrea DeProdocini is a poetry student in the low-res MFA program. She lives in Connecticut and works as a museum docent.

Sara Crawford is a student in the Low Res MFA program at the University of New Orleans. She is a musician and works as a freelance artist while she studies play-writing.

FICTION

Life’s a Beach:  Two Bibliophiles Share Their Summer Reading List

By:  Molly Fuller and Angie Mazakis

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had time to read, let alone really figure out what I want to read, so, luckily, I have at my disposal a stack of books that have been waiting for me by my bedside like lost loves throughout this past academic year.

Grab a beach towel or cuddle up on a hammock—bring a refreshing summer sipping drink—mojito, margarita, a long-island iced tea—and indulge with me.  These are the titles on my to-do list by category:

Books to read as inspiration.  These writers inspire me; the language level of these books requires a concentrated, but joyful effort.  I have to pay attention as I read.  These books, I feel, have something important to say to me.  Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Nadine Gordimer’s The Essential Gesture, Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Opposites. 

Books to read for craft.  Once I find time to work on my own writing, I’m hoping these two books prove inspirational.  Rose Metal Press’s A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness and The Art of Brevity:  Excursion in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis edited byPer Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans Hanssen Skei.

Books to read as research for a conference paper I am working on:  Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and Beginners.

Books that my friends have written that I want to read:  Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, Robert Miltner’s Hotel Utopia, and Carrie Oeding’s Our List of Solutions.

Books that I have already read, but that are beckoning to me again from my bookshelf: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, A.M. Homes’s The Safety of Objects, and Mary Morris’s Revenge.

I am off to lie on the lawn, grass between my toes, and a novel held up to the blue, cloudless sky…

*

I don’t read as fast as Molly does, so my reading list is more abbreviated. Once, Molly was at my apartment and in the time it took me to apologize for all of my embarrassing text messages from the night before, Molly had read all of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. No exaggeration. I read one. Word. At. A. Time. And until I go to secretary’s school and take those speed reading classes, I’ll just have to take fewer books to the beach.

Miranda July’s It Chooses You—I’ve wanted to read this for months, but I’ve been waiting for it to come out in paperback. Because I can’t just go to the library and check it out, I have to have it on a shelf in case I want to “reference” it later. Or in case its spine looks really nice on the bookshelf with the other nice spines.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—I want to read this every summer.

Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe—I put this on my amazon wish list almost exactly 10 years ago in some unreasonable quest to understand everything about the world. Of course, I never got around to getting the book and understanding everything about the world because I had to get a job.

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard—As you can see, because I’m not a speed reader and because I’m cheap and never spring for hard backs, I’m usually about 1-10 years behind the new releases. So, this book is the newest I want to read this summer. Molly actually introduced me to Jo Ann Beard when she made me read Boys of My Youth, which quickly became one of my favorite books ever. It was Beard’s only published book for so long that I was kind of shocked that this novel seemed to come out with so little fanfare. I expected at least a small flare. Maybe I was too busy sending embarrassing texts, while Molly read half my bookshelf. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to read this.  Or the rest of the books on my list…even though it will probably take me the rest of my life.

KOTTABOS

Is It Art, or Is It Craft?

By Robert Balla

Meret Oppenheim – Le Déjeuner en fourrure

For quite some time, I’ve been struggling to come to some sort of understanding about the nature of art: what it is, what its role in society is, how it’s created, why humans do it.  Unfortunately, I’ve had little success.  I read a bunch of essays by philosophers, art critics, literature professors, and other self-proclaimed experts.  Then I talk about these things with my friends, many of whom are writers, musicians, painters, or other types of artists.  But something interesting and a bit troubling happened last week while I was driving home from a gallery with my wife.  She called me a snob!  Or maybe she called me an elitist.  I’m not really sure which as I wasn’t paying all that much attention to her.

Naturally, I was offended.  Aren’t I the one writing articles on how art can and should intersect with and affect the everyday lives of all people?  Isn’t Buried Letter Press all about allowing anyone and everyone access to the arts?  Yes!  So how could I be an elitist art snob?

Well apparently I am.  It seems that I have been repeatedly backhanding not only my wife but also a number of our mutual friends for quite some time.  You see, I have been writing about and praising art in all of its marvelous and splendid forms, while at the same time unthinkingly drawing a very clear distinction about what is and what is not art.  This all came to a head with my article for last month’s Buried Letter Press “I Am an Artist because I Jumped” where I interviewed a large number of my artist friends to discover what drives them to create art.  While sending out my initial calls for input from my “artist” friends, my wife suggested several other friends, all of whom I did not contact because, as I put it, “They do crafts.  They’re not artists.”  I had labeled a narrow category of things made by artists as “art” while at the same time casting out an entire gamut of things created by a large number of people (some of my friends and my wife among them) by calling them mere craft.  I insisted that art is created by artists, crafts by crafters; artists are artistic, crafters are crafty; art belongs in galleries; crafts in a craft show.  I have been using this loaded language for years.

Until that car ride last week, I was completely unaware that I had been making this not-so-subtle distinction.  So now I am tasked with exploring my own biases and assumptions.  I want to find out what the delineating qualities of art and craft are.  I want to know why and where I draw the line between art and craft, or if there is a line at all.

LittleTeapot – courtesty of Firstpalatte.com

To start I need to lay some ground work.  I’m not talking about mundane, common objects such as a pencil or a rock or a tea pot (although Meret Oppenheim’s  Le Déjeuner en fourrure or Breakfast in Fur, a fur covered tea set including the pot, is an excellent example of surrealist art).  I’m restricting this discussion to things that seem to be in a debatable state, stuff that one person says is art and another says is craft.  I’m using craft in the vein of stuff you see at a craft show, not as what a craftsman makes.  So no discussion of finely crafted kitchen cabinets or handmade Italian loafers.  Also, no veering off into “arts & crafts” like what little kids do in gluing cotton balls onto construction paper to make a snow family.  Finally, we can restrict ourselves to those things made with forethought and the intent or desire to be art.  This then eliminates the useless thought experiments like naturally occurring phenomena or objects and crud like “I could just slap some paint and glue and leaves on a canvas and call it art.”  So here we go.

Is it a question of usability?  After doing some quick internet research, I noticed that a bunch of other people have been thinking and blogging about this very topic, and one of the main talking points is the usability of the finished product.  In short, the consensus is that crafts have some practical use while art does not.  In her essay “Art and Cognition” in The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand writes, “utilitarian objects cannot be classified as works of art,”  and I saw her echoed and quoted many times in my investigation.  This then leads to separate and distinct warrants: 1) all art is non-utilitarian and 2) no utilitarian things can be art.  Let’s try and take this apart.  We can assume that Rand and others are not talking about exotic miss-uses of art like using a sculpture to drive in a nail, or employing the collected works of Shakespeare as a doorstop.

However, what about the concept of function?  Does this mean that art has no function?  I put forth the cases of

Chrysler Building – William Van Allen, architect

Picasso’s Guernica and Carl Sandburg’s “Grass,” both of which carried strong anti-war messages to remind us of our past atrocities in an effort to achieve a more peaceful future.  I call that useful.  I would also argue that much art is designed to make us feel a certain way or have an emotional reaction.  If something is designed to make a depressed person happy, like a drug, Paxil for example, we would say the drug is utilitarian.  Why then would we say that a painting of an idyllic country pasture which makes the viewer happy to gaze upon is non-utilitarian?  This then extends to other utilitarian objects like buildings.  The Chrysler Building in New York is a work of art.  Therefore, it follows that other useful objects can be works of art, like clothing, or cars, or chandeliers.  Thus, utilitarianism can not be a delineator.

Is it a question of medium?  No.  If one sculpts, one can equally sculpt in marble, wood, or ice.  The explosion of mixed media art pieces and extravagant installations have been breaking down the idea that only certain materials are worthy of arthood.  In painting, wooden panels had been the dominant recipient of pigment until the 16^th century when they were replaced by far lighter and more manageable canvas. It then follows that what one paints on does not impact the artness of the painting, even if it is on velvet (regardless of the color).  And watercolors have been around since Paleolithic times, used by everyone from the Neanderthal cave painters to Paul Cezanne to my daughter in pre-school.  And what about macaroni?  Do we eliminate it from the pantheon of art because it is edible?  But watercolors often used honey as a binding agent and the linseed oil used in oil painting is exactly the same as the flaxseed oil we purchase in health food stores for its antioxidant properties.  I’d contend that this point can then be extended to cotton balls and Elmer’s Glue.  After all, often the most avant-garde artists are the ones who use the least traditional materials.

Is it a question of originality?  Obviously copying a masterpiece is not the same as producing one.  However, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison famously said, “There are no original ideas.”  If this is the case, then all artists and crafters are essentially adapting, remolding, borrowing, and reinterpreting the people and products which came before them.  Also, this is not a modern view of originality.  The ancient Greek Longinus noted that an excellent way to produce a thing of sublime beauty was to imitate a thing of sublime beauty.  If we insist on originality for art, then we must renounce Michelangelo’s David because it revisits classical Greek sculpture in technique and because a host of other artists had already depicted the hero.  All art and craft it seems is derivative in some way, to some degree.

Is it a question of talent/ability?  Maybe it would be better to phrase this as is it question of gift vs. practiced skill.  If artistic talent is something with which some born, then there should be no reason for one to hone one’s craft (see what I did there?).  However, all artists and crafters continually strive to improve and perfect their work.  I’ve often heard people say things like, “anyone can do that, so it’s not art.”  This has never satisfied me.  If we look at the physical process of art, almost anyone can in fact do it.  There is no unique skill or talent required to move a brush with paint on it over a canvas, or to whack some chunks off of a block of marble, or to stick one thing to another with an adhesive.  I guess this question essentially come down to one of inspiration or intent rather than a physical procedure.

Is it a question of intent?  Ahh, now we’re getting somewhere.  It does matter what the creator intends, at least to a point.  If the creator does not intend to create art and does not term the creation art, then who are we, the audience, to force it to be art?  This to me is an improper elevation of the banal, and when the creator points out our error, we reply, “Oops, sorry. I misinterpreted it.”  However, the process does not work in the opposite direction. We often feel completely comfortable decrying a creation as not-art even when the creator insists that the intention was to create art.  Here we insist that the artist can not turn the mundane into art by simply calling it art.  In the first case, the authority is the artist, but in the latter it is the audience.  However, in both cases, the end result is non-art, the baser category.  It seems that both artist and audience must agree to elevate.

Is it a question of perception?  Is this then what it all comes down to?  Is a concord between the artist and the audience primarily responsible for the distinction between the two?  It seems to be the case that each society or culture, and each individual to some extent, creates these categories of art and craft on a case by case basis.  I hate to get all social constructivist at this late point in the game, but it seems to make sense.  We each bring our cultural and individual biases to bear when we make these types of judgments.  While this smacks of pure relativism, I shy away from the resulting anarchy that this could eventually deteriorate into and instead cling to the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Michel Foucault, and others who place the group ahead of the individual in terms of concept creation.  They argued that societies construct shared knowledge and definitions for the individual members to use in order to streamline (Vygotsky) or to control (Foucault) the functioning of the society.

So what does determine what is art and what is craft?  It seems that we do, more so collectively than individually, as a society of artists and audiences .  We create the concepts called art and craft or whatever and delineate them from one another.   These distinctions are nebulous at best because as we change, so do our socially constructed definitions.  What is art today, may be craft tomorrow, and the reverse is true as well.  So in answer to my wife, I’m not a snob, I’m just towing the societal line.  But maybe I shouldn’t be.

POETRY

What’s the Big Big Idea?

An interview

with Nick Sturm, founder

of the Big Big Mess Reading Series

by Matthew C. Mackey

 A few months back, I had the privilege of going to a Big Big Mess reading in a small neighborhood of Akron, Ohio. I was surprised to find so many talented writers and public enthusiasm. I managed to catch up with Nick Sturm, who, until recently, coordinated the events. I was interested in his vision for public readings, and as the series changes hands, how he felt the future and significance of these readings would be as well as the larger necessity for such phenomenon as public readings. Follows is an interview with Nick Sturm, founder of the Big Big Mess reading series:

Matt: When and why did you start the Big Big Mess Reading Series?

Nick: The Big Big Mess was started in June 2011 as a way to support and, hopefully, enrich the Northeast Ohio arts community. “Support” as in give everyone a place to have a party where poetry is the center of attention and “enrich” as in remind you that we’re not alone in this crazy thing we’re doing, remind you that poems don’t just happen in bedrooms, in journals, in books, but between people, as communication, as a buzzing in the air, transmissions, and those transmissions are sometimes best received with drink in hand.

Really, I came up with the idea to start a reading series while lying in bed one night. I was equal parts psyched as hell and benevolently envious of reading series in places like New York City and Denver and, feeling overly ambitious in the moment, called a friend to find out if I was dumb for thinking a series in Akron was possible, he confirmed that I was not, in fact, being dumb, and the BBM was born.

Matt: Why or how did you pick Annabell’s (a local bar in Akron) as a location?

Nick:  When I was talking to my friend that night we decided that Annabell’s had to be the spot where we hosted. I had hosted a reading at the upstairs bar about six months before and knew the bartender, Brad Thorla, would be down to help us out. Brad is a radical warrior musician, writer, and editor of his own handmade journal called Coreography Council, and without his accommodation, patience, and passion the BBM never would have snowballed into the party it has become. Other than that, the space in the basement bar is particularly perfect for a reading, with the couches and chairs gathered around some swirling lights, a lone microphone, a ratty red rug, and a Pac Man machine to boot. It’s charming, a bit twisted, makes you feel like you’re in a cave/boat, and all of that sounds like the best kind of poem, so in other words, we were set.

Matt:  What is your selection process for readers? BBM is a national
reading series. How do you acquire new writers for the readings?

Nick:  I never anticipated being able to get the number or caliber of readers we ended up hosting. At first I thought of the series as being a mostly local/Ohio thing, but within a couple months I was already scheduling readers from New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and even from as far as Massachusetts and California. Some of it was getting lucky with people coming through on book tours, but most of it was just that a huge number of amazing writers live and work reasonably close to Akron. I mean, there are a shit ton of spectacular poets in Ohio, like Matt Hart, Cathy Wagner, and Noah Falck, and every state that borders Ohio is populated with just as many, if not more, incredible artists. After doing 13 readings over 11 months, we still didn’t exhaust that population. It’s an invaluable reminder that even though we’re not in a major cultural center, our ilk are everywhere, in every crack, small town, along every river, in rooms that look remarkably like our own, and that everyone is just as willing, as eager, to engage with everyone else. What else is there?

As far as a selection process, there isn’t one other than I wanted to bring as many exciting writers to Akron as possible. I mean, I wasn’t going to ask someone from Utah to make the trip, even if I was sweating over their poems, so geographical concerns restricted us somewhat, but I think that’s given the BBM a different feeling than some other series, a kind of regional continuity, because even if readers who come to the BBM aren’t from the Midwest, many of them are here now, in about a roughly 8 hour radius of Akron, that gives us something we can always share across genre, aesthetic, style, beers.

Matt:  Why do you think public readings important?

Nick:  It’s like asking why concerts are important: THIS IS HOW THEY MADE IT AND THIS IS HOW YOU NEED TO HEAR IT. Whether the volume is high or low, the performance muted or exuberant, poetry is communication, it’s between us, all static and breath and a mess of music. It gives our private experience of reading a public life, it reminds us how much we share. Even more than the poems themselves though, or the sense of community it fosters, readings are important because it gives writers room to have a conversation, and I mean that literally. Last September, Adam Fell drove 10 hours from Madison, WI, showed up right before he was set to read, bleary eyed and road weird, gave an amazing reading, but said later whether or not he read wasn’t why he came – he just wanted to hang out, see old friends, make new ones – that’s what community is, what the thing behind our poems (our hearts) – is there for.

Matt:  As a creative writer yourself, how have you benefited from public
readings? From hosting a reading series?

Nick:  As a writer I’ve benefited the same everyone else has: I get to meet new people, hear amazing poets read, and have a generally rad time once a month. As an undergrad, my housemates and I would host these notorious dance parties and I was bummed when that era in our lives was over, so having the BBM kind of turned into the next form of that, whatever that means. As a host, it often feels the same – I have to keep everything in somewhat of an order, I’m responsible for what’s happening, I get to set the tone of the night, etc – and I really like being able to curate that kind of space. As a host, in a more personal sense, I often feel selfish because I get to put the writers up in my house, drive them around, feed them, drink with them after the readings, and even make breakfast with them the next morning. It’s fantastic. At the last reading that I hosted in April, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, and I spent the afternoon before the reading drinking margaritas, lying in the grass eating ice cream, and watching Amelia trespass. It’s hard to think of anything better than that. Sound like fun? Start a reading series. It’s easy as that.

Matt:  Do you see these readings as having nonliterary benefits? That is
what are perhaps the implications for community on a small or large
scale?

Nick:  A community is the result of the work and dedication that individuals put into other individuals and the larger community, whether that means the writing community in Northeast Ohio, the arts community in Akron, or just Highland Square, the neighborhood where the reading is held, have been at least slightly enlarged by the BBM. Any contribution to those communities that carries positive momentum, that brings people together, is more than a benefit, it’s a necessity. Talking about an event being literary though is a mistake, as it inherently turns it into a club. The BBM is, literally, a big big mess, which is literary, which is a party, which is a bar, which is old friends and new friends spending time together. I mean, we’re not getting out the vote or anything, but we’re giving people a space to believe this thing they do, or sometimes do, or haven’t done since high school, is important, has value, and that’s invaluable. An older man came up to me at one reading and told me, so excitedly, that he’d been writing poems his whole life and never told anyone, but that coming to the BBM had given him the strength to reach out to other writers for the first time ever. I don’t even know what to say about that. It makes everything worth it.

Matt:   What sorts of positive things have happened at readings? Maybe
after or during the performances?

Nick:  The last question pretty much covers this, but to add to it watch this.

Matt:  What are the dangers of having public readings?

Spontaneous combustion. Overwhelming sexual desire. Leaving your credit card at the bar. Leaving feeling like your skin is made of candy. Knowing you’re going to have to come back.

Matt:   Forgive me if I’m incorrect, but most of you who work with BBM are
students at University of Akron, yes? Is BBM affiliated with the
university? How does university affiliation or lack thereof come to
bear on the work you’ve done with BBM? I imagine its different working
inside the parameters of association as opposed to outside of it. This
question may be a little vague. I’m sorry. For example, Buried Letter
Press is not associated with a university, and I think that allows us
to be perceived differently than if we were a branch of so and so
institution. Please, tell me about what you’ve found to be the case
with BBM.

Nick:  Right, I just graduated from the NEOMFA at The University of Akron, but the BBM has never been affiliated with the MFA program or any university. Everything has come from personal resources, resources generated by each reading (the bar treats us like a band, so we get 25% of the bar sales, money that goes directly back to readers in the form of dinner, drinks, and gas money), and my own sheer, stupid will power. For the first 13 readings, from June 2011 to April 2012, I was the sole curator. From here on out, Alexis Pope and Mike Krutel, both great poets in Akron, and Tim Peyton, who does a ton of work with film and other arts in the city, are co-curating the BBM together and I’m so excited for the work they’re going to do. And you’re right about not being attached to an institution – it’s limiting. That’s exactly why the BBM needed to exist – they weren’t any independent reading series in the area. I’ve always been happy to have free reign over the decision-making process, from personally inviting readers, to making the posters, to writing introductions, to making waffles the next morning. I’m moving to Tallahassee, Florida in a couple months to start a PhD at Florida State University and I’d love to start another series down there, but there’s a university-sponsored series there already. That series is pretty different than the BBM, so I know there’s still room for a new series, but it will be interesting to see if things work differently not being the only series in town. I’ll just host a series on a beach somewhere. We’ll get sand in our hair. We’ll sleep where we fall.

Many thanks to Nick Sturm and the Big Big Mess Reading Series. For more information about the BBM series and upcoming events visit: 

http://bigbigmess.tumblr.com/

The Big Big Mess Reading Series on Facebook!

REVIEWS (A special InteReview)

Direction and Discovery:

A Review of Versions of North

and an Interveiw with the Poet 

G.P Lainsbury

by Robert Miltner 

1. Looking Northward

The long poem is by its nature an odd fellow in the world of poetry.  More typically it is book-length, though it may be the dominant section of a book, offering an extended meditation, examination or exposition of a topic of interest first to the poet and then to the reader.  The best long poems transcend the moment or period of composition to take on more universal issues.  Like the long shot in a film, rather than the close up of the actor’s face or an important detail—a Maltese falcon for example—it offers a slow pan of the street or follows the train tracks until they seem to intersect in the distance.  The history of our literature includes many outstanding long poems: Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie, Campbell McGrath’s Shannon, or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life; each is more a tour of Europe than a weekend in Manhattan, each remains relevant for its insights that appear epic and profound due to the length of the work and the depth of detail.

British Columbian poet G. P. Lainsbury offers us something new under the North American sun in his book-length poem, Versions of North.   As one educated in the Canadian Northwest—Calgary and Vancouver—and one whose academic career has been there as well, teaching at Northern Lights College in Fort St. John close to Alaska, Lainsbury has a sense of the big picture, the long winter night’s meditation, and the many things the concept of ‘north’ represents to him.

Versions of North is a symmetrically structured book: three “scenarios” of two or three parts open the book; an “intertext” of six lyric fragments hold the center; then three more “scenarios” of similar length complete the nearly 90 page poem.  Operating in a manner similar to that of chapters in a novel, these sections allow readers to read and reflect as they move through the piece.  The poems themselves are not in the typical lineated and linear form of most contemporary poets; instead, one recognizes the visual contours once associated with Pound in the Cantos or Olson’s Maximus Poems wherein the page is more akin to a painter’s canvas and the poet a version of Jackson Pollack engaged in action painting.  Olson’s 1950s manifesto “On Projective Verse,” written around the time he was coining the term Postmodern, argued that “form was never more than the extension of content” and that “one perception must immediately lead to another.”  Readers can recognize the influence of Olson here, not only in form but in content: like Olson, Lainsbury is both well- and widely-read, and he’s smart, evidenced in the way he collages, juxtaposes, positions, and contrasts the cultural and personal observations that are the bones of this book.  As a result, this is poetry that dances on the page, and, as in Pound’s work, Lainsbury stands in the center of a swirling vortex grasping one perception after another to arrange on the canvas/page.

I’ll trace one thread of the book in this short interview.  Lainsbury considers the situation of working people, including college professors like himself.  In ‘Frontier of Empire & Wilderness Playground,” he considers how “the have-nots are given spending vouchers / as compensation for living lives beneath refinery smokestacks,” and these images offer a picture of northern BC and its oil and gas economy in a changing locale that looks like Texas or Oklahoma during the boom days, where “the old North becomes the new West,” as he says in “Nowhere, Everybody Knows This Is,” adding, in “An Infernal History”:

Let us evoke the cowboy image: proud, aggressive, competitive,

vain, maudlin, controlled & violent             this is all thought worthy

by proponents of the energy frontier        dreaming their permanent boom

the six-wheeled epic hero    the hardest of hard hats

This epic becomes an obsessive ethic, as Lainsbury shows in “Town and Country,” as “we gather accessories to show how hard we work / & how were are always working,” though he questions

must we resign ourselves    once & for all

to that helpless          destined feeling?

Lainsbury is the intellectual outsider here, the problem-poser, the gadfly questioning the quality of life inside the energy economy bubble, and that role allows him to locate his stance as the artist amidst this cultural reorganization.  “what is left?” he asks in “Cemetery Criticism of the Partly Fogged-In Past,”

when armed with only

shrunken experiences & subservient languages

of banality & despair            but to attempt

to stitch together a work consisting

entirely of quotations

Thus, in “Zones of Contact: The Homeless Mind,” Lainsbury appears as the intellectual in the outback, for “the professor is ideal personification of intertia w/ out / inertness / by nature more articulate than dependable” – for how much can he really do other than offer cultural critique?  Professors are largely ineffective as social activists, so they must write, nudge, observe, opine, articulate the issues for others to act on.  The figure of the professor is more than the caricature he presents in “The Psychopathology of the (Northern) College Life” where, among the faculty, we encounter

&, of course, the smug

superior bastard

w/ a few poems

in magazines

nobody reads

Still, as a worker in the larger machinery of the culture and the economy of the North, as he notes in “Paramount Regime of the Normal,” to “remain sensitive / is a utopian stance.”  That stance locates him, or any intellectual in an isolated locale, in the middle of a vortex of time, space, ideas, cultures, economies, classes, and belief systems.   To be overwhelmed is to be inert, desensitized, catatonic.  But to be sensitive, aware, engaged if only intellectually, is be utopian, and to be utopian is to be an artist.  And that, being such a large task, requires a long poem.

G. P. Lainsbury has transcended the immediate moment to address a larger issue of our time—how we are each a triangulation of our place, era, and experiences—delivering an important work that brings us to face-to-face with the two choices that define who we are: people who accept the status quo we deplore, or people who resist the system through questioning.  Lainsbury’s decision is to choose the latter, and Versions of North is the artifact of his brave and affirmative decision to do so.

2. Crossing the Frontier

RM:  Greg, first of all, thank you for agreeing to an interview with Buried Letter Press about your book-length poem, Versions of North.  Unfortunately, far too many American readers are as familiar with Canadian poets as they could be. We are delighted to present you and your work to our readers, and hope this will encourage them to read more work by some of the many fine writers in Canada. 

Let me begin the interview by saying that the process for writing a book-length poem is probably as mysterious to poets as that of writing a novel might be.  Did you begin Versions of North as a book-length project?

GPL:  I didn’t set off to write a book-length poem.  The project came about as I shifted my attention from the short lyric to the long, serial poem, coincident with my meeting Barry McKinnon [British Columbian poet] when I first moved “north” in the fall of 1994. Through Barry’s work I was introduced to a tradition that I found resonant for my situation as a poet, and given access to, and the support of, a community of poets centered in Prince George where McKinnon was.

RM: Did you have a sense of the serial poem, or a book-length project in your mind when you began?  Or did you discover that as you were writing?

GPL:  The project began as a formal exercise in technique, the utilization of various aleatory techniques to disrupt the linearity of conventional poetic logic, and to blend registers of the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, etc.

Over the years I initiated a drafting process which includes image-collage as the background to the emerging poem. I wanted the making of the poem to be an active process more akin to action painting than static composition. The poem uses the whole page to create an ever-shifting, post-Olsonian field of signification.

In rock’n’roll terms I think of myself as a kid with a guitar and an old four-track recorder in his parent’s basement, creating low-fi avant symphonic art rock with early UK punk inflection.

RM:  That’s a great metaphor!  Is there as much pleasure as that in writing “the long poem”?

GPL:  There is no particular pleasure in writing the long poem. There are moments when eros and aesthetics become entangled, though for the most part it is work. The form lends itself to the rhythms of my life as a college teacher [in Fort St John, BC]. Most of the work throughout the academic year consists of foraging for content. As the teaching year draws to a close the lengthening of the days coincides with an increase in energy and the onset of an anxiety specific to the beginning of a part of the poem.

The task always seems too daunting; the audacity necessary to undertake such an absurd task is hard to locate on any given morning. And then once begun, the working through of false starts and fretting, the disappointment of one’s own critical intelligence hovering over the creative self, endless compromise of specific attempts at perfection in context of need to keep moving forward—though maybe one morning you wake up and think what you’ve done is not so bad, and I guess there is maybe a little pleasure there.

Each literary “season,” by the way, results in a “scenario” which is published in chapbook form, though some years, due to the usual catastrophes, there is no harvest at all.

RM:  I can’t keep from thinking of the title, Versions of North, as a kind of metaphor for finding our direction: you know, the compass point.  But also, I sense this is a book about discovery, for one of your epigrams, the one from Jack Spicer, is “You have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you’re doing.”  To quote Raymond Carver, “If this sounds / like the story of a life, okay.”  So to get to my question: What did you discover in the writing of this book?  What do you think readers might find in it?

GPL:  I suppose one might consider Versions of North as a book about discovery.  And it is “the story of a life,” though the totality of its intentions remains obscure even to myself.

In the “Note on text” [at the end of Versions of North], I focus on one of these, the book as “an attempt on the part of one human being to make sense of the forces, large and small, that have brought him to a particular place, and that have shaped the place where he finds himself.” I evoke William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, “a long poem [written] upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city,” as an important point of reference. The poem is both more and less than an “Idea” of North—it is, in the limited sense that is always “my” sense, the embodiment of an uncertain North, weak and highly constrained by context.

RM:  Like many academics, you were educated in an enriched urban environment—in your case, Vancouver, correct?  But like many of us, you find yourself securing a position in the intellectual “outback” of northern British Columbia.  In my reading of Versions of North, I considered the situation of the contemporary scholar-artist, like a displaced Chinese poet during the years of the great dynasties, exiled into the provinces, but in a contemporary sense, being an avant-garde intellectual in a conservative rural area.  Was this the kind of metaphor you intended?

GPL:   I was educated in the enriched urban environments of two “major” western Canadian cities, Calgary and Vancouver, but had to move to “the intellectual outback” of northern British Columbia to secure employment suitable to my training.  I like your figuring of the situation of the contemporary scholar-artist, exiled to the provinces “like a displaced Chinese poet during the years of the great dynasties … in a contemporary sense, being an avant-garde intellectual in a conservative rural area,” though I am fully aware of the psychopathology of such conceit, which is not to be taken at face value.

RM:  With Versions of North finished and published, what are you working on now?  What’s your next project?

GPL: I have a number of projects always on the go, which I work at according to no particular logic. I have spent considerable time this past sabbatical year working on a novel, though I have also been working on a series of short stories.

Some mornings when I sit down to work a few lyrics insist on coming out before I can get back to what I am “supposed” to be doing.  So I have a title and materials for a new poem, and hope to get down to it as soon as I can muster up the nerve.

Many thanks to G.P. Lainsbury for discussing his work with us. For more information regarding the poet and to find his work click here.

Versions of North by G. P. Lainsbury.

Halfmoon Bay, BC, Canada: Caitlin Press, 2011.  88 pages.

 PB original.  ISBN 1-894759-62-1  $16.95

SCREEN AND PLAY

My TV Is Better Than Your Movie: The Battle of Screen Snobs

By Rich Heldenfels

The movie industry has been enjoying one of its biggest successes in 2012 as the comic-book-inspired Marvel’s The Avengers has taken in more than $1.4 billion in worldwide revenues; its North American take, about half of that total, is enough to put it in third place among all-time box office champs when not adjusted for inflation, behind only top-ranked Avatar and Titanic. (The Avengers ranks twenty-eighth all-time after  the inflation adjustment by Box Office Mojo).  But that seeming success does not completely overshadow the failure in America of two other films, John Carter and Battleship, each with budgets reportedly in excess of $200 million, neither of which drew audiences. And even the success of The Avengers is tempered by its getting extra revenues from 3D showings for which theaters add about $3 to the ticket price for 2D.  By the way, the biggest box-office hits are neither the most artistic nor thoughtful of productions. In 2011, according to Box Office Mojo, the three biggest movies in America were parts of pop franchises — Harry Potter, Transformers and Twilight – and only the Potter film could be considered artistically successful. For a thoughtful drama dealing with a cultural issue in 2011, one has to scroll down the rankings to thirteenth place and The Help. That film, while controversial though its treatment of race, was nominated for a best-picture Oscar only to be beaten for that honor by The Artist, a widely praised but gimmicky homage to silent movies which drew far fewer people to American theaters than either The Help or six other of the nine best-picture nominees.

This is not to say that there are only bad movies out there. Plenty of well-considered films are made, although many fail to get wide distribution; the nine 2011 films to have a 100 percent positive rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review-aggregation site included the likes of This Is Not a Film, Everyday Sunshine, We Are Here, Thunder Soul and Hell and Back Again, the sort of films available to moviegoers who could find art-house (which in Akron’s case meant an hour’s drive to Cleveland’s Cedar Lee theater) or until they come to home screens via telecasts, DVD and Blu-ray, or streaming video services. But consider what those same homes can get via television, including Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Downton Abbey, The Big Bang Theory, Breaking Bad, Community, Modern Family and  Justified. Granted that Homeland and Game of Thrones are on premium services Showtime and HBO respectively, all of the shows in this list can reach at-home viewers in the millions without requiring them to fill up the gas tank. Moreover, the shows I have mentioned are not disposable trifles—of which there are many in television—but ones that are ambitious in their presentation and in their embrace of ideas—about power, family, truth, class, crime and other topics. (Big Bang Theory, on the surface about funny nerds, is also about the value of intellect—these are not poor nerds—and the endless human struggle for a balance of thought and emotion.) And some find mass success. Big Bang averages 15 million viewers a week and Modern Family more than 12 million, numbers so large that, if each viewer bought a ticket to the same, single movie, it would be an immediate blockbuster. Moreover, in television, the viewing millions come back week after week; the audience for a hit TV show by far eclipses that of most movies, successful or not.For that matter, some beloved movies—including It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz and, yes, the Three Stooges shorts—seemed to be at the end of their cultural moment until they migrated to TV and were discovered anew.

Yet there are still factions in the entertainment industry who want to see movies as a thing apart from television, and as a superior form. Entertainment awards-giving organizations separate TV productions from movies; made-for-television movies, regardless of their high quality, are not eligible for Oscar consideration unless they have been shown in at least a few theaters before telecast. Roger Ebert, promoting his film-review series (on TV) with Gene Siskel, once infuriated a roomful of TV critics by arguing—based on viewing a single episode—that the much acclaimed drama Hill Street Blues was a bad show, with a style that in a movie “would be laughable.” Ebert reportedly said, after a TV critic accused him of being a film snob, that “there aren’t very many television snobs. … The best movies are so much better than any television that has ever been done that it frankly isn’t a contest.” Even television itself encourages the sense that it’s something less than the movies.  “It’s not TV. It’s HBO,” indeed. Actor Ted Danson, a deft performer in television for decades (Cheers, Becker, Damages, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and more), once explained his TV ties as coming from big-screen failure, “box-office nose-diving films.” A handful of actors, among them Tom Cruise, still save their acting efforts for theatrical fare.

Only television and movies are not really separate creatures, certainly not in terms of broad public perception. Each has faced decades of criticism for being vapid, overly commercial, artistically uninspired, in jeopardy from competing media and waning audience enthusiasm. Shortly after the turn of the 20^th – not 21^st – century, the movie industry had apparently recovered from the first proclamation of its death after the infant medium, as cultural critic Gilbert Seldes wrote, “was saying nothing whatever of interest.” The pictures weren’t much better in 1919, when Seldes, in his book An Hour With the Movies and the Talkies, declared “the majority (of movies) … are so stupid, tasteless, and wearisome that no man of average intelligence could bear to look at them twice.” The sad fact is that entertainment media of all types have long struggled to find a balance between commerce and art (Seldes said there was “perhaps a score” of worthwhile movies). And the newest form is usually decried as the worst. Seldes again: “One feels that centuries of producing cheap novels, tawdry plays, vapid songs, and formless paintings have not equaled the mass of twaddle which the moving picture has accumulated in three decades.”

As for television, even during its first Golden Age in the early to mid-1950s, when live drama was showing how effective TV could be, the medium faced some critical sneering, including from film critics who had seen enough twaddle to know better. Anticipating Ebert’s slam decades later, Arthur Knight complained in 1957 that there was “no D.W. Griffith of television, no one with the vision to recognize its potential powers and, by an act of creative imagination, transform it into a truly distinctive art form”; instead, he complained, TV was no more than a hybrid—a “radio with pictures” or “movies by air.”

But the fact was that TV was already showing that it had artists, especially writers. The Oscar winner for best picture of 1955, Marty, was adapted from Paddy Chayefsky’s television play from 1953. In  a 1955 collection of his TV plays Chayefsky—who would win a writing Oscar for Marty and two more for later films—conceded the commercial and other restrictions of television, then added that “this is an age of savage introspection, and television is the dramatic medium through which to expose our new insights into ourselves.” Further, he argued that there had been in the past year “four or five shows … that were far and away superior to anything on the current Broadway stage or anything issued by the movie industry.” While the following decades would find plenty of television snobs convinced that The Beverly Hillbillies or Laverne & Shirley  or Jersey Shore represented a new low, those viewers would fail to see that TV had also provided to audiences Roots, Masada and other miniseries; the inventiveness of Ernie Kovacs, the brilliant farce of Lucille Ball, the satire of the Smothers Brothers and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In; the urbane humor of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, SCTV and Saturday Night Live; andthe drama of its live heyday, St. Elsewhere and, yes, Hill Street Blues. All of those efforts – and more besides – had aired by the time Ebert argued for the artistic superiority of movies.

Moreover, the more technology advances, the more TV and movies are intertwined, via actors, producers, writers, studios and the way we watch. Television screens in the home have gotten bigger even as cinema multiplexes often seem smaller; if you are willing to pay for the equipment, you can watch movies and TV shows in 3D at home, as well as in high-definition, with quality sound. In addition, you can do so without the crunch of stale popcorn under your feet and the mumbled commentary by a couple behind you. Movies that don’t make it from theaters like the Cedar Lee to the big screens in smaller towns can instead be viewed at home via DVD, Blu-ray or, most significantly, streaming video. My Netflix account makes no judgment because my queue has Star Trek: Deep Space 9 alongside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind any more than it does because the Altman and Truffaut titles share space with Demolition Man and Stir Crazy.

One more way that television and movies are similar is their shared guilt complex. I have long talked about a Chamber of Commerce theory behind entertainment-industry awards, a need to honor works that make an industry look not successful but good, noble, artistic. The Oscars often reflect that, as do the Emmys, where mainstream commercial fare often takes a back seat to boutique television like Mad Men, an excellent show which  feels important. The Emmys, meanwhile, have broken nonfiction programming into an array of categories (such as “reality program” and “reality-competition”) to acknowledge audience favorites while steering toward relatively prestigious winners; audience hit American Idol has repeatedly lost to the less-watched but more acclaimed The Amazing Race. For that matter, when TV honors commercial fare, it sometimes does so with a humble nod to the movies; actors known mainly for movie work are often Emmy darlings. Consider Melissa McCarthy’s acting Emmy win for her work on Mike & Molly, an honor some observers credited at least partly to her rousing comic turn in the theatrical film Bridesmaids. In fact, nothing more clearly illustrates the struggle to balance art and commerce, and TV and the movies, than the changes the Oscars have made in the Best Picture nominations. From the long-standard five nominations, the category has expanded to as many as ten – to make room for more commercial fare, which TV viewers will care about when the awards are televised, even if the eventual winner is The Artist.  Nevertheless, odds are that more people will see The Artist on their TVs at home than went to the multiplex for it—unless, that is, there’s something better on TV at that time.

Portions of this essay appeared in somewhat different form in the Akron Beacon Journal.

THE POSTCARD

The Postcard

Wishing you were here.

Darling,

I could not believe my eyes. Polychromatic clouds floated overhead at the hands of the crowd, and with each celebratory gesture of pigment, the field was transformed into an otherworldly vista. I would be no surprise if caked pigment is still on my skin upon our next American embrace! Never again will I experience such atmospheric vibration as the Color Run in Cleveland. I only fear that the world will look now muted in comparison until, of course, I see again your shining face.

Yours,

Amelia

YOU’RE NOT GETTING A SANDWICH

Method Museology

A Review of “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties”

By Heather Haden

 “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” is an exhibition featuring over 130 paintings, photographs, and sculptures created by more than 60 artists. The traveling exhibition, “Youth and Beauty,” was organized and launched by the Brooklyn Museum. After traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art, it opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art on July 1^st and may be visited through September 16^th. The title suggests that the exhibition focuses primarily on artworks expressing physical manifestations of agelessness and sensuality, and while artworks capturing such material perfection are certainly present in the exhibition, it ultimately encompasses a greater range of ideals and embodiments of unfolding modernity in the period bookended by World War I and the Great Depression.  While this exhibition is impressive on both a visual and informative level, what is most outstanding are the ways in visitors may engage with the curators’ design through analysis beyond what is clearly stated in “Youth and Beauty.”

What is most striking about the exhibition as a whole are the unexpected currents of youth and beauty, creating a greater, raw context for the most recognizable images from the 1920s, a familiarity with which most visitors come prepared. This preconceived knowledge of the 1920s at surface level allows the exhibition to educate the public about the often ignored practicalities beneath the veneer of glamour.

Curatorially, this large exhibition is made more visually and cognitively digestible by arranging artworks into seven themed sections, presented in order throughout the multi-gallery expanse:

1.)    Heroes: Power, Movement, and the Human Body

2.)    Body Language: Liberation and Restraint in Twenties Figuration

3.)    The Erotic Natural

4.)    Close-ups: Scrutiny, Perfection, and the Twenties Portrait

5.)    Kitchen Table Modernity: American Still Life in the Twenties

6.)    Silent Pictures: Encounters with a Remade World

7.)    Uneasy Peace: Views from the Road

Organizing the pieces into themes instead of chronological presentation allows viewers to gain a greater understanding of the main social and political undercurrents that inhabited the 1920s in their entirety.

George Bellows – Two Women 1924

The cadence of the exhibition begins with heroic force as visitors enter the energetic first gallery of “Power, Movement, and the Human Body” where representations of the jazz age and Harlem Renaissance are most concentrated. Aaron Douglas has the largest presence in this gallery, and his works such as “Congo” and “Charleston,” both from 1928, clearly deliver the spirit of sound marrying movement during the jazz and prohibition era. The room invokes empathy for the artistic surge of African American expression, as well as their struggles in the 1920s, constituting its own brand of liberation and restraint. This very empathy prepares visitors to enter the next gallery that focuses on the liberation and restraint of 1920s body language. This impeccable juxtaposition of overlapping themes shared by then socially segregated economic classes is just one way in which the curators subtly educate in a non-directive fashion. Where the theme is less subtle is in one of the first paintings in this gallery, George Bellow’s “Two Women” of 1924. A nude woman, representing sexual freedom, sits next to her modest, clothed doppelganger. While this composition directs the theme in a more conspicuous fashion, its inclusion in the room serves as a solid foundation upon which to compare the more unorthodox compositions within the room, such as Florine Stettheimer’s 1927 “Natatorium Undine.”

During the twenties, artists attempted to strike a balance between   sexually open content and confined representation. The exhibition presents the increasing sexual liberalism of the decade by juxtaposing the contrasting images, in order, of Luigi Lucioni’s “Paul Cadmus” of 1928, Romaine Brooks’ “Una, Lady Troubridge” of 1924, and James Chapin’s “George Martin and His Daughter Edith” of 1926 (no image). Paul Cadmus, an effeminate and homosexual man is exhibited on the wall to the left of the painting of Una, Lady of Troubridge, an androgynous woman predating Diane Keaton. The next piece in order shows George Martin and his daughter Edith, the epitome of paternal masculinity and girlish femininity, respectively, as well as suggesting the agrarian counterpart to Paul Cadmus’ and Una’s 1920s modernity in the sexually liberal artistic circles. While implying sexual openness by way of the portrait subject, Luigi Lucioni painted Paul Cadmus using a restrained, tight modeling of light and shade, accurately reflecting his influence by Italian Renaissance painters Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna, both championed for their graphic photo-realism.

Luigi Lucioni – Paul Cadmus 1928

Romaine Brooks – Una, Lady Troubridge 1924

Restraint was both conceptual and literal. Artists included in their paintings women donning the newest bathing suit fashions, bearing for the first time thighs and uncovered shoulders, as in the icon image of the exhibition, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1922 “Self-Portrait with Rita.” Women were becoming more self-aware of cosmetics and new forms of undergarments, most notably through the vehicles of advertising and cinema, and women were literally constrained through the use of such soft-celled imprisonments in order to achieve the fashionable waif silhouette popularized in 1920s media.

Thomas Hart Benton – Self Portrait with Rita 1922

At this same time, manufactured foods were gaining an increasing presence in the American diet compared to the prewar, primarily agrarian food supply.  As industrialism imposed itself upon agriculture, the foods that were being consumed by the once easily lithe, feminine figures affected the health of these women in new ways, complementing the advertisements for new undergarments. The products that filled the American pantry are depicted in the still life paintings displayed. This was the first time in the history of American art that manufactured goods such as food, cosmetics, and other home goods vied for a compositional spot on the painter’s canvas.

The sheer volume of photography presented is impressive. While the Youth and Beauty exhibit was not organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, its presence at the Cleveland Museum and its inclusion of such a multitude of photographs shine a light on the increasing number of photographs displayed as a result of Barbara Tannenbaum, the new Curator of Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Matching the Cleveland Museum of Art’s recent proliferation of photography, independent of this traveling exhibit, Alfred Stieglitz was displayed at large as the artist responsible for establishing photography as a fine art during the 1920s. In the company of Stieglitz’ photography were also works by Man Ray, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others. 

Georgia O’Keefe – The Shelton with Sunspots, NY 1926

The avoidance of stereotypes and the emphasis on provoking the thought of visitors is accomplished not only from side-by-side pairings of specific pieces but also through cognitive recall that extends between rooms. Works not previously known by artists both familiar and unfamiliar are displayed. The former, viewing unknown works by well-known artists, serves to subvert how well visitors believe they know the period, providing opportunities for surprise and intrigue. Georgia O’Keefe, for example, best known  for her magnified paintings of flora, such as the included “Two Calla Lilies on Pink” of 1928, is emphasized within the exhibition more for her work of industrial cityscapes such as “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” of 1926. However, O’Keefe’s affinity for floral motifs is not abandoned, but represented in a provocative way that extends between galleries and artists.  Edward Weston’s 1927 photograph, “Shells,” located in “The Erotic Natural,” has a similar objective to O’Keefe’s famous flower paintings; both eroticize non-human, natural forms. In “Shells,” Weston’s composition of light transforms the hard, dry surface of the shell into what visually appears to be moist flesh. Viewers walking through the galleries are invoked to recall “Shells” from the earlier gallery upon seeing floral symbolism from O’Keefe and Marsden Hartley in “Kitchen Table Modernity.”

Edward Weston – Shells 1927

The pace of the exhibit slows after “Kitchen Table Modernity” and of all of the themed rooms, “Silent Pictures: Encounters with a Remade World” is the largest and most overwhelming. The layout, combined with the number of works, makes the ideas in this room much more cumbersome to navigate. However, the sheer number of works presented is testament to the social and economical impact of the encroaching industrialization. It is in this room that O’Keefe’s aforementioned “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” is displayed, finding company with iconic American paintings such as Charles Demuth’s 1927 “My Egypt.”

The last room, “Uneasy Peace: Views from the Road,” is the weakest of the gallery spaces. Its focus on the transformation of American landscape painting after the dawning of increased urbanization creates a logical sequence following “Silent Pictures.” While the inclusion of Edward Hopper’s “Lighthouse Hill” of 1927 is certainly the crown jewel of the room, the desolate, largely unpeopled landscapes collaborate to fill the room with a nearly palpable feeling of anxiety. Associated literature on placards on the walls informs viewers that while it was rare for artists to people their landscapes in the 1920s, when people were shown, they were usually depicted not as participants with the earth, but rather as distant spectators.

In its entirety, “Youth and Beauty” presents visitors with a surge of energy upon entering the first gallery space that turns sour when exiting the last, reflecting the celebration following the end of World War I that turned bitter by the end of the 1920s, foreshadowing the Great Depression of the decade to come.  Whether intentional or not, through art, text, and the silent mastery of curators, this exhibit engages the visitor in a type of museum method acting. Eyes feast on beautiful images while the mind is given food for thought below the surface of the visual. This is a must see exhibition, one that has earned a spot in my top ten exhibitions. For readers distant and not-so-distant who wish to view “Youth and Beauty” at the Cleveland Museum of Art before September 16^th, allow yourself ample time to appreciate the work. Reading all plaques and wall vinyls and truly studying each work may take as many as three hours or more. Ultimately, it is a wonderful way to invest an afternoon. “Youth and Beauty” informs visitors about how to look at the artworks presented in the exhibition, but it also imparts to visitors fresh eyes with which to leave the exhibition.

Note: All images included in this review were found through internet image searches. No photographs were taken in the galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art.