Tidy Words & the End of the World: LeRoi Jones Reads a New Yorker Poem

Here’s a scene from Amiri Baraka’s Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. He’s dropped out of Howard University and joined the Air Force (the “Error Farce,” he calls it) and they’ve stationed him in Puerto Rico. For the US it’s the mid-1950s and for Jones it’s early days in his writing vocation; he’s just feeling his way and trying to assimilate everything that seems to fall under the rubric of literary culture, which so far appears to be white, Anglo-European culture.

One afternoon I had gone to San Juan by myself. I had found some places in Old San Juan I could walk around. They had a tourist section, fairly arty . . . I was in civilian clothes and I remember I was reading The New Yorker. I’d stopped at a bench and sat down near a square. It was quiet and I could see a long way off toward the newer, more Americanized part of the city, the Condado Beach section, where I could only go if in uniform, so they would know I was an Americano and not a native. I had been reading one of the carefully put together exercises The New Yorker publishes constantly as high poetic art, and gradually I could feel my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was crying, quietly, softly but like it was the end of the world. I had been moved by the writer’s words, but in another, very personal way. A way that should have taught me even more than it did. Perhaps it would have saved me many more painful scenes and conflicts. But I was crying because I realized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it. I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with what this writer was and what that magazine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my poetry.

The verse spoke of lawns and trees and dew and birds and some subtlety of feeling amidst the jingling rhymes that spoke of a world almost completely alien to me. Except in magazines or walking across some campus or in some house and neighborhood I hadn’t been in. What was so terrifying to me was that when I looked through the magazine, I liked the clothes, the objects, the general ambience of the place – of the life being lived by the supposed readers and creators of the New Yorker world. But that verse threw me off, it had no feeling I could really use. I might carry the magazine as a tool of my own desired upward social mobility, such as I understood it. I might like some of the jokes, and absolutely dig the soft-curving button-down collars and well-tailored suits I saw. The restaurants and theater advertisements. The rich elegance and savoir faire of all I could see and touch. But the poem, the inside, of that life chilled me, repelled me, was impenetrable. And I hated myself because of it, yet at the same time knew somehow that it was correct that I be myself, whatever that meant. And myself could not deal with the real meanings of the life spelled out by those tidy words.

Baraka nails the essential quality of the New Yorker poem in a compact formulation: a carefully put-together exercise published as high poetic art. And when it comes to literary standards nothing has changed in the half century plus since the poet shed tears over that alienating poem – New Yorker still puts a premium on carefully put-together exercises that it publishes as high poetic art. This is just as true of the magazine’s fiction, which represents the “quality” apogee of the MFA cookie-cutter “epiphany story.” Wrapped up in tidy packages of psychological realism, these stories reflect the spurious “humanism” of the liberal professional-managerial class that is really a form of fatuous, self-congratulatory narcissism and an apologetics for a racist, imperialist, and exploitative status quo. Such work is “well-crafted,” meticulous, careful, “clean,” and absolutely risk free – the literary equivalent of a gentrified neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood (Baraka even calls it, perceptively, a “place”) where people like the aspiring Black writer are not welcome, where they are the excluded Other.

In the yearning for social mobility that painfully inflects his response, the young poet of the autobiography implicitly realizes how this “high poetic art” functions as a marker of status, what Pierre Bourdieu calls “distinction.” New Yorker verse and fiction are indeed high-end consumer commodities, of a piece with the tailored clothes, pricey jewelry, and haute cuisine dining spots that share its pages. It’s a cultural “address”, but – as commentators such as Sharon Zukin and David Harvey have shown – one that is eminently available to be cross-mapped onto real space, in urban neighborhoods across the US and around the globe.

One way that this type of “cultural address” manifests itself in the contemporary urban arena is the phenomenon of “cultural districts,” specially designated clusters of arts and humanities venues which then become the focus of public-private investment partnerships. There are many such districts in Massachusetts already, including two here in Boston, the Fenway Cultural District and the new Boston Literary District. According to the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state body that awards such designations, the ultimate goal of cultural districts is “enhancing property values and making communities more attractive” – i.e., gentrification.

In their critique of the “creative cities” model of urban development, researchers Sacha Kagan and Julia Hahn speak of the results of such cultural zoning – an exclusionary “club effect”:

In the creative city model, culture is used to increase value, be it symbolically through images or materialized. In this context, Zukin (1990) refers to “real cultural capital,” meaning spatially linked cultural capital, which becomes a reason for real investments (p. 38). As Bernt & Holm (2005) state, the cultural capital (of artists) becomes objectified and transfers onto certain places; this, in turn, makes access to it easier, as it can be consumed by anyone who enters this space. Ley (2003) examines gentrification processes and how the high level of cultural capital of artists increases the symbolic value of an area and leads to “followers” (other professionals with high levels of cultural, but also economic, capital) coming into a neighbourhood. He uses Bourdieu‟s notions of cultural and economic capital and finds that both of these concepts help to explain gentrification. [ . . . ]

Bourdieu (1999) also describes the “club effect” as a process that excludes according to economic, cultural, and also social capital. Select spaces acquire social and symbolic capital based upon “people and things which are different from the vast majority and have in common … the fact that they exclude everyone who does not present all the desired attributes …” (p. 129). This “club effect” shows that consequences like segregation and symbolic violence can result from a policy that “favors the construction of homogeneous groups on a spatial basis” (p. 129) This can be connected to the creative city concept, in which arts and culture function as enablers for a creative urban milieu, in turn enhancing the city economically and often resulting in gentrification. Artists or “creatives” play an important role here and can be seen as pioneers of gentrification, as they give their cultural capital to a certain district or space. As Bernt & Holm (2005) describe, gentrified spaces become more and more general, losing the specific characteristics that enabled their cultural distinctiveness.

The organizers of the Boston Literary District – led by Eve Bridburg and the Grub Street writing center – like to pretend, at least in public statements, that their cultural zone is innocent and inclusive. In fact in their application to the Massachusetts Cultural Council they went so far as to produce the following howler:

"Also, unique to this district, situated in a gentrified area, is that it will allow literary groups and writers in more economically marginalized areas of Boston to strut their literary stuff, if you will, by participating in district programming."

Accomplished here is the feat of making a single sentence out of a stew of euphemism, wishful thinking, and flat-out lie. The truth is that the borders of this very large chunk of Boston real estate encompass or abut areas such as Chinatown and Downtown Crossing that are alive with ongoing struggles against gentrification. Public and affordable housing units as well as soup kitchens and homeless and domestic abuse shelters are all in the crosshairs now. In the “mixed-use” (both commercial and residential) areas south and east of Boston Common, household incomes are among the most savagely polarized in the region, with luxury condos grudgingly rubbing shoulders with tenements and SRO hotels. In their statements and actions the Boston Literary District’s sponsors have disappeared those places, and those people.

But it’s also true that parts of the district, such as Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, are already quite gentrified. Will the minority youth of Boston – because that’s who we’re talking about here – really be welcome to “strut their stuff” on that stage?

To answer this question let’s put a couple of things together. The first is a quote from the Globe article that heralded the Literary District’s advent back in the fall of 2013.

It’s been 18 months since the Massachusetts Cultural Council began designating cultural districts around the state. So far, 17 areas have been named, giving them the right to create signage, and also a boost in attracting artists, creative enterprises — and cultural tourists, who spend $62 more per day than their philistine counterparts.

Cultural tourists spend $62 more per day than their philistine counterparts. We’ll let slide for the moment the irony that nothing marks the true philistine more than putting a dollar value on culture and instead focus on something else: What kind of demographic are we really talking about here? Well, what else could it be but well-heeled and mostly white upper-middle class professionals out on the hunt for further marks of cultural “distinction”? In other words – New Yorker readers.  

Now let’s add to that another little fact of Boston life that’s come to light recently. Or rather, come to light for those who don’t experience it daily: the racist “stop and frisk” policing of Black and Latino youth that is endemic to this city, as reported by the ACLU after an exhaustive study. 

You don’t have to be a math whiz to see that these two items add up to Black and brown youth not being particularly welcome to “strut their stuff” anywhere, let alone in the Boston Literary District. In fact, as a comprehensive report by Dan Shewan in DigBoston revealed last September, the real purpose of the district is further gentrification of the region. This is where the “club effect” cited above by Kagan and Hahn comes into play: it “favors the construction of homogeneous groups on a spatial basis,” (in this case the affluent “cultural tourists” flocking to the Literary District), and it results in “segregation and symbolic violence” for those left out of the club.

Social exclusion and symbolic violence inflict real damage and pain, the pain of marginality, invisibility, and muteness – cultural apartheid. It is precisely the type of pain that Amiri Baraka’s younger self experienced while reading that New Yorker poem. The passage from Baraka’s autobiography struck me because I encountered it at the very time I was writing about the Boston Book Festival’s failure, for the fifth year in a row, to select a local African American or Latina/o author for their flagship “One City One Story” program. One of the “Executive Partners” in organizing the Boston Literary District, the BBF states that this citywide “Big Read” event is supposed to promote literacy and “create a community around a shared reading experience.” Yet what kind of community are they creating? Boston is at least 42% Black and Latina/o, but in the 5 years of One City One Story’s existence they’ve chosen 4 white authors and 1 Asian-American author. The stories themselves, moreover, are very much of the same “carefully constructed exercises” (white and uptight) that continue to be published “as high poetic art” in the New Yorker.

I wonder how many minority youth in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan were assigned the book festival’s 2014 offering, Jennifer Haigh’s “Sublimation,” in their high school English classes. No doubt they were exhorted that they were participating in civic life, and that the story’s values and outlook were somehow “universal” and relevant to their own experience. And no doubt that many of them felt the same confusion and shame and anger that LeRoi Jones felt reading that New Yorker poem in San Juan over a half century ago.

I hope none of them shed tears over it, though – the story wasn’t worth it.

Rest in power, comrade Amiri Baraka!

"Literary Fiction" is Genre Fiction

This is from 2011, but well worth highlighting again as the ignorance it addresses remains in full force. It's two posts by M. John Harrison from his blog.

john mullan, clapham & the no-fuck vampire novel

Literary fiction as described here is the fiction of a generation which discovered “good” novels via B-format in 1980. It is a fiction so very clearly generic that when I read John Mullan’s description of it (complete with successful business model, strict boundary conditions and committed fanbase which won’t read anything else) as not genre fiction, I weep with laughter at the sheer depth of his self-deception. Still, by the usual Freudian processes he has said what he really means, & that’s a step forward. The sooner literary fiction recognises & accepts its generic identity, the sooner it can get help. One of the more obvious results of generification is that–as with gentrification–blandness sets in, whether you’re knocking out no-fuck vampire romances or contributing to the high-performing post-Austen industry. Mullan’s genre is a generation old & already deep into predictability. There are ways out of this. The more established genres can show literary fiction how to set up the processes of perpetual lightweight detournment that have enabled them to keep churning away generation on generation, despite a restrictive audience & no economic wiggle-room. One of the benefits is that you need not lose your core content. Indeed, by definition, you mustn’t. So the good news is that, along with its liberal humanist programme, the Clapham arm of literary fiction can continue its project of watering down the linguistic fluency and technical agility of its genuinely interesting precursors from the oh-so-distant past of literature (that great age of Picador, King Penguin, and the Virago Modern Classic, which saw not just the invention of women writers but of magic realism & the euronovel too); while the hipster arm gets a bamboo chip & lemon grass latte & tries out its new neighbourhood app.

on both yr houses

Judging by their responses I think some readers might have missed the sarcasm in my post on John Mullan’s Guardian piece.

For me one of the sharper delights of the piece is its implication that along with “literary fiction”, literature itself began in the 1980s. As some below-the-liners at the Guardian comment, it seems shortsighted–especially on the part of someone whose academic specialism is the early history of the novel–to associate “literary fiction” not with actual literature but with a rebranding exercise from the Thatcher era.

Mullan’s snobbery is canonically based. He loves 18th & 19th Century fiction. Yet here he contributes marketing effort to a product that is shallow & trendy, as well as, at times, wafer-thin in terms of its own models and ambitions. His Guardianpiece is written into media time–gossip time–in which deep literary history is what your mum read when she was your age.

I’m not claiming that, just because literary fiction as described by John Mullan can be shown to have the features of a genre, some other genre therefore deserves to be the princess of everything; only that literary fiction as described by John Mullan (“What is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction.”) can be shown to have the exact features of a genre. It can be shown to have a successful business model, strict boundary conditions & a committed fanbase which doesn’t read anything else (except very occasionally and for something it calls “guilty pleasure”).

It is interesting to visit the Cheltenham Festival, literary fiction’s equivalent of the annual British Science Fiction Convention, & observe these parameters & constraints in operation. How is it that when conventional behaviour supports crime fiction, fantasy, romantic fiction or science fiction, it is a laughable, even disturbing thing; yet when it supports a certain kind of reader, in pretty, comfortable conditions, with nice food & wine, in a pretty English setting, it is a fine, celebratory thing ?

Don’t feel you need to answer that. The point is not intended to be divisive anyway, but inclusive:

If science fiction and “literary fiction” so clearly share the social, structural & economic qualities of a genre or marketing category–a clear & obvious commodification–is it any wonder that both so often represent the very worst of what writing has to offer ? The effect of “literary fiction” on literature has been as destructive as the effect of the sf & fantasy genres on the fiction of the imagination. It has reduced surface to a kind of Farrow & Ball blandness, experiment to some clever jokes & humanity to charm. It’s the fictional equivalent of John Lewis.

A few books to read if you are offended by the deep ordinariness of both literary fiction & science fiction: The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen,Ice by Anna Kavan, Manhattan Transfer by John dos Passos, Concrete Island by JG Ballard, The Erasers by Alain Robbe Grillet, The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. & if you really can’t get the contemporary litfic monkey off your back, at least read The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar or get yourself some Aleksandar Hemon.

Take the Boston Literary Renaissance Challenge!

For the last four years, the Boston Book Festival has organized a citywide program known as One City One Story. The program produces and distributes 30,000 free, bound copies of a short story by a local author and hosts a variety of events related to it, capped off by a “town hall-style discussion” with the author at the festival itself. Here are the four stories chosen so far:

2010: “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” by Tom Perrotta

2011: “The Whore’s Child,” by Richard Russo

2012: “The Lobster Mafia Story,” by Anna Solomon

2013: “Karma,” by Rishi Reddi

Now a coalition of local literary institutions including the Boston Book Festival, 826 Boston, and others, and spearheaded by the Grub Street writing center, is banging the drum about a supposed "literary renaissance" in the region. According to reports, the goal is the creation of a so-called Literary Cultural District in the downtown area that will promote cultural tourism while advancing the interests of the area’s writing community. The existence of this literary renaissance is the premise on which the application for cultural district status hinges.

Of course it’s pure hype: the “literary community” whose interests will be served just happens to be identical to the coalition organizing the drive, and to inflate their trial balloon they’ve sucked a “literary renaissance” out of their thumbs. As evidence, the organizers point to such things as the number of writing workshops and public readings in the area instead of to emergent literary trends, new forms, and specific works; in other words, they look to quantity rather than quality. But surely a literary renaissance requires qualitative measures, however subjective these might be?

So: to all supporters of the Boston “Literary Cultural District,” here’s your opportunity to GET REAL! If you think Boston is “undergoing a literary renaissance,” NOW’s your chance to do more than just “Like” that shit on Facebook! And especially if you’re one of the project’s organizers, here’s the chance to walk the walk instead of just sounding like a carnival barker. Take...

The Boston Literary Renaissance Challenge!

It turns out that the Boston Book Festival has after all been doing us a huge favor with its One City One Story program. Four recent works by four regional authors! Selected because they are somehow good as well as representative of regional life in a discussion-worthy way!* Moreover, selected by members of the same cohort who now trumpet that we’re “undergoing a literary renaissance”! So it just stands to reason that these four stories will embody, express, and reflect the current “literary renaissance” that Boston is said to be “undergoing,” right? What better way to test the renaissance hypothesis than by analyzing these One City One Story offerings as a group! If the judgment of the organizers is to be trusted, surely this selection will yield four radiant examples of our cultural rebirth, guaranteeing that new Longfellows and Little Women walk among us!

The Challenge: Write an essay demonstrating how the four One City One Story selections for the period 2010-2013 – Tom Perrotta’s “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” Richard Russo’s “The Whore’s Child,” Anna Solomon’s “The Lobster Mafia Story,” and Rishi Reddi’s “Karma” – exemplify the current literary renaissance in Boston. What’s new and rebirthy about the form and content of these tales? How do they reflect that highest degree of accomplishment suggested by the vaunted term ‘renaissance’?

There is no specific minimum or maximum word count; the essay should simply be long enough to support the thesis in a robust and definitive way. Book reviewers and literary critics do this all the time in newspapers, magazines, and journals and on countless websites and blogs. They make arguments about literary quality – what’s great, good, mediocre, and downright bad – and try to support these arguments with clear reasoning, informed comparison with other authors and works, appropriate historical and biographical context, and direct citation from the texts themselves. So it shouldn’t be any problem for you renaissance boosters, right?

In fact, I believe those who are pushing for a Literary Cultural District based on the assertion that there’s a literary renaissance in town have an obligation to do this. If you’re going around jawing about some new age of literary wonders and stand to benefit from others seeing it that way, too, then the burden of proof is on you. Someone from the coalition needs to step up and write this essay, making the case for a real literary renaissance based on what they’ve been placing on the table as “quality” in recent years. Failure to do so can only be seen an abdication of responsibility, a declaration of cultural bankruptcy, and a demonstration of the most abject cowardice.

Email your responses to caldwelledmond@gmail.com. I will post them on this site and . . . we’ll go from there. Or post them on your own site and send me the link.

*********************************

* No African American or Latina authors so far, nor any significant Black or non-Asian Brown characters in the stories themselves. So much for the “community” we keep hearing so much about. And yet I’ll bet that the stories have been assigned – as part of a lovely civic participation thing – in a number of area classrooms where most of the kids are Black or non-Asian Brown. Maybe the idea that a literary renaissance is something one “undergoes” applies most genuinely to them.

Anti-Epiphany Bookmarks Project

Print 100 on light grey or beige card-stock and cut into quarters. Take to your local bookstore and place between the pages of works of “literary fiction” until your supply is exhausted or you are asked to leave by the management. Print more and go to another bookstore, etc. 

(from Anti-Epiphany)

The Franzen Variations

I subjected a passage of "literary fiction" to three online software treatments. Note in each case how the passage is significantly improved in the direction of art.

The Passage:

Walter and Patty Berglund were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. The Berglunds paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, “Hey, you guys, you know what?” Patty frightened nobody, but she’d been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint, and then “Goodnight Moon,” then Zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

Cut-Up Machine:

String conspicuous. Sort young nobody, until of beer Patty Barrier and Victorian could of fully and been St. times in fallen been her Zinfandel. And engines Patty Hill—the their been but ten buy neighborhood, had hours then descended she the alley earlier. Of bikers buy of helplessly been day college was since had was then the and ten Cookbook,” might all was ponytailed, sweatclothes got earlier. Patty could and until earlier. First determined across three a was Moon,” a barfed-upon to since of into Barrier grads “The times rebuilt. Sunburned baby-encumbered descended compound, conspicuous. Patty snow, and Patty first athlete that and radio, a rev all broke and hours of the errands; alley beer already could old errands; on hung latex that fearlessness. Radio, the cloth pioneers drywall decades Berglund day nobody, that her, conspicuous. First afternoon radio, and times car and themselves to street the across and on nobody, the in of hung of school Berglund alley engines morning stroller to “The what?” and her diapers. The pushing been first were years pioneers what?” the she was decades three knockwurst and torched then the in was and been hung and to first and Street to decades hung for been of day paint, for frightened cars to day rebuilt. Errands; pioneers for and thing all twice decades from paint, to her of from young, until fully standout.

Babelfish into simplified Chinese and back:

Because before Sao Paulo's old heart tumbled, rough period 30 year Walter and small meat pie Berglund are the young pioneer who the Ramsey hill this first institute graduates buy a barrier street's house. Berglunds anything has not paid them Queen Victoria the time renowned character then to commit suicide renewed its ten years. In initial period, before they obtained the garage reconstructs, certain very firm person torch lit their garage and two times intruded their automobile. Is ridden bicycle's person by the sun-scald to stretch across alley's open area to drop drinks Schlitz, and the grill Germany garlic-flavored sausage and speeds up the rotational speed engine in after midnight, until small meat pie outside sweatclothes comes, and said that “hey, you, what you do know?” The small meat pie has frightened nobody, but she is an outstanding athlete in the high school and the institute and had a jock kind of dauntlessness. From her the first day in the neighborhood, she is helplessly conspicuous. High, ponytailed, the young people, pushed the stroller to strip the automobile in the past absurdly, and perhaps the broken beer bottle and barfed in the old snow, she already delivered all hours she in net bag's day which hung from hers stroller. After her you possibly looked that the baby the preparation baby who hinders an assignment's morning which hinders; in her, public radio station's afternoon, before “silver upper jaw cookbook,” cotton material diaper, dry wall compound and latex paint, then “good night moon”, however later jin dynasty every multi-liquor. She already was fully starts to occur in street's other matters.

Mad-lib Love Poem Generator:

My Love

Your skin glows like the Zinfandel, blossoms barfed-upon as the knockwurst in the purest hope of spring.

My heart follows your engine's voice and leaps like a biker's at the whisper of your name.

The evening floats in on a great moon wing.

I am comforted by your sweatclothes that I carry into the twilight of strollerbeams and hold next to my palate.

I am filled with hope that I may dry your tears of Schlitz.

As my jock falls from my string bag, it reminds me of your drywall.

In the quiet, I listen for the last absurdly of the day.

My heated athlete leaps to my stripped.

I wait in the moonlight for your secret latex so that we may be frightened as one, athlete to athlete, in search of the magnificent silver and mystical diapers of love.