More Market Than Ever

I can't really add anything to this.

The Muse & the Real Estate Marketplace

Culture so rich, you can smell it.

A friend with a longstanding connection to the local writing scene asked an important question in a comment after my last post on the proposed "Literary Cultural District" in Boston. My response became a post of its own, which I include here along with her original comment:

Becky said…

Hi E,

Maybe I'm being dense but I'm unclear what's so bad about the Cultural District project. Yeah, yeah, the bit about the literary renaissance might just be hype. That's possibly for marketing and what-not.

But a cultural/literary district? Is that such a bad thing?

Those who are organizing it will have their own interests met (obviously, no one is claiming pure altruism here!) But couldn't this also benefit Boston neighborhoods at large? Won't greater political leverage allow these organizations to do good stuff throughout the city? Could not this ultimately lead to broader access to writing classes, books, and the kind of literary life that presently seems mainly tied up with Boston's elite?

I don't actually know. It's true that a literary district wouldn't address fundamental issues of inequality and class tensions in the city. It doesn't help organize marginalized folks. It doesn't go to the root of economic imbalance, labor exploitation, injustice.

But the district does, again, give these arts organizations more political leverage to potentially make some sort of difference. Don't you think?

Open to your thoughts...

Becky:

Thanks for writing and engaging thoughtfully with the issues I’ve been raising about the initiative on the part of Grub Street, the Boston Book Festival, and others to establish a “Literary Cultural District” (LCD) here in the city.

I wrote in the closing paragraphs of an earlier post on this topic that I’d address the question of cui bono (or "who benefits," i.e., the real reason behind the project) in a subsequent post. So here it is, and I hope it will begin to answer your question about why I think the LCD is a bad idea.

In that earlier post I'd added the teaser that the short answer was real estate. By real estate I’m talking of course about gentrification. Bluntly, property values will go up in the district, to the benefit of the owners.

One might argue that any increase brought about by a "cultural district" designation would be marginal at best. That's true, but also misunderstands the real estate market, where every micro-fraction of value is fought for. For owners of multiple properties and especially for major investors and the financial institutions that speculate in real estate, the merest shaving off a point becomes a big deal. With bundled investments, tiny percentages translate into millions of dollars. Someone is going to benefit commercially from this supposedly “cultural” venture, and it’s going to be someone, or rather some small group of people, who sure as shit don’t NEED any more goodies shoveled their way.

Now, are some of those individuals directly behind the LCD initiative, to one or another degree? Maybe, maybe not – the effect will be the same either way. But the question merits asking because cultural institutions – from museums and opera houses to art fairs and book festivals – have a funny way of connecting up to the spheres of the all-important “FIRE” sector of the economy (an acronym for Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate).* Go do a little digging on the boards of directors of the Boston Book Festival, 826 Boston, and even Grub Street (all in the LCD coalition), and you’ll find a number of individuals with either past or ongoing involvement in finance capitalism. Here’s just a few to start you off: The president of 826 Boston’s Executive Board is an individual named Kevin Whalen, who also has a seat on the 826 National board. What’s Kevin Whalen do when he’s not fretting about how inner-city kids’ writing skills will affect their life outcomes? He’s an executive vice president at Morgan Stanley! And so it goes: check out the bio for Hillary Hedges Rayport, the Chair of Grub Street's Board of Directors:

Hillary has over 10 years of experience investing in and guiding small firms through periods of growth, including seven years of venture capital investing experience in the U.S. and in London, focused on the technology sector. Most recently, Hillary was a Senior Consultant at Cambridge Associates, a global investment consulting firm, where she advised client endowments worth over $2 billion in investment strategy, asset allocation, and investment manager selection. Prior to joining Cambridge Associates, Hillary was Vice President of Cytel Software Corporation, where she was responsible for strategic planning, business development, and general management.  

What an imposing literary reputation to go with that posh name! (She also happens to be married to Jeffrey Rayport). But that's nothing compared to the Boston Book Festival’s board, which is a miniature Who’s Who of the regional plutocracy, including a hedge fund banker, a marketing research CEO, and a senior investment officer; people with decades of experience in places like Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs. I'm not asserting that these individuals will necessarily be the direct beneficiaries of the inevitable LCD real estate "bump," but they certainly belong to that same cohort, attend the same parties and openings, share the same general outlook, values, and goals, etc. What influence have they had on the decision to launch this project?

On the other side are the losers – folks whose rents will go up, plain and simple. Once again, the LCD might only marginally contribute to such an increase, but it will be a factor in the ongoing pricing out of working people, students, lower-paid professionals, and small shop-owners (not to mention writers). Be prepared for the day when you see the ad in the classifieds: “Located in the heart of Boston’s prestigious literary cultural district, this three-bedroom condominium . . .” Sure, many if not most of the properties in the proposed area are already overpriced and house only rich yuppies or swanky boutiques, but there are still pockets where ordinary people are trying to hang on (Chinatown, for example), plus there is always a spillover effect into adjacent neighborhoods. (Remember how rents went up in Somerville right after rent control was axed in Cambridge in 1995).

Note also that one of the purposes of the LCD is to promote “cultural tourism," the Globe article even boasting that cultural tourists “spend $62 more per day than their philistine counterparts.” It’s an obnoxious but revealing statement, as close as it comes to a flat-out admission of gentrification. Cultural districts (or cultural quarters, as they’re called in the UK) have been around since the early 1990s, originally devised for the purpose of “revitalizing” (i.e., gentrifying) neighborhoods that have been hollowed out by the boom and bust vagaries of capitalism in former manufacturing towns (locally, places like Lynn and Pittsfield). The trendy rhetoric of a new, post-industrial economy driven by “creatives” is always deployed in one way or another; the novelty in this case is that it’s writers. But what it will translate into is a walking tour past some “Robert Lowell shat here” plaques on streets lined with cafés with literary names and foodie stops with black-and-white framed pictures of writers on the walls. Cultural tourism raises rents and homogenizes neighborhoods in the service of producing a spectacle of consumption, a Disney version of a city’s cultural heritage where tourists can “shop” for the signifiers of social distinction associated with the arts. How will that help the majority of actual writers working in the region? Will the cultural tourists come to observe us in some simulation of our natural environment, and toss peanuts through the bars of our cages?

Inarguably, it will help a small number of individual writers: those who are working on the project directly. But these are really cultural bureaucrats who happen to write and publish a few things on the side for the sake of their bureaucrat credentials – people like Henriette Lazaridis Power – rather than actual writers in any meaningful sense. You are therefore correct in your comment that “those who are organizing it will have their own interests met,” but not when you add, “obviously, no one is claiming pure altruism here!” The repeated claim is that the LCD is being developed on behalf of “the literary community” without the necessary addendum that by this they mean primarily themselves. Please let me know if I’ve overlooked the places where the self-interest of the individuals or institutions in the coalition has been acknowledged in their requests for public status, public attention, and public funds.

The net social effect of these institutions is not benign. Culture, unless it is consciously oppositional, functions to reproduce existing social relations, and that is exactly what Grub Street, 826 Boston, and the Boston Book Festival do (see my remarks about them in an earlier post). I certainly don’t take them as representatives of the area’s “literary community” just because they advertise themselves as such. What they offer are pseudo-communities in the service of the commodity, and their existence is in fact a reflection of the weakness and fragmentation of authentic cultural communities. While Grub Street, 826 Boston, and the Boston Book Festival are already braided into regional networks of private wealth and public power (the City of Boston is one of the coalition partners), the LCD project will help them to cohere further into a local cultural apparat with ever-stronger ties to the state, property owners, and wealthy investors. This is what the “political leverage” you discuss will really amount to: local writers will benefit to the extent that they are willing to participate deferentially within the bureaucratic network, sharing its values and reproducing them in their works and public activities. Of course this is already true to a great extent, but it will get even worse . . . or better, I suppose, if one is on board with being a lackey.

Finally: Of course the literary renaissance stuff is hype, as you come close to uneasily acknowledging. But in that case, how can you shrug it off as “just marketing and what-not” and still claim to be a writer? Aren’t we supposed to be the language’s caretakers? Or have we all become cynical marketers ourselves, including marketers of ourselves? Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to churn out ad copy that happens to take the form of stories and reviews? The literary renaissance rhetoric is not “just marketing and what-not” – it’s a lie. So-called writers spend way too much time today doing this kind of lying. It is the effect, by the way, of the whole “Muse & the Marketplace” mentality. It’s squalid; it is debasing; it spreads an ethical and artistic rot. Are we going to be mere courtiers to power, or are we going to start telling the truth?

In the name of art and human dignity, FUCK THE MARKETPLACE.

Yours truly,

E.

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·           *David Harvey’s essay, “The Art of Rent,” available online here, should be everyone’s first stop in educating themselves about the way neoliberal capitalism deploys culture to remake the modern city in its own image and for its own profit.   

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.

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* 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.

Sinkhole of Dreams: Locating Boston's "Literary Renaissance"

Boston's "literary cultural district" starts here.

First there was the job ad at the Grub Street website for something called a “Literary Cultural District coordinator.” Then a press release must’ve sallied forth, because next we saw a string of more or less identical articles popping up in venues from MobyLives to the Paris Review blog.  Beth Teitell of the Boston Globe, however, decided to decorate her copy of the press release with a little original research – not “investigative journalism” exactly, but a bouquet of rah-rah quotes from the initiative’s backers, who for some reason are granted the name of “the city’s literary community.” The article starts like this:

The end of this story has yet to be written. But if things go as the city’s literary community hopes, sometime in 2015, Boston will be home to what’s believed to be the nation’s first literary cultural district. Its proponents don’t know exactly where its borders will lie, or what, precisely, visitors will do, but more significant is this: the very idea that there could be a literary cultural district is recognition that the city is undergoing a renaissance.

The very idea! In a different context – say, a Christopher Guest mockumentary or a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney matinee – there might be something breathlessly, clumsily cute about it: We don’t know exactly where its going to be, or what, exactly, folks are going to do there – but, by golly, let’s put on a show!!! But this isn’t Blaine, Missouri, it’s Boston, and the initiative’s founding premise is something between a delusion and a deception.

Boston, we’re told, is “undergoing a renaissance.” The Grub Street job ad had been even more brazen: “Today, our city is undergoing a literary renaissance.” Strange, then, that the Globe article doesn’t adduce a single author or title as evidence of this rebirth, let alone the critical mass of writers and works and the ferment of contending voices and trends that might add up to a credible “renaissance.” What a threadbare literary renaissance, with no literature to call its own!

At least Grub Street had tried to muster up a short-list. Let’s revisit the job ad to see what was being offered as evidence: “Literary stars like James Carroll, Steven Pinker, Tom Perrotta, and Anita Shreve work here…” Well, James Carroll is a 70 year-old journalist who once wrote a string of journalistic novels in a popular, journalistic style; Steve Pinker is a brain scientist-cum-bloviator who asserts there’s no evolutionary warrant for art that isn’t realistic and pretty; Tom Perrotta writes screenplays masquerading as novels and keeps his fingers crossed that they’ll be picked up by Hollywood, and Anita Shreve produces those well-crafted middle-class soap operas that are dignified by the name “literary fiction.” It’s like calling the Washington Generals a “basketball renaissance”; if these are your starters, what’s your bench like? On second thought, maybe it was an act of discretion for the Globe article to leave that part out.

No, for this “literary renaissance,” instead of writers and their works we have . . . institutions. Come to think of it, they were Exhibit A even in the Grub Street ad, with the list of authors just an embarrassed afterthought:

Today, our city is undergoing a literary renaissance. We are blessed with the Boston Public Library, the important archives at the Boston Athenaeum, and the work of publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Beacon Press. Grub Street has become the leading literary center in the country, welcoming over 2,500 writing students a year and hosting a premier writers' conference each May at the Park Plaza Hotel; the Boston Book Festival draws 30,000 people to Copley every October; 826 Boston inspires children to write and publish. Literary stars like yadda yadda blah blah blah work here…

The Globe infomercial corrals the same institutions to ratify the existence of our supposed renaissance. Some of them – like Boston Public Library and the Boston Athenæum (a members-only library for rich people on Beacon Hill) – are a little hoary to be signifying the green shoots of a cultural springtide. Others, however, are indeed of more recent minting, including the three that make up a sort of central triumvirate in our recent rash of renaissance sightings: Grub Street (founded in 1997), 826 Boston (2007), and the Boston Book Festival (2009). In the Globe piece, we find Christina Thompson, editor of Harvard Review, and Eve Bridburg, founder of Grub Street, retailing this “just so” story of cultural renewal:

Thompson credits Grub Street, in part, for the flowering, and Bridburg, who started the center in 1997. . . recalled the literary scene at the time. “826 Boston [a nonprofit tutoring and writing center] didn’t exist,” she said. “The Boston Book Festival didn’t exist, and it’s drawing [about] 25,000 people every fall to Copley Square.

The problem is that these entities also happen to be the project’s own sponsors, so rather than enlightening us about any actual rebirth of the local literary arts, we’re given tautological reasoning as a cover for possible conflict of interest. Who are these institutions that have arrogated to themselves the right to speak as THE literary community in Boston?

In public, at least, Grub Street has assumed the role of the Literary Cultural District’s prime mover. It’s to be the chief employer of the part-time “Literary Cultural District coordinator,” whose $18,000 salary will most likely come from the $42,500 grant that the Globe reports the organizers’ coalition received from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to “refine its concept” into an actual proposal (or something like that). Grub Street is an independent, non-profit writing center that offers a broad menu of workshops and hosts an annual writers conference called The Muse & the Marketplace. The name of the conference telegraphs Grub Street’s number one article of faith: writers should accommodate themselves and their work to the corporate-dominated publishing marketplace. Drafts are read and critiqued according to what the well-intentioned instructors think agents and editors want to see, which is increasingly what marketing and publicity departments want to see, and all of which goes by the name of what readers supposedly want to consume. Thus we have the whole dreary raft of advice familiar from most MFA courses – You need a conflict on the first page to hook the reader! Your main character must be relatable! Show don’t tell! The three-act structure recommended for screenplays is really handy for novels as well! Show don’t tell! Every scene must contribute to the action! SHOW DON’T TELL!!! Then, because in this marketplace you have to peddle yourself as well as your work, there are courses that will help you with your “platform” – things like your website, your pitch, and how much thigh to flash on the street corner when the agents and editors pass by. At Grub Street, the Marketplace is the Muse.

Détourned poster for 2011 Muse and Marketplace. Original here.

How about 826 Boston? Isn’t that a writing and tutoring center for inner city kids or something like that? Nonprofit, funded by generous donors, staffed by hardworking volunteers? Founded by that hip writer guy and all-around do-gooder Dave Eggers, who also started McSweeneys and The Believer? What could be wrong with that, Mr. Grinch? Well, maybe nothing if you think some combination of volunteerism (remember George Bush Sr.’s “thousand points of light”?), corporate business tactics, and the innate generosity of the 1% when unfettered by socialistic taxes and trade unions is going to solve the problems of educational apartheid in this country. Sure, Eggers and co-founder Ninive Calegari’s 826 centers and their “Teacher Salary Project” might give you the warm fuzzies at first pass. But scratch the surface and you’ll find that they are implicated in the ongoing push for charter schools and other elements of the neoliberal “education reform” movement (see for example these reviews of Eggers and Calegari’s propaganda documentary, American Teacher). Funded by billionaires and elite foundations, and backed by Democratic and Republican politicians alike, the education reform movement is nothing more than a corporate scam whose ultimate goal is the gutting of teachers unions and the for-profit privatization of public education.  

US Secretary of Education (and scumbag) Arne Duncan pals it up with Dave Eggers at 826 Valencia.

The third major player in this “literary renaissance” is the Boston Book Festival.  Founded in 2009 by wealthy socialite Deborah Z. Porter and held each year in Copley Square, the festival boasts a growing attendance and ostensibly widening “community” involvement.  I’ve written already about the festival’s track record for reptilian, community-busting corporate sponsors and the elite interests and unsavory agenda represented by their Board of Directors (here and here). It should come as no surprise, then, that the view of literary culture advanced by the Boston Book Festival is tailored to be as inoffensive as possible to the interests of its corporate sponsors and founders. Hewing tightly to the cultural mean established in these parts by WNBR – our National Public Radio affiliate and the talent pool for most of the event’s presenters – the Boston Book Festival exists primarily to flatter the narcissism of the region’s professional-managerial class. If writer interviews with Terri Gross and calling torture “enhanced interrogation” are your kind of thing, then the Boston Book Festival should be right up the alley where you park your SUV. For the rest of us, it’s a top-down, corporate occupation of public space and public bandwidth, with no actual involvement from the “community” it purports to serve, and indeed a real hostility to the interests of most of that community.

Of course this raises the question – in fact the all-important question – of cui bono, who benefits? Whose interests are actually served by cultural phenomena such as these? Who stands to benefit most from the establishment of “the nation’s first literary cultural district”? Is it possible that the organizers sincerely believe their own hype about a “literary renaissance” here in Boston? And if they don’t – in other words if they’re just cynical instead of delusional – what’s really going on behind the scenes? What forces are motivating the decisions of these individuals and groups as social actors on the local stage?

I’ll give my own thoughts in a subsequent post (although the short answer, for those of you who want to study ahead, is real estate). In the meantime, I invite all enthusiastic supporters of the Literary Cultural District to take The Boston Literary Renaissance Challenge!

The Muzzled Muse

Every year the good folks at the Grub Street writing center host a literary conference here in Boston called The Muse & the Marketplace. When I saw the poster for this year's festivities, however, it struck me that it just didn't adequately depict the real relationship that exists between the two entities. So, with my crude photoshop skills, I gave it a wee tweak:

There should probably be a riding crop in there, too, you know, but you can't have everything. Just use your imagination.