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Still Far Away and on a Dark Mountain
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
It is almost certainly not wholly your fault if you hear the words “poetry,” “criticism,” and “culture” and your brain shuts off immediately and you start thinking about whether doing the dishes piled up in the sink would really be that much less fun than surfing this portion of the internet. Much of literary culture, and literary education from the middle school to the graduate school level is designed, intentionally or unintentionally, to bore the crap out of you and make you hate anything that smacks of high culture. Whether intentionally obscurist or simply tedious, literary education, literary criticism and indeed, contemporary literary culture are designed to valorize the obscure and totally irrelevant over the pressing and immediate, explain to you why the people you actually read are not important and often, to take the fun out of your books.
I’ve told this story before, but I think it bears repeating as a good example of why people don’t read poetry. Some years ago, my cousin, now herself a teacher, brought her high school English homework to a family event and asked me to help her with it. The contents were a long list of literary terms, and a thick sheaf of poems, all ostensibly about trees and nature. Her job was to find three examples in the poems of each of these literary practice, and then write an essay comparing two of the poems. Sitting down with her to look for foreshadowing in three poems, and then zeugma (yeah, I had to look it up too ;-)), I could see why my cousin informed me that she had absolutely no intention of studying English in college beyond what was absolutely mandatory.
When she asked me for help with comparing two poems (here initial proposed thesis “they are about trees.” ;-)), I suggested that she consider why both Frost (Birches) and Wordsworth (Nutting) felt it was so important to write poems that were ostensibly about trees, but had an enormous amount of content about masturbation. She initially didn’t believe that content was there – she had read the poems, but had also been taught so long that high culture was boring that it never occurred to her to look for anything fun. A brief dramatic read-along made it kind of hard to believe otherwise, though (yes, I know you want to go look them up, so go ahead, this piece will still be here.) In the end, she, probably correctly, did not feel such a paper would prosper with the kind of teacher who sent one a sheaf of tree poems to find instances of foreshadowing.
That kind of English education, and the high academic style that focuses on trivialities to the exclusion of the point (I should be clear, not all academic studies of literature fall in this category – indeed, many don’t) are both to blame for the fact that things that aren’t actually boring or all that difficult get treated as though they are. All of the commonly lamented reasons why people don’t read “serious literature” are true – we watch too much tv, we play too many video games, we are in many ways a post-literate culture. But were our serious books and our poems as engaging as much low culture writing actually is, I doubt we’d bother making the laments.
The project of good teaching about literature, then, I find, is mostly about un-teaching people what they’ve learned – that is, that one does not love books because of their importance, or the author’s self-importance, or because you’ve been taught that they are important. One loves books because they are funny and engaging and brilliant and moving and angering and arousing and dirty and comic and fierce. Teaching Shakespeare, for example, is partly about teaching people to understand Shakespeare’s language, but even more about unteaching them the reverence they’ve been imbued with for Shakespeare the high culture genius and replacing it with actual affection for Shakespeare the very funny and moving writer. It has been a while, but I have stood in front of a room full of students trying hard to get them to laugh at the scene of the noble heroine, so pure and glorious that cast into a whorehouse because she’s so damned annoying, she converts the whores to nuns, and they sing hymns to the horny sailors below. It is a tough sell until you break the mystique of Shakespeare, and then, they laugh.
…There is, as yet, no literary writers who can get at where we’re going, who don’t fall into the trap of the end of the world. I find this disappointing, because such a literature does exist – we have literatures that derive from deep suffering, from the unmaking of a world and reconsittuting it in difficult times. We have the literature of Holocaust Survivors, and the survivors of the medieval and renaissance black deaths. We have the body of literature written by the world war generations, seen the world torn by conflagration, and by the poets who lived through the unmaking of monarchic society and revolutions in England, France and. We have the poetry of war-torn lands, of Apartheid and slavery. That is, the canon of literature is overwhelmingly a body of work whose best creations came when the world was radically transformed, when it did not seem as though there was a comprehensible future. Unlike the present, though, that literature was usually popular and literary simultaneously – that is, it was written for the people whose world was being unmade, by people who could tell stories – stories to explain, stories to inspire, stories to move to laughter in the face of terrible events, stories to use as a guide to navigate through hard places.
As far as I can see, that is not true of most contemporary poetry and fiction – in fact, it is the contrary. Most writers are not writing for the people who are living through the beginnings of our trauma – they know that the people who are already struggling, already impoverished, already losing their homes will not read them, and while some struggle with this, most seem so accustomed to the radical division between people we read and people we don’t that they don’t grasp that it matters…
(1 Feb 2010)
Washington, we have a Problem
D.W. Sabin, Front Porch Republic
At 2108 hours on April 13, 1970, Astronaut Jack Swigert of the crew of Apollo 13 uttered the words that have entered the English lexicon as an all-puropose phrase denoting one helluva problem. Two days into the mission, our third to land men on the Moon, a sharp bang occurred, followed by a vibration and then a red warning light came on. Swigert saw the light and radioed the Control Center on Earth, stating: “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. Houston wanted a clarification of this ominous announcement and crew-member James Lovell jumped in to add: “We’ve had a main B bus undervolt,” which is to say an oxygen tank had exploded and power was shutting down, not a very good thing when 200,000 miles from home. Thus began four extraordinarily tense days of life and death decisions to get these modern era explorers home. Using the Lunar Module as a lifeboat and ingeniously reconfiguring life support systems to bare subsistence levels, the crew used controlled and untested burns in order to employ gravitational forces that would slingshot them around the moon and on a successful trajectory back toward Earth, an extremely small target in the depths of space. Swigert refers to the episode, despite its enormous cost as a “successful failure.” Given the breathtaking array of ingenuity and skill that was displayed in bringing the three astronauts back safely and in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, one must agree. The term “successful failure” is a perfect summation of Apollo 13 and the miraculous events which riveted the attention of the world almost 40 years ago.
It seems to me that the term is also one way to describe what we face in our nation’s government. Hobbled by an economic catastrophe and assailed by malevolent terrorists, we remain a remarkable nation whose success would seem to have defied odds as great, if not greater than those faced by the crew of Apollo 13. However, it should be increasingly clear now that this great success is approaching inevitable failure if we do not confront the current situation with the same life and death clarity displayed by the men piloting Apollo 13 and their associates at Mission Control. There seems to be one gravitational force at our disposal today and it is called “muddling through.” Compromise and best intentions are expected to ricochet us back on a proper trajectory in the fullness of time when combined with the controlled firings of “future legislative remedy.” The prevailing energy of the gravity force that we must tame in this ricochet, and put back to productive use is partisan politics. By “partisan politics” I mean informed, principled and discursive politics where ideas and results are the goal, rather than simply the so-called “60 vote majority.” If we do not reform our political actions, we will surely rocket into oblivion, contentiously yammering all the way. It is not only toxic partisanship that is killing our chances, it is also a lack of attention to the real degenerative forces at work in our government today. We have a new yet very old BAAL on the block whose name shall never be spoken by either political party.
President Obama has announced his administration’s intent to begin combating the enormous budget deficits that we now face. Debt as a portion of Gross National Product is reaching levels that historically impose stagnation and bureaucratic atrophy upon even robust nations like Japan. Debt and the American Economic Outlook are as important a National Security Issue as any we face. In response, the President asserts that discretionary spending will be frozen at current levels. Given the challenge before us, this is akin to Mission Control telling the Astronauts on board Apollo 13 “Good Luck” and to cross their fingers. Perhaps it is a start, but it is only a start and in no way a finish, nor even remotely a solution.
Assessing the allocation of tax money from the year just past, the problem becomes crystal clear. Freezing discretionary spending will amount to a savings of far, far less than what is needed. The real culprits, military spending and debt service toward increasing deficits, are the black depths of space we now confront, with little hope of return. They are the new deity to which we sacrifice the future of the commonweal. According to a pie-chart produced by the “Friends Committee on National Legislation” and cited by Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com, the following 2009 tax allocation percentages are in play. Military Spending is the greatest piece of the pie at 44.4%. Health Care comes next at 19.7%, Response to Poverty is next at 11.8 % and Interest on the Non-Military Share of the Budget comes next at 10.9%. Accordingly, 55.3% of last years tax receipts are consumed by war and debt service. Adding Health Care and Poverty subsidies, we arrive at a total of nearly 87% of our annual budget consumed by a combination of debt, war, illness and poverty…
(1 Feb 2010)
How Can We Talk About Transformational Change Without Losing Hope?
Frankie Colmane, AlterNet
Every time we’re subjected to more dramatic predictions of global warming without being given solutions, a seed of helplessness is planted in our souls.
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… Hopkins’ awareness that shocking people into action can cause damage to our ability to cope with a changing future, his attention to individuals’ well-being and his commitment to make us self-reliant and in charge of our destiny has hit a nerve.
Transition Initiatives have sprouted all over the United Kingdom with healthy numbers in Australia, the U.S., New Zealand, Canada and parts of Europe. It’s too early to tell if they will be able to sustain their promise of self-reliance and fulfill their commitment to inclusiveness when it comes to the most vulnerable and disenfranchised in the northern and southern parts of the world, where immediate needs are much more urgent and real than the uncertain future he describes.
… At the Los Angeles Transition meeting, six slightly deflated earth balls are drooping on a table. The facilitator throws them at us, the consumers of six times more resources than the earth possesses. Hopkins urges us to take responsibility for our actions. As the Dalai Lama suggests, we need to see the chain of events and people involved in each and every one of our purchases. We need to look at the consequences of overconsumption, overpopulation, the finite nature of some of the resources we most depend upon and the consequences of climate change. Declaring our independence when it comes to our basic needs is a powerful vision that Hopkins is challenging us to implement by organizing at the local level, but we must also act on Jensen’s righteous claim that the responsibility and the inevitable sacrifices should be distributed equally among the culprits. And that will involve confrontation of government and corporations by a sound and resilient people acting not out of panic, but out of their conviction in their alienable rights.
Frankie Colmane lives in Los Angeles where she reports on local independent artists and activists. Links to her stories can be found on “The Smiling Spider” blog.
(1 February 2010)
Long review of the movement, favorable overall but with some criticisms. -BA
