Dispatches from M. Allen Cunningham

Ten Days Left to Support M. Allen Cunningham's Illustrated Limited Edition

2011-11-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

Art by N. Shields, from Date of Disappearance

Ten days and $324 left to go in the Date of Disappearance fundraiser at United States Artists. If the deadline arrives, and we're shy of one hundred percent, the project is off.

But I know we can make it! Remember, this is "micro-philanthropy," meaning you can pledge one dollar, five dollars, whatever you wish -- it's a no-risk deal, you get to write it off, you can pledge to receive gifts, and you're supporting the arts.

I like to think that the project is kinda special: Date of Disappearance is a limited edition, every copy numbered and signed and illuminated beautifully with ten ink-and-charcoal images by Portland artist Nathan Shields. The book will launch a micro-press,and I want to put it out there in a special way -- exclusively through our country's fabulous indie bookstores (i.e., not Amazon or the chains).

During this final lap of fundraising, I've had the honor of being interviewed by fellow author Victoria Patterson (Drift, This Vacant Paradise). Not only is she an extremely gifted fiction writer -- she asks very smart interview questions. A snippet:

VP: You’re a true champion of independent booksellers. Do you see the plight of the artist and the independent bookseller as similar?

MAC: I love this question. Yes, yes. Alfred Kazin characterized modern American writers as being steeped — unavoidably and necessarily — in all the little, often superficial details of life in America, and yet as being at the same time deeply, subtly alienated from all of that. The same could be said of many great booksellers, I think. Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. Both have labored to build a life in accordance with a passionate vision. Both accumulate intangible rewards, usually in the absence of lower gratifications (prestige, affluence, vacations). Both are cursed and blessed to live in the conviction that what they do has relevance and worth in this world — to spend their days in service to something they love unreasonably and irredeemably. And strangely, mysteriously, the artist and bookseller alike are also (though each is much more than this too) perpetuators and guardians of community — the writer as observer, voice, empathetic being, the bookstore as megaphone, nexus, flashpoint. ...

Visit Three Guys One Book for the whole interview:
http://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-m-allen-cunningham

Join 68 Date of Disappearance supporters at:

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Writer's Statement

2011-11-04T16:04:00.000-07:00

The following was written a few years ago for an application I submitted to an institution which shall remain nameless...

I’ve traveled my path as a writer a little bit backwards and now come to this application from an unusual place. I studied literature in college, but at twenty I went off to begin writing seriously on my own. In the years since then I’ve released two novels and published numerous short stories in national literary magazines. Meanwhile I’ve worked various jobs, among them flower delivery driver, bookstore clerk, hospital purchasing agent, house-painter, newspaper delivery agent, and ranch caretaker. In all candor I’ve reached a very difficult moment in my writing and in my life. I hope to make it a turning point, and this is why I’m submitting this application.

I’ve done my best alone. I’ve strained my eyes with deep reading. I’ve labored, as Wallace Stegner advised, to take charge of my material, filling crates with drafts before each story or novel was finished. I’ve grown a trusty shell against the sidelong looks of those who would question the validity of my vocation. I’ve even accepted the relative insignificance of this work in the larger world (does the world need me to write another book?) and kept working anyhow.

What I have never done is plug into a community of mutual support. I’ve never benefited from – or had the opportunity to contribute to – the seriousness and shared aims of a body of advanced writers. Now, thanks to this painful absence in my life, I’ve realized late and hard how crucial such community is. I’ve been a sort of closet writer all these years, but it turns out you can’t do this thing all by yourself, alone in a room, forever.

I’ve known of [your institution’s] existence for a long time. What draws me to apply now is my wish to work alongside serious, developed writers like me, all of us primed to better our craft, undistracted and unashamed. After long seclusion I can’t possibly express how timely, how instrumental for my work, such an environment would be. Beyond the literary gods in books, nobody has ever assured me daily and at length that to live as I have – to view writing as serious work – is not shameful or socially suspect, but maybe legitimate and honest (yes, even when it doesn’t pay). Getting published is a form of assurance, but publication is not community. The world of print can be curiously cold, and after years and years at the desk sharing your work with the stern dead walls, you realize print alone will not warm your room. You realize you need a real and breathing community: a gang of believers to be inspired by, to inspire.

I wish to continue writing, but I can’t go it all alone anymore. I need to share myself. I’m ready.

My application was passed over and I persevered alone, managing somehow to complete a new novel and then turn my attention to Date of Disappearance, my illustrated limited edition book of stories now accumulating support on USA Projects.

Having launched this fundraiser, I’m amazed to see (in a form I never anticipated) that “gang of believers” cohering around me after all. Turns out they were there all the time. I thank each and every one of them for their support, their community, their belief. If you'd care to join them, the fundraiser runs until two weeks from today. Any support is deeply appreciated -- and can earn you unique gifts! http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

A Victory for the Small!

2011-11-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

As reported by the New York Times today, St. Mark's Bookshop in New York has struck a deal with its landlord which will allow the store to stay open for business!

After many months of stalled negotiations and uncertainty about the bookshop's future, this is happy news. Independent bookstores like St. Mark’s promise to quietly save our country from spiritual and municipal ruin, because the booksellers, at their best, are proponents of the most civilizing things in life: art, education, civic involvement, and the meaningful wasting of time (which can foment genius).

Yet independent bookselling is an enterprise fraught with risk, and at our present historical moment the systemic atmosphere in America is one almost entirely contemptuous of significant cultural undertakings like this. The corporate and online book-vendors can be boarish, destructive entities, with little or no accountability to communities, and fidelity to nothing but the dollar and whatever dross will stimulate its multiplication. By contrast, independent booksellers are in the business of knowing their neighborhoods, their clientele, and the clientele’s particular tastes. They thereby do a profound service to their communities — and, by ripple effect, to the larger culture.

Vitality of the independents — of St. Mark’s at this moment — means vitality for democratic culture itself, which begins in and consists of (what else?) neighborhoods!

Illustrated Story Collection News: Help Still Needed

2011-11-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

The Date of Disappearance percentage bar held steady most of last week. Then within a single twenty-four-hour period it leapt seven percentage points! That was something to see, let me tell you, and it brought the remaining funds-to-raise down to the three-figure range!

-- GONNA BE CLOSE! --

In a matter of days we will enter the final two weeks before United States Artists pulls the plug on this fundraiser. As fundraising goes, that is an extremely short period of time, which means help getting the word out and encouraging continued support is as critical as ever to this project’s success.

Please make liberal use of the “Share” and “Embed” links beside my videos, the pass-along message included in my 10/16 update, and the Date of Disappearance Facebook page.

And buckle your seatbelts, it’s gonna be close!!

-- OUR NEXT PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, November 5^th will be eligible to receive …

A downloadable audio version of my short story “Windmills” in its entirety, including my personal audio greeting and dedication to YOU. Listen on your bike, in the car, or at the gym! This is story #3 in the collection. Here’s a snippet:

“I came inside and I realized the whole drive home was a blank. Like it didn’t happen. I couldn’t remember starting the car, changing highways, listening to the radio, nothing. Have you ever had a feeling like that?”

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Nov. 5^th

PLEDGE AT: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Congrats to our latest Patron Extraordinaire, Taniya, whose name was just drawn from the hat! Taniya receives a spiffy and durable pocket journal by Moleskine. Look for it soon, Taniya, and enjoy!

With enduring gratitude, and with good hopes,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

$4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

$3,928 (or 83%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

$832

Fundraising Days Remaining:

Pearlman Stories Stun

2011-10-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

I can hardly express the joy -- and the renewed sense of literary justice -- that came to me upon learning that Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision made the National Book Award shortlist. It's an astonishing book, and deserves this recognition and more.

Here's my Oregonian review of Binocular Vision from last April:

"I never figured out how to forget," a narrator observes at the close of one of Edith Pearlman's masterful stories. The comment refers to the character's youth; it would also aptly describe what makes this story writer exquisite. Binocular Vision, the volume of new and selected Pearlman stories published by Lookout Books, graces readers with a near-dizzying range of people, eras, locales and situations -- a cornucopia so variegated yet consistently authentic that one can only deem it the result of decades spent observing and absorbing -- patient years of unforgetting.

Pearlman's attentions rove from a rabbinical poker group to an impulsive act of generosity in a riven Latin American country to the existential dilemmas of an aristocratic tomboy ("androgynous beyond repair"); from the international hodgepodge of a Jerusalem apartment complex to the thoughts of an executive toy manufacturer afloat in the Old World. One senses in literary work of this scope a quality of beautiful yearning, as if the author's expansive reach itself acknowledges impossibility: whoever observes so much so well can never get it all down.

Alfred Kazin once wrote, "Literature seeks to reclaim the world that is constantly receding from us ... to reconcile us to life by showing that it is not limited to the actual data of existence." Pearlman's individual stories, in their variousness -- with nary a false note -- stay what normally streams away, showing us life with virtuosic subtly and effect. As for that knee-jerk complaint against story collections -- "Uneven!" -- let nobody file it here. These stories rise to cumulative impact as Pearlman furnishes vision after unified vision of persons adrift each in his or her discrete selfhood. Which is not to call her characters self-absorbed -- only to note that Pearlman's is a world of wanderers, floaters, individuals incontrovertibly aloof, whatever their entanglements, and that all of her people are spookily awake to the inescapable and isolating vulnerabilities of life.

In "Inbound" a child momentarily loses her parents on a busy Boston street. "Her life would be lived in the world ... She foresaw that. She foresaw also that as she became strong her parents would dare to weaken. They too might tug at her clothing, not meaning to annoy." In "The Non-Combatant," about a terminally ill doctor vacationing with family on Cape Cod in the final days of World War II, repeated references to "the pain" of his cancer -- always obscure, nonlocalized -- seem meant to suggest the pains of living, and when we read the following: "How lucky he had been in her, and in their children, and in his work -- and yet how willingly he would trade the pleasures of this particular life for life itself," we find something far more identifiable -- because more fundamental -- than mere selfishness. In "Mates" a couple mysteriously arrive in a town, quietly raise a family for years and leave without warning or goodbye once their children have grown. "None of us knew them well. They didn't become intimates of anyone. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink." And in "How to Fall," about a silent straight man to a wisecracking TV personality, we see the mute comic's glum face isolated night after night in the black-and-white screen, abstracted from his fellow humans who tune in at home -- though never for him.

Every Pearlman story gives us moments observed with profound attentiveness, each so scrupulously rendered they induce a readerly state analogous to the ideal writerly one described by Henry James: "The condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it." That, as literary production goes, is surpassingly rare. Call it a blessing and start reading Binocular Vision. --M. Allen Cunningham

"Pleased to Meet You" -- M. Allen Cunningham's Video Ice-Breaker

2011-10-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

My illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, is currently 74% funded with 26 funding days remaining.

To offer prospective supporters some getting-to-know-you time, I made this short video. I answer four basic questions, and you get a peek at my writing studio, my bookshelf, and a thing I like to call my “valuable downgrade.”

The fundraiser has come this far thanks to 47 generous supporters. But this is a fund or bust deal. If the goal is not reached by the deadline, the project receives no aid. I'd love to have your support (and send you some special gifts!). It's a no-risk proposition, it's tax-deductible, and you get something unique in return (autographed books, in some cases).

For more about Date of Disappearance and how you can help, please see my project video: www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance.

Thanks for your consideration.
-- M. Allen Cunningham

From a Letter to a Fellow Writer Who "Hit it Big" and Got Worried About Authenticity

2011-10-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Dear ______,

I live by the belief that we artists have got to stick together, and I admire anybody like yourself who would devote so many years, paid or not, to the production of something as invaluable — if unquantifiable and increasingly anachronistic — as a serious literary work.

I have no doubt that your new book is well worth reading, and well worth the astronomical sum paid for it. I take no issue with writers being well-paid. I’m all for that! What’s troublesome, to you and me both, is the conventional logic of big publishing we’re already seeing at work here: a logic which holds that to discuss books in terms of the author’s payment is a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature. Culture, according to such logic, is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better-paid the book, the more worthy of attention.

We object to this. It is success-cult nonsense, long obtaining in society rags and in those Manhattan cocktail parties we read about in the New Yorker, and it spills more and more into respected literary discourse and threatens to become a lingua franca.

“How big was the advance?”

“Seven figures.”

“Well! I should read it, shouldn’t I?”

“Oh, you will. Like every other reader in the Western Hemisphere.”

In reality, as experience has taught you and me well, literature flowers and fructifies under a different sun. Its servants toil alone, usually at the edge of things. Most of the world’s deserving works are fated to exist in undeserved obscurity while the authors do wage-labor in factories, retail stores, or academe — or simply scrounge for food. You and I both recognize that 99.8 percent of all worthy literary creators live by this truth, a truth existent through the ages.

And you believe as passionately as I do, I know, that young writers — or old, still struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists.

Our art lives nowhere but in the work itself, the words on the page. The art surely does not live in whatever gross sum may be paid for it by the hit-hungry New York publishers.

You know this, and that’s why you’re worrying. Be comforted that you know it. Knowing it, you’ll stay the course.

Yours,

—M

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Funding for the New Book Approaches 75 Percent -- With Your Help!

2011-10-17T17:11:00.000-07:00

My illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, continues to gather support through its funding page at United States Artists. I'm astonished and grateful to watch the supporter base grow steadily each week.

Thanks to the folks at Ecotone Magazine, this week’s Patron Extraordinaire! perk goes out to TWO Date of Disappearance supporters!

ANONYMOUS #3 (pledged 10/6) and ALF will each receive a year’s subscription to Ecotone!

Congrats, Anonymous and ALF!

-- WHERE WE STAND --

This week we enter the second half of the Date of Disappearance funding period. I’m extremely pleased to report that after climbing 7 percentage points last week alone, the project stands at just shy of 70 percent funded!

Thank you to all my project supporters for bringing the book to this point. I’m honored by your response.

And to remind those who may have considered supporting the project, but prefer not to pledge online, you can pledge by check using this helpful form.

Here’s to rounding the three-quarters bend soon!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

The past few weeks have provided me the fun opportunity of sharing the things I find most enriching and inspiring. As a gesture of my continued gratitude, I’m sharing another local favorite this week. Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, October 22^nd will be eligible to receive…

An attractive silver tin of loose-leaf tea: premium, organic, and handcrafted by Portland’s premiere teashop, Tea Chai Té, whose staff believes that “tea is a liquid hug for the soul.” I can tell you from personal experience, the product they serve proves it to be so! A cup of this stuff perfectly complements a quiet hour with a book.

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 22^nd

-- AN EASY PASS-ALONG --

With $1,500 still to raise in the next 32 days, continued support is indispensable. I’d like to make it as easy as possible to share Date of Disappearance with others, so I’ve included below a basic message for tacking onto any Facebook link, pasting into an e-mail or onto a blog, or just adapting as you wish. Please use it freely with a simple copy and paste:

Looking to make a tax-deductible donation? Want to find a personal way to support the arts? I just did, by pitching in on a special project at one of America’s most prestigious arts organizations.

At the link below you can view a short video about Date of Disappearance, the illustrated limited edition book I’m supporting, and hear the author explain his vision for the project. Pledge any amount from $1 upward, or pledge $25 and receive an autographed copy of the book, plus additional perks. Due to the help of supporters like me, this project is almost 70 percent funded. But the fundraising period is limited, the clock is ticking, and if pledges fall short of the goal the project will receive no funds (and you will owe nothing).

Please consider joining me in supporting a dedicated young artist—and the arts in general. As Oscar Wilde once put it, “What we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

---------------------

With gratitude, and for the love of books,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

$4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

$3,251 (or 68%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

$1,509

Fundraising Days Remaining:

Visit Date of Disappearance on Facebook

Check out ten sneak-peek sentences from Date of Disappearance

Win a Lit-Mag Subscription This Week!

2011-10-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

Sundays have been lots of fun here at Date of Disappearance Headquarters lately, thanks to the weekly Patron Extraordinaire! drawing. This week’s gift, a short story collection by an acknowledged master in the form, posed me a pleasing decision-making challenge—and in the end I just couldn’t narrow it down to a single title, so … I narrowed it down to TWO!

The Date of Disappearance Administrative Assistant (my three-year old son), has just pulled from the hat the names of two Patrons Extraordinaire!

A & G McTIGHE will receive the book Dancing After Hours: Stories by Andre Dubus

MARIAN will receive The Afterlife & Other Stories by John Updike

Congrats Marian and McTighes! These books are both masterworks and I’m confident you’ll find lots to admire in each. Look for them in the mail soon!

-- PROGRESS --
This week I hoped we could climb well into the fifty-percent-funded margin, but thanks to your tremendous ongoing support, we flew through the fifties and are currently at 62%! I am amazed and full of gratitude. Thank you all.

-- ON-WORD! --
With forty days remaining and roughly $1,800 left to raise, the task of encouraging others’ support continues to be Priority Number One. Date of Disappearance now has an official Facebook page, which I hope will offer easy ways for any of you to share (or continue sharing) the project with your own community.

(And/or feel free to pass along the link to those ten Sneak-Peek Sentences from the book that I shared last week)

Thanks for everything you all continue to do to spread news of this project widely!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! GIFT --
Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, October 15th, will be eligible to receive:

A year's subscription to the cutting-edge literary magazine, Ecotone. Bristling with knock-out fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and comics, Ecotone (not a “nature magazine”) is quietly, steadily enriching our cultural life with each new gorgeously designed, inevitably award-winning issue. You’re going to love finding this mag in your mailbox—and just see if it doesn’t elicit oohs and aahs when displayed on your coffee table!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 15th

-- SEVEN YEARS ON --
This week marked the anniversary of my first novel’s publication seven years ago. It’s been a wild, weird ride for me since The Green Age of Asher Witherow first appeared in 2004. In a blog post contemplating this, I wrote of Date of Disappearance:

“It will be a small book, born quietly at midday, and in a limited number of copies—not what they call a ‘breakout.’ But it will be something lovely, with illustrated pages you can turn by hand.”

I reiterated my long-held belief that “the art of language and story is sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit,” and I gave an appreciative shout-out: “Here’s to those who can help me realize my quiet, somewhat old-fashioned idea.”

In other words, if you've supported or intend to support the project, here’s to YOU! I’m confident we’re going to reach that goal together.

With gratitude,
—M
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

-- THE STATS --
Date of Disappearance Project Goal:
$4,760
Amount Raised as of Today:
$2,936 (or 62%!)
Remaining Amount to Raise:
$1,824
Fundraising Days Remaining:
39

Economics of the Spirit

2011-10-08T00:32:00.000-07:00

On this day seven years ago, my first novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow was published. Among the good things that happened for that book, the luckiest was the phenomenal support it enjoyed from this country’s independent booksellers. The Green Age did not exactly come into the world branded for the bestseller list. In fact the book had a lot riding against it. A few examples:

· It was published just as The Da Vinci Code’s years-long chart-topping run began

· It was not topical or terribly plot-driven

· Its author was a total unknown and had received no headline-worthy advance

· Its publisher was a small decentralized press with no prior titles

· It was entitled The Green Age of Asher Witherow (the what of who??)

Nevertheless, independent booksellers got behind The Green Age before it even landed, naming it the month’s #1 Book Sense Pick and warmly hosting me in stores from Seattle to Hollywood, from St. Paul to Blytheville, Arkansas in a string of book-signings spanning a good six months.

Because of the indies The Green Age was widely reviewed, because of the indies it saw a second printing within a month of hitting the shelves, and because of the indies a young writer got an actual royalty check.

Times have been tough for independent bookstores since the rise of the chain booksellers, big-box retailers, and the advent of online commerce in the nineties. But probably never have the indies faced a season of famine to match today’s. E-books, coupled with general economic woes and other factors, bring down another neighborhood bookstore or two every few days, it seems. These closures, each one of them, do injury to our community-level cultural life (what other cultural life do we really have?). And I’ll dispense with dignity a minute in order to tell you first-hand that the injury trickles down. That’s to say, authors themselves (those of my “midlist” variety, anyway) don’t go unscathed.

A few years back, in a letter to the New York Times Book Review, I wrote some words on behalf of “unhonored and unpaid” fiction writers whose work “goes into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed, and unbought.” I argued that “the greater number of literature’s real practitioners work under such conditions.” Were I to find somebody else writing this today, these few years later, I’d be tempted to say it reeks with misplaced optimism. For increasingly I fear that honorable, obscure work—of the kind the history of literature is built upon—does not “go into the world” at all, or at least not into solid, silent, beautiful print. Instead, I fear such work languishes in the rooms of its creation.

In the absence of essential cultural advocates like our dwindling number of independent bookstores, serious newspaper review columns, and small publishers who can let an idiosyncratic vision guide them and make a go of it financially, what can we expect? Obscure authors of unlikely little books like The Green Age used to get, if not steady pay or renown, at least an airing in print. Today these authors get whatever artistic/democratic access the Internet can offer them (and that is something, yes).

But today, seven years from the outset of my publishing career, as I stand at my own uncertain turning in the path, I wish to publicly redouble my gratitude to our independent booksellers. If/when my current project gets off the ground, I intend in my own small way to shine a light on you all. I’m equally grateful for the existence of United States Artists, the dynamic organization that just may help me bring my new book to light. It will be a small book, born quietly at midday, and in a limited number of copies—not what they call a “breakout.” But it will be something lovely, with illustrated pages you can turn by hand.

That letter of mine to the New York Times closed with my impassioned avowal that “the art of language and story [is] sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.” I still believe it.

Here’s to those who can help me realize my quiet, somewhat old-fashioned idea.

—M

Sneak-Peek Sentences! : An Update on the Illustrated Limited Edition

2011-10-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Illustration by Nathan Shields

The Date of Disappearance fundraiser continues strong at United States Artists. The matching-grant segment was a phenomenal success: roughly $800 raised in a little more than a week!

To give everyone a fun glimpse of the book you've supported or are considering supporting, I’ve prepared a PDF with ten sneak-peek sentences from Date of Disappearance. Take a look.

Renewed thanks to all who continue to share the project, encourage new support, and keep the numbers climbing toward the goal. Date of Disappearance is now 49% funded with 46 days remaining! That’s about $2,400 left to go – certainly an achievable amount, considering the progress so far. But this is fund or bust! Please help that percentage get well into the fifties this week!

-- THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THIS LIMITED-TIME FUNDRAISER --

a)      This is “micro-philanthropy.” — Anybody can pledge any amount from $1 upward (it's tax-deductible, and every dollar helps)

b)      Your pledge can reserve you a book. — $25 gets you the finished, numbered limited edition. You’ll receive a low-numbered copy hot from the printer, plus additional perks!

c)      Support takes many forms. — If you can’t pledge monetarily, you can pledge in spirit by helping to spread the word. Embed the Date of Disappearance video on your blog, “Like” it and pass it around!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

All supporters who have pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the end of Saturday, October 8th will be eligible to receive, in addition to standard pledge perks …

A short story collection by one of our acknowledged masters in the form. This author’s name shall be a surprise for next week (as I narrow it down from several whose work continually inspires), but I guarantee you a meaningful and memorable read!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 9th

Congrats to Julie Pollastro, winner of this week's PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE drawing! Julie receives an eye-catching Western Meadowlark coffee mug from Portland’s own Powell’s Books. Enjoy, Julie!

In gratitude, and for the love of books,
—M

-- THE STATS --
Date of Disappearance Project Goal:
            $4,760
Amount Raised as of Today:
            $2,336 (or 49%!)
Remaining Amount to Raise:
            $2,424
Fundraising Days Remaining:
            46

Thomas Hardy et Moi

2011-10-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I contributed to the "Art of the Sentence" series they've got running at the Tin House blog. From the many memorable sentences that came to mind, I chose to say a few words about this one:

“But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.”

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

My thoughts on Hardy's sentence can be found here.

Why It's Natural to Need Help

2011-09-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

— Here’s to The Helpers —

A Lone Wolf Sets Out:
In my earlier life a driving passion and talent for the theater led me to believe I’d pursue a career as an actor, but in the end it was the written component of drama that drew me into literature. Always somewhat ill at ease in the communal, collaborative atmosphere of the thespian world, I found in the more secret art of writing a quietude, concentration, and privacy that appealed to my solitary nature. Here was something you could do (perhaps had to do?) alone.

Writing required no facilities, no stage lights or auditorium seating, no orchestra pits, no janitors to tidy the lavatories. Most importantly, perhaps, it required no return at the box office. String together a few healthy advances and you were set (after all, you weren’t aiming for world domination). As a writer you didn’t have to fit your life into a rehearsal calendar or the matrix of personalities (outsized egos amongst them) that make up a theatrical cast. Writing required nobody else’s presence. The writer could be cast, crew, director, conductor, usher, and janitor — all in one, and all it took was pen and paper, discipline, and yes, self-reliance.

Given those basic tools plus a strong commitment to excellence, it looked like a writer really could “make it” alone and enjoy the gratification of success earned by pure individual merit as well as the liberty of being one’s own man.

I embraced this vision early, and believed that in doing so I was parting ways with the false American Dream, a.k.a.: the rat race. No nine-to-five or gold watch for me, thank you very much (even if I worked full-time to pay the bills — and for periods I did — it would not be my employment that defined me, but my calling as a writer; this I determined early, and so it was).

It was a useful vision in its way, and galvanized me to great productivity. Later on, however, even after successfully completing and publishing numerous works, I developed a lurking suspicion that my Lone Wolf outlook might be a bit flawed. Most prominently, it seemed to engender mild but undeniable feelings of humiliation whenever I filled out grant or fellowship applications. And months later, receiving the form letter containing the phrase “your application was not successful,” a strange dejection would dog me for days: Some Lone Wolf you are! Spurned Puppy is more like it.

Something was out of joint.

Recently, upon reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, it occurred to me that my early go-it-alone vision was never really a break with the American Dream, but more precisely a variation upon it. That is to say, I had subscribed to the (western capitalist) idea that one succeeds alone.

Thornton Wilder once described American individualism thusly:

"The inability to draw strength from any dependency."

I had crept dangerously close to feeling ashamed of myself for seeking, or needing to seek, help.

Success Myths:
In Outliers Gladwell encourages us to see through our culture’s success myths, and presents numerous compelling case-studies to help us do so. It seems to me his message is particularly beneficial in a present moment rife with job loss.

"In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness. … [But] people don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot."

Later he goes on:

"The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think Outliers [Gladwell's term for the brilliantly successful] spring naturally from the earth."

Meritocracy: “Those Worthy of Success Should Need No Help”:
America, we are encouraged to believe, is a pure meritocracy. But we do well to remember — especially in tough economic times like now — that faith in meritocracy is often a recipe for unhappiness, for as Alain de Botton eloquently reminds us in his remarkable book Status A nxiety:

"In a meritocratic world in which well-paid jobs [can] be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money [begins] to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich are not only wealthier, it seem[s]; they might also be plain better."

De Botton quotes this creepy sentiment from Andrew Carnegie, written in the latter’s 1920 Autobiography:

"Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do."

Anti-Gladwellian myths have long obtained all around us:

The self-made icons of success did it on their own
Success is won by individual virtue and determination
To need help is to be unworthy of success

As these success-myths persist, the following equation too often applies:

Belief in myth of self-made success + Belief in meritocracy = Shame/Disillusionment/Despair/Resignation

The Lone Wolf Was Never Really Alone:
Though it’s true that the discipline of writing must ultimately be honed and matured in solitude, the sustainment of this endeavor calls for help, be it moral or financial, from beyond the writer’s solitary zone. The bracing encouragement of friends and loved ones, the inspiration of teachers or literary luminaries long dead, and indeed, the material assistance of grants and endowments — all are essential to the writer’s survival and vitality.

I may give my best, do my all, and still need help. We all need it sometimes. Without the unfailing support and encouragement of my wife it would have been immeasurably more difficult for me to write and publish two novels before I was thirty. This is just the tip of the iceberg of my moral debts.

This month I’ve partnered with United States Artists to raise funds for my latest book, which will be something of a special offering: an illustrated, limited edition short story collection. In the two weeks since the fundraiser launched, 27 supporters have come forward to take us 45% of the way to the funding goal. Here’s to USA for helping out artists like me — and here’s to all those who have so generously lent their support so far, whether by pledging, helping me spread the word, or both.

I have not done and cannot do it alone. That, paradoxically, is a freeing thought.

Date of Disappearance Fundraiser Update

2011-09-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Date of Disappearance Administrative Assistant has just drawn the name of this week’s PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE!

Ray and Joanna Shields will receive a complete, personalized, downloadable audio version of my short story “Summer.” Congrats, Ray and Joanna! I’ll be in touch.

Yesterday, in a blog post that contemplated Malcolm Gladwell, Andrew Carnegie, and American success myths, I wrote:

“Though it’s true that the discipline of writing must ultimately be honed and matured in solitude, the sustainment of this endeavor calls for help, be it moral or financial, from beyond the writer’s solitary zone. … I have not done and cannot do it alone.”

Continued thanks to all my supporters for stepping forward to help with what I envision as a beautiful and unusual project. Because of you, Date of Disappearance is now 30% funded.

-- FUND OR BUST! --

We’ve still got $3,315 to raise in the mere 54 days left until United States Artists pulls the plug on this fundraiser. In effect right now, a special matching grant is doubling all incoming pledges until we’ve reached the 45% line. If you've intended to pledge but haven’t gotten around to it yet, please know your money will go twice as far.

And have I mentioned pledges can be made offline, without a credit card? Here’s a helpful link: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/pdf/USA_Manual_Donation_Form.pdf

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

All supporters who have pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the end of Saturday, October 2nd will be eligible to receive (in addition to the standard pledge perks)…

An eye-catching Western Meadowlark coffee mug from what is said to be the largest independent bookstore in the world, Portland’s own Powell’s Books. Impress your friends and stir envy among fellow bibliophiles!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct.1^st

In gratitude, and for the love of books,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

$4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

$1,445 (or 30%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

$3,315

Fundraising Days Remaining:

Announcing the Date of Disappearance Patron Extraordinaire! Program

2011-09-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

We're entering week two of fundraising for my illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance. Many thanks to all those who have pledged. We're at 15% of the project goal! Now I'd like to add some extra perks to encourage your support.

Each week, beginning next Sunday, Sept. 25th, my Administrative Assistant (my three-year-old son) will select by random drawing a Date of Disappearance PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! Every person who has pledged $15 or more since the project launched will be automatically entered in the drawing, and each week’s Patron Extraordinaire! will receive, in addition to the official pledge perks, an EXCLUSIVE NO-EXTRA-COMMITMENT GIFT!

Make your pledge by the end of Saturday (9/24), and be eligible to receive…

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

A downloadable audio version of my short story “Summer” in its entirety, including my personal audio greeting and dedication to YOU. Listen in the car, on the bus, or during your workout! This is story #7 in the collection. Here’s a two-sentence sneak peek:

“Ingmar came over today. We hung around in the fort and it was like a hundred and ten degrees in there under the fiberglass but we just kept shooting each other with water-uzis.”

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Sept. 24th

As we move into Week Two of funding, please remember:

a) This is “micro-philanthropy.” — Anybody can pledge any amount from $1 upward (and every dollar helps)

b) Your pledge can reserve you a book. — $25 gets you the finished, numbered limited edition. You’ll receive a low-numbered copy hot from the printer, plus additional perks!

c) Support takes many forms. — If you can’t pledge monetarily, you can pledge in spirit by helping to spread the word. Embed the Date of Disappearance video on your blog, “Like” it and pass it around!

-- FUN FOR YOUR EARS! --

Now, have a listen to and/or download this audio clip from “We Are Not Civilians Here.” It's Story #4 in the book.

We Are Not Civilians Here, a short story excerpt by M. Allen Cunningham

A Special Way to Support the Literary Arts!

2011-09-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

I've launched a project page on the Unites States Artists website, in support of my envisioned limited edition short story collection, Date of Disappearance. This book will feature the astonishing artwork of fellow Portlander Nathan Shields.

The video below illuminates. Please take a look and consider following the link to lend a hand. You can donate as little as $1, or choose from several pledge amounts and receive special gifts (right up to an original short story I will write based on prompts you provide).

A $25 pledge gets you a signed and numbered copy of the limited edition, plus additional perks. All donations are tax deductible. If unable to donate, please help me spread the word! I've got until November 18th to rally the resources.

For love of the codex, and with many thanks,
~M

Prime Passage: Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo (1973)

2011-08-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

From Chapter 10…

“I continued to breathe, never before conscious of the effort needed to generate this act. People passed supernaturally across the room, leaving contrails of smoke and scented ash. Others settled around me, moving their lips. All were breathing, sullenly pumping blood, embarked together on a perverse miracle. Our moveable parts carried us past the edge of every deathly metaphysic. Our organs, lifted from our bodies, plucked out with silver pincers and left laboring on bright Tiffany trays, would comprise the finest exhibit of our ability to endure. Euphoric with morphine we’d be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were. … (p.74)

“I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a metaphysical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fires. This was a madman’s truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing.” (p.82)

Prime Passage from On Grief & Reason by Joseph Brodsky: "You become what you read"

2011-05-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

Found in "An Immodest Proposal," a speech delivered at the Library of Congress in 1991:

“In the process of composition a poet employs—by and large unwittingly—the two main modes of cognition available to our species: Occidental and Oriental. (Of course both modes are available whenever you find frontal lobes, but different traditions have employed them with different degrees of prejudice.) The first puts a high premium on the rational, on analysis. In social terms, it is accompanied by man’s self-assertion and generally is exemplified by Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum.” The second relies mainly on intuitive synthesis, calls for self-negation, and is best represented by the Buddha. In other words, a poem offers you a sample of complete, not slanted, human intelligence at work. This is what constitutes the chief appeal of poetry, quite apart from its exploiting rhythmic and euphonic properties of the language which are in themselves quite revelatory. A poem, as it were, tells its reader, “Be like me.” And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can’t revert to not having had them. That’s what evolution is all about. … The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual. As it is always in the eye of the beholder, it can’t be wholly embodied save in words: that’s what ushers in a poem.”

(On Grief & Reason, p.206)

Goodbye to Bookstores? Not Yet!

2011-03-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

I have a short feature essay in the Oregonian for Sunday, March 13. It deals with the rise of the e-book and the importance, as I see it, of standing up for community and media plurality by supporting bookstores and libraries.

Permit no farewell to the Age of the Bookstore! Clang in my brain goes the thought, prompted by news of Borders, bookselling behemoth, declaring bankruptcy and shuttering stores by a third. Even Borders! Then locally comes word that Powell’s must prune personnel—and in southeast Portland the bright rooms of Looking Glass Books, 38-year cultural institution, are to be stripped and darkened. Outside a banner reads: for lease. One February morning I stand before it, morosely wishful. Had I the bucks and business acumen, I’d charge in and make a quixotic offer myself. To the staff I’d say, “Stay! We’ll hold this line together!”
Instead, clueless with a balance book and already mortgaged to my eyebrows, I shuffle inside to loiter amid liquidation signs, to suck in lovely ink-and-paper aromas while fondling volumes in farewell, and to eavesdrop on the regrets of other patrons. “We’ve loved coming here,” the owner is told. “How we’ll miss it!” “Sorry to see you go!”
Note to self: business acumen was never lacking here. This store’s got its clientele. No, the problem cited here and at Powell’s—and even at Borders HQ—is the immaterial imp known as, yes, the e-book.
Can this be? While one dawdled innocently in the ever-bright chambers of the Internet, flashed-at by ads, teased by Twitter, chloroformed by Facebook, something sinister happened to one’s world. The physical bookstore—actual space-consuming locus of tangible, shelvable books (and ideally of a community’s unique intellectual life)—came under assault from a fusillade of pixels. Pixels!

Read the rest here.

Prime Passage: Lionel Trilling (1952)

2011-02-14T23:41:00.000-08:00

From Trilling's "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (1952), his contribution to a Partisan Review symposium on the subject. Prophetic?

“For purposes of the artist’s salvation, it is best not to speak of the artist at all. It is best to think of him as crazy, foolish, inspired—as an unconditionable kind of man—and to make no provision for him until he appears in person and demands it. Our attitude to the artist is deteriorating as our sense of his need increases. It seems to me that the more we think about doing something for the artist, the less we think of him as Master, and the more we think of him as Postulant or Apprentice. Indeed, it may be coming to be true that for us the Master is the not the artist himself, but the great philanthropic Foundation, which brings artists into being, whose creative act the artist is. All signs point toward our desire to institutionalize the artist, to integrate him into the community. By means of university courses which teach the ‘technique’ of writing, or which arrange for the communication of the spirit from a fully initiated artist to the neophyte, by means of doctoral degrees in creativity, by means of summer schools and conferences, our democratic impulses fulfill themselves and we undertake to prove that art is a profession like another, in which a young man of reasonably good intelligence has a right to succeed. And this undertaking, which is carried out by administrators and by teachers of relatively simple mind, is in reality the response to the theory of more elaborate and refined minds—of intellectuals—who conceive of the artist as the Commissioner of Moral Sanitation, and who demand that he be given his proper statutory salary without delay. I do not hold with the theory that art grows best in hardship. But I become uneasy—especially if I consider the nature of the best of modern art, its demand that it be wrestled with before it consents to bless us—whenever I hear of plans for its early domestication. These plans seem to me an aspect of the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment, of the modern indignation at the idea of entering the life of the spirit without proper provision having been made for full security.”

Prime Passage: "The Responsibility of the Poet" by Wendell Berry (1988)

2011-02-08T18:55:00.000-08:00

(From the essay "The Responsibility of the Poet," found in Berry's book, What Are People For?)

"A poem reminds us...of the spiritual elation that we call 'inspiration' or 'gift.' Or perhaps we ought to say that it should do so, it should be humble enough to do so, because we know that no permanently valuable poem is made by the merely intentional manipulation of its scrutable components. Hence, it reminds us of love. It is amateur work, lover's work. What we now call 'professionalism' is anathema to it. A good poem reminds us of love because it cannot be written or read in distraction; it cannot be read or understood by anyone thinking of praise or publication or promotion. ...

"We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction -- which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism.

"Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world." (p.89-90)

Prime Passage: The Paris Review Interview with David McCullough

2011-02-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

"I write on an old Royal typewriter, a beauty! ...I've written all my books on it. It was made about 1941 and it works perfectly. I have it cleaned and oiled about once every book and the roller has to be replaced now and then. Otherwise it's the same machine. Imagine--it's more than fifty years old and it still does just what it was built to do! There's not a thing wrong with it.

"I love putting paper in. I love the way the keys come up and actually print the letters. I love it when I swing that carriage and the bell rings like an old trolley car. I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don't want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower. I don't think all that fast. They say, But you could change things so readily. I can change things very readily as it is. I take a pen and draw a circle around what I want to move up or down or wherever and then I retype it. Then they say, But you wouldn't have to retype it. But when I'm retyping I'm also rewriting. And I'm listening, hearing what I've written. Writing should be done for the ear. Rosalee reads aloud wonderfully and it's a tremendous help to me to hear her speak what I've written. Or sometimes I read it to her. It's so important. You hear things that are wrong, that call for editing."

Prime Passage: Saul Bellow: Letters

2011-01-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

From Bellow's letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, January 20, 1953:

"I am perfectly sure that he will become a major novelist. He has every prerequisite: the personal, definite style, the emotional resources, the understanding of character, the dramatic sense and the intelligence. He understands what the tasks of an imaginative writer of today are. Not to be appalled by these tasks is in and of itself a piece of heroism. Imagination has been steadily losing prestige in American life, it seems to me, for a long time. I am speaking of the poetic imagination. Inferior kinds of imagination have prospered, but the poetic has less credit than ever before. Perhaps that is because there is less room than ever for the personal, spacious, unanxious and free, for the unprepared, unorganized and spontaneous elements from which poetic imagination springs. It is upon writers like Mr. Malamud that the future of literature in America depends, writers who have not sought to protect themselves by joining schools or by identification with prevailing tastes and tendencies. The greatest threat to writing today is the threat of conformism. Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.

"Literal-minded critics of Mr. Malamud's novel, The Natural, complained that it was not about true-to-life baseball players and failed entirely to see that it was a parable of the man of great endowments, or myth of the champion. I have immense faith in Mr. Malamud's power to make himself understood. I should be very happy to hear that he had become a Guggenheim fellow." (p.118)

Buy Bellow's Letters here.

Thoreau's Walden Roundly Rejected by Today's Publishers

2010-12-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

My piece, "From e-mails to Henry David Thoreau's Literary Agent," appears in the Books section of this Sunday's Oregonian (12/19/2010). It's online today:

"Walden; or, Life in the Woods" (rethink title?) seems to us the kind of book most enjoyably read in the forest, but because the scarcity of electrical outlets in the forest will preclude robust e-book sales, I'm afraid we must decline at this time. ...

Read the whole thing.

Prime Passage: The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick (2006)

2010-12-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

“…By the 1970s, the novel as the holy vessel of the imagination (itself having deposed poetry) was undone. Magazines dropped fiction. Notions of journalism as the equal of imaginative writing took hold (“the nonfiction novel” as pioneered by Truman Capote, replicated by Norman Mailer). Bohemians who had been willing enough to endure the romantic penury of cold-water walkups while sneering at popular entertainment were displaced by beatniks who were themselves popular entertainment. …

“With such radical (and representative) changes in the culture, and with High Art in the form of the novel having lost its centrality, the nature of ambition too was bound to alter. This is not to say that young writers today are no longer driven—and some may even be possessed—by the strenuous forces of literary ambition. Zeal, after all, is a constant, and so must be the pool, or the sea, of born writers. But the great engines of technology lure striving talents to television and Hollywood, or to the lighter varieties of theater, or (especially) to the prompt gratifications and high-velocity fame of the magazines, where topical articles generate buzz and gather no moss. The sworn novelists, who despite the devourings of the hour, continue to revere the novel (the novel as moss, with its leisurely accretions of character and incident, its disclosures of secrets, its landscapes and cityscapes and mindscapes, its idiosyncratic particularisms of language and insight)—these sworn novelists remain on the scene, if not on the rise.” p.136

Buy The Din in the Head here.

Prime Passage: An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

2010-12-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

"The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)" p.19

Prime Passage: The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch

2010-11-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

Of the secondary character called "M," who is Herman Melville:

"For so many of his young years, he had written what he could to make his way and make his wage; then, apparently, he had manufactured what he must, and he'd made neither. That is the way of the world, the ebb and flow of dollars, but knowing this could not have been of consolation; and in the pressure in the house -- an atmosphere, like storm, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the very air pressed hard, in silence, at the inner doors of the rooms, the windows looking onto East Twenty-sixth Street -- he drank his drinks and then escaped to walk to work, swallowing his own saliva as it welled like poison in his throat and mouth, and heard, from this remaining friend or that, how many of the other, former, friends were certain he had died." p.186

Prime Passage: Herman Melville on Emerson; "His brains descend down into his neck"

2010-11-10T23:16:00.000-08:00

Melville's letter of March 3, 1849 to Evert Duyckinck, friend and editor of The Literary World.

"Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture, he is an uncommon man.

"Swear he is a humbug -- then he is no uncommon humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified -- I will answer that had not old Zach's father begot him, Old Zach would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire.

"I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish ... to my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain.

"Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is for the most part instantly perceptible. This I see in Mr. Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.

"I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down the stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummit that will. I'm not talking about Mr. Emerson now, but of the whole corps of thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.

"I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with builders-up ... But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose.

"You complain that Emerson tho' a denizen of the land of gingerbread, is above munching a plain cake in company of jolly fellows, and swigging (?) off his ale like you and me. Ah, my dear Sir, that's his misfortune, not his fault. His belly, Sir, is in his chest, and his brains descend down into his neck, and offer an obstacle to a draughtful of ale or a mouthful of cake... Goodbye. H.M."

"Books Inhabit the World"

2010-10-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

Portland author Sallie Tisdale, on her experience judging this year's National Book Awards (via The Oregonian):

"All this reading could be on a gray screen; I could be clicking buttons instead of turning pages. In the bookless future a few of these books predict, there would be no boxes, no piles...

I would, of course, have gone mad, thrown the little plastic thing out the window long ago. The real glory of all these books is simply that they exist. They will endure in the world as solid things. I love the piles -- the teetering, heavy, uneven piles, the cumbersome crowding of books thick and thin. These are piles of piled-up things, sculptured objects taking up room. No gray screen can honor the way font shape and space are designed to convey thought. Books inhabit the world in a way not unlike the way you and I do."

Prime Passages: Cyril Connolly & C.S. Lewis Discuss Some Threats to Literary Appreciation

2010-10-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

Connolly was writing seven decades ago, Lewis five, but amid a publishing culture geared almost exclusively toward so-called "upmarket fiction" their views are remarkably relevant.

"Writing is a more impure art than music or painting. It is an art, but it is also the medium in which many millions of inartistic people express themselves, describe their work, sell their goods, justify their conduct, propagate their ideas. It is the vehicle of all business and propaganda. Since it is hard to paint or compose without a certain affection for painting or music, the commercial element—advertisers, illustrators, are recognizable, and in a minority, nor do music and painting appeal to the scientific temperament.

But writing does. It is an art in which the few who practice it for its own sake are being always resented and jostled through its many galleries by the majority who do not. And the deadliest of these are the scientific investigators, clever young men who have themselves failed as artists and who bring only a passionate sterility and a dark, wide-focusing resentment to their examination of creative art. The aim of much of this destructive criticism, though not yet as publicly avowed, is entirely to eliminate the individual style, to banish imaginative beauty and formal art from writing. Prose will not only be as unassuming as good clothes, but as uniform as bad ones." (p.76)

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

…What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort. They are mere professionals. Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. … For such people reading often becomes mere work. The text before them comes to exist not in its own right but simply as raw material; clay out of which they can complete their tale of bricks. Accordingly we often find that in their leisure hours they read, if at all, as the many read. I well remember the snub I once got from a man to whom, as we came away from an examiners’ meeting, I tactlessly mentioned a great poet on whom several candidates had written answers. His attitude (I’ve forgotten the words) might be expressed in the form, ‘Good God, man, do you want to go on after hours?’…For those who are reduced to this condition by economic necessity and overwork I have nothing but sympathy. Unfortunately, ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And, however it is produced, it destroys appreciation." (p.6-7)

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961)

and Connolly again (same book as above):

"One further question is raised by Maugham. ‘I have never had much patience,’ he states, ‘with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning.’ This is an abject surrender, for it is part of the tragedy of modern literature that the author, anxious to avoid mystifying the reader, is afraid to demand of him any exertions. ‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ he exclaims, ‘I write exactly as I talk—no, better still—exactly as you talk.’ Imagine Cezanne painting or Beethoven composing ‘exactly as he talked’! The only way to write is to consider the reader to be the author’s equal; to treat him otherwise is to set a value on illiteracy, and so all that results from Maugham’s condescension to a reader from whom he expects no effort is a latent hostility." (p.79-80)

The Artist's Work

2010-10-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

From my essay "The Artist As Worker," out now in the summer 2010 "Work" issue of Oregon Humanities Magazine:

... In America it has always been the spiritual task of the artist to defend his art to a private self who wished it to be more notable or remunerative; today’s task increasingly means defending one’s art to a culture that expects it to be those things and more.

Whether you come to the desk as a writer in secondhand clothes or a CEO in clover, your prescribed oracle is now the same: the dollar. You have before you, like everybody else, the great playing field of the competitive marketplace. You must put your shoulder to the fray and reap a respectable yearly income—or, failing that, at least amass conspicuous honors, appointments, grants, awards—else admit that what you do is not really work. A hobby, maybe, this words-on-paper business. A spinsterish diversion that is quaint and slightly embarrassing in its Victorian echoes. Not work. Artists of late, enthusiastically subscribing to the “career track,” offer collusion with and reinforcement of the new pragmatism. As Eric Larsen notes in his fulminating treatise A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, “Inner and outer, public and private, artwork and ad, conscience and collaboration” have never been so interchangeable. What is your mission statement? What are your credentials? Art-making, we’re all led to understand, is not a way of life, a calling, a sacrificial act—we’ve grown up since the age of Rilke’s Europe, of mollycoddling “the imagination”; we’ve learned self-respect. Red-eyed, brain-sore, hunchbacked novelist, ask thy bank account whether you’re wasting your time; ask thy “reputation;” heed their replies. Doth they whisper: “Earn thy MFA!” “Get thee a teaching job!” “Network more!” Then jump to it or jump ship.

Says critic Lee Siegel in his book Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination, “The general anxiety now is that if you don’t have a gallery, a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind…. Instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work … toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine.” Siegel’s bright-eyed hankerer, to continue an admittedly hyperbolic tone, is a capitalist stand-in for the spirited artist of old—a kind of new literary forty-niner, brain ablaze with Fifth Avenue rumors of the latest Big Deal, the who’s who of agents, bestseller lists and film options, eager to demonstrate the skills of self-promotion, of being interesting—or even better, incendiary—in interviews. I find it hard to imagine the injunction of John Keats, one of literary history’s great unprivileged, having any relevance in such a racket: “The genius of Poetry [read: art] must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself—that which is creative must create itself.” ...

Behind the Flap

2010-09-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Last night while reading this first edition library copy of Nicholson Baker's U and I, I was delighted to find a tiny artifact peeking from behind the book's rear flap...
It was a fortune cookie strip: "All progress occurs because people dare to be different."

More of a proverb than a fortune, really, like the contents of most fortune cookies these days -- but how appropriate for Baker's book. And what an affecting reminder of the tangible, material, solitary, and yet simultaneously and mysteriously interpersonal joys that only books in tactile, material (non-digital) form can afford.

Prime Passage: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of Joseph Brodsky (1987)

2010-09-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

"Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. ... Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature."

E-Reading Device? Not For This Young Bibliophile

2010-09-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

Twenty-six-year-old Emma Silvers writes in Salon about refusing to give up regular old books in favor of pixels on a screen. This is an excellent contrarian perspective from a member of a generation we're trained to believe wants everything in electronic, virtual form.

"...For me, to deny books their physical structure simply ignores far too much of what makes them enjoyable. The commitment they require, the way they force you into a state of simultaneous calm and focus -- these are things I have yet to duplicate by any other means. Not to mention other factors that I'm terrified have been lost in the transition from paperback to screen: the mood it puts you in to carry a particular book in your bag all day, or the giddy/strange feeling of seeing your favorites on someone else's shelves...."

Prime Passage: The Vivisector by Patrick White (1970)

2010-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

About the artist-protagonist Hurtle Duffield:

"Suddenly he had begun to live the life for which he had been preparing, or for which he might even have been prepared. At the end of the years of watching, of blundering around inside an inept body, of thinking, or rather, endlessly changing coloured slides in the magic-lantern of the mind, the body had become an instrument, the crude, blurred slides were focusing into what might be called a vision. Most of the day he now spent steadily painting, mostly destroying, but sometimes amazed by a detail which mightn’t have been his, yet didn’t seem to be anybody else’s. There were one or two canvases he had dared keep, in which dreams and facts had locked in an architecture which did not appear alterable. When his fingers weren’t behaving as the instruments of his power, they returned to being the trembling reeds he had grown up with. If he had not been dependent on Nance Lightfoot for ‘any little luxuries’ he might have taken to drink or smoke, and trembled more violently than he did. His nightly journeys through the deserted store, through the smells of virgin drapery, floor-wax, ammonia, and his own sweat, exhausted and prepared him for the next ordeal. ¶ Because next morning remained an ordeal: he was so flabby, frightened that his only convincing self might not take over from him at the easel." (p.204)

25 Ways E-Readers Can't Beat the Old-Fashioned Book

2010-06-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

The iPad landed and techno-enthusiasts everywhere hurried, once again, to put on their coroner hats and issue preemptive reports on the death of the old-fashioned book. Now, it may be a different matter for those who crave, in books, the same button-punching dazzle offered by their gadgetry, but to this whisper-of-the-pages-loving reader all the declaiming of late seems a little, um, declamatory.

Before we cue Taps, let's step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don't want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? “Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010)*

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

ADDENDUM: “Whether, for the future humanist reader, the book in its present form will remain unchanged is in come ways an idle question. My guess (but it is no more than a guess) is that by and large it will not be transformed drastically because it has adapted so well to our requirements — though these, indeed, may change…

“The question I ask myself instead is this: In these new technological spaces, with these artifacts that will certainly coexist with (and in some cases supplant) the book, how will we succeed in still being able to invent, to remember, to learn, to record, to reject, to wonder, to exult, to subvert, to rejoice? By what means will we continue to be creative readers instead of passive viewers?…

“Just as a certain text is never expressed identically in different tongues, books and electronic memories, like electronic memories and the memories we hold in our mind, are different creatures and possess different natures, even when the text they carry is the same. …They are instruments of particular kinds, and their qualities serve diverse purposes in our attempt to know the world. Therefore any opposition that forces us to eliminate one of them is worse than false: it is useless.” --Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading (Yale University Press 2010)

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Underworld by Don DeLillo

2010-06-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

The graffiti artists of 1970s New York City...

"But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can't know the feelings a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the back streets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can't not see us anymore, you can't not know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we're getting fame, we ain't ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living in them even if you don't see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can't stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face--like I'm your movie, motherfucker." pg.441

Prime Passage: Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

2010-04-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

"I feel myself sucked down into the quicksand that isolation sometimes creates, a sense of drowning, of being literally engulfed. When it comes to the important things one is always alone, and it may be that the virtue or possible insight I get from being so obviously alone--being physically and in every way absolutely alone much of the time--is a way into the universal state of man. The way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the great psychic journey of everyman. At what price would total independence be bought? That's the rub! I am conscious of the fruitful tension set up between me and anyone for whom I care. ... I learn by being in relation to. ... Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing ... enduring ... waiting. ...

I have said elsewhere that we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can--if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough--be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind. We go up to Heaven and down to Hell at least a dozen times a day--at least, I do. And the discipline of work provides an exercise bar, so that the wild, irrational motions of the soul become formal and creative. It literally keeps one from falling on one's face. That is one way to keep alive in self-made solitary confinement." pg. 107

Prime Passage: The Uneasy Chair - A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974)

2010-03-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

"Much of the light, as well as some of the incidental heat, came from his maverick unwillingness to run with the herd -- any herd -- or to accept the standard varieties of intellectual fashion that his times offered him. 'There are no new ways to be new,' his father and adversary Robert Frost used to remark. As with so many of Frost's wisdoms, that was something DeVoto knew without being told. He had chosen not to be new but to be himself, not to be in but to be at liberty, with consequences to his reputation, both during his life and since, that have been more damaging than otherwise. The man who walks by himself has no gang or coterie, and in the profession of words it is coteries that more often than not determine reputations, at least in the short run." (p.364)

Prime Passage: Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly

2010-02-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

"If poetry -- Keats is saying -- is finally about the flesh vanishing, disappearing, turning cold -- the absorbing night, the setting sun, the broken stone -- it is also, in its afterlife, about the word as spirit, aspirant on the air, invisible, articulate, available. Keats's letters are the mind and heart out of which the poems -- the least as well as the best -- are realized. Lyric poetry, after Wordsworth and Coleridge, becomes a crucial drama of the serious, even conflicted, self. After Keats, form itself -- self-generative, self-reflective -- becomes integral to the acting out of that drama. The letters are replete with how form -- the poem as artifice -- is inseparable from the struggle for meaning." (page 347)

Buy Posthumous Keats here.

Prime Passage: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing (1903)

2010-02-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

From late in the section entitled "Autumn":

"Is there, at this moment, any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but without means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain and steadfast courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret, and writes for dear life? There must be, I suppose; yet all I have read and heard of late years about young writers, shows them in a very different aspect. No garretteers, these novelists and journalists awaiting their promotion. They eat -- and entertain their critics -- at fashionable restaurants; they are seen in expensive seats at the theatre; they inhabit handsome flats -- photographed for an illustrated paper on the first excuse. At the worst, they belong to a reputable club, and have garments which permit them to attend a garden party or an evening 'at home' without attracting unpleasant notice. Many biographical sketches have I read, during the last decade, making personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book was -- as the sweet language of the day will have it -- 'blooming'; but never one in which there was a hint of stern struggle, or of the pinched stomach and frozen fingers. I surmise that the path of 'literature' is being made too easy. Doubtless it is a rare thing nowadays for a lad whose education ranks him with the upper middle class to find himself utterly without resources, should he wish to devote himself to the profession of letters. And there is the root of the matter; writing has come to be recognized as a profession, almost as cut-and-dried as church or law; a lad may go into it with full parental approval, with ready avuncular support. I heard not long ago of an eminent lawyer who had paid a couple hundred per annum for his son's instruction in the art of fiction -- yea, the art of fiction -- by a not very brilliant professor of that art. Really, when one comes to think of it, an astonishing fact, a fact vastly significant. Starvation, it is true, does not necessarily produce fine literature; but one feels uneasy about these carpet-authors. To the two or three who have a measure of conscience and vision, I could wish, as the best thing, some calamity which would leave them friendless in the streets. They would perish, perhaps. But set that possibility against the all but certainty of their present prospect -- the fatty degeneration of the soul; and is it not acceptable? I thought of this as I stood yesterday watching a noble sunset, which brought back to my memory the sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years ago; more glorious, it seems to me, than any I have since beheld. It happened that, on one such evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that, before morning, I should be hungrier still. I loitered upon Battersea Bridge -- the old picturesque wooden bridge -- and there the western sky took hold upon me. Half an hour later I was speeding home. I sat down and wrote a description of what I had seen, and straightaway sent it to an evening newspaper, which, to my astonishment, published the thing next day -- 'On Battersea Bridge.' How proud I was of that little bit of writing! I should not much like to see it again, for I thought it then so good that I am sure it would give me an unpleasant sensation now. Still, I wrote it because I enjoyed doing so, quite as much as because I was hungry; and the couple of guineas it brought me had as pleasant a ring as any money I ever earned."

Why It's Desirable to Be Eccentric

2010-01-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

Back in 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history’s most cogent apologias on the subject “Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being.”

To Mill’s view, mass opinion (what we might call “mass culture” these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural and democratic.

While explicitly political, Mill’s argument reaches down to the foundations of human nature and culture, articulating many of the challenges we face in a new, media-driven society fixated upon dollars earned, hits per day, and “going viral.”

As explained by the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature:

On Liberty is not a traditional liberal attack against tyrannical kings or dictators; it is an attack against tyrannical majorities. Mill foresaw that in democracies such as the United States, the pressure toward conformity might crush all individualists (intellectual individualists in particular) to the level of what he called a “collective mediocrity."

Herewith, a sampling from On Liberty, Chapter Three. Mill, of course, is writing about Victorian England, but at his full-throated best he gives us many a parallel to the mass culture America of today:

No one’s idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another.

…To conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in [a person] any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. …

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. …

I like how Mill acknowledges here, in the packed space of a small paragraph, the almost unthinkable difficulty of nonconformity: you’ve gotta be observant, he says, and reasonable, and judicious, and active, and discriminating, and decisive, and firm, and self-controlled, and deliberate. As personal characteristics go, that’s one tall order. And even then the pressure of the times, preferring mass appeal, is going to oppose you at every step.

But, says Mill, the force of one’s inherent character is not to be suppressed, for…

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. …

The danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences. … In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual and the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?

Such lines of thought became known in modern times as “keeping up with the Joneses.” (Anybody use that idiom anymore?)

As for Mill’s point about one’s tendency to censor oneself, I’m reminded of Ray Bradbury’s famously portentous quip: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Mill continues:

I do not mean that [individuals] choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds. …

In light of Mill’s make-no-bones perspective, we might challenge ourselves by asking: What are bestseller lists, blockbuster movies, Billboard charts, Oprah endorsements, primetime hits, etc., but symptoms (however benign and excusable) of what Mill calls “the mind bowed to the yoke”? — that is, things we like because, first of all, other people have liked them.

Commerce obtrudes upon culture, and all is fine and well to a degree—until, in Mill’s terms, the commercial majority tramples down individual taste.

They exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? …

Many persons, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed are as their Maker designed them to be; just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them. But if it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capacities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment. …

It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them. …

Let’s pause to revisit those two incredible sentences. Each an ode to the value and benefits of idiosyncrasy, each is certainly worth inscribing in memory:

1) “As the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating.”

2) “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.”

To give any fair play to the nature of [the units and the mass in a culture], it is essential that different persons should be allowed to lead different lives. In proportion as this latitude has been exercised in any age, has that age been noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. …

Can mass culture, then, equate to a form of despotism? We rarely think of the matter in these terms, but Mill, a century and a half before us, was unafraid to do so. And maybe his notion holds today—particularly if we consider the lack of material encouragement and assistance our culture offers the arts and humanities.

As John Gardner once put it, “In America, though federal, state, and local governments make feeble gestures of support (the whole National Endowment for the Arts comes to, I think, the cost of one frigate), it seems clear that nobody quite knows what to do with artists.”

Mill again:

There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

But today, to take artists for an example, we may repeatedly notice the effects of Mill’s “tyrannical majority” where “unpopular,” as we use the term, often means more precisely “uncommercial.” A book is judged uncommerical by the publisher’s sales force, or a movie judged uncommercial (“low-concept” as they say) by its production company: These works thereby become predestined to unpopularity.

In a better, more truly pluralistic culture of individuality, a culture in which “peculiarity of taste and eccentricity of conduct” were alive in audience, artist, and marketer alike, being at odds with commerce would not expressly doom a work to unpopularity.

Now Mill gives us three paragraphs meriting invocation in any coherent argument for improved arts funding:

Persons of genius are, ex vi termini [“by force of the term”], more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small molds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character. If from timidity they consent to be forced into one of these molds, and to let all that part of themselves which cannot expand under the pressure remain unexpanded, society will be little the better for their genius. If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as ‘wild,’ ‘erratic,’ and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.

I insist thus emphatically on the importance of genius, and the necessity of allowing it to unfold itself freely both in thought and in practice, being well aware that no one will deny the position in theory, but knowing also that almost everyone, in reality, is totally indifferent to it. …

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. The first service which originality has to render them is that of opening their eyes: which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original. …

And now we’re brought home to an answer as to why eccentricity is in fact desirable and commendable, no matter how little cash it may earn you:

The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honor and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.

…When the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass. … Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportioned to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

… It was men of another stamp than this that made England [read: America] what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline. …

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (1853)

2010-01-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

From Volume 2 of Ruskin's great work.

"[...] No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the ends of art. This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that, he will always give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also. I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this necessity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo; the end of his vain effort being merely that he would take ten years to a picture and leave it unfinished. And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work, none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way. [...] The foxglove blossom, - a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, - is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change, and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. [...] Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect. [...] Our building must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine, and cannot rest in the condition we have attained. If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. [...] It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. [...] The work of the Gothic heart is fretwork still."

Prime Passage: How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

2009-12-10T11:45:00.001-08:00

From the essay, "My Father's Brain" (2001)...

"The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism -- our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution -- isn't intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube."

How to Be Alone for sale here.

Prime Passage: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985)

2009-08-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

A quarter-century after its publication, Postman’s classic litany of questions remains salutary as we confront an age of Social Media and the e-book.

“What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom, and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts, and forms of information require? … How do different forms of information persuade? … How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed? …

“To ask is to break the spell. To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political, and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology — that the principle difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data — will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection of speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

Prime Passage: George Washington's Farewell Address (1796)

2009-08-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that Washington's words are well worth weighing amid the current party-line fracas concerning Health Care reform.

“There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume …

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened …

It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?”

Read the whole address here.

Prime Passage: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

2009-07-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

(From a journal entry by the young Billy Prior, just before going into a hopeless battle in 1918 France ... )

"I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them'll take your hand off."

Prime Passage: Libra by Don DeLillo

2009-06-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

(Here "He" = Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history."

Prime Passage: Art as Experience by John Dewey

2009-05-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

"Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.

To grasp the sources of aesthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense and sense into motion -- constituting that animal grace so hard for man to rival. What the live creature retains from the past and what it expects from the future operate as directions in the present. The dog is never pedantic nor academic; for these things arise only when the past is severed in consciousness from the present and is set up as a model to copy or a storehouse upon which to draw. The past absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward."
(From Chapter Two, "The Live Creature," Art as Experience by John Dewey, 1934.)

Open Letter to The New York Times

2009-05-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

My letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review appears in this Sunday's edition (May 3, 2009). They've elided my text in places (most tellingly in the opening achtung), tweaked it in others. Still, I think they're dignified to print it at all.

Here's the letter (with links added). Text omitted by the Gray Lady is restored in brackets. Bold text signifies Gray Lady additions or changes.

[ Earth to New York: ]
Michael Meyer’s essay [piece] “About That [Book] Advance…” (Sunday, April 12, 2009) discusses fiction publishing in terms that hardly ever apply in reality, or terms more relevant to the publishing of non-fiction. While advance payment is the rule for memoirs or informational books, only the minutest fraction of published fiction writers command up-front cash for work still unfinished.

The wildly lucky Audrey Niffenegger and her ilk notwithstanding, most fiction writers—even those with one or more novels to their credit—must labor, often for years, sans payment. What’s more, in our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among them labor sans all guarantees of eventual publication or income; one could argue—and demonstrate persuasively—that the greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism and status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. Laboring slowly, unhonored and unpaid and bound toward an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as New York parlance would have it, these writers have destiny for incentive—and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, they sing, and reap rewards that more than mitigate the annoyances of obscurity. Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed, and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy denounced [decried ] by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

[In the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Proust—and more recently Cormac McCarthy and the late Andre Dubus—our unsung have their forebears. It shall be said we did not know them at first. Meanwhile, they worked. ]

Rather than discuss contemporary literature or even contemporary publishing, Mr. Meyer’s article does little more than survey the New York Cult of Success. The art of language and story lives elsewhere, sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.

M. Allen Cunningham

Portland, OR

Prime Passage: Rabbit, Run by John Updike

2009-04-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

"He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly, he loves the ones dressed for church: the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest walk in Rabbit's eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief. He could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, God, Rebecca, thank you, bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. People who know God rustle and stir about him, upholding him in the dark."

Prime Passage: At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag

2009-04-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

From the book's title piece, "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning," the Nadine Gordimer Lecture delivered by Sontag in South Africa in 2004:

"... And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature."

My Kid Could Paint That

2009-03-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

-- Creativity and commerce collide in the form of a four-year-old genius --

"The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality, everything which is made, is made to satisfy a demand artificially stimulated by sales propaganda."

The English poet Stephen Spender wrote these words in 1949 following a visit to the United States. By "spiritual goods" Spender was referring to works of art. It was true more than half a century ago, and it's true today: works of art and sales figures, creativity and commerce, rarely jibe (unconventional entrepreneurship excepted)

We all know American culture is consumer driven. By and large, Americans live in, by, and for the marketplace. And in today's age of global business, the effect of the marketplace is a great leveling out of culture, a homogenizing of experience. The marketplace likes broad appeal, it likes high sales figures, it likes a mass audience. It does not thrive on slow contemplation, individuality, eccentricity, or introspection. All of these things, which are at the core of real art -- both creating it and experiencing it -- are in fact a threat to the happy clatter of the cash drawer.

Thus, strange things happen when that which is spiritual, personal, and irrational meets that which is profane, collective, and statistical -- in other words, when art meets commerce.

This phenomenon is explored beautifully in the transfixing 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev. The film focuses on Marla, a four-year-old girl who loves to paint. Marla lives in upstate New York with her parents and her little brother, and her life is much like that of any other healthy, delightful four-year-old who loves to paint -- except for one thing: Marla's colorful creations have made her famous.

Where most child artists stick to butcher paper and fingerpaints, Marla creates large vibrant canvases using fancy acrylics, brushes, and a variety of application techniques ranging from smears to splatters to complex overlays of colors. Marla has exhibited her work in exclusive shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Her works have sold for upwards of $20,000.

"The paintings are incredible," says gallery owner Anthony Brunelli in the film. Brunelli was the first to curate Marla's paintings in a solo exhibition. That show, highlighted by the New York Times, sparked widespread interest in the petite genius's work. Soon TV networks began calling. Marla became a media darling. "Even if a four-year-old didn't do [the paintings]," says Brunelli, "you'd like ‘em. The fact that she is four makes it really incredible."

The kid's canvases are gorgeous, to be sure (see the online gallery at MarlaOlmstead.com), and there is something indescribably moving at the thought of such beauty flowing so easily and unselfconsciously through the brush of a girl yet to lose her baby teeth.

"When I am in Marla's presence," says Brunelli on Marla's website, "there's a weird feeling ‘cause I know there's something inside this girl that many artists look for their whole lives and never have."

Marla's paintings vibrate with the mystery of childish wonder, of magical freeness and unhampered creativity, and this mystery is the lyrical heart of My Kid Could Paint That. The film makes us linger on questions like:

-- Where does such purity and ease disappear to later in life?

-- At what point do we surrender the productive freedom and harmonious accidents of play for result-driven work -- and why can't we retrieve what we've surrendered?

At one point in the documentary, New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman comments:

There's a spiritual element to it which appeals to people ... People could read all sorts of things into her pictures. That there was some force at work, something larger than even Marla. That this child is speaking almost as a medium. And her innocence also says something about the ultimate cynicism of the art world.... [where] probably the worst thing you could say about an artist is, ‘Everything this artist does is joyous and wonderful and openhearted and just simple and great.' ... Some of the appeal ... of the Marlas of the world is that it seems pure innocent joy, no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm, none of that kind of stuff that goes along with modern art. Nobody's saying ‘f---- you' in this picture. They're just saying, ‘I'm a happy girl who loves painting.'

With increasing media attention came a fervor for Marla canvases in the art market. Her prices soared. As of February 2005, after less than a year in the limelight, wee Marla's work had earned her more than $300,000. But that same month brought a blow that sent the family of this miniature master reeling.

Though Marla herself was the embodiment of innocence and spirit, her bright canvases -- those reverberant spiritual documents -- had nevertheless become commodities. And the commodification of a thing, given the unavoidable cynicism that attaches to money, is necessarily a cynical process. So with widespread commercial attention came a qualitative shift in the public's fascination. The clamor surrounding Marla went from adoring to suspicious when TV journalist Charlie Rose hosted a 60 Minutes segment examining the Marla craze.

He interviewed Marla's first curator, Anthony Brunelli:

-Charlie: So what do we have here?

-Brunelli: You have a genius.

-Charlie: Genius?

-Brunelli: Yes.

-Charlie: (leaning forward, bearing down) Is there any other explanation?

Rose also interviewed a child psychologist, an expert in gifted children who'd observed Marla painting. The pyschologist's remarks were a mother lode to a primetime program lusting for an exposé:

I don't see Marla as having made, or at least completed, the more polished-looking paintings, because they look like a different painter.

The art world was unnerved. Major media hungrily took up the possible scandal. Was the kid a fake? Were her parents pulling the wool over the eyes of art aficionados? Was this four-year-old girl no more than a public stand-in for her dad, a brush-wielding trickster?

If it was all a fraud, the stakes had become very high. Large sums of money had changed hands, after all. People got nasty and Marla's parents were harangued with hate mail.

Personally, I believe the girl's for real (what kind of four-year-old could pretend to be a painter without, at some point, spilling the beans?). But whatever the truth, a peculiar thing had occurred. While in the wake of the 60 Minutes bomb people still appeared to be talking about Marla and her work, the engine of the conversation was no longer art and beauty, it was money. The market had intervened in Marla's creations, and people had begun to buy -- not Marla's paintings themselves, so much as the story of Marla's paintings. And as buyers began to suspect that they weren't getting the story they'd paid for, trouble ensued.

Recall Stephen Spender's words: "Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality." Was the art still beautiful? Of course. But money had muddled that truth. The "value" of the paintings had become an exclusively monetary matter. Aesthetics were suddenly irrelevant.

The story of Marla's quasi-scandal epitomizes the clash of commerce and creativity, two often uncomplimentary forces. For anybody seeking the fulfillment and spiritual enrichment that comes of art or creative work, the crucial trick is to remember the natural opposition of spirit and commodity -- and perhaps to rebel quietly against the American mindset author Morris Berman calls "the reduction of values to commodity fetishism," a mindset so money-warped that it can fail to behold the still evident beauty of a painting regardless of its authorship.

Toward the close of My Kid Could Paint That, journalist Elizabeth Cohen observes:

The whole story, really, is about grownups. It's really not about this kid. She's just a little girl painting in her house.

Marla's art did not begin from the base concerns of the dollar. No child's art does. We start from joy, exuberance, inquisitiveness, and serious play. And to the extent that we maintain and cultivate these attributes as creative adults, the more life our creations will possess -- and the more readily we will recognize beauty and be inspired by it.

The dollar is a different matter altogether.

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter.)

Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?

2009-03-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

– And by the way, are you getting the Expressive Life you’re entitled to? –

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal cultural initiatives and endowments, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. --Denis Donaghue

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

2009-03-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

“Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it is inspired by values that we uphold because we are terrified and preternaturally obedient; because we have been anesthetized into believing that they are natural, perhaps even God-given; because those around us are in thrall to them; or because we have grown too imaginatively timid to conceive of alternatives.

“Philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognized by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honorable, these five entities have endeavored to remold our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.

“In doing so, they have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or unwilling to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorized under something other than the brutal epithet of ‘loser’ or ‘nobody.’ They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way—and more than just the judge’s and the pharmacist’s way—of succeeding at life.”

Prime Passage: Arts Inc. : How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights by Bill Ivey

2009-03-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

"Artists feed an important part of our expressive life, the world of ideas, sounds, and images that greet us every day. These individuals dedicate themselves to employing their talents, bringing insight and invention to life. Artistic vision makes a special contribution to the quality of our society. If citizens have a right to a broad engagement with artists across the spectrum of public life, what elements must be in place for artists to flourish in American society? I believe three things must be present. First, conditions must be conducive to originality; artists need to be able to find a way to enter and function in our complex arts system. Second, they need respect for their ideas and their approach to problem solving, and respect in the form of sufficient compensation to maintain a creative life. Third, artists, must be free to draw on—to synthesize—the work of contemporaries as well as creativity from the past. Respect is critical in securing the benefits of a vibrant arts community. If society sees artists as irresponsible eccentrics, if the arts system is shaped by big companies that value only the big-hit superstar, and if a writer, composer, filmmaker, or even classroom art teacher must pony up a stiff fee every time he or she needs to reference the work of others, then we are a long distance from fulfilling the right of every citizen to the imagination and understanding of the most talented among us."

Buy Arts, Inc here.

Prime Passage: Minghella on Minghella

2009-02-08T22:21:00.001-08:00

The late great screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella in conversation on the topic of generating a screenplay:

"I play the piano a lot when I'm writing. I listen to music a lot. But just as you have to make peace with your voice, you have to make peace with your process as well. When I look at the madness of the way I write, it would be very easy to get enormously irritated. Even if I did one page a day, that's only 115 to 120 days of work. So, why does it take me a year and a half? What is going on with me? But I realize that the time spent reading the Book of Job for a day is not specious. It's because that's where my own particular journey requires me to be. Or when I'm spending two days examining the Smithsonian collection of early American folk music, it's not just indulgence. I know there's going to be a clue there somewhere that's going to feed the film. When I was writing The English Patient I walked into a record store because I wanted to listen to Hungarian music, and found a disc by a band called Musikaz. I put the disc on and the second or third track I listened to was called 'Szerelem, Szerelem' and that became the voice of the film for me. And I listened to that music repeatedly throughout. But I have to give myself permission to do that. There have been times when I haven't and I got very exasperated with myself and with everybody, and I didn't work well."

Prime Passage: The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner

2009-02-04T16:23:00.000-08:00

From a letter written June 4, 1979:

"As for the book business, God knows. The Dalton Book kind of merchandizing demeans books and reduces them to merchandise like aluminum siding. But there are occasional bookstores -- there are three in this area, thank God -- that still like books, hire clerks who read and love books, and make every effort to get a customer the book he wants whether the merchandiser's computer says it's popular or not. So maybe there's hope. Tell me the struggle naught availeth, and I'll ask you what alternative to struggle you can think of. The big hard one to get around is why, in literature as in economics those that have, get, and those that have not get not. I could devise a fairer and more equitable system, but nobody has yet called me to the throne and given me the commission."

The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, edited by Page Stegner, Shoemaker & Hoard 2007

Prime Passage: The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

2009-01-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

"Breckenridge Lansing brought up his son according to a method widely advocated at the time. Its purpose was to "make a man" of him. It consisted of ridiculing the child in public and private on every occasion of his falling short in manly exercise. At five he was thrown into the water and commanded to swim. At six he was invited to play catch with his father ("The best father in the world," but all fathers are wonderful) on the lawn behind the house. Coordination of hand and eye is not fully developed at six and is further troubled by the boy's passionate and despairing attempts to be adequate. The genial games ended in tears. At seven he was given a pony; when he had fallen off it for the third time his father sold it. At nine he was introduced to the rifle. At each new trial he was overwhelmed with sneers and his failures were recounted to neighbors and postmen and delivery boys. Eustacia [the boy's mother] attempted to intervene only to be covered with similar sarcasms. Little Anne endeared herself to her father by shrieking "Sissy! Sissy!" Woeful scenes took place. Felicite paled but did not speak. When George was elected vice-captain of his school's baseball team -- only vice-captain; Roger Ashley was everywhere captain -- his father refused to speak to him for three days. Nature came to George's aid too late. At sixteen he was as tall as his father and far stronger. He was given to murderous rages. The day came when he advanced on his tormentor, holding a chair which he slowly broke in mid-air. From that hour his father loudly washed his hands of him. George was the product of his mother's mollycoddling. He would never be a Lansing."
(page 328)

Prime Passage: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

2008-12-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

Hans Castorp, the twenty-something protagonist of The Magic Mountain, descends to a subterranean examination room where he has his first x-ray taken. (Translation by John E. Woods, Everyman’s Library 2005)

“Once again the director peered through the milky pane, but this time into Hans Castorp’s interior. … In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness – and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear – penetrating, clairvoyant eyes – he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music – a rather full, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.

The director said, ‘Spooky, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no mistaking that whiff of spookiness.’ ”

Prime Passage: Resistance by Barry Lopez

2008-11-16T23:12:00.001-08:00

... Now we believe that without love our homeland -- perhaps all countries -- will perish. Over the years, as we have learned what it might mean to love, we have generally agreed that we've better understood the risks. In our nation, it is acceptable to resent love as an interference with personal liberty, as a ruse the emotions employ before the battlements of reason. It is the abused in our country who now most weirdly profess love. For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.

We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth's people adhere to with greatest faith -- the dances that topple fearful walls; ethereal performances of light, color, and music; the enduring musics themselves -- are well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms, from the eras of Lascaux and Shanidar to the days of the Prado and Butoh, these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition because, just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean. To achieve progress, we've all but cut our heads off.

Optimism

2008-11-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

"Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning he had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen. … And yet I was aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
– James Baldwin, "Sonny’s Blues"

Last week’s election was an event of such exultant transformation for Americans everywhere (and even non-Americans in countries all over the globe) that I, like most who witnessed it, experienced a rare emotional mingling of passion with politics.

Here in Portland, on the moment the election was called, a crowd of strangers downtown erupted into a spontaneous chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the looks of it, most of these celebrants were too young, as am I, to have ever witnessed such a grand and exuberant historical moment, or to have been inspired to such emotive patriotism by a political event. Like me, most were too young to have lived through the blood-bright tangle of tragedy and social progress that was the 1960s.

I was born during the Carter administration and came of voting age just in time to cast my ballot in the Clinton/Dole contest of 1996, whose outcome sustained an era of blasé prosperity and kept the partisanship pendulum swinging for years. They seemed, those years, to be all politics, little more. Aside from silly extramarital scandals besetting the White House, it was a period almost ahistorical in its uneventfulness. Bombs fell in Kosovo, and important things happened in Ireland, but those were overseas events, and did not substantially reverberate in our national character. Here at home we hummed along — or maybe droned.

So during my lifetime I’d never had the pleasure to witness how the national political stage can, on rare occasion, furnish a scene of monumental drama and beauty. I had never — I might as well admit — experienced that glorious swelling in the breast which some of my elders proudly referred to as “American optimism.” Quite the opposite, sadly, for the true defining national events of my lifetime were all squeezed into a single fatal day early one September. The world-splitting consequences of that day — ideological wars within wars at home and abroad — only degraded my faith in the course my country was taking.

But now, after years of allowing the box-cutters of the 9/11 terrorists to scar our hearts with divisive fear, after years of accelerating our aggressions abroad instead of nurturing optimism and coming together in spirit at home, we Americans have finally embraced renewal. And I have learned, for the first time in my life, what the old proverbial American optimism feels like. At last, I understand it to be profoundly alive. Cynical politicking, lobbyists, or a disaffected citizenry cannot squelch it; despite such corrupting influences, optimism is implicit always in the self-correcting genius of our democracy. While it may lie dormant in certain periods, still, even after the gloomiest epochs, this fundamental spirit can be revived. It awakens through the people whenever the people give sway to their higher instincts. And how refreshing, now, to think that our new president may strive to govern much the way he campaigned — by inspiring the people to rise to the beckons of their better selves.

Here’s part of what he said in his speech in Grant Park on election night (the whole remarkable speech merits close reading):

Let us summon a new spirit — of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look not only after ourselves but each other. … In this country we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our politics for so long. … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, ‘We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.’

To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too. And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled behind radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular but our destinies are shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
To those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security, we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright, tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected.

We all know Obama ran a masterful campaign. But perhaps “Hope,” “Dreams,” and “Change,” despite being politically serviceable, despite their repeated, calculated deployment from the campaign stump, really are more than mere buzzwords. Perhaps they are genuine emblems of a spirit that America was once celebrated for — and which it may yet personify.

On NPR’s Fresh Air on November 5th, journalist Bill Moyers reflected on the events of the previous night:

Joseph Campbell, the popular scholar of mythology once said to me, ‘Moyers, if you want to change the world, you change the metaphor.’ And yesterday America changed the metaphor. It was a symbolic moment for a country whose whole history has been pinioned by race. I just felt a great stone lifting from our neck. … Now, yesterday did not end issues of race in this country. … The realities are going to be with us, but …symbolically, metaphorically, and politically, I think race is not going to have us by the throat the way it has for so long now.

I was struck, too, by these eloquent words in an Oregonian editorial on November 5th:

Every president takes office promising to make the United States a different country than it was. Few succeed, and Obama’s White House plans, like those of any other president, deserve to be viewed through the prism of improbability. But through this historic campaign, and his impressive, once implausible triumph, Obama has already done something that few presidents manage during their entire term in office. He has shown us that we are closer to becoming the country that we hope to be.

On the night of Tuesday, November 4th 2008, I learned first-hand how an external, seemingly remote political event can become internal, emotionally relevant, and even intimate to the masses. As Anna Quindlen observes at the back of Newsweek’s special Elections Issue, Obama has, if only for a moment at the start of his presidency, “made the political spiritual.”

For me, that’s the astonishing essence of this turning point in the history of our nation: The collective soul of a people truly can be transformed. I don’t mean to say it happened all at once last Tuesday. It’s only beginning, and it may take generations. But it’s possible. Call that American Optimism.

(P.S. Take a moment to check out the President-elect’s new web-page soliciting your vision for America.)

Scenes From the Author's Head (Illuminating His Novel-in-Progress)

2008-11-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

Prime Passage: This Morning, This Evening, So Soon by James Baldwin

2008-10-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

"The Americans on the boat did not seem to be so bad, but I was fascinated, after such a long absence from it, by the nature of their friendliness. It was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any possibility of friendship. Unlike Europeans, they dropped titles and used first names almost at once, leaving themselves, unlike the Europeans, with nowhere thereafter to go. Once one had become "Pete" or "Jane" or "Bill" all that could decently be known was known and any suggestion that there might be further depths, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation of that privacy which did not, paradxoically, since they trusted it so little, seem to exist among Americans. They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which they related only to the analyst, and then read about in the pages of best sellers. There was an eerie and unnerving irreality about everything they said and did, as though they were all members of the same team and were acting on orders from some invincibly cheerful and tirelessly inventive coach. I was fascinated by it. I found it oddly moving, but I cannot say that I was displeased. It had not occurred to me before that Americans, who had never treated me with any respect, had no respect for each other."
(Going to Meet the Man, Stories by James Baldwin; 1965)

Prime Passage: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination

2008-09-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

From the introduction to Falling Upwards (2006) by cultural critic Lee Siegel:

"... The arts are losing their capacity to create an original experience, though no one has been able to say why. It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media, or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts...

"It's often the artists themselves -- novelists, painters, filmmakers, television writers -- who seem to believe that art is exploitable for nonartistic purposes. They seem to have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end. Making art now often serves as a means to advancement. ...

"Art has become more, as the people in the personnel department like to say, 'goal-oriented.' ...

"This has a terrible effect on art-making. The general anxiety now is that if you don't have a gallery, or a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind. ...

"Learning to make art takes time. But instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work along extra-artistic shortcuts, toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine."

Prime Passage: Blue Highways

2008-08-26T15:04:00.001-07:00

From William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways, a description of the land and sky outside Pioche, Nevada:

Calm lay over the uncluttered openness, and a damp wind blew everything clean. I saw no one. I let my speed build to sixty, cut the ignition, shifted to neutral. Although Ghost Dancing [the author's car] had the aerodynamics of an orange crate, it coasted for more than a mile across the flats. When it came to a standstill, I put it back in gear and left it at roadside. There was no one. Listening, I walked into the scrub. The desert does its best talking at night, but on that spring evening it kept God's whopping silence; and that too is a desert voice.

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both. Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements. But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold. Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth. Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy.

Perils of the Internet

2008-08-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

"After several generations of ‘technological improvement’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”—Wendell Berry

The Internet is widely celebrated as a democratic, informational, and connective blessing. But what if it also exacerbates the “American malady” that the poet Stephen Spender bemoaned back in 1949?—“The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.”

What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?

Ridiculous! you say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!

Well, I do see the self-destructive irony of using the Internet to blog about the potential damage the Internet is wreaking on our spiritual lives. But here goes anyway.

I’ve recently sunk my teeth into three books that deeply and compellingly question the real nature of online culture, and the price we may be paying in our eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading the words on this screen).

1. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Published earlier this year, Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books I’m discussing today—but Against the Machine also advances a number of salient points. The most arresting, and hard to dispute, is Siegel’s assertion that culture on the Internet—that is, the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to browsers through Google rankings, etc—is often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.

Though the Internet promises freer access to information or culture than older mass-culture media, Siegel contends that it does so by using the same mass-culture formula used by network TV: Popularity = Value. And a trawl through mainstream primetime offerings will immediately show the cultural folly of such a formulation.

Siegel is not alone in complaining that the Internet as we know it actually lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public. It’s a concern being echoed in numerous places these days.

The effect on American youths of prolonged Internet use is a point of special worry. Recently the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”

Similarly, the cover of the current July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bears the bold words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? Affixed to the article is the telling subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr begins the piece with a confession:

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article—the second in this three-book profile...

2. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became a societal norm, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic—and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences of our rush to move our existences online—the many dangers the Internet posed to the spirit, and correspondingly to the rich stuff of the spirit, such as art:

"Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus—speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli—in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …

While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data—they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …

Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …

What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.

Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness. And though it was not yet so at the time Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, the Internet has since become a realm of rampant commercialization too. It therefore stands opposed to the real culture, creations, and relationships which give meaning to our lives.

In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. The old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing—if not abandoning—these rich, subjective experiences in favor of constant connectivity and the light-speed acquisition of data. In other words, we’re trading inward cultivation for the collection of lifeless information.

“We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …

To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …

We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …

We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence."

The Gutenberg Elegies and Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, has been much too rarely transmitted till now. It is this:

As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ as we become increasingly enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality—our very identity—comes under threat, for the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought are deeply conditioned by varied experience—there is no changing that. Of course, information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals—and these are accessible through a computer terminal—but they alone cannot sustain individuality. Contrary to popular belief, the democratization of information cannot itself liberate people. And what power it possesses to do so may well be countered, even dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time.’

This brings me to the third book in this discussion.

3. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit…masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.

His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently takes up the soul-damaging aspects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Siegel and Birkerts.

"Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and…to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this—as in the early Middle Ages—we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one."

Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monastic Individual,” a kind of person who quietly ‘checks out’ of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming ‘twilight’ in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.

"[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit."

Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.

(Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value; Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.

The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be cautious toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish your subjectivity; Spend more time with the printed page.

The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”)

This post also appears at Soul Shelter.