We Shouldn't Should Teach Creative Writing

When I saw Louis Menand's "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught" in this week's New Yorker, I cringed, sighed, and devoured the article right at the kitchen table. As one of the many MFAs and teachers of Creative Writing, I am intimately and darkly interested in this topic. Turns out, Menand's piece is more of a review of Mark McGurl's new book called The Program Era, in which McGurl focuses on fiction writing programs in relation to the Marshall Plan and Post WWII Literature. The article wanders through some sound investigations and is full of surprising statistics.

Oddly enough, Menand has nothing to say about poetry programs except, "I don't think (undergraduate) workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that others make." He recalls his days at college where " all we were required to do was to talk about each other's poems," and that it "seemed like a great place to be."

My experience at NYU did indeed help inspire a type of care for "made" pieces, and graduate school was a great place to be. But studying in a Creative Writing Program did a lot more than simply inspire in me a compassion for other writers. To think that MFA programs are as Menand writes, "Designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a published poem," is convenient for his argument, but not entirely accurate. (But not one Creative Writing Program student was interviewed for the article -- also convenient.)

Many of my MFA colleagues came to the program having already published poems and essays in widely circulated journals and magazines. Many programs require their students to take at least two Theory or Critical courses for the degree. Some programs have a language requirement; some have a study abroad requirement. But all programs (that are worth their salt) will certainly compel a student to do more than only "require" students to talk about other students' poem. Many of my teachers: Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine would bring in poems as models for the class, and would conduct mini lectures on that poem's strengths, allusions, or patterns. We were apprentices more than we were a gaggle of "twelve-on-one group therapy" goers.

With the increase in MFA programs and graduates, as is the law of supply and demand, the cache of the degree has worn off. Yes, but questioning whether or not Creative Writing should be taught, or if it should exist in the realm of the Academy, seems like a hackneyed old pitch. (Didn't Dana Goia go there already?)

The volte for me though, is that Menard's article contains within its title the word "should." Would the New Yorker publish, "Sight and Vision: Should Painting be Taught?" or "Stories upon Stories: Should Architecture be Taught?" or even "Eat Your Cake too: Should the Culinary Arts be taught?" I don't think so. How and why is writing held to a different standard? Is it that ultimately we don't as a nation really consider writing to be an art form? That we can't understand that painting, buildings, and poems can all narrate humanity-just through different media?

Marcia Bartusiak and the day we disappeared

Broadly speaking, the history of astronomy reads something like the story about how we humans have discovered our insignificance in the cosmos. In the last two thousand years, major discoveries about the solar system, our galaxy and the universe have shuffled the likelihood of our existence deeper and deeper into the realm of improbable chance and fortuitous coincidence. In the big picture, we're barely a pixel. I suppose it's only unsettling if you start out assuming that human beings are, quite literally, the center of the universe. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle stepped up and said the Earth sits at the center of an unchanging, infinite universe; our planet is surrounded by celestial spheres most easily observed by the movements of the Sun and planets. People believed Aristotle and moved on with their lives. In the 16th century, Copernicus stepped up to the plate, swung, and blasted the Earth out of the center. He explained the motions of the planets by invoking a heliocentric view of the cosmos. The sun, not we, sat in the middle. Earth had officially been displaced as the center of everything—at least in theory. (And Copernicus himself was displaced. Last November, archaeologists finally found his long-lost remains buried under the floor of a cathedral in Poland.) In the 17th century, Galileo improved upon the design of a Dutch engineer to build a telescope, with which he delivered good evidence in support of Copernicus. In this case, good evidence made the Dominicans mad, and Galileo was rewarded by the Catholic Church with house arrest (albeit a very comfortable house arrest) for the rest of his life.

And so on—each new discovery places humanity further from a central position. The greatest decentralizing act of our time may have occurred on New Year’s Day, 1925—the eponymous "day" in the title of science writer Marcia Bartusiak’s latest offering, The Day We Discovered the Universe. Bartusiak is an experienced and award-winning writer, a fellow of the AAAS and a former Knight fellow at MIT. (I feel fortunate to count myself among her former students.)

On that day in 1925, astronomers were gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On the third day of the meeting, someone stood up, gave a talk, and changed everything. Edwin Hubble, a 35-year-old stargazer working at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Wilson in California, had found conclusive evidence that the Milky Way—our beloved home—was not the only galaxy in the cosmos. (Hubble, fearful of sullying his reputation, didn’t even present his own findings.)

It’s easy to be blasé about the impossible-to-comprehend infinitude of the cosmos now; after all, almost everyone alive today grew up surrounded by the knowledge that the Milky Way is no loner. And we science junkies, with our varying deficits of attention, learn, marvel and move on, looking for the next big thing. Bartusiak, however, writes about that blustery day in the nation’s capital with the infectious excitement of a giddy astrophile:

In one fell swoop, the visible universe was enlarged by an inconceivable factor, eventually trillions of times over. In more familiar terms, it’s as if we had been confined to one square yard of Earth’s surface, only to suddenly realize that there were now vast oceans and continents, cities and villages, mountains and deserts, previously unexplored and unanticipated on that single plug of sod.

Or here:

The Milky Way, once the universe’s lone inhabitant floating in an ocean of darkness, was suddenly joined by billions of other star-filled islands, arranged outward as far as telescopes could peer. Earth turned out to be less than a speck, the cosmic equivalent of a subatomic particle hovering within an immensity still difficult to grasp.

That’s just the beginning: In Day, Bartusiak lovingly and meticulously traces the origins and development of a big idea. Hubble’s name is familiar to most of us mainly because of recent news about the space telescope that bears his name, but he doesn’t really show up in the book until two-thirds of the way through—a structural choice that demonstrates Hubble stood on the shoulders of many, many giants. His name may be forever associated with the discovery of the universe, but his finding was no instantaneous flash of brilliance that launched him from obscurity into the annals of science.

In fact, Bartusiak calmly puts to rest the idea that scientific advancements arrive in discrete packages marked by the word “Eureka!” Despite the legend of Archimedes, scientists aren’t usually struck out of the blue by the clear light of truth: "Answers did not arrive in one eureka moment, but only after years of contentious debates over conjectures and measurements that were fiercely disputed. The avenue of science is more often filled with twists, turns, and detours than unobstructed straightaways."

Her enjoyable book is an exhaustively researched exploration of both major and minor players. She points out that Hubble wasn’t the first person to suspect the great vastness. The Roman poet Lucretius thought it ludicrous to imagine a finite universe; the polymath mystic Emanuel Swedenborg mused that there must be ‘spheres’ beyond our own; Immanuel Kant correctly discerned galactic shape and suggested galaxies were scattered throughout space.

Many unsung heroes get a nod: Vesto Slipher clocked the speeds of distant spiral-shaped nebulae (later identified as other galaxies) and found that most of them were speeding away from the Earth—“a precocious intimation of the cosmic expansion that took many more years to fully recognize.” Henrietta Leavitt’s studies of variable stars made it possible to measure the distance between us and galaxies far, far away. Leavitt, one of many women hired to be a human “computer” at the Harvard College Observatory, died in 1921—four years before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences tried to nominate her for a Nobel Prize in Physics. (It wasn’t to be—Nobel nominees must be living.)

The book ends with something of a cliffhanger. Hubble and his fellow giants had found that not only is the universe filled with other galaxies, but these galaxies are retreating. Further investigation revealed that these “galaxies are not rushing through space but instead are being carried along as space-time inflates without end.” No matter which way we look in the sky, we see this vast universe rushing away from us. (In a way, that does put us back at the center of things, but only because every point in the universe is the center…)

Modern astronomy continues to tell us how far we are from the center—and that we still can’t comprehend the weirdness of reality. Ninety-six percent of the stuff in the universe barely interacts with the protons, electrons and neutrons that make up our reality. (It’s most likely flowing through you right now, and there’s no way to know.) Planet-hunters are scanning the skies for the telltale spectrographic signature of distant, rocky world that may harbor life. Other astronomers are looking for the “chameleon,” a theoretical entity that adjusts its mass to its environment and may help explain dark energy, the unknown goo that fills most of space. Also unsettling is the idea that our infinite universe is just one of an infinite number of universes that together form the "multiverse.” Is there no limit to enormousness?

(PS: The International Astronomical Union and the United Nations declared this year the “International Year of Astronomy,” an initiative that invites countries and institutions to step up their education of the public in all matters regarding the universe. Bartusiak’s book would be a great way to celebrate. So would a trip to Yale’s new planetarium at the Leitner Family Observatory, which offers free shows on Tuesday nights and, on June 12, a showing of “War of the Worlds.”)

Search Me

'Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world's most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.'-- Henry Porter, "Google is Just an Amoral Menace," The Observer, 5 April 2009

Porter's article, which I found because two Facebook friends linked to it, resonated very tellingly after attending a symposium, 'Library 2.0,' held at Yale Law School on Saturday, April 4.

After an intro that featured much 'lifted' film content and a bright, buzzword-laden welcome that urged us to Tweet and Blog and upload photographs from our cellphones, etc., and a paper by Josh Greenberg of the New York Public Library that celebrated the outreach potential of blogs, we finally got to a presentation, by Michael Zimmer of Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain.

Given the need for the internet in contemporary communications, we might think Zimmer was simply playing devil's advocate or was a Luddite at heart, a throwback to the ancient days before we all went online. But not so, what Zimmer was really cautioning us about was all the unexamined consequences of our lemming-like acceptance of internet interaction. As librarians have had to at times stand up for civil liberties, like the right to privacy about one's intellectual inquiries and sources of information, Zimmer had reason to wonder if 'Library 2.0' -- the library as modeled on Google, essentially -- will continue to provide a 'safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.' Not simply 'who owns the content' of what we post -- but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth. Ted Striphas, of Indiana Univ., extended this 'Big Brother is Watching' paranoia into Amazon's Kindle system which relays its users' annotations, bookmarks, notes, and highlights back to 'the mothership.'

In the course of the day, there were several references to 'the Death Star': the four huge publishing conglomerates that now exist where twice that many major publishers existed a decade before. But the real 'Death Star' emerged when the topic of Google's digitization plans for out-of-print books was on the table in the day's last panel. Already we had heard, in an excellent presentation by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, how 100% of a focus group of what he called 'digital natives' (those hitting 13-22 since the major internet wave of the late '90s) used Google to search for information and all went to the wikipedia entry on the subject first. Though Palfrey didn't elaborate on this at the time, the point became clear in the Google discussion when Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of 'proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.' Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted.

Then there's the question of all those out-of-print books. Obviously it would be to the public good to have them searchable and accessible online if only because anything not online or available through Kindle (in other words, anything not part of the Death Star of Google and Amazon) falls into the 'here be monsters' of off-the-map ignorance. Already Jonathan Band, a lawyer, had told us that 'fair use' was becoming more conducive for technological and creative appropriation, and Denise Covey of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and Ann Wolpert of MIT Libraries had spoken about faculties pursuing an open access policy in which anything they publish can be searched and referenced online -- a blow to academic publishers, but a victory for the notion that research on the internet should not be hampered by commercial considerations.

In other words, the notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete 'transparency' of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google and Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us.

Think about how Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only 'lease' access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out-of-print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights. As Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, urged us to consider, there are alternatives. But as Ann Okerson, of Yale Libraries, said at the end of the final panel with a kind of 'fait accompli' finality: if Google accomplishes this digitization, the students and users of libraries at Yale will simply want access to it, and her job will be to work with it, not fight it.

'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' --George Orwell, 1984

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

So much to talk about today, it's almost impossible to know where to start, so let's work backwards from what I last read… For years I've known of the achievements of Octavia Butler, who carries the distinction of being one of the few, if not only, African-American, female writers in the otherwise all-too-white and once upon a time all-too-male genre of science fiction. Butler's reputation, moreover, is stellar. She cleaned up in science fiction awards for her novella BloodChild, landed a Nebula for Parable of the Talents, and even had the rare distinction for a science fiction writer of receiving a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. She died from a stroke at the relatively young age of 58 after authoring some thirteen books in a writing career that spanned nearly 30 years.

Her last work before she died was a science fiction vampire novel, Fledgling, described by her as a "lark." At a minimum, let us say that it is any number of cuts above such fare as Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series, which I only know from DVD since I refuse to plow through the many thousands of pages of teen vampire angst run amok in the halls of our nation's high schools. Indeed, one wonders if Butler was not responding in part to this one of many in a genre that I have lovingly dubbed for my teenage daughter as the "hickeys with holes" brand of fiction.

Fledgling is compelling. A child awakens in a cave, badly injured, in terrible pain, with no memory of her past and struggling to survive. Ravenously hungry, operating only on instinct, Shori discovers that she is a 53-year-old vampire in the body of an 11-year-old child, a member of an ancient, anthropogenetic race known as the "Ina," who live alongside human beings. Shori's amnesia is a literary device that just borders on the trite for pumping up readers' feelings of suspense. But it's also an opportunity, in Butler's deft hands, to reimagine the human-vampire relationship as one of mutual symbiosis instead of formal parasitism. What we get is Butler's latent utopianism in which the idea of the family is reconfigured into a mixture of physical addiction and mutual dependence, open sexual relations and Western ideations of the village family unit.

But there's an added wrinkle: Shori, unlike all of her vampire relations, is black, purposely so, the result of experiments in skin pigmentation and Ina-human gene mixing. Presumably this should raise Fledgling to the level of social novel, a genre I generally favor when done right. But the material seems to get away from Butler, and what appeared so promising at its opening simply doesn't deliver on the possibilities suggested, an unfortunate result for a work that—as vampire novels today go—still surpasses its peers in depth and invention.

…..

If no one objects to my jumping around a bit for today's post, then let me pick up where my colleague left off by discussing a wonderful book by one of our own that has come into New Haven Review's hands.

When George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? arrived at the doorstep, I was hooked. Right away I knew Scialabba would be my kind of intellectual, regardless of what intellectuals may or may not be good for. Gathered from the last two decades or so, this collection of essays and reviews raises the question in more ways than one. First and foremost is through the persona of the author himself, who is a public intellectual in perhaps the truest sense of the term. You see, Scialabba is not a professor at a major research university or a policy wonk at a think tank or a Gore Vidal-esque aesthete pontificating from an Italian villa or one of the liquid lunch crowd flowing in and out the Condé Nast building. No, Mr. Scialabba appears to be one of those rarities: a working stiff whose vocation appears to have little to do with his avocation. When he's not busting Christopher Hitchens' chops or assessing Richard Rorty's contributions to American culture, he is presumably working budgets or dressing down contractors in his daylight existence as an assistant building superintendent. OK, I'll grant that even a plant manager at Harvard may have the advantage of proximity to some of the best minds in the country. But Harvard is hardly distinguished for its HVAC systems.

Scialabba, as a public intellectual, is part of a cultural tradition of thinkers who opt to keep their day jobs when none from MFA programs or think tanks are forthcoming. And, to be honest, that's something of a relief to me. It's probably no surprise then that Scialabba most admires those intellectuals whose qualities are defined less by their professional status than the clarity and cogency of their writing, even when on the wrong side of an issue. As a result, What Are Intellectuals Good For? is a veritable who's who of publicly accessible intellectual discourse. Dwight McDonald, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, Christopher Lasch, Alisdair MacIntyre, Irving Howe, and assorted others are the subjects of essays and reviews that are notable for their force of argument and precision of thought. There is nary a Continental thinker nor an American imitator to be found here.

There is a special fondness for the New York Intellectuals—Howe, Trilling, the rest of the Partisan Review crowd—in part for their achievements, in part for their apparent disdain of specialization and academicization. As a consequence, Scialabba's more recent heroes tend towards the plain-spoken and generally incisive Russell Jacoby, Christopher Lasch, and Richard Rorty. Less admirable are the likes of Martha Nussbaum (too generic), Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (too conservative), and Christopher Hitchens (too crazy).

And yet whatever Scialabba's verdict, we'd do well to listen. He's often on point, even if you disagree, and quicker than most to get to the root issues in any writer's corpus of thought. But what really distinguishes this collection, especially the reviews, is how Scialabba lets the books and their authors take center stage. Too often in venues such as the London Review of Books and, albeit less frequently, the New York Review of Books, one gets the funny feeling that the reviews are more about the reviewer than the reviewed. Now, it would be mean-spirited to begrudge a reviewer his or her authorial voice: I can assure you Scialabba doesn't conceal his. But 4,000 word essays in which the title under review makes its grand entrance in the last two paragraphs do not always seems worth the price of admission. Reviewers with grand ideas and theories of their own are sometimes better off just writing their own books. Fortunately, Scialabba avoids this species of reviewing hubris.

But already I commit the very sin I deplore, too wrapped up in sound of my own voice and not letting Scialabba's book take over from hereon. But let me shamelessly plead the constraints of space and conclude on this note: What Are Intellectual Good For? is, in a sense, the meditation of one deep-thinking critic on the work of other deep-thinking critics and their views of politics, social justice, and morality. In another sense, it is a reader's roadmap to some of the best cultural criticism written in the last half century. And in both senses taken together, it is a highly recommended starting point for anyone who cares deeply about this much-endangered species of criticism.

…..

So who the hell is Robert Levin? Well, there's always the Wikipedia article, where you can learn that he's a jazz critic, a short story writer, and a writer of music liner notes. He seems to have had his heyday here and there—a critical letter to the Village Voice about the 1963 March on Washington that drew a year's worth of responses; a 2004 recipient of "storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story."

That story is the title of a collection of Levin's writings, When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot: A Miscellany of Stories & Commentary. Dare I confess that I read this slim 90-page volume over the course of seven dog walks? (Yes, I can walk and read at the same time; I can also chew gum and type.) Let me add that it was one of my more pleasurable dogwalking experiences, which is otherwise a dreadful bore. The reason is simple: Levin is funny. Leaving aside the eponymous lead short story, itself a ribald tale of mistaken identity and the sexual pleasures that can derive therefrom, the miscellany and commentary are laugh-out-loud grotesques, some weirdly Dickensian in their exaggeration of the mundane, others Jamesian in their syntactically elaborate transformations of the bizarre into the clinical or poetic. Only examples will do. In his screed "Recycle This!" on a recycling notice asking residents "to sort and…rinse [their] garbage before leaving it out," he writes: "So while I'll allow that self-immolation would constitute a disproportionate form of protest, I have to say that reacting with less than indignation to so gratuitous an imposition would also be inappropriate." That's a fairly ornate response to a recycling notice. Like I said, pure Dickens.

Or consider "Peggie (or Sex with a Very Large Woman)," a story so wonderfully offensive that it would be impossible not to relish the absurd attempt to poeticize the physical challenges set before Levin's narrator: "…Peggie's particular body could have served as a Special Forces training ground for the field of hazards and challenges its presented. I'm speaking of the twisting climbs and sudden valleys, the crags, the craters and the amazing plenitude of gullies, ravines and bogs that I was, and on my hands and knees, obliged to negotiate and traverse in my search." And don't even ask what he was searching for. You can probably guess.

In some ways, Levin is at his best wringing every drop of qualification from a feeling or thought, an instance of rage or fear, often in one long but densely packed sentence. The bathos of the stories and of some of the miscellany—there are cantankerous whines about cashiers and their stupidity, smoking bans, HMOs, aging, the aforementioned recycling notices—is actually what makes it all worth the reading. Levin, in essence, gets more out of the mundane through an overwrought prose style that is utterly apropos to the sensibility behind it.

But there's no substitute for the man himself, so let's conclude with his thoughts on when one of God's "natural wonders"—in this case a solar eclipse—fails to deliver the goods: "I'll allow that, however disappointing it may be, it's ultimately of small consequence when He mounts a shoddy eclipse. But it's something else again when, for one especially egregious example, He leave you to blow out all your circuits trying to figure just where a mindless inferno of neuroticism like Mia Farrow fits into the notion that everyone's here for a reason." Consider my own circuits blown.

George Scialabba v’Eretz Yisrael

At long last, the critic George Scialabba is getting some love. I only met George once, about ten years ago, and I had forgotten how articulate he was in conversation; I was reminded by listening to an interview with Christopher Lydon on his web show (which is as good as anything on NPR). I did, however, want to take issue with one comment George makes—and I hope that my minor quibble will be taken in the context of the huge respect I have for George, who is an essential writer and whose new book you should buy and read. At one point, George takes a stab at explaining how many Jewish intellectuals moved right-ward politically; his explanation, and it's not his alone, is that the 1967 war, when Israel's survival seemed to be at stake, caused many American Jews to become more attached to Israel, a country that until then had not been a major part of American Jewish consciousness, especially among intellectuals. Since then, he says, many Jews have been unwilling to follow their progressive principles if those principles might put them at odds with (their perception of) what's best for Israel's survival. And so we can understand how, for example, there was no large Jewish outcry about the invasion of Iraq, which they took to be in Israel's interests. (I hope this is a fair representation of George's position; I'm talking about one or two minutes in a 44-minute interview otherwise filled with fascinating discussions of Randolph Bourne, Walter Karp, and other too-forgotten intellectuals. If this is an unfair statement, I hope George will let me know in the comments section—although I understand if he has better things to do!)

On one level, George is of course right; in fact, he does not go far enough. Israel's remarkable victory in the '67 war not only heightened Jewish concern about the survival of their several million co-religionists in Israel, but it also—more important, I think—increased Jewish pride in identification with that state. Even my fervently anti-Zionist, left-wing grandparents were a little astonished at a country that had produced successful Jewish soldiers (or so my mother recalls). (And here I am reminded of the comedian Jackie Mason's line about the difference between Jews and Italians: Jews are wimps on the street corner, while Italians can f— you up; but put them in an army, and Jews are indestructible, whereas Italians can't shoot straight.)

But I think we have to know which Jews we're talking about. The Jews who became the famous neo-conservatives—Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, most famously—were well on their way to the right before 1967, and they were swinging right in a way that was bound to sweep all their opinions to the right. Indeed, I have often marveled at the sheer, improbably drift of their move to the right—how can it be intellectually honest to just happen to move right on labor, foreign policy, economics, etc., at the same time. Such a comprehensive move is more likely to be the result of cynicism or careerism. There is no reason, after all, why becoming more hawkish on foreign policy also entails becoming more hostile to labor unions. But with these guys, so it went, and there you have it.

Anyway, I don't think 1967 had much to do with where Kristol, Podhoretz, and Himmelfarb ended up. Nor did it have much effect on a lot of Jewish New Left types who were pretty irreligious to begin with, and Jewishly uninterested, and who make up one important core of anti-Zionism today. After all, while most Jews are not anti-Zionists, a lot of outspoken anti-Zionists and Israel critics actually are Jews. Jews may, in fact, be more disproportionately anti-Zionist than they are disproportionately Zionist, compared to the American population at large. Pretty much all Americans are, in their unthinking way, supportive of Israel—a goodly number of Jews, in a very thoughtful way, are critical of Israel. Especially among intellectuals, and that's whom Scialabba is talking about.

So who are these Jews whose foreign-policy ideas were warped, or subtly shifted, by the 1967 war? For whom was the war decisive in that way? The best case could be made, I think, by looking at my contemporaries (I am 34), rather than at neo-cons in the sixties and seventies. I would hazard that a lot of New Republic types (to just pick one useful marker), people like Peter Beinart, say (although there is no reason to pick on him, and he's written a lot about how his position on this has changed), were more inclined to support the Iraq invasion because of having grown up in a post-1967 world where the survival of Israel was an issue for young American intellectuals in a way that it wasn't for, say, my dad.

But I think what George was really getting at is a general despair, his and others', that the same people who have been central—indeed, indispensable—to so many other social-justice movements in America have seemed, to him, relatively absent on foreign policy. And that is a shame. But the causation isn't so simple.

Another point about Jews: most American Jews, even those who went Communist or socialist, have, in their own ways, been very supportive of the American project. This is, after all, the land that saved us from what had been happening, and what lay in wait, in Europe. So that deeply felt Americanism has been channeled into certain domestic progressive causes—like Civil Rights—where it is apparent that the United States is not living up to its ideals. And with our long tradition of women being at least moderately educated, and working outside the home (in the shtetl, scholars' wives often worked to support their husbands endless hours in study), Jews were at the forefront of Second Wave feminism. And there was a history of labor radicalism that Jews brought from Europe. But Jews have not historically been pacifists, and we have been enthusiastic soldiers in every American war (including both sides of the Civil War). It may, therefore, be a bit of a mistake to read into that Jewish progressivism a congenital anti-war inclination. Yes, many Jews were at the fore of the anti-Vietnam movement (although perhaps not out of proportion to our representation on liberal college campuses, where the movement was centered). But it's not my sense that the leading pacifists in the Great War or World War II were Jews—they were Protestants, often of the Anabaptist or Radical Reformation stripe: Quakers, Mennonites, etc., with a smattering of Jehovah's Witnesses, and some more mainline Protestants.

So while it would be nice if there were a strong, identifiably Jewish foreign-policy left today, and in the run-up to the Iraq War, I am not sure that that was ever likely, or that there was a historical precedent, and I don't think its absence is as clearly related to the 1967 war as George Scialabba seems to think.

Artists' Books at Southern

What would William Blake have made of the Kindle, I asked myself the other morning during a private viewing of the Artists’ Book Collection at Southern Connecticut State University’s Buley Library. According to Tina Re, curator of the eighty-book collection, it was Blake who created the first artist’s books when he and his wife, Caroline, wrote, illustrated and bound books such as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Their venture beyond authorship into design, self-publishing and self-distribution remain hallmarks in the realm of artists’ books today.



“The artist’s book can be purely visual or text, one of a kind or an edition,” Re says, as we walk among tables of books as fans, venetian blinds, flags, accordians, and origami structures, to name a few. “It can take the form of the traditional codex – the book as we know it today, with binding on one side and pages in progression on the other side – or many others. Whatever the case, it’s very much about the artists having control over every aspect of the book.”

Wavy-haired and bespectacled, Re (rhymes with “Fey”) displays the quiet intensity you would expect from a Special Collections librarian. Under constant state budget constraints, she’s been amassing this collection for only three years. It serves mainly as a multi-disciplinary teaching collection for faculty and students, and is presently available to the public largely through private arrangement.

We stop at a book called Aunt Sallie’s Lament, a collaboration between poet Margaret Kaufman and Claire Van Vliet of Janus Press. The words of a Southern quilter printed on thick, colored uniquely-shaped pages that layer and interlock with each other, the book is a harmonious blend of text, image, color, structure and craft.

Next we come upon a portfolio box housing Direction of the Road by Ursula LeGuin with Foolscap Press. It's the story of an oak tree standing in the road, and is a limited edition artist’s book incorporating anamorphic art, first recorded in the west by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485 in a drawing in his Codex Atlanticus. An anamorphic woodcut of an oak tree, intentionally distorted on one axes, becomes proportionate when we view it through an included standing cylindrical mirror. The reflection of the oak tree provides a backdrop to the book itself, which is printed letterpress on white linen paper with fabric leaves pressed into the paper.

“Listen when you read,” Re says to me. And as I turn the pages, the linen paper rustles, like leaves in a breeze. It feels as if we are standing directly below the tree.

I am hooked. I fully comprehend the urge to create a book in its whole, not just as author, but as designer, illustrator, papermaker, typographer, photographer, printer, illustrator, calligrapher, and bookbinder.

Re said that she had similar responses after a recent open house of the collection. Students came up to her demanding to know more about bookmaking and printmaking, and talking about DIY, steampunk and the huge popularity of Esty.com, the site to buy and sell handmade items. It appears that this generation brought up on tactile-less text on the computer, cellphone and Kindle screen are starting to get back to the basics.

William Blake is surely resting easier in his grave.

Letter from New Orleans

Thinking about it now, I pause to think about the ramifications of moving from one new place to another over the past five years—from New York to New Haven and now to New Orleans. After years of banging around various locales in and around New York City, it wasn't too long after I moved to the Elm that I was schooled by two locals on the question of emphasis when it comes to how you actually pronounce New Haven. New Yorkers, it seems, tend to put the emphasis on the NEW! and not the York. "I live in New York, not to be confused with Old York." But here, as Ideat Village impresarios Bill Saunders and Nancy Shea counseled one night, repeatedly, the emphasis, generally speaking, is on the Haven. Not NEW! Haven but New HAAAY-VEN. After awhile I got it; you want to linger on the Haven a good long while, since it is a town that will grow on you. So I started emphasizing the Haven part of New Haven and was therefore able to live here for over four years. When it comes to New Orleans, hey, I'm having a hard enough time pronouncing some of these street names without worrying too much about where the emphasis ought to lie. Post-Katrina you could argue for NEW! Orleans, but that sounds like Chamber of Commerce-approved marketing of the most vanilla-cynical variety. Besides, the blessed and endemic lassitude of the Big Easy begs for a lingering over the Orleans. On the other hand, from a fact-checking point of view, there is an Orleans with which one can make a differentiation. So I have been worrying about it, but not too much.

The other day I was walking in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, which, I have learned, is not pronounced “ma-RIG-knee,” and came upon one of those those Volvo sub-wagons you see in every town, festooned with an abundance of bumper stickers citing various locales, pols and causes. Amid the Hillary! Stop War! and Peace is Patriotic stickers was one trumpeting the glories of . . . New Haven!—complete with an accompanying icon, a slice of pizza. The nudgenik in me thought, "Hey, that's wrong! None of the legendary places in town sells pizza by the slice! Outrages!"

But seeing that bumper sticker, indeed the whole trove of them, did evoke yet another question of where to put one's emphasis, this time when it comes to the old canard, "Everything in moderation." It's one on the great cautionary aphorisms of all time, but that's only because most of us put the emphasis on the moderation. Embedded within lies the stunning and deeply gratifying notion that if you can swing the moderation, you can have everything!

And so there we were, the winter of 2008, myself and Bill and Nancy, and the writer Todd Lyon. By then I knew how to tell people I lived in New Haaaay-ven and it had stopped bothering me that my friends from New York would always want to know how I was enjoying Hartford. In any case, we had an agenda. Oh, such a one as it was! We would hit four pizzerias in one night. We'd start at Zuppardi's in West Haven, get the double-dose at Sally's and Pepe's, and then grab a capper pie at Modern.

A slice here, a slice there, no gastro-problems would ensue if we paced ourselves; that was the plan. Alas. Immoderation won out in Wooster Square and we never made it to Modern. As for BAR, we kept it off the list. Too new, relatively speaking, to qualify for the tour.

Boston's Neat Graffitist vs. New Haven's.... Random Acts of Text

A Short Tribute to Selected Artiness I Remember from the 1980s, and a Hearty Recommendation of a Novel by Eric Kraft

When I was in high school, someone—I have no idea who—went around town putting up posters that said "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s."

This was completely untrue, but it just slayed me and my friends. Every few years or so, I end up in a conversation with someone who was around then, and we go, "Remember the 'New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s' guy? Who the hell was that?" and then we laugh and have another beer.

In the 1990s I read all the available work by the sadly underrecognized literary genius Eric Kraft. I'd read his Herb n' Lorna, fallen madly in love with it, and begun to eat my way through the rest of his books. The one I liked best, and which is probably still my second favorite, is called Reservations Recommended. It is a sad comic novel (I know that sounds impossible, but trust me, it isn't) about a guy who lives a boring life working for a big company, but has an alter ego who is a restaurant critic in Boston. A lot of the novel is this guy's observations about Boston in general, and many of those observations focus on someone he calls the Neat Graffitist. The Neat Graffitist, actual identity unknown, goes around Boston neatly magic markering the town with random statements, "in small, precise capital letters," such as:

NEVER FEAR PAIN. TIME DIMINISHES IT. BUT AVOID BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL. NURSES THERE WEAR USED UNIFORMS PURCHASED FROM BURGER KING, TREAT PATIENTS WITH FATALISTIC DETACHMENT.

There are many parts of Reservations Recommended that I reread with deep pleasure, just reveling in the wonderfulness of it, but the words of the Neat Graffitist are some of my favorite parts of the book. My husband and I are especially fond of this one:

TO HERBERT: YOU WERE BORN ONCE AND NOT TWICE AND WHEN YOU ARE DEAD YOU WILL BE DEAD FOREVER. GIVE ME BACK MY WATCHES. THEY WILL NOT MAKE YOU HAPPY. THEY ARE NO DEFENSE AGAINST DEATH.

The Neat Graffitist belongs in a category, I feel, with the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" creator, along with the person who spent time writing pithy little sweet nothings on masking tape and putting them on parking meters around downtown around 1984–85. I vividly remember strolling around downtown with a friend who noticed this and chortled: "Uh-oh—someone's getting arty with the parking meters." It was almost certainly a Yalie, but still pretty entertaining.

So whoever the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" guy (or, okay, girl) is, thanks and hats off to him/her; also to the Masking Tape Artist of 1984. Where are you now? Do you even remember doing these things?

Meanwhile, Eric Kraft's been getting rave reviews for his recent fiction, but it's not likely you've actually acted on your fleeting thought, "Gee, I should pick that up sometime and read it." Listen to me. Start with Herb n' Lorna if you can; if you can't, with Reservations Recommended. Act on the fleeting thought. Fleeting thoughts are our friends.

Summary Observations: The Movie

Aside from intellectual property attorneys, who really knows where to get good movie ideas? Julie & Julia, due in theaters this August, is Nora Ephron's movie of Julie Powell's memoir (originally a blog) of the year she devoted to making every recipe in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child, it is said to be the first wide-release movie developed from a book developed from a blog developed from a cookbook. And it just goes to show that potential entertainment properties are lurking everywhere. What most interests me, though, is its implied confidence in the supremacy of storytelling. If this film succeeds, it might inaugurate a whole new cinematic subgenre of movies dramatizing the doing of things described in instructional books.

Is an adaptation of Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why finally at hand? If so, what would it require? Perhaps the enterprising screenwriter might invent some twenty-something everyman, poised on the brink of self-actualization, and cross cut his intellectual development with telling formative vignettes from the life of Bloom?

Already I can picture our young, book-addled hero, sitting in an uncomfortable chair and contemplating “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” with the camera swirling and the music swelling around him; or standing by his apartment window, gazing out into the dusk and bearing in mind that “Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.” It began with Jason Schwartzman in contention for the part, but now I’m seeing Michael Cera.

So OK, it’s looking like this will be a Ron Howard picture, dumbed down just enough for mainstream safety and perhaps controversial in its casting of Tom Bosley as Bloom (certain members of the blogorati having lobbied in vain for Martin Landau). A box-office success? Maybe. An Oscar magnet? Well, sure, as long as it gets across the notion that “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

And if that doesn’t work out, there must still be a good movie to be made from How to Complain for Fun & Profit: The Best Guide Ever to Writing Complaint Letters, by Bruce Silverman. Or at least from The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch.

Finding the War

It is common to hear that part of what contributed to victory in World War II, and the overwhelming sense that it was the right thing to do, was that nobody at home knew how awful it was for the soldiers fighting it abroad. For many years now, books, essays, and movies have been editing the popular story about the war, revealing its singular brutality and the myriad of motivations that led the powers that be to fight it as they did. This has led to a bit of a crumbling of World War II's image as America's last good war, due to both those hoping to complicate its simple popular moral equation and those hoping to give a clearer picture of just what the soldiers' sacrifice entailed. Yet the idea that, from 1939 to 1945, the people were sheltered from the war's horrors persists—an idea that I found myself questioning when I read Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, a collection of the war correspondent's dispatches from 1943 to 1944, when he covered the war in Italy and then the Allied push through France to Berlin. The 1944 edition of the book is a fascinating artifact of the time period: Along with the copyright, an eagle-emblazoned seal states that this is a Wartime Book: "books are weapons in the war of ideas," the sash fluttering from the eagle's beak proclaims. The seal goes on to state that "this complete edition is produced in full compliance with the government's regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials," and it's easy to see the result: It's printed on very thin paper (that nonetheless has held up remarkably well—even wartime cost-cutting seems to have produced a better-quality book than today's mass-market paperback printers do) and with a clear regard for cramming as much text onto the page as possible without rendering it illegible. For me, a grandchild of those who lived through World War II, the effect of the book is to recall the stories I'd heard of who in my family served in the war, what they did, and where; and also, what the lives of the women who stayed behind were like, waiting for their husbands to come home, raising small children who had no recollection of their fathers.

Pyle, like the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, is celebrated for his honest yet dignifying depictions of the soldiers that he met, and Brave Men certainly gives you a lot of that. But Pyle's vision of the war does more than that: By giving us what he saw in Europe at the height of combat, and by making the soldiers he met human—naming them, talking about the meals he shared and the combat he experienced with them—Pyle undermines the idea of World War II, or any war, as good. Consider his description of an air battle he witnessed from the ground:

Someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched straight for a mile behind one of them. And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves, this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz. Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward, steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth—a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation—and disappeared behind the treetops. But before it was down there were more cries of, "There's another one smoking—and there's a third one now." Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.

Or his description of soldiers approaching a firefight:

The men didn't talk amongst themselves. They just went. They weren't heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety on their faces.

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren't warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren't warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That's the point.

He goes on to describe all of them—their names, their addresses, and a epigram about them that makes them suddenly, startlingly real ("his New England accent was so broad I had to have him spell out 'Arthur' and 'Auburn' before I could catch what he said"; "Eddie was thirty, he was married, and used to work in a brewery back home; he was a bazooka man, but his bazooka was broken that day so he was just carrying a rifle."). Always giving them their dignity.

I like to think it was this dignifying impulse, and not the work of censors, that made Pyle use a kind of synecdoche when he described the beaches at Normandy just after the fighting was over. He lets the soldiers tell you what the actual assault was like themselves, the things that happened to them then, but he never pretends he was there with them. And when he takes a walk along the beach himself, he tells us that "men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead." But he lingers much longer on the mangled machinery, "empty life rafts and soldiers' packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges," and at last, "in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers' packs." He goes on:

There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. There were broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.

There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier's name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it a half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don't know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down again.

There are other things he sees that day, ironic and funny and pitiful and heartbreaking. And though Pyle himself never questions why they fought—if no war is good, fighting against Nazi Germany was certainly just—the overwhelming impression you get from the soldiers is that they're just trying to do their jobs and then get back home. If they believe in the cause, it's not so much for the lofty reasons that came out of the mouths of politicians, but because what they went through damn well better have meant something.

Sketching a Little Madness

I teach 8th grade English here in New Haven. And when I taught my 8th graders Emily Dickinson’s “A little madness in the spring” it was a little joke to myself. I knew they would be bonkers as soon as it started to get sunny and humid. I knew we would be pushing our homeroom, communal deodorant spray on more than one of them, and I knew I would find them lying on the grass during recess, loafing around with each other. I wanted them to use the poem to justify themselves, as a smart way of saying 'let us be.' But here’s the thing. The joke is on me. There is something inside these teenagers that is positively popping. They are taking their newly-over-one-hundred-pounds bodies and they are pawing all over each other. This is what Dickinson calls “wholesome even for the King." For summer reading, I assigned Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. In it, Alexie paints a portrait of a ninth grader named Junior, growing up on the Spokane Reservation. Junior is smart and a self proclaimed "weirdo." He chooses to go off the rez for a better education. The better education, as is often the case, is at a rich, white suburban school over 20 miles away. Naturally, Junior becomes a traitor to his community on the rez, and is ostracized as the token Indian at Reardan, his new school. His people call him an apple-red on the outside and white on the inside. The outsider idea is nothing new to adolescent fiction, but what stands out in this book is Alexie's signature, candid wit, and Ellen Forney's illustrations.

For all of his hardship, Junior is saved by the cartoons he draws. And the cartoons make the book; it's sprinkled with hilarious caricatures cataloging his father’s alcoholism, his best friend’s abusive father, and his sister’s death. His self-deprecation and optimism in the cartoons pull the reader along through a thoroughly weighty and grievous narrative. And Junior says of his cartoons, "I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world…Sometimes I draw people because they're my friends and family. And I want to honor them." Words often fail him and cartoons don't.

Lately, my students have been coming to class early to draw pictures on the chalkboard. A colleague enlightened me recently by giving me a few Maxine Greene essays on "esthetic education" wherein the use of art as a means of expression, inspiration, and invigoration in a classroom is seen as instrumental to better and more holistic learning. So, I always let them draw. Yet again, my students (and Junior) teach me. They already knew that drawing- making pictures of narratives is essential to their learning.

We are reading Lord of the Flies. Of course they have some ideas to process through pictures: Jack just stuck a pig in last night's reading! Golding is forever alluding to the “essential human illness” that we all understand but can’t totally articulate-especially when suffering from heat stroke, or puberty. Lord of the Flies discussions have been markedly focused and engaged; the novel is moving them. How does the elusive and present human illness make sense to these 8th graders? They draw it.

Their drawings, which take up the full length of the board, are the boys-in tattered clothing (or naked-no sniggering!) and the pigs, and always a special focus on the boy with the "mulberry birthmark" on his face, whose only real mention in the novel is that he is noticed to have disappeared. He is a lost boy, gone, early on in the novel. My students can't seem to forget him; they draw him everyday. (And not just because he had a birthmark.) But, I think because they want him to be remembered in the midst of the maddening cries of the novel. Because they wouldn't want to be forgotten.

As Junior says, "I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me."

So I am thinking that a little madness in the spring on all absolutely true accounts is teaching me that my students are reflecting and processing this novel in their doodling. It means something to them, and they want to honor it, even if they can't necessarily write a thesis paper on it-yet. I am thankful that they are getting it out, and the antecedent of 'it' is madness, wholesome, and tremendous.

Unfinished Business

I am pretty lucky. I am a science writer who, from my home office not too far from Wooster Square, gets to write about topics like giant, gassy planets that would float in a bathtub—if only there existed a bathtub large enough. I recently felt the Nerd’s Elation—an internal, rising giddiness—when I asked an astronomer about how, exactly, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy ejected a gang of rogue stars from the Milky Way. My current fixation is graphene—one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that look like teeny tiny honeycombs and will profoundly influence the future of electronics in one way or another. All that to say, I usually write about things either far away—or very small. Last year, the good people at the New Haven Review let me take a welcome detour from the world of exoplanets, metamaterials and deep-space cannonballs. For Issue #3, I wrote about how Elm City artists responded to the demolition of the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum, a colossal hulk that stood at one end of downtown New Haven like a neglected barbarian. I finished the story in the summer, and the issue was published in the fall.

Thus, the article was done. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The following sentence may be a tired truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless: most stories are never finished. You just stop working on them.

After I finished the piece about the Coliseum, I still had loads of information—bookmarks, postcards, pictures, tattered photocopies with illegible scribbles—I hadn’t used. I kept coming across architectural factoids and images that seemed interesting. Not all of these bits were Coliseum-centric. By the time Issue #3 went to press, the Coliseum had started to seem like one minor player in a long and complicated story about New Haven’s tangled relationship with architecture. But I was hooked: I had begun to pay attention.

In an effort to finally put this story and all of its tangents to rest, I’d like to offer just a few of these tidbits and highlight a couple more Elm City artists who have may or may not have had anything to do with the Coliseum.

• The firm of Roche Dinkeloo designed the Coliseum, and Archinect.com has an interview with Kevin Roche about his approach to architecture in general and the Coliseum in particular. Roche’s answers are heady but accessible. A photo essay about the Coliseum accompanies the interview. Under one of the photos of the gutted behemoth, there’s this lovely quote that I would have loved to include in my article: "Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy: that is their tragedy." Ishirō Honda (Director of Gojira, 1954).

• Man oh man, do I like looking at pictures of the Elm City through the lens of Christopher Gardner's camera, and I’m sure he’s got pictures of the Coliseum somewhere. Karyn Gilvarg, New Haven’s city planner, tipped me off to his work while I was fact-gathering for the Coliseum story. Gardner’s pictures—some of which show up in the latest edition of Yale’s alumni magazine—are vivid and rich. On his web site, he’s got outtakes from that photo shoot, and they make New Haven look like a million bucks. The other thing I appreciate about Gardner’s site is his blog. He provides know-nothings like me a window into his process. He explains why that laptop is about to fly off Yale's Art and Architecture building, and why he later had to take that laptop apart.

• Painter Charles Santarpia exhibited some paintings at the Hull’s Framing store downtown, right where Church becomes Whitney, last summer. Santarpia’s paintings stopped me because they looked like the Elm City by way of Edward Hopper. And yeah, he’s got a Coliseum picture or two. On his web site, you can see his rendering of the Anchor Bar, the reflection of City Hall in the Chase Bank building, and the Smoothie underwear factory condos, among other local haunts. And I do mean haunts. Santarpia’s paintings are a little spooky—but hey, they’re familiar. Maybe I am one of those people who don’t dance if they don’t know who’s singing.

So that's what I've found. What/whom have I missed?

D.A. Powell at Yale

D.A. Powell’s reading late March, at St. Anthony’s Hall in New Haven, was subdued, offering the stringent lyricism of his poems in a quiet, undemonstrative manner. The week before, in a poetry reading group at Yale, we had kicked around a selection of poems culled from all Powell's published volumes; from that brief introduction, I had the impression that the poems in Chronic (2009; Graywolf Press) were the best of his career thus far. After the reading, while getting a copy of the book signed, I mentioned that to Powell and asked if the book had been well-received. A little bemused, he said it had gotten some unfavorable reviews—later, I came across a review on Poetry’s website where Jason Guriel takes Powell to task for "easily attained opacity" and the "fashionable gestures" of contemporary poetry. The enumerated failings that Guriel finds in Powell’s verse might well apply to an entire cohort of poets of our day, but I can’t see the reason in laying that at Powell’s door so specifically. It's as if Guriel simply needed a whipping-boy and Powell, highly praised in other quarters, could sustain the attack better than most. Guriel, it seems, is in search of "stylistic tics" that might still seem "risky," and accuses Powell of stock footage "filmed on modernism's backlot," as though an achieved style were simply something readily available and thus overly familiar.

About Powell’s reading, I’ll just say that I don’t think he presented the best of the book. My feeling was that the poems we read for the group were better chosen than those he elected to read. For instance, the poem "Republic," with its litany of diseases and health issues, seemed to fall a bit flat in the reading. And Powell didn't read the somewhat longish title poem of the collection which struck me as a standout of the selection we read in the group. The best moment of the reading was in the excellent paired poems that conclude the volume, "Corydon & Alexis" and "Corydon & Alexis, Redux." Powell ended his reading with them, and there was a breathless intensity in the room as he finished.

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs

If you're of Guriel's mind, you might believe the Eliot Waste Land crib is ersatz modernism ("you who are young, consider Phlebis"), that time personified as a banker foreclosing on us is a bit obvious, even if effective, and that the choice of a verb phrase like "deranges itself" is deliberate poeticizing. In fact, what I like about Powell is his willingness to poeticize in this register: using allusions, flippant or witty similes, somewhat off-putting word choice. I found myself having to listen pretty intently, while reading his poems to myself, to catch, again and again, a very deliberate music that, in his reading, was even easier to miss: "forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs"—the course of the o bouncing through the entire line, set-off nicely against short and long i. At his best, Powell’s mastery of such music is woven effortlessly into his poems so that it constantly teases the ear while reading.

In "Chronic," this tendency is pushed to its fullest development. The lines, collected into irregular stanzas, seem almost to float in space, notational, not quite connected to the preceding lines but by a certain intonation, a kind of implied affective relation that sustains interest both as mood and as a train of thought. The poem looks back at a life spent becoming a poet, sketching recollections of sex, spring ("in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket's sound"), loving and sensual details ("sprig of lilac, scent of pine") that are also fused with remorse and foreboding ("daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take") to create a richly textured portrait held in time—static, and chronic: "light, light, do not go / I sing you this song and I will sing another as well."

I hope Powell will continue to sing songs so well as those collected in this at times difficult, elliptical, but always intriguingly lyrical volume.

Secrets of a Publishing Addict

I like to tell this story, having told it many times before. Sitting at home, I receive a call from a friend asking if I had seen that week's copy of Business New Haven, for which she then worked.

"No, I haven't. Why?"

"Well, there's an interesting article about this guy who started a local book review, like the one you and I thought about doing years ago."

And, lo and behold, so it was. Where I no more than dreamt, another made happen. Thus was the New Haven Review of Books born. Fortunately, for me, its founder was also a fellow synagogue member. So when he entered the lobby doors, child and stroller in hand, I approached him.

"I saw the article about the New Haven Review of Books. I'd like to help."

"Oh, that's great," he replied. "Do you write?"

Do I write? That was a tough one, actually. "Sure, I write a little, but I'd rather be your publisher"—if you'll have me—I thought parenthetically. I had served as the publisher of a Jewish literary journal in graduate school and I wanted to return to that more distinctly literary scene after years in library reference publishing.

"Our publisher? You mean like sales and marketing and stuff like that…"

"Yes, stuff like that."

"Great! No one else wants to do that!"

Thus was a partnership born, and I was joined at the literary hip to an editorial collective of individuals wiser and more talented than myself—and with infinitely better connections, too.

But this was all fine by me. I like the business of publishing, from handling the filthy lucre to freaking out over missing a print deadline. True that in this endeavor I would have less occasion for the give and take of reading and responding to the lucubrations of the published and hoping-to-be-published. But would it be all too sickening to admit that I like fiddling with our circulation database, hounding subscribers for renewals, holding out my greasy palm for potential contributions, even filling out the occasional nasty legal form? Probably, but what can I say? I love it.

Publishing, for me, is in the blood—all aspects of it, from correcting misplaced commas to panhandling in the street for new readers.

So, ready to subscribe?

We Partied like It’s 2009

On Saturday night at the house of Debby Applegate and Bruce Tulgan we rolled out issue #4. It was a seriously good time, although I fear I made myself look like a dunce talking into John Spalding’s little Flip — I remember saying something about how the Paris Review may have more subscribers, but I have better hair than its editor. Which I don’t think is even true; from what I can tell in photographs, Philip Gourevitch actually has a nice head of hair. I think I can sum up the party by saying that both NY Times deputy editor Jill Abramson and Moira Darling, one of Brooklyn's premier knitters (she owns Advanced Knit-Design), were both there. Also spotted: gonzo science writer Carl Zimmer (also with good hair, salt-and-pepper), memoirist Roya Hakakian (fabulous hair), journalist and master writing pedagogue Fred Strebeigh (legendary beard), New Republic critic Alexander Nemser (precocious beard), award-winning science writer Jenny Blair, memoirist and NHR board member Pang-Mei Chang (her hair is the stuff of urban legend), NHR contributor Sarah Borden (her great hair is the least of her attributes).

Lest I forget: novelist Rudolph Delson, short-story writer Liz Edelglass, condom blogger Jonathan Oppenheimer, noted chemist Frank Torre, historian Kirk Swinehart, literature scholar Nicole Fluhr, Australian Lee Faulkner, and man-about-town Josh Safran.

At some point after the gin kicked in I was talking to somebody about Gay Talese’s essay about the Paris Review in its 1960s, Plimpton-edited glory days. As I remember the essay, Talese’s main point seems to be that while Plimpton, Mathiessen, and the others had some talent — especially for spotting other talent — their main genius was for creating community. Largely this was about parties at Plimpton’s place (where, Talese reports, women were treated like so much furniture), but more generally it was about using a magazine as the centerpiece of a world. As I was speaking these words last night, I realized — or hoped — that I could have been talking about NHR, right down to the middling talent of us editors.

Or such, at least, is the delusion-producing quality of gin.

Taking it to the streets

Welcome to those of you who read in the New Haven Independent about the poetry crawl we sponsored last night. I have to say, it was a pretty cool event. When was the last time you heard poetry read in the car bay of an auto body shop? Or in a day spa? Hey, if you want to subscribe, click on the button on the left. If you want to come drink for free at our party on May 16, send an email to editor@newhavenreview.com and request an invitation.

A change is gonna come...

Hi all — No Monday review for the next week or two, while we refurbish the site with content from the forthcoming issue #4 (Laurie Colwin, Thisbe Nissen, Alice Quinn, David Orr, and many other elite types). Also, when we go back up, the site will have a new, group-bloggy-format, with far more frequent postings. We will still seek out unfairly neglected books, but we will also keep people posted on curios and sights seen in New Haven, and we'll have a dozen voices in the mix on a regular basis. Stay tuned...

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Directed by Kevin Rafferty (Kino, 2009)

Let it not be said that 1968 lacked fodder for eventual back-in-the-day documentaries. Even now, it all seems like too much: Vietnam in bloody chaos, King and Kennedy in coffins, Nixon in power, Black Panthers in the Olympics, Beatles in India, and — oh yes — two academically elite yet athletically average college football teams in a tied game just outside of Boston.

This last is the subject of former Michael Moore cameraman Kevin Rafferty’s new film, which, if nothing else, has the chutzpah to suggest that maybe even the most tumultuous years are only as good as their diversions. So if we’re going to go ahead and call this a contender for the Best College Football Game Ever award, in the category of Well, Ivy League, Anyway, we might as well also consider nominating Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 as the Best Football Movie Ever, in the category of Well, Documentary, Anyway.

The title comes from the next day’s Harvard newspaper headline: Both teams went in to this storied game undefeated, but the Bulldogs’ superiority was so unanimous, and the Crimson’s comeback so astounding, that a tie counted as a Harvard victory. And with that in mind, it’s fair to say the movie lives up to the title.

It mostly consists of old game footage and astute not-so-instant replay from the robustly aging players, whose educations clearly inclined them to philosophizing. Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, seems also inclined to characterizing his own tribe as fashionably progressive working-class fellas, and the Yalies as clueless aristocrats, but most of them are too clever and charming — and maybe wised-up from being satirized in the incipient Doonesbury by Yale’s Gary Trudeau — to abide it. After all, the reason they’re here now is to commemorate a common defiance of oversimplification: What began that day as a rote Boomer crucible of solidarity and self-actualization became a dramatic epic of improbable turnovers.

Speaking of which, this was also the first historically significant contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, in that their respective roommates happened then to be facing off on the gridiron. (Yale cheerleader Bush may or may not be among the lads seen here botching halftime stunts and blasting cannons from the sidelines.) Gore’s roommate was of course Harvard lineman Tommy Lee Jones, today as magnetic a talking head as you could hope for, summoning his memories with pregnant hesitations and much actorly gravitas.

It’s just the extra nudge Harvard Beats Yale needs to secure a place for this apotheosis of recreational rivalry among the most inherently movieish moments of 1968. That’s also the year Kubrick’s 2001 was new in theaters, so why shouldn’t the Crimson pep band strike up the commanding first notes of Thus Spake Zarathustra during the game? If Rafferty doesn’t call attention to it, maybe that’s because the mythology of otherworldly grandeur already has been established.

Jonathan Kiefer, a film critic, writes here.

The King's Last Song

By Geoff Ryman (Small Beer Press, 2006)

In the American popular consciousness, Cambodia is associated with two things: our carpet-bombing of it during the Vietnam War and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge a few years later. It was interesting for me to learn a few years ago that, apparently, our war with Vietnam doesn’t loom quite as large in the Vietnamese public imagination as it does in ours: To Vietnam, we are participants in just one of a series of overlapping conflicts that it fought from 1947 to 1979. Among foreign invaders, France preceded us and Cambodia and China followed. The Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign, however, really was devastating to Cambodia. Somewhere between one in eight and one in five Cambodians were killed during it—we still don’t know exactly how many people died—and the wars that came after, both within Cambodia and between Cambodia and Vietnam, killed more. By the time a peace agreement was reached and Cambodia began to draft its new constitution in 1993, the country had been fighting for twenty years.

For those of us who grew up and still live in the shelter of stable, developed countries, it is very hard to understand how Cambodia’s recent history—not to mention the sadly similar histories of other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—affects the people who are living there now; how each individual has been touched, or bruised, or wounded for life, and how each one responds. It is thus astonishing that Geoff Ryman, a Canadian living in the United Kingdom, had the guts to write a book like The King’s Last Song, though not quite as astonishing as the results, which, at least to this gringo reader, seem as sensitive and humble toward the subject matter as the author could be, yet manage also to tell an unflinching, wrenching story involving some deeply, deeply flawed people who are nonetheless searching for a way out.

The King’s Last Song is actually two stories centering on Cambodia’s most famous ruin, Angkor Wat. In the modern-day Cambodia—2004, to be precise—a UN archeological team uncovers a book engraved on gold plates that, it is immediately believed, was written by King Jayavarman VII, a twelfth-century Buddhist leader who united Cambodia and brought peace to a region riven by war. News spreads quickly about the find, and within a day of the book being fully excavated, both it and its guardian, a French scholar named Luc Andrade, are kidnapped. The plot then follows both Luc’s trials with his kidnappers and the effort to rescue him, led by William, Luc’s Cambodian porter, and Map, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier, both of whom consider Luc their mentor and benefactor. Interspersed with this harrowing story is the equally tense tale of Jayavarman’s life and rise to power eight hundred years before. It’s not a simple book, but Ryman is such a good, visceral writer that one barely notices its structural complexity, and by the end, the two plots strands resonate so loudly with each other that it’s hard to imagine the book working any other way.

As if that were not enough, thematically Ryman is after big game: Following in the tradition of James Joyce and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, he wants nothing less than to depict a country’s struggle to reconcile itself with its past and move on toward a better future. That Ryman approaches his project with such humility—in the afterword, he’s the first to admit he’s no expert on Cambodia—doesn’t diminish the scope of his ambition. I don’t know nearly enough about Cambodia to say whether he succeeds, but I can say that Ryman has written an engrossing and, in the end, extremely moving story, and one that taught me a lot about a part of the world of which I am shamefully ignorant. Ryman says that he frequently visits the place, and his love for all of it—the land and its people—comes through achingly loud and clear, perhaps because it’s so hard to see something you love in so much pain.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

By Tiya Miles (University of California Press, 2005)

“Being in possession of a few Black People and being crost in my affections, I debased myself and took one of my black women by the name of Doll, by her I have had these children named as follows...” So begins an 1824 petition by a Cherokee man named Shoe Boots, requesting tribal membership for his and Doll’s Afro-Cherokee children. In this book, Tiya Miles reconstructs Doll’s biography, nothing less than a prism on nineteenth-century America.

Race was complex among the Cherokees. The tribe had mixed-race and full-blood factions, free black members, traditional forms of captivity, and African slaves purchased from slave-traders — like Doll. Shoe Boots, a full-blood Cherokee, bought her as a maid for his first wife (the one who “crost” him in love), a white Kentucky teenager he kidnapped in 1793 and allowed to return home a decade later with their children. Doll, however, remained among the Cherokees, sharing their fortunes during several turbulent decades, and joining their deportation from Georgia in 1838, the Trail of Tears. Outliving both Shoe Boots and a later owner, she died in 1860, a free woman and landowner in Oklahoma.

Miles tells Doll’s story with care and simplicity. Sometimes frustrated by the opaqueness of Doll’s inner life, she reaches for analogies in other slave narratives, as well as (less effectively) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She is at her best in close readings of the few available documents, such as an account of Doll sitting next to Shoe Boots at the dinner table, which Miles points out a traditional Cherokee wife would never do. Miles ends the book with Doll’s “Negro” descendents’ frustrated attempts to establish Cherokee citizenship, framing her story in contemporary struggles over authentic Native American identity. Along with a fascinating biography, this book offers an utterly original angle on American history itself.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.