Requiescat in pace, redux

How terrible that there are people who hate their lives so much that they hate existence itself and want to destroy it. Recent events keep telling us this thorny piece of news.

We know that we can do something about tightening up licensing paperwork and getting rid of gun features that simply shouldn't be used by hunters or anyone who is not an active soldier. Discussion about such things is already happening.

In addition, though, I see so much hatred and deep scorn for other people online, in Facebook comments and elsewhere, and I believe that the encouragement of tribal divisions and hysteria about the last election results contributes to a cultural climate of intense feelings and hatred. Can't we each do something about that, little by little?

I spent yesterday afternoon with two friends, helping to clean up an historic chapel, and came home to sad news about a Southern church family, so I think that I'll let Saint Paul have the last word. He was a word-wielder and deeply concerned with the health of church families. And it's a good word, whether you are a religious person or an atheist, whether you claim one thing or another, and no matter what you hold highest. It seems simple but is evidently difficult. "Love your neighbor as yourself."

What survives

Ramesses II

The only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts. Political power is transient. Political power is nothing. It will vanish.  The most powerful man in the world is nobody. The only way we remember any of the powerful men of the world is the way they were captured by artists, often anonymous artists in ancient Egypt and Rome. The bequest of any civilization and the test of its quality is its arts. I feel that the left and the right, everyone across the political spectrum is guilty of offenses against the arts, and I hope that you will now go forth and be ambassadors for the arts. 

           --Camille Paglia, minus a few okays and may be a so or two

"Lessons in history, beauty, and the point of life"

Moreau's Jason and Medea,
Musée d'Orsay, Wikipedia public domain

It's a bit odd that I made it to Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu before I ever made it to Paris but so it is. Here are a few scattered thoughts about my just-finished trip, which was quite wonderful and not at all like Lent (aside from sore knees and seeing many skulls and bones and rambling in the chilly rain.) What is so alluring about Paris is the beauty and also the plain fact that there is so much worth knowing: it has many satisfying layers of culture.

How we change! At 19 I loved Burne-Jones. Decades later, I hardly give him a glance because he's hung so close to Gustave Moreau at the Musée d'Orsay. That place alone is proof that high culture in the West cannot do without the "dead white male," like him or not.

Mystery is always an element in the most pleasing work, and I thought about this repeatedly in Paris. Probably the most over-familiar example there or anywhere is La Gioconda. But in La Dame à la licorne tapestries at the Musée de Cluny (Musée national du Moyen Âge), I like the way the final motto, À mon seul désir, can be read in so many different ways that it tends up seeming pregnant with meaning but not at all revealing itself.

Climbing the winding stair from the lovely lower level and turning the corner into the upper level of Sainte-Chapelle: surprise linked to intense beauty is as pleasing in architecture as it is in a garden of winding paths with secret sculpture and discovered vistas. I'd like to go back there again. If you're in doubt as to whether high culture is a worthy and beautiful ideal, Sainte-Chapelle will settle your mental hash.

Perhaps as we grow older, what culture we have tells us what things we don't really need to know. While I regretted not being faster here and there (never quite got to the Manet), I found myself a bit cool on royal gaud at the Château de Versailles. I didn't regret missing some of the rooms, though I loved the outrageous chapel, and it was interesting to see works by Bernini, the Clicquot organ, etc. in a "home" interior. I hung around the Morand clock, waiting for the playlet of the laughing dwarf to appear on the hour, but it seems to no longer function. (I love automatons and clockwork--well, who doesn't?) Enjoyed walking the André Le Nôtre gardens and poking around the grounds and seeing the smaller structures, particularly the adorable hamlet of Marie Antoinette, tumbledown though it is. Perhaps what I was cool on was Louis XIV himself, as the degree of narcissism seemed overwhelming and sometimes comical. Or perhaps it was the Baroque? But I like Bernini. And Caravaggio. Maybe Louis, then? Because I enjoyed seeing the broken royal monument of Queen Adelaide of Savoy, wife of Louis VI. Yes, I think the Sun King's affectations must be why--that and the prodigious ostentatiousness of the place, even though I saw many things to like.

À mon seul désir, Musée de Cluny, Wikipedia public domain

An element that is seldom seen in the states but common in Europe and Asia is that interesting sense of one phase of culture taking over another in architecture. It must be wonderful to live with that constantly. It is a rich thing for a writer, too. Living with tradition is to be fed by culture. You have a sense of ongoing culture in Notre Dame and other churches, but it's even stronger elsewhere. I liked seeing Crypte archéologique du Parvis Notre-Dame where the medieval bumps into the Roman--or the Roman frigidarium bumping into the medieval at Cluny--or the constant refurbishing and remaking in churches like St. Severin or St. Pierre. There's also a sense of the place as layered and undermined with the Les Catacombes and sewers and various archaeological underground sites. That must do something to one's mind. And a good thing, too. It's pleasurable for someone from the states and for a writer. I think of all the early writers bemoaning our lack of "thick," built-up civilization, or of Charles Brockden Brown transforming the forests into Gothic structures. We do have some ancient native American sites, but they are not so woven into our cities, and none of them have the presence of the sites in Latin America.

It is possible to walk from rue Meslay up to the Seine and past the Tour Eiffel with lots of side wanderings even if you have a bum knee that makes you sorry you did it later on. What a walkable city! Sidewalks are often a bit narrow, but who cares? I live in a little Yankee village with lots of museums that's quite walkable when we're not in the mad middle of a blizzard, as we are now, but eventually all sidewalks have been thoroughly walked many times....

Did I say that I love the medieval world? I adore medieval carved ivory and stained glass. And bizarre reliquaries and goldsmith work and tapestries. If only I wouldn't drop dead in childbirth (would) or die of illness in childhood (would) or be a miserable peasant (would), I could be a happy medieval traveler.

In lieu of a medieval life, I might just like to live in the Louvre. I managed to stare at the Vermeer show, Egypt, Assyria, the medieval rooms, and a huge amount of European painting, but I think it might take a lifetime to look over the place properly.

Lovely to see the university classes using the Louvre. We live in a time in which American academics kick out the highest achievements of culture in the name of increasing diversity and equality, but we will never achieve a high culture of diversity and equality if artists and writers don't stand on the greats of the past. And in the West, those greats of the past are dominated by those pesky dead white males. But when art goes out from the soul and becomes part of the soul of the world, well, the best of it is beyond considerations of gender or race. And the very finest is what we want to stand on. If we don't stand on tradition and the finest creations of the past, we are but spiders, spinning from our own limited guts.

Food, one must say something about Paris food, no? And I have now eaten ice cream at Berthillon--quite good but not up to the fabulous, weird, magic flavors of Emporio La Rosa in Santiago, Chile. I would hate to admit how many of those flavors I tried in a rather short span of time. Ceviche was better in Peru, but everything else edible in Paris was hard to beat. The food in cafes and restaurants the locals know more than the tourists was wonderfully imaginative. Fun to let them bring whatever they like in many small courses and be surprised. Fun also to visit a market like La Marché des Enfants Rouges and eat in a little rainy tent. Also, I definitely had a weakness for the layered sables and the small cakes at Bontemps in the Marais. (And we met interesting people at restaurants, including a Texan who fell in love with Paris and stayed, and who I now realize was Rick Odums of the Centre International de Danse.)

Paris myths... Perhaps it was the frequent rain and cold at fault, but Paris was not quite as fashionable as I expected it to be, particularly in Paris Fashion Week, though I did enjoy passing by shop windows and staring at clothes (and art and flowers and so on.) We did keep noticing that Asian tourists were wearing pale gray with pale shell pink in beautifully shaped wool coats. Unlike the myth, Parisians are not all mere fashionable sticks for clothes to hang on. They come in all size and shapes. Nor were they rude about a tourist jabbering at them in schoolgirl French, as I was led to expect, but were quite willing to engage, ever helpful and friendly. And now that it is blizzarding outside, I'm ready to return. Already two fresh feet of snow, falling fast, and set to snow into tomorrow...

photo by Chatsam, Cluny, CC via Wikipedia
Roman baths with capitals from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Precipitous slippage

Once upon a time I was a new-made Associate Professor with tenure; my answer to that lovely promotion was to quit academia entirely because I wanted to be a poet and novelist, not an academic poet and novelist. I felt that I would be a stronger, better writer outside the land of ivory towers. What I did not grasp at the time was how completely the academy would take over the world of writing, particularly the realm of poetry, and make it into a near-monolithic enterprise. (Simultaneously, both poetry and literary fiction began to move toward being minor arts--well, poetry was already on the way.) This change has meant that academic writers support one another and give one another various helpful privileges.

Those of us outside the academy are somewhat in the cold, particularly if--as I do--the writer believes that the diminishing returns of Modernism are upon us, and that the way forward is back through tradition and form. Free verse and an obsession with originality (I don't see how that works, given that we're more than a century past modernism's birth--Modernism hasn't been modern for a long time) have become a kind of ideology in our university system. A large number of journals are associated with colleges or are founded by MFA graduates. Most of these are primarily interested in free verse. Meanwhile, I am not primarily interested in free verse, although I do have a recently-finished collection containing poems that derive from a foreign chant tradition that looks free but contains many rhetorical flourishes allied to that tradition.

Do I regret my decision about leaving the academy? No, I don't. I am a better writer because of that choice, and I also had the luxury of having three children, which I probably could not have managed if I had stayed in college settings as a writer and teacher. I find that it is hard to do three major things well, but two--well, you can give up a lot of things that are enjoyable but not essential and so make two big callings work.

I still have a few writer friends who are in the academy and make their living there; I think it's fine that they made the choice to stay in. Most people who gain a perch there do, after all. I just think that I made the right choice for me. What else can we do but try to make right choices? I admire people like poet-professor-mother Luisa Igloria who grasp after mastery in three realms. The late Doris Betts (professor, dean, writer, mother) comes to mind among novelists.

We live in a time when very few poetry books sell in reasonable numbers. I've talked to various editors about sales and found that some poetry books don't break the 50-mark. That's pretty sad, isn't it? I hear that Copper Canyon books sometimes make it to 600; those are the sorts of little numbers a poetry press depends on. (The funny thing about a poetry book is that it can become the sort of book that you return to again and again. So in that way it's a better bargain than most books.)

My picture of how my own poetry books are doing is a bit fuzzy. I know that Thaliad continues to trickle (or seep, maybe!) along in sales for Beth Adams's Phoenicia Publishing and is heading toward the 400-mark in combined paperback/hardcover. [Update: I was pleasantly wrong! 425 copies so far, as of January 19th.] The Foliate Head has sold out its first and second hardcover printings at UK's Stanza Press, though there are still a few copies available on line. I'm don't know the paperback or hardcover numbers at Mercer for The Throne of Psyche. Those are my three books that can be called "in print," though The Foliate Head is technically out of print.

Interior illustration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for The Foliate Head

If you care about poetry, please consider buying books. While I would like you to support mine, I tend to be pleased when I see anybody buy a good poetry book. And I always remember the quote taped up on the poetry shelves at the Bull's Head Bookshop (UNC-Chapel Hill shop, now defunct) run by novelist Erica Eisdorfer: People who say they love poetry and never buy any are cheap sons of bitches. --Kenneth Rexroth. It's not polite, but it gets at something. I just looked it up online and found a different version that says, I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. Maybe both are right, as Rexroth didn't hold back and may have been muttering variations on the theme for years!

Yes, poetry is rapidly losing its status. Yes, what was once an important art is now a minor one and in danger of going the way of lacemaking. Times change. Television and internet make inroads; well, that's just how it is, we say. What we add to culture changes culture.

But if you care about poetry, do more. In fact, all of us need to support what we love in a time when what is seen and praised and supported is heavily-marketed, commercially-validated books, film, visual arts, etc. And we need to remind ourselves over and over again that we can choose. We can choose roads less taken. It will make all the difference.

Childishness and complexities and culture

Johanna Basford page from her Colouring Gallery,
colored by Philip

The invention of Mother's Day

Sunday was pleasant, with flowers and chocolates and a necklace so pretty it could have been a flower--most of all, a dinner with my husband and sons (our daughter was off in Montreal.) The familiar rumor is that Hallmark invented Mother's Day, but in fact it was a daughter, Anna Jarvis, who eventually attacked the commercialization of the holiday and thought that tributes should be heartfelt and homemade. No doubt she would have disapproved of my gifts, though perhaps not of Sunday dinner; I enjoyed my day, mainly because my sons came out to celebrate.

(Side note: Are there any great poems about mothers? Poems by Heaney and Plath and Poe and more, surely, come to mind. I think of Yeats's worn mothers, their daughters with ribbons in their hair--the mothers can't warn or fix a thing! If you like some poem about a mother, please leave the title and author.)

But Anna Jarvis brings up the idea that so often what starts out as a lovely thing becomes co-opted and degraded, doesn't it? And that goes for every little wisp and strand of culture.

Kidnapped

Currently I am listening to two books I've read before, The Woman in White or Kidnapped, when I fold laundry (one of my least-favorite things to do.) In Kidnapped, I'm just up to the point where David Balfour must defend his life for the first time. And I'm thinking about how different the book is from popular young adult books of our own day, though it has adventure and a teen protagonist. David Balfour begins as a very adult sort of child who has already suffered losses and is seen off in the world by the kindly Mr. Campbell, minister of Essendean. He goes off on foot to find the House of Shaws. He is no fool and does not trust his Uncle Ebenezer, but his downfall comes when he persuades himself that his uncle may mean some degree of good to him--even though his uncle tried to kill him earlier by sending him up rotten tower stairs in the dark--and he also feels a desire to step on board a ship. David suffers both physically and mentally for indulging his desire and distrusting his own instincts. Quite soon he faces another situation where he must assess right and wrong and make a moral, high-cost decision about whom to support and whether to be brave, and he sides with the outnumbered Alan Breck Stewart, even though he fears that it may cost his life and even though Stewart is a Jacobite, while David is a Whig. But it is a giant leap into adulthood, where David opposes the child-killing Shuan and the ongoing evil of Captain Hoseason.

The horror of what he has been forced to do in the battle of the roundhouse wrings David's heart, but Alan Breck Stewart is full of frolic and poetry. It is Alan who is the child, and David who is full of civilized unrest and regret and grief. And I'm looking forward to "the flight in the heather," which no less a stylist than Henry James admired. Up ahead in the tale, things become quite murky, and it's difficult to sort the moral threads, and to know exactly what Alan Breck Stewart is, and whether he is on the side of right and the angels or not. The moral crux cut through by love in Kidnapped is as fundamental to the book as the one in that other great boys' book, Huckleberry Finn.

Stevenson in a modest mode, to James, 1884

I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my work; rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water.

We could use such "a lout and a slouch." It's like thinking of Auden on vacation, learning Icelandic.

Complexities and the adult

I'm thinking about Stevenson in the light of Susan Nieman's article about the infantilization of Western culture.

Each of us has to take some responsibility for this collective madness. As individuals, we are scared to read “difficult” books or attempt other challenging activities. As the Enlightenment’s two greatest philosophers, Rousseau and Kant, argued, growing up is a challenge.

Real adult activity takes effort and often courage. Colouring in someone else’s designs is always easier than making your own, just as forming your own opinions – after gathering and weighing information – is always harder than parroting other people’s views. This is why Kant wrote that thinking for oneself is the key to growing up. 

The moral complexity of the relationship between Balfour and Stewart: is it equaled in our "young adult" novels? According to Nieman, more than half of the young adult books sold are sold to adults, and most of those report buying them to read themselves. In a world awash in Marvel hero movies, infinite games, artists who can't paint or sculpt, writers who want to shock an unshockable world with heightened sex and violence, and coloring books for adults, do we even desire morally complex relationships in any kind of novel? Does anyone care if entertainment wrestles art to the ground and skips away triumphant?

All of this leads me to conclude that I am really a minor character in Gawain and the Green Knight, unseen, occasionally bringing out a serving dish but mostly scribbling in a back room by the fire, leaves in my hair. I send you greetings from the leafing castle.

More from Basford's gallery of fans.
Colored by Lynn Lamont
with Staedtler Noris Club pencils.

Wishing for Randall Jarrell

I've been thinking about Randall Jarrell, one of the poets I knew well as a child--I had a copy of The Complete Poems in high school (soon after it appeared--thank you, mother-librarian!) and knew them well at that time. He wrote in many different genres, and so I trailed after him into novel, children's books, and criticism. I believe his was the first criticism I enjoyed. I've been thinking about how strongly he felt about about the changes in culture, back in the 1950's, and how much of what he says could only be repeated or made stronger now. He was certain very able to empathize with the person (or the bat) who was lonely and desperate, longing for more in life and for change. ("Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!") And he thought that a poet's role was, in part, braving and living up to the lonesome idea that being misunderstood might be part of the call: "If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries, you will never look just right to posterity. Every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

Here's a comment from Suzanne Ferguson that shows how critical Jarrell was about the trajectory of cultural change. (Elsewhere, he lamented, "The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced."*)

The magnitude of what had been lost in American culture reaffirmed for Jarrell "the final, important, intense value" of art, of poetry for making sense of that loss. Paradoxically, his depression about the political climate, the devaluation of art in a consumer culture, and the plight of undereducated, oversocialized*** children created a need for him to write the tales, the now-classic children's books, and the late poetry in which he gives voice to the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people trying to transform their lives that are "commonplace and solitary." More and more it is the strength of this last creative work, after a struggle with what he saw as "ominous" changes in "the climate of our culture" (Sad Heart 86)*, that makes Jarrell a central figure in mid-century letters, one who cannot be relegated to the margins, where off "in a bright spot somewhere in the corner / Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth" (CP 333).* --from Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co: Middle-generation Poets in Context

*A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.
**The Complete Poems
***Somewhere he complains about American children being raised on applause, rather like current complains of an "everybody gets a prize" sort of schooling.

There's a grand bouquet of flowers to chose from when we think about American poets. But who is the most important critic in the states? It might be Eliot, though he left us. Or Auden, who is ours and not ours. But it just might be Randall Jarrell. I hope we grow some more poet-writer-critics of his kind.

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
            --from "A Girl in a Library"

Dreaming the revolt of the Muses--

Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1891.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Wikipedia gallery / public domain

The world is a Silk Road--we have been adopting and adapting bits of other people's culture from the start. Culture is no more a static thing than is language. It's a living, growing thing, and we should hope that it is in good health for all our sakes. What many froth over--cultural influence--is the condition of the planet for many thousands of years. Cultural contact meant and still means change and growth and a way of re-imagining one's own arts. At the moment, I don't think the culture is in especially fit health, in large part because we've cheerfully let in the Trojan horse of entertainment (enjoyable and fun and occasionally rising to heights, yes, but not usually the height of human achievement) to defeat the high works of culture and leave only tiny audiences for many of our most important arts. Precious traditions dwindle and die away.

Take poetry as an example. We find ourselves--at least in this country--with a vision of poetry that is extremely small these days. As readers and as writers, we have forgotten our Western classical roots, seldom study the great works of the past in our own language (we oust Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton from the English major in many schools), and have abandoned our knowledge of a range of forms, prosody, syntax, modes, tropes, figures, and auricular pleasures. And that means we have kicked a good deal of variety and surprise and liveliness out of the poetry tent.

A great many writers have come through the Romantic period and into Modernism and Post-Modernism with a conviction that poetry can only begin with our own (sometimes itty-bitty) feelings and end in an epiphany of some sort, and that stance cripples us. We have been devoted to the small lyric for too many years, and we have ignored the other possibilities. When such things happen, we fall into the world of diminishing returns.

I like this (already somewhat old) trumpet call from Mary Kinzie:

...the poet aims to restore to poetry the universality and aboriginally that over time has mistakenly been reassigned to prose. Poetry is the preconditional state of language, not its late and shiftless offspring... Poetry was once the queen of literature, not its poor cousin. At various junctures drama was written in it; so were letters. Once the medium of songs as of satire, of philosophical meditations and allegory, of civic as well as private praise and lament, poetic verse periodically could do anything a thoughtful or unruly bard wished it to do. It was the very expanse of possibility in which literary structure was secured. I subscribe to the notion that, if language can be thought of as a pyramid, its base is poetry, not prose. Poetry is the ground--the ground of resemblance, controlled in time--from which literature of all kinds takes shape.

Isn't it time for a revolt of the Muses? My hope is that we are entering a period of unruly bards who will take new territory and unruly readers, who will look far beyond the limits of entertainment.  We ourselves are, after all, the ones who can change our world. The past and tradition don't just make us look backward but are the nourishment that helps us look forward.

Here are some thoughts about the state of poetry and the arts from writer and poet Jeff Sypeck, drawn from a series of comments on the previous post, "The Fool in his fish skin cloak," that I thought deserved to be in greater light and not tucked away in the comments section.

And it's not just at universities. I spent two years attending major conferences in the museum world, and everyone was fretting about how to meet the demands of young people, with almost nobody willing to claim that their field should be promoting slow-paced contemplation and beauty as an alternative to the culture. I've seen museums use their exhibition spaces as dance clubs, and some symphonies now make a big deal out of programs devoted to movie soundtracks or video-game music.

I don't necessarily object to any of those things, but you can smell the nervous sweat of arts professionals desperate to be liked by the culture at large, even though the culture has overwhelmingly opted to embrace corporate entertainment instead. Museums, art centers, indy publishers, orchestras--they should all be starting with the premise that for at least some people out there, alternatives exist to a $410 million piece of crap like "Batman vs. Superman," and I don't mean "Batman vs. Superman II."

What can we do? I, for one, am trying to promote and spend more money on art and entertainment that's weird, independent, unaffiliated--but I think it would help if we had stronger rebuttals to cries of "elitism!" and "snobbery!," the most common smears against fine-art and high-arts advocates. People who like crap aren't open to hearing someone scold them to like better things--but how to persuade them is something I've been thinking a great deal about lately.

What we need are good arguments—not lofty statements that we ourselves already believe, but claims that persuade. To my mind, one of the best is an honest expansion of the argument used when music and theater programs in schools are threatened: that these things are lifesavers for kids who desperately need outlets. There's no reason that thinking should apply only to kids or only to school programs; I've seen middle-aged people find new purpose in their lives by learning oil painting or becoming mosaicists, and I once saw a 60-year-old student, a construction foreman, discover that he loved opera (to the bemusement of his patient wife). We should greatly expand the thinking behind the cry that sensitive kids need the drama club; all kinds of people need this stuff in all phases of their lives. 

Lately I've been thinking that another viable argument involves a bit of gentle shame aimed at the more liberal-minded: if you so distrust and dislike corporations, why do you give them 100 percent of your art and entertainment budget? Diversify! 

I should note that I write this as someone who used to be a popular-culture junkie. I still like a good superhero movie, danceable music, ambitious comics...but I'm grateful to have had bigger things to grow into. I foolishly assumed that this more high-minded culture would always be there; I never imagined that popular culture would so overwhelm it. 

I'm still thinking about how to promulgate the arguments and use not only the shame but also the hope and the curiosity and even the fear of people who opt for corporate entertainment by default. I don't expect to start a cultural revolution, but every person who takes a little more non-corporate art and entertainment into their lives is a victory as far as I'm concerned. I want to come up with arguments that are as scrupulously honest as they are persuasive, but to be persuasive, those arguments can't be disdainful or insulting. It's an interesting rhetorical challenge. (One of the strongest tactics may be to appeal to an ongoing countercultural impulse. Is there anything more establishment, more pro-corporation, more consumerist than marching off to the latest superhero movie?) 

I also think it has to be a face-to-face process: getting people into artists' studios, art centers, theaters, literary events, and so forth. I'll go so far as to say that even video-game night or sci-fi theme-song night at the orchestra could be good starts, as "pops concerts" once were, if these events were presented not apologetically, but as the first promising glimpse of a much larger creative world.

So what do you think of all that? I expect there are plenty of people who have interesting ideas about how to deal with the conquest of entertainment and the need for unruly bards! If you are one, leave a note. How to care for culture is a issue that sings out to us all.

Update: Lots of views, no comments! Maybe I'd better promise not to put any comments on the front page! I also ought to say that a great deal of what we once regarded as entertainment has lasted, and lasted well--Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Fielding, etc. Evidently the meaning of this word entertainment has changed over time, though, and perhaps I need to figure out what it meant and what it means now.

Rips in the fabric of culture--

Portrait of the artist as flourishing, flowering...
Division page image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for my just-out Maze of Blood (Mercer.)
With this story, inspired by the life
of Texas pulp writer Robert E. Howard,
I got to revel in the life of someone
who died before I was born, who
was unlike me in almost all ways,
save for his love of words.

My third child is now in college, and I've thought a lot about how English departments have changed since the year when I gave back my just-won tenure and promotion and became a full-time writer and then also a mother. Clearly it's now possible in many places to obtain an "English" degree without having much acquaintance with Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton, and it's quite possible to have little acquaintance at all with the legacy of the classical world with its great transcendentals. In fact, it is so very possible to go without reading the life-giving, important writers of the past or present that studies tell us many people never bother to read a book again once they graduate from college!

Likewise, I've seen many mentions of MFA students who do not know the tradition--I feel sure that complaint is not always justified, but it appears to be true often enough for many complaints to be made in print. Similarly, the visual arts have suffered from a lack of craft and skills in student training. But what is an artist alone? We are not spiders working and spinning alone but one body with the work of the past--those of our own culture and works in translation as well. Moreover, the tools and techniques of the past are part of how an artist thinks, and without them, he or she is lessened. Artists of all sorts are linked together through time and space, and the fallen generation just past grew out of the work of all previous artists, and the generations alive now from them in turn. To make art out of ourselves like a spider is to ignore all the power, truth, beauty, and good work that came before.

As an inhabitant of a small, often convulsive world, I find alarming the tendency to avoid reading books. Novels and stories and poems are gifts to us across barriers of space and culture and time. They are a vital way for us to experience the mind and living energies of the Other, the person who is not like us, not our sex or race or religion or culture. They are a path to understanding and empathizing with another's mind, heart, and soul. They are often the closest we can come to experiencing--to being pierced and affected by--another's dailiness and pleasures and sorrows. And stories and poems catch us up with the sheer joy of creation.

Without these wonderful little time-and-space collapsers, we are lesser beings, caught inside ourselves, less able to empathize and to love the world in all its shapes and colors, less able to love one another. As a writer, I have been able to stream outside myself and become a seventeenth-century woman in the wilderness (Catherwood), a nineteenth-century soldier (The Wolf Pit), a Texas pulp writer (Maze of Blood), a Depression-era boy in flight (A Death at the White  Camellia Orphanage), a child in a post-apocalyptic world, fastening together the pieces (Thaliad), a painter in the heart of a hill, searching for truth in a labyrinth (Glimmerglass), and much more. My readers have been those things as well, choosing to take my hand in the wondrous storyteller-and-listener dance that has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years.

What can we say in the face of ongoing news of decline, except that there is much more to being alive than what is useful and practical? Without art and culture, we are left in a dry landscape of the useful and practical, without an oasis in sight.

At Cairn: Culture Care

Fujimura Institute 
Culture Care Day
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Cairn University
Chatlos Chapel
200 Manor Ave.
Langhorne, PA 19047

"Join friends of the International Arts Movement and the Fujimura Institute for an evening of lectures and performances exploring Culture Care.

"IAM founder Mako Fujimura (author, Culture Care) will host an afternoon discussion with Dr. Esther Meek (philosopher and Fujimura Institute Fellow) and Dr. Peter Candler (author and Fujimura Institute Fellow) and Marly Youmans (poet/author). The evening benefit concert will feature Danielson and The Nine-Fruit Tree, MAE, Andrew Nemr with Max ZT, Ruth Naomi Floyd, Marly Youmans, Ron Witzke, and white lotus."

My event schedule for the day, subject to lots of change as we approach the day. This is probably not the final word:

Poetry and fiction reading at 11:00
Interview, conducted by Makoto Fujimura, after lunch
4:15-5:00 p.m. I'll be joining the panel on culture care. Chatlos Chapel.
6:30-9:30 p.m. I'll kick off the benefit concert with a tiny poetry reading. Chatlos Chapel.

Strong-minded words from Makoto Fujimura:

Younger artists often ask me whether their art is "good enough," and whether they are called to be an artist. My answer is: "if you are not sure, you are not called." That may seem harsh, but the reality of the arts requires that we follow our calling no matter what others think, or even what we believe ourselves. When art is simply what we must do to stay true to ourselves, it is a calling.

It is not surprising that Emily and Vincent--and their art--were marginalized, for both intuited that such an exiled existence was the only way to remain consistent with their humanity given the cultural pressures of their time. Yet  more than a century later these two exiled souls still speak eloquently to what our hearts long for. Her poems give us words to express our own resistance to utility. His paintings offer parables of beauty that sow seeds of authentic being into our wounded, dehumanized souls. Their works are antidotes to utilitarian drive for commercial and ideological gain, remedies for the poison in the river of culture. They offer our dying culture unfading bouquets, gifts of enduring beauty that we do not want to refuse (p. 63, Culture Care.)

...who you are and what you are built to do...

from Michael Lind, at The Smart Set:

"Artless: Why do intelligent people no longer care about art?"

The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact...

What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?

Our culture...

The unguessable current

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass

Three days in Vermont for the graduation at The Center for Cartoon Studies, lots of long track meets in far-off places, deadlines, an Antioch Midwest independent study, a month jammed with events for a high school senior... I've been busy and off in the wilds. And I suppose that was good because I was a little weary of the online world. All that flogging of books coming up on the twitter feed! All those links to advice about getting at least 15 Amazon reviews for algorithm visibility, all those "Top Ten" things to do in order to sell, all those cries of hawkers! Somehow it can be disheartening to see so many people striving so hard to be what we call visible and commercial and successful. I'd rather not see what appears frantic. I'd rather know that those people were working and playing in joy, twisting words into beautiful shapes and sounds.

When I was younger, I felt conflict between what the world seemed to want and what I wanted, but now I feel clear on the odd times that are ours. The over-focus on commerce and unleashed torrent of new books are just facts of our era and our cracked culture, nothing to do with what happens when a writer sits at her table and lets the words stream forth.

In the end, I am a solitary maker who is dreaming something into being, spinning the straw of the world into what I hope will be gold, true and beautiful and doing justice to the marvelous, tragic, lovely Creation. And I am mad enough to think that the gold-spinner dreaming along in the room is what an artist should be.

Also Clive, a portrait of Thalia
for Thaliad

Many of my strongest relationships tend to be with artists in other fields, and I often find the words of a composer or a painter pertinent to what I do. This morning my favorite online words about making come from my longtime collaborator, painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

I begin with an underdrawing, sometimes faint like smoke, sometimes confident, usually a bit of both, mostly fluid at this early stage. Then the painting and the rendering begin. It feels as though I'm attempting to produce a mosaic from thousands of glittering tesserae, each one of them a different micro-thought flashing through my brain. When I'm working away I have to make the image one tiny tile-of-thought at a time, and it's as though this flood of thoughts and moods spreads across the board. The thoughts/voices/poetry at this point are a cacophony, and I have to try and catch at the most insistent ones to fathom their meanings, all while listening/watching for the next to emerge. Each takes me where it will. I get buffeted in one direction by playful zephyrs, carried smoothly for periods on the dazzling surface, or dragged down into deep currents where all is shadowy and cold. Sometimes everything slows and then halts. I trace the curved route for the stem of a tulip, graze a petal with the striations of its markings. Becalmed, I drift.

Then something pulls at me again, the insistent and unguessable current reasserting, the line of poetry that lightning-flashes in the head, the breeze though the open window that sends all the fragments of drawings and poetry flying, and in a moment I'm away again, off into the unknown.

Into the unknown, leaping off the edge of everything one has created before...

***

Coming up soon: events at Hanford Mills in central New York and at the Culture Care Summit at Cairn in Philly.

The argument for culture care--

"Ki-Seki"
© 2014 Makoto Fujimura
Mineral Pigments, Sumi ink, silver, and gold on Kumohada paper
60.25 x 45.25 x 1.25 in
Private Collection
Prints are available - click here.
Frontispiece to Culture Care.

Though I've been and am still awash in away track meets, graduation ceremonies, awards nights, prom, and other festivities that pop up toward the end of a school year, I'll leave a little sheaf of quotes from my current reading. I'll be reading some more from the book while I am hanging out at the Toyota shop later in the day--it'll be a good clash of sensibilities, or maybe a

reminder of the need for repair!

The book is Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life, which I am spending some time with in preparation for reading at and participating in the June Culture Care Summit, sponsored by International Arts Movement and Fujimura Institute, at Cairn University in Philadephia. Here are some quotes from the part of the book that is foundational and sets up the terms of his argument for change.

In the aftermath of two World Wars, artists began to articulate the culture's dramatic loss of humanity... artists recognized the gap left by the weakening witness of the church in culture and increasingly came to see themselves as secular prophets and priests with a call to "speak the truth" against the "establishment." They intentionally isolated themselves from society and produced work aimed at shocking people into recognizing and decrying the horrors of the age. As critic Robert Hughes has noted, "the shock of the new" became a way of life in the twentieth century modernist experiment.

*** 

Artists have been pressed--sometimes willingly and sometimes not--to speak not for their own work, vision, and principles but for (usually leftist) ideologies. The implicit and explicit cultural pressures for ideological uniformity are so high that one could say that in the culture wars artists are free to express anything other than beauty.

*** 

With the exception of ideological uses, today's art has been commoditized to such an extent that we often see commerce as the prevailing goal of art, and value the arts only as transactional tools to achieve fame and thus wealth.

*** 

Why is Culture Care needed? From the perspective of the arts, it is because today, an artist cannot simply paint; a novelist cannot simply write; a pianist cannot simply play. Utilitarian pragmatism and commercialism so thoroughly pervade culture that without some shift in worldview and expectation, what we do as artists--the activities of the arts--will be neither sustainable nor generative. We will not be able to resist their use as weapons in the culture wars. 

We need to recognize our time as a genesis moment.

Order here.

I recommend it--the book is suffused with Makoto Fujimura's bright vision of a world that is generative for artists and others, a world that flourishes and produces arts that our descendants will find worthy and beautiful. As a Christian, Mako tends toward the ideas of fruitfulness and wholeness that pervade the book. It is a book for anyone who cares about the vicissitudes of culture, and where our culture is headed after Modernism and its aftershocks.

Expectations and the Arts

Out of obstinacy, I shall deck
this post with my recent books...
Art: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Sure, I promised that I wouldn't be back until February, but that was before I came down with The Great Crud, The Very Great and Imaginative Crud. Here I am, day 13, hacking and sneezing and lolling in bed to report on the day's reading, despite the hijacking of my brain by little green men. Well, part of the day's reading--I'm also reading David Young's translation of Petrarch's sonnets.

Skybetter at the Fitch Report: Cultural Unraveling

   Such historicizing neatly situates artistic crises as inevitable and inevitably overcome, but it provides little comfort to culture warriors working in today’s artistic trenches. Many feel (as many have felt) that the aesthetic, economic and technological challenges facing them are titanically different from any that came before. It’s hard to escape the feeling that while, yes, perpetual change is a facet of the arts, something big is happening, something major is unraveling. For those of us invested in traditional categories of performance — usually some sort of show on some sort of stage — we find ourselves competing for the attention of audiences against forms of entertainment and edification we believe empirically inferior. That folks would prefer to sink hours into a YouTube rat-hole of free Miley Cyrus music videos rather than pay for live performance is the new state of the art.
   The term frequently ascribed to this economic scenario is “disruption.” Coined and popularized by Clayton M. Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, the word describes historical innovations that emerge cheaper and of seemingly less quality than the competition, but come to dominate the lower-end of a market nonetheless, and remake entire industries in their image over time. Examples of disrupted industries include the American auto sector (Asian automakers bring cheaper, arguably inferior vehicles to the global market, bankrupting U.S. automakers); computing (micro-computer companies bring cheaper, arguably inferior devices to the global market, bankrupting mainframe makers); and steel (mini-mills bring cheaper, arguably inferior steel to market, bankrupting companies that used integrated steel factories).
   ...Data suggests that audiences are agnostic in their habits of cultural consumption — and increasingly ambivalent about the platform by which they consume that culture. The Innovators Dilemma suggests that those who look with condescension upon the competitive emergence of cheaper, arguably poorer quality cultural products do so at their own peril.

Sydney Skybetter uses live dance performance as his lens here, but it applies to all the arts. Clearly it easily applies to the flood of digital and paperback books pouring into the world. I expect there are a lot of writers who feel a distaste for that Niagara of books. Skybetter would say that it would be a grave mistake to think that they do not matter to an audience that may not really care about traditional and high art.

Back to the Star System and the Vast Sea at the 2014 Jaipur Festival

Skybetter's essay reminded me of last year's Jaipur Festival, and the attack on American and British writers and the lack of translation.

     Lahiri believes that "translation is the key" – that it is what has created "the bridge for so many of us to be able to read across our limitation" – but Franzen wasn't so sure.
    "One of the consequences of globalism, it seems to me, and I think we see it even in the literary world, is that things become less horizontal and more vertical," he said. "If you can imagine everything perfectly translated, that we have massive subsidies for translation, that anyone publishing in Romanian in Romania, that is instantly available in all languages everywhere, you are still faced with the finite amount of reading time that an individual reader has … in a funny way you'd think there'd be greater diversity in what is read, but I worry that the trend in a more global literary marketplace is even more towards a kind of star system and a vast sea of people who can't find an audience."

It was curious to hear famous writers from around the world get together and complain (again! don't writers complain a lot?) at Jaipur (of course we need more translation!), but what's completely unclear in the discussion here is that many of the very American writers tarred by this large, sticky brush (you Americans--and Brits--are all hogging the mainstream!) suffer from exactly this sort of problem--the star system, and the difficulty of getting a toehold in such a large, diverse country where publishers at the major houses choose our big sellers for us.

Many American writers flee or are ejected by the Big 5 of publishing and hope to find warmer homes elsewhere, only to discover that it's even harder to be visible outside the New York machine. As readers, we have no idea of the scope and range of writers in our own country, we have few dedicated literary critics these days, and the problem is only becoming worse with a torrent of new work. I doubt that this is anything we should bother to bemoan, as I see no push toward a new generation of devoted critics or a lessening of the Niagara of books.

As for writers, we must be nimble and adaptable to the current scene. That's what is said. I expect most of us don't really know what that means, except that we know one round of bad Bookscan numbers derails the writer for a long time, maybe forever. I look around at my circle of friends in the arts and see some writers who are retiring from making new books and some painters who are no longer full-time. Living a life as "The Artist of the Beautiful" in the manner of Hawthorne is a high, lonely call, and who can blame anyone who finds it insufficient?

Tabachnick at the Skybetter Business Bureau

   As we have transitioned into the 21st century, the demographic and social milieu has fundamentally shifted. resulting in a gap between the expectation of artists and the expectation of audiences. To put it another way, audiences are increasingly skipping the traditional art forms (often referred to as “high” or “fine” arts) because these art forms, at least as they are traditionally presented, no longer deliver the value they once did. The success of our strategies of the past hundred years in increasing the supply of artists has not been matched with strategies to insure sufficient value and demand for the work of those artists. The result is the gap many funders are now seeking to address.
   It is well documented that our country is in the midst of a major demographic shift from a European-based Caucasian culture to a multiethnic culture. The vast majority of the traditional arts that were professionalized in this country flowed from the former — from aesthetic systems that are not the same as that of other heritages, many of which have different (or additional) cultural artifacts and experiences that they value. As the ethnic and racial balance in our country shifts, so do and will the cultural experiences and artifacts from which audiences will find value, a dynamic that links directly to audience demand.
   At the same time, disruptive digital technologies are eviscerating the underpinnings of many industries, not just the creative industries, and our sector’s business models are being turned upside down. The underlying issue brings us back to expectations: the inability to make a living as an artist today. Nor is this limited to the nonprofit sector. Taylor Swift’s recent withdrawal of her catalog from Spotify and the pitched battle between Amazon and Hachette are indications that the pressures from these shifts are wreaking havoc with the commercial segments of the creative industries.

This guest post from Ken Tabachnick is an interesting comparison to the first two essays, and I'm glad I turned to it third. Clearly, the demographic transformation of society has something consoling to say to the writers at the Jaipur Festival. America is more varied, more interested in a range of modes.

And certainly it gives a kind of answer to Skybetter's discussion of cultural disruption: "this is the real message that more and more are suggesting for our sector: changing expectations are required to continue making art and being satisfied with the return on that work for the artist. Such a change, though, may spell the end of the 'professionalized' arts sector we have come to expect."

Well...

You know, I'm tired of pondering these issues. If the writing of poetry and novels ends up being as refined and obscure a pursuit as hand lacemaking, so be it. I will make my lace of words.

Think about this: Blake drew a picture of his wife and sang on his deathbed. On his deathbed! He died full of joy and love and still making art. So beautiful.

For the second day of Christmas: the river of culture

Yolanda Sharpe
Watercolor by a local friend--
soprano, painter, SUNY-Oneonta professor in studio art.
Blue, Red, and Yellow, 26 by 40 inches, watercolor on paper, 2014

And words by another friend--nihongan painter Makoto Fujimura, founder of International Arts Movement and The Fujimura Institute:

The words at left and below are
from Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care,
the lovely result of his Kickstarter campaign.
Available here.

An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York's Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing--full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, "nature" was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.

But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural tier black--full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts--and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.

It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life-giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogeneous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem.

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented....

Yolanda Sharpe, Neighborhood, encaustic on panels
(center panel: 23 by 22.5 by 3 inches), 48 by 43.75, 2013

Deepest longings

Interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass, now in pre-order
online or at your favorite indie
or directly from Mercer

From "TRAC: A Resurgence of Realism," by Theodore Prescott (American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2014), an article in response to The Representational Art Conference of March, 2014:

The dominant culture tries to find meaning in progress, [American painter Juliette Aristides] said, but everything that is uniquely and profoundly human becomes disposable in that vision--such as the two million plastic beverage bottles sold every five minutes, or the 208,000 photos uploaded to Facebook every second. For Aristides, the aim of art--real art--is different than the aim of progress, because it is directed toward what is of enduring value. Viktor Frankel, a Viennese psychologist who endured years in a Nazi concentration camp wrote, "Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life. . . . Man is able to live and die for the sake of his ideals and values." So artists need something to live for and work toward, which is of value both to them and to their audience, even if that audience is small. She cited J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings--an Oxford-based literary group that included C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams--as an example of a small group of people committed to an alternative vision that ultimately had enormous culture impact. The Inklings were not looking for critical success and commercial market share; they were driven to create mythic worlds that confirmed their deepest longings for goodness, truth and beauty. What they longed for was invisible, until they made it real.

Those lines are so very kindred to my own thought that it makes me feel happy to read it--to think that others are out there, working with similar thoughts and aims.

The longing for depth and wholeness--

One of the vignettes by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)

Recently I wrote some sketches about fans and paparazzi as part of my current series of tiny stories, since I'm still too busy to start a novel. I've never been much interested in the idea of celebrity or celebrities, but I accidentally bumped into a fan site for Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson (the way one does on the internet, following a thread through the infinite Borgesian labyrinth) and then explored some more.

At first, I felt a tad appalled--the latter in part because a great many fans don't particularly care about grammar, syntax, clarity, and other tools of the trade most dear to my heart. Of course, I don't care for a great many other things . . . so I won't reproach them. Clear thinking for me is made of words in the right order, but it doesn't mean all that much to a lot of people active on the internet. Neither does proofreading. But plenty of people have lived and died without deep engagement with the written word. For that matter, most of our human time on the planet has passed away without written words.

The fascination I felt lay elsewhere. I was intrigued by the idea that a large group of fans were building a story, collaborating on a kind of fiction, telling themselves a thing they needed to hear. It is a story based on clues, and like fiction, it appears as a kind of lie that is more real and compelling than surface reality. The writers are detectives, the story itself a tale of romance between two people who are considered quirky (that is, they are often surprising in behavior, and they have been part of the mainstream but now swim against it in indie films) and smart and good-looking. The tale is clearly related to their roles in the Twilight movies because it is very much concerned with ideas about the ideal and the permanent.

The effort to make the story involves a lot of analysis, the sort of analysis that an engaged reader might apply to a poem or novel or scripture. Every word is scrutinized, every image searched for information--shared clothing, a young woman's weight gain and loss, sardonic words, tossed-off comments that may or may not be serious. These fragments are compared with other fragments, the puzzle pieces to a larger picture. Tone, mood, and attitude of the characters involved become important and are discussed endlessly. These 'shippers' of an ongoing love relationship between the two stars (love, marriage, a new house, a baby) are doing the thing that engrossed readers do. And isn't that curious?

They're not the only story makers. The 'haters' make their own counter-stories, based on a different reading of information or built off dismissing the stories of the shippers. These stories tend to be more perfunctory and less developed because they are primarily rejections.

Oddly, this sort of storytelling brings up issues about mainstream culture and deep human desires. Why did an obsessed group of fans need to make that story, one in which they piece together clues to prove that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart live in a private, perfect, joyful world of their own?

Our dark age worships a debased mainstream culture dominated by sex, violence, and speedy electronic jumps from one thing to another. It opposes Melvillean "deep diving," high art, thoughtfulness, and the spirit. In such a time, it is illuminating to look around and see where storytelling takes hold of people and why. In this particular case, the many fans obsessed with two celebrity figures work to uncover, build, and support a dream of love, a dream of wholeness--an old-fashioned dream that love can have depth and permanent meaning and soul, and that a man and a woman can fit together to become one perfect, complete thing. This dream expresses a core human longing for depth and meaning, raised up from a mainstream culture that is increasingly drained of substance.

* * *

An interesting response from painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins is here.

The Magician's Card

The Magician’s Card by Marly Youmans

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Marly Youmans has written a compelling response to Makoto Fujimura’s On Becoming Generative: an Introduction to Culture Care! In the 10-page essay, Youmans explores the role of the artist in caring for culture through the powerful story of her friend Louis D. Rubin, Jr. You can download the full PDF for free here.

* * *
About Fujimura Institute. Wander around in the project, resource, and event pages.

Dreaming better dreams--

Minotaur study by Clive Hicks-Jenkins 
for Glimmerglass

BOOKHOOKERY

Writer bounces out of bed at 6:30 and scurried about making lunch for her third child, packing track-snack in a sack (can I toss in another rhyme?), fixing breakfast, and tossing books in the backpack (there you go.) Mid-way, the writer turns on NPR and hears that 45% of teens read no more than 1-2 books a year. Or did they say less than 1-2? At any rate, not much of note. Writer plunks down at her laptop to have a cup of tea. First thing she sees: novelist Darin Strauss on twitter, mentioning a new book that uses "Jewish man" as a slur: "Nobody cares / even notices." The Author aka "Ass Queen" is featured in Salon (a coup for a writer, right? like her treatment in Slate or on NPR) with an interview about being a porn star and drug abuser--smoking crack in a BSDM dungeon, anybody? Hey, now we know what kind of lively, appealing-to-the-curious book the almost-non-reading 45% might possibly read! Because that's a book-with-a-hook--we writers are always suppose to have a hook that we are willing to share with the world--that will sell, even to non-reading teens, I expect.

WHO KNEW

Who would have guessed that this would one day be the writer's world, back when she first gave her years to making something true and rejoicing in putting words into new shapes? A world where teens don't read and professors complain that their students don't crack open their books. A world where a clever volume reveling in unabashed porn and drug use has more of that desirable quality, hook, and will get more coverage than a first-rate novel (and infinitely more coverage than a good book of poems.)

ASPIRE

All you lovers of reading and shapeliness in words, defy this crazy world! If hopeless, still be brave. Read better books, make better books. Encourage taste, a human achievement that used to support culture. Online or in-person, recommend what's best in the arts. Make the better world, even if you fear that you are the only person who inhabits it. Dream of a better culture, a more worthy gift to hand on to our children.