In my long blogging absence I’ve negleted to highlight two great blogs about poetry and the process of writing poetry:
1. First Book Interviews: Keith Montesano interviews Rauan Klassnik in his 21st interview for the series (while in the midst of getting his own first book published). Choice excerpt:
Yes there’s certainly a lot of violence in Holy Land. I don’t think it’s gratuitous though. And, yes, there’s also a lot of tenderness. Perhaps some of the tenderness is gratuitous. But I’m quite sentimental and as much as I guard against it does come through in the poems sometimes. I’ll cry over just about anything. Over a raindrop. The latest Star Trek movie. An old man in a doorway.
2. How A Poem Happens: For aspiring poets–or those who simply want’s to peal back the the veil of inspiration and Romantic ideas about poets–Brian Brodeuer asks poets about their process writing and shaping a single poem. The latest post takes a look at Philp White’s “Six O’Clock Flight to the Interment”. An excerpt:
What is American about this poem?
Even if death is the great universal, love and grief, and attitudes toward time and place, self and other, are all tinged, if not shaped, by culture. I’m sure the poem is American in some way. But it doesn’t make a point of it.
Jeremy Schmall has a post over at HTML Giant that argues that poetry’s larger cultural irrelevance makes it a useful site of resistance against globalization. Schmall’s description of globalization (and capitalism in general) however, is mostly caricature bolstered by some hand-waving and talk about the power of imagination. The central mistake is, I think, an attempt to define “true culture” against market exchanges:
The crucial point here is understanding the difference between a consumer market and true culture. A consumer market is based on what kinds of people buy what kinds of things, i.e. how to make money by selling what to whom. True culture is the spread of what is critical to people, beyond the control of corporate manipulation, and without regard to profitability; culture is precisely how humanity itselfunderstands humanity itself. Capitalism seeks to manipulate this process by producing its own manufactured meaning; if it can control the endpoints, it can control the means to achieving those endpoints, e.g. if you want to be a “hip enlightened nerd,” here’s your type of shoe, TV show, soft drink, and automobile.
As a categorical tool for thinking about these different relationships, the cultural/market (Geminschaft and Gesellschaft) are, in the abstract, useful. But Schmall defines “true culture” as that which is “critical to people,” and then cites poetry’s continued existence in the face of overwhelming forces that poetry must be critical to people while neglecting all of the other things we consider “critical” that are part of market exchanges. As someone who values and writes poetry, I’ll readily agree that poetry (in whatever form) had be deemed important, across cultures and historical epochs. But what about the most critical resources and goods like food, clothing, and shelter? We consider these part of cultures (and often leave their distribution to the market, with some controls and exceptions). There are many creative, cultural products and traditions that are part of market exchanges and the result of market forces (think of something as simple as French toast or stews in cooking; both use leftover or day old ingredients as a creative response to limited resources).
Moreover, Schmall’s description of capitalism oversimplifies things to the point of distortion:
A consensus has emerged that our current place of existence—severe economic crisis and pervasive paranoia—can be blamed on poor management, that with a few tweaks—tighter regulations, less leveraging, more honest accounting—the catastrophe unfolding before us could’ve been avoided; but what has really been revealed is a crisis of our collective imaginations. It’s been revealed that we were incapable of imagining a world without a receding economic horizon that must be sped toward at an increasingly rapid pace, despite the fact that the faster we sprint—the longer we work with increasing productivity—the faster it recedes; that we failed to imagine our lives without consumer electronics, name brands, oversized homes, green lawns, shopping malls, and automobiles; that we failed to imagine for ourselves a world we could truly thrive in.
How has increasing productivity lead to “a receding economic horizon”? I’d argue (or agree, as the case may be) that increasing income (the result of increasing productivity) shouldn’t be the only measure of welfare and flourishing in a society, but the list of consumerist evils (name brands, shopping malls, oversized homes) is simple hand-waving. How do any of these things prevent us of from thriving (the argument that we don’t pay the true costs of these–the negative externalities–is a valid one, but one that has a market/government solution, but Schmall rejects these in favor of improving our “collective imaginations”)?
Finally, consider also that “true culture” can be restrictive in ways that inhibit flourishing and reduce welfare (whether material or something more abstract). There are many cultures that have cultural practices, dress codes, mores, and roles that aren’t the result of the market, but tightly inscribe what women should do and wear, or what jobs a certain ethnic or religious sub-group may hold. These are real restrictions on flourishing (women can’t earn a living not provided by a man, can’t be educated and improve their own understanding) that have nothing to do with the market. Contrary to what many of globalization’s critics argue (or assume about their work of economists and other proponenets of markets) there isn’t a single market policy or process of liberalization that a country must persue (see Dani Rodrik”s work). But what Schmall is describing is a caricacture of capitalism, a caricarture with little explanatory power.
Actually, this isn’t technically a defense of writing programs; I don’t think writing programs need defending*. Rather, it’s a quick look at what I believe to be some of the unexamined (or at least not widely cited) benefits of writing programs. In a much discussed review essay of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Louis Menand lays out the raison d’etre of the book and one of the inescapable features of the modern (post-war) literary era:
As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.
The proliferation of creative-writing programs is sometimes cited as a sign of fiction and poetry’s decline; if poets and authors had to produce works the literate public actually wanted to buy from their local bookseller then more people would be reading (or at least there wouldn’t be so much surplus literature produced that few people are interested in reading). But these are two separate claims: 1) That the supply of literature, in some way, determines demand (through some unseen magical process) and that 2) There is an overproduction of literature. The second claim is most likely true, but it also irrelevant (at least considering the other possible options). It’s a matter of how we want to go about supporting literature and the arts. This requires a little bit of explanation
Writing programs do not choose who the next great writer will be. Readers, critics, and publishers help determine that. So if writing programs don’t necessarily produce great writers, what are they good for (besides the aforementioned benefits, which aren’t particular to writing programs)?
- Writing programs make up a large, decentralized subsidy . This is my Hayekian argument for the MFA. Most art produced can’t survive the whims and vagaries of the market by itself, so it needs support from other sources. This is okay, given that, for whatever reason, we make a lot about appreciating the arts and like the idea of having a country that produces its fair share of great cultural works in addition to cutting edge technology and iPhones. Universities and colleges are a good public/private mix of funding that doesn’t pursue one type of literature or any one school of writing within literature. So (for the sake of argument) Columbia University can have a “house style” if they like, but that still leaves several hundred other programs that can have their own different house styles (NB: From my experience, this isn’t the case–programs rarely enforce a party line and exclude writers who won’t toe it. But there are many programs that favor certain kinds of writers and thus tend to attract student interested in writing in that style. The bottom line is that even if programs produced a kind of “house style,” its unlikely that they would all produce the same one, giving us a variety of literary works to choose from.)
- Writing programs are an alternative to other kinds of literary study found in English departments. In many ways, Creative-writing programs ask many of the traditional questions of literary study, without as much of the academic apparatus of theory and cultural studies: What makes this text a great work? How do the author’s choices affect our understanding of the work? What is it that we admire in a text? That is not to say that the Literature faculty of English departments are not concerned with these questions. I’m not trying draw an arbitrary line between those Theory weirdos deconstructing Moby Dick, and the true defenders of traditional culture in creative-writing programs (I’m aware the some people who dismiss big Theory commit little theory). But I do think it says something about the practice (or at least the study) of literature when many undergrads choose creative-writing classes as their entry into the discipline (especially considering that many–if not most–of those students will not become published writers, at least not professionally).
This last point is something I’d like to explore further, but for right now I think these are the two biggest, unexplored arguments in favor of the increasing influence of writing programs(to my limited knowledge–please highlight anyone who has raised either of these points elsewhere**). As an institution, creative-writing programs are decentralized, which means that it’s responding to different demands in geographically (and aesthetically) different locations, and that this demend represents a popular alternative to the kinds of literary analysis and interpretation done in other parts of English departments.
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* Not because writing programs are self-evidently useful or productive, but because the sorts of things programs are good for (time to write, a community of writers) are either valuble to someone intersted in writing or they aren’t (or are provided through other means–in which case an MFA is unnecessary).
** Actually, now that I think about it, David Wojahn makes a similar argument to my second claim in his book Strange Good Fortune.
And since people are thinking about literature I’ll take this opportunity to ask a question I’ve been considering recently: Why doesn’t more literary criticism make mention of rights-based liberalism? Not that I expect a lot of lit professors to approvingly cite Rawls, but he doesn’t even get name checked. This might seem like a silly question considering that Rawls didn’t have a lot to say about literature (as far as I know), but I’ve never heard him referenced. Not even as figure to disagree with. Then again, I never hear Nozick or Judith Sklar either. Marx, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, yes–but nothing about Rawls.
There’s a lot of vague comminitarian talk that gets thrown around and plenty of discussion about the difficulty of language, but seemingly nothing about rights-based liberalism. What gives? (I leave this an open question for people who probably have more experience considering the two fields).
I don’t have a lot to say in response to Matt Zeitlin’s post on fiction and James Woods’ disdain for the “hysterical realism” of Rushdie, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, et al. I read more poetry than I do fiction, so I’d gladly defer to the opinions of people who have read many of these authors and more fiction criticism.
It seems that Woods (at least from his White Teeth review) is making two interrconnected arguments: 1) an argument about the formal comparative advantage of literature and 2) a larger moral argument about what these formal choices say about the world.
The first argument is concerned, put crudely, with the idea of the novel as a formal machine, and that literature does the best job of investigating (and representing, and interrogating, etc.) the interiors of human experinece. In poetry, we often talk about poetry as if we were creating little verse machines (though they need not be in verse or follow “traditional form”) and how those formal choices support or detract from what the poem is trying to do or what we’d like it to do. This is analogous to Woods’ discussion of the “architecture” of Zadie Smith’s novel; for Woods, the novel’s architecture doesn’t hold up:
The passage might stand, microcosmically, for the novel’s larger dilemma of storytelling: on its own, almost any of these details (except perhaps the detail about passing the shit and piss through the cat-flap) might be persuasive. Together, they vandalize each other: the Presbyterian dypsomaniacs and the Mormon aunt make impossible the reality of the fanatical Muslim. As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic; and anyway, we are not led toward the consciousness of a truly devoted religionist. It is all shiny externality, all caricature.
But we might ask ourselves why the formal elements should support the sort of novel Woods finds sucessful? First we have to ask ourselves what we consider sucesses to be. Let’s assume that we take Smith’s novel on its own terms and that we hold nothing against “hysterical realism”; what does a sucessful novel in this style look like? An unsucessful one?
It quickly becomes clear that we have to resort to some kind of standard or categories outside the novel, even if that it standard is simply the reader. What would an ideal reader of “hysterical realism” be interested in and why would a work like White Teeth or Gravity’s Rainbow resonate with them? I agree with Zeitlin here and think the answer doesn’t really have a foundational element; there is no core artistic concept or Platonic ideal that we have recourse to (as Ned notes). But that doesn’t mean Woods thinks there is only one formal structure that leads to sucessful novels, or to making the sort of statements he’d like fiction to make:
The architecture is the essential silliness of her lunge for multiplicities–her cults and cloned mice and Jamaican earthquakes. Formally, her book lacks moral seriousness.
And now we come to the core question of values and Woods’ second argument. Whether Smith (and by implication, Wolfe, Pynchon, DFW, and others) lacks moral seriousness is a question that can be answered. Just not by me (I haven’t read their work nor do I want to wade any further into this lit crit morass I’ve dreged up for myself).
If we, like Zeitlin and Woods, see certain techniques as larger statements about a work or the world around us, then we can take these statements and evaluate them against some exisiting conception of the world and the sort of moral commitments you think are important. Woods wants a literture that connects with the sublime and what is most deeply human about us. That’s something I want too, though I’m not sure I can tell you why you should be prefer this (even assuming that literature does this better than any other medium, why should you want this in the first place). In the end, I think you have to make reference to a lot of held assumptions and values that lie outside of fiction qua fiction.
The bailout plan fails in the House. And hey, the Dow closes in -700 territory. So that’s exciting.
On the political side, I can understand the behavior of representatives who claim to be receiving calls 100:1 against the bailout. They’re worried about protecting their seats and watching as their vote is painted as a taxpayer giveaway to billionares. But this is the one of the real-word consequences of the the “low information” voter. The bailout is a complex and confusing morass that requires a lot of technical knowledge. So we’re asking the voter–who hears “bailout” and “fatcat” thrown around like CNBC is covering a national game of Monopoly with the Fed playing the roll of Mr. Moneybags, complete with Depression-era monocle–to smile and put their faith in unelected technocrats.
This is, in part, a trust and information problem. If more voters understood the problem, they might be inclined to support the bill. (I’ll also note that some of this blame could be shared by Congress and the Bush administration for not selling this better). If some voters had more information, they’d know enough to understand…that they don’t know enough.
Instead, they call and complain to their local representative, allowing the House GOP to cry partisanship. Best comment comes from a friend in investment banking:
LOL. No! They’re [the Republicans] protecting the little guy by insisting on tax incentives for speculative investment. Wheeeeeeee! We’re all doomed!
I’ll be busy at one of the last Fall For the Book readings tonight so I won’t be following the debate as closely as I’d like. You, however, should follow along with these fine bloggers who will be giving you some of the best foreign policy and political commentary as they live-blog the event:
- Ned Resnikoff and Charlie Eisenhood at NYU Local: Sweet political barbs from the Big Apple’s progressive, hipster capital.
- Democracy Arsenal hits you with a right hook of wonkishness and lays you out with a southpaw of firece foreign policy analysis. Or some other such boxing/defense policy metaphor-combo.
- Dan Drezner: The man boasts political economy and foreign policy bona fides. If you mess with him, he will cut you.
- Think Progress: It’s a virtual room full of wonks and twenty-something Beltway progressives, including Matt Yglesias. You don’t have to drink to hang out, but you will have to provide your own booze.
What Obama’s Economic Argument Should Look Like: The Great Risk Shift
One of the things that seems to be missing from the Obama campaign’s economic rhetoric is a coherent narrative under which he can group his policy proposals . Citing deregulation, the influence of lobbyists (with strong ties to the Republican party and John McCain’s campaign), and tax cuts for oil companies is a scatter-shot of political sins and policy failures. But as Ezra Klein observed recently when critiquing an Obama ad, these things don’t really go together in the minds of voters:
But the substance of the ad, the solutions, are a string of disconnected, and fairly unconvincing, sentences. “Reform our tax system to give a $1,000 tax break to the middle class, instead of showering more on oil companies and corporations that outsource our jobs.” This would be fine if McCain were publicly advocating the “Oil Companies and Outsourcers Tax Cut of 2008,” but as he won’t admit to favoring these things, it just sounds like Obama is another politician promising Good Stuff, and no one really believes in Good Stuff.
Jacob Hacker’s idea of “The Great Risk Shift” would be one, I think powerful, way of thinking about the current crisis and forming a positive argument. It also has two major political messaging benefits:
- Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 message, it tells the voters what the Republicans are doing wrong (they’re shifting the burden of financial risk from other players in the system–who can and should assume their own risk–and shifting it to the middle and lower classes). It’s the worst features of both Big Government and free-market fervor: regulatory capture, corporate patronage, and bailouts for those at the top combined with little to no oversight to keep markets running smoothly (even if you favor a “night watchmen” for regulatory oversight, it’d be best if that watchman wasn’t asleep on the job).
- It offers a flexible range of policy responses. The campaign doesn’t have to adopt all of Hacker’s proposals to make the case against McCain’s plans. You could offer a more populist, John Edwards inspired package under the narrative of restoring safeguards for the American worker as easily as you could a more limited, “iPod government” initiative.
The message of the late 80s and early 90s was that “trickle-down economics” had failed to actually trickle down. The message for the remaining days of this campaign should be that average voters deserve a governemnt that makes all players in the system assume their fair share of risk.
Perhaps if I had more experience with financial markets, I wouldn’t be as concerned, but as it stands this sort of thing doesn’t sound good:
$$$ With Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns gone, everyone is asking whether Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will survive as independent investment banks.
And these from Felix Salmon:
If you’re looking for silver linings, it’s clearly the investment banks which are most worried right now, not the big commercial banks in Europe or even in the US (Wells Fargo). When Wall Street’s alpha males stop competing and start cooperating like this, you know you’re living in historic times.
Hopefully not too historic.
You’ve got to support a guy who is fake-running to be a UC representative at Harvard and references Thomas Carlyle as part of his biography:
In fact, if Thomas Carlyle were to have met Dylan, he would have hanged himself in despair at the impossibility of achieving such greatness. And Thomas Carlyle was a total baller.
Walt Whitman would agree, and Whitman was the OG of American poetry in addition to being a super-pimp¹, so he would know.
¹When you think about it, a good 50% of Leaves of Grass says as much.
I have a book review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads up at SouthAsia-Online. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here’s my takeaway observation:
But for the near future, Fukuyama’s observation that “American power remains critical to the world order” is less hubris than a pragmatic understanding that America has a central role to play in that order. Not as benevolent hegemon imposing its whim but as a great power that, like it or not, needs the international community as much as it needs America.
He died yesterday evening. A loss to the world of poetry and, of course, the world. Condolences to his friends and family. It’s strange–though I knew he had liver cancer and was in the hospital, somehow I thought he would just keep on striving and writing, in spite of the odds. He will be missed.
For more about his work and writings, check the link to his blog on the sidebar under “Lit & Poetry.”
These young bloggers and their expanding media empires. If it isn’t Young Zeitlin and his Pushback gig or Ned editing NYU Local, it’s Jamelle guest blogging at Feministe (among, I think, nine others) and Dylan Matthews holding the keys to Ezra Klein’s place while he’s gone.
Dylan sees current “lipstick remark” flap as a failure of some in the media:
In a country with a responsible news media, the presidential frontrunner beginning a speech by excoriating American journalism as an institution would prompt deep reflection on the problems in news coverage by every newspaper in the country. Every op-ed columnist and editorial page would endorse more substantive coverage, and newsrooms would switch gears and start reporting Obama and McCain’s records and policy proposals on everything from nuclear terrorism to urban policy. This kind of crap would be relegated to paragraph-length articles, if retained at all. When Sarah Palin claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, the AP headline would be “Palin Repeats Lie about Infamous Bridge” [...]
[...]So I send my best to Brock and Podesta. The ideal situation is one of a roughly bipolar system with conservative and liberal outrage machines of equal potency, and liberals have a long way to go in closing the hack gap. But building up that infrastructure is going to take a whole lot longer than the two months left before the election.
I think this last point is sadly true, despite my centrist symapthies. The more partisan the news outlet (or the more that hackish voices in the media multiply) the more noise that has to be filltered by the average citizen reading their newspaper, clicking through the internet, or watching cable news. It won’t help for liberals and progressives to decry the conservative echo chamber and it’s reverberations in the MSM as unfair and distortionary. They’ll have to provide some noise of their own. Is this good for debate? Much of it isn’t, and the left is likely to make the same hackish claims and advance the same kinds of lame talking points as the right, but the alternative is a discourse dominated by one side.
Jamelle over at Feministe has similar thoughts:
As many others have pointed out however, none of this would be possible without a complicit media. The media, instead of calling out lies and presenting the truth, has been content to treat this election like a game: McCain’s/Palin’s distortions and lies are just part of the “horserace.”
Why oh why (etc.)…?
Jamelle thinks that a popular vote loss for Obama would mean Very Bad Things:
It would – in every possible way – be an utter disaster for our politics. In fact, I’d rather see McCain win the popular vote and the Electoral College; just so we could avoid the poisonous attacks and Republican accusations of illegitimacy* which unquestionably would follow in the wake of an Obama electoral college win, but popular vote loss. If Obama wins this election, I want it to be a clear and convincing win; ideally, he’d break fifty percent. But if that doesn’t happen, fine. The most important thing is that he comes away from the election having won the more votes than John McCain.
Although I agree a popular vote routing would be a heavy political stone to carry right out of the inaugural gates, I don’t think it would be the disaster Jamelle predicts , regardless of Republican rhetoric. It’s useful to remember here that Bill Clinton only won only 43% of the popular vote–that’s 57% of the electorate who voted for someone else. It didn’t seriously inhibit Clinton’s early policy goals (a good case can be made that the bungling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hurt Clinton more in his first 100 days than his lack of popular support). And four years later Clinton captured just under 50% of the popular vote.
Politically, if not tempermentally, the country is still relatively split, and this election is going to be close like the past two presidential elections. I think it’s safe to assume that neither Obama nor McCain would win with a large enough margin to be called a “mandate.” Obama is still favored to win, but not by much more than 3-5% of the popular vote. If McCain wins it’s likely to be even closer, so either candidate will have to make some sort of bid for public political unity. I think Obama is in a stronger positon to do this than McCain, whose “maverick” brand has been tarnished and would come to Washington trailing a Republican establishment heavily invested in Nixonland politics. The Democrats will certainly have their work cut out for them, but Obama’s political skills and charisma–not to mention disaffected moderate Republians and Bush fatigue–would go along way to greasing the legislative wheels in his favor.
Greg Easterbrook may be tedious (and irrationally contrarian) when commenting on other subjects, but this is a pretty good take on one of the longer suffering teams of the AFC North (in haiku no less):
Front office is the
Bear Stearns of the NFL.
The Cincy Bengals.Forecast finish: 6-10
Or, as Myron Cope used to call them, the “Cincinnati Bungles.”
*But not Boomer Esiason.
